At this juncture we are grizzled SEO Veterans and have the click scars to show for it! We were recently responded to a LinkedIn Question about “best of breed SEO tools” that are indispensable to us all. Here’s our short list - check back at a later date for a longer list.

1) Aaron Wall rocks the SEO world and anyone who disagrees with this sentiment would have to be on a distant planet. His Toolbar is one of the best SEO Tools in the world and his integrated training services and community are an excellent resource as well.  He has a freemium model - if you are new to SEO we’d strongly suggest signing up for all of his services.

2) SEOMoz has a suite of some of the Best SEO Tools and we recommend them as well. They have a number of free applications and paid tools and tutorials.

3) Market Samurai has an extremely powerful application and their technology is like jumping into an Aston Martin with a top ten Formula One driver - you better hang on for the ride.

The rivers deep, fast flowing and you have to spend some time getting your arms around this technology - it’s not for the faint of heart or the novice by any means. It’s much more than an SEO tool - will give you significant insight into your competitive position, keyword rankings, content sourcing and strategy, competitive analysis and much more.

4) We would be remiss if we didn’t touch on Google’s Aanlytics Program as one of the Best SEO Tools!  Yes, it’s the defacto industry standard - but 85% of most people who use it for Web Site Analytics have no idea of the raw power available. It’s inherent reporting and analysis tools alone are extremely powerful.

For example, we see far too many clients that worry about a ranking for those “all important” top tier Keywords who don’t understand the significant value and wonderful traffic generation (highly qualified) via Long Tail Keywords that can be found easily running basic reports via Google Analytics.

5) Compete is well worth the modest subscription fee required to really run a competitive analysis on a competitor’s site - their robust feature set has grown the last 12-24 months and we use them on a regular basis to monitor search and traffic rankings for client sites and direct competitors.

6) Get “Real Time Search” savvy!  If you are harvesting information on the web we would strongly recommend understanding how to do real time searches via Twitter and Google that are Keyword and Hashtag driven.

7) While you are looking at Organic Search Engine Rankings you may want to look at Pay Per Click to see what a competitor is doing here as well. SpyFu has a freemium model and their paid services are powerful, insightful and will save you a great deal of time setting up a Pay per Click campaign and monitoring what your competitors are doing.

8) Another everyman/everywoman best of breed SEO Tool is Wordtracker - it’s the Swiss Army Knife of Keyword Research and they’ve recently added Link Builder and Wordtracker Strategizer, two excellent modules that extend the functionality of their SaaS (Software as a Service) services. This UK based company has been around for ten plus years and we couldn’t say enough good things about them - great team of friendly and courteous Keyword Geeks par excellance.

So, that’s eight of our Best SEO Tools that we use and recommend - no animals were harmed during the writing of this blog post………….if you are a Mashable writer in residence feel free to mention us on the front page.