SEO Basics: Top Free SEO Tools To Help You Get Started

Are you looking for free SEO tools to help your website rankings? Here are some of the best free tools to help you achieve this!

Source: freepik.com

Search engine optimization (SEO) may seem overwhleming and complicated for non techie people. But thanks to SEO experts who have developed great SEO tools to allow people with non-technical backgrounds to know how to optimize web pages for top ranking in search engines, without having to code.

While the dynamics of SEO keep changing as determined by search engines like Google, you won’t have to worry much when you have access to top SEO tools, because they are also regularly updated to keep up with the changes.

In this article, I will consider the essential tools you need to:

• Index websites in search engines

• Analyze keywords and competition

• Optimize search results in SERPs, and

• Monitor site performance

---

1. SEO Tools for Site Indexing

SEO starts with getting a website indexed (listed) in search engines; the following tools are great tools to get your web pages crawled and indexed by web crawlers:

Yoast SEO Plugin for Wordpress

Yoast SEO Wordpress plugin is a multipurpose SEO tool that serves as an interface between your website and search engines. It is designed to help with indexing a website on Google Search Console and Bing. Once installed, the plugin automatically generates XML sitemaps, which you can submit manually to search engines for indexing.

The plugin is useful for analyzing the content of a webpage when they are updated, giving you insights on how your content is being optimized. It has indicators (red, orange, and green) to indicate the SEO status of the page. It also offers suggestions on what should be adjusted to get a ‘green light,’ which signifies that your page SEO is excellent.

Google Search Console/ Bing Webmaster Tool

Search engines have bots that crawl web pages all over the internet, and they can locate and index new web pages as well. However, it might take time to do so. To accelerate the process, and get a website indexed in hours or a few days, you can submit your site directly to either Google Search Console for Google or Bing Webmaster Tools for Bing and Yahoo. Although you're not required to do this, but as mentioned, it can help speed up the process!

To add a site, you will need to verify ownership of the site by copying a verification code from search console or bing and add it to the header file of your website. If you use a plugin like Yoast SEO, you can do this directly from your website’s dashboard. An alternative is to use DNS verification, which can be a little cumbersome for beginners.

After verifying ownership of the site, submit XML Sitemaps of the website and check back later to know when it is indexed. When checking, confirm if all the essential pages on your site are indexed. Otherwise, take note of the errors and attempt fixing them.

XML Sitemaps

An XML sitemap is basically a list that acts as a tour guide that leads search engine crawlers to all the essential pages on a website, so they can crawl and index them. It helps search engines to understand the structure and hierarchy of a website.

If you are not using a tool like Yoast SEO, you can generate a sitemap online using the XML sitemap online generator. Enter the URL of the website and click on start, then wait. Once completed, you will be able to download a file that you can add to the domain root folder of your website. After adding it successfully, you can then add your sitemap URL to Google Search Console or Bing. The URL will be in the form of yoursite/sitemap_index.xml.

2. SEO Tools for Keyword Research

After you have successfully indexed a website, the next thing is to place content on the site. Whatever a website is promoting, the volume of the content on the site is a crucial factor for SEO. Each content should target a focus organic keyword or keyphrase that has a considerable monthly volume. The following tools can help you in analyzing keywords to build website content for top ranking in SERPs.

Keyword Tool

If you have a keyword idea, this tool can help you generate a list of long-tail keywords based on related terms people are searching. The tool fetches data from Google Autocomplete, a feature within Google search that helps to complete queries as you type them. You can also use it to validate your keyword ideas. Some other alternatives to the Keyword tool are KWFinder and SEO Book.

