seo

By Megan Bryson

For every website owner, building a great-looking and fully-functional website is only the first step toward success. After putting a lot of effort into polishing the look and feel of your website, you are ready to reveal it to the world.  But in order to make sure that the “world” can find your website, you need to employ some SEO best practices.

E-commerce web developers also specialize in the implementation and use of SEO tools for digital stores. Here’s our list of essential (and easy-to-use) SEO tools.

Keyword Analysis Tools

SEO experts agree that picking the right set of keywords is at the heart of every successful SEO strategy. Several keyword research tools are available to help you predict what keywords will be relevant to your audience.

ÜberSuggest is a free and easy-to-use keyword analysis tool. It provides you with a comprehensive analysis of your keywords, based on selected countries and target markets. Additionally, this tool also suggests keyword alternatives and even long-tail keywords.

A great paid option for keyword analysis is SEMrush. This in-depth tool analyzes keywords and can help you determine how difficult it will be to rank for each.  It also reports your competitors’ rankings so you can assess where you can earn a competitive advantage.

Rankings

As you’re investing both time and money into your SEO campaign, it’s important to use the right tool for keeping track of the campaign’s success. Using a tool that checks your website’s current rank (and historical data) is beneficial.

Google Search Console is one of the most widely-used SEO tools for monitoring the performance of websites. To check your website’s current ranking, you can use the “Search Traffic” tab, which lists keywords you’re competing for.

Authority Labs is a highly-capable paid alternative to Google Search Console. This tool is used for highly accurate and reliable search engine ranking data, where you can generate new data daily. You can also perform checks both locally and globally, giving you in-depth information on different levels. You can check your competitor’s rankings as well.

Content Quality

If you look at your highest-ranking competitors, you will notice they provide a lot of content (usually daily). However, Google is known for checking websites for quality, not the quantity of their content.

So instead of pumping a lot of low quality content into your website, include unique and in-depth analytical pieces. Here are some of the most valuable tools that check your website’s content.

Yoast WordPress Plugin is one of the most popular SEO tools on the Web. This is a freemium tool that integrates with your WordPress website and provides real-time suggestions as you write new blog posts. You can find Yoast’s interface at the bottom of your blog posts, where you can fine-tune your page’s Google appearance.

Buzzsumo is a premium SEO tool that will help you determine topics for your site’s content. The key to a successful SEO campaign is to carefully pick your future article titles, which is where Buzzsumo excels.

This tool provides real-time and historical graphs that allow you to select the right topic to attract a lot of attention on the Web. Even though Buzzsumo is a complex tool, its UI is incredibly intuitive and easy to use.

Link Building

One of Google’s unwritten SEO rules is that you should build high-quality links to your website, as well as from your website to other useful Web resources. However, links get broken over time, which is why it’s beneficial to get an alert when one breaks.

LinkMiner is an incredibly easy-to-use Chrome plugin for detecting broken links. After adding it to Chrome, you can check Web pages for broken links.

This plugin scans all your links and color-codes the broken ones. This tool also provides a summary of your links’ value, so you can adapt your SEO strategy accordingly.

Moz SEO Toolbar is yet another web browser extension that scans websites and web pages in real time. In addition to showing broken links, this tool also shows highly valuable SEO information, like keyword value and website ranking.

Link Removal

Up until recently, some people believed that “buying” highly valuable links was a good idea. However, Google’s Penguin algorithm update ended this practice. This update brought numerous changes to how Google sees links, which in turn punished millions of websites who used this controversial SEO technique.

Disavow is Google’s own tool for checking low-quality links directed toward your website. Using this tool, you can easily check for those bad links and instruct Google to ignore them. However, it is advisable to take an additional step and completely remove those links from the Web, if possible.

Back-End SEO Tools

It’s important for you to know that SEO runs deep and that your website’s back-end is also important. Your Google ranking could be easily hit by performance issues or, even worse, if your website was marked as malicious. This is why there are tools that inspect your website for technical errors.

Screaming Frog is a freemium tool that scans your website’s back-end structure. You can see your website’s status codes, page titles, meta descriptions and even robots and metadata (readable by search engines only). You can also export data into a filterable spreadsheet.

DeepCrawl is designed to be used by newbies. Instead of getting a lot of technical-related data, DeepCrawl presents easy-to-interpret graphs and charts. It also allows you to identify duplicate pages, missing page titles and more.

Using the right set of SEO tools allows you to work smarter, not harder. An effective SEO tool provides the information you need to allow more visitors to learn about your website from Google and other search engines.

Megan Bryson has been in Marketing and Advertising since 2011. She is passionate about helping clients and creating awesome content.