Articles in The 'SEO-Tools' Tag

Simple SEO Tools All Marketers Have Access To

by Matt Crowley

You don’t have to be an SEO expert to assist in the optimization of your website. Sometimes, you simply need tools to help you out. While these aren’t all of the tools our SEO experts use to make optimization recommendations, they are a good start for anyone interested in assisting in the improvement of their website’s SEO.

Some of our simple go-to SEO tools include Google Webmaster Tools, Google’s Cache, Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends. Read on to learn more about how you can use these tools to improve your website’s SEO.Read More

My Favorite SEO Tools

by Michael Buczek

When I speak with clients about keyword research and content optimization, they often ask me what tools I use to gather the data or make recommendations. Here I will give you a little insight to some of the tools I use regularly.

One of the best places to start with keyword research is Google.   Google offers a suite of free tools that you can use to insights about the keywords you are researching.   One that can be used by aspiring SEO’s and paid campaign managers alike is the keyword tool.   This tool will give you some approximate statistics and other recommendations for your keywords.   You can get additional data about your keywords with Google Insights and Google Trends.

Another component of page optimization is keyword density. We recommend that your pages each consist of at least 200 words of text and have approximately a 4% keyword density.   To check what keyword has the highest keyword density, you can use the MoreVisibility keyword density checker.   If you need to check the density of copy you are writing for new or revised pages, you can use the live keyword analysis tool.   It allows you to copy content and past it into the provided fields to get the statistics.

Another set of tools I use to checks PageRank, backlinks and cache date.   These items are good to monitor so you can see how the search engines are viewing your site. Downloading the Google Toolbar is what you need if you are using Firefox or Internet Explorer as your browser. If you use Google Chrome, I have found that the Chrome SEO Extension works pretty well.

While there are many other tools out there, some paid and some free, the few that are mentioned above will give you a good start to researching and analyzing your SEO efforts.

Another Great Keyword Research Tool

by Michael Buczek

When conducting keyword research, it is important to have as much information as possible so you can pick the best word for the page you are trying to optimize.   There are a plethora of tools available and some of our favorites include WordTracker, KeywordDiscovery and the Free Google Keyword Tool.   These tools are great because they can show you some very important statistics about each keyword.   Some stats that they show include approximate search volume and the competitiveness of the keyword.   The one thing they don’t show you however, is trending.   For that we recommend that you take a look at Google’s Insights for Search.

Insights for Search allows you to compare up to 5 keywords and look at trending data from as far back as 2004.   It also displays significant news stories or events that happened during the time frame so you can see how these events played a role in the search data for the keywords. Trending data such as this can help you to choose a better keyword.   Perhaps when cross referencing your researched terms with Insights, you will notice that a highly searched term is actually decreasing in trending data.   This might cause you to evaluate a different term that is a rising search, which you may not have discovered from your other keyword research tools alone.

Insights for Search also allows you to see related search terms, regional interest and rising searches.   In my opinion, the rising searches section is the most interesting.   These are words that you should be focusing on because they are becoming popular very quickly.   When you see “breakout” listed instead of an actual percentage, it means that the search term has experienced a change in growth greater than 5000%.

The next time you are doing keyword research for a new page or blog, also consult Insights for Search to see what other keywords you might find.