XML sitemaps are files that provide Google and other search engines a map to your site and its various URLs and pages.

Consider when a crawler arrives on your site. Without an XML sitemap, it has to follow links around your site to locate new content for crawling and eventually, indexing.

With an XML sitemap, the crawler is signposted to the parts of your site that you want it to crawl and index.

XML sitemaps are signposts that urge crawlers on the right path round your site.

Without a sitemap, your site will still get indexed so long as you have proper internal linking, so don’t panic if you’ve never used an XML sitemap before.

As far as SEO goes? XML sitemaps are supportive of good SEO but will only directly influence it under specific circumstances.

You’ll need to set your site up with Google Search Console and other search engine webmaster tools to point them to your sitemap.

Crawlers can also find the XML sitemap in your robots.txt file if you specify the path to the sitemap there.

Do You Need an XML Sitemap?

XML sitemaps aren’t strictly essential – your site will still get indexed without one, so long as pages are properly linked by internal and/or external URLs.

But that doesn’t provide the whole picture as XML sitemaps certainly improve the efficiency and quality of indexing and this does impact SEO.

Google themselves state that XML sitemaps are only 100% essential if your site is reasonably large (over 500 pages) or features a lot of rich media.

The problem is, by modern standards, sites with 500+ pages can still seem small, and many ‘small’ sites will exceed this if they have a store with quite a few products, a blog, etc.

Other situations when you definitely need an XML sitemap is when your site has a complex structure with a lot of disparate or isolated content that might get overlooked by crawlers if you don’t provide a sitemap.

In these situations, crawlers may never reach your newly created content if you don’t have a sitemap to direct them there. Obviously, this is a problem; they’ll arrive on your homepage, explore a little and pretty much get lost crawling the same pages until your crawl budget depletes.

This could leave parts of your website uncrawled and therefore, unindexed!

Why You Should Create an XML Sitemap

Even if Google states that you don’t need an XML sitemap, particularly if your site is small (though you might be surprised as to how large your site really is), it’s definitely good practice to create one for any site. 

Creating an XML sitemap is pretty easy, and once you upload your sitemap into Google Search Console, you’ll be able to check when Google visits it and crawls your URLs, which is very useful in itself.

Providing a sitemap to Google will also help get your site indexed quickly and you’ll be able to check and track the crawl status of your URLs from the Sitemaps section of Google Search Console.

For this alone, creating a sitemap is well worth it.

When You Should Create a Sitemap

It depends on how you’re constructing your website or what platform or theme you’re using.

If you go down the WordPress route, your theme will already have some sort of built-in URL structure, e.g. you might have a homepage, blog, about, shop, portfolio and other related pages.

Shopify and other platforms will auto-generate XML sitemaps, but you still might need to modify them at some point.

Generally speaking, once you build your site out with some content and get your site set up with Google Search Console, you should create and add a sitemap.

When you make small changes to your site, there’s no need to update the sitemap unless it’s very large and you’re concerned about your crawl budget.

Dynamic Sitemaps

Some sitemaps generated using plugins like Yoast SEO are known as ‘dynamic sitemaps’ and will auto-update when you add and remove content from your site.

These plugins ‘ping’ search engines to alert them of updates (which may get new content indexed quicker, but it’s hard to tell and you can’t count on it.

Where Do You Put the XML Sitemap?

The XML sitemap should be placed at your site route, so www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml.

You place your sitemap manually with the file manager of your web hosting software (such cPanel), but you can also use a plugin to do this for you (and many will also generate the sitemap also).

Once you’ve placed your sitemap file at the root, you can head into Google Search Console and head to Sitemaps > Add a New Sitemap.

For other search engines, e.g. Bing, Yandex or Baidu, you’ll have to use their equivalent webmaster tools to upload your sitemap. You can also add the sitemap to your robots.txt so they can find the sitemap automatically when they crawl your site.

Step-by-step:

1. Create a sitemap using a sitemap generator tool or plugin
2. Add the sitemap to your site’s root (manually or with a plugin)
3. Add that sitemap to Google Search Console
4. Wait for confirmation that Google can see your sitemap, your URLs should be mapped and crawled soon after
5. You can also add your sitemap to any robots.txt files you create for your site

Advanced Sitemap Attributes and Controls

XML sitemaps can contain complex attributes that provide in-depth signposts for crawlers visiting your site.

XML sitemap attributes include priority, last modified and change frequency, all of which are designed to instruct crawlers on what your important URLs are and how often they change.

You can alter these if you like (using in-depth XML sitemap generators like Screaming Frog), but many search engines pay little or no attention to them.

For example, Google stated that they do not consume priority attributes in sitemaps.

XML Sitemap Tools

Screaming Frog XML Sitemap Generator

The Screaming Frog XML sitemap generator is part of their SEO Spider tool that crawls your site, locates its URLs and analyzes various on-page and technical SEO characteristics.

In the process, it will crawl your URLs for XML sitemap generation.

Screaming Frog provides a full breakdown of your site’s URL structure, allowing you to create an XML sitemap that is modifiable with attributes such as priority and change frequency.

You’ll also be able to select any URLs you don’t want to include in the sitemap (though they’ll still be crawled if there are internal or external links pointing to them).

The free version of the SEO Spider will crawl up to 500 URLs which you can use to create your XML sitemap.

Features

• Crawls your site for URLs
• Allows you to add many types of sitemap attributes (e.g. priority, change frequency)
• Up to 500 URLs for the free version of the SEO Spider (which does a lot more than create sitemaps)

XML Sitemaps

This longstanding XML sitemap generator tool has been around since 2005 and is a quick and easy way to build a standard XML sitemap for any site.

Simply insert your site into the field and the tool will crawl its various URLs to generate a downloadable XML sitemap to place in your website root and Google Search Console.

The free version of the tool will map up to 500 pages. There is a premium version of the tool that creates dynamic sitemaps for larger websites, and it will ping them to search engines so you don’t have to upload them yourself (but you should anyway).

An excellent, simple free tool for creating XML sitemaps for upload to your site’s root and Google Search Console.

Features

• Free tool crawls up to 500 pages
• Downloadable XML sitemaps
• Premium version ideal for super-sized sites

XML Sitemap Generator

Another super-simple, free XML sitemap generator, this free tool will crawl up to 2,000 URLs, more than broadly equivalent free tools.

There are also several options for creating advanced XML sitemaps with change frequency, priority and exclusion or filtering settings. It’s only worth fiddling with these settings if you’re an advanced SEO user or want to manage a crawl budget problem.

The company also offers a WordPress XML sitemap plugin that lets you choose whether or not to add new content you create for your site.

Features

• Generate XML sitemaps for up to 2,000 pages
• Advanced attribute settings
• WordPress plugin also available

My Sitemap Generator

This is another super-simple sitemap generator suitable for the vast majority of standard websites. Simply enter your root URL to create your sitemap.

You’ll be able to set priority and change frequency for specific URLs if you like and can add attributes to instruct crawlers whether or not to crawl certain content (e.g. javascript).

The free tool accommodates sites with up to 500 pages. There’s plenty of advanced settings here if you’re looking to manage a crawl budget problem (unlikely for small sites).

Features

• Free for up to 500 pages
• Set advanced sitemap instructions and attributes
• Set URL change frequency and priority

Yoast SEO

The fantastic and widely known Yoast SEO plugin includes an XML sitemap feature that is free to use.

The plugin will automatically update your sitemap as you add/remove/change content on your site, which is obviously great.

The XML sitemap feature is very easy to activate, and once you’ve done it from within the plugin menu in WordPress, you’ll be able to view your sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console and other webmaster tools.

You’ll probably notice that there are no additional settings to adjust priority or change frequency, but as stated, you really don’t need to worry about these too much.

Features

• Auto-generate dynamic XML sitemaps for any WordPress site
• Sitemaps are auto-updated
• Simply point Google Search Console to the sitemap that you can open from within the plugin

Google Sitemap Generator

Though named Google Sitemap Generator, this sitemap generator plugin is compliant with most search engines and allows you to auto-generate sitemaps for WordPress sites.

When you update your site or create new content, the plugin ‘pings’ Google and other search engines with an alert that your sitemap has been updated.

This plugin does allow you to edit priorities, change frequency and other parameters if you want to. It’s extremely well-rated, reliable and easy-to-use for anyone.

Features

• Auto-generate dynamic XML sitemaps for any WordPress site
• Auto-update sitemap and alerts Google and other search engines to changes
• Allows for changes to advanced sitemap parameters and attributes

Rank Math

Rank Math is an extremely sophisticated WordPress SEO plugin that provides unparalleled control over numerous on-page and technical SEO settings ranging from schema to sitemaps.

It doesn’t just cover XML sitemaps but also news and video sitemaps that can help Google index your content and media to Google Videos and Google News.

The XML sitemap generator is exceptionally easy to use and modify, and you’ll be able to allocate URLs that you don’t want to include in the sitemap.

In general, though, Rank Math is a gem of a WordPress SEO tool that has been featured by many top SEO brands. The XML sitemap feature is available in the Standard version at $59 a year (and is also obviously available in the more advanced, expensive tiers).

Features

• WordPress SEO plugin
• Powerful sitemap features
• Tons of other tools available in the plugin

Site Robot for Shopify

This is an XML and HTML sitemap generator plugin for Shopify.

It essentially creates an XML sitemap for any Shopify site for upload to Google Search Console.

The only real advantage it lends over auto-generated Shopify sitemaps is that you can choose URLs to exclude (and that it lets you create HTML sitemaps too, which are a different type of sitemap that pull all your site URLs onto one page of your site).

Features

• Auto-generate XML sitemaps for Shopify
• Exclude URLs
• Also generates HTML sitemaps

Magento XML Google Sitemap Generator

For the Magento CMS, this sitemap generator is designed to quickly and efficiently create very large sitemaps for super-sized sites (typically enterprise-level or larger business sites with thousands of pages).

It’s a powerful tool that allows total control over sitemaps and it’s capable of mapping the maximum number of URLs Google permits for a sitemap (50,000 URLs or 50MB).

This is very useful for large Magento stores with potentially thousands of products and many dynamic pages. Essential for enterprise-level crawler budget management for Magento.

Features

• Sitemap generator for Magento
• Works with XL websites
• Plenty of control over attributes

Summary

Creating and implementing XML sitemaps for Google Search Console and other webmaster tools is straightforward and whilst the jury is out on whether or not they confer direct SEO advantages, XML sitemaps definitely qualify as SEO ‘good practice’.

For some sites, there’s no doubt of the necessity of XML sitemaps and properly implementing them can get your site indexed properly, also helping you manage crawl budget problems.

It’s also very useful to be able to view and navigate your site in the Search Console under the Sitemaps tab.

This provides you with an easy way to monitor the URL structure and indexing status of your site and its pages.

The post XML Sitemap Generators appeared first on SEO Administrator.

The options are bewildering and finding the best software for your project is a tricky process, especially given that not all SEO software is built to the same specification, and prices do vary considerably.

SheerSEO has been around since 2006 which actually makes it one of the first SEO tools available for the mass market.

It can be considered an ‘SEO suite’, meaning it has a wide focus and provides you with virtually everything you need for SEO as an individual site owner or small agency.

This differs from other SEO software that might focus on just one or two aspects of SEO in detail, e.g. competitive analysis, technical or on-page SEO, or keyword analysis.

SheerSEO covers pretty much all the SEO bases – it’s a comprehensive set of SEO multi-purpose tools.

SheerSEO is a cost-effective, trustworthy, comprehensive but altogether lesser-known SEO suite that is certainly well worth a look, so here’s a review on SheerSEO!

SheerSEO Background

SheerSEO was created by Israeli software engineer Eyal Aldema. He’s a successful software designer that always had a penchant for SEO, and whilst aggrieved by the lack of SEO options back in 2006, he set out to build SheerSEO.

There’s no doubt that SheerSEO is a budget, utilitarian SEO software suite.

You can tell the site and tools themselves have been built pretty DIY by the guy himself. Some people will really enjoy the no-frills design and approach to SEO.

It’s important to bear in mind that you’re not dealing with million-dollar aesthetics here, but you are dealing with a very strong set of highly usable SEO tools that work effectively and at probably a quarter of the cost of main-brand SEO suites.

SheerSEO Prices

• Free: SheerSEO begins with a free-forever version that is expectedly limited. It lets you track 20 keywords and crawl 100 pages each month with a once-a-month site audit. Most other features are disallowed or greatly limited.

• Standard, $10/mo: The standard package is basically more of everything you get in the Free package. You’ll also get access to reports. You’re still lacking most features.

• Advanced, $15/mo: For just $5 more than Standard, the Advanced package comes with all features except the Competitor Analysis tool. That means you’ll get plenty of keyword tracking, site audits with decent page crawl limits, guarded backlink tools, a blog review, and outreach tool, the ability to re-poll rankings immediately, and integration with Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

• Professional Thin, $25/mo: For just $25/mo, you get the Professional Thin package. $25/mo is still extremely cheap compared to many equivalent SEO suites. You’ll get access to everything with generous budgets + the Competitor Analysis tool.

• Advanced, $40/mo: For agencies and teams, the Advanced package gives you everything, and you get very generous crawl budgets, keyword limits, etc.

