6 Free SEO Tools to Powercharge Your SEO Campaign

Every SEO professional agrees that doing SEO barehanded is a dead-end deal. SEO software makes that time consuming and painstaking job a lot faster and easier. 

There are a great number of SEO tools designed to serve every purpose of website optimization. They give you a helping hand at each stage of SEO starting with keyword research and finishing with the analysis of your SEO campaign results.

Nowadays you can find a wide range of totally free SEO tools available on the web. And this overview of the most popular free SEO tools is going to help you pick up the ones that can make your website popularity soar.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Keywords lay the foundation stone of every SEO campaign. Hence keywords unearthing and faceting is the initial step on the way to Google’s top. Of course you may put on your thinking cap and make up the list of keywords on your own. But that is like a shot in the dark since your ideas may significantly differ from the terms people really enter in Google.

Here, Google AdWords Keyword Tool comes in handy. Despite the fact that this tool is originally aimed to assist Google AdWords advertisers, you can use that for keyword research too. Google AdWords Keyword Tool helps you find out which keywords to target, shows the competition for the selected keywords, lets you see estimated traffic volumes and provides the list of suggestions on popular keywords. Google AdWords Keyword Tool has a users-friendly interface and moreover it’s totally free. You can use some other paid alternative tools like Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery that may be effective as well, but Google AdWords Keyword Tool is the ultimate leader among free keyword research tools.

XML Sitemaps Generators

To make sure all your pages get crawled and indexed you should set sitemaps for your website. They are like ready-to-crawl webs for Google spiders that enable them to quickly find out what pages are in place and which ones have been recently updated. Sitemaps can also be beneficial for human visitors since they organize the whole structure of website’s content and make website navigation a lot easier. The XML Sitemap Generator lets you make up XML, ROR sitemaps that can be submitted to Google, Yahoo! and lots of other search engines. This SEO tool also lets you generate HTML sitemaps that improve website navigation for humans and make your site visitors-friendly.

SEO Book’s Rank Checker

To check whether your optimization campaign is blowing hot or cold you need a good rank checking tool to measure the fluctuations of your website’s rankings. SEO Book’s Rank Checker can be of great help in that. It’s a Firefox plug-in that lets you run checking ranks in Big Three: Google, Yahoo! and Bing and easily export the collected data. All you have to do is enter you website’s URL and the keywords you want to check your positions for. That’s it and in some seconds SEO Book’s Rank Checker provides you with the results on your rankings. It’s fast, easy-in-use and free.

Backlinks Watch

Links are like the ace of trumps in Google popularity game. The point is that the more quality links are on your backlink profile the higher your website ranks. That’s why a good SEO tool for link research and analysis is a must-have in your arsenal. Backlink Watch is an online backlink checker that helps you not only see what sites have links to your page, but also gives you some data for SEO analysis, such as the title of the linking page, the anchor text of the link, it says whether the link has dofollow or nofollow tag, etc. The only drawback of this tool is that it gives you only 1,000 backlinks per a website, regardless of the actual number of backlinks a website has.

Compete

Compete[dot]com provides a large pool of analytical data to fish from. It’s an on-line tool for monitoring and analysis of online competition that provides two categories of services: free Site Analytics and subscription based paid Search Analytics that lets you take advantage of some additional features. Compete an out-and-outer SEO tool that lets you see traffic and engagement metrics for a specified website and find the sites for affiliating and link building purposes. Compete is also a great keyword analyzer, since it lets you run the analysis of your on-line competitors’ keywords. Some other features to mention are subdomain analysis, export to CSV, tagging etc.

SEO PowerSuite.

SEO PowerSuite is all-in-one SEO toolkit that lets you cover all aspects of website optimization. It consists of four SEO tools to nail all SEO tasks. WebSite Auditor is a great leg-up for creating smashing content for your website. It analyzes you top 10 online competitors and works out a surefire plan based on the best optimization practices in your niche. Rank Tracker is a great at your website positions monitoring and generating the most click-productive words. SEO SpyGlass is powercharged SEO software for backlink checking and analysis. This is the only SEO tool that lets you discover up to 50,000 backlinks per a website and generate reports with ready-to-use website optimization strategy. And the last and the most advanced in this row is LinkAssistant. It is a feature-rich powerhouse SEO tool for link building and management that shoulders the main aspects of offpage optimization.

Free versions of these four tools let you tackle the main optimization challenges. You can also buy an extended version of SEO PowerSuite with advanced features to make your optimization campaign complete.

Summing things up we can conclude that there are lots of SEO tools that will never burn a hole in your pocket and let you effectively run your website optimization campaign with minimum of costs and efforts.

Read More

PPC and SEO: Benefits Of A Collaborative Approach

First, let us present the independent merits of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, also commonly referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or paid search. Whether you use Baidu Advertising, Google AdWords and/or Bing adCenter to run your PPC campaigns, each platform essentially has the same primary benefits:

• Instant visibility within the SERPs (unlike SEO)
• Flexibility
• High level of control
• Pay per click model (minimal wasted media spend)

Aside from all of these benefits, having a PPC campaign is a great way to gain more insight to ultimately boost SEO performance. The search industry is now realizing that collaboration between SEO and PPC professionals is a key factor of successful search marketing.

Reason 1: Discovering New Keyword Opportunities

When optimizing for organic search, we generally target one primary keyword and another secondary keyword per page. This means that the total number of keywords we can target is limited to the amount of content on the site. In contrast, with PPC we can target thousands of keywords which give us an extraordinary amount of data to play with, including important metrics such as conversion rate. Keywords which convert well in a paid search campaign are also likely to convert well in organic search.

Reason 2: Filling Content Gaps

Search engines have made a number of updates to their algorithms with the aim of providing their users with “fresh” content. Creating and adding good content to your website on a regular basis is more important than ever, however you may be at a loss as to what content you should write about. Creating more content that you think your users will find useful is fine, but wouldn’t it be better to create a content plan that is backed up by data? Identify your potential new content topics, create ad groups based on those topics and add them to your PPC campaign. Once you have enough data, compare the KPIs of each ad group to determine which content gaps you should fill.

Reason 3: Increasing Traffic Exponentially

Many people believe that if they already rank well for a given keyword in the organic search results, there is no need to target the same keyword in a PPC campaign. After all, clicks from organic search results are free, right?

With experience in both paid and organic search, we know that when you simultaneously target the same keywords via both channels, an exponentially larger amount of traffic will be generated… here’s why. If your website is organically ranked at #1 on Google but has no PPC presence, you are giving competitors an opportunity to steal your traffic via PPC ads, which often appear above the organic search results.

Reason 4: Increasing CTR From Organic Search

The copy used in PPC text ads is arguably the most vital element which affects the Click-Through Rate (CTR). In SEO, we know that the page title and meta description are visible to human users within the SERPs; they should always be created with this in mind. Although the meta description is not used by major search engines to determine ranking any longer, a well-written meta description can be the difference between someone visiting your site and someone visiting a competitors’ site. From analyzing PPC ad copy, it is possible to discover which words and calls to action perform best; you can then use your findings to optimize the meta description and increase CTR from organic search.

Read More