SEO has become a cornerstone in content marketing campaigns as businesses look to establish a presence on the Internet. However, SEO is about more than just making sure you have the appropriate keywords placed in landing pages and blog posts. Search engines are getting smarter – specifically Google – which is constantly trying to keep the playing field leveled with every new update.
Google’s goal is to ensure that Web surfers are getting quality results each time they submit a search query, and you need to keep these guidelines in mind to make sure your company site actually reaches your target audience. That being said, it helps to know how to optimize your SEO strategy to make sure that you’re always tapping into the potential of the Web. Here are eight tools to optimize SEO you can use.
-
The Free Keyword Tool (Wordstream): With the Free Keyword Tool from Wordstream, you can search up to 30 different unique keywords to determine which ones can improve your own SEO. To get the most use out of this tool, Wordstream recommends searching for long-tail keywords (e.g., “buy romance novels” instead of “novels”).
-
Moz Pro: If you’ve been hunting for an all-in-one SEO management tool, Moz Pro might be exactly what you need. With a subscription to Moz, you have access to more than a dozen different tools that allow you to gauge analytics as well how your competition is optimizing SEO. Moz Pro is most popular for its Open Site Explorer feature, which allows you to hone in on your competitors’ link building strategies and improve based on this information.
-
SEObin.org: This website allows you to input your page title and description to determine the SEO value of your title tag and meta data. All you need to do is type in your “targeted search phrase/keyword” and select the search results for your country. SEObin.org is free of charge.
-
Majestic SEO: Another popular tool you can use to quickly gauge the performance of your site is Majestic SEO. Right on the homepage, you can type in a hyperlink and instantly receive information on its performance – some of the metrics included are Referring Domains, Referring IPs and External Backlinks. For a fee, you can subscribe to Majestic SEO to utilize more features such as Site Explorer and Topical Trust Flow.
-
Image SEO Tool: Images can be a big driver of traffic for a website, but not if they aren’t optimized appropriately. On FeedTheBot.com, you will find the Image SEO Tool that allows you to check the ALT tag and dimensions of any photo. It will also alert you to any SEO related issues you may be having with the image or its tags. FeedTheBot.com has additional resources such as the Ask Google tool, which can help you determine the popularity of specific topics across the search engine. Give the website a good look after trying out the Image SEO Tool.
-
Google’s Keyword Planner: Google has developed Keyword Planner to help individuals lay the groundwork for successful online advertising campaigns. In short, Keyword Planner helps individuals research keywords and gather historical statistics on keywords, increasing the chances of more exposure and revenue.
-
Snippet Optimizer: You don’t want to have a meta description abbreviated before it gets to the point – the Snippet Optimizer will help you make sure this never happens. On this site, you can type in the URL of one of your Web pages to get a preview of what its meta description will be in Google’s search results. With this information, you can edit your meta data appropriately before the page goes live.
-
Pingdom: Pingdom is designed to help you gauge the overall speed of your website. It grades you a scale 0/100 (100 being the best) and also gives you an estimate of the size of your page. With this information, you can make your site more responsive to its visitors.
There are several ingredients that go into a successful SEO formula – popular keywords, relevant ALT tags and grabbing title tags are just the beginning. As SEO becomes more critical for businesses looking to branch out onto the Internet, additional optimization tools are bound to emerge. However, these eight resources can give you a starting point as you look to make your presence known on the Web.
And if you’re interested in leveraging the benefits of content curation for SEO, check out our complete guide.
Great list! I personally find Google autosuggest quite useful for keyword research. I usually use http://keywordtool.io/ to get ideas from it, have you used it?
@mariadavies:disqus Wow! great tool. Thanks for sharing!
This is nice tool and it has youtube search functionality.
I also use sg.serpstat.com – it has “question only” mode, which helps me to generate good titles for my texts.
Hello its really wonderful knowledgeable..Give more good things. we are providing these type of services Best SEO Company, Rankings and reviews of best SEO company India and best search engine optimization companies, best SEO India , best seo services, best seo consultants. If you want to know more about this services please click here
http://globalsquares.com/
I still use the Keyword Planner and keywordtool, but I’ve also discovered a medley of not-so-obvious ways to get keywords that improve my organic traffic. One of them is sg.serpstat.com
Good list of tools, thanks for sharing
Check your Google webmaster tools – Search queries from images and try to optimize them to move their position better to top to get more traffic.
Thank you so very much for putting this together and sharing it. Really valuable and IMMEDIATELY relevant 🙂