Are you a webmaster who is looking to boost your website traffic but think you don’t have a budget to make it happen? Don’t feel to bad about it, as the web has plenty of free tools that offer capabilities to help you achieve your website goals.

Here are some of those tools that we think are most helpful. It’s not unusual that most tools listed here have something to with performing search engine optimization.

Google Webmasters
Google Webmasters tool offers essential features that help webmasters diagnose and troubleshoot particular problem areas, identify link popularity and even remove pages and reinstate pages banned/blocked by Google.

Yahoo! Site Explorer
Yahoo! Site Explorer helps webmaster identify which pages are indexed by Yahoo! and which pages get most links.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool
This tool enables us to take a peek on what keywords are being used by search engine users when they look for certain pages. With this tool on hand, we will have a better idea of what type of keywords we need to include on our page content.

Live Search Webmaster Center
Live Search Webmaster Center helps webmasters determine Microsoft’s Live Search activities on their websites such as last crawl date, back links, outbound links or whether their site is blocked by the search engine.

XML Sitemap Generator
XML Sitemaps quickly generates standards-compliant XML sitemaps for free, thereby allowing webmasters not to spend hours on finding ways to generate the file themselves.

Google Trends / Hot Trends
This tool allows webmasters to identify what terms are generating enough buzz within search engine landscape. In this manner, webmasters (and copywriters) will know what good topics to write about (and generate some inbound traffic through these pages).

Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides a rich set of reports that helps webmasters identify many things such as top visited pages, which keywords were used to reach their pages, and on which cities/countries visitors are mostly coming from.

SEO Book’s SEO Toolbar
SEO Book’s toolbar provides a wealth of reports at a glance. These reports include number of links pointing to websites from .gov or .edu sites, age of website, directory listings at DMOZ or Yahoo! directories as well as from social networking sites. All without the need to open a new browser window and visit individual websites.

Feedburner
Feedburner helps webmasters to maintain their current feeds and allowing them to create flexibility to syndicate content and reach new visitors.

Photo credit: http://estacionmacias.blogspot.com/