2014 is about to end. As we are beginning a new year, it may be time we start reevaluating what we have been doing so long.
Is SEO still a relevant tactic that you can use in 2015?
Have the various updates from Google killed SEO in totality? One of the best techniques of late was building private blog networks. Right now they are being deindexed left and right.
So what works in 2015?
I think it ultimately boils down to creating content that naturally gets links from other websites. Content that brings your brand to the center stage.
Of course you need to supplement those content marketing efforts with outreach and social media sharing.
But nothing would work without content. Also, you need tools that automate a lot of the manual processes that you do each day and save you time.
Here we have gathered together 24 tools that’d make you a PRO when it comes to SEO.
Let’s begin.
Link research tools
Service
Feature
Linkody
Finds and monitors links to a site, helps disavow bad links
Ahrefs
Finds virtually all the links to a site
Seo tools for Excel
Helps find more info regarding links
Builtwith
Finds what a site is made of, plugins, tools etc.
Keyword tools
Service
Feature
Wordstream
Finds keywords
Ubersuggest
Finds keywords, especially long tails
Keyword Tool for YouTube
Finds keywords for YouTube
Semrush
Finds keywords which your competitors are ranking for
Removeem
Finds links with over optimized keywords
Scrapebox
Finds tons of keywords from a given seed keyword
CCaptionTube
Finds keywords to optimize YouTube videos
Optimization tools
Service
Feature
Schema Creator
Optimizes search engine listings
Pingdom
Pings a site and optimizes it for search
Fiddler
debugs a site
Domain Hunter Plus
Searches for domains, finds domains with good links
Email format
finds email ids and structures
Getlisted
helps local businesses get listed
Google snippet optimization
Helps in Google snippet optimization
Google Snippet Testing
Helps in Google snippet testing
Bing Webmaster tools
Optimizes sites for Bing listing
Copyscape
Finds duplicates of your content
Circle Count
offers data on Google+ Users
Content Strategy Generator Tool
generates content ideas
Word to Html
generates clean html
Linkody
Linkody is one of the best tools around that can help you prevent any problems with your site in the future.
At the start of this article I talked about Google penalties. Linkody empowers you to avoid all of these penalties. The disavow feature will help you submit all your bad backlinks to Google’s Disavow tool with ease.
With email reports on new links and detailed stats on the quality of each link, this is the one tool that would keep your business alive in this age of tumult.
Also read Why you need to check your website’s backlinks and The future of link building
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a site explorer and backlink checker. Ahrefs includes a massive link index and it updates and reloads data every 15 minutes. It has an intuitive interface and performs rich data analysis. According to many users, Ahrefs has become one of the world’s most powerful tool for checking links. The tool can show links, linking domains, anchors, and the highest quality domain pages. You can also check if you have gained any new links or lost some with this tool. Users claim that by using Ahrefs, they were able to measure and improve the quality of their own backlink profile as well as those of their clients.
SEO Tools for Excel
This tool helps you scrape data easily. Say, you’d want to know which one of your competitor’s posts has got the most likes or tweets. Adding a Json path scraping code would list the tweets and likes for all the links imported into the tool.
The tool is free and for the skilled SEO is a ninja kit.
BuiltWith
BuiltWith offers a database of 7,000+ web technologies and more than 250 million websites to build lists for lead generation. It shows the websites that use hosting, analytics, shopping carts and many more. You have the option of filtering by traffic, location, vertical and more. It also helps you know the platform of your prospects before you contact them. The end result is improved conversations with validated market adoption. BuiltWith also provides advanced country based analytics and technology market share information for all web technologies.
Wordstream
If you’ve been into SEO for some time now, you might know about all the standard Google tools we use to effectively create, manage and or even optimize PPC campaigns. But other than using Google Adwords/Analytics/Editor to effectively manage your campaign, you could use Wordstream instead.
Of course this SEO tool has all the standard features you’d expect in a good PPC tool. It has a keyword research tool, an ad group builder, a campaign builder, as well as a segment that makes managing historical data easy.
This tool also has something called ‘’20 minute work week’’, a feature that teaches you how to best manage your campaigns in a week. The feature is ideal when you’ve set up your PPC campaigns; hence you only need to make a little bit of tweaks here and there.
On the other hand, the keyword tool lets you aim at certain niches or groups of related keywords which you can use. You can also group these suggestions according to a common theme you’ve chosen, for simple ad group launches.
Lastly, you only get 3 searches for free, after which you’ll need to upgrade to their paid version, known as Wordstream Advisor.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is really simple to use. Once on their official site, you only need to key in your base term, and of course choose your language source to get variations of your base keyword. What’s more, you can click on each keyword suggested to see more variations of the same.
Then you can add all the keyword suggestion to your basket by clicking the plus sign on the left side.
The advantage of Ubersuggest is that it gives thousands of suggestions from real user queries. This means you can use it to get inspiration for your next blog, or even optimize it for SEO purposes. And the good thing is that it’s free.
