Useful Tools for SEO:
Use them for effective search engine optimization
A few basic but necessary tools for use in your SEO
work
There are a number of online tools that I use in my
SEO efforts. Some of these tools are free and some cost money. I
suppose you could do your SEO work without most of these tools, but who
would want to? They make life easier, and they make your SEO efforts
more efficient and effective.
A good keyword tool is critically important
I have to tell you, as far as I am concerned the
single most important tool in your tool kit is a keyword tool. As I’ve
said before, if your keyword phrases are not ever searched for then your
search engine optimization efforts are in vain. First you need to find
out what people are searching for in regards to your topic, and then do
your optimization.
There are a lot of keyword tools out there if you do a little
searching. Some are free, but I use
WordTracker which costs me about $60
for a month subscription. It’s an online tool, and you just log in and
use it whenever you need it. I usually end up subscribing for a
month every few months. The thing is, it is so valuable that it
would be worth way more than 100 times that price. Thank god for
competition
With WordTracker you can find out how many times a
keyword phrase is searched for, how many sites are competing with you
for that keyword phrase, and how many times your search engine listing
would be seen per day if you were on the 1st page of the
search engine results page. It also finds keyword phrases for you in
various ways. Once you subscribe you have a wealth of information
available as to how to effectively use the tool.
Google webmaster tools are invaluable in achieving
a high ranking on Google.
I am a firm believer in using Google’s webmaster
tools. For crying out loud, if Google is willing to tell you what
errors and problems your site has, then you should listen! The
webmaster tools tell you things like which keywords it sees in your
sites content, what it sees in the link text on other sites that point
to yours, which of your pages are being pointed to from other sites, and
more. The tools tell you when you have duplicate title tags, not enough
words in your meta description and when the meta description is
duplicated on more than one page.
You can submit a sitemap to make sure all of your
pages get spidered. Sitemaps can be very simple, consisting of just a
list of URLs in your site. Google spiders your sitemap within hours of
it being submitted, and it then tells you if there are any errors. It’s
simply amazing.
Google Analytics is another good SEO tool
Google analytics can provide you with a wealth of
information about your visitors, where they come from, the paths through
your site they take, the entry and exit pages, and tons more valuable
information. And it’s free. You can see at a glance your visitor bounce
rate, number of visits over time, page views, keyword phrases used to
find you and so much more that I don’t have the space here to go into
details. It’s very easy to check out, so check it out.
Link Popularity Checking Tool
Marketleap has a great little tool for checking
your link popularity.
This tool lets you measure your website's online
awareness and overall visibility. This SEO tool helps website owners
find out who is linking to their site and gives a useful benchmarking
report to quickly show where you stand in comparison to competitors and
other major online players. You can also track your links over time by
checking every so often. The site keeps records, some of mine now go
back 4 years! A great tool by any standards.
Link
Popularity Tool
The Compete tool helps you compete!
I’ll conclude with a wonderful tool I use to find
out the approximate traffic that any particular web site has. You put
in the URL of the site you are interested in and the tool gives you a
number of statistics including the approximate traffic that the site
receives. You can compare up to 5 URLs at a time and the tool gives you
both numbers and graphs to view.
Obviously the more traffic a site gets the more
accurate the estimate. I’ve tried several and compete gives me the most
accurate figures of the ones I’ve tried.
I like to see what kind of traffic a site gets when
I am considering trading links and when targeting specific keyword
phrases I like to scope out the competition to see if it’s worth doing.
Compete
There are many more tools that you can find online,
but this gives you a very good start, and possible all you really need
to perform expert professional SEO on your webpages.
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