SEO tools can help speed up your process and save you time, allowing
you to concentrate on the important tasks. But with so many out there
promising the earth how can you decide what you need and which tools to
choose?
To help you out, we’re going
to list the best tools for specific SEO jobs. Some of them are free and
some require a paid subscription, but most offer a free trial so you can
check them out and decide if they’re right for you.
However,
don’t go signing up to every tool you see here. First you need to make a
SEO plan for your campaign and make sure you follow it through. These
tools are here to help you with your campaign, but they won’t do it all
for you.
We’ve categorized our 25 tools into the main tasks of an
SEO campaign, in the order you’d normally action them, starting with the
research phase. You can consider these categorize as your top-level
task when creating your plan. And remember, “He who fails to plan is
planning to fail”.
Do your research
Before
you start making any websites improvements or building links, first
you’ll need to do some research. You’ll need to determine which keywords
you want to target and this will be based primarily on how much traffic
and competition keywords have. It’s also important to remember that you
want relevant keywords that are likely to convert into a sale or a
lead. Bigger traffic is not always better!
Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Probably
the most well-known keyword tool to online marketers, Google’s keyword
tool enables you to find related keywords to the ones you enter and see
how many searches they get per month, both globally and locally to you.
You’ll
be looking for the relevant to your website. You can easily export the
data to Excel for manipulation and end up with a great keyword list
starting point.
As this tool is freely available, it’s often the first port of call, even for professional SEOs.
Note that the figures it produces aren’t always perfect and you’ll need
to understand the difference between exact and broad match when doing
your research, but on the whole it’s one of, if not the best keyword
research tools available. Not to mention it’s from the search engine we
all want to rank in!!
KeywordSpy
One
of the best ways to discover keywords is by analyzing your
competitors’. Keyword Spy provides a one-stop-shop for all manner of
keyword research. You can easily spy on what your competitors have been
optimizing for and also what they’ve been bidding on for Pay-Per-Click
(PPC) campaigns. PPC campaigns can often give you a great insight into
which keywords convert well, as the competition will have tested this
already for you! Alternatives to keyword Spy include Word Tracker and
SEMrush.
Micro Niche Finder & Market Samurai
Both
these
tools help you find niche and long-tail keyword opportunities. In
Micro niche finder you can quickly analyze data from lots of different
sources and see special keyword scores such as Soc (Strength of
Competition) and OCI (Online Commercial Intention). The OCI value will
tell you if people are looking to purchase something or are looking for
information.
SimilarSites
SimilarSites
allows you to find websites that are similar to the one you’re looking
to promote. The search results in Google will allow you to find most of
your main competitors, but perhaps some of your competitors are
targeting different keywords to the ones you are…
By using this
tool you can find lots of competitors and then research them to find out
what keywords they’re optimizing for. A simple idea, but very useful.
Google AdWords
If
you’re promoting a brand new website or a website which hasn’t seen
much traffic in the past, consider spending some money on Google Adwords
so you can test how keywords convert quickly. There’s nothing worse
than promoting a keyword for six months to end up finding it doesn’t
convert very well SEO is all about testing to see what works and keyword
research is no exception.
Optimize your Site
Once
you’ve determined the keywords you want to target, you need to move on
to optimizing your website’s content and code. The way you structure
your site and the content you place on it helps Google determine what it
thinks your site is all about. But there’s a lot to check, especially
if you have a dynamic site with thousands of pages. You want to make
sure keywords are targeted correctly and that there is nothing getting
in the way of Google when crawling your website. the following tools can
help you out.
Xenu Link Sleuth
This
amazing free tool crawls your website in a similar way to Google and
quickly finds broken links and other problems. Can all your web pages be
found? Maybe they’re too many clicks away? With Xenu link sleuth you’ll
be able to see a good overview of your website’s pages and fix or
improve them. Try to get in the habit of running this tool on any new
website you creates as it can help lick up simple mistakes that could be
embarrassing later down the line.