You can also get a lot of suggestions that can be directly implemented in a PPC advertising campaign.
Keyword tool for YouTube
On September this year Google decided to disband their free youtube keyword tool.
But don’t worry, I have an alternative for you.
This tool is designed for the video nerds!
YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web, with a potential to drive in thousands of views from your videos, and right into your website.
This tool is very important where content marketing is concerned. It lets you optimize video titles and descriptions for people to find your site easily.
The interface is straightforward, no jargon as you’d expect if you’re a first-timer. So for example, if your site has content about SEO and you made a video for your audience then input seo into the search engine and the keyword suggestions would bring views to your video.
SEMRush
When you need information from a competing website that ranks high on Google, you need something that’s so powerful that it can pull that information from the web, pull historic rankings and save it on their servers forever.
SEMRush.com is a tool that belongs to SEOQuake, and its main purpose is to give you key analytical information about a competitor website. It can show which keywords the website is ranking for in different countries, which ads it’s running etc.
Again, even with the free version of SEMRUSH, you get information about particular keywords that a website is ranking for, and also their position in the search results for up to 10 keywords.
If you upgrade to the pro level, you even get in-depth information about the same. However, if the keyword you were searching for has very low searches on Google, then the program will return zero results for that particular keyword. That’s the only drawback that I see for the tool.
Anchor text over optimization tool
The act of over-optimizing anchor texts can get you penalized. Google Penguin was specifically designed to limit the rankings of sites with over optimized anchors.
You see, when you do this, you are building too many links with the targeted anchor text, and you will not be seeing any positive results at the end of it all.
However, most SEO experts advice that you stick to 7:3 ratio where anchor text optimization is concerned, and there are lots of tools available to help you strike that ratio.
Remove’em is just one of these tools designed to help you diversify your anchor texts while highlighting for you areas that need attention.
When you key in your site, the tool shows the anchors that consist the majority of your links.
If it flags down certain keywords or phrases, then it’s essentially requesting you to modify those links to put more focus on your brand than in the anchor text itself.
An important thing to keep in mind is that you need to be concerned only about the “money keywords”. For example I have lot of anchors that say “George” to my site seekdefo.com. These aren’t money keywords, i.e. I am not trying to rank for George. There is no commercial intent. Such anchors cause no problem.
Scrapebox
Scrapebox is one of my favorite tools online. I never use it for spamming. There are so many other little known functions that you’d be missing out on a lot of good stuff without Scrapebox.
If you have large list of sites you can import them into Scrapebox and check if any of them runs any malware. Just use the Malware and Phishing filter.
You can search for blogs that accept guest posts in your niche with Scrapebox. Scrapebox will run all queries corresponding to the term guest post and send you a large list. Doing that manually would take you more than a day.
There’s a Scrapebox addon that lets you check for broken links on your site.
There are a lot more options with the tool and you can refer to this guide below:
How to use Scrapebox for linkbuilding and not spamming?
CaptionTube
It is basically a utility used for adding closed captions to any YouTube videos. Once you have imported a video, you are able to add captions and play the video as needed. When you are finished, you upload the video YouTube after exporting the captions. It is better than editing your captions in a text editor while watching YouTube. The reason behind this is that it offers increased precision with a scaleable timeframe. You also have the option of making changes to captions and previewing them immediately. Lastly, it has the option of creating multiple language tracks.
Schema creator
This is all about structuring your website’s data in such a way that search engines have an easy time understanding your HTML structure.
You see, Google, as well as other search engines designed a structured data standard known as Schema.org. The problem is that most SEOs and website designers don’t have time to understand the complex nature of Schema.org standard. But the good thing is that there are tools offered like Schema creator to quickly help them build and stay up to date with schema.org requirements. That’s what Schema Creator does.
In one case study, Matt Barby refers to using the tool to add enhanced rich snippets to his website. This made the search engine results a little more noticeable and drove more traffic to the site. “When compared to a lot of the other competing results, it’s clear that our SERP snippet is much more clickable”
Image Source
Pingdom
No one likes a site that takes forever to load. In fact, if this is the case, most visitors won’t have the patience to wait, so they will move on to another site, with the same information but one that loads pages quickly.
The attention span now is 5- 6 seconds and if it takes longer you may lose your visitors forever.
Pingdom helps you to evaluate the speed of your site so you can make the necessary changes needed; hence your site is able to perform faster.
Fiddler
If you don’t like another debugging tool because you’re paying $50 or whatever price, then you can simply switch to Fiddler. The best thing is that it’s free to use. The bad thing is that it’s only available for Windows users.
You need to download the .Net framework from their official site. This tool analyses the interaction between the browser and the web servers. You might be wondering the reason why you cannot use Firefox & Install tamper data instead?
The answer is simple – if you are looking for a tool that won’t freeze your browser (a common problem with most plugins), then Fiddler is your ultimate debugging tool.
Fiddler comes from Telerik, a company that’s known for the variety of debugging and ux testing that it offers.
