Free SEO Tools to Increase Search Engine Rankings

Search engine optimization (SEO) is do or die for most businesses, and a very critical resource and facet of the internet marketing strategy.

Many small businesses use a variety of effective SEO Tools and heavily depend on SEO to increase website rankings across a multitude of search engines.

Without proper SEO, it is extremely difficult to achieve first page rankings across multiple search engines due to the ever-growing competition.

And add in the constant changes in search algorithms imposed by search engines, and your website could find itself on a never-ending SEO roller coaster, drastically moving up and down for a variety of keywords.

To help their website gain SEO relevance and rank well in search engines, companies make use of many search engine optimization tools and methods.

Most SEO tools have been developed by SEO experts as a way to help others lacking SEO expertise to perform SEO without having to learn each and every aspect of SEO as a strategy.

Now widely available to most Internet users, search engine optimization tools are available via desktop applications, software plug-ins, or browser extensions.

And with the treasure trove of search engine optimization tools on the market, there also comes a wide variety of prices.

From free to monthly to annual to one-time fees, it can be quite a daunting task to review and compare SEO tools, and choose the best SEO tool according to your business and SEO needs.

As with most internet marketing tools, most offer SEO tools and software using the “freemium” model, a blend of “free” and “premium” meaning free to download and use but for to be a premium user, you have to pay a fixed or monthly fee.

Today, I’m going to quickly discuss and give you a few “freemium” SEO tools to try out and use for your website as a part of your SEO efforts.

Speaking from experience, the main concern in regards to SEO tools is the price point.

Usually there is a misconception among many business owners that “free” tools are not very effective.

There are “freemium” SEO tools on the market that you offer sound, basic functionality to produce profitable SEO results.

However, the downside with these types of SEO tools is that they are mostly developed for really simple SEO needs, and charge a fee for more advanced SEO feature sets.

Although it’s true that free SEO tools do not offer complete functionality, there are some SEO tools in the market that provide great features and results.

To facilitate the process of choosing the right SEO tools, I’ve compiled a simple list of 5 free SEO tools available that I consistently use to effectively rank my own websites across all search engines.

Google’s SEO Tools

Undoubtedly, some of the best yet totally free of charge tools available for various aspects of SEO have been designed by Google.

You can completely rely on these methods to get insights into your website’s performance and get custom reports based on user-defined parameters.

The most popular among these tools are Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, Google Insights for Search, and Google Suggest.

Some of the applications are in the beta phase of testing but they still provide great functionality to the users to improve their SEO strategy without having to spend money.

MajesticSEO

This is one of the “freemium” SEO tools available out there offering a way to improve your link building strategy.

The basic features are free, as you may have guessed, but if the volume and scale of your reports increase, you have to pay a monthly fee starting at as low as $15 a month.

If you run a small business and have recently launched your site, testing your link building efforts through the basic and free features offered by MajesticSEO is going to be very beneficial in the long run.

SEO Quake

This is a powerful browser plug-in recommended by many SEO experts as a must-have SEO tool to improve your website’s performance.

If you don’t have time to learn how to use complete SEO packages or software suites, this SEO tool is the solution to all your SEO challenges and problems.

You can check the age of your domain, analyze internal and external links, and check keyword density on individual pages.

The best thing is you don’t have to download and install a stand-alone program to use all these features.

FireBug

Another browser plug-in available totally free of charge to test the speed of your site.

If your site is slow loading, it may cause problems for the search engines to index it properly.

Moreover, too much Flash or JavaScript content may be frustrating to a lot of visitors of your website who are merely looking for useful information and nothing of the glamorous stuff.

Check out how your site is performing in this context, and improve it and overall SEO for users as well as search engines.

Open Site Explorer

This is again a “freemium” link analysis package offering basic SEO features to its users totally free of charge.

If you are familiar with the popular Moz, formerly SEOMoz, you will be happy to know that the same developers developed Open Site Explorer to check link popularity of websites and see how anchor text distribution is working.

If you want to use its premium features, you will have to pay a fee starting at $79 per month. If link building is important for you, this tool is highly recommended.

Many other free SEO tools and methods are also available out there, but the ones that have been listed above are the SEO tools I use most frequently.

The best thing about free SEO tools is that you can use as many of them as you want to determine if spending money on SEO tools is really worth it.

Try the above-mentioned SEO tools to see which one suits your business model most specifically, and most importantly, your SEO needs.