You don’t need to spend a fortune on expensive software if you want to do your own basic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and link building.  Here’s a list of five essential free tools that you can use to track your visitors, investigate backlinks, spot problems with your own website and track mentions of your business or competitors.

Without a doubt the most important free SEO tool you can use is Google Analytics.  It offers all of the features that you would expect such as the ability to see where your visitors have come from, how long they spend on your web site, the keywords that they used to find your site and many, many more.  But it also offers some enterprise-level killer features as well.  One of the most important, and least understood, is the ability to set up goals and to determine how many of these are completed.  For instance, if you have a ‘Contact me’ form on your website that you use to gather prospective clients then you can use Google Analytics to determine how many people look at the form and how many actually complete and submit it.  By tweaking the page content and tracking the conversions you can increase the overall conversion rate of the page.

Although Google has almost 91% of the UK search market the other ‘big’ search engine Yahoo is still useful but not in the way that you might expect.  If you ask Google to show you the backlinks to your site it won’t, instead showing you a subset.  Yahoo on the other hand will, at least it will show you the ones that it knows about and it even orders them with the most trusted at the top and the most spammy at the bottom of the list.  This is extremely useful as it allows you to see, quickly and easily, where  a site gets its links from.  Now Google will also give you this information but only if you use their Google Webmaster console but this restricts you to looking at your own site.

And talking of Yahoo, BacklinkWatch.com is a free service that uses Yahoo to display all backlinks for a given web address and shows you the anchor text (the clickable words in the link), the number of outbound links on that page and whether the nofollow tag has been applied to each link.  Compared to the commercially developed software that I use to investigate clients’ inbound links (and those of their competitors) when conducting an SEO review it’s slow and lacks features but it is free !  Highly recommended if you want to quickly see why a particular web site ranks for a certain keyword or keywords.

I mentioned the Google Webmaster Console just now and I’d say that this too is an essential tool to use on your site.  Once you’ve added your website by inserting a special tag to the front page of your site, Google will provide information such as: url’s that it can’t crawl, broken links, the anchor text of links pointing your site and the words that Google thinks describes your web site.

At the risk of this looking like a Google love-in I’m going to mention one more service that I use on daily basis.  Google Alerts allows you to set up automated email notifications for specific topics.  As Google crawls the web it will email whenever it finds something that matches your search.  If you set up alerts related to your business name and web address, it can alert you whenever someone publishes something good or bad about you on the web giving you the opportunity to quickly step into the conversation.  You can also use it to track what is being said about your competitors and your products.

Have I missed any free tools  ?  If so leave me a comment and I’ll take a look at them in future posts.

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Filed under: SEO Tools

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