Search engine optimization can sometimes be difficult to monitor for websites due to the complexity of search engine algorithms and ranking formulas. There are many different tools available online though, that will help monitor website optimization and identify any problems search engines may have with indexing website pages, in order to allow your website to rank as high as possible in search engine results.
While many advanced SEO tools must be purchased or require monthly fees, there’s still a good amount of tools available online to use for free. Here are 8 free SEO tools that are beneficial to use:
- Google Analytics – Google Analytics tracks website traffic data and goal conversions, creates detailed traffic reports, compares one month of data to another, and much more. Google Analytics is a great tool for SEO to monitor organic traffic coming to the website and analyze how or where the traffic entered and exited from your website.
- SEO for Firefox – Offered by SEOBook.com, the SEO for Firefox Tool shows SEO data for websites in Google search results pages when using Firefox as a web browser. The tools shows website PageRank, age of domain, links to the website, cached website pages, and more. This type of data is very beneficial to use for competitive analysis or to identify areas to improve on for your website.
- Google Insights for Search – Google Insights for Search shows search interest over time for specific keywords, identifies rising searches, and shows locations the searches came from. It’s very useful for SEO in determining seasonal trends and high search volume keywords to optimize for.
- SEOmoz Tools – SEOmoz.org offers a variety of useful SEO tools for free, such as Linkscape, SEOmoz Firefox Toolbar, Term Extractor, and more. The tools help with competitive analysis by showing other website’s link data and also help you with monitoring the optimization of your own website. SEOmoz also offers additional advanced SEO tools for a monthly fee.
- Google Keyword Tool – The Google keyword Tool shows local and global monthly search volume for keywords as well as the advertiser competition for them. You can view search volumes based on broad match, phrase match, and exact match results. The keyword tool is great with finding keywords to target to improve SEO and bring in more traffic to your website.
- Copyscape – Copyscape scans a website and identifies any duplicate content that is also found on other websites. Duplicate content is likely to be penalized by search engines and can lower rankings of the website that copied the content. Copyscape is a good tool to use to ensure your content is unique, or to check if your website content is being copied by other websites.
- Google Webmaster Tools – Google Webmaster Tools allows you to view your site as search engines see it with features such as search engine crawling errors, top site keywords, top search queries, backlinks, and more. Google Webmaster Tools is great to use to identify any problems search engines may have in scanning or indexing your website to help it rank as high as possible.
- Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Xenu’s Link Sleuth scans a website for broken links that result in a “404 Not Found” error or that are not correctly linking to other pages of the website. Broken links are like road blocks for search engines that crawl through the website. If links aren’t working correctly, search engines may not be able to scan and index website information. Xenu’s Link Sleuth finds broken links on the website so you can repair them and ensure all links are working properly.
In summary, the amount of free SEO tools available on the web is immense. These above said tools help to uncover the basis of where optimization of your website is needed and most commonly ignored. Try them out for yourself and let us know how they’ve help to increase your website’s traffic and usability.
By Lisa Regall
Organic Search Analyst