Google Webmaster Tools
Again
another free tool, webmaster tools gives you important feedback about
your website from Google itself. You can also configure your website by
adding a Google Site Map and setting a preferred domain, and see
diagnostics for your website, which include crawl errors and HTML
suggestions.
Google PageSpeed Tool
The
speed of your website can have a big influence on your rankings, so
Google has provided this free tool to measure it, and provides lots of
great tips on how to improve things too. Some simple tweaks to your
website can make all the difference here and you’ll be making your
website visitors happy tool
SEO Powersuite- Website Auditor
A
paid tool, Website Auditor is very comprehensive. It at first seems
very similar to Xenu, but takes things a lot further and offers
simple-to- follow reports for improving your website’s on-site SEO. It
also caters for the internal linking of a website and can help you find
ways to boost the page rank of pages you feel need more prominence. It
will also help you optimize the content of your website and includes
tools to analyze what your competitors are doing.
SEOmoz
Probably
the best and most well known SEO website / toolset around at present,
SEOmoz is found all over the place and for two good reasons. First, it
combines great resources and tools to create an awesome place to learn
and improve your SEO knowledge. And second, it has a rather cute looking
‘Roger the robot’.
One of the main differentiating factors from
other all-in-one SEO tools is that SEOmoz offers amazing resources,
training and tips. And if you will still need help there’s the Q&A
system where you can ask a professional SEO any question you like.
There
are also SEO Webinars where pro members connect directly with the
experts behind SEOmoz. Each Webinar lasts for an hour-and-a-half and is
based upon a specific SEO or online marketing topic.
Pro members can ask their own questions at the end and you can watch previous Webinars too.
If
you want to know more about a website’s backlinks and are missing Yahoo
Site Explorer (OSE). This will help you compare your website’s
popularity not only in terms of backlinks, but also social mentions and
SEOmoz’s own Domain Authority and page Authority metrics.
Finally
there’s the SEOmoz community. It’s not only SEOmoz employees who
contribute to the SEOmoz website: their users also regularly write in
the YouMoz blog, a place where anyone can write an SEO article comments
from other users. Some very interesting topics pop up, and every now and
then the SEOmoz team likes a post enough to promote it to the main
SEOmoz blog.
If you’re looking to learn or improve your SEO, you can’t go far wrong here.
LinkBuilding
There
are many websites that offer linkbuilding services in return for your
hard earned cash, but that’s not what this list is for. Instead, we’ll
assume you’ll be doing your own link building and will be looking for
quality links from trusted websites.
The main tasks for
linkbuilding are identifying link prospects and implementing outreach to
build relationships with the ultimate goal of securing a link. There’s a
lot of information to keep track of and the following tools will help
make is a lot easier for you.
MajesticSEO
MajesticSEO
crawls the internet much like Google’s own spiders and indexes it all
in its own database. With this massive database majesticSEO is able to
provide extremely useful data about your site and your competitor’s
sites.
Want to know all the links a competitor has? No problem!
Simply run off a quick report and you’ll soon have everything you need
to know.
The competitor links tool can help you find links that
you can also acquire. It can also help you analyze the techniques your
competitors are using and find out why ther’ve got the number one
position and you don’t . Maybe they’ve been doing more article directory
submissions, or maybe they’ve been doing something naughty like paying
for do-follow links? You can dig into the data and find out all sorts of
useful information.
Another great aspect of majesticSEO is the
Backlink History tool, which enables you to chart this discovery of
backlinks over time for multiple websites. This is great for seeing how
much SEO effort your competitors are putting in and comparing it to how
you’re doing. If you’re down in links per month, then you need to get
working!
You may wish to know if your web server is in a bad
neighborhood ( you don’t want your website being tarnished with the same
brush as other spammy websites ). Using MajesticSEO’s neighborhood
tool, all you need to do is enter your domain or IP address and it will
provide you with a list of other websites on the same IP address or
nearby, which you can then visually check. If you see lots of spammy
websites then it might be prudent to consider changing your hosting
provider.
MajesticSEO also includes a great tool called Clique
Hunter, which can analyze the backlinks of several sites at once. You
can use this to report on your site and your competitors at the same
time and then identify which links your competitors have that you don’t
while filtering out the ones you already have.
