10 Free SEO Tools

Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website with the goal of increasing your search engine ranking and ultimately your traffic and sales. It involves researching your keywords to find good phrases for your website, placing these keyword phrases strategically on your website and then improving your ranking by increasing the number of backlinks to your website.
Here is 10 free SEO tools you can use to increase your search engine ranking:-
  • What? This tool allows you to research keywords. It tells you the approximate average number of searches per month for a keyword phrase and also suggests similar alternative keyword phrases.
  • Why? You need to make sure that your keyword phrase is actually being searched on before you optimize your website. Optimizing your site for a keyword that nobody searches will mean that you get very little or no visitors from the search engines.
  • How? Enter your keyword phrase in the box, choose your language and country (or “all countries and territories” if your website is not country specific) and submit. Choose “Exact” from the drop down menu.
  • What? This is another keyword research tool. Enter some keywords and you will receive a list of up to 100 related keywords and an estimate of the number of daily searches for each keyword phrase.
  • Why? No keyword research tool is 100% accurate, so if you are serious about keyword research it is worthwhile checking your keywords in two keyword research tools. The Google Adwords keyword tool and the Wordtracker keyword tool are the best free keyword tools that I know of.
  • How? Enter your keyword phrase (e.g. dog training is the chosen keyword phrase in the above screenshot) and press the “Hit Me” button. You will then receive a list of related keyword phrases along with the estimated number of searches per day for each phrase.
  • What? This tool will generate a sitemap for you in either XML or HTML format. A sitemap contains links to all the pages on your website.
  • Why? A sitemap helps to ensure that the search engines find all the different pages on your website. It can also be helpful for your visitors.
  • How? Just enter your URL and hit the start button. Your sitemap will be created and you can upload it to your website.


Tool #4 - Social Marker Bookmarking Tool

  • What? This tool allows you to bookmark your website in multiple bookmarking websites with one click of a button.
  • Why? Many people search for pages on the web using bookmarking websites rather than search engines. The more people that bookmark a web page, the higher that web page will appear on the bookmarking website. Some social bookmarking websites will also give you abacklink which will help to improve your search engine rank.
  • How? First you will need to register individually with all the social bookmarking sites listed on the Social Marker site. This will probably take you around 1-2 hours, but you only need to do this one time. Every time you create a new page on your website, write a blog post, or find a page on the web that you find interesting you can bookmark that page in all of the bookmarking websites by visiting Social Marker.
    A similar alternative free bookmarking website is http://www.onlywire.com – this is quicker to use but contains around 20 bookmarking websites compared to Social Marker’s 48 bookmarking sites.


Tool #5 - Link Popularity Checker Tool

  • What? This tool allows you to check how many backlinks your website has. It will show you how many backlinks your site has in the Google and Yahoo search engines.
  • Why? The number of backlinks is one of the biggest influences on the ranking of a website in the search engines. The more backlinks you have to your website, the better your chances are of ranking well for a phrase.
  • How? Enter the URL of your website and optionally the URLs of up to three of your competitors. Click on the “Generate Report” button and you will see the number of backlinks in Yahoo & Google for your site and a number of other sites including any competitors that you have added.

Tool #6 - Keyword Rank Checker Tool

  • Why? Most of the traffic goes to the sites listed on the first page of Google, so your aim should be to get your site into the top 10. This tool allows you to check your progress more quickly than you could do manually.
  • How? Enter the URL of your website and the keywords that you are trying to rank for and optionally your competitor’s URL. The tool will return the position of your website in the Google search results and compare it to your competitor’s URL.

Tool #7 –Website Grader

  • What? Once you have optimized your website and started to promote it, this tool is an excellent way to get a free critique of your site. It provides information about the effectiveness of your on-page SEO, off-page SEO, blogging and social marketing. It also gives you suggestions on how to improve in each of these areas.
  • Why? It lets you measure your progress and find potential areas for improvement.
  • How? Enter the URL of your website, add competing websites (optional) and enter your email address. It will take a few minutes to process all the data, and once it has finished you will be taken to a report with a website grade (mark out of 100) and a wealth of information about how your website ranks and ways to improve it. You will also be emailed a link to your report.

Tool #8 - Google Webmaster Tools

  • What? This tool allows you to find the top Google search queries for your website, see errors found by Googlebot, find issues with your website content (e.g. missing tags), submit a sitemap, find out how many backlinks you have, remove content from the Google index and generate a robots.txt file.
  • Why? Submitting a sitemap will help to ensure that Google crawls your entire website. The diagnostics will alert you to any errors or broken links on your website and the top search query information can help you to refine your website optimization.
  • How? Create an account and then add your websites to the account. You will then need to verify that you are the owner of each of the websites that you added. You can do this by following the instructions to upload a text file to your website or by adding a meta tag to your home page.

Tool #9 – Statcounter

  • What? Statcounter allows you to see how many visitors and hits you have received to your website, the keywords that your visitors searched on, the pages that they visited, the browsers they use, the countries and towns they live in, the pages that they entered and exited your site on and how long they stayed on your site.
  • Why? It is useful to see the keywords that your visitors use to find your site and the search engines that they came from as this can help you to refine your optimization. It is also valuable to understand more about your visitors, the countries they come from, the browsers and computers that they use and what pages they visited while on your website.
  • How? Register with statcounter and follow the instructions to generate a small piece of javascript code. Place this code on all the pages of your website so that statcounter can track all your visitors. You can then login to statcounter at any time to view your statistics.

Tool #10 - Google Analytics

  • What? This is an alternative to StatCounter, as it provides similar information about your website visitors. However, it presents the information in a different way, so you may find it useful to use both StatCounter and Google Analytics.
  • Why? As well as finding out where your visitors come from, how they found your website, how many pages they visited and how long they spent on your website, you can also view the data in a variety of different formats.
  • How? Register with Google Analytics and generate a snippet of javascript code. Follow the instructions to Install this code on all the pages of your website and then login to Google Analytics to view your site statistics.
Posted by celinz at 4:34 PM

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