The Bennis Inc Blog is excited to host another guest author this week! Marcela De Vivo shares her insight on Search Engine Optimization and something we’re most interested in–the top FREE resources for SEO! Be sure to share your thoughts and comments on this post to keep this important conversation going. To learn more about Marcela, please visit her brief bio below.
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As Google works to change the way websites are ranked, it’s important for you to keep up with the tools that will make sure you can achieve, or continue to have high search engine rankings.
If you want results, you need to start using the right SEO tools as soon as possible. Listed below are the best free tools available today. They’re all fairly easy to use, and they can be a tremendous help with your SEO efforts.
SceamingFrog is an SEO spider tool that you can run in order to help you get an idea into the status of your site. Using ScreamingFrog, you can also check for competitors backlinks and resource links on major sites with considerable web value.
With ScreamingFrog, you can run the spider on another page to help you find broken resource links. For example, if you find a great resource page on a popular site, you can run the program to identify what links are dead or inactive.
Then you can email them and propose a replacement resource that links back to you. The site will appreciate you finding the dead links and likely take you up on the offer to replace the dead ones with something of value to them.
SEO Quake is an extension for your browser that gives you information about the sites that you’re looking in real time as you’re browsing them. SEO Quake is particularly helpful for competitive research to figure out different SERPs and find new opportunities for your site to rank higher.
For example, if you are working on promoting a Giveaway and find a great site, you can check while you’re on the site if it has good statistics and is worth contacting or not.
Google’s Keyword Tool is a common starting point when it comes to regularly used keyword tools. In fact, it’s one of the most commonly tools used in SEO.
The free Google Keyword tool will give you a variety of suggestions for choosing, finding and picking your keywords, so it’s a great tool for beginners or people that aren’t too sure which keywords might work for a particular topic or site.
SEO by Yoast is a WordPress plugin, and since many people are using WordPress, it makes sense that it’s so popular. What SEO by Yoast does is help you optimize every single article you publish to your blog.
SEO by Yoast can also help you identify the best keywords to focus on and give you ways to incorporate them into your WordPress pages.
Speed is becoming more and more important, and that’s why you need to be using Pingdom. Pingdom works to look at and evaluate your site’s speed as users see and experience it.
Using Pingdom, you can check to see if your site is downloading quickly, exactly how much time pages take to load for most users, and if any of the files are hanging. This is important because the average user is becoming more and more impatient when it comes to slow sites since there’s so much information out there on the web.
If your site isn’t fast, consumers aren’t going to want to deal with it, and they will quickly move on to a better resource. Fast sites also tend to rank higher in Google.
These five tools can help you with your link building, keyword research, competitive research, and for optimizing your sites for search engines and users. While you might still need some other tools in your SEO arsenal, these make a great starting point, all at the low price of free!
Have questions, comments or other free SEO resources you want to share? Be sure and leave a comment below to get the conversation started!
Marcela De Vivo is a freelance writer from Los Angeles. She covers a variety of topics, including technology, music, real estate and health & wellness, but she specializes in online marketing and currently writes for HostPapa, specializing in social networking and web analytics.
