Is your online business aware of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? Our colleagues at ITespresso.fr have created an infographic listing the 25 most efficient SEO tools available to small and medium-sized enterprises. By following the advice given below, you will be able to increase your website’s visibility with all of the popular search engines, including Google.
This is vital work for website builders: generating audience and becoming more influential requires the best ranking in search results.
Here are five essential points and 25 tools to help take advantage of SEO:
Here’s some more information on the basics of SEO:
Check your ranking
With these tools you can see at what position your site appears in Google’s search results, for each of your target keywords. You can also spy on your competitors.
For example, SEO Scope, made by one of Google’s partners, allows you to automate this process with regular detailed reports. If you are on the move, you can access your data from your mobile using Ranks.fr.
However, you need to know that positions change depending on the time, the day, the visitor location and other criteria. Positions are useful only as a trend indicator, to verify your progress and compare against your competitors.
Analyse your website
Auditing a website requires time and rigour. Tools that can help you are legion, but only a few are really efficient. Among the most interesting is Screaming Frog. It “crawls” your site, visiting your pages in the way search engines do, in order to highlight weaknesses such as dead links or missing meta-descriptions.
During recent months, you may have noticed a trend towards content marketing. With recent Google algorithm updates (Panda, Hummingbird) content becomes more important if you want to rank well.
Choosing the right keywords is not only about ranking opportunity, it is also a question of user experience. Google Trends will help you identify how your visitors are using search engines and what information they need at a specific period: every Christmas, for example.
Monitor your performance
SEO involves a huge quantity of information, numbers and metrics. There are great monitoring tools like AdvancedWebRanking, which is probably one of the best. It is also regularly updated.
Monitoring tools allow you to see your position evolving, detect technical problems, audit a site, compare with your competitors, visualise your social media performance and even spot keyword opportunities with monthly search and keywords competition. A real Swiss Army knife!
Track your backlinks
The number and the quality of your backlinks is one of the most important ranking criteria. Tracking your backlinks prevents you from being penalised by Google due to a spammy linking profile. It also allows you to identify who speaks about you, mentions your articles in a positive or negative way, and sends you traffic.
Analysing your backlink profile regularly can also help you protect the site from “negative SEO” penalty set by a competitor.
According to the SEO community tests, ‘ahrefs’ seems to be the most powerful tool to track your backlinks. It tells you if the previously detected backlinks are still live or if they no longer exist. Checking the target of the links gives you the opportunity to set up the appropriate 301 redirections if you changed your URLs.
Are you an SEO guru? Take our quiz!
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It's good to see another well done infographic on this topic.
The free tools are of particular interest to many of the small businesses / SMEs I work with on design, content marketing, web sites etc.
Here is Brisbane, Australia, the scene is much the same as you cite, as the Internet is so pervasive :-) It's good we can sharpen our understanding from people on the other side of the world :-)