When it comes to SEO, we often need all the help we can get. After all, there is not such thing as ranking too high. As time goes by, there are more and more tools that become available for online site owners to use. These are tools that help make your SEO efforts more effective. Here is a short list of effective SEO tools to improve your website.
10 SEO Tools To Improve Your Site
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the best free SEO tools within the market today. It lets you know how your site is performing on a day to day basis, monthly basis and yearly basis. Google Analytics has the right set of tools to let you monitor things such as traffic spikes and their causes. Additionally, you can get a clearer picture of where your traffic is coming from. This means you can see who is referring you to others. Google Analytics will give you and overall view on what affects your site and the traffic you get. It will keep track of activities such as launches that often spike traffic. It will let you know how effective your launch was and how that effect is felt after the fact.
2. Google Webmaster Tools
This is almost a must for every site owner. It is free of charge and it lets you in on how Google views your site. You get to know what the crawlers are looking at and can therefore tweak accordingly. Additionally, it lets you know if there are any page issues such as 404s or whether or not you have a piece of malware infecting your website.
3. Google Trends
Yet another free tool from Google. As the name suggests, this tool allows you to see what is trending on search queries. This includes keywords and content. This can be very useful when it comes to brainstorming your keyword phrases as well as content to focus on at any given time. Most of the sales online depend on trends. This tool will let you know when a certain keyword or phrase is trending and the periods of the year when it is not. This way you can tweak your marketing messages accordingly. It can also give you some great insights on which way the market is going, especially if you are new within the niche.
4. Screaming Frog
This tool has both a paid and a free version. You can simply download it and install it on your Mac or PC. The Screaming Frog spiders links, images and CSS all the while using an SEO viewpoint. Additionally, it will alert you of any issues such as 302s. This way you can have your developer fix them quickly before any real damage is done. Using this tool, you can export meta descriptions, page titles and URLs into Excel. This helps you get a clear picture of what needs to be done. The paid version is an extended version of the free option which allows you to crawl over 500 pages among other useful features.
5. Adobe Site Catalyst
This is an analytics tool that allows you to get a clearer picture of how your site traffic is behaving. Some industries have periods that can be termed as sensitive cyclic events where there is a boom and dwindle in activity. If you belong to any such industry, then Adobe Site Catalyst will keep you appraised of these cyclic events and the effects they have on your traffic. It also helps you know which funnel is the most profitable for your website as well as which one is causing bounce offs. This way, you can work on optimizing for ‘stickiness’.
6. Bing Webmaster Tools
Just as Google has its Webmaster tools, so does Bing. This set of tools allows you to do very much the same thing only this time it is from Bing’s point of view. This tool set allows you to see your website the way Bing sees it. This can go a long way in helping you optimize your website accordingly for not everybody uses Google. For the regions where Bing is a key search engine, you can get some reasonable traffic by taking your cue from this set of tools.
7. SEMrush
High stakes business would not be complete without a little bit of espionage. Not only does SEMrush allow you to research on the most effective, traffic generating keywords within your niche and for your site, but it also lets you see what your competitor is doing. It keeps you appraised on their ranking, paid search keywords as well as traffic data. From this, you can decide on what you need to do to get a leg up on them.
8. IIS SEO Toolkit
This free tool gives you an invaluable overview of your site. Using this you can analyze all the necessary SEO aspects of your site such as structure, content as well as URLs. This set of tools can also bring to your attention certain issues such as which page titles are too long and therefore working against you, broken links and so on. These errors are presented with a simple red X so you know where to focus on fixing. Being a Microsoft tool, you will have the added advantage of Bing crawling your pages.
9. Open Site Explorer
When it comes to links within your site, having broken or ‘bad’ links can do more harm to your site than not having links at all. This is why you need a tool that can keep an eye on your website link metrics. Open Site Explorer does just that. You can use this tool during your SEO audit and get an appraisal on the linking domains, anchor texts used in linking to your site as well as inbound links. It also tells you what the top pages on your website are, how they are viewed and shared on the various social media platforms. It covers most of the social metrics for your top pages. These include Tweets, Facebook likes and Google +1s.
Finally, the most obvious and effective of tools, your very own eyes. By simply looking at a website, you can tell whether or not it has the appropriate level of quality. You can see how the website works by simply going through it. See whether or not there are wrong canonical tags, whether or not the images within the site contain proper alt tags that are keyword focused, look for robots.txt and so on. Simply taking a visual tour of the site can give you great insight on what needs to be changed in order to improve the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
As mentioned earlier, with SEO, you need all the help you can get. These are just Effective Tools To Improve Your SEO that can be easily found online. You can opt for the free tools which contrary to common belief, work just as well as the paid tools. Although you may get a little more value when you go for the paid tools. It is paramount that you do whatever you can to get your site highly optimized and ranked.
10. Use your eyes
Finally, the most obvious and effective of tools, your very own eyes. By simply looking at a website, you can tell whether or not it has the appropriate level of quality. You can see how the website works by simply going through it. See whether or not there are wrong canonical tags, whether or not the images within the site contain proper alt tags that are keyword focused, look for robots.txt and so on. Simply taking a visual tour of the site can give you great insight on what needs to be changed in order to improve the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
As mentioned earlier, with SEO, you need all the help you can get. These are just Effective Tools To Improve Your SEO that can be easily found online. You can opt for the free tools which contrary to common belief, work just as well as the paid tools. Although you may get a little more value when you go for the paid tools. It is paramount that you do whatever you can to get your site highly optimized and ranked.
