“Want to learn SEO like a pro?” “Want to know how to check if a company is any good at SEO before hiring them?” “Tired of being taken for a ride by useless SEO companies that promise the world but deliver nothing?”
Now you can fight back. Check out these great free SEO tools you can use to quickly improve your own Search Engine Optimization or test whether your SEO company is ‘exaggerating‘ their SEO skills..
Whether or not you have any technical SEO experience (HTML, JS, CMS, PHP, .htaccess, etc), these tools can quickly help you to understand where your site’s SEO needs improvement, and what is involved.
This article shows a selection of the best free SEO tools that anyone can use to learn more about SEO on their own blog or website – as well as anyone else’.
Why good SEO is important
It’s in the search engines interests to help everybody implement the best possible SEO on their own sites or blogs.
Proper SEO is designed to make a site as useful, convenient and valuable to visitors. The better your SEO, therefore, the better your visitor’s browsing experience, the better the search engines do their job, and everyone is happy.
How SEO tools can help you find the right SEO service
All of the SEO tools we discuss in this article can be used to quickly ascertain the SEO performance of any website. This means that you can do your own tests to see if an SEO company is worth their salt.
Are you going to hire a company that promises the world, but gets an SEO score of 50 out of 100? Or, will you go for the company that scores 95 out of 100?
The best free SEO tools
Simple. Quick. Easy. Powerful. These are the criteria for the SEO tools that are included in this article.
Please note that some of these tools may require you to install add-ons to your Firefox or Chrome browser.
1. Google developer’s page speed online
Page speed online is a great free SEO service that measures your SEO page speed performance and provides a suite of suggestions for improvement (categorized by priority).
How to use page speed online:
Enter the URL of any webpage you want to test, and wait for the results. To see some near perfect scores, try any webpage on Site prebuilder:
- http://www.siteprebuilder.com ~ homepage
- http://www.siteprebuilder.com/content/how-test-seo-top-free-seo-tools-easily-check-seo-any-page ~ this blog post
Despite having numerous social sharing buttons, Google and Amazon ads, as well as plenty of high-tech JavaScript, Site prebuilder pages are nearly perfect.
In fact, if you browse through the remaining low priority SEO suggestions on Site prebuilder’s page speed test, you’ll find that most, if not all, relate to the JavaScript and links of Google, LinkedIn, Amazon and Twitter.
Try it out. How does your own site compare?
2. Fully Loaded speed test
Fully Loaded is an add-on for Google Chrome that is a good alternative to Google’s speed test. By installing Fully Loaded, you can easily test the SEO of any page you browse.
How to use Fully Loaded:
- Install Fully Loaded onto Google Chrome
- Browse to any page and click the Fully Loaded icon at the top right of your Chrome browser
Try it out on your own homepage and other pages (landing pages, blog posts, etc). How does your site compare to Site prebuilder?
3. Google chrome’s Audits
Google’s Chrome browser comes with a brilliant feature – you can perform a full SEO analysis of any page at any time using their Audits tool.
How to use Google Chrome’s Audits:
- Browse to any page you would like to test
- Right click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect element” to bring up the Developer tools pane (Hint: you can also do this from the Tools menu)
- Select the Audits tab and click Run
Audits doesn’t provide a score. Instead, it brings up a huge array of results that are categorized by importance (how much SEO goodness you can gain by implementing fixes). The fewer results you see, the less there is to improve, the better your SEO.
In Site prebuilder’s case, there is one red task that complains about the order of a single CSS file. Unfortunately, the CSS file is created and downloaded by the JavaScript of one of the social sharing buttons, so I’ve left this… for now.
How does your site perform? Hopefully you won’t have too many problems as some of these can be very technical and tricky to fix.
4. YSlow
If you prefer to use FireFox, Yahoo’s YSlow is a great add-on and alternative to Chrome’s audits feature.
How to use YSlow:
- Install the YSlow add-on for FireFox
- Browse to a page you want to analyze, and click the YSlow icon at the bottom right of your browser
- Select which RuleSet is most appropriate for your site or blog and click Run
YSlow will analyze your page and bring up a categorized list of potential fixes to any SEO related issues that page might have. Again, many of the fixes are simple, but some can be very technical and difficult to weed out.
How does your site or blog perform?
SEO tools aren’t a substitute for human SEO expertise
It’s important to remember that no tool is perfect. They can only follow the SEO rules built in to them. They can’t make decisions that apply to unique circumstances. Experienced and skilled human SEOs are still they best way to go – although, slightly more costly.
In many cases, the SEO suggestions provided by SEO tools might not be the right ones for your particular set of needs. Unless you have some technical experience, I would recommend at least having an SEO expert look over your site to approve and improve on any plans of action you have regarding your blog or site’s SEO performance.
