There are a lot of things to think about when you're running a website. You need to make sure your design is up to par, your content is engaging and helpful, and you're doing everything you can to attract visitors and keep them coming back for more.
But one of the most important things you can do for your website is to make sure it's search engine optimized (SEO). This means making sure your site is easy for search engines to find and understand, and that it ranks high in the search results for the keywords and phrases that matter most to you.
Fortunately, there are a lot of great SEO tools out there that can help you with all of these things. In this article, we'll take a look at 5 of the best SEO tools that are totally free to use.
Google Search Console is a free tool that shows you how your website is doing in Google search results. You can use it to see how often your site appears in Google, what keywords people are using to find your site, and what pages on your site are getting the most traffic.
To use Google Search Console, you'll need to add your website to it and verify that you own the site. Then, you can start using the tool to see how your site is doing.
To get started, go to google.com/webmasters/tools/ and sign up for an account. Then, follow the instructions on how to add your website and verify that you own it. Once you've done that, you can start using the tool to see how your site is doing in Google search results!
Advantages of Using Google Search Console
1. Uncovering Technical Issues: Google Search Console is a great tool for uncovering any technical issues that may be hindering your website’s performance in search engine rankings.
2. Monitor Your Site’s Performance: With Google Search Console, you can monitor your website’s performance in search results, analyze trends, and make sure your website is properly indexed.
3. Monitor Your Backlinks: Google Search Console keeps track of all the backlinks to your website. This helps you monitor any changes and keep track of your SEO efforts.
4. Optimize Your Content: Google Search Console can help you identify keywords that are performing poorly in search results. This can give you insight into how to optimize your content for certain keywords.
5. Submit Your XML Sitemap: Submitting an XML sitemap to Google Search Console helps search engines crawl and index your website pages. This can help improve your website’s visibility in search results.
Create an Account with Google Search Console now.
If you want to track your website's progress and see how users interact with your site, Google Analytics is a great tool to use. It's free and easy to set up, and it gives you a ton of insights into your website traffic.
Some things you can track with Google Analytics are:
- The number of visitors to your website
- The average time spent on your website
- The bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave your website after only viewing one page)
- The number of new visitors vs. returning visitors
- The most popular pages on your website
- Traffic sources (where your visitors are coming from)
- User behavior (how visitors interact with your site)
- Conversions (goals you want visitors to complete on your site)
- Audience (demographics, interests, and behavior of your visitors)
- Acquisition (how visitors are finding your site)
- Site content (pages, posts, events, and downloads)
- Campaigns (how visitors respond to your campaigns)
- Ecommerce (sales, revenue, and average order value)
- Real-time activity (what visitors are doing right now)
- Technology (devices and browsers used by your visitors)
Google Analytics is a great tool for understanding how users interact with your website, and it can help you identify areas for improvement.
MozBar is a free SEO tool that's great for giving you an overview of a website's on-page optimization. To use it, simply install the MozBar extension and then head over to any website.
Once you're there, MozBar will show you the website's PageRank, domain authority, and other key metrics. This is helpful because it lets you see how your website stacks up against your competitors.
MozBar also allows you to do things like highlight nofollow links and view on-page elements like titles, meta descriptions, and H1 tags. This is helpful because it allows you to quickly see what needs to be improved on a page.
Advantages of using MozBar
1. Page Analysis: Get an overview of how your page is performing with MozBar’s page analysis feature. This includes page titles, meta descriptions, and more.
2. SERP Analysis: MozBar allows you to quickly check out the competition on the search engine results page (SERP). You can check out the page titles, meta descriptions, and more.
3. Keyword Research: Keep track of the keywords you’re targeting, and get insights on the competition for those terms.
4. Link Analysis: See what sites are linking to your competition, and get a better sense of your own backlink profile.
5. On-Page Optimization: Make sure your pages are optimized for search engine success with MozBar’s on-page optimization feature.
Overall, MozBar is a helpful tool that's great for getting an overview of a website's SEO health. And best of all, it's free!
One great free tool that I use all the time is Screaming Frog. It’s a desktop program that you can use on Windows or Mac. And what it does is it crawls your website like a search engine would, so you can see all of the links, titles, and metadata on your site.
This is really valuable because it allows you to see any errors that need to be fixed. For example, you might have pages with missing titles or descriptions. Or you might have duplicate content issues.
Screaming Frog also lets you export all of this data into a spreadsheet so you can track your progress over time. I highly recommend this tool to anyone who wants to improve their website’s SEO.
Advantages of Using Screaming Frog
1. Crawl Visualization – Visualize the structure of your website in an interactive map for easy navigation.
2. On-page Analysis – Analyze key on-page SEO elements including titles, headings, meta descriptions, and more.
3. XML Sitemaps – Create and submit sitemaps to search engines like Google and Bing.
4. Robots.txt – Check and ensure that your robots.txt is configured correctly.
5. Redirect Chains – Identify and fix any redirect chains to ensure that your pages are indexed properly.
6. Log File Analysis – Analyze and visualize crawl data from log files to identify potential issues.
7. Canonicalization – Check that each page is using proper canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues.
8. Structured Data – Validate structured data markup such as Schema.org to ensure it is correctly implemented.
9. Page Speed – Test page speed across multiple devices and locations to ensure a great user experience.
10. Backlinks – Analyze the quality and quantity of your backlinks to identify any potential link-building opportunities.
If you're using WordPress, then you can't go wrong with the Yoast SEO plugin. Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins out there, and for good reason.
First of all, it's totally free. And second of all, it's really easy to use. Yoast will help you with things like keyword optimization and creating meta descriptions, and it will also give you an idea of how your post or page is going to look in the search results.
Plus, Yoast has a ton of features that are perfect for both beginners and advanced users. So if you're looking for a way to step up your SEO game, then Yoast is definitely worth checking out.
Advantages of using Yoast SEO Plugin
1. Page Analysis: Yoast SEO analyzes the content of your page and gives you feedback on improving it.
2. XML Sitemaps: Yoast SEO automatically generates XML sitemaps to help search engines index your website.
3. Connect Search Console: Yoast SEO allows you to connect to your Google Search Console account so you can track your website’s performance.
4. Social Integration: Yoast SEO allows you to set up social media profiles and link them to your website.
5. Canonical URLs: Yoast SEO helps you avoid duplicate content issues by setting canonical URLs.
6. Breadcrumbs: Yoast SEO adds breadcrumb navigation to your website for better navigation and more visibility.
7. Meta Descriptions: Yoast SEO allows you to add meta descriptions to pages and posts so they are more likely to appear in search engine results.
8. Robot.txt: Yoast SEO allows you to create and manage a robots.txt file for your website.
9. Link Suggestions: Yoast SEO provides suggestions for internal links to help improve your website’s SEO.
10. SEO Analysis: Yoast SEO provides an SEO analysis
There are a lot of free SEO tools available that can help you improve your website. While some are better than others, all of them can be useful in their own way. Try out a few of these tools and see how they can help you make your site more visible and easier to find.
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