Answer The Public

In content and search marketing, a demand-based approach to content development is better for SEO. Answer The Public is a great SEO tool that can help you discover what people want to know about a topic. It enables you to explore the perfect blog topics based on the search strings or keywords that customers use. It fetches its data from search engines, social media, and online forums to return relevant answers to your search queries. All you have to do is enter a topic in your mind in the search bar, and it will bring keywords, keyphrases, and title suggestions for your article.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a multipurpose SEO tool that is designed to analyze domains, keywords, and competitors. You can use the site to know the SEO strength of your domain and also spy on the domains of your competitor to identify the top keywords that gave their site top ranking. You can also use the tool to analyze keyword volumes and other SEO stats that can help you compare the best keyword variations. Alternatives to Ubersuggest include SEMrush, Ahref, etc.

Moz

Moz is another multipurpose SEO metrics tool that can help you find the top competitive SEO metrics for a particular site. When you enter a domain URL on the toolbar, it returns metrics for both the domain and top competitor websites. This can help to discover what top competitor websites are doing to achieve their top SEO ranking.

Google Trends

Use Google Trends to search for people’s interest. This tool shows popular searches by interests, and locations, etc. You can use the tool to test if your content idea is popular. You can also use the tool to find out what is already trending and probably develop content around that area.

Exploding Topics

If you are a marketer, and you want to know the latest trends, Exploding Topics shows you trends across several topics and industries up to 15 years ago. It shows the search volume on a topic, a graph showing the growth trend, and the growth rate. You can also receive trends in your email with actionable insights when you sign up on the site.

3. SEO Tools for Search Optimization

It is essential to improve how a website appears in SERPs, as this also affects organic traffic. If your site returns useful information to the user, you will have more people visiting your site than having generic information displayed to the user. Some tools can help to improve user search experience while some can help you find the position of your web pages in SERPs.

Schema Markup

Schema markup is a code that is placed on a website to help search engines fetch more informative results from your web pages for users. The structured data improves the site appearance in search results and leads to higher click-through and conversion rates for business. Schema provides additional information about the content of your web page, which users might find helpful when deciding which website to visit. There are different ways to generate a schema markup, but one of the easiest ways is to install a schema plugin on your site, which will only require minimal settings.

SERPRobot

SERPRobot is a free google ranking checker that you can use to find your website's position in SERP rankings. This can help marketers to focus their efforts in link building and on page optimization to achieve higher rankings. To use this tool, you'll select a google region if your site is region-specific and then input your domain with a set of keywords that you want to check your position. For unbiased results, the SearchRobot advises that you run this check after you might have signed out of your google accounts and cleared your browser of caches. You can also consider using a proxy or VPN.

4. SEO Tools for Performance Check

There are some other tools that you can use to track the performance of a website or specific pages. Such performance metrics include page visits, traffic sources, page speed, mobile responsiveness, and more.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool that you can use to track and report website traffic. It shows you how your SEO tactics are working out, your traffic sources, and how users are interacting with your web pages. It tracks activities such as session duration, page per session, bounce rate, etc. It can also spot problems such as slow page loading speed and other site issues. You can use the demo mode to explore and learn how to use the platform.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Page speed is one of the signals used by search engine algorithms to rank pages. It also enhances user experience and reduces bounce rate, increasing the average time users spend on a page. Google PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page and generates suggestions to make the page faster.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

Many website visitors access web pages from their mobile devices, and Google ranks mobile sites above desktop sites in SEO ranking. It implies that you should optimize your site for mobile responsiveness. Such that the pages are automatically adjusted to the size of the users’ devices. Google's mobile-friendly test helps you to determine if your web page is mobile-friendly.

SEO Site Checkup

SEO Site Checkup has an array of tools you can use to test your website and webpages for compliance with different SEO requirements such as title, meta description, keywords, competitors, headers, sitemap, and more. You can also take a single test on the site to check for all SEO factors by just entering your URL for a checkup.

Conclusion

While tools are great to help you get started on the SEO journey, they won’t do the SEO job for you. You will have to understand basic SEO concepts and how they are used to optimize web pages for the best SERP rankings. That is the only way the tools will make sense, and you will know which tools you need to get a particular job done.