You might have started a blog website after getting inspired from few highly successful bloggers. Moreover, you may not have software development background and also may not possess a good understanding of SEO (search engine optimization). As a result, your website is not attracting the expected web-traffic. Now, you are anxious and a little frustrated not knowing what to do.
Web-traffic depends on many factors, and one of the most important ones is SEO. Therefore, you have to make your website search engine- optimized. But, how to do it?
Many SEO tools are available in the market to help bloggers – some are free tools with limitations, whereas some are premium tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Majestic, etc. cost $100 per month and more.
For beginner bloggers and those who do not want to spend money to buy expensive SEO tools, I have listed some very useful SEO tools that will help your website improve and start attracting more organic search traffic.
List of SEO tools
1. Website speed testing tool
If your website takes long to load, then this affects you in two ways. The first effect, a user may not wait for the site to load and quit the website for not to come back. And the second effect, search engines also don’t like slow websites as they give high importance to user experience and thus will not rank your site high.
To know the speed of your website, you can use Pingdom – the most visited site for website speed test.
Apart from load time, it will provide information on many other parameters. These include– performance grade, faster than, page size, requests, tested from, etc.
Website load time of 3 seconds or more is counted as very poor and you must bring it down to approximately 2 seconds or even lower.
There is one more very reliable website which tells you about the user experience on desktop and mobiles. This is none other than Google. Use this Google Pagespeed Insights tool which will also tell how you can improve your website page speed.
2. Plagiarism checker tool
When you write a new post, you should check it for plagiarism before publishing. Plagiarism is a term used for copying of someone else’s work, conversation, songs etc. and using them as if you create them.
You must avoid plagiarism as search engines are very strict on this matter and may penalize your website. That will bring down the website ranking resulting in a loss of traffic. My favorite tool is Dupli Checker.
Here, there is a limit of 1000 words per search. But, that is enough for a blog post. If your post contents are more than 1000 words, use the tool twice.
Remember, you must create an original, high-quality blog post.
3. Ping websites
Consider a case where you have just published a blog post or you have created a backlink to your website, what you should do next. The simple answer is you should submit the post and the backlink to major search engines and directories. Ping sites make this job easy.
These sites submit your website URL or blog post URL to main search engines, communities, and directories for indexing. This way your website and blog posts become more visible to web users.
My favorite two ping sites are – Pingomatic and Twingly. There are many other ping sites you can use. But do not use more than 3 or 4 ping sites a day, otherwise, your site may be considered as a spam site.
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4. Website SEO audit tool
Periodically, you should run some SEO tools to audit your website. This exercise will display the performance summary of your website on various SEO parameters. Some of these are – HTML header, keyword consistency, text to HTML ratio, links, robots.txt, XML sitemaps, page speed and size info, Gzip compression, minification, UI results, social activity results, and security results.
Based on these results, you can take corrective actions if required.
My favorite website SEO audit tool is SEOptimer.
5. Alexa traffic rank checker
Whenever you visit a blog, you may be interested to know its Alexa traffic rank. You may also like to check daily the Alexa ranking of your site. The lower number in Alexa traffic rank means a higher ranking. For example, Google.com has an Alexa global traffic rank 1.
Here is the required tool from Alexa. It is an extension to Chrome. URL: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alexa-traffic-rank/cknebhggccemgcnbidipinkifmmegdel?hl=en
This tool gives some additional information also, like traffic ranking of the selected site in your country, site links ( I am not convinced with this data), search analytics, page speed etc.
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6. Mozbar
Apart from Alexa traffic rank, there is one more parameter which is used to measure the quality of a website – domain authority (DA).
If a website is good and popular, then Alexa rank and DA will be high. For example, Facebook.com site’s Alexa traffic rank is 3 and DA rating is 100.
Mozbar provides DA rating of a website. It also tells the PA (page authority) of a website page. To add further, it highlights do-follow links and no-follow links on a website.
Mozbar is again an extension to Chrome. You have to create a free account on Moz community site and click the following URL to reach the Mozbar for Chrome.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mozbar/eakacpaijcpapndcfffdgphdiccmpknp?hl=en
After installing this tool, log in with your Moz community account credentials. Otherwise, it will not show DA value of a website.
7. Google Webmasters tools and Google Analytics
You need a Gmail account and a website you own to access these tools. Google Analytics provides a complete analysis of your website traffic. On the hand, webmasters tools provide information related to messages from Google, search appearance issues like structured data errors, HTML improvements that include duplicate meta description, duplicate title tags, etc. Other topics include search traffic, Google index, Crawl and security issues.
You should carefully make a note of the data provided by these tools and work toward fixing the errors reported to keep your site neat and tidy.
Conclusion
You can’t succeed as a blogger by merely creating a website and publishing posts. You have to act on your site SEO seriously. For this, in the early days, you should try free and reliable SEO tools.
If you have any questions related to these tools, please write in the comment panel below and I shall be pleased to reply at the earliest.
