Is SEO Important?
The goal of SEO is to ensure your website can be found online.
SEO is an integral part of your marketing strategy. If you have searchable content then your website is viewed as a useful resource for readers. If search engines view your website as a useful resource, they will rank your website highly for readers who search for keywords that appear on your website.
Most people who conduct searches online usually view the first page of results after entering their search terms.
Knowing how your potential reader searches for information and the type of information they are searching for is an important part of developing your overall SEO strategy.
Ways to improve SEO?
1. Google Webmaster Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools is the primary mechanism for Google to communicate with webmasters and helps alert you about issues with your site. This guide will walk you through the various GWT features, and what actionable data can be found within.
key features:
Search Analytics
Manual Action Penalties
Sitelinks
Cost: Free
What are the pros?
– Real-time data
– Secured and trusted results
What are the cons?
– A bit slow and delayed some time
2.GT Metrix
Well, it is a website performance analytics tool, created by GT.net, which is well known in the digital space for the speed monitoring tool. The key objective of GTMetrix is to analyze the performance of your website and provide you with a list of actionable recommendations to improve it.
key feature :
★ Monitor pages and run a test daily, weekly, or monthly to ensure optimal performance
★ Visualize performance with 4 graphs available: Web Vitals, Page Timings, Page Size & Request Counts, and Performance/Structure scores
★ Zoom, pan, and set a date range to find specific performance history
★ Annotate areas of interest on your graph and give your data context
★ Set alerts with numerous conditions based on Web Vitals, Page Timings, Total Page size, etc
Cost: GTmetrix pricing starts at $10.00 per user, per month. There is a free version. GTmetrix does not offer a free trial.
what are the pros?
Quickly assess the general technical health of a page or site.
Quickly Identify areas that can be improved.
Reporting
The complete report of performance issues.
Gives a score from each separate tool, also displays loading time, page size, and total requests very easily.
what are the cons?
The user interface is a little bit confusing.
You can’t choose a different test server.
there is a wait time (queue) in case other users are using the platform at the same time.
3. SEO Quake
SEO Quake is a free plugin for your browser that provides you with organic search data at the click of a button. .. Along with organic research data, SEO Quake provides other useful tools including an SEO Audit, Keyword Density report, Internal/External Link analysis, and even social metrics.
key features:
★ Get a thorough analysis of SERPs and export the results in CSV format
★ Estimate keyword difficulty instantly
★ Set parameters for a search query
★ Run a complete SEO audit of a webpage, including a check for mobile compatibility
★ Check your social statistics for Facebook and Google+
★ Use a wide range of default parameters or create a custom set
★ Get a full report for internal/external links
★ Determine a keyword’s density and configure a stop-word list
★ Compare URLs/domains
Cost: Free
what are the pros?
Gives a ton of SEO info in one area. I usually have to use a few different Chrome extensions that show different areas to get the full picture that this tool gives you upfront.
The domain comparison feature is nice to see a high-level view of how a website sizes up against competitors.
It gives you info on ways to improve the infrastructure of your website.
It’s free for the first 100 pages of the audit.
what are the cons?
It doesn’t have a sleek or exciting design. It is kinda clunky and not super appealing in color.
The keyword density section is somewhat helpful but gives the density in a percentage without rationale as to what an average percentage is or what the website should aim for.
The high-level parameters are nice to see, but for a new-to-the-tool person, they are confusing and don’t provide a lot of explanation, unfortunately.
SEO Quake is a good option if you want something quick on your browser to analyze some high-level information about a website.
However, if you want more in-depth analysis, other tools may be better suited for that type of work.
4. HubSpot's Website Grader :
Website Grader is a free online tool that grades your site against key metrics like performance, mobile readiness, SEO, and security.
Website Grader measures the marketing effectiveness of a website and provides an inbound marketing score (on a scale of zero to 100) that incorporates website traffic, SEO, the blogosphere, social media, and other inbound marketing factors.
key feature :
★ Overall Website Performance – page load, page requests, speed of the site
★ Mobile readiness
★ SEO checks
★ Security (HTTPS) check
cost: Starting Price: $200
Free Trial Available?
Yes
Has feature
Free or premium Version Available?
Yes
Has feature
Premium Consulting/Integration Services Available?
Yes
Entry-level setup fee?
Required
what are the pros?
Social media scheduling. A comprehensive and easy-to-use social calendar allows you to easily schedule posts and get an overarching view of social activities for the month and beyond.
Email marketing. The templates provided allow me to easily create, beautiful professional emails.
Landing pages and forms. I can easily track submissions with the forms and the templates provided for a landing page ease a major pain point.
what are the cons?
Because HubSpot [Marketing Hub] charges by several contacts in the system, it can become expensive and a little limiting. Consider re-evaluating the degrees of membership: enterprise, professional, etc.
E-commerce capabilities
The marketing & traffic analytics feature is missing.
Social media Integration is missing.
5.Yoast WordPress SEO
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugins are a set of tools developed by Joost de Valk and team, founder of yoast.com and WordPress enthusiast. These tools are designed to help content rank higher and are subsumed under the Yoast Complete pack, which includes Video SEO for rank climbing with embedded videos in a WordPress site, WooCommerce SEO for the WP e-commerce plugin, News SEO for rank climbing in Google news, Local SEO for (as the name implies) climbing in local listings with more complete information so can be located (e.g. Google Maps, a store locator, etc.), and Premium SEO redirect manager for dealing with common redirect errors and issues.
key feature :
★ A structured data graph
★ Self-referencing canonicals
★ Paginated archives with rel=next / rel=prev
★ Nofollow login & registration links
★ Noindex your internal search results
cost :
Free Trial Available?
No
what are the pros?
Metadata optimization
Optimizing for social sharing
Keyword optimization analysis
what are the cons?
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugins imposes a penalty on sites for not having social shares, regardless of the size or fame of the site.
Sometimes it will break other plugins
Not a complete SEO solution: There is always more you can do to improve your SEO strategies.
Tip: Yoast SEO premium has a, well, premium support. While you can also do well with a free version of the plugin, the support is not at the same level. It’s difficult to maintain the plugin that’s been downloaded and installed on more than 1M websites.
Conclusion
Finally, I would not recommend you go all of the tools listed above, for better keyword research, you can stick to one or two research tools and more from it. However, whatever you choose, all these best tools can help you power up your SEO rankings.
On the other hand, most of the SEO tools are offering free versions and it’s really good when you’re starting out blogging, but if you want to grow your site into an online service or business, you might need paid tools. That will helps you to keep up with the competitors in your niche. Happy blogging!
