Free SEO Tools - Good or Bad?
I love a good freebie, don’t you?. Whether you’re just starting out, or a seasoned pro, we all use free tools. Why? Well, one of the reasons is maybe we’re too skint right now to fork out for a pro version. Or perhaps you’re not that heavily into a particular aspect of internet marketing and earning money online to care enough about buying tools. Or maybe, you’re just curious if it can give you a different insight into something.
Although they’re free, free SEO tools have come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years.
My favourite site for free SEO Tools has always been SEO Book. The first thing that attracted me was the lovely clean layout and look of the site. I’m afraid I’ve always been too ridiculously tight to pay for a proper web designer (so far!) but when I do I wil certainly put that one on my list for the look and feel I’d like to achieve.
So, what free SEO Tools have they got and why do I think you’ll find them useful?
Simply type in your keyword/s and press submit and you instantly get back a FULL listing of keywords and how many times they’re used from 14 sources, including Wordtracker, Google, Yahoo and MSN. Not only that, but right at the top is a link where you can download the full list straight to a csv file (meaning you can save it and play around with the keywords and results in a spreadsheet programme like Excel).
What I like is that the results include results from Wordtracker, which is THE main keyword finding tool. If you’re only ever going to buy ONE keyword tool, that’s the best in the world, then it has to be this one. So you can check it out for yourself, I’ve arranged for a Free Trial of Wordtracker - a full 7 days’ trial of this should get you sorted for months! It might be all you ever need, so that’s probably got my Freebie of the Week Award!
A rank checker will look at your website and your chosen keyword/s and will tell you just where your site is placed in the search engines. Nobody can be number 1 for every keyword. When you set up your site you choose a small group of specific keywords and your objective is to become number one in the search engine rankings in just that list. Would you rather be ranked number 1000 for 1000 keywords? Or get in the Top 10 of Google with a dozen carefully targetted keywords/keyphrases? This is what a rank checker does, it checks your rank for each of your keywords. As a rule of thumb, which always means talking generally, I’d tell somebody to specifically target just one key phrase per page in the first instance, then build that up over time by tweaking their pages.
However, be aware that unless you’re using the right tools, SEO can literally suck up 100 hours of your week without any trouble! In fact, if you get too hung up on optimising your pages at the start, you might find you never get anything done! So sometimes it’s just nice to know your rank, but don’t get obsessed about it. Your ranking matters, a LOT, but so do all the other things you have to think about! So just keep it in perspective and peck away at SEO and ranking piece by piece. Remember the story of the Tortoise and the Hare!
If you use Firefox and have discovered the super benefits of the plugins you can get, then why not check out the free Firefox plugin. This lets you see what your competitors are up to when you use Google or Yahoo to search. Once you’ve downloaded and installed the plugin, you simply do a search and right underneath each entry you get to click straight through to check the site’s PR, the Google Cache Date, the site age, if it’s on del.icio.us, if it’s on Technorati, how is its Alexa ranking, what’s it’s compete.com rank, trends, dmoz….. anyway, you get the picture. Maybe most of that lot isn’t something you’re interested in, but if you want to keep an eye on how well a competitor is doing then there’ll be 2-3 items of interest for you to monitor!
Youcan even use the Firefox SEO plugin to find nofollow links, but I’ll deal with that in another posting as it’s a bit geekier than information about free SEO tools needs to be!
So, what else is there from free SEO tools?
Free Search Analytics Tools: When you have a website, you’ll have some goals in mind. Your goals might be to get more people staying longer on your site. Or you might want them to sign up for your newsletter. Or buy something from you. These are your Site Goals. You might not have a site goal from day one because there’s so much to learn and do. But once the dust has settled you’ll be wanting your website to perform better, so you can set your site goals then. These free search analytics tools will help you to establish your marketing goals and to establish a baseline for where you are at right now. What that means is, you can plot and watch your progress as you and your site get better and better at what you do!
See What Keywords Your Competitors are Using. This is handy. If you want to be number one in Google you can look at what the current number one are doing to get there! Nifty cheating.
Free PPC Tools. Thinking of doing something with Pay Per Click advertising? Just intrigued? Tried it and bombed, but want to give it another go? Check out the PPC Tools, these will help you perform better in your Google Adwords campaigns.
…. and there’s more. There are even more tools available at Free SEO Tools, so take a look. You’ll be glad you did.
If you got this far, well done, you’re clearly cut out for all this earn money online malarkey! So good luck to you, and if you’re wanting
Palapple Blog | SEO Solutions for your Business…
Thanks for sharing. Search engine optimization is indeed one of the most crucial areas in Internet marketing, it is a perfect bridge between technology and business….