Most Useful SEO Tools Of The Year 2012

If you are ignoring Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as it is popularly known, for your blog, website, or online business, you are doing so at your own peril. SEO has taken the world of internet business so much by storm that anyone not using it is bound to get buried under the huge mountain of websites, invisible and forgotten.

So what does SEO do? For one thing, it increases your website’s visibility in search engines. It also draws traffic towards your page, and we do not mean random traffic, but rather visitors who are looking for services similar to the ones you offer, and who may actually buy them from you. It boosts your page ranking, and helps you earn more revenue through advertisements. And it gives you a fool-proof way to measure your page’s success, with a perfectly quantified result.

As more and more websites jump on to the SEO bandwagon, SEO techniques also get more and more sophisticated and diverse. Here are six awesome tools that can help you optimize your website and ensure that you stay ahead of the crowd.

1. SEO Doctor

SEO Doctor is a pretty simple Firefox add-on, which will be useful for both fledgling users as well as more professional and experienced users of SEO. It identifies potential problems, gives your page a score based on currently accepted SEO methodology, displays the structure of links, tracks your page rank flow, points out pages that cannot be indexed by search engines, and can be customized to suit your requirements.

2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

If your website is so large that manually testing each page for SEO could take a very long time, then Screaming Frog SEO Spider will be a very good tool for you. It allows you to do a quick analysis, audit and review of your site from the perspective of an onsite SEO, by spidering your site’s links, images, CSS, script and apps.

3. Cute Rank

You probably use keywords in your website and posts as a SEO measure, but how do you find out whether or not they are effective? CuteRank’s keyword rank checker allows you to check and track all your keyword positions on multiple search engines, and displays the results to you in graphs that are easy to understand. You can even view your keyword ranking history to see how your keyword ranking in progressing with time.

4. GTMetrix

Your web page rank depends a great deal on how fast your page loads. Find out what your page’s Google Speed Grade and Yahoo YSlow Grade are, by going to the GTMetrix site and entering your page’s URL. If you don’t get a good grade in either, be concerned, because potential visitors on an average have been observed to leave a page if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. After analyzing your site’s loading speed, GTMetrix also gives you a number of suggestions as to how to improve your site’s speed.

5. Tynt

Unfortunately, though visitors to your site have the option to share your content by clicking the share button, many of them choose to sidestep giving you credit and simply copy and paste your writings. Tynt defends you from content copiers by inserting a code on every page of your website, so that whenever anyone tries to copy your content and paste it elsewhere, an attribution link is automatically attached. What’s more, this free tool gives you regular SEO reports about which of your content is getting copied most frequently.

6. SEO Quake

This analytic SEO tool gives users information about any site for a number of parameters such as page rank, Google index, and Alexa ranking, highlights nofollow links, and also keeps count of the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page. The SEO Quake tool comes with a toolbar that is easy and quick to install.

I hope you find these SEO tools as helpful as I did! Always remember, an optimized website is a website that will survive.