SEO of a site defines how much free traffic you can generate through search engines. Google being the leader in search engines, it is very important that your business site, blog or personal site has the right setup to drive organic traffic to your site. For a business this traffic means products and services reaching new customers, more sales and higher revenue. For a blog advertising revenue and affiliate sales are the main sources of survival to create new content and for a personal site it means reaching new people on the internet with similar passions, objectives and the opportunity to collaborate.
I come across many small businesses who want to do SEO but are not able to budget for it, this SEO tutorial will help them get started. Before going through this article I suggest every site owner to go through the 15 SEO Tips I have covered earlier. This article will cover the free SEO tools which you can use to conduct SEO audit of your site and make necessary modifications wherever necessary.
SEO Audit
When businesses look out for SEO services they normally come across this term in the websites and proposals of many SEO companies (it is also listed in our SEO service offering). SEO Audit is the process of analyzing a site on its interpretation by search engines. So in simple terms, Is the site being understood by the search engines for the right Search Queries or Keywords which can generate leads and eventually generate new sales for the business. So if you are in business of selling flowers in India then your site should have keywords such as “Send Flowers to India”. During an SEO audit keywords such as these and many others which can generate higher revenue and profit for any business related to its products and services are identified and the competitiveness of a website is measured. SEO Audit is the first step in identifying where a business stands to gain from billions of searches being done every day on search engines.
Free Tools for SEO Audit
Some of the free tools where a business owner can analyze the On Page SEO for his website are quicksprout and SEO Chrome Toolbar SEOQuake.
Quicksprout provides a detailed report as well as comparison report with your competitors without any charge. To get a SEO audit report from quicksprout visit www.quicksprout.com and enter your website on the main page. If you wish to compare the competitiveness of your website with your peers then you can enter three competitor sites. This report is useful for you to understand the changes that need to be communicated to your site development team.
SEOquake can be downloaded from Chrome Store. It is one of the best tools to analyze On Page and Off Page SEO of any website. Once you have downloaded and enabled SEOquake on your Chrome browser, visit your business website and the seoquake toolbar will provide your information as shown below for www.seoabc.org
The toolbar will be visible on the top below the URL Address bar, click on Diagnosis on the right hand side of the toolbar. This will open a new window which will provide information about On Page SEO of the website as shown below.
SEOQuake provides SEO diagnosis of any website on the following 20 parameters:
1. URL
2. Title
3. Meta Description
4. Meta Keywords
5. Headings (Header Tags)
6. Images (Alt Text in Images)
7. Text/HTML Ratio
8. Frames (If the site has them)
9. Flash (Site contains Flash or not)
10. Robots.txt (Available or not)
11. XML Sitemaps
12. Language (If mentioned in the HTML Code)
13. Doctype
14. Encoding
15. Google Analytics
16. Microformats (Rich Snippets)
17. Dublin Core
18. Geo Meta Tags
19. Feeds
20. Favicon
The SEO Audit information is also assisted with correct implementation guidelines. This information is good to get you started for ON Page SEO of the site. SEO quake also provides information about Keyword Density for a particular website. This information is useful to understand the keywords on which your site is focussed upon. This information is used by Search Engines to understand the content on your website.
These tools are very useful for a beginner as they provide the necessary insight into the way a site is structured to get traffic from search engines.