Overall, the pricing here is more-than-fair. In fact, it’s actually pretty outstanding. SheerSEO wins over many users on pricing alone. You are limited until you reach the Advanced package, but at $15 it’s a steal.

SheerSEO is cheap but powerful, a winning combination!

Sign Up Process

Signing up to SheerSEO is easy.

All you’ll need is your domain name and email. By signing up you’ll automatically be put onto the Free version of the software, with limited functionality. It’s still decent though and is free forever – not a free trial, which is excellent.

During the sign-up process, the software will analyze your site and suggest keywords to track from your content.

This gets you started nice and quickly, but of course, you’ll probably want to add more keywords you’re targeting into SheerSEO.

Dashboard and Interface

SheerSEO has a pretty utilitarian interface. It certainly works, is easy to navigate, and seems robust, though perhaps a little lacking in the design department.

One of the first pages you’ll land on is the Dashboard.

The Dashboard area displays critical data and graphs.

You’ll find:

Once you land on the dashboard, you should take note of the ‘Onboarding Tasks’ positioned at the bottom of the page. This provides you with a few tasks to complete so you can start to properly use the various tools on offer.

You can set up your local SEO here with ‘Localization’. This will allow you to track local rankings in the Rankings tab. You can also add your precious backlinks to the Guard Precious Backlinks tool. This is an alert system that will update you with any changes to your existing backlinks.

You can also Define Optimization Targets, which essentially allows you to single out a handful of keywords you really want to work on. You can then track these in greater detail, and the tool will also show methods to improve your ranking using SheerSEO features.

It could also be a good idea to head straight into an SEO Audit (also suggested by the onboarding). Checking your site’s existing pages for errors and actionable insights is always a good place to start when it comes to SEO.

Features

Now, let’s move onto the features SheerSEO has to offer.

There are 16 tabs in total.

Rank Tracking

The first tool available for you down the left-hand side is the rank tracking tool, or ‘Rankings’. This is a rank tracker tool for analyzing and tracking movement in the SERPs.

Here, you’ll be able to track ranks for given keywords alongside various numerical and graphical data. Some of these keywords will be analyzed when you sign up – these are the only ones you’ll be able to track using the free version of SheerSEO.

For the paid versions, you’ll be able to add keywords from the Keyword Explorer tool, and will then be able to track their ranks from Rankings. Data can be imported from Google Search Console to display “visits” and “impressions”.

The Rankings tool has all your typical features including historical ranking graphs, search volume, estimated clicks per SERPs listing, and the numerical rank itself.

Current data can be compared to past data to track ranking changes over time.

Ranks can also be tracked locally or by country or region if you set this up in the localization settings. Filters can be set up to sort ranks if you have a lot of data there.

You can track rankings for Google, Google Local, Bing, and YouTube.

Competitor Analysis

The next tab down is Competitors. This is only available for paid versions of the tool.

Competitors will be automatically generated from sites that relate to your keywords, but you can add others manually.

Competitors allow you to insert and track your competitor’s rankings by keyword. You’ll be able to track their local SEO performance, including how this changes throughout time

You’ll be able to directly compare rankings side-by-side.

It’s worth mentioning that there are other ways to track competitors in SheerSEO, namely the Keyword Gap and Site Backlink tabs.

Overall, a decent set of tools for tracking the movement of competitors in the SERPs alongside the keywords they’re ranking for.

Optimization Targets

As touched on earlier, the Optimization Targets feature helps you ascertain your highest priority keywords. These can be imported from Google Search Console.

This is pretty much just a more detailed version of the keyword tracker combined with ranking analysis. It provides suggestions of actions you can take to improve the ranking (e.g. securing backlinks or on-page SEO).

Backlinks Explorer

The Backlinks Explorer tool provides you with a detailed rundown of your backlink profile including:

This tool is somewhat linked to the Backlink Checker tool where you can add your precious backlinks and set up alerts on any changes that occur to them.

The Backlink Explorer also lets you analyze competitor’s backlinks including the anchor text and source URL.

Moreover, you’ll be able to locate toxic links to your site, assess how bad they are/could be, and then generate disavow files for the Google Disavow Links tool.

Site Audit

The site audit will crawl your site and its pages to discover page errors such as redirects. It will also let you analyze how/if your pages are being crawled.

The Audit Issues tab here is probably more in-depth and will provide you with a breakdown of issues page-by-page alongside tips on how to fix any issues you encounter.

Site Audit is more of a technical SEO audit tool – On-Page SEO is more of a content audit. 

Organic Research

The Organic Research tab identifies and analyzes competitors based on your keywords.

It’s designed to help point you towards sites you should investigate manually and with SheerSEO’s competitor analysis tools.

You’ll be able to find keyword information for each site and their ranked keywords as well as their CPC value (where applicable).

This is great for quickly building a snapshot of how your niche is featured on Google.

Keyword Gaps

Keyword Gap is another competitor analysis tool. It would have been easier to group the tools together based on what they’re used for rather than scattering them out throughout the menu.

Keyword Gap analyzes competitors’ keywords to find out what they’re ranking for and what you don’t rank for. It’s simple to use – hunt down keywords from competitors and seek to build content around those gaps.

Social Media

SheerSEO lets you track Twitter and Facebook and will discover shares, likes, and comments relating to your brand. Any mention of your site on Twitter or Facebook should appear here.

This is excellent and though simple in interface and design, this is a non-convoluted way to track branded social media mentions.

On-Page SEO

For many, this is one of the most important tools of any SEO suite. The On-Page SEO tool lets you analyze your pages for many types of optimization factors ranging from meta tags to keywords in heading, alt tags, and keyword density.

The optimization issues are all easily laid out and displayed alongside tips on how to fix them.

The Keyword Density tab provides a more complete breakdown of your page-by-page keywords so you can find out the kind of terms you’re including in your content already.

Index Pages

This is a simple tool for checking if/how many of your pages are indexed.

You can use it to track whether or not new content you’re adding to your site is being indexed.

Backlink Checker

We’ve covered this already – it allows you to allocate guarded backlinks that can be set up using alerts. 

Directory Submissions

Now, this is an interesting one!

The Directory Submissions tab provides a semi-automated method of getting your site backlinked in directories.

Directories are sites that will take your link, often with a small bio or snippet of content, and place it on their site. They’re a quick-win backlink method that gets your site up and running with some backlinks.

In the long run, directories do not provide a great deal of ‘link juice’, but they’re generally inexpensive when you’re starting out.

To use this tool, you’ll have to create a directory profile. You choose directories and pay via the tool itself, and SheerSEO will take up the request with the directory.

If the request fails or the directory doesn’t respond, you’ll receive your money back.

Blog Reviews

Another nifty and quite original tool, the Blog Reviews tool lets you create blog profiles that you can then use to prospect blogs related to your niche for outreach purposes.

You simply add an Offer profile and then ask SheerSEO to display blogs related to your input keyword.

Like the Directory Submissions tool, this semi-automates the process of finding suitable blogs to contact for backlink purposes.

It’s pretty clever and works well, saving time on procuring blog submissions and other blog backlinks/guest posts manually.

Reports Generator

The Reports tab lets you create reports and breakdowns of your SEO metrics and performance.

There’s plenty of options here and you can automate reports to send periodically.

SheerSEO Pros and Cons

Now we’ve overviewed the main features and tools, what’re the key pros and cons of SheerSEO?

Pro: Cost-Effective

SheerSEO is one of the cheapest SEO tools of its class. Whilst it might not be so flashy and high-end in appearance, it has the tools you need to succeed in SEO at almost any level.

Pro: Comprehensive

SheerSEO is comprehensive with deep functionality and some clever tools. The Blog Review tool lets you send blog requests en-masse – a real time-saver.

The Directory Submissions tool is also effective and intelligently implemented. It takes the legwork out of directory submissions and makes them much easier to manage than if you were going through them manually by email.

Pro: Generally Easy-to-Use

While the interface might feel clumsy at first, it is easy to use. Once you’ve set the groundwork for your site, e.g. choosing keywords, setting competitors and setting up localization and blog profiles, etc, the whole experience runs pretty smoothly.

Con: Clunky

There’s no hiding SheerSEO’s clunky and slightly outdated interface. Whilst it works fine, it would be straightforward to group tools based on their general uses. For example, all the backlink tools should be placed side-by-side, the competitor analysis tools, outreach tools, etc.

Con: Lacks Graphical Detail

The interface lacks a splash of color and other graphical features to animate data and bring everything to life. Again, whilst the utilitarian vibe is broadly effective, it could benefit from some refining.

Who Should Use SheerSEO?

SheerSEO’s pricing angles it towards entry and novice-level SEOs, or small teams.

For single sites, it’s a superb tool that combines a wide range of quality tools with some nice innovative touches in the form of the Blog Review and Directory Submissions outreach tools.

DIY SEOs will enjoy the pricing and the scalability of the product. It just goes to show that if you’re a small business with a developing site that you run either part-time or even for hobby or non-profit purposes, there is an affordable SEO suite out there for you.

SheerSEO is welcomed in a market where SEO suites are still generally quite expensive.

Summary

SheerSEO is cheap and effective with plenty of tools. Many of the tools have enough depth for serious SEO – this is not a basic SEO suite by any stretch of the imagination.

Standout tools here include the Directory Submissions and Blog Review tools, both of which provide an innovative path to conducting outreach en-masse.

All of your standard SEO tools are well-represented, including content and technical SEO audits, ranking tracking and competitor analysis, etc.

Overall, whilst SheerSEO lacks some refinement or design prowess, it represents one of the most cost-effective SEO suites in the entire industry.

The post Shear SEO Review appeared first on SEO Administrator.

Luckily, backlink checkers and tools can really simplify the backlinking management process and will even help you find backlink opportunities.

What Are Backlinks?

The internet is networked together via links.

Links are embedded everywhere, connecting sites to each other as sources, references, or citations.

For example, there are many links in this article, and if you’re creating content for your website, you should be adding links to your articles too.

Links provide evidence of your claims, they bring authority to your site and help direct users to relevant and helpful resources and tools.

Backlinks are one of the most important SEO factors and variables. They mark your website and pages down as useful or relevant to others. In raw terms, the more backlinks you receive, the more authority your site has.

There is somewhat of a hierarchy to backlinks and they’re not all built equally. Backlinks to your site from high-ranking, high-traffic authoritative sites provide the most ‘link juice’ and securing these is one of the best things you can do for your site’s SEO performance.

On the other hand, some backlinks can be detrimental to your site. Backlinks originating from spammy domains or those associated with malware or other harmful activity will damage your SEO and could result in a ‘manual action’ from Google.

A manual action is a declaration that Google will demote your site or even remove it from the SERPs – get one of those and it’s a long way back for your site’s SEO health.

Why You Need Backlinks

Backlinks were the most important ranking factor in Google’s early algorithms.

It makes sense on a practical level – the more authoritative you are, the more mentions you get, the more trust you gain and the more deserved you are of higher ranking.

The backlinking process models the trust of a resource and deems it valuable to expose to others.

Today, backlinking remains a key essential ranking factor.

In 2019, backlink campaigns were cited by SEO professionals as one of the three most important SEO factors.

51% of professional SEO professionals claimed they would see a measurable difference in site traffic just 1 to 3 months after a successful link campaign.

Meanwhile, Backlinko said that backlinks always have been, and still are, a key ranking factor – numerous experiments by top SEO brands back this up with data from high-ranking sites.

To backlink or not to backlink? There is no question!

Backlinking Tools to Aid Growth

Backlinks may seem daunting to SEO novices and beginners. You’ve built a fast site with a smooth interface, excellent UX and built out some valuable content fully-tuned with on-page optimization, but how do you get others to backlink you?

There are many others in your position and backlinking strategies can start small and pick up pace when you produce quality linkable content that is organically locatable in the SERPs.

You should start by running small-scale outreach campaigns to backlink sites for mutual benefit. This often involves emailing others for guest post swaps.

Of course, you’ll probably want to avoid direct competitors but many sites related adjacently to your niche will be willing to backlink you.

It’s also entirely possible for your site to pick up backlinks without you doing anything, even in the early days.

In fact, Neil Patel said that even sites that have only been around for a few months probably have at least some backlinks.

But who are they? And are these backlinks what you want or need? Are they spam? Will they harm your SEO?

To find out, you need to use a backlinking tool! Here are the top 11 backlink checkers and tools:

SemRush is one of the most prolific names in SEO and their tremendous suite of SEO tools includes the sophisticated Backlink Analytics tool.

SemRush’s backlink checker allows you to perform 3 key functions:

• Check any and all backlinks that you’ve received from other domains
• Analyze the link, including how authoritative it is and what anchor text was used
• Analyze your competitors to view their backlinks

The Backlink Analytics tool lets your drill down into the type, characteristics, and qualities of backlinks.

You can view how authoritative these links are or whether they’re possibly linked to spammy or shady sites. You’ll get alerts when you gain or lose backlinks and will be able to analyze what anchor text used for the links. The domains that link you can also be analyzed for what keywords they rank for, allowing you to assess how relevant they are to your domain.

Competitor analysis is fully-featured here also, so you can check your competitor’s site to view their backlink info too. This allows you to quickly discover new backlinking opportunities, pointing you towards sites you can approach for outreach.

