top 20 free tools for search engine optimization

Agenda

Top 20 Free Tools for Search Engine Optimization

19th March, 2015

Tools for Keyword Research

Google Keyword Planner

The keyword planner tool in Google Adwords forms the basis of most SEO strategies today. This free tool from

Google can be used to search keywords, ad group ideas and also get an understanding of how a particular keyword

might perform. You can also get help in choosing competitive bids and budget to go with your SEO campaign.

While this is a free tool it requires you to setup a free account with Adwords before accessing the tool.

Keyword Eye

Keyword Eye is a free tool for keyword research and helps mostly in PPC/SEO

campaigns. This tool can be effective during brainstorming of keywords.

Keywordtool.io

Keywordtool.io, provides about 750+ suggestions for every keyword you enter. Thereby enables quick

identification of top keywords in less time.

Ubersuggest

One of the most used free tool in the industry today, Ubersuggest provides a neat and organized list of

keywords that many other tools fail to do.

Incognito google.com search

This one though not a tool, goes a long way in helping identify top keywords that are being searched worldwide.

When searching for a particular keyword the suggestions provided by google gives an insight as to what users

are looking for in the particular field. Simple shortcut to Incognito is Ctrl + Shift + N.

Tools for Content

Siteliner

The site helps identify duplicate content within the site, be it in the meta-tags or content within the site. In

today’s scenario where Google algorithms strictly check for duplication Siteliner is very beneficial.

Copyscape

A special tool to check for copied content from other sites. More often than not bloggers are seen referring

content from other sites and using them without any modification which is strictly against SEO rules.

Copyscape can help detect any copied content to be placed within the site.

Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool

Once you have created your meta-tags, it is important to check the optimization levels of the keywords used in

them. Google has penalized several sites for over optimization and hence using Remove’em over optimization tool

to check the same is highly beneficial

Technical Tools

Google & Bing Webmaster tools

Google and Bing have their own respective Webmaster tools that can help keep your site optimized and also

help check the site’s indexing. Apart from this the tool also provides insight on website traffic patterns, reach,

visibility, speed-metrics and authorship statistics.

Moz open site explorer

Moz is considered to be one of the pioneers of SEO and their open site explorer sites will help you understand the various off-page SEO techniques. With Moz open site explorer ou can gauge site’s influence, view subdomain, inbound links to the site, root domain and analyze the link pages.

Google Developer PageSpeed Insights

The tool helps analyze the performance of a webpage. Based on the speed at which the site loads you can

quantify and estimate the performance on all devices.

Pingdom Website Speed Tool

Pingdom Website Speed Tool helps check the time your website takes to load. It provides ample details on

average load time and also provides suggestions to help improve the speed.

Robots.txt generator

At Economic Times Real Estate &

Digital Conference, 2014

As the name suggests, the tool helps create a robots.txt file which can be used to instruct the search engine about

pages in your site that are allowed to be indexed. Apart from generating the file you can also enter pages that you

want the search engine to not crawl without having to do manually.

Ahrefs – Backlink Checker

Ahrefs is a site explorer and backlink checker and is probably one of simplest yet effective tool available. It is well known

for its ability to filter backlinks and referring domains. Can be useful in analyzing online strategies to compete with your

competitors.

Majestic SEO

A complete SEO service tool that shows results specifically on link building and domain-based metrics.

The free services provided include Site Explorer, Backlink History tool and Keyword checker.

Schema Creator

This site will help you create a schema based on which Google and other search engines make sense of content

in your HTML. For people new into SEO creating a schema might be difficult to grasp and Schema Creator will

turn out to be a huge help for them.

SEO Chat

Useful in developing new SEO strategies. This tool shows how search listing will appear in

Google and this search list can be downloaded for further analysis.

Xenu's Link Sleuth

This is a spidering (crawling) software that will show broken links in your website. It validates text links, images,

maps, backgrounds and frames in your website.

Yoast Plugin for Wordpress

Wordpress has become an extremely common platform to submit content online. The Yoast Wordpress SEO

plugin goes a long way in taking care of all the technical optimization and helping write better content in

terms of SEO.

Tracking SEO Results

Google Analytics

Google Analytics offered by Google, is a service that provides detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and its

sources. It also keeps track on the conversions and sales. You can look into our article on Google Analytics for more

insight into using the tool.