Search engine optimisation (SEO) is where you ensure a website can be found in search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, for relevant keywords and phrases around what’s on offer on that site. SEO is a form of quality control for websites and is a vital opportunity for businesses to improve their online presence.
To help you with SEO, we’ve compiled a list of some handy and free SEO tools.
Keyword
Keywords remain key (no pun intended) to successful SEO performance by choosing the right keywords and phrases to optimise your search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
Wordstream Free Keyword Tools – Wordstream offers four keyword tools, Free Keyword Tool, Keyword Niche Finder, Keyword Grouper and Negative Keyword Tool, which suggest different ideas, groupings and long-tail keywords that show you what people are actually searching for around a particular topic. The Negative Keyword Tool is particularly handy to find out what keywords to eliminate from Pay Per Click campaigns and in saves you money.
YouTube Keyword Tool is useful if you’re looking for keywords and phrases for YouTube. The tool tells you how many people are searching for various keywords. You may also apply the suggestions from this tool to other content platforms.
Übersuggest uses the ‘suggest’ data from search engines to develop optimised phrases based on your query.
Soovle is a handy tool if you want to see keyword suggestions from multiple search browsers and websites such as Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon and YouTube.
Suggestion Keyword Finder helps you by giving you a list of related keywords to any word or phrase you enter in its search box. The tool also lets you download the data as an Excel document should you want to use the results in your SEO strategy.
Content
Content builds trust, brand and awareness with current and potential customers. If done correctly, content can also establish your company as an expert in your field and build on customer relations. For optimal SEO, content needs to be of high quality, relevant and valuable to your target audience. Most importantly, and this is where these tools come in handy, it ensures there’s no duplication or over use of specific words.
Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool determines the likelihood of your webpage receiving a penalty from Google’s Penguin algorithm for a lack of anchor text diversity. Anchor text is the visible, clickable words that appear in a hyperlink, which Penguin penalises if the anchor text is found to be over-used, or in the case of this tool “over-optimised”. This tool will look at your website and show which areas of the site have over-optimisation so you can fix the mistake.
Copyscape looks for duplicate content on the web. Simply enter the URL of your website and Copyscape will tell you if your content is not original or whether the content you’ve created has been plagiarised by another site. Hopefully you won’t need to draft up any cease and desist letters.
Ranking tools
Want to know where you site ranks when compared to your competitors? The following tools will help with that.
Alexa is a web analytics tool that can tell you where your site ranks compared to other companies. Alternatively, you can find out which websites are the most successful based on keyword, category or country.
PR Checker tells you what the page rank is for your website or your competitor’s on Google’s search engine. You simply enter your site’s URL and hit enter, you’ll then be given a score out of the 10. The lower the score, the lower your page rank.
The finer details
For the finer and equally important details such as meta descriptions, images and site performance, the following tools will help fine tune your website into an SEO-friendly result.
Title and description optimization tool is a competitor intelligence tool that provides information about the titles and descriptions used by competitors. Using this tool, you can diversify and enhance your webpage above and beyond your competitors with improved SEO.
Image SEO Tool, as the name suggests, checks if there are any problems with images on your webpage. It ensures your images conform to Google’s standards and recommendations for an optimised search result.
Google Snippet Preview shows you the information and content on your site from the meta tags and how it is displayed on Google’s search. Once that’s shown, you can edit and optimise the content to meet the word count requirement and improve your Google ranking.
Microsoft Free SEO Toolkit is a complete SEO audit for your website. There are multiple tools in this toolkit: Site Analysis, Sitemaps and Sitemap Indexes, and Robots Exclusion. These tools help make your site search engine-friendly and relevant for Bing, Google and Yahoo.