Prices

SemRush SEO tools are integrated, so you get access to all of their tools under the same membership package. Prices start at $119.95/mo for the Pro level ranging to $449.95 for the Business level. It might seem steep but this is a professional suite of SEO tools that provides everything from SEO audits to rank tracking and backlink analysis.

Features

Ahrefs are another SEO titan and their Backlink Checker is unsurprisingly decked out with advanced link analysis features. They let you get a quick rundown of backlinks to your site for free.

The main tool has in-depth link checking features that help you detect broken links on sites, e.g. that lead to non-existent 404’d pages. You can then contact the site(s) to request they re-link your site to get your backlink running again.

You’ll be able to drill down into the type and quality of backlinks, discovering their anchor text and other characteristics. You’ll also be able to estimate how much organic traffic you gain from your links. If you do find shady or spammy backlinks then you can download a disavow file directly from the tool that can import into Google’s Disavow Link tool.

Competitor analysis is fully featured too, providing a detailed picture of your competitor’s link network. This can aid your own link campaigns, helping you spy opportunities for outreach.

Prices

Like SemRush, Ahrefs is a full suite of SEO tools. Prices start at $99/mo for the basic Lite package The Standard package is $179 and the Advanced and Agency packages are $399 and $999 respectively.

Features

Majestic Backlink Checker is purpose-built for backlink checking duties. It’s utilitarian and meticulous, allowing you to check all link characteristics ranging from Nofollows, redirects, and deleted links. You’ll be able to check the domain type of sites backlinking you, e.g. whether they’re governmental or educational institutions.

Majestic also analyses the type of domains and site types that currently hold greater sway over traffic and influence.

It also assesses keywords, providing you information on the keyword profile of sites backlinking you and competitors so you can discover the types of content that are popularly linked.

The Pro version of Majestic Backlink Checker also lets you identify sites that link to a number of similar sites to yours, indicating that they’d likely backlink you also.

Prices

The Lite version is just £39.99/mo, allowing you to analyze up to 1 million links. Pro has more features for £79.99. The API version for agencies is £319.99/mo+.

Features

Link Research Tools is an advanced suite of backlink analysis tools that let you survey and analyze backlinks of any and every variety and origin. LTR lets you know how fresh your data is, allowing you to order a re-crawl for updated link analyzes. It actually provides some 150 link metrics covering everything from domain trust scores to link type and anchor text keyword performance.

One innovative feature is the link detox feature that scores the risk posed by your links. Once this approaches the limit, you’ll know to audit your links for spammy or black-marked sites. You can then go about disavowing and delinking those sites.

The Issues window will provide actionable insights on your links, instructing you on what to do if you run into backlinking problems. Competitor analysis is also advanced.

This is probably one of the most advanced link analysis tools available right now and is used by many top European brands and businesses.

Prices

Pricing starts at $ 499/mo with $799, $1,999 and $2,999 tiers.

Features

Moz Pro is another exquisite set of pro SEO tools.

Their Link Explorer is well-built with a bulletproof interface and an in-depth feature-set that delves down into advanced competitor analysis and link prospecting.

The Link Intersect tool is particularly good for discovering sites that are linking to your competitors but not you. You’ll also be able to research top-performing content for your niche, helping you analyze the content that is currently attracting the most links so you can plan to better it.

Checking the spam score and authority of links is also simple. Moz Pro is a full suite of SEO tools that include Keyword Research, Rank Tracking, Site Crawl, On-Page Optimization, Link Research, and Custom Reports. It’s a superb set of tools for agencies and brands that are looking to seriously improve their SEO performance across the spectrum.

Prices

The Standard package is $99/mo. The $149/mo Medium package adds 25 more crawls for a total of 30 each month. The Large and Premium packages cost $249/mo and $599/mo respectively.

Features

Monitor Backlinks is a minimalist and streamlined simple backlink checking tool. Monitor your own domain and competitors to view their backlink profiles, anchor text, and ranking keywords. Use this info to strategize your own backlinking campaign, quickly sweeping up easy backlinks from sites that have linked your competitors but not you.

There is also an easy-to-use disavow tool to rapidly purge bad backlinks and you can discover broken links that are easily reclaimed. You’ll also be able to import data from Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, and Google Webmaster Tools.

This is a professional backlink analysis suite. Report generation and advanced alerting ensure that you can keep your team up-to-date with any positive or negative changes in links.

Prices

Prices here are reasonable for a streamlined pro backlinking tool. The lowest tier is just $25.00/mo, but is quite limited by letting you check up on just 2 competitors. You’ll have to fork out more like $187.42/mo to analyze 10 competitors across 10 domains. Ultimately, this tool is best for agencies that are managing multiple clients instead of single users.

Features

Time for a totally free tool! It’s refreshing to find totally free tools and Small SEO Tools provide just that. Their nice collection of free SEO tools includes the Backlink Checker.

This backlink tool is actually great and pretty powerful running off Ahrefs’ engine. It offers a number of advanced analytical metrics that help you identify 404’d links, investigate competitor’s links, keywords, and traffic earned via backlinks.

You’ll be able to research performing content and keywords and measure your domain rating and ranking position. It will display over 100 links, which is pretty impressive.

This is a superb option for users with single sites who are just starting out in SEO. If you’ve been put off by some of the pricing of other tools then Small SEO Tools provide a great starting point for SEO beginners and novices.

Prices

100% free.

Features

SE Ranking has a very impressive selection of tools available at some remarkably reasonable prices.

There are 7 tools divided into 3 categories; Get Ready, Drive and Maintain.

Get Ready has keyword research tools and a marketing plan maker, Drive provides on-page optimization tools and site audit and Maintain features the backlink tool.

You can import backlinks from Search Console or gather them using the tool yourself, which is great if you’ve already been working in Search Console. The link analysis features are excellent, providing info on domain popularity, link power and even social media performance.

Locating bad links and disavowing them is straightforward too and everything is easily manageable from a slick interface.

Prices

Pricing starts as low as £13.8/mo for weekly updates on 5,000 links for 10 websites, which is very impressive. It’s highly scalable from there and even the Enterprise package is very reasonable at £112/month for daily updates across 75,000 links. You get access to the other tools as well, making this one of the most reasonable SEO suites around.

Features

RankWatch is yet another superb set of flexible SEO tools that covers the full spectrum of SEO from keyword analysis to site audits and link tracking.

The link tracker itself is excellent and integrates very well with a dedicated competitor analysis tool. It has 14 features for analyzing links, keywords, traffic and anchor text.

Find lost and broken links to quickly discover sites you need to contact to restore your existing backlinks. You’ll even be able to track down the authors of those who created the content that backlinked your site so you can contact them for collaboration.

Prices

RankWatch is powerful but also very well priced. The cheapest package, which is £19/mo, allows you to check a mighty 145,000 Backlinks. It scales from there, with the XL package at £294 offering in-depth analysis of over 2,245,000 backlinks.

Features

This is a simple, streamlined free backlink checking tool. It’s entirely free and gives you an accurate rundown of your basic backlink profile. You can also input competitors’ URLs to check their link breakdown for ideas on what sites to target for basic outreach.

SEO Review Tools has two separate tools in addition to this; one for checking competitors’ rankings and another for generating content ideas around subjects and industries.

It’s all pretty rudimental, but it’s free and can give single-site users a decent rundown of links, their quality, anchor text, and traffic generation.

Prices

100% free.

Features

SEO authority Neil Patel’s UberSuggests tools have always been amongst the top-ranks with Ahrefs, Moz, SemRush, etc. The free version of the tool provides you with a good array of data, but only for a handful of backlinks.

The full backlink checker is powerful with all your usual filters and analysis options. Drill down into your competitors to discover their backlinks and prospect your own off the back of their links. You can also analyze anchor text, link type, lost links and traffic generated from links and content types.

UberSuggest is a full suite of SEO tools that includes SEO Analyzer, A/B Testing Calculator, Ubersuggest, Chrome Extension, Backlinks, and Subscribers. Every tool is impeccably made and easy-to-use.

Prices

UberSuggest pricing is very reasonable starting at just £29/mo for the Individual package. The Business and Enterprise/Agency packages are just £49 and £99 respectively.

Features

Summary

There are so many tremendous tools here – choosing will be tricky!

Backlinking is always important for your site, but when you start out, keep your expectations realistic and select a product at a price that suits you.

Of course, this doesn’t apply for agencies of fully-fledged SEO professionals who might need to delve in immediately with advanced analysis of thousands of links.

Whichever way you look at it, there’s something here for everyone and although competition is tight, there’s surely a backlink tool here for you.

The post 11 Best Backlink Checkers & Tools appeared first on SEO Administrator.

You’ll need to assess and analyze the current state and progress of your SEO efforts as you progress through your SEO journey – audit tools enable you to do this.

SEO audit tools automatically check and audit your website and its pages, analyzing numerous technical and on-page variables to create actionable reports that you can follow to enhance SEO.

The great thing about an SEO audit is that it can be carried out on existing websites to instantly guide you towards problematic pages that need immediate attention.

Audits can also be scheduled to track changes in site errors and technical SEO performance over time.

There are two main types of SEO audit:

1) Technical SEO Audit

A technical SEO audit checks your site and pages for technical SEO errors and insights. Technical SEO audits check all typical errors such as redirects, canonical tags, HTTPS certificates, schema, page and content crawlability, and mobile optimization.

Technical SEO audit tools will also check page speed so you can tune and optimize your content for quicker load times.

A technical SEO audit will instantly highlight and guide you towards elements of your page that can be fixed right now for SEO gains.

2) On-Page/Content Audit

Audit tools can also check your site content and on-page SEO, including keywords, page structure, meta tags, and user experience (UX). These audit tools can suggest new keywords for existing content, generate content ideas, and highlight content gaps.

Content audit tools can even suggest new headings for existing content and highlight content that can be extended and improved to yield a better ranking.

In essence, SEO audit tools focus on both the technical and content aspects of your site.

They act as a critical eye cast over your site, its design, structure, back-end, and front-end with regard to content and UX.

Why Run an SEO Audit?

SEO audits paint a complete page-by-page picture of your site’s SEO characteristics and qualities.

They’re excellent to execute after a major content creation drive, after making changes to your website, migrating your content management system, or practically any other major site change.

But also, they’re useful to run periodically to check for existing and newly developing errors.

Another reason you might want to perform an SEO audit is following a Google algorithm change.

You might have effectively tweaked every page of your website and bam! Google comes through with an algorithm change.

Think this isn’t frequent?! On the contrary!

According to SearchEngineLand, Google changes their search and indexing algorithms some 500 to 600 times a year!

Most algorithm changes are negligible, but sometimes, they will impact your site and an SEO audit is the best way to track down potential issues.

Reasons Why You Should Run an SEO Audit

SEO Audit Tools

The standards of SEO audit tools are very high, but there are some big differences between the chief protagonists.

So, without further ado, let’s check out the 11 best SEO audit software tools!

Semrush is one of SEO’s premier sets of tools. The entire suite contains a fantastic 40+ interlinked tools that cover everything from market and keyword research to technical SEO, backlinking, and SERP analysis.

Semrush is a fully comprehensive toolbox for SEO and thousands of SEO pros and marketers around the world count on it.

There are a few tools in the Semrush arsenal that could fall under ‘SEO audit’. The first and most obvious one is the SEO Audit Tool itself, which is specifically designed for checking technical SEO.

It audits some 130+ potential errors spanning everything from HTTPS certificates to crawlability, page speed, and redirect errors.

The tool will check page HTTPS certificates for security and validity, crawl links to check for errors, highlight missing meta tags and image attributes and provide insight into how quickly each page loads.

This effectively allows you to track down and fix particularly problematic pages whilst checking the general health of your site for more common errors.

You’ll be able to receive weekly reports on your technical SEO so you can track errors as they develop and fix them as you encounter them.

The second SEO audit tool on Semrush is the On-Page SEO Checker. This is more content-oriented and is designed to check your site’s content to audit keyword usage, content ideas, and even UX performance.

The on-page checker is very action-oriented in that it guides you with specific ideas for making improvements. It’s really easy to use and provides many instant clues on how to whip your on-page SEO into shape.

As well as the website audit tools Semrush is of course also an excellent tool for keyword research and off-page SEO.

Features

Prices

Semrush is an entire suite of top-notch SEO tools, so pricing is on the steeper side starting at $119.95/mo for the Pro level and extended to $449.95 for the Business level. You’ll get access to every tool, though, including these very well-designed SEO audit tools for technical and on-page SEO.

Surfer SEO is purposefully built for on-page SEO so it’s perhaps unsurprising that this is where it excels. It boasts a very sophisticated set of tools for checking site content. Surfer SEO enables you to quickly check and audit your blog, landing pages, and other written content for optimization ideas.

The written content analysis tools are particularly powerful and use NLP – natural language processing – to semantically analyze written content and suggest ideas to bolster or optimize content.

You’ll also be able to analyze the sentiment of your content and the entities it relates to – this is pretty handy to check that Google is perceiving your content the way that you wish it to be perceived.

The audit tool will also check page structure, meta tags, backlinks, and page speed. You’ll also be able to compare your content to top-ranking content to discover improvements.

