8 SEO Tools for 2012

To develop a website that attracts a lot of traffic, you need great Search Engine Optimization tools. The best SEO methods change frequently, which means you need the latest and best SEO tools to increase and maintain your site’s rank. Here are eight of the best SEO tools for 2012.

Microsoft SEO Toolkit

This free tool is excellent for tweaking your website and making it SEO-friendly. It checks out your page and proposes recommendations to make it rank better in search engines. Broken links, missing tags, and general relevance are examples of factors that Microsoft SEO Toolkit analyzes. In short, it offers recommendations perfect for fine-tuning how effectively your site attracts traffic, as well as how to improve consumer experience on the website.

Shared Count

Social media buzz weighs more than ever in SEO rankings. With that in mind, Shared Count analyzes social metrics by topic, for free, so webmasters can see which subjects have buzz and which seem to fall flat. Shared Count offers data about how much will people discuss a topic repeatedly, whether the topic is discussed positively or negatively, top users, the most popular hashtags associated with the topic, and the social media sites responsible for creating the buzz.

GTMetrics

Load time factors into how well your page ranks, so it is important to know if it is lagging. GTMetrics analyzes how quickly everything loads. If parts of your site are compromising its speed, this handy tool provides a breakdown of what is wrong and explanations about how to fix it. It also prioritizes these recommendations, so you can get right down to mending the most pressing issues.

Pingdom

This is another handy tool for testing speed. Simple enter an URL and it runs a full page test that calculates load time. It also gives data on the size of your page, as well as the size of page objects.

Google Adwords

While this tool is not new, it is still one of the best and most important SEO tools at your disposal. It helps find sought-after keywords that you can incorporate into your page to increase the chance it ranks well in search engines. It also points out which popular keywords have a lot of competition, which means your page is likely to get buried, and which have surprisingly little.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

This free SEO tools analyzes and reviews any site on the web. Screaming Frog SEO spiders CSS, links, images, and scripts, and also gathers SEO elements like meta descriptions and page titles. It is a powerful way to assess the SEO of your website as well as snoop on the SEO tactics of your competition.

Copyscape

This is another old tool, but it still has value, particular since many search engine updates have focused on slashing the rank of duplicate content. Up to ten times per month, you can check the originality of your website’s text. This helps ensure that the original content you are posting for the sake of rank is, in fact, original.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer checks backlinks, up to three a day for free. It shows how many of these links a site has and, for free, a detailed description of the first 15. That description includes the page and domain authority of the back link.

To land on the first page of a search engine, you need powerful, up-to-date Search Engine Optimization tools. Their data and recommendations can make the all the difference in your search rank.

Author Bio:

David Kendall contributed this guest post on behalf of WhoIsHostingThis.com – see here for more information on their hosting reviews. David is a freelance technology writer who enjoys writing for various online marketing blogs.

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