Lightening the SEO Burden…
While the burden of SEO may appear heavy with continuous algorithm updates, numerous views and opinions on what works and what doesn’t, and a whole lot of competition, having a few tools to hand can make it all that little bit easier.
You’ll find here a few useful tools that may help you in your on-going SEO quests!
- The Google Keyword Tool (Free)
One of the greatest SEO tools has to be the Google Keyword Tool, and if you’re not using it then you should be! This tool gives you huge amounts of keyword data and insights. If you want to find out what keywords you could be targeting, and traffic flow you might expect in return, then the Google keyword tool is perfect for this.
- Google Analytics (Free)
Google analytics gives you all kinds of information like who’s visiting your website, how they’re coming to your website, when they are visiting your website, and for how long they’re staying. Knowing how much traffic you’re receiving, analysing the quality of this traffic, and monitoring the changes in traffic as you implement your SEO strategy is highly valuable. It tells you what keywords are working and what keywords are not.
- Google Webmaster (Free)
Google Webmaster enables you to monitor the health and index status of your website and reassures you that Google has no problems with your website. In addition, you can use it to monitor variables such as keyword ranking data and backlink data which although sometimes slow to update, can give you some very interesting insights.
- Google Position Checker (Free)
Quickly checking where your website ranks for a keyword or keyphrase is easy. Using this Google position checker you can simply enter your URL and the keyword you are interested in and it will instantly give you your position in Google.
- MajesticSEO (Free/paid)
MajesticSEO provides you with backlink information for a given domain. This can be particularly useful for monitoring not only your own website backlinks but your competitors’ as well. For many, the basic subscription will be enough meaning it can be used as a free tool. However, if you are interested in more detailed backlink analysis, you have the option to pay a monthly fee for a lot more information.
- Market Samurai (Free/paid)
Market Samurai provides detailed analysis on keywords, competition, ranking data, and other useful metrics. Although there are numerous SEO tools like this on the web, many of them require you to pay a high monthly fee. However, Market Samurai asks you to just pay a one-off fee making it much cheaper in the long term than other SEO tools. Therefore I’d recommend using this tool if you are interested in some detailed SEO analysis
- NetComber (Free/paid)
Netcomber allows you to check the ownership of websites. After entering a domain name you are given a list of domains that are likely to be owned by the same person. This is useful for checking up on competitors but is also useful for checking up on yourself. You might have links from numerous websites but does Google think you own these websites? If so it is likely to give you less credit for having these backlinks. Netcomber allows you to check whether a search engine is thinks your backlinks are coming from sites you own or not.
- Similar Page Checker (Free)
Search engines don’t like duplicate content, especially if they think you are trying to create multiple pages with duplicate content just to gain higher rankings. You might even have pages on your website that are rather too similar by mistake. This Similar Page Checker tool can tell you how similar your pages are.
- Copyscape (Free)
Is anyone copying your work? Copyscape tells you whether your content exists elsewhere on the web so you can check if your work is being copied by someone else.
- Website IP Address Checker (Free)
You can easily check whether websites have the same IP address or not by using this website IP address checker. This might be of interest to you since websites with the same IP may help Google determine whether they are owned by the same person or not. Check whether your backlinks are coming from websites with the same IP address or not using this tool.