Surfer SEO will display page errors and warnings relating to broken links, page speed, and mobile optimization, but it’s best-suited for on-page audits and excels at analyzing content.

Features

Prices

Prices are reasonable and start at $59 for the Basic package that allows you to launch 25 site queries a month for the content analyzer. It does not offer the NLP analyzer. The Pro package has all tools apart from white label tools and weighs in at $99. The Business plan with everything costs $199.

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a little different from other tools as it comes in the form of a downloadable client that can be run from your desktop. The SEO spider crawls your site, renders its content, and displays a wealth of technical and on-page data information.

It’s arguably one of the most comprehensive SEO analysis tools around and will check your site for technical errors ranging from titles and metadata to JavaScript issues, AMP analysis, load speed, and schema validation.

It can even check spelling and grammar, search for shorter or duplicate content, etc. You’ll be able to cycle through your site’s pages to gain instant insights into errors and page performance.

You can connect it to Google Analytics and Google Search Console via API to get the data from those tools too.

It’s pretty easy to use, even though it looks a little more complex than other SEO tools.

For me, this is one of the best SEO audit tools for crawling a site and doing a technical audit.

Features

Prices

The Screaming Frog SEO spider is cheap. In fact, it’s free for up to 500 URL crawls, but you won’t get access to more complex audit data. The Paid version is a very reasonable £149 a year for one license (for one site)

Sitebulb is an advanced audit suite that crawls your website and suggests detailed yet actionable and easy-to-follow insights. It uses the Chromium rendering engine, which is what Google itself uses to render pages for SEO indexing purposes.

This ensures that Sitebulb provides a transparent audit of your site – it sees your pages in the same way that Google does.

Sitebulb provides accurate analysis and breakdown of page speed, allowing you to locate and optimize individual pages. It’s very fast and is particularly well-optimized for enterprises.

Compatibility with a number of JavaScript frameworks makes Sitebulb ideal for auditing sites with complex JavaScript content. It can accurately render AngularJS, React, Meteor, Vue, Ember and Backbone frameworks

Content and on-page analysis are also well-provided by the Sitebulb platform. You can locate thin content and Sitebulb will suggest improvements, new keywords, content ideas, etc. Sentiment analysis also breaks down the meaning of your content so you can check that Google and other search engines understand it in the way you intend.

Features

Prices

Sitebulb is very reasonably priced at £10 + VAT a month for the Basic package and £25 + VAT monthly for Pro. Pro allows access to all of the on-page and content management tools whereas Basic is more oriented towards technical SEO.

It’s in the name – Page Optimizer Pro is specifically designed for page optimization. It’s a pleasantly designed tool that is certainly easy to use and is angled more towards content optimization rather than technical SEO audits.

Page Optimizer Pro is excellent for the writing side of things and enables you to create SEO-driven blog and article content for your site. It works with Google Docs or most CMSs (e.g. WordPress), and will integrate with the editors themselves to provide instant insight into content.

Page Optimizer Pro is pretty basic but it does provide you with ideas based on competitor content, which is excellent. It also allows you to discover what sort of schema you should be using to tag your content up for SEO purposes.

Overall, a brilliant on-page optimization tool that excels for bloggers and written content-heavy sites.

Features

Prices

Page Optimizer Pro basic costs just $20 a month and allows you to audit 12 pages for 12 reports. That’s fine for most, say if you want to check and optimize 12 pieces of blog content a month. $39 nets you the Unlimited plan with unlimited reports.

Link Assistant is amongst the world leaders in SEO tools and their longstanding Website Auditor tool has been utilized by many top brands worldwide.

This is a dedicated tool designed specifically for auditing web pages and it does everything from in-depth technical crawling with JavaScript rendering to content analysis.

Link Assistant’s web auditor crawls your site to reveal all levels of errors ranging from HTML errors to missing HTTPS certificates, redirects, loading problems and broken links. It uses semantic analysis to analyse your keyword performance and suggest the increased/reduced use of certain keywords.

You can also reverse engineer the content of competitors so you can equal or better their strategies.

The tool can construct visual maps of your web pages so you can check content flow and UX. You’ll also be able to edit and tune content from within the app itself before saving your fully-tuned content to HTML for upload to your site.

All in all, Link Assistant’s Website Auditor is one of the more powerful tools out there for comprehensive on-page and technical SEO auditing.

Features

Prices

The free version of this tool is pretty awesome and allows you to crawl 500 site URLs max. From there, the Pro version is £109 a year and the Enterprise £249 a year – both pretty reasonable.

Raven Tools Site Auditor is a lesser-known but very well-regarded SEO audit tool that will analyze your entire site. Once analyzed, Raven Tools displays a breakdown of your site as categorized into 6 tabs; Visibility Issues, Meta Issues, Content Issues, Link Issues, Image Issues, and Semantic Issues.

Each one is suitably in-depth. For example, the Content tab looks at pages with low word count, missing metas, duplicate metas, missing tags, and broken links.

This system makes it extremely easy to flick through and check out what you’ll need to change. You can home in on pages with lots of errors or discover site-wide issues that will need to be tackled in bulk.

You’ll also find a checklist with easy-to-understand directions on how to make the amendments. Once you’ve changed your pages and added technical SEO elements, just re-run the audit – simple!

The Raven Tools Site Auditor is part of an excellent full suite of comprehensive tools and offers a serious alternative to SEO brand leaders.

Features

Prices

Raven Tools is very reasonable, with the cheapest package (ideal for single businesses and individual sites) weighing in at just $39/mo. There are 4 other packages ranging up to Lead (enterprise-level), which costs $399. Even Start at $79 is great for budding SEOs and small agencies.

Deep Crawl is a sophisticated set of tools aimed at enterprise-level businesses with large, complex sites that are often custom-built using various APIs.

Deep Crawl is adept at providing real-time information on on-site issues and errors, identifying errors that hinder site UX and could therefore lead to sales or service reductions.

This is particularly important for eCommerce sites that require super-smooth UX to ensure sales conversions.

There are actually two tools here; Deep Crawl and Automator. Deep Crawl crawls a site to find technical SEO issues whereas Automator is designed to check potential SEO issues brought about by API deployment and new code releases.

Deep Crawl is probably unparalleled for enterprise-site technical SEO audits – it will work with unconventional sites to detect technical SEO issues for repair, management, and maintenance.

Perhaps one of the most unique elements of Deep Crawl is its Task Manager which lets you highlight and group errors under tasks that can be assigned to tech teams, etc.

Features

Prices

Deep Crawl is a tailored/managed service for enterprise-level business and thus, you have to request a demo and contact them directly for pricing.

SEOPressor is an SEO optimizer plugin for WordPress and it includes SEOPressor Connect which is a WordPress plug.

This is brilliant as it lets you find and tackle on-page issues directly from your WordPress site. The content analysis tool is very good – it’s similar to Yoast but offers more in terms of keywords suggestion. There’s also a tool to help you create schema markup. The plugin will also score your pages and suggest in-page tips on how to improve them.

It also has some superb SEO intelligence tools for measuring page error changes over time and overall site health. The link management tool lets you quickly scan your site for broken or missing links and you can even discover when pages are over-optimized, which is pretty unique.

You can also generate XML sitemaps and robots.txt files from within the plugin – very handy.

SEOPressor is an impressive tool that is adept for WordPress optimization so will naturally appeal to many single site owners.

It’s somewhat similar to Yoast Pro but has some marked improvements in terms of technical SEO at least.

Features

Prices

SEOPressor is a very reasonable $9 a month for one site.

Serpstat is yet another suite of SEO tools that contains a fantastic on-page optimization tool.

There are 11 tools here, at least two or three are relevant to SEO auditing.

The audit tool is the on-page optimization tool designed to check sites and their pages for on-site and off-site errors. All of your usual functions are covered; scan for missing or duplicate meta tags, find image issues, redirects, and other technical SEO problems.

Another relevant tool for site audits is the superb Content Marketing ideation tool that enables you to discover content that will benefit your site, identify content gaps and find new keywords to use, etc.

SerpStat is perhaps a lesser-known SEO suite than Semrush or Ahrefs, but it’s comprehensive and highly scalable. It also comes with a browser extension plugin for scraping web data and analyzing competitors.

Features

Prices

SerpStat starts at $69/mo for SEO individuals. For agencies or larger, you’re looking at $149 to $499+. Considering it contains many of the same tools as other more expensive SEO suites, it’s reasonably priced.

If you’re looking for a quick, free SEO audit then Neil Patel’s Site Analyzer is a good place to start.

It’s a limited free test of one of the tools included in UberSuggest, which is Neil Patel’s full SEO suite.

For checking page loading times, critical errors, SEO page score, and other broad-brush on-page SEO factors, this tool will give you a pretty good rundown of your site. The free tool will only display a finite amount of tips and errors/warnings, so you’ll have to upgrade if you want more!

The awesome thing about UberSuggest is that it’s a little less taxing to use for inexperienced SEOs and each tip is broken down on why it matters for SEO and how to fix it – which is often exactly what you need.

The full UberSuggest tool is an SEO suite much like the big gun SEO brands, e.g. Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush, but it is generally cheaper – a more solid choice for single-site users.

Features

Prices

The Site Analyzer is a limited but free tool that can be used 3 times a day. The full version of Ubersuggest starts at £29/mo and rises to £99/mo for enterprise-level – which is very competitive indeed!

Summary

SEO audits are a very simple but effective way of getting under the skin of your site and determining what you can do to improve your SEO right now.

The vast majority break down issues with tips and insights, so they’re good for SEO users of every level.

Of course, there’s a lot of selection here and it mainly depends on whether you’re in the market for a full SEO suite or a dedicated optimizer tool.

As far as SEO suites go, it’s so hard to beat Semrush and Ubersuggest, but SerpStat and Raven Tools both make superb alternatives.

Of the many other brilliant tools, Sitebulb, SEOPressor, Surfer SEO, and Page Optimizer all excel at on-page optimization.

Deep Crawl is the enterprise-level option and comes with some unique high-scale features for large sites.

Last but never least, Screaming Frog is a real SEO favorite and will always be worth another glance, no matter what your experience level is.

Good luck!

The post 11 Best SEO Audit Software Tools appeared first on SEO Administrator.

Without accurate and proper HTML, web pages would just be chaotic blocks of unformatted text. HTML guides the web browser to display the document as the designer or creator intends it to be displayed.

HTML is fairly simple and is one of the first languages web developers learn – though you cannot technically call it a ‘programming language’, as its sole intent is to markup documents.

Here, we’ll be providing a brief example of what HTML and validation is, overviewing some HTML validation tools, and explaining how HTML errors can affect your site’s SEO performance.

HTML Example

An HTML copy of the first portion of this document would be:

<h1>HTML Analyzers & Validators</h1>

<p>HTML is the number one foundational document markup language.</p>

Here, <h1> marks up the first line as a title and <p> marks up the first paragraph. Notice how the opening tags are different to the closed tags, which are closed with </.

There are around 100 total HTML markup tags – not too many in the grand scheme of things.

HTML and W3C

The W3C, World Wide Web Consortium, is a quasi-regulatory organization for the internet. They set out codes of best practices for web designers and developers to follow.

Over time, HTML has needed to adapt to different devices, browsers, and assistive technologies. HTML errors can cause readability issues, particularly on certain devices such as screen readers (which render text documents as speech for the blind or visually impaired).

Poorly constructed HTML can cause a number of issues that sabotage the readability and compatibility of your web pages.

This could even render the entire webpage unreadable or uncrawlable in exceptional circumstances.

The W3C has laid out best practices for HTML – if you follow those then, in theory, your site is more likely to be compatible cross-browser, device and technology – both now and in the future.

This is why we have HTML validators – they check the quality and ‘cleanliness’ of your HTML.

Why Do HTML Errors Occur?

HTML errors and bugs can result when you’re editing pages in HTML format and make a mistake, or when you use a buggy plugin or other tool to create and markup web pages.

Codeless web development apps and WYSIWYG editors mean that we generally don’t need HTML knowledge to create documents – the software does that for us.

But it’s not always perfect, and errors can occur, harming the technical quality of your webpages, in turn damaging SEO.

HTML Validation

To analyze HTML documents for errors and bugs, you can use an HTML validator.

HTML validators check and validate your HTML against W3C best practice guidelines. They’re simple online tools that load an HTML file or URL before parsing the HTML markup and analyzing it for errors and bugs versus W3C guidelines.

Some HTML guidelines are pretty trivial, e.g. W3C says you should use <strong> and not <b> to embolden text.

Both markup a document in a near-identical fashion, but it just so happens that some plugins or editors might use <b> instead of <strong> for whatever reason.

That said, HTML validation will route out genuine errors and bugs.

Some key examples include unclosed tags, incorrectly written tags, and formatting errors which cause compatibility issues, particularly with regards to tables.

In fact, you might have experienced dodgy HTML in the past when surfing a webpage that clearly doesn’t render properly, particularly old web pages that haven’t been optimized for mobile.

Yoast SEO draws attention to an example of a Dutch news site whose homepage failed to crawl properly, and couldn’t be rendered in Google’s cache.

They were using an XMP tag, similar to the PRE tag, but instead of rendering tags internally, it outputs them instead. The XMP tag wasn’t closed correctly, so GoogleBot failed to render and crawl the page.

