SEO TOOLS - Paid VS Free

Thursday, June 28, 2012

You know that when you enter in the world of SEO it's no escape. That's so many things you can learn that it's overwhelming just to think. So learning is a big part of SEO, that's the part you need to do first before you "put you'r hands in the dirt".
So, when you start to study you realise that you need some tool to understand better what you are doing (for me works like this...) and you start to realise that the best tools aren't free and they are in some cases very expensive...and you must pay monthly...yaikss :/. So for a starter this start to be a problem. All that knowledge, all that hard work in finding the best answers to understand SEO and know you have to pay.
So, fear not my friends, here are some tools for you to start optimizing your websites and see the amazing world of SEO.

WEBSITES AND PROGRAMS

When you start to search some tools for SEO, instantly you find the website from SEOmoz, and you see on the page "Pricing & Plans" and you think ohhh %$&#" is not free. Before you go away just stay a little bit on the site and make the register to find some great stuff. Once you register you can ask questions in the forum and learn some great stuff from guys that have seriously knowledge in this subject.
A great tool from SEOmoz is Open Site Explorer. With this tool you can compare 5 websites simultaneously and check for the page authority, Domain Authority; Linking Root Domains, Total Links, Anchor Text and Link Metrics (at this point a great part of your study is done and you know what i'm talking about), and then you can export them to CSV, how great is that! And everything for free!! 
So, and if you want to analyse some geek stuff like the communication from the server to the browser? Well Fiddler do the job just well. Here you can check the response of the website, Host, Url and see if you have some error pages (404).
Another program that is essential for SEO is Screaming Frog. This is a smal program you can install on Pc or Mac that spiders the website's links, images, CSS, scripts, pages titles, meta keywords (yeah yeah, they are not so relevant this days but if you have too much it can be consider spam), client and server side erros, redirects, etc, etc, you MUST install this. As free edition you can only scan as much as 500 pages, but for starts is rather good.
Xenu is another great program where you can see your page status code, size, outbound links, page errors, load time and more.
If you, for some reason, want to "spy" your competition and analyse their backlinks you can use SpyGlass from Link Assistant. As a free tool is very very good. You can check the number of backlinks of your competitor, Google pageRank of every backlink, the exact anchor text and anchor url, link value, etc etc. With this tool you have the oportunity to build your links more easily, but i must advise you that Google is penalizing backlinks came from poor websites and link farms, so if your competitor website is penalized you will be too for the same reasons. Act carefully on this.

EXTENSIONS BROWSERS

Another thing about SEO is that you must get familiarized with browsers and work with them as they are you family (well not family but close friends...). The best browsers to work with SEO are Firefox and Chrome, they have sooooo many extensions that is hark to count them.
So start with Firefox, one of the best Extensions is the SEOquake extension. With this extension activated you can access as many information on the page as your brain can handle. Starting with page info, Page Rank, How many pages Google and Bing has indexed in this domain, age of the domain, how many interactions from Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus this page have, information about the server, keyword density, description about Text/HTML Ratio and much more.
Another extra for firefox is the Backlink Explorer. With this tool (as it says) do best for your backlinks, as it search your backlinks in Bing, Blekko, searchmetrics and more.
As you know, speed plays a major role in websites as Google and other search engines are giving it much more importance as it gives better user experience. So what do you want to measure speed? Well lori is a great tool to measure the speed and page size of a website.
So...know that we'r more or less done with Firefox, let's see the Chrome.
As i mention above SEOmoz have great tools for free. If you use Chrome (or Firefox) you can use their extension and almost instantly you can check some page elements as no-followed / followed links, internal, external, keywords, ranktracker, Text to Code Ratio, Bold / Strong words (gives relevance to those keywords) and some other great SEO tools.
The Meta SEO Inspector is another tool that you can't loose. This extension is mainly aimed at web developers that need to verify the description tag of their site to follow the Webmasters' Google Guidelines, SEO, or even to who is curious about page contents that are usually not visible, but can reveal interesting site properties. Alerts are showed when the meta data is not within certain ranges, for example when the description tag is too short, or too long.
SEO Workers have an excellent tool that allows you to perform a basic analysis of the page in your browser with a single click. The results from the SEO Workers Analysis Tool are displayed on their site.
With some sort of limit and with more work you can get as almost information about your site as a paid versions with these free tools.
So, it's up to you if you want to experiment this tools or go on adventure on your own and find others that's suit you.