Group Buy SEO tools
If you are
looking to boost your blog’s visibility in search, you will need to invest in
some powerful SEO tools for research and management of your search marketing
campaign. The following are some of the best tools (free and premium) that you
can use to help optimize your blog for search.
Keyword Research
The
foundation of any search marketing campaign is finding the right keywords. And
for bloggers, this is especially important since keyword research can be the
basis of a lot of great blog topics. Here are some tools you can use to start
your keyword research with.
Google AdWords Keyword Tool
The first
tool of choice when it comes to keyword research is the Google Ad Words Keyword
Tool. Simply enter the main keyword phrase for your blog, and
this tool will give you phrases related to that keyword along with their search
volume. If you have a Google AdWords account, you can get up to 800 ideas –
regardless of whether you have actually placed a Google AdWords ad in search.
SEMrush
SEMrush is a premium
tool that allows marketers to research a competitor’s keywords in organic
(normal results displayed in search) and paid search. Using the free interface,
you can enter the website address of you or your competitor’s website and get a
nice overview of traffic to the site, keywords the site is ranking on and much
more. This is great for analyzing you or your competitor’s site.
You can
then drill down on each section. For example, you can select the organic
keywords and look for a more detailed breakdown of the traffic volume for that
keyword on the site, the website address that’s attracting the traffic and much
more.
To perform
comprehensive initial keyword research for your blog, you can sign up for a
one-month subscription for $79.95 and get thousands of keywords from blogs
similar to yours. You can download these keywords in an Excel spreadsheet for
future reference. But start with the free version because that provides
lots of good information.
On-Site Optimization
Once you
have chosen your keywords for your main blog and your first blog topics, you
will want to then optimize your blog for those keywords. The following tools
will help you see how competitors optimize for search and allow you to add
proper Meta tags (i.e. content that Google reads to help index your blog) to
your blog.
SEO Site Tools
SEO Site Tools is a Chrome extension that allows you to
quickly see any website’s main SEO tags (elements that are essential if you
want to rank well in Google) including the title tag, meta description,
meta keywords, and image ALT tags.
WordPress Plugins
If you run
your blog on your own domain using WordPress, then you have a lot of great
plugin options for on-site optimization. WordPress SEO by Yoast has
the most features for a free plugin including sitemap creation, addition of
Meta tag fields (title, Meta description, meta keywords) for your posts and
pages, and SEO analysis of your content.
You can
read more about its features in this.
Link Building
If you want
your blog to rank well in search engines, link building is a must. One way to
discover great links for your blog is to research links acquired by similar
blogs. This will help you discover:
·
Links that competitors gain with their content. This will show you
their best link worthy content pieces.
·
Links that competitors gain through guest blogging. This can direct you
to guest blogging opportunities you can acquire as well.
·
Links that competitors gain through social bookmarking on sites like
Stumble Upon, Delicious, and Reddit.
·
Links that you can acquire without content such as directories, social
profiles, forum profiles, etc.
There are a
lot of great tools when it comes to competitive link research. Most offer the
traditional list of links that you can download into an Excel spreadsheet, but
some offer special visual tools and better organization. Here are a few that
fit in a small business budget.
Cognitive SEO
Cognitive SEO has a lot of great features starting at $19
per month. The best is the ability to view the link profile of your blog and
your top four competitors using the Visual Link Explorer.
Color
coding allows you to quickly see a competitor’s link strategy along with the
ability to hover over each dot representing a link to learn more details about
that specific link.
·
Do they have a lot of links from authority websites? Top links are
represented by the largest dots furthest from the center of the main link
clusters.
·
Are they getting links from social networks, press releases, forums,
directories, and other blogs?
·
What types of sites are they getting links from? Business, fashion,
health, recreation, etc.
·
Are they acquiring mostly text links or image links (usually associated
with banner ads)?
You can
also see this information in chart format and click on the bars to see links
that fall into specific groupings.
Web Me Up
Web Me Up offers simple organization of your links and
your competitors’ starting at $99.95 per month. For example, you can quickly
see backlinks organized by domain, Google’s authority metric PageRank, and by
Alexa Rank (traffic).
It also
allows you to see other metrics about your blog and your competitors’ such as
their social popularity, keyword ranking history, and more at a glance.
Rank Checking
If you
don’t invest in a link building tool like the ones mentioned above, you’ll
still want to have a standalone rank checking tool so you can monitor your
blog’s progress in search. This is essential if you want to make sure
that your marketing efforts are leading to results. The following tools start
at $49 per month with accounts for bloggers and small businesses.
Authority Labs
Authority Labs offers a clean interface for tracking 250
keywords across 50 domains with a Plus account. Their clean interface
makes it easy to spot your current rankings and changes.
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