If you want to succeed today in SEO, you’ve not only go to write the right articles, you’ve also got to have the right tools in place to correctly analyze what is happening on your site. After all, search engines look at your site as data only and so you’ve got to be able to look at your site in the same way.
Otherwise, how will you ever be able to identify, let alone fix, the problems that your website has? I promise you, you can’t do that on intuition alone.
For that reason, today we’re going to look at some of the best SEO tools out there to help you analyze your site this year.
Google Webmaster Tools
The best way to see how Google looks at your site is – not surprisingly – by looking at Google. They’ve got a great tool package that is user friendly (Even for novices) and still gives you plenty of content to allow you to figure out what’s going on with your website.
Take Fetch as Google for example. This great tool will allow you to look at your website as Google looks at it. And in that way you can find out what is working and what is not. Doing this a couple of times with your website will give you far more information about how you should SEO optimize than reading a dozen articles will. After all, you’re getting your answers from the horse’s mouth.
Check My Links
You get punished quite severely by Google if you’ve got links on your website that don’t actually lead anywhere. Checking them all by hand, however, is a devilishly time consuming task. And why should you? Check My Links will do it for you.
And they’ll do it for free! That’s going to save you a great deal of time, as afterwards you just have to look for red links on your page – something that’s easy for most of us, though it isn’t exactly optimal for the colorblind. They really should look into that.
Moz Pro Tools
Okay, after the first month’s free trail, Moz Pro Tools expensive as it goes somewhere between 99 US to 599 US a month. At the same time, it’s got everything that you could possible wish for in terms of SEO optimization and then some.
For example, if you’ve got a lot of content on your URL, then their own crawler will go through all of it (up to 3000 links) and give you feedback about how well they work. In this way, you can find out what you should change and optimize in order to get a much better SEO result. After all, Google doesn’t just look at who links to you, but also who you link to.
SEO Report Card
Sure, you’ve got to give them a bit of personal information, but in return they’ll give you a wealth of information about what you can do to make your site work better. What does SEO Report Card Tell you?
Well:
- Rank Analysis. They’ll tell you how well you rank on the three big search engines (google, bing and yahoo) in terms of your big keywords.
- Link Building. They will let you know who links back to you.
- On-site analysis. They’ll let you know how well you did at incorporation your keywords into your actual site, so that you can work better at optimizing that.
- Website accessibility. It is important to know how easy people can actually get to your website and how easy it is for crawlers to access, which in turn will influence how you rank.
- Trust metric. Does your website seem authoritative and trustworthy? Because if it doesn’t, you’re going to lose out on a lot of traffic. And that is something you’ve got to know so that you can fix it.
- Current indexing. Do you know how many of your pages have been indexed? You will after you’ve had this report card made!
Woorank
With this tool you’ll get an in-depth site analysis to help you in your marketing efforts, so that you can further improve your website. This one gives you a 14 day free trail and after that will take 49 US to 150 US from you, but you get quite a bit in return.
In eight different categories, which cover Marketing checklist, SEO, Mobile, Usability, Technologies, Social, Local and Visitors they’ll give you over 70 metrics of information, which you can then use to make decisions about what you need to change and what can be improved.
They’ll also let you download their reports as PDFs, which can help you spread the information around in case you’ve got a big team of people who should all be in the know about what is going on.
Last words
That’s a lot of tools! All of them have a different direction and different feel, so you should really explore which one is best for you and your level of expertise. You’d probably be best to start out with the free ones and then take it from there, as there is a lot of information to digest and to consume.
Once you get the hang of it, however, you’ll see your SEO ranking grow by leaps and bounds and before you know it, you’ll be wondering how you ever got by without all of these data collection tools. To be honest, if you aren’t using them, I’m wondering pretty much the same thing.
Good luck and good ranking!