Why Use SEO Tools?

Whether you're trying to gain notoriety for a blog or trying to give your business an online presence, you will need some help when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). The basis for SEO is having content on your website that is relevant to the search terms people use so that it will be found organically by search engines.

Essential Tools Include

-♦ Google Keyword Tool
-♦ Word Tracker
-♦ Keyword Spy

-♦ Keywords Position Checker
-♦ Keyword Density Checker
-♦ Meta Description Creation

-♦ Google Analytics
-♦ Stats Counter

1) Search Engines

The most obvious tools for an SEO are the search engines themselves. They’re free to use and you can use them as much as you want. With a simple search you can see how your pages are displayed in the SERPs and check your titles and meta descriptions. Perhaps you’ll even see rich snippets, created by structured data. But if your page doesn’t show up at all, you might have gotten a penalty or you have problems with duplicate content.

2) Webmaster Tools

Both Google and Bing have Webmaster Tools where you can find a ton of information about your website. You can discover crawling errors, check the index status, control your sitemap, get traffic information and more besides. They serve as dashboards for everything that search engines do when indexing your website. These services are free and they take just two minutes to set up, so why wouldn’t we use them?

3) Web Analytics

Web Analytics are a *must* have for every website. No matter how small it is, web analytics can give you valuable information on how to improve things.

How do web analytics have an influence on SEO? Well, you can see where your visitors come from (Google, Bing, Facebook, Ads...), which pages they visited, how long they stayed on your site..

4) Keyword Tool

Every website owner wants to attract as many visitors as possible. That’s why choosing the right keywords is essential. A simple example: let’s say I’m planning on selling football jerseys online. Is ‘football jersey’ the best keyword to use? Or should I use the term ‘football shirt’? To get an idea about the traffic potential of both keywords, I can use the Adwords Keyword Tool.

5) Google Trends

Another useful tool from Google. Google Trends shows how often a term is searched for. Search volume is relative to the highest point in the chart (100) and allows you to discover seasonality.
This data can be used to analyze sudden changes in traffic and discover new opportunities. After all; SEO is not only about adapting and optimizing websites, but also about foresight and even a bit of speculation.

6) SEO Software / SaaS

Below you’ll find some of these services that might be worth your time (it’s impossible to list them all, so I made a selection):
-Screaming Frog
-Xenu’s Link Sleuth
-Majestic SEO
-SEOmoz
-Open Site Explorer

7) SEO Browsers

I've already mentioned in one of the previous articles of this Session that search engines can’t read certain content types; they have problems with images, flash and other rich media types. We can see what search engines can see by using an SEO browser such as Browseo. You can also check other important elements, such as page title, headings, response code, etc.

8) Browser Plugins

Some of my favorite SEO tools are browser plugins. They’re really handy if you want to do a quick check of a website
-SEO Site Tools
-Mozbar
-SEO for Chrome
-PageSpeed Insights:

9) Information

SEO is a field which changes frequently; search engines release algorithm updates, new tools are released, markups change, etc. These constant changes make the optimization process so interesting.

10) Conclusion

There you have it! An overview of some of the tools that might be useful for SEO-related tasks. As you can see, a lot of these are free, so give them a chance and try them.