Julianna
As a university student, I had a motto for saving money – free = good. Whether it was free miso soup at my favourite sushi place, or free samples from the cosmetics counter, this unspoken rule worked well for a student trying to maximize her budget. Years on I still think free = good, and while I don’t apply it to all aspects of my finances anymore, it’s a tactic many small businesses can and should use to help stretch every dollar. You can pay thousands of dollars for a top notch SEO consultant, and in many cases you get what you pay for. We can’t all afford to pay top dollar for SEO expertise, but lucky for us, the good folks at SEO Position have catalogued 15 of the best free tools out there. Who better to offer up reviews of these tools than an SEO consultancy.
If you regularly monitor SEO sites and blogs, some of these tools won’t be new to you, but even adding a few of these in your repertoire will be very useful indeed. From tracking keywords to page rank, here are our 5 favourites from their top 15:
1. SEOmoz – Rank Checker We agree with SEO Position on this one, rank checker is a great tool to have in your arsenal. You can check 5 keywords a day and save your results. Check, track and download your keywords in your SEOmoz account – all for free.
2. SEObook.com – SEO for Firefox Get a wealth of information right in your browser (as long as you are using Firefox that is). You can track a number of stats and export it all into a CSV file for further analysis. Another great reason to use Firefox.
3. We Build Pages – Strongest Subpages Find out the rank of any and all the pages on your site. Find the best pages and try to enhance them, and boost the rank of your poor performance pages by optimizing content and page copy.
4. iWebTools – Multi-Rank Checker Keep track of your rank, and all your competitors – at the same time. This tool saves you time by checking the rank of multiple sites in one go.
5. Google Analytics/Google Webmaster Console Last, and possibly the most used free SEO tools out there, Google Analytics provides more information than you’ll probably know what to do with, and their Webmaster Console lets you look into what Google sees about your site.
Here’s another tool to add to your list. It helps you find ranking + authoritative but abandoned websites. It uses dmoz to get a list of sites in your niche (potentially hundreds) and then sorts through that list to find the sites that are most likely abandoned. You can then try to buy these sites for very little.
Hey Justin – Thanks for the great tip!
In addition to building authority and rank, it’s seems like a good tactic for driving ‘qualified’ and/or relevant traffic to your website.
Cheers!