Lewis Lebentz

Top free SEO tools in 2015

In 2015 many companies will be investing more and more money into their marketing department to improve their SEO. It can literally make or break business, if people can't find you on Google, how will they know you exist?

How can I improve my SEO?

Firstly, you need to have the right tools. I have made a collection of some of the best free tools there to improve your sites ranking in Google and other search engines. I'll start with a few tools from Google themselves, as you'd hope they would be able to give the most accurate information on how to rank in their own search engine!

Google Webmaster Tools

[caption id="attachment_54" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Google Webmaster Tools - Screenshot[/caption]

Google's tool for Webmasters, you can submit your sitemap, ask them to crawl pages, check for errors, notifications that your site has been hacked. You can also see what a specific page would look like in a search result.

Google Trends

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Google Trends allows you to see what people are searching for, and the popularity of keywords over time.

Google PageSpeed Insights

[caption id="attachment_57" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Google PageSpeed Insights - Screenshot[/caption]

PageSpeed Insights shows you a detailed analysis of how fast your website loads on a desktop/mobile and gives advice on how you can improve it.

Google Analytics

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One last tool from Google, Google Analytics. This is one of the most informative, free tools for tracking visitors to your website. It tracks visits, keywords, operating systems, browsers, countries and more. It can even track visitors in real time!

Pingdom Tools

[caption id="attachment_59" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Pingdom Tools - Screenshot[/caption]

Pingdom can track your websites uptime, and alert you when it goes down. They also have a great set of free tools, including a website speed checker similar to Google's. However, it shows you exactly what is taking the most time to load, the amount of requests it makes, the page size, and a ranking out of 100. There is also a DNS health checker and a ping/traceroute tool.

QuickSprout Tools

[caption id="attachment_60" align="alignnone" width="1024"] QuickSprout Tools - Screenshot[/caption]

Similar to Pingdom's tools, QuickSprout can run a wide range of test of your site, including SEO score, speed score, backlink checks, keywords and it can even check your social media clout.

OpenLinkProfiler

[caption id="attachment_61" align="alignnone" width="1024"] OpenLinkProfiler - Screenshot[/caption]

If you want to find backlinks to your site, OpenLinkProfiler will find them for you. It can show nofollow links, and rank backlinks by page influence, so you can try to 'disinfect' the bad links to your website.

feedthebot

[caption id="attachment_62" align="alignnone" width="1024"] feedthebot - Screenshot[/caption]

A simple too that checks your site to make sure it follows Google's guidelines, if it doesn't it tells you what you are doing wrong, and also lets you know what you could do to improve.

SERPLAB

[caption id="attachment_63" align="alignnone" width="1024"] SERPLAB - Screenshot[/caption]

SERP stands for 'Search Engine Results Page'. SERPLAB lets you enter your URL and some keywords and quickly displays where, if anywhere, you rank for it in Google.

BuiltWith

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Ever wanted to know what technologies were used to build a website? Now you can find out. Find out what services are used to make up your site, and compare it to your competitors.

Open Site Explorer

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Great tool by Moz for finding backlinks and other page link metrics.

Browseo

[caption id="attachment_66" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Browseo - Screenshot[/caption]

See your site how Google see's it. Browseo displays the site to you how the web search spiders see it, showing you page hierarchy and more!

They are 12 of my favourite tools so far this year. What SEO tools do you use? Let me know in the comments and I may add them to the list!