First up on the panel was Matt McGee of Key Relevance.

Matt began with a number of affordable tools, one being the SearchStatus extension for Firefox. This is a free tool that provides useful data, including a webpage’s Google Page Ranking, Google Category, Alexa popularity rating, Compete.com ranking, Alexa incoming links, and Alexa related links and backward links from the top three search engines.

One of Matt’s top choices for keyword research is Keyword Discovery, which offers a free limited trial. In addition, the tools from the engines (Google, Yahoo & MSN) themselves can provide advanced information about your website and how it ranks.

Another tool to get more info on backlinks of your competitors is Link Diagnosis. Link Diagnosis is very useful for locating sites to get valuable inbound links!

SEO-Browser.com can also be helpful to diagnose any content issues you may have, as it looks at your website much like a search engine sees it.

Next we had Scott Allen from Hybrid6 Studios.

Scott talked about competitive research. He recommended using Compete.com as a resource which can help find what works or doesn’t work in your competitor’s SEO campaign. This is great because it can easily open opportunities for your own website by seeing what NOT to do.

PPC Spyfu is a powerful resource for pay-per-click marketing. Although it’s still officially in Beta testing, Allen also recommended using Competitious for creating an informative matrix of your competitors.

Finally we had Joe Abraham from Sage Rock. One of his top FREE resources is MSN’s AdLab, which features a variety of tools, from keyword research to demographic research.

In addition, Crazy Egg which allows users to visualize traffic patterns on a website. This tool can supplement existing analytics to see exactly what’s happening on your website.