Search Engine Optimization can be a difficult process if you don’t have the right tools at your side. The problem is, there are so many great tools out there, you can have massive information overload if you’re not careful.
Today I want to show five of my favorite free seo tools.
1. The Google Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal This tool is great for the critically important task of picking keywords. It’ll show you search volume for a keyword, give you other keyword suggestions, and additional keywords related to your original keyword. It’s features allow you to sort your data by relevance, or by global or local search volume or by advertiser competition. You can also download the data into a spreadsheet or text file. I use this tool every single day.
2. The All-In-One SEO pack for WordPress at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ If you’re using wordpress, this free plugin takes all the work out of optimizing basic things on your web site such as title tags, meta description and keyword tags, etc. It’s the first plugin I install whenever I build a new blog.
3. Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics/ How do you know if your SEO is working? Which search engines are sending traffic to your site? What keywords are people using to find your site? How much traffic are you getting? Google analytics is a comprehensive stats and tracking package run completely by google. There’s nothing to upload to your web site but a small snippet of code that you put on each web page you want to track. Most wordpress themes have a place to type in your analytics tracking code and the blog will automatically post the code snippet on each of your sites web pages. Priceless.
4. Google Webmaster Tools at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ is a great free tool that allows you to submit your web site and your sitemap directly to Google. It will also diagnose your web site for crawl errors, show you the top search queries for your site, show you how many links are pointing to your site and what those sites are, instruct Google how and when to crawl your site, set a preferred domain for your site (ie list it as www.yoursite.com or just yoursite.com in the Google index), show the keywords and internal site links that Google found when crawling your site, show crawl stats, and suggest HTML changes that your site should make…among other things. The Google Webmaster Tool should be your first stop in the SEO process…and it’s all free.
5. Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ Of course, Wordtracker is the premier paid keyword tool with a suite of useful tools available, but they also offer a free keyword tool that is quite handy as a second look tool after your use the free Google keyword tool. I find it handy for suggesting other keywords that I might have missed with the Google tool (no two keyword tools offer the same exact results because they obviously use different algorithms and different databases etc).
Notice how most of these tools (well, three out of five anyway) are from Google? Hm…imagine that! *hint hint, nudge nudge* Well what do you expect? Google is the five hundred pound gorilla after all!
Do you have a favorite free SEO tool or something to say about the tools I’ve listed above? If so, Comment below! I’d love to hear from you.
October 12, 2009
SEO Instructions, SEO Tools