This is a pretty unique example, though, and you’re very unlikely to experience page-breaking HTML errors.

What Does Google Think About HTML Validation?

It’s worth remembering that W3C is not really affiliated with Google, and that you’re under no obligation to conform every component of your documents to their standard.

So what does Google say on the issue?

Google Search Central states:

“The best way to make sure that your page looks the same in all browsers is to write your page using valid HTML and CSS, and then test it in as many browsers as possible. Clean, valid HTML is a good insurance policy,”

– Google.

Meanwhile, Google’s Matt Cutts admits that HTML validation is not an organic ranking factor, also stating that a minuscule percentage of sites have perfect HTML – and a large portion of global giant websites actually have pretty poor HTML on balance.

“Google does not penalize you if you have invalid HTML because there would be a huge number of webpages like that”

– Matt Cutts, Former Google Head of Webspam.

HTML, like many areas of SEO, is a grey area. You can leave messy code alone and hope it never matters – and it probably won’t unless there are serious errors – or you can strive long and hard to build the perfect HTML markup for every page on your site.

Largely, this comes down to time and resources. HTML gurus will whizz through validation, but it could still be time-consuming.

So What’s the Point in Validation?

Validation is non-essential but it’s still good practice, but the truth is, few SEOs take it particularly seriously unless they encounter errors.

W3C themselves do put forward a strong case for checking HTML, particularly as it will future proof your pages to new browser software and accessibility tools.

Debugging HTML errors and bugs are made simpler by HTML validation tools, and they can direct you towards serious issues. If you have knowledge of HTML then it should be fairly simple to use an HTML validator to check your code, but if not, then it can be pretty bewildering, especially if it throws up a lot of errors.

It’s also worth highlighting that HTML validation is not the only way to check page errors. SEO tools such as Semrush Site Audit and Surfer SEO offer a multitude of other on-page and technical SEO checkers that can crawl your site and will highlight errors that Google will see – and which could then affect your SEO.

You can also check for browser compatibility, Google highlights this themselves:

“Once you’ve created your web design, you should review your site’s appearance and functionality on multiple browsers to make sure that all your visitors are getting the experience you worked so hard to design.”

HTML Validator Tools

Without further ado, let’s suggest some HTML validator tools to plug your HTML in for markup analysis and validation.

W3 Validator

By W3C themselves, this validator is very easy to use via URL input, HTML file upload, or direct input. It handles all HTML, XHTML, and other web document formats.

Once you’ve input your URL and clicked validate, the tool will parse your HTML and display both errors and warnings. Errors are what you should focus on first, warnings usually related to unnecessary attributes or other markups that could be removed – but that’s usually unnecessary, or at least very low priority.

It is almost guaranteed that you’ll find some errors and likely many warnings. Try some competitor sites, friend’s sites, or other major sites and see how they compare – you’ll likely find many errors there also.

If you do find reams and reams of errors then don’t panic, and don’t rush into making any changes. Check your site on multiple browsers and use an SEO audit tool like Semrush SEO Audit to check the crawlability and technical SEO of your site.

If Google can crawl it and people can read it without issues, then you’re probably fine!

You can do your own research into errors – there are too many possibilities to describe but the likelihood is, if it’s a genuine issue then people will have discussed it many times already.

JSON Formatter HTML Validator

A powerful set of tools for formatting, converting, and validating HTML as well as JSON and CSS, the JSON Formatter HTML Validator works like any tool – you simply plugin your URL or upload a URL file.

You can hit ‘Run’ to render the HTML and Validate to check the HTML for errors. Again, the same caveats apply, and you’ll likely find errors – possibly many

The interface here isn’t as good as other HTML validator tools and doesn’t give you a detailed breakdown of errors and warnings, though it’s still fine if you have HTML knowledge and know what you’re looking at.

Freeformatter HTML Validator

Another simple HTML validator tool. The Freeformatter HTML Validator only lets you copy and paste HTML or upload an HTML file. You can choose from all ISO language codes for parsing HTML in different languages.

You’ll find that errors and warnings are clearly differentiated here, allowing you to look at common errors that appear on your pages and delve into further explanations online.

Infohound Tidy

This tool lets you check and validate HTML and then create and download a tidied copy. There are many options

Like other tools, it will display both warnings and errors. You can then tidy errors using the controls provided before downloading the tidied HTML.

DO NOT just copy HTML from your site into here and replace it with the tidied HTML, at least not without creating a duplicate to test it first, or using a backup.

Like with other HTML validators, it’s likely that many errors are negligible or pretty much meaningless – always research them before taking action.

Code Beautifier for HTML

Code beautification is slightly different from validation. With this tool, you can beautify your code, meaning deleting unnecessary components and minimizing down to what is needed.

This makes it easier to work with the code.

Again, this has a pretty niche use but will be useful for some

SonarSource

SonarSource is a professional suite of paid code analysis tools. They’re oriented towards creating highly robust, secure codes. The software helps tidy code but also identifies secure blackspots and other backdoors or other security issues.

For sure this is the most advanced HTML validator and analyzer around and each and every code or warning is broken down with an explanation of what’s going on.

For clients that demand perfectly validated error-free code, SonarSource is tough to beat.

What Do I Do If I Find HTML Errors?

It’s likely that you’ll find HTML errors when using a validation too.

Feature-rich pages that run lots of plugins will likely be the worst, whereas simple pages with little content, or just plenty of simple block text, will usually be fine or totally error-free.

The first thing to do is to check and see if any errors appear multiple times. Look them up to gain more info on what they mean and whether they matter – it might be jargon but you might find some simple-worded insight!

You can also consider hiring an HTML specialist on a freelance website. Checking your HTML should be easy for someone who knows HTML inside out and it’s likely that any serious errors can be fixed in seconds.

If all else fails, then you’ll need to check your pages using SEO audit tools and browser compatibility apps. If your pages load fine on every browser and device, and you sort technical SEO issues highlighted by an SEO audit, then you’ll probably be fine!

Make sure you monitor your site in Search Console, Google Analytics, or whatever other tools you use, and keep an eye for changes in traffic or other anomalies that could indicate more serious site bugs or UX problems.

The only other thing to do is to keep up-to-date with Google’s algorithm changes to make sure they never add HTML validation signals or other new rules that could lead to negative SEO results for sites with messy HTML – but this seems unlikely.

Summary

Clean HTML is a hot topic, with the purists arguing that fully clean, precise and valid HTML as validated by validation services is totally necessary for now and the future.

But, checking the HTML of many sites reveals a different story and Google themselves admit that ranking sites on their HTML would be likely destructive and antithetical to what they’re trying to do – i.e. serve the user.

But, therein lies the crux of the issue.

If HTML does affect user experience on your site, then it will affect SEO.

This is why HTML validation is a good way of tracking down HTML issues, and together with technical SEO audit tools, you can build a clean, fast and robust site.

The post 7 Free HTML Code Analyzers & Validators appeared first on SEO Administrator.

Analyzing log files is an often-overlooked but important aspect of technical SEO, and it really comes into its own when dealing with huge websites with thousands, or hundreds of thousands of pages.

Here, we’ll be explaining what a log file is, where to find it, what it means for your site, and how you can squeeze SEO juice out of it.

What is a Log File?

Every request made to a web server is logged and saved.

The file is output and saved to your hosting web server – and you’ll be able to find it and analyze it.

When you look at a raw log file, it’ll be densely packed with written info and data – but don’t panic!

Some logged request information you’ll see may include:

• IP Address
• Type of HTTP request (GET/POST, etc)
• User Agent
• Requested URL
• Timestamp
• HTTP Status Code
• Referrer

Other attributes might include:

• Host name
• Bytes downloaded
• Request/Client IP
• Duration

This information can be useful for troubleshooting issues, but for SEO, we’re primarily interested in HTTP requests – this recorded information tells us about how GoogleBot and other crawlers crawl a site.

The log is a 100% accurate representation of how GoogleBot and other search engine bots crawl a site and its pages.

Log files essentially log the activity of crawlers, providing SEOs clues as to how a site and its pages are being crawled and indexed, and by who.

How Do I Find a Log File?

It depends on your server setup and configuration.

For those who have access to/have configured their own server, the following guides can be followed to download a log file. This is often a convoluted process – you can ask your web developer or tech team for log files if you are not responsible for the server.

Using cPanel to Download a Log File

cPanel is a web hosting control panel software that simplifies web and server management.

If you have access to your site’s cPanel then downloading log files is much simpler (thankfully!).

Log into cPanel and you’ll typically need to head to Metrics and Raw Access Logs. You’ll need to tick the Archive box to ensure that logs will be saved from then on.

After a new log is created, you’ll then be able to download the log for analysis.

This is by far the easiest DIY method to retrieve logs and anyone can do it, provided you can access your site’s cPanel.

Once you have the log file, you’ll need to look into log analyzer tools to analyze the data.

You can manually convert and filter the file, but there’ll be tons of info in there which is totally irrelevant to SEO. In fact, some log files can reach hundreds of megabytes, and parsing and sorting the info DIY is painstaking.

It’s worth noting that you may need multiple log files to cover longer periods of time – one day’s worth of data is not likely to be enough to analyze how GoogleBot crawls your site.

Why Analyze Log Files?

It’s a lot of hassle right?!

Well, if you use cPanel then it’s not too bad!

But still, what do you do with all that data?!

Identify Crawl Bots

SEO is usually all Google, Google, and Google, but other crawl bots matter too, especially if you’re looking to tap into emerging markets or audiences in China for example, via Baidu.

Your server log will tell you if requests have been made by GoogleBot as well as BingBot, Baidu, Yahoo, and Yandex, and any other user agents.

So, for example, you may find that you’re not getting crawled by Baidu, but you want to appear in China. The log file contains this sort of information.

You’ll also be able to see if your robots.txt file is doing its job in disallowing certain crawlers.

Crawl Budget

Search engines don’t crawl your site indefinitely, and they don’t have unlimited resources either.

Crawls are periodical and only a dedicated quantity of crawling resources will be dedicated to your site. Log files let you find and assess how many pages are being crawled across your site over a given period of time – usually daily.

More authoritative, healthy, and optimized sites will be dedicated greater crawling resources.

Consider a site like Wikipedia which has some 6 million pages, with over 600 newly added articles each day. That’s going to need a lot of crawling and as such, GoogleBot probably crawls many thousands or even millions of Wiki pages every day to check for updates and changes.

Wikipedia is one of the most authoritative domains in the world and thus, it has a huge crawl budget to suit its vast quantity of pages and ultra-high authority.

But your site might be different, you still might have thousands of pages and if your site isn’t being allocated the appropriate crawl budget, then your newly created or updated pages might sit there uncrawled for days, weeks, months, or even years in exceptional circumstances!

You could also find that crawler bots are indexing old pages, redirects, orphaned pages, and other useless URLs when you want them to crawl your new or updated content.

Log analysis lets you calculate how many pages of your site are being crawled – and which ones – so you can make necessary changes to your site, robots.txt and sitemap to make sure your top pages are prioritized.

Once you’ve assessed crawl budget and timing, you can modify your XML sitemap to prioritize which pages Google crawls regularly.

This might be your blog or similar, whereas other parts of your site that remain the same for long periods of time will not need to be crawled so often.

Temporary 302 Redirects and Duplicate URLs

Temporary 302 redirects direct users and crawlers to a temporary page. They’re not harmful to SEO but do eat into crawl budget as the search engine will be continually crawling to see if the redirect is still there.

You can also narrow down the content that you can instruct Google not to crawl at all, i.e. duplicate content. This can also help reduce analytics errors.

Check Page Crawl Times

You can analyze log files to discover the time to first byte (TTFB) and time to last byte (TTLB) associated with each page, helping you quickly find your fastest and slow loading pages.

This is a quick and easy way to check page load stats for big sites, and you’ll be able to sort your largest web pages so you can check those for particularly slow content (e.g. high-res images).

Discover Orphaned Pages

Orphaned pages are pages still linked to your site and crawled, but aren’t internally linked. They exist to Google (if they’re being instructed to crawl the page from the sitemap, or external links point to it) but not to you or the user (unless external links still point to them).

These can be created by site structure changes, internal linking errors, and old redirects.

Either way, they won’t rank as they’ll have no internal links. Log analysis finds orphaned pages so you can inspect them and deal with them.

Best Log File Analysers

Here is a compilation of log file analyzer tools that take the graft out of analyzing complex log files for SEO purposes.

Semrush Log File Analyser

In Semrush’s mighty set of SEO tools, you’ll find the Semrush Log File Analyser which was actually only released in 2018. This tool is available with Semrush’s main set of tools, costing $119/mo for the Pro package.

You’ll be able to upload your log files for analysis where the tool will break down all of the important SEO-related metrics and display them in graphs.

The tool will breakdown:

• Requests from various search engine bots (e.g. GoogleBot)
• HTTP status codes found each day
• The different file types crawled each day

This easily lets you assess your crawl budget, and shows how often pages and/or files are crawled. This enables you achieve the main goal; to analyze the crawlability of your site and point GoogleBot towards the pages that require crawl priority (e.g. a regularly updated blog).

