Top 5 Free SEO Tools for Marketers

Our recent acquisition of SpinShark has enabled PM Digital to go deep with clients on new strategies for improving natural search and page rank.  While pretty much any business benefits from outside counsel and perspective regarding SEO, there are also things that marketers can do themselves to gain insight on how to continually optimize their web properties for maximum exposure.

To that end, below are five easy-to-use SEO tools that we encourage any marketer to check out. And best of all, they’re all free!

1. SEOTools Back Link Analyzer

Back Link Analyzer quickly determines anchor text, page title and number of inbound links to a page. This is a great tool that gives you insight to how the page gets its visibility in search. Links are food for search engines, and this tool gives you an idea how satisfying your page (or a competitor’s page) is. We use this tool to inform our link building and search improvement activities.

2. Website Grader

True to its name, Website Grader attempts to “grade” the effectiveness of your website vs. competitors. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. This tool gives you a great way to objectively look at your page from a search perspective. It looks at all of the on-page elements that search engines look at and points out your weaknesses. Website Grader is a great tool that provides objective measurement with a no-nonsense result.

3. Total Validator

Total Validator provides a one-stop-shop chockfull of validation tools – an HTML validator, an accessibility validator, a spelling validator and a broken links validator.  This tool is a spot check to reveal any technical issues on your page. Search engines value standards compliance, and Total Validator gives you a completely objective look at how compliant you page code is. Poor technical construction and standards non-compliance can cause search engines to skip crawling your site or diminish its search visibility.

And no listing of top SEO tools would be complete without a few Firefox Add-ons, as Firefox remains a favored browser for SEOs everywhere.

4. X-Ray

X-Ray gives marketers a quick way to see a webpage’s tags without having to view the source code. X-Ray is simply an indispensable tool. It illuminates the meta-data, inbound link volume and essential code elements like H1 tags without having to look at source code. This speeds up the technical discovery process and can easily show even the non-search expert points that need improvement.

5. SEOpen

SEOpen gives marketers a quick look at the the number of indexed pages and inbound links on the major search engines. Also you get a look at Alexa rankings and more. This great tool aggregates important information all in one place!

Jeffrey Cohen is CIO/CTO of PM Digital.