Five free SEO tools

Does your website rank well in search engines? While search engine optimisation (SEO) can often be confusing and time consuming, here are some useful free SEO tools to make it easier for you to improve your search engine rankings.

1. Using Google Analytics to understanding your website’s performance

Having a website without an analytics tool such as Google Analytics, is like flying a plane without an instrument panel. Google Analytics is simply a must-have. It provides easy-to-read charts that show you how many visitors you’ve had, how they found your website (e.g. from Google Adwords, organic search, referred websites), and what they did (e.g. request a free report), or did not do, once they were there.

Critically, you can also find out which keywords users typed into search engines to find you. The key with analytics is to not be overwhelmed by all the data, but to ask yourself “So what does this mean?” and more importantly “What action should I now take”.

Installing analytics is quite easy, you just need to add a few lines of code to each page of your website. See Google’s website, or have a chat with your web developer about this free SEO tool.

2. Find your Page Rank using the Google Toolbar

Google gives each page it visits (or “crawls”) a score to reflect how important it considers that page to be. This is called “pagerank” (PR). It is a score out of 10, and the higher the better. It is only a rough guide, but it can be helpful to analyse your website and also to judge whether to accept reciprocal links with another website. All things being equal, you’d rather have a link from a page with a ranking of 4 than a ranking of 1. Most small businesses pages are usually in the 1 to 4 range.

To install this fee SEO tool, search for “Google Toolbar” in Google, click the link, and follow the download instructions. Once installed, go to the Toolbar “settings” and “options”, and turn on the “page rank and page info” button. Now load up your home page in the browser. Hover over the page rank button with your mouse. It should display Google’s page rank (PR) score for your webpage.

3. Find the last crawl date using the Google Toolbar

The same toolbar button can be used to easily find out when Google last crawled your website. It will most probably be within the past few weeks. You can check each of your web pages.

Load up your home page in the browser and click the black arrow on the “page rank” button. Then click “cached snapshot of page”. You should see a date there.

If Google has never crawled the page, or the date was more than a few months ago, you probably need to develop more external links to that page. I would also recommend visiting Google Webmasters - Site Status for further help. It’s worth spending a bit of time on this website as you’ll find some very useful free SEO tools and advice.

4. Discover what your competitors are up to using “SEO for Firefox”

This free SEO tool will not work in Internet Explorer (IE). You will need to download the Firefox browser.

SEO for Firefox allows you to see a lot of useful SEO data about your competition. It was created by the famous (in SEO circles anyway) Aaron Wall of SEO Book.

Under each search result, there will be two lines of additional SEO data (shaded blue) relating to that website. For example, if you’re a business coach, and looking to rank for “business coach Sydney”, type that into the Google search box. By clicking on the right field, you can find how many links your competitor has, who is linking to them, how old their domain is, and who owns that domain, among other things. This data can be very helpful in planning your own SEO strategy. If your competitor is ranking highly for a keyword, they must be doing something right!

The tool can be downloaded from www.SEOBook.com. You can also watch Aaron Wall’s instructional video.

5. Quick link checker using Yahoo!

If you want a very simple way of finding out who is linking to your website, or a competitor’s website, and you don’t want to download any tools, go to Yahoo’s website.

In the search box, type “linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com.au -site:www.yourdomain.com.au”, where www.yourdomain.com.au is the name of your website. This technique will not work in Google, as Google does not show a complete list of links.

There are lots of both paid and free SEO tools out there. What are your favourites?

Philip Shaw a director and founder of CleverClicks, an online marketing company passionate about helping small businesses use the phenomenal power of the internet to boost their sales.

9 comments | Add your own 1 2 | Next» View all»

Is site page rank really all that important? Because I downloaded it, and it doesn't work. Ben from sydney
Ben you may have to restart your computer to get the Google Toolbar happening. Your page rank is not high - yet - this is probably just because it's a new site. But don't worry - your developer has done lots of good things - plenty of relevant text, good link names etc. You may want to consider headings and sub-headings and to change the actual file names to match the links. Good luck with your business. Melissa from Melbourne
Ben, page rank is ony a rough guide. The more important thing is that you rank in search engines for the right keywords to get the right sort of traffic. As well as Melissa's points above, try get some more links to your webite to improve your credibility with Google. Some of my previous articles explain how to do this. Good luck. Philip Shaw from Sydney | Read my articles
I have found this article very useful. I am often wondering how to get more traffic to my site and often feel overwhelmed with all the information that is out there on how to get more traffic.
I consider the Google Analytical feature quite interesting and have added this to my website, so I guess it is only a matter of time to see whether or not it is a useful tool that will give me the much needed data to convert to traffic! :) Amanda Karamihalos from Adelaide, South Australia
As with all parts of your business, search engine optimisation also requires consistent monitoring, notice the word consistent, not constant. A short 30 minute check once a month to monitor and update your Google ranking and adjust as nesccesary will not only improve business but will also teach you that this is not the ugly monster that some think it is. Onward and upward . . . . :) Tony Scarcia from Brisbane, Australia
Useful tips - thanks Philip. I am new to this...it's like learning a new language (!) and was dismayed to just see my pagerank says 0/10 :-( ...Oh well, I'll keep reading more Flying Solo articles and learning. Andrew Penfold from Sydney, Australia

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