5 Great Free Search Engine Optimization tools

Whether you are writing articles or building websites to sell products Search Engine Optimization is something you should be learning about. Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is all about optimizing your website or article to be picked up and ranked highly by the search engines. Without good SEO you will not be found.Its what makes your work stand out from the crowd.

But if you’re new to hubpages and you think that SEO is a big complicated science that needs years of study, it’s not so don’t worry. You’ll learn a lot about SEO from just reading Hubs. You’ll certainly learn how to optimize your hubs, websites maybe a little more complicated. When you’re working on SEO you’ll need some tools to help you. There are thousands of paid and free tools available on the internet. In my opinion you should just stick with the free ones, I was a member of wordtracker for 2 months and I didn’t think it was good value for money. I paid 50$ a month and didn’t see a return on the investment. I think the paid tools are for the Pros who have years of experience. Anyways below is list of my favourite tools; I’ve also linked to some of the best SEO articles I have found on hubpages.

Backlink checker

Having backlinks to your hubs or websites is one of the most important parts of the SEO process. The google “bot”s that scan your page before ranking it look at these backlinks and give extra value for the more high quality backlinks from relevant sites you have. When using the tool make sure to untick the box when checking the backlinks to your individual otherwise you will get all the links to hubpages in general and there are a lot. This hub is a great introduction to backlinking and how it works.

Google Toolbar

The google toolbar is free to download and gives you all sorts of cool free tools. The one I used most is the page rank checker. At the top of your page you will see a rating out of 10 for all the pages you visit. This will let you know the strength of the pages and is fundamental when building backlinks. It also has a highlighter tool which will allow you to see the keyword density of your articles. Here is a guide on how to install the Google tool bar and heres what you can do with it with the google toolbar.

Traffic Travis

Traffic travis is a real find for me. Traffic travis is an application you download and install on your desktop. You can then use it to analyse competitors websites or hubs before you decide to build one yourself. There a number of tools that are available with this the two I tend to use are the keyword analysis tool and the website analysis tool. It comes with videos to explain everything before you start to use it and best of all its absolutely free.

Google ad words keyword tool

Google adwords keyword tool should be a fundamental part of any hub or website you build it will allow you to find what are the terms people search for. If you want to write a hub about “how to cook potatoes” you need to know what are the terms people search for when they want to know “how to cook potatoes”.Do they search for”cooking potatoes” or ”easy ways to cook potatoes” or “how to cook potatoes” .This tool allows you to find this out and more. This hub gives a step by step explanation on how to use the google keyword tool .

We build pages

We build pages offers a number of tools on its page, however the one I use most is the spider checker. This is how the Google “spider” that comes to crawl your page and analyse it will view your website or hubpage. It will help give you a better overall understanding of how the backend of SEO works. You should for the repetition of key phrases throughout the text.

If you want to do an in depth study of SEO and understand the full workings of it I recommend checking out Lynda.com's SEO course. This is a paid for online training site that has top quality videos on a range of topics.