SEO Tools You Didn't Know You Needed

If you live in fear of Google releasing a new algorithm that utterly destroys your website’s position in search rankings, you’re not alone (trust me, I’ve had my share of nightmares). From Panda to Penguin to every little tweak in between, content marketers are having to work harder to keep their website (and those of their clients) ranking well.

But that’s not a bad thing.

It simply puts more pressure on marketers to write quality content that truly benefits their target market instead of posting narcissistic drivel about how great they are. The days of black hat tactics keeping useless sites at the top of search rankings are long gone. If you’re not writing with your audience in mind, you’re wasting your time.

That being said, there are some tools marketers can use to help promote their content on search engines. (Keep in mind, however, that these tools only work if you’re publishing good content – those who try to trick the system will always get caught.) Here are three types of SEO tools every marketer should know about.

Keyword Research Tools

Keywords are a valuable tool to help focus your content and reach your audience in search rankings, but you must use them sparingly. Rather than loading your blog posts with three variations of the same word, use the word once or twice and expand on the idea throughout your writing. If a search engine sees the same word or phrase too many times on a page, you’re going to get dinged.

Using a keyword tool is a great way to avoid this problem. You can look into platforms such as Wordstream, Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool and Google Keyword Planner to find out more about this type of tool.

SEO Audit and Technical Tools

These types of tools are incredibly important, especially if you’re not an online design whiz. Having broken links or defective elements on your site can wreak havoc on your ranking and seriously impact the usability of your website.

For this area, consider tools such as Bing SEO Analyzer, which will alert you to any technical issues, and Pingdom’s Website Speed Tool, which analyzes page load speed to minimize issues. You can also try an all-in-one kit such as Microsoft’s Free SEO Toolkit. Depending on what blog platform you use, you might also be able to find a plug-in to monitor your SEO aspects, such as the All in One SEO Pack from WordPress.

SEO Monitoring Tools

Of course you can gauge the success of your SEO efforts by seeing where your websites land in search results, but there are other monitoring tools you can use to get a better idea of your ROI.

For this aspect of SEO, consider tools such as Getstat, which can give you alerts and detailed reports of your rankings, and Advanced Web Ranking, which can monitor ranking and links and can crawl your site.