Free SEO tools

Search Engine Optimization is a hot topic for businesses, especially if the majority of your traffic comes from Organic Search. Unless you have the opportunity to study trends and articles that deal with the search engine algorithm, you probably won’t know what is valid information and what is just a waste of time. The reality is that the industry is every changing, and what may have been beneficial before may become harmful to today.

You may not have the budget to hire an SEO company to enact the broad range of optimizations that your site needs. If that is the case, there are some simple items that you can do to enhance your site in search. Of course it’s not anywhere near the full list of items that a company like ours does, but it’s a start. These are also items that should require very little technical knowledge, and can easily be implemented in a few hours.

Page Speed

Google and Bing have 1000’s of factors that make up the total ranking algorithm, some weigh very little, and some have quite a bit more effect. One of these factors is page load speed, a slow loading website is a bad user experience, and usually causes people to leave all together. Google itself has its own page speed test, try it out here. Unfortunately Google weighs factors just as javascript and css (code) files. There may be some other issues like readability, image compression as well as differentiating between mobile and desktop speeds and issues.

A more robust way to isolate which items are taking up the most load time is to use a waterfall test, such as the one at webpagetest.org, try it out here. Here you can see how many items are being called, in what order, and which items take the longest. After you run the test, click on any item that has a long load time, and you can see what it is. If it is a .js file or a .css file, you may benefit by minimizing these files, or moving them all to one file. This is someone technical, but can help quite a bit. If they are image files when you click on them, you can click on the object tab so see which ones they are. Here are some good ways to fix slow loading images.

.png files should only be used if they have transparency behind them, they should also be the size they are used for. If the image is meant to be in a 120x120px box, make sure it is that size.
.jpg files should be used for images. When they are uploaded they should be compressed, progressive and typically not saved at 100% quality. By making them 50-80% quality you can cut the file size down immensely. Also make sure they are set to the size they are supposed to fit. I’ve seen images saved at 4000px wide, and the biggest screen they should be viewed on is 1920px.
Try and use image sprites, which are single image files that use positioning to hold all images in one file. Also trying to use .svg files is another way to help load images faster than .png files.
If you can take advantage of cacheing or cloud distribution, you can load images from other locations, rather than your server.

Broken Links

Google’s algorithm really penalizes bad user experience. Another way to fix a bad user experience is to identify and fix any broken links on your site. If a user is reading a great article on your site, and they click a link that is broken, this would be bad for your site, the target site and the user. Click here for a site that will comb your site for broken links so that you can fix any. Of course you can’t always control the targets of your links, and how long they stay live, but you can clean them up.

Webmaster Tools

Google and Bing both have webmaster tools. This is a centralized place that both search engine giants report on any errors they find while crawling your site. Some of the items to pay attention to here are under the search traffic and crawl tabs. They can alert you to broken links (crawl>crawl errors) to your site, meaning links on other peoples websites that lead to dead ends on your site. To fix these you should put in redirects from broken links to live links on your site. 2 other items to pay attention to are manual actions (SEO violations) and security issues.

The primary reason to use webmaster tools though, is to see what people are searching for when they see your site. This information is available under the search traffic>search analytics tab. This can be very helpful to see your rankings and click through rate of your site in the search results. This can also let you know what areas you have to improve on.

Google Analytics

You should be using some kind of analytics to track traffic to your site. One thing to pay attention to for SEO purposes is in analytics. This also has to do with user engagement. When looking at your traffic pay attention to the bounce rate, time on page, and page views per session. These are factors that lets Google know how good your content appears to visitors. The more engagement, the better the site, in their eyes anyways. Bounce rate, is the percentage of visitors that only view one page and leave. Time on page, and page views per session are self explanatory. By increasing the quality of the content and including relevant content to other pages on your site, you can easily increase these numbers.

On Page Structure

Search engines expect that your pages are set up correctly so that their crawlers can easily decipher what your page and site are all about. This way they can accurately place your site in the search results with the proper page and for the proper searches. This includes meta titles and descriptions, headers, content analysis and keyword density, internal links, external links, image attributes and social media interaction.

To use this tool just go here, and read the analysis. This is the best content analysis tool I have come across, and can help you fix each and every page on your site to be more readable to both your users and the search engine crawlers.

About Us

Elite Wolf Digital is a web development, SEO and digital marketing company. We take pride in helping our customers with beautiful websites that get found by the customers they are looking for. Contact us today for more information.

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