If you aren't correctly prepared, managing your website's search engine optimisation can be a nightmare. It's imperative that you have the right tools at hand, which is why we have prepared a list of the best free SEO management tools you can find.
Every day, Cosmic uses a large number of search engine optimisation tools, so we have put together the best that we have found so far for you to use for your business or organisation.
Google Analytics
www.google.com/analytics
Google Analytics is the must-have tool for any website owner. Created by Google, Analytics tracks and report website traffic to you in a variety of ways - Google Analytics' approach is to show high-level, dashboard-type data for the casual user (beginner/intermediate level), and more in-depth data for the more advanced webmasters.
Google Analytics analysis can identify poorly performing pages, show you where visitors came from (known as referrers), how long they stayed on the website (or even each page) and their geographical position, as well as a host of other features.
The data offered will enable the webmaster to see what techniques are and aren't working - using this, you'll be able to make calculated alterations to certain areas of the website, such as structure, keywords, alt tags, meta data and the current setup of your URLs. The tool also have a real-time section so that you can see what your current website visitors are doing - other features include behaviour of the user (i.e. which pages they travel to, how long they spend reading each page), your traffic sources (i.e. organic searches, social media, pay-per-click) and the devices/operating systems the user is running to access your website.
Take a look at this useful video guide from Google Small Business on how you can use Google Analytics:
Keyword Density Analyser
www.seobook.com
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a page compared to the total number of words on the page.
In the context of search engine optimization, keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.
The Keyword Density Analyser from SEO Book allows the user to enter their domain name and choose to refine the search with a variety of options, and returned is a list of your home page keywords and their density. The data supplied will allow the webmaster to tailor their on-page search engine optimisation to increase viewing figures, lower bounce rates and increase page reading times.
Want to know some more about keyword density and what you should be aiming for with your percentages? Take a look at this video from the Google Webmaster team:
SERP Checker
www.serplab.co.uk
'SERP' also known as 'search engine ranking position' is the method of crosschecking your website and a certain keyword to see where your website ranks on search engines like Google for the keyword/phrase in question.
There are many different types of SERPS but three main categories
- Organic SERPs: These are the natural results that the search engine has selected as being the most relevant to your search query and the most useful to the user
- Paid SERPs: These are paid for by site webmasters and provide an easy way to jump the natural selection process and become more prominent to the searcher. Usually there is a charge for each click that the advertiser receives and the site willing to pay the most per click will gain the highest position.
- Contextual SERPs: These are generated by the context that the search keywords provide and can come in many forms like maps, for a local search, hotel reviews for a booking related query, images for a visual related search or even business reviews for a specific service query.
The tool enables the user to enter a number of keywords and your domain name and check your positioning for each. This is a great way to see what areas you are succeeding in and what areas need more work. Using this and the other tools here, you can improve your on-page SEO to include your target keywords and phrases and therefore increase your SERP.
Another great use for this tool is to check out how well your competitors are doing - there is no restriction on what domain name you can enter, so by typing in a competitor domain name and keywords, you can see how well they are doing. If they're doing well in a certain area, see what methods they are doing to achieve this. If they are not doing so well, avoid the methods they're going for - simple!
PageRank Checker
www.checkpagerank.net
Google PageRank (Google PR) is one of the many methods Google uses to determine a web page's relevance or importance to the search term. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear higher up the the search engine listings. Google PageRank (PR) is measure from 0 - 10, 0 being the worst and 10 being the best.
To give you some perspective, Cosmic's PageRank is 5/10, The Huffington Post's PageRank is 8/10 and the BBC's is 9/10. Google PageRank is predominantly based on backlinks to the website; the more quality backlinks, the higher Google PageRank will be.
CheckPageRank.net also offers a plethora of other nifty features such as the number of external backlinks (including refined lists for EDU and GOV backlinks), Alexa ranks, domain age and PR quality, amongst other useful tools.
Want to learn some more about Google PageRank? Take a look at this video from the Google Webmaster team:
In conclusion...
We highly recommend taking a look at the tools above. At the very least, ensure you have Google Analytics implemented on your website - this will make any future SEO work a lot easier as you will have historical data that you can look back on and evaluate rather than starting from scratch. If you're confident in working on your SEO, use the other three tools we have suggested and work on improving your search engine visibility.
If you'd like some more guidance, feel free to get in touch with Cosmic and talk to one of our SEO professionals - you can phone us on 0845 094 6108, e-mail us on info@cosmic.org.uk or even tweet us at @Cosmic_UK!