Domain Hunter Plus
Domain Hunter Plus is a duplicate link checker, and can crawl hundreds of links on a page. Domain Hunter Plus lets an individual know if a domain exists by returning all of the outbound links. For each of the error codes it receives, Domain Hunter Plus displays the data procured from SEOmoz by the number of broken links to that particular page along with the domain. All one needs to do is open the Open Site Explorer report in a new tab right from the DHP interface. If you are interested in purchasing a domain or perhaps in multiple domains, you can select the ones you want and move directly to GoDaddy to
register them. If you just want a report, you can export all of DHP’s results into a file.
This tool can help you with setting up a new site on an expired domain with lots of positive link juice and get it ranked immediately.
Email format
Email Format helps an individual find the correct structure for millions of companies and organizations on the Internet. With this simple too, one can simply click on the name of the company and then find the email format it uses. It is simple to use, and has received numerous positive reviews. This tool can help those who do not have a lot of time to research company structures, and instead need a compact and simplistic tool at their fingertips.
GetListed
GetListed is a tool that has now become Moz Local. It is geared primarily towards businesses and agencies who manage multiple locations or business online.
If you want to add multiple listings and locations to the tool at the same time, this is possible by adding it all in one spreadsheet. The formatting is similar to that of other tools. If you would like to upload spreadsheets, this works in a similar fashion to using Google’s multiple location spreadsheet.
Google SERP Snippet Optimization
It’s a tool designed to help with search engine optimization, and works in a similar way to Google’s search engine results; also known as SERP’s. The tool asks you to use the form on the page to enter the title, meta description, and URL of your web page. The tool then generates a virtual search result listing based on your input. Many people find that it has a simple design and a friendly interface. It also has a great description page, so if you run
into questions, they can be easily sorted out on the page.
Google Snippet testing
Google Snippet testing tool is another search engine optimization tool that supports the following types: application, events, authors, recipes, reviews, products, music, and more. It lets an individual check his or her markup to make sure that Google can extract the structured data, such as authorship information, metadata, and rich snippets markup. Reviews claim that it is simple to use, and an asset to those wanting to enhance their search engine optimization portfolio.
Bing webmaster tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is designed to help an individual find traffic, discover why people come to their site, improve the site and the areas of the website that should be expanded. The tools can assist you get listed in Bing search results. Knowing why people come to your site can help you understand what you need to focus on to increase traffic. Bing Webmaster Tools can also assist you improve your site easily and know the areas that need expansion.
Recently Mozilla Firefox changed the default search engine to Yahoo. Yahoo’s search results are powered with Bing. As such Bing’s search dominance has increased by 20% over North America.
Getting your site listed on Bing Webmaster tools is the first thing you need to do in order to get it ranked on Bing.
Copyscape
It can be described as an online platform used to protect your content online. Copyscape is the world’s most popular and most powerful online plagiarism detection solution. The majority of website owners worldwide use it to search for copies of existing content, prevent duplicate content and check the originality of their new content. It has two major services; free plagiarism checker used to search for copies of content on the web, and professional solutions for finding out if newly generated content is 100% unique.
Circle count
This platform works by offering Google+ users a plethora of statistics on any given Google+ user. You can find out data on comments, average number of +1’s and follower history. You have the option of using its Google Chrome extension or circlecount.com to take advantage of everything it offers. It provides a guide that a user can refer to in case they are having trouble using the tool.
Content Strategy Generator Tool
CSGT (Content Strategy Generator Tool) is a Google Docs spreadsheet using import-XML functions to pull different data around the web that can be used for content brainstorming. The content does not have to be restricted to blogging as the tool can be utilized to research audio, infographics and videos. The tool can be effectively used to view new keyword opportunities, create your own spin on topics, generate great headlines ideas, spot trends and many more, all in one spot.
Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML
If you have noticed ‘&’ symbols when copying text from Word to, say, WordPress, you know what I am talking about. They are a royal pain.
This is a tool that cleans up HTML copy pasted from Microsoft Word documents. Filters are applied to get rid of the html that automatically comes when pasting documents. It then provides you with a well formatted result that can be pasted directly into a content editing system or web page.
Due to its nature, it is completely private. The process of conversion is fully automated. No one will get to see your document and there won’t be a copy of the same stored in the tool.
The only time when a copy is made is when you decide to file a bug report and opt to include a copy of your document. At this point,the document as well as the bug report will be emailed to the developer.
Concluding thoughts
SEO isn’t dead. You just need the right approach. With these tools you will have plenty of help. Do share with us if you use some of the tools above or something else entirely.
Related posts:
What is dead in SEO after all the updates? If you’re still clinging on to the old SEO techniques, it’s time for a change.
Social shares for backlinks quality check (new metrics) New social metrics available in Linkody (G+, Twitter, FB and LinkedIn social shares). Check the SEO value of your backlinks with our tool.
Using Linkody to Monitor Anchor Text and Avoid Google Penalties One of the most valuable aspects of Linkody is that it easily allows you to see the distribution of different anchor texts being used to link in […]
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