Free SEO Tools
Free SEO Tools
It isn't always necessary to buy SEO tools in order to find out the data that you need to in order to devise a successful SEO strategy.
It is important to find out several key pieces of information in order to enable your site to rank well.
1/ keyword analysis - you will need to choose keywords that have significant traffic, while also being achievable for your site.
2/ competitor analysis - once you have a suitable keyword list that you want your site to rank for, you will need to analyse the sites that are already ranking for those terms. This information will allow you to see what it is that they have done to their site so that you can do the same thing, but more efficiently to your site.
Keyword Analysis:
Google keyword tools are a good starting point as they offer a lot of good data in an easily accessed format. It is important to note however, that the traffic volumes stated are very often inaccurate and so should be treated with caution.
We quite often use secondary keyword tools such as submit express keyword tool in order to provide a balanced second opinion. This tool provides daily traffic results, rather than Googles monthly results, but a simple x 30 calculation provides useful compatible data which very often shows significantly lower traffic than Google shows. Our rule of thumb is that if the site can see a return on investment from the lowest traffic data we can find, then any additional traffic the site receives will be a welcome "free"bonus.
See http://www.deeho.co.uk/seo_tools/keyword_research_tools.php
Competitor Analysis:
Once you have some keywords that you want to focus your site on, you will need to look at the sites that currently rank for those keywords.
There are several different areas that you need to look at in order to optimise a website properly. Having picked several target sites that you consider important, you will need to analyse several key elements. First, you need to look at the competitor sites back links. You will need to know not just the volume of their back links, but the power and authority of the sites that are linking to your competitors, as well as the link text that they have used. The better the link sites PR, the more valuable the link is to you, so it is important to know the value of your competitors back links.
Page content is also important, not only do you need to include each keyword that you expect to rank for, but you also need to pay attention to your keyword density. This does depend upon the total volume of words on each of your pages, but as a rule of thumb, 2% - 4% is ideal. The search engine are not capable of guessing what you want to rank for, so make sure you include words and phrases that you want to rank for on each page.
SEO quake is a good keyword density tool and is a free add on for firefox. I would also recommend Yslow which is another Firefox add on which will show you the page size and load speed of your pages. The load speed is an important metric for Google rankings as slow pages are penalised within search. Small page sizes will help to speed your site up, as will reducing the DNS requests needed to render your pages. Each DNS request takes time to action, so the fewer requests your pages need, the faster it will load.
XML Sitemap Tools:
Creating an XML Sitemap and submitting it to Google is an important part of an effective online strategy. An accurate site map will allow the search engines to easily find the pages that you want to be found. For small sites of less than 500 pages, this can be done free, while larger sites will only cost around £10 to create. Once you have generated your site map, you will need to submit it via each search engines Webmaster Tools area. The search engine will then know about each of your pages rather than you waiting for them to be discovered.
See http://www.deeho.co.uk/seo_tools/xml_sitemap_generating_tools.php
Back Link Checking Tools:
There are many back link checking tools available, some offer limited information for free, with full analysis data only available within the paid model. Majestic SEO offer a basic overview for free, but show every link that their spiders can find. Many other tools use Yahoo Site Explorer as the basis of their analysis, which doesn't show every link you may have, and can be temperamental. Yahoo are however a reasonable indicator of back link information and allow you to compare the most powerful 1000 back links for any given site.
Google are a lot more secretive about the back links that they value for a site. Through webmaster tools you can see the links in Google for any site to which you have access, but you are unable to compare this with competitor sites as Google won't let you see their data. It is important to compare like for like so we would recommend that you use Yahoo data as you will then have data that you can compare accurately.
See http://www.deeho.co.uk/seo_tools/backlink_checking_tools.php
It isn't necessary to pay for the tools that you need as with a little effort, you can find out all the information that you need using free SEO tools.
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