As we come to the end of this month, what better way to wrap up this month’s theme of “Getting Your Business Found” than giving away free stuff. Well, free advice and content at least. A few months ago I came across this article of great SEO tools that are free written by Mark Thompson over at Web Analytics World. You can use them for link research, SEO, social media and analytics.
Here is the article list:
1. SEO Toolbar
This is by far the best SEO tool out there. No matter what client or industry I am researching, I always start with the data provided by the SEO Toolbar. It will give you a snapshot of a site, by providing high level information search engines analyze when ranking websites. Even though the toolbar will give you lots of different data points, there are only certain things I look at. I look at the follow data to get a basic overview of the site.
- Domain Age
- Inbound Links
- PageRank
- Pages Indexed
- SEO X-ray (nofollow links, H tags, meta data)
2. Xenu
There was a great post written by Ann Smarty that talks about the different things you can do with the Xenu tool.
Basically this tool will allow you to scan and analyze a site to help find potential problems.
- Broken Links
- Depth of the Site (crawling issues)
- Potential Duplicate Content Issues
- Orphan Pages
- 404 Error Pages
3. Website Grader
This web-based tool, allows you to enter a url and it will analyze the site, then it creates a user-friendly SEO report. This can be an easy report to generate for a potential client. However, sometimes it can be overwhelming for people because of all of the information it returns.
- Overall SEO Score (out of 100)
- Basic On-Page SEO (Meta data, Alt tags, H tags)
- Basic Off-Site SEO (Domain Age, Pages Indexed, Inbound Links)
- Blog Analysis
- Social Media Analysis
4. SEO for Firefox
SEO for Firefox is a plugin that will pull in data about the site within the Google search results. I will use this to see how fierce the competition is and to help determine how much effort and time it will take to optimize a potential clients site. The nice thing about SEO for Firefox is the flexibility to only add data into the results that you want to see. These are the data points I pull in:
- PageRank
- Inbound Links
- Domain Age
- Google and Yahoo Rankings
5. Rank Checker
Rank Checker is a stand alone firefox plugin (also on the SEO Toolbar) that allows you to check the rankings of a site for specific keywords/phrases. One nice feature about Rank Checker is you can check not only US search engines, but foreign versions of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Data I pull from this tool include:
- Baseline Rankings
- Ranking Improvements
- What URL is Ranking
6. AuditMyPC: Sitemap Generator
There are a lot of sitemap generator tools out there, however I feel that this is the best…plus its free.
- Generate a XML Sitemap
- Generate a HTML Sitemap
- Analyze Website Pages & Structure
7. Reverse IP Lookup
This tool allows you to see what other domains are on the same server. It is not often, but sometimes if a site that has been penalized by Google is hosted on the same server as your site, it can penalize ALL that are on the shared hosting server. This is another reason why being on your own dedicated server can help your SEO.
8. Yahoo! Site Explorer
There are a number of link analysis tools like Link Diagnosis, BackLink Watch, andLink Assistant, however Yahoo! Site Explorer I feel still does the best job of not only finding backlinks, but ordering them in place of importance. Here are the main things I will look at when analyzing SiteExplorer links.
9. SocialMention
To see what is being said about a potential or current client, I will use a variety of real-time search engines. I usually will start at SocialMention because it will scour the web including Blogs, Q&A, Forums, Mircoblogs, Social Bookmarks, Events, Video, and News sites for mentionings of your brand or keyword you enter. I can get a better understanding of:
- Brand Perception
- Brand Reach
- Industry Position
- Influencers in the Industry
- Types of Communication/Discussions
10. Google Analytics
Of course if you have access to a clients Google Analytics you can find out a wealth of knowledge that you wouldn’t be able to gather with free tools anyone can use. When I first look at a sites analyics I will look at certain data including:
- Daily Traffic
- Traffic Sources
- Keywords
- Geo-Location
- User Engagement
- Conversions
With all of these free tools you can learn a lot about a potential/current client and your competitors. You are able to cover a wide spectrum of information including on-page/off-page factors, social media, reputation management, and user engagement. Feel free to try one or all of these tools the next time you perform some research on a site.
Want to Learn More about Search Marketing?
Here at Network Solutions we have put together some great tools and services for search marketing, local search visibility and pay-per-click advertising. Check them out and if you need some help getting your site optimized, reach out via phone, e-mail or twitter.
Google+
Feeling overwhelmed by the tsunami of social media to-do’s coming your way daily? From new sites and services to check out, to new tips and resources to help you use social media better, there is a lot to keep up with. Even though you can probably ignore most of the noise, you really should pay attention to what your customers are saying about you online.
