12 Free Analysis Tools to Optimize Your Website
November 29th, 2007Webmasters and bloggers are normally quite SEO savvy even if they’re not SEO professionals. However, they often neglect SEO efforts and forget about all the useful Web analytics and keyword research tools that are available and so I thought I’d remind readers about some of them. Web analysis tools are getting better everyday so it is good practice to regularly analyze your Website to identify changes and new trends in search traffic. Here is a list of essential tools that you can use to analyze your Website and traffic and to optimize your site for search engines.
Website Analysis Tools
1. Google Analytics
This should be your starting point, it doesn’t have to be Google Analytics, there are many other Web analytics tools, but you have to have a good Web analytics tool. Using your Web analytics tool you can see what keywords or phrases people are searching for to find your site, which search engines drive the most traffic and what content users are finding. There are advanced Google Analytics tricks that you can use to get more out of the tool.
2. Google Webmaster Tools
This is where you create a Google sitemap and get to see how often Google indexes your home page. Webmaster Tools offers pretty much everything that Google is willing to tell you about your site and how it’s indexed. Google recently added the ability to set the geographic target of your Website and you can also opt-in to enhanced image search which can improve indexing and search quality of images on your Website.
3. Yahoo! Site Explorer
Yahoo’s version of Webmaster Tools. It doesn’t provide as much information as Google’s, but you can add a sitemap or RSS feed and get some information from Yahoo! about your site. Yahoo doesn’t display cached dates like Google does, but Yahoo! Site Explorer shows you when each page on your site (and other sites) was indexed or cached.
4. Xinu
Provides a dashboard view of key SEO indicators of a Web site, including PageRank, number of pages indexed and backlinks. The Diagnostics pane provides details on things like domain name, page size, HTML tags and gives you a thumbs up rating. It even tells you how long your site has existed and the blog owner.
5. Poodle Predictor
A good search engine simulator tool. Enter your URL, click on “Poodle Search” and then on “Diagnostic View”. There are many other search engine simulator tools, but I like how this one displays the results.
6. SEO for Firefox
A Firefox plugin that provides easy access to SEO related information about a page or link. When enabled it highlights “nofollow” links in red.
Keyword Research Tools
7. Google Trends
Search engines don’t share detailed search statistics, but you can use Google Trends to get a good idea of how popular search terms are. If you have a keyword that ranks #1 then you can use that as a base for comparison against other keywords to get a gauge for how much traffic one could expect from those keywords. Since the main purpose of the tool is to see trends it is of course very useful to see if keywords are growing in popularity. There’s also a section called Hot Trends that lists the current 100 “hot” keywords. These keywords offer good AdWords opportunities.
8. Microsoft adCenter Labs
As described in a previous post on keyword search funnels and demographic predictions, adCenter Labs gives a very interesting perspective on keywords and helps you to better understand what your users look like and the thought process that they go through when doing searches. The Search Funnel and Keyword Forecast tools are particularly cool.
9. Yahoo! Buzz Index
A service by Yahoo! that resembles Google’s Hot Trends. The Yahoo! Buzz Index shows the day’s top 20 searches in various categories including actors, movies and sports.
10. Keyword Discovery
Search term suggestion tool. They offer a free tool that lists up to 100 top keywords for a given keyword or phrase ranked by the number of searches over the last 12 months. The premium version of Keyword Discovery has a lot more functionality and a much slicker interface than Wordtracker.
11. Wordtracker
Probably the most popular subscription based keyword research tool, but like Keyword Discovery they also offer a free keyword suggestion tool that lists the top 100 search terms ranked by searches.
12. Google AdWords Keyword Tool
The tool is really intended for paid search research, but it is a useful keyword suggestion tool.
November 30th, 2009 at 4:27 am
I have to say I agree with most of what is being said here. I’m gonna have to have to snatch the rss so I can keep tabs. on what is going on here.