Ontolo
Ontolo’s
primary function is to help you find relevant and quality link
prospects. You let Ontolo know the keywords you want to target and it
will scour the internet and come back with lots of prospective for you,
all categorized by their type. You can then search thee link prospects
to find suitable link opportunities for your campaigns. For example, if
you’re looking to do guest posting you can find sites that are likely to
accept guest posts and exclude pages from your competitors or sites you
have already engaged with.
Finally the Majestic Million tool
lists the top one million websites. This can be used to find
authoritative link prospects-or you can simply bask in your glory if you
find your website on the list! Interestingly the top three websites at
the moment are google.com, facebook.com and adobe.com
Buzzstream
Trying
to keep on top all the outreach you’ve done via email, Telephone,
Twitter and so on can be an enormous task. You can end up with such
massive Excel sheets containing all the contact information and
reminders to follow up with people that some never get actioned.
Buzzstream
solves this problem nicely with a custom online solution that enables
you to keep all information in one place and categorize by website and
campaign. It also enables you to send emails directly from the system
and will collect replies and automatically add them into the contact
history.
Plus it can help with link prospecting by automatically
finding new websites to connect with everyday. If that’s not enough, it
will also do project management and handle tasks for your different team
members and track your links to see if they’ve gone live, or been lost.
Social media
Online
social activity has been proven to influence search rankings and it’s
now becoming more commonplace for social media to be included in SEO
campaigns. Although nowhere near as important as link building, those
Facebook likes and Twitter tweets can make a difference.
SproutSocial
A company can have so many social media profiles these days-with the likes of Facebook pages.
Twitter
accounts, Google Plus and LinkedIn-that it can be difficult to keep on
top of them all. Enter SproutSocial, a tool that provides complete
social media management. With SproutSocial you can easily run campaigns
to promote your offerings and engage with your online communities.
Tracking and Analysis
Fundamentally,
SEO is all about testing. You want to know if what you’re doing is
working and if you ban better it. So monitoring your results over time
is extremely important. You’ll want to monitor everything from your
rankings on Google to how much money you’re turning over.
Google analytics
Rankings
are all very well and good, but as SEOers we need to remember the end
goal, and that’s making money! So although we may have the positions, we
need to know if they’re converting and how much money they’re making it
doing online payments.
By using Google Analytics goal and
e-commerce tracking we can see everything we need to know and adjust our
SEO campaign over time as we determine which keywords perform the best
from a business perspective.
Management
Trying
to manage an entire SEO campaign can be a daunting and difficult task,
especially if you have an SEO team all working on a project at the same
time. You can consider project management tools such as Microsoft
project or Basecamp, but why not use something specifically built for
the jobs?
LinkDex
The
linkdex platform is made up of many different features. The first main
feature is the SEO task and project manager. This simple to use, but
very effective, project management area enables you to assign tasks to
different team members and easily report on them. Linkdex provides some
sample task lists to get you started and you can, of course, make your
own. The other great feature is that you can track ranking changes
against completed tasks.
The next set of features helps you with
your SEO tasks. There’s a backlink analysis system that will help you
work out where you’re lacking in backlinks when compared to your
competitors and there’s a website optimization system that will score
your paged and suggest improvements. Linkdex provides some great
analytics also, with a fully fledged keyword rankings checker where you
can compare how you’re doing against your competitors. And finally, you
can create and export lots of reports in different formats. Great for
monthly client reports.
Raven tools
Raven
tools are a one-stop-shop for your SEO tool need. The list of tools it
includes is so long we couldn’t possibly mention them all here! You can
use research tools, contact managers, keyword managers, use data from
your Google adwords campaigns, grab Google analytics data and even
access the system via their own free iOs app.
It also caters well
for different user types. You can give users only the access they need
and assign them tasks with little effort, allowing you to fully manage
your SEO campaign.
There are also social media tools, content
management tools and third-party connections to systems such as BaseCamp
and MailChimp.
ENJOY ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
