SEO Tools That Are Effective In 2018
The higher your rank in the search engine results the more likely a user will click on the link to your website. Nate Drake of TechRadar shares with us the best SEO tools that are effective in 2018.
Getting high ranks are not easy, there are a lot of websites that are doing SEO, which makes it a crowded battle for the top rankings.
There are also spammers who will try to use black hat tactics to lift their junk content and pile up many links on one page.
Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)
Google Webmaster Tools is an excellent way for starters to get acquainted with SEO. There are a whole lot of tools that you can try out like “Fetch as Google.” This gives you the ability to view a webpage the way a search engine does. The tools strip a webpage down and show it in code, just like how search engines crawlers view it. In this way, you can detect errors and troubleshoot poor search engine optimization. You can modify your page and even check on a code to see if your site has been hacked.
Page Speed Insights is a tool that allows users to do speed checks on both mobile and desktop versions of your website. Mobile traffic is now higher than desktop and this tool ensures that your mobile visitors get fast access and remain on your website.
Visitors often leave pages that take too long to load, if your website takes more than 10 seconds, then you can say goodbye to a boatload of traffic who are now surfing faster sites.
The structured data testing tool is great for checking if your data is in the correct format and is inputted in the right way.
Google also offers free chat via Hangouts with their personal rep if you have questions or further assistance. This feature is available during office hours. You can ask about site issues which include more information about the various tools and detecting malicious activity. For further help, there is a GWT forum where webmasters can connect and share performance and troubleshooting tips.
SEMrush SEO toolkit
SEMrush SEO toolkit was developed way back in 2008 by SEMrush. This year, the project got a funding of $40 million for expansion into large platforms like eBay, Amazon, HP, Baidu and BNP Paribas.
It includes a keyword research tool that gives you an elaborate keyword analysis as well as a summary of the domains that you manage.
The toolkit gives you the ability to compare the performance of your pages and see how you rank against your competitors. You can analyze backlinks from other sites and compare them to yours.
Traffic analytics help you know your competitor’s main sources of web traffic and top referring sites. You can also get a summary of their SEO strategies and even know specific keywords they have used and how they performed.
A Pro subscription costs $99.95 a month, which gives access to all SEO tools in the toolkit.
SEO Spider
This tool is a great web crawler that can perform a fast search of friendly URLs. Search engines favor simple and readable URLs for indexing over meaningless characters all jumbled up.
SEO Spider can crawl your site for errors and broken pages. It will search for missing title tags, duplicate meta tags, and any other errors that are not in line with best SEO practices. It also tells you if you have too many links on your page.
The free version has basic features that allow crawling up to 500 URLs. You are also able to customize robots.txt.
The paid version costs $160 per year and has more advanced features and tech support.
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