For successful SEO campaigns on must have essential tools in the arsenal. These tools help you run, measure and analyze the performance of a website on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other major search engines.
Free SEO tools offered by Search engines
1 – Google Webmasters tools:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Google webmasters tools is the most important SEO Tool. It helps webmasters analyze the keyword performance on search engines, problems with the website. After Google stopped showing the keywords in Google analytics, ultimately WMTS provide the most information on website statistic on Google.
2 – Google Analytics:
https://www.google.com/analytics/
Knowing how many visitors visits your website, where they come from and their activity on the website is essential for improving the optimization of your website. There are many analytics tools however Google analytics is the best tool available. There are many feature that can be used comfortably by SEO novices to tools that gives advance data professionals. If you don’t like Google Analytics then you can check out other tools like Piwik, or Open Web Analytics. These tools have their own benefits and drawbacks to Google analytics.
3 – Bing Webmaster Tools:
https://www.bing.com/webmaster/home/
Bing webmasters tool is released by Microsoft for their Bing search engine. It functions just like google webmasters tools by providing you the insights on the performance of your website on Bing.
Essential On-Page SEO Tools and services
These tools and service will help you improve the on-page optimization of your website. They’ll also help you choose the right keywords, and create good quality content for your website.
Keyword Rank Checkers:
There are many rank checkers. Almost all of them come with the same basic function of checking the rank of your keywords on Search engines once a day. Some keyword checkers allow you to check the ranking whenever you want.
One of the best Keyword rank checker is SERPBOOK. It comes with diverse features, and used by SEO beginners to Enterprises. http://serpbook.com/?aff=5569
SEO book has many online tools on their website that allow you to check the onpage health of your website. These tools are free and come with basic functions.
Essential Tools For On-page SEO Analysis:
Onpage optimization has become talk of the town again after release of Google Panda update. Here are few free tools to help you optimize your website to make it more user and search engine friendly.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool:
Screaming Frog scrapped all pages of your website and lists most important information and data. It’s a free desktop software. The free version does the basic function of crawling your website and generate important data. For more functionality there is a paid version.- http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
SEO Tools and Services to improve user experience
The behavior of the users has become an important factor that impact ranking on Google. That’s why its very important that you make sure your website provides best user experience to the visitors. Its fast, easy to explore, and rich in informative content. Here are some tools that help you improve the user experience of your website.
Google Page speed checker:
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Page speed is very important SEO factors. Visitors don’t like slow websites and if pages don’t load in time they leave and go to other website. Which increases the bounce rate and Websites with high bounce rate are ranked lower by Google.
Google Page speed checker tool helps you find the elements that are slowing down your website and work of them to improve its load speed.
Mobile ready checker:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Mobile useres has already surpassed desktop users using Google and other search engines. That’s why its important that your website is mobile ready, desktop websites can’t be viewed on mobile phones properly unless they have a mobile ready responsive design or an alternative mobile website. Google has already made it as a crucial ranking factor on Mobile devices. If your website is not mobile ready, it ranks lower than the other websites on Google mobile search. Google mobile ready test tool helps you determine if your website is mobile ready or not .
9 – Schema Creator:
http://schema-creator.org/
Structured data can be search engines to pass additional information about the content of a page. For example, the reviews which you sometimes see in the search results.
Structured data pass additional information to the search engines about the content of the page. For example, the review or events you see in search results at times are generated via Schema creator. Keyword Research :
Dedicated tools and services for SEO keyword research
Keyword Research is a prerequisite before starting any SEO Campaign. Using right keyword can make or break your SEO campaign. That’s why you should use these keyword research tools to find best keywords for your website.
10 – Google Trends:
http://www.google.de/trends/
With the tool from Google Trends, you can display how many times a keyword was searched for a specific period. This also compared to other keywords. In addition, you will find out what is currently the most sought.
Google trends provides you with the information on the change in search trends for your keywords. It’s pretty nifty tool to keep yourself updated and make modification in your campaign accordingly.
Google Adwards Keyword Planner:
https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
Google Adwards Keyword planner is an essential tool for researching keywords. With this tool you can find the best keyword for your website, its estimated traffic, cpc cost, further it also helps you find long -tail keywords which are easier to rank.
Essential Off-page SEO and link building tools
Backlinks are still an essential factor in Google ranking. This has been comfirmed again and again by Google. Off-page seo tools help you improve your websites off page optimization by providing you with best data on the performance of your website, and find new link opportunities.
Backlink checker:
Backlink checker tools help you find out how many websites are linking to your website and what are the links. This help you analyse your link portfolio and take action if you find anything wrong like bad websites linking to your website, etc.
There are many backlink checkers, some free and some paid. Paid backlink checkers have good indexing rate and gives you more data on your backlinks. Free backlink checkers doesn’t provide you with full data on the number and other statistics of the links. Here is the link to some of the backlink checkers.
- http://www.backlinkwatch.com
- https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ has paid and free versions. Free version has very limited functionality.
- https://ahrefs.com/ is the best backlink checker tool. It’s a paid tool with lots of functionality and best backlink crawling.
- https://majestic.com/ Majestic explorer functions just like moz explorer, however its crawl rate is higher, and its quality scores are widely considered to be best by SEO experts.
All of these and many other backlink checker tools make it possible to check the links to your website. Important here is that each provider uses different method and database to crawl and rank the links, so we get different results from them. It therefore make sense to use multiple tools and not just one.
Social Signal checkers
Social signals have become important part of the ranking algorithms of Google, and Bing. They tell Search engines and your potential clients about the authority of your website and its social media presence improves their confidence on your product and service, and leads to more sales.
http://monitoringsocials.com/ helps you check the social signal count your website have.
Social media management tools
These tools help you manage your social media profiles and save you time and resources. With these tools you can connect your social media profiles and post new updates to them.
http://monitoringsocials.com/ helps you manage your social media profiles by scheduling a new post to them.
https://ifttt.com/ Ifttt is one of the most versatile social media management tool. It allows you to create recipes and connect multiple platforms and share and schedule posts to different social media platforms. It also allows you to create different recipes and support wide varieties of social media websites and apps.
With these SEO and digital marketing tools you can improve your websites performance on search engines, and they also save you lot of time and resources that you would have spent on hiring manpower. We will be posting a more detailed list of tools and services in coming weeks.