Features

• Analyze bot activity
• Discover most crawled and least crawled pages
• Filter by file type, e.g. HTML, PHP, amp, CSS, Javascript, and JSON

Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser

The Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer is probably one of the most complete log analyzers around and doubles up as an excellent technical SEO tool.

Costing just £99.00 per year, it’s one of the cheaper tools around and the free version still lets you analyze 1000 lines of log, plenty for single-site owners and SEO novices.

This tool will breakdown crawler activity in full, filterable by the bot, e.g. GoogleBot, Baidu, Yandex, etc. It’ll point you towards broken links, redirects, and orphaned pages. Sorting by page size is simple too, so you can quickly ascertain page load speed and size.

For SEO purposes, the tool breaks down crawl budget and reveals the most crawled pages and content, enabling you to discover how efficiently your site makes use of its crawl budget.

Features

• Discover and verify bots
• Analyze crawl frequency
• Find your most crawled pages to analyze crawl budget
• Find orphaned pages

Paper Trail by Solar Winds

This is more of a log management tool for DevOps and tech teams. It aggregates many types of logs, including server log files, for centralized accessibility across an organization.

Log alerts can be sent via Slack or other team management platforms and data can be imported into software utilities such as Hadoop.

Features

• Aggregates logs for engineers and dev teams
• Email alert system for anomalies
• Access and download log files for further analysis
• Wide technical remit (not really an SEO tool)

Graylog

Graylog is a sophisticated log and data analysis platform that enables aggregation of logs of virtually any type, from any source. It’s designed for enterprise and organization-level businesses that require rigorous analysis of many data log outputs.

Graylog is an advanced tool for engineers and dev teams, it’s designed for analyzing data from many inputs or outputs – not just servers. 

Features

• Can store huge quantities of data
• Designed for enterprise-wide data analysis
• Real-time analysis
• Unprecedented scalability

Loggly

Loggly aggregates log data across large enterprise-level or organization-wide networks. It’s an enterprise-level platform that allows for real-time analysis of server logs as well as log data from near-limitless sources.

Loggly enables the analysis of all server data, but it’s also an interdisciplinary tool for log aggregation and analysis.

Features

• Store and analyze server logs across large distributed systems
• Secure, cloud-enabled analytics platform
• Near-limitless scalability
• Enables cross-department collaboration

Log Entries by Rapid1

Another enterprise-level server log file and aggregator. Designed to pool and centralize server info from distributed networks, Log Entries enables advanced analysis of server resources and system health.

A professional engineering/dev tool that breaks down server metrics in minuscule detail to audit the health of colossal networks.

Features

• Collect server logs across large networks
• Real-time alert system
• Server anomaly detection
• Enables cross-department collaboration

GoAccess

A fast, terminal-based log analyzer, GoAccess breaks down key server requests in detail for real-time analysis. It shows visitor numbers as well as crawlers and spiders so you can analyze how often your site is crawled. It’s also great for assessing page response time and server load.

Features

• Terminal-based dashboard
• Analyze web traffic and crawlers in real-time
• Analyze server resources and bandwidth
• Free

SEOLyzer

Optimized for SEO log analysis, SEOLyzer provides seamless live log tracking tools to detect crawling errors rapidly. It has an easy-to-use interface and the focus here is on speed; it enables you to locate and home in on errors before your other systems (e.g. Search Console) pick up the error.

SEOLyzer has built an impressive repertoire of clients and has proven a superb technical SEO tool for auditing useful server logs for key information. The aim of SEOLyzer is to detect logged errors and work to fix them before site coverage declines.

The software also allows you to aggregate information into graphs and KPIs.

Features

• Log analysis for SEO specifically
• Aggregate log data for analysis
• Find errors before they hit your site coverage
• Free version for single-site users (limited analysis capacity.

Summary

SEO log analysis may seem fairly niche and complex, but it’s a powerful weapon for your technical SEO armory.

SEO log analysis’s main strengths lie in debugging and troubleshooting, but it’s also an excellent tool for analyzing crawl budget in the natural habitat of the crawlers themselves.

The log is 100% accurate, data-rich, and hard-linked to the requests made by crawlers – that is its main advantage.

The post Log File Analyzers appeared first on SEO Administrator.

The internet is a content-driven universe and words and language are its main ingredient.

The brilliant thing about words is that they’re so info-rich, they communicate everything from thoughts to feelings to topics, sentiments, opinions, and more.

This has made keywords a primary SEO ranking factor since the dawn of Google and other search engines.

Researching keywords is crucially important for the SEO of any website, and they’re quite straightforward to get started with.

Of course, any keyword strategy requires the use of some tips, tricks, and perhaps most importantly, keyword tools.

Exploring Keywords

Keywords are relatively simple to research and explore, so long as you know what you’re searching for and why.

There are also several key metrics to be aware of.

The first thing to be aware of is that there are two key ‘types’ of keywords, PPC and organic.

PPC

PPC (pay per click) are keywords you bid for. You bid for a keyword and pay each time a user clicks on that keyword – the cost per click (CPC). High competition keywords have higher bid prices.

An example would be ‘insurance’, which is ultra-competitive and could have bid prices in the $20 to $50 region – very expensive indeed!

Your bid helps you secure your ad for your targeted keywords in the SERPs.

PPC keywords are:

Organic

Organic keyword targeting should be the primary focus for long-term, sustained SEO.

These types of keywords are unpaid – they’re nothing to do with Google AdWords.

Organic keyword targeting revolves around content creation. The idea is to home in on keywords that people use to obtain certain results and rank your page in the SERPs for those words/terms.

Keywords include everything from single words such as “tea” to long-tail keywords that involve phrases such as “How do you make Chai tea?”

Organic/SEO keywords are:

Before we move onto the best keyword tools, let’s quickly review the key metrics you’ll need to bear in mind when conducting keyword research:

Important Keyword Metrics

The most important keyword metrics include search volume, search volume over time (trends), keyword difficulty (KD) and the commercial value of the keyword.

Sadly these rarley exist!

This means people are searching for these keywords but finding…well, relatively little as there are few pages competing in the SERPs for those keywords!

SearchEngineLand dubs these the “Holy Grail of SEO”.

Furthermore, you want to bear the purpose of the keyword in mind, as it will have to fit the content you embed it in.

There’s no point in using the keyword “buy Chai tea” to create content on making Chai tea – “how to make Chai tea” would be a much better option instead.

Similarly, if you’re selling Chai tea on the page you want to rank then targeting “how to make Chai tea” probably won’t work.

Without further ado, let’s look at the best keyword tools around, both paid and free!

The Best Paid Keyword Tools

Semrush is an SEO titan and they actually offer 6 powerful keyword tools in their full membership packages.

These include:

• Keyword Overview – For rapidly checking new keywords and assessing their viability
• Organic Research – Analyze competitor’s keywords and discover how others are using keywords in your niche
• Keyword Magic Tool – Super-easy keyword tool that lets you find semantically related keywords and search volume over time
• Keyword Gap – Compare your keyword profile with others to identify gaps you need to fill
• Keyword Manager – Manage keywords and view how well they perform in the SERPs
• Organic Insights – Analyse keyword traffic and discover more keyword opportunities

Semrush also includes a full PPC keywords research tool.

Semrush SEO tools are fully comprehensive and allow you to find and research keywords in granular detail.

Brainstorm new effective keywords for your content, check difficulty, search volume, search volume over time, CPC, and SERPs performance. Plan keyword targeting and compare your content to competitors to find a competitive edge.

Prices

From $119 for Pro membership. Ranges up to $449 for businesses.

Features

KWFinder by Mangools is specifically designed for keyword research. That makes it nice and streamlined for the job, and cost-effective too.

You’ll be able to search and analyze keywords per location, including local keywords – great for small local businesses and services. All your usual metrics are in there and well-marked, including search volume, search volume over time, and difficulty.

Competitor analysis is also well-implemented, so you’ll be able to look up what keywords your competitors are ranking for/targeting. Once you know, you can go and beat their content!

KWFinder is great for PPC keywords too and you can easily compare PPC vs organic keywords to discover what you should and shouldn’t consider bidding for, which is excellent.

Prices

Starts at €29.90 per month for Basic, Premium is €39.90 and Agency is €79.90. The Basic version lets you look up 100 keywords every 24 hours which should suffice for the vast majority of smaller businesses or DIY SEOs.

Features

Ahrefs is another top name in SEO and this in-depth keyword tool contains keywords from 171 countries, making it a go-to for international keyword research. It also allows you to research keywords for numerous platforms including other search engines such as Baidu and YouTube.

Brainstorming keywords is also super-easy and each keyword will display a ‘parent topic’ allowing you to move between more niche terms and words and broader topics or entities. You’ll also find questions relating to your keywords providing yet more content ideas and ways to rank.

SERPs analysis is also straightforward, so you’ll be able to drill down into what keywords make the SERPs tick and how well your competitors are targeting these.

PPC research is also fully comprehensive, analyzing the effectiveness of PPC keywords and their CPC over time.

Of course, all your standard keyword metrics are in there including search volume, search volume over time, CPC, difficulty, and many more.

It’s worth mentioning that Ahrefs includes a full suite of SEO tools and you’ll get access to all of their other coveted tools in the same membership (similar setup to Semrush).

Prices

Prices range from $99 for the Lite version with 175 keyword reports per week (plenty for most single sites). Standard is $179, Advanced is $399 and Agency is $999. Remember, you get access to the whole suite of cutting-edge Ahrefs tools.

Features

Longtail Pro is oriented around longtail keywords with 3 or more words. These are amongst the most dynamic and easily-targetable keywords, making them the most likely candidates for high volume and low difficulty.

Longtail Pro helps you discover and analyze longtail keywords in superb detail. It’s essentially a robust keyword checking tool with all features for both organic and PPC keyword research.

Track volume over time, SERP performance, and spy on your competitors to find gaps in your content strategy.

The SERPs analyzer here is particularly good and is updated daily with keyword performance and ranking changes. It does also have other tools such as backlink analysis for checking backlinked keywords.

Longtail Pro also has an excellent suite of helper videos and tutorials to assist you in your keyword research journey. Overall, a superb program that is trusted by many SEOs and agencies worldwide.

Prices

The Basic version is just $25 / month and allows for 800 keyword searches every 24 hours, easily enough for DIY SEOs and smaller sites. Even the Agency version is just $98 / month which is quite impressive for 6000 daily keyword lookups.

Features

Keywords are everywhere! This browser plugin allows you to conduct keyword research from directly within the SERPs.

This semi-automatic, semi-manual approach to keyword research allows you to search queries and terms directly from within Google or other search engines.

Keywords Everywhere enables you to discover accurate keyword data and metrics as you use the internet – it certainly makes sense, allowing you to collect keywords on the go without heading into an SEO tool.

The tool pulls up keywords from related terms and People Also Searched For, and you’ll also be able to pull up keyword data and traffic for any page or site ranking in the top-20 SERPs.

All the main keyword metrics are covered in the tool including search volume, CPC and competition data. You can also analyze keyword trend data.

You can create lists of keywords for export and further analysis in more detailed keyword tools or Google Keyword Planner, etc.

An excellent holistic keyword tool, Keywords Everywhere is very good for surfing competitors sites and lifting keywords from their blog posts and articles.

Prices

This tool has a credit pricing system where 1 credit = 1 keyword. $10 will net you 100,000 credits, which is a fair quantity, though you may be surprised how quickly you get through them. From there, pricing is linear, e.g. $50 for 500,000, $100 for 100,000, etc.

Features

Jaaxy does take a slightly leftfield approach to keyword research and it packs some innovative features for affiliate marketers. There’s also a nifty trend analysis tool that lets you find and track emerging trends, discovering how these are impacting search intent so you can remain current in your niche.

Jaaxy is perhaps on the obscure side, though some users will look through it and have a eureka moment – this could be the tool affiliate marketers and other niche web content creators are looking for.

For keyword research, the tools are fairly basic but all your core metrics are in there. There are caveats, e.g. difficulty is expressed as ‘SEO’.

There is an intriguing ‘Alphabet Soup’ tool for finding keywords with high buying intent, e.g. “Chai tea” could produce results like “Buy masala Chai Tea US” – a longtail keyword with strong buying intent.

The idea is to combine these high buying intent keywords with trending niche data – it makes sense on paper and could potentially be very profitable in the right hands.

Prices

The free trial here is unlimited time-wise but only lets you have 30 keyword searches. Pro at $49/mo lets you access more Alphabet Soup searches (which may be where its strengths lie).

Features

Working with major multinational brands such as Uber, L’Oreal, Shopify, and Deloitte, SerpStat is a professional all-in-one SEO software suite that delivers impeccable results across the board.

The Keyword Research tool delves into profitable and relevant keywords associated with your niche or topic. There’s a significant focus on long-tail keywords and SerpStat is very capable of delivering useful lists of long-tail keywords to incorporate into your content.

All of your usual keyword stats and metrics are represented including search volume, competition, CPC, average clicks, and volume throughout time.

Measuring on-page SEO reveals keyword and content gaps and competitive intelligence can be carried out to identify the keywords your competitors are ranking for but you aren’t.

By all accounts, SerpStat is a powerful SEO suite of more than 20 tools that link keyword tracking and research into many other SEO tools. It’s an advanced and upcoming SEO suite that is already trusted by global brands.

Prices

Pricing starts at $69 for the Lite version, aimed at small businesses, individual users, and freelancers. It allows for 4,000 keyword queries a day. From there, the Standard package represents a significant jump to $149 and enables logins from 3 users. The Advanced and Enterprise packages cost $299 and $499 respectively.

Features

The Moz SEO suite is incredibly popular and has proved its worth for businesses of every shape and size. The Keyword Explorer is a powerful tool that covers everything from organic and paid keyword research to keyword analysis, competitor keyword analysis, and predictive keyword metrics.

The Keyword Explorer is adept at finding long-tail and question-based keywords and phrases. Keywords can be searched by country, region, or locality. Keyword difficulty, volume, and organic click-through rates are all easily measurable from within the tool.

With the SERPs analyzer, you can view how keywords perform in the SERPs, and competitor keyword analysis helps you identify keyword gaps and suggestions.

Moz’s selection of SEO tools covers all the key bases including rank tracking, site audit, and reporting.

Prices

Moz Pro starts from $99 for the Standard package that allows you to track 300 keyword rankings and generate 5 keyword lists with 100 keywords per list, which is plenty for individual users and small businesses. The Medium, Large and Premium packages are priced at $149, $249, and $599 respectively.

Features

The Best Free Keyword Tools

Google Search Console is an SEO lynchpin and provides you with an excellent way to analyze the keywords you’re ranking for and what queries users search to find your site.

Most of this is done by inspecting URLs from your site and then heading to the Queries tab. This will show you a breakdown of the queries people use to reach your site.

When you link Google Search Console to Google Analytics, you’ll be able to delve into the search behavior of people that search for relevant queries to your site.

Under the Audience tab, you’ll also find Interests and Affinity Categories, which provide a report of what your site users tend to search for and interact with online.

Features

In many respects, Google Keyword Planner is your classic keyword, but it is oriented around Google Ads (PPC advertising).

Once you input your head terms, you’ll be provided with a list of related terms which are all broken down with volume forecasts, CPC, and impressions. You can also find keywords for product categories that Google has collated.

There is plenty of organic research potential here and you’ll be able to check out Organic Impression Share and Average Organic Position as well as Competition.

Overall, Keyword Planner combines with other free Google tools to provide impressive research capabilities. You do somewhat miss the ability to contextualize keyword performance in the SERPs, and competitive analysis isn’t really possible in the same way as it is in other paid SEO suites.

Features

Google Trends is a keyword research tool you can use immediately without any sort of sign-up or integration process.

It allows you to analyze the trends of what people are searching for online, and that of course extends to the keywords they’re searching.

Google Trends is particularly powerful for identifying how search interest changes over time. By typing in keywords related to your niche, you’ll see how their search volume has changed throughout time as broken down by nation, region, or locality.

The Related Topics and Related Queries tabs are very useful for providing additional keyword and topic ideas.

The strength of Google Trends is that it’s hard-linked to what people are searching for right now, but also in the past.

Features

This awesome tool lets you conduct keyword research whilst you surf the web, which is actually a very intuitive way to go about it

You can use it when manually researching your niche or competitors. When you search a query in Google, the tool will display monthly search volume, keywords suggestions, visibility metrics, and related searches all from the plugin interface.

This allows you to quickly build a list of analyzable keywords as you toy around with different search queries.

The tool also displays location and site traffic metrics as well as CPC.

Features

The majority of search queries are indeed queries or questions.

Answer the Public harnesses this fundamental search characteristic and enables you to discover the questions that people are asking in relation to a keyword or phrase.

It’s very easy to use and will break down your query into questions by question or preposition, e.g. how, what, where, why, can, where, and what?

Finding questions surrounding your niche provides you with long-tail keywords for further analysis. This is an excellent tool for researching ‘how to’ types of content or any other content that answers the public.

Features

Looking for instant, no-fuss, no-frills keyword ideas? Soovle provides a breakdown of top keywords by search engine/platform. YouTube, Amazon, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and eBay are all represented.

Soovle is brilliant for providing keyword ideas with different intent. For example, you can see if keywords align between different search engines, allowing you to formulate a content strategy that takes into account Google search queries as well as eBay or Amazon buying intent.

Features

Keyword Sheeter takes your terms and spews out a massive list of related terms.

It’s a solid tool for providing a bulk of keywords for further analysis. You can also use the tool to buy different reports on your generated list, e.g. on search volume, CPC, and difficulty.

Overall, though, the best use of this tool is to generate a raw list of related terms for any given keyword.

Features

The aptly named Keyword Tool allows you to search for a limited number of keywords for free.

You can research keywords for Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, Play Store, Instagram, and Twitter, which is very useful.

The resulting list will be very similar to what Keyword Sheeter and Soovle provide and you’ll have to pay to view search volume, CPC, trend, and competition. You can also sort by questions and prepositions.

Another quality tool for finding a list of keyword starting points for further research.

Features

Similar in some respects to Answer the Public, Question DB provides a list of questions related to an input keyword. It does also display a list of standardly related keywords.

It will display 50 results for free and you can also discover topics related to your keyword.

Features

Summary

The SEO software market is hardly lacking for competition and choosing the right tools can be a tricky one!

Big brand tools from Moz, Semrush, and Ahrefs will rarely let you down, but many of the lesser-known suites and tools are also awesome.

There are some nice innovations here, like KWFinder’s feature that lets you compare organic keywords to PPC keywords to research whether or not it’s worth bidding.

It’s hard to go wrong as the standards are just so high, and even free SEO tools provide powerful starting points and can get your first pieces of content off the ground with minimal to no cost.

The post 17 Best Keyword Research Tools (Free & Paid) appeared first on SEO Administrator.

Here’s an analogy:

GoogleBot is strolling through a library, it encounters a new book it’s never seen before.

This book permits GoogleBot to see it – to look through it – GoogleBot then crawls the book, analyzing and following its content.

Once it’s analyzed the book, it can go about storing its information in the library database.

Without crawling, the book is never found, without indexing, it can never be searched in the database.

The Google Search Index is over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size – that’s a lot of information to index, and it does raise the question of how Google goes about crawling and indexing an ever-increasing resource.

It’s worth bearing in mind that only a small percentage of the internet is actually indexed, so SEOs can’t take indexation for granted.

Luckily, most of the unindexed or ‘deep web’ is paywall or password protected content, dead or dormant content, spam and other information that doesn’t need to be in the index.

How Do I Index My Site?

It goes without saying that to get anything indexed on Google, you have to create a functional website with pages and content.

Building a site with some content is a good idea before you take steps to go ‘live’ and get it indexed. There’s no rule of thumb here really, but you’ll want your site fit for users, error-free and functional on both mobile and desktop.

In fact, Google uses mobile-first indexing now anyway, meaning they crawl and index the mobile version of a site. That means your site needs to be absolutely cut-out for mobile UX.

Mobile-First Indexing

If you’re reading up about indexing then it’s possible that you’ve not built your site yet, or are still in the process of building it.

You might be using a site builder, like Wix, or might be developing your site yourself using WordPress and a theme from ThemeForest or similar.

Most modern site builders and themes are fully responsive, meaning they’re mobile-optimized and will seamlessly respond to mobile and tablet browsing.

But, mobile optimization is still something to watch out for when adding plugins and other content and elements – bear in mind that Google will index and rank your site based on the mobile version – this is very important!

Indexing Your Site

Once you’ve developed your site, you’ll need to take a few extra steps to prepare it for indexing and ranking.

The first step is to set yourself up with Google Search Console. This is crawling and indexing HQ – a one-stop-shop for basic SEO that is totally free.

Search Console will also let you access Google Analytics to measure and analyze site traffic.

There really is no trade-off or substitution for using Google Search Console – it’s pretty much essential and is thankfully very easy to set up and use.

Once you set up Search Console with your Google Account, you’ll have to add your site as a ‘Property’.

Not quite done yet – you need a sitemap.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps translate very literally – they’re maps of your site and its pages.

Once your site is hosted, Google will eventually crawl it and it should eventually index it, even without using Search Console. But, this really isn’t the best route to go down, and you’re best off uploading a sitemap to Search Console – indexing is much faster that way.

You can create sitemaps using Yoast or use an XML sitemap creator like XML Sitemaps. Once you create a sitemap file, you’ll need to add it to your site using Yoast or equivalent for site builders.

Then, head into Google Search Console > Sitemaps (under Index) > Add a Sitemap.

Once you’re done, Google will crawl your site and you’ll be able to analyze its status in Search Console – your first step to getting your site properly indexed in the SERPs!

After your sitemap has been crawled, you’ll be able to check the indexation status of your site’s URLs – be patient as it can take a few days.

Inspect URLs

Your base site and its main pages should be indexed shortly after loading up a sitemap.

When you add new content, your sitemap will be updated – GoogleBot will look there and find your new content and pages.

But, you can also use the Inspect URL field at the top. Paste URLs for new content into this field and you can inspect them – to find that they’re not indexed – and then hit Request Indexing.

This could save about a week or so versus simply waiting for Google to index your new page at its own accord.

Google has a guide on how to use the URL Inspection Tool here.

Does Google Crawl and Index All Content?

Google has its work cut out – it’s crawling and indexing millions of pages on a near-constant basis.

The short answer is no, Google does not guarantee that your pages will be indexed.

To get pages indexed, they need to provide some value to the user – they need to be worthy of Google’s resources.

The Search Console states:

“Note: Requesting a crawl does not guarantee that inclusion will happen instantly or even at all. Our systems prioritize the fast inclusion of high quality, useful content.”

This is pretty much why SEO revolves around content, and why the internet is indeed a library and not just a big box of random bits and pieces. Google wants to create a content-rich universe, not a stack of chaotic information that evidently provides no value.

There are other factors and variables too, including your site’s crawl budget and you robots.txt file.

But, for new sites with a small amount of content, Search Console + sitemaps should get your site indexed.

Checking Indexation Status

By far the easiest and best way to check and manage indexation status is with the Search Console.

The URL Inspection Tool will tell if a page is indexed. You can also see this in the Sitemap section of the Search Console.

However, there are other tools designed for checking indexation status, and some of them do display other handy information on your pages:

This nifty free tool provides a full SEO report – for free – with actionable tips. It’ll also grade your site with an SEO score out of 100.

An impressive free tool, the WebFX Google Indexing Checker will tell you whether or not your pages are indexed and well as breaking down all the core SEO features of your site alongside a pass or fail grade. Any errors will be explained and tips are given for fixing them.

Features

This extremely simple index checker does what it says on the tin – simply copy URLs into the field and it will check whether or not they’ve been indexed.

Whilst you may not need tools like this when you’re using Search Console, they’re useful for checking the indexing status of pages on the go, e.g. on your phone when you can’t or don’t want to log in to Search Console.

Features

Small SEO’s set of free tools are awesome for SEO beginners and novices. This simple tool allows you to check up to 5 URLs for indexing purposes. It can be re-run again with more URLs.

Features

From another excellent free SEO tool provider, Northcutt. The Northcutt index checker tells you whether a page or domain has been indexed or not – simple. Note that large sites will probably exceed their request limit (but most are fine).

Features

Link Indexing Tools

Not everything on the internet gets indexed. Google will only index pages that it deems relevant, valuable, and trustworthy – pages that deserve a spot in its library.

This can pose issues, and links you want to be indexed in Google may not be indexed in some scenarios.

Link indexing tools are tools that help ‘push’ links to Google and other search engines (but mainly Google), forcing (or trying to force) Google to index them.

They’re relatively grey-hat. The general idea is to ‘push’ links that Google would probably not index naturally.

They can be handy when you publish a guest post and don’t really know when it’ll be indexed but are usually used for indexing spammy or low-quality content that is ignored by Google.

There are some legit uses, say the site you publish a guest post on could be very bloated, or poorly optimized for crawl budget, meaning your content won’t be indexed for weeks, months, or at all!

The guest post itself might be very good, though, but is unfortunately lost in the noise, and Search Console can’t help here as the site isn’t your property.

A link indexer can help you in this scenario, though.

Other Legit Uses for Link Indexing Tools Include:

• Getting social profiles indexed – these might contain your link. Some social profiles on lesser-known sites have a larger area for writing bios – this provides you with an opportunity to link your site for some link juice. But you’ll need Google to index that page to pick up that link. Link indexers can help you do that.
• This also might apply to other social site content, for example, some people have used Omega Indexer to get their YouTube playlists indexed. This could yield traffic from people clicking onto your site from that playlist. Another example is Pinterest boards – Google simply might never index them and you can’t find out why. Another legit use for link indexing tools.
• If you create some good content for another site, they publish it, but you find it’s unindexed after some time, you can use a link indexer to push it to Google. Of course, there will likely be legitimate reasons why Google didn’t index naturally and spammy or manual actioned sites could be one reason. But, it’s possible that the post doesn’t get indexed due to crawl budget or other technical SEO issues.
• If you make changes to social profiles (e.g. site address, email, phone numbers, etc), then you can use link indexers to push these to Google. You don’t have control over these sites so Search Console would be of no use.
• If a site goes down and has a lot of links attached to it, link indexers are a quick way to get those links re-indexed. Basically, they just alert Google that this renewed site is back on the internet.

Tier 2 and Tier 3 Backlinks

he kind of links you push to a link indexer are known as tier 2 or tier 3 backlinks.

Tier 2 backlinks are links from comments, social profiles, posts, and other content where your link is placed in relatively thin content.

Tier 1, on the other hand, are your high-grade genuine content-based links that are designed for organic ranking as well.

Tier 3 links are basically spam. They can be posted on any page (that allows link following) with low trust and authority.

Obviously, these links are often not indexed at all, thus providing no link juice.

That’s why you use a link index tool to ‘push’ these links to Google – a common grey-hat or black-hat link-building method.

To do this, these sites likely have some sort of network where your link is placed temporarily until indexed, or somehow hit Google’s server with that link until it indexes it. They might use other ways to guide Google to your link also, like providing it with some (likely fake) social signals.

The following tools should be used with caution:

Omega Indexer is an indexing tool that works for the above use cases.

You create a ‘campaign’ and add your links then request Omega ‘drips feeds’ them to Google. This helps links stay under the Google Penguin radar – which downplays or refuses to index low-quality links.

Omega Indexer works over around 5 days. It’s not 100% successful but testimonials reveal a good rate of success with hard-to-index links.

Omega Indexer works via credits. 1 Credit = 1 Link = $0.02.

Features

Very similar to Omega Indexer, Elite Link Indexer is another paid tool for pushing hard-to-index tier 2 and tier 3 links to Google.

The claim indexation rates of around 64% (high for a service like this). They claim to use white-hat methods to get links noticed by Google.

Elite Link Indexer costs $10 a month for 5,000 links, enough for most users.

Features

Summary

Google and other search engines are choosey with their index, which is fair enough.

Without screening content and its links, Google would be rammed full of spam content.

For sure, the best method of link building is via the creation of quality content and content marketing. Use Search Console and the URL Inspection Tool to request indexing of genuine content you publish on your site (though it will be indexed naturally after some time – usually just days for small sites).

If you’re looking for methods of pushing other links to Google using grey-hat link-building tools, then there are options. These tools do have legitimate uses too, though, so shouldn’t always be frowned upon.

Proceed with caution and good luck!

The post 7 Google Indexation Tools appeared first on SEO Administrator.

Bots typically include web crawlers, such as GoogleBot, which will look at the robots.txt file on your site to learn what it should and shouldn’t crawl on your site.

Robots.txt files are not just for GoogleBot, but will be ‘read’ by many other web crawlers from other search engines and services, as well as web scrapers that are hunting your site for information.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the instructions contained in the robots.txt aren’t mandated – they’re not legally binding (though violating them could still result in breaking the law or violating copyright, etc).

Robots.txt files just pleasantly nudge bots in the right direction and kindly ask them to not crawl certain parts of your site.

Robots.txt files are created by default in most WordPress sites and other sites that use Wix or other site builders, and will automatically be set to allow web crawlers to crawl everything on your site.

With many site builders or platforms like Shopify, you can’t edit the robots.txt file (but can use other techniques to control the crawling of your site.

When To Adjust the Robots.txt File

If you’re an SEO beginner, novice, or an owner/designer of a personal or individual small site or blog (that has already been published), you likely won’t need to adjust the robots.txt file for some time, but checking it is still good practice.

One potential use some advocate for the robots.txt file is preventing your site from being crawled whilst it’s still under construction.

This is ineffective if links point to the page(s), and Google recommends you use a noindex meta tag or password protection instead if you want to prevent a page from being indexed during construction/migration.

You can also use a plugin that covers your site with an ‘under construction’ notice.

There are many other legit reasons to check and edit the robots.txt, though:

Crawl Budget and Robots.txt

There are legitimate motives for editing the robots.txt file and these can confer SEO benefits.

Most of these benefits are linked to a site’s crawl budget. Crawl budget refers to the resources Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines allocate to crawling and indexing your site.

For example, whilst you might assume Google has an infinite army of bots ready to crawl each and every intricate detail of the internet at will, 24/7 around the clock, this isn’t strictly true.

Even Google has finite resources (for now!), and they allocate these resources to sites based on their size/reputation/authority and other factors (many of which are not totally known or understood).

SEOs analyze crawl budgets by checking out their site’s log files, which provide evidence of how many pages crawlers are crawling on their site.

In short, editing the robots.txt directly influences how crawlers interact with your site, which directly influences crawl budget.

Case Example: Robots.txt and an eCommerce Store

Before moving onto some robots.txt tips and tools, let’s run through a simple case study of when you should consider editing your robots.txt file.

eCommerce stores typically use dynamic pages and contain a lot of duplicate content.

Dynamic pages and duplicate content are typically changed via user interaction, like when a user filters product categories or customizes a product. When a user filters a group of products, a page with duplicate content is produced – there’s nothing useful there for anyone apart from the user.

You can disallow bots from crawling duplicate content and filter content, or any other content that is practically useless for SEO and might occupy your crawl budget.

Content to potentially disallow from crawlers includes:

Whilst you might feel your site is way too small to be affected by crawl budget issues – and you’d probably be right – being aware of how you can edit the robots.txt file for the future is still very important.

If your site becomes bloated with content that is useless to Google then retrospectively fixing that is more exhaustive than preparing your robots.txt file early on in your web design and SEO journey!

Additionally, you may have pages with sensitive information, copyright material, and other files you don’t want to be crawled. Editing the robots.txt file can help keep these files off search engines.

Mostly, though, editing the robots.txt file is useful for managing crawl budget.

The Main Five Main Robots.txt Directives

There are five main robots.txt directives.

When you go to edit or generate your robots.txt you’ll see/use some of the following:

When you edit your robots.txt, you’ll be providing it with directives on URLs and directories.

The robots.txt file will sit in the root of your site, e.g. for site www.example.com, the robots.txt file lives at www.example.com/robots.txt.

A simple example of a robots.txt directive would be:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /thank-you/

This tells Googlebot to disallow crawling at: www.example.com/thank-you/

Note, whilst some tools ask you to input ‘directories’ and others ‘URLs’, you can input either.

Directories will be useful if you want to tell bots to ignore specific folders or files within your site’s root, e.g. /wp-content/plugins/ (which contains likely useless data on WordPress plugins).

URLs are best for singling out specific pages that you don’t want bots to crawl (e.g. thank-you [for ordering, buying, your interest, etc] pages as above).

Advanced Robots.txt Controls/Directives

There are some advanced robots.txt directives that go beyond allow/disallowing.

One key example is the wildcard, used to bulk-block files.

So, Disallow: /copyright-material/*.jpg would block all .jpg images located in the copyright-material directory.

Where To Put the Robots.txt File?

The robots.txt is placed at the root of your domain.

So, if your site is example.com, the robots.txt would be placed at: http://www.example.com/robots.txt.

You can locate this using the cPanel file manager (common for WordPress websites).

Once you open the file (literally a text file), you can write your new directives straight into it and save it.

There are different instructions for site builders like Wix, but Shopify and Squarespace don’t allow you to edit the file – though there are other options for hiding your site or its pages and preventing them from being indexed.  

Some SEO suites and plugins such as Better Robots.txt and AIO SEO semi-automate the process of creating robots.txt files for your site.

Robots.txt Generator Tools

Small SEO Tools Robots.txt Generator

Small SEO tools provide a fantastic array of free SEO tools, and the robots.txt generator does what it says on the tin (and is obviously 100% free).

This is a simple robots.txt generator with a selection of 15 bots and crawlers that can be set to be allowed or refused from your site. You can point it to your site’s sitemap.

You can also set the default for all bots and choose crawl delay settings which will roll out to bots that take notice of this (i.e. not GoogleBot).

You’ll then be able to add restricted directories and/or URLs using the form at the bottom. The /cgi-bin is pre-filled (a commonly blocked directory that does not need to be crawled), but you can edit that field if you want to.

Features

• Allow/refuse 15 common bots/crawlers
• Add sitemap
• Block directories/URLs
• Crawl-delay

Ryte Robots.txt Generator

An intuitive robots.txt generator with step-by-step instructions. The Ryte Robots.txt Generator is an excellent little tool for quickly creating robots.txt files with a selection of 11 bots. It’s a bit strange to not see other search engines like Baidu or Yandex in the bot selection, but you can add these user agents yourself.

To block crawling of URLs or directories, simply input them into the fields. You can also allow or disallow all bots from crawling your site.

Features

• Good interface
• Add sitemap
• Block directories/URLs

SEOBook Robots.txt File Generator

Another simple robots.txt generator with allow/disallow all and per-bot control of basic robots.txt directives. There are 9 bots here and it’s straightforward to add URLs or directories to block.

A super-simple tool that lets you copy and paste your new robots.txt straight into the old one.

Features

• Simple interface
• Add sitemap
• Blocks URLs/directories

SEOptimer Free Robots.txt Generator

With a selection of 15 bots, this is one of the more complete robots.txt generators available. It also has crawl delay settings. You can allow/refuse certain bots or set all bots to allow/disallow by default.

The fields allow you to add the URLs or directories you don’t want to be crawled.

Features

• Allow/refuse 15 common bots/crawlers
• Add sitemap
• Block directories/URLs
• Crawl-delay

Internet Marketing Ninjas Robots.txt Generator Tool

With a comprehensive selection of 22 user agents, this is a quality tool for allowing/refusing crawling from many major bots. You can add URLs/directories to allow/disallow per bot.

A very simple, easy-to-use robots.txt generator tool with plenty of bots. Unfortunately, there are no crawl delay settings.

Features

• Allow/refuse 22 common bots/crawlers
• Add sitemap
• Block directories/URLs

LinkGraph Robots.txt Generator

With over 40 bots built-in to the tool, this is a comprehensive robots.txt generator. However, it only lets you add 5 URLs/directories for disallowing, which is a minor letdown.

Still, though, with crawl delay and plenty of user agents in the list, this is yet another solid free robots.txt generator.

Features

• Allow/refuse 40+ common bots/crawlers
• Add sitemap
• Block directories/URLs
• Crawl-delay

Summary

Editing the robots.txt file is actually pretty straightforward!

Even as an SEO novice, it’s very handy to know what can and can’t be done with the robots.txt file.

As Google recommends, using the robots.txt file for completely hiding a site and its pages from the SERPs is ineffective compared to using a noindex meta tag.

The primary reason you’ll want to edit the robots.txt file is to prevent the crawling of non-publicly accessible site data that potentially eat into your crawl budget, or to control the activity of individual user agents that crawl your site.

The post Robots.txt Generators appeared first on SEO Administrator.

You’ve spent hours on keyword research, drilled down into the nitty-gritty of your user’s search intent, and have put some elbow grease into creating quality content.

But how do you if this is impacting your ranking?

You can manually check your traffic and note whether it’s increasing – that’s one way, but it’s certainly not ideal in the long run.

What you need is a rank tracker.

They’re the easiest way to get a complete picture of your website’s SEO keyword performance in Google and the other search engines.

Rank Tracker Features

The core function of a rank tracker tool is to locate your site and pages in the SERPs and show you how they rank for different keywords and queries.

This keyword ranking data can be used to compare to competitors, and to see what sort of performance you’re getting from your SEO campaigns and PPC where applicable.

Most rank trackers update you periodically, telling you if your page is moving up and down in the SERPs.

You’ll also be able to generate reports which can be sent to clients if you’re managing a portfolio of sites.

Tracking local search engine rankings is also extremely handy and you’ll find out if Google is ranking you for rich snippets and other media.

Remember, one small step up the SERPs can equate to a giant leap in traffic!

Standalone vs Integrated Rank Tracking

It’s worth mentioning that some rank trackers are standalone tools, i.e. just rank trackers, whereas others come as part of a suite of other SEO tools.

If you’re looking for a rank tracker combined with other SEO tools (like keyword trackers, link building tools, etc), then it’s best to opt for an integrated rank tracker.

Integrated suites of tools include:

Without further ado, here is a compilation of the 13 best rank tracker tools available right now.

Semrush is one of the biggest names in SEO and their suite of tools is kitted out for SEO professionals or businesses of any size or experience level.

Semrush membership carries 40+ advanced tools that cover almost every aspect of SEO and marketing. Their position tracker is very sophisticated and allows you to size up your keyword rankings vs local, regional, national, and global competitors.

It also integrates with Google Data Studio for generating advanced reports on this industry-standard platform. You can also analyze rankings for different SERP features ranging from the local pack to rich snippets and reviews.

There is also a phone app for tracking on the go. SemRush tools integrate together for running seamless, dynamic SEO campaigns.

Prices

Semrush has a steep pricing structure from $119.95/mo for the Pro level to $449.95 for the Business level.

The Pro level provides analytics for 250 keywords a month over 5 projects (for different clients).

There are numerous add-ons and Semrush can get pretty expensive – but it’s a serious class-leading SEO suite.

Features

The self-professed ‘world’s fastest keyword rank tracker’ AccuRanker provides an in-depth analysis across an unlimited number of domains and subdomains. You get instant on-demand ranking updates and plenty of filtering options for region, local area, or national SERPs as well as results for mobile or desktop.

It’s worth noting that this is a standalone ranking tool. If you’re looking for a pure and complete rank tracking tool then it’s a great choