(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/seo-tools2.jpg alt: Best SEO Tools for Business)
**If you have a great product but nobody can find your site, it may as well not exist. **
Optimising your website for search engines increases your company’s web presence, and encourages organic traffic to your site.
There are a wide range of online tools available to help you SEO your website, but with so many to choose from it can be difficult to make the right decision. That’s where our handy guide comes in, with our top picks of both paid and free tools to help you build a winning (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/2013-seo-strategy/ text: SEO strategy):
**Free tools**
**1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool**
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This tool is just what you need when choosing, changing or monitoring your keywords. The user-friendly interface shows you the global and local monthly searches for a particular term, allowing you to optimise your site for popular search terms.
It also lets you know how much the keywords would cost you to use in a (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/advertising/online-advertising/pay-per-click-advertising-ppc/ text: PPC campaign). This cost is higher for more popular terms, which will indicate to you how difficult it might be to rank for these terms.
**2. Quirk Search Status**
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This handy toolbar is an extension for Firefox or Seamonkey, allowing you to see how every single website you visit is performing, displayed in a compact toolbar.
The comprehensive information includes the page’s Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Compete.com ranking, mozRANK, as well as information like the page’s keywords and meta tags.
This helps you to quickly and easily decide the value of each site you visit; something which is highly important when implementing a link building or (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/content-marketing-plan/ text: content marketing strategy).
**3. ****Xenu**
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If you want your site to keep improving in rank, it’s essential for it to be regularly maintained. Dead or broken links mean 404 errors, which is bad for your (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/digital/search-engine-optimisation-seo/ text: search engine optimisation) and your user experience.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth tool tests your entire site’s links to check that they are working properly, with broken links highlighted simply in red. The report it creates then lets you manually repair your links. The programme can also test your site’s speed in the early stages of a site audit and check for duplicate content.
** 4. ****Screaming Frog**
(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/screaming-frog.jpg alt: screaming frog)
This useful programme ‘spiders’ your website in much the same way as a search engine crawler does.
The website’s links, images, apps, script and more are all crawled from an SEO perspective; allowing you to check for common SEO problems, and analyse your results – performing a professional, comprehensive audit.
This tool is especially suitable for big sites, where manually checking every page would be far too time consuming. The spider flags up your missing re-directs, meta data and duplicate pages for correction
**5. ****SEOMoz Toolbar**
(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/SEOMoz-toolbar.jpg alt: SEOMoz toolbar)
SEOMoz offers a wide range of paid tools that are indispensable to many SEO specialists. However, if you’re on a tight marketing budget the SEOMoz toolbar is a starting point.
Available for Firefox and Chrome, the toolbar offers access to SEO metrics, creating custom searches and analysing keywords.
Want to compare link metrics of sites on a search engine results page, without having to click through to each one individually? Use the SERP overlay function, which can be a big time saver.
**And the essential paid tools that your company needs:**
**6. ****Raven Tools**
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Raven is a brilliant all-rounder, gathering information from a number of tools including Google Adwords, Majestic SEO and SEOMoz. You can also control your social media channels, and an end-of-month analytics report can be created quickly and easily.
It’s especially useful for companies that do a lot of guest blogging, as outreach can be logged, organised and maintained in the link manager section, along with other activity such as directory sign ups, blog commenting and press releases.
**7. ****SEOMoz**
(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/SEOMoz.jpg alt: SEOMoz)
SEOMoz offers a wide range of features and tools, and is particularly useful when deciding on the keywords for your site and how well your site is optimised for those keywords. The Keyword Difficulty tool gives an indication of the amount of competition there is for your chosen phrases.
And you can analyse your site’s on-page optimisation using the On Page tool.
Open Site Explorer is one of SEOMoz’s most popular tools allowing you to compare your own and competitor’s backlinks – particularly useful for finding new links that could work well for your own website.
As you can see, there are a wide range of tools available to improve your company’s online marketing efforts, some of which are straight forward and simple enough to be used by even a complete novice, whilst some contain features that are a little more advanced. It’s worth experimenting to see which suit you and your business best.