SEO on a Nickel…More mind bogglingly awesome free tools

I love free samples.  Sometimes I don’t even care what they are.  Walking through the local supermarket I’ll gladly take several helpings of something I would never eat…just because it’s free.  However, when that free sample is something you enjoy…EUREKA!  You’ve struck gold.

Now that I’ve reached a happy place imagining myself wolfing down a dozen toothpick impaled mini hot dogs, let’s talk about some awesome freebie tools you can start using today to improve your SEO efforts.

  1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider – This is probably my favorite new tool.  The free version of the Screaming Tree Frog SEO Spider will crawl up to 500 pages on your site and in a remarkably easy to view and sort format it provides you with status codes for broken links, redirects and more.  If you have a smaller site, the free version is all you need to run a quick check for broken links, see if you have duplicate page titles or meta descriptions or see if you’re missing alt tags.  The interface is incredibly slick and you can easily export reports to Excel.  HIGHLY recommended by yours truly.

    Who knew Screaming Frogs had a thing for SEO?

    Who knew Screaming Frogs had a thing for SEO?

  2. Blekko /seo search – I know I blogged about Blekko previously, and I linked out to some other reviews of the new search engine, but in case you didn’t follow my links I’d be selling you short if I didn’t let you know about the /seo tag.   Do a search on a domain and add this tag (something like espn.com /seo) and Blekko gives away all the dirty details they have on a domain.  It’s nearly all the information you always wished Google would give away!

    Strength of the domain (Hostrank), number of links, duplicate content, strength of links, duplicate content and more?  YES PLEASE!

    Strength of the domain (Hostrank), number of links, duplicate content, strength of links, duplicate content and more? YES PLEASE!

  3. SEO-Browser – This is an oldie but a goodie.  If you’re not a designer or a developer and you notice that your site isn’t getting crawled or indexed very well, it might be due to your site not being crawler friendly.  SEO-Browser gives you a view of what a page looks like to a search engine – if your site has some flash elements or javascript menus as navigation items, it’s very possible that the engines can’t follow these links.  Try it yourself and poke around the web through the eyes of a search engine!  (Note: this really isn’t that exciting to the average person.)
    Put on your Google glasses and see if your pages play nice with the engines.

    Put on your Google glasses and see if your pages play nice with the engines.

    Any more fun free tools you use?  Feel free to share in the comments!

Adam Henige

Adam Henige is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing. Adam heads the SEO and link building efforts for Netvantage and has been a contributing blogger for industry publications like Search Engine Journal and Moz.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *