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Top SEO Tools That Are Easy to Use, Highly Effective and Completely FREE

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What else do you need in the arsenal of an SEO expert apart from a full fledged and highly effective SEO tool? Below I am listing my favorite SEO tools that helps me to maximize my SEO campaigns.

Ubersuggest – For Keyword Suggestions

Keyword suggestion is a time consuming process and extremely important part of the entire SEO process. Keyword research if done wrong can hamper the performance of the overall SEO campaign. 

Ubersuggest is one of my preferred tools when it comes to highly effective keyword research. Here are some of the important features offered by this tool:

  • This tool fetches data from both Analytics and Search Console without the need to login.
  • You get hundreds of keyword ideas from head terms to long tail phrases.
  • You can easily filter out negative keywords.
  • Ubersuggest also displays data related to your competitors like who else is ranking for your selected keywords?

Google Page Speed Insights – For Checking The Speed of Your Website

Speed is already a ranking factor and owing to the fact that mobile searches have surpassed that of desktop, you need to make your site as fast as possible.

I take the help of Google Page Speed Insights to check the speed of any site and also review suggestions offered by the tool for optimizing the current speed. 

The tool displays:

  • The speed of the site on both mobile and desktop.
  • Page speed metrics like FCP and DCL. 
  • Page stats and optimization suggestions to further improve the performance of the webpage. 

Google Analytics and Webmaster Search Console – For Monitoring Your Website  

You won’t get any free SEO tools better than these. Both Google Analytics and Search Console offers free data and suggestions to improve the performance of a website. 

The first step is to add your website as a property in the Search Console. Once you have added and verified the property, you can do the following tasks with the help of the Search Console:

  • Submit new content for crawling and remove content you don’t want shown in search results.
  • Create and monitor content that delivers visually engaging search results.
  • Maintain your site with minimal disruption to search performance.
  • Monitor and resolve malware or spam issues so your site stays clean.

Similarly, you can add your website in Google Analytics. With the help of analytics, you can:

  • Grant permissions to make configuration changes and to interact with data. 
  • Link your AdWords and Analytics accounts to enable them to share data together. 
  • Set up reporting views so you can align Analytics users and relevant data. 
  • Set up goals to identify the actions you want users to take on your site or app.
  • Create custom reports and dashboards in your Analytics account.
  • Modify your tracking code to collect additional data 
  • Monitor ecommerce activity like user engagement with product lists and internal promotions.

SEO Review Tools – For Checking Backlinks

Backlinks were and still remain one of the most important ranking factors. Although there are several paid tools available like OSE, Ahrefs and SEMrush that display link data, if you are looking for a free tool, then SEO review tools should be your preferred option.

This tool displays backlink URL, anchor text, type of link ie. No Follow or Do Follow and Ahrefs Domain Rating. Hence, you get all the important link metrics in one place. Moreover, you can check the percentage of follow links and the number of referring domains/IP’s. 

Duplichecker – For Checking Duplicacy of Content

Content forms an integral part of every SEO strategy. For effective content marketing, you need to ensure your content pieces are not copied from somewhere else on the web. 

Although Copyscape is the best tool to check duplicacy of content, it’s paid. Duplichecker is a completely free alternative to Copyscape. 

Simply register and start checking duplicacy of as many content pieces as you wish to.  

AMP Test – For Checking The Validity of Your AMP Pages

In an era where mobile is dominating desktop, speed plays a deciding factor in enhancing the user experience. 

AMP is a lightweight version of your normal HTML and loads much faster. In order to test your AMP pages before you actually upload and run them on a server, it is recommended you test them using the AMP test tool by Google. 

This tool will test and look for any issues in your AMP pages and offer suggestions to fix them. Moreover, you should follow the AMP guidelines for Google search. 

Robots.txt Generator – For Creating Error Free Robots.txt File 

Many SEO’s still ignore robots.txt and the result is that they face improper site indexation issues. Hence, it is extremely important to create error free robots.txt files in order to ensure your important pages can be easily accessed by Googlebot.

You can easily generate robots.txt using robots.txt generator. Simply enter the directories and files that you wish to exclude and this tool will generate the required commands to be added in your robots.txt.

XML-Sitemaps – For Generating Sitemaps For Search Engines

In order to enable Google and other search engines to regularly crawl updated and new pages on your website, it is important to update your sitemap regularly. Moreover, a sitemap is a way of organizing a website and identifying the URLs under each section. 

You can create an XML sitemap using this tool. 

Using XML-Sitemaps is extremely simple. You only need to enter the URL of your website and this tool will automatically generate the sitemap for you. 

Microdata Generator – For Creating Schema Snippets

Due to rising competition, it has become a necessity for website owners to use proper schema data in order to enable search engines to display as much information as possible in the search results. With the help of Schema data, you allow Google to gain valuable data about your business. Google can then automatically display that data in the search results depending on the user query. 

The Microdata Generator generates the required code automatically for you. Simply enter information related to your or your client’s business and you get the code hassle free.  

Conclusion

In order to save time and improve productivity, usage of proper SEO tools should be a priority. Make use of the above tools because they will help you to have a balanced SEO strategy, reducing mistakes and improving your chances of increasing conversions. 

About the author

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Joydeep Bhattacharya

Joydeep Bhattacharya is an internet marketer and owner of the SEO blog, SEO Sandwitch. He has been associated with SEO, SMO, PPC, ORM and other activities related to online marketing for the past 5 years.