Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to market your site and get more traffic and exposure – all for free. The key is to make sure that your website appears at the top of search results when users search for the keywords in your niche. Unfortunately, doing this can be easier said than done as SEO encompasses dozens of strategies and is constantly changing. Fortunately, many using tools make SEO easier by checking your keyword usage, page tags, and many other elements. In this article, we will talk about the best SEO tools you can use to manage the SEO for your site.
Why your website needs Search Engine Optimization
The search engines are now often the first thing that we turn to when we have questions that need an answer. Nowadays, if we need information on a product or even a service, we will turn to search engines. The number of searches carried out on a search engine on a daily basis is steadily climbing.
Since 2010, E-Commerce has grown by 16.5%, which is a huge amount. If you don’t invest in SEO Services, then it is likely that you are going to get left behind. Basically, they will be taking your customers! Never ideal, is it?
Many people invest in PPC advertising as they feel as though it is a quick way to get to the top of the search engines. It is, but studies have shown that they only get around 15% of the total clicks on that page. SEO is a big business at the moment.
Businesses, even large ones, are eliminating printed advertising. Instead, they are switching to SEO to build up their business. Having your site go through an SEO process ensures that your site will be working for you, and of course, giving you a good return on your investment. Remember, doing this ensures that your site can be found at any time of the year, at any time of the day. The majority of your customers will find you through your search engine optimization efforts. SEO is the only form of marketing that will allow you to directly target your customers. This is going to deliver you the best possible return on investment.
Best SEO tools
There’s quite a bit of content out there on SEO strategy. You can find tips on everything from onsite page architecture to offsite link-building strategy. Surprisingly, if you haven’t been in the SEO field for long, it can be hard to know exactly what tools (especially the free ones!) to use to get the SEO data you need! Here’s a quick rundown of some useful tools that you can access that will really help you craft your SEO strategy.
SEO by Yoast
Get in-depth analysis for each page or post on your site to make sure it is fully optimized. This tool will check for keyword usage in your title, URL, photos, and more. It will also give you feedback on your keyword density and on what areas of your page need to be improved. Every check will come with an easy-to-read indicator: When it’s green, you know your page is fully optimized.
All-in-One SEO
The advanced features of this tool allow you to really take control of your SEO. Get access to advanced canonical URLs, fine-tune navigational links, and automatically optimize your titles for search engines and get Meta tags. The tool also provides Google analytics support and SEO integration for e-commerce sites.
Platinum SEO Pack
There are a number of features in this tool that can help you to improve SEO on your site. You can get automatically generated Meta tags, canonical URLs, and custom taxonomies. You can optimize tags and categories; avoid duplicate content, and overrides formatting for posts and pages. Take complete control over the SEO on your site with this tool.
Automatic SEO Links
You can make internal linking easily with this handy tool. Pick a keyword and set the tool to automatically replace that word with the link of your choice. Easily increase the SEO juice for your site with well-placed internal linking.
SEO Smart Links
You can use this tool to increase your internal linking without having to choose the URLs yourself. Choose the keywords you want to link, and the tool will automatically turn the text into a link to appropriate pages on your site. You can also link to categories and tags, and you can choose which links should be no-follow.
OpenSiteExplorer.org
OpenSiteExplorer is a fantastic tool offered free from SEOmoz.com. This will allow you to type in any web address in the search bar and get extremely useful data returned like a number of links to the domain, linking root domains – as well as the “Page Authority” and “Domain Authority.” The “Domain Authority” is a 0 – 100 scale, with each multiple of 10 corresponding closely with each multiple of 1 in the Google Page Rank scale of 1-10. Why not just use Google Page Rank to check the value of a website? Because you won’t get all of this other fantastic data, including the exact links to the site (possibly from your competition) catch: OSE only allows three free searches per day without a subscription to SEOmoz.com. With your subscription, you’ll also get access to the amount of Facebook shares, likes, and Twitter tweets. Before you chase a link, pop the URL into Opensiteexploere.org.
Google Keyword Tool
While it is important to realize that there are many search engines, and Google is only one – what works in google will almost always get positive results in other search engines. That said, Google does offer the best free tool for analyzing keywords and identifying excellent opportunities for your SEO strategy. The Google Keyword Tool will allow you to enter a single industry word or term and will return a whole host of related terms that you may never have thought of – along with valuable metrics about these terms that will help you choose even better.
Start by looking at the “monthly searches” returned for a given set of terms. Pay attention to your filters before you search; these will tell you what people in your specific parameters are searching for your keyword. Once you’ve applied these filters, you’re going to want to decide relevancy based on the “local monthly searches” value returned by the tool. Also, pay attention to the “competition” level listed next to a term. This gives you an idea if the term has a relatively high, medium, or a low number of sights competing to drive traffic to their sights for this keyword.
PRChecker
PRChecker is a simple and free tool that gives you the “Google Page Rank” for any site instantly. This site works officially with the Google Algorithm to return the most accurate results for Page Rank. Another nice feature of PR Checker is the buttons you can implement on your site to display your Page Rank actively to browsers. They even supply imbed HTML to implement the page rank checking tool into your own site, so you can simply copy the URL of the page and paste it into the tool for rank – and compare other URLs Page Ranks without leaving your site.
Compete.com
Compete is an excellent free tool to identify different metrics for a given website. You can then type in multiple websites and “compete” them against each other with all metrics listed in tandem. These metrics include unique visitors, rank by unique visitors, and competitive rank. An even cooler part of this tool is that if you don’t know the competition for a given site, Compete will actually locate a list of relevant competitor sites and, by default, compare the data for you. This gives you an excellent idea of what sites to check out for keyword ideas and who’s currently winning.
CraftKeys.com
CraftKeys’ slogan appears in huge bold print on their homepage “CrafKeys Provides a Bunch Tools to Analyze Search Keywords.” Not perfect English – but they’re not lying. Craftkeys does provide a “bunch of tools” that are quite useful and also – totally free. Arguably the best free tool on this list, there are almost too many awesome features of CraftKeys to list. Just to give you a taste, simply type a domain in the search bar, and the tool will automatically break down and list all the first position keywords, new keywords, top landing pages, advertising opportunities, and much more. Like Compete, you can also compare websites with side-by-side data – identifying competition, or lack thereof. Just jump in and give this free tool a try; you won’t be disappointed with your use of time.
With almost all of these tools, there’s always going to be a “pro tools” option that gives you “even more” capability for a price. That’s cool, and maybe you do want these options, but that’s not why they’re listed in this toolset. These are tools where the free option is actually quite good – and worth checking out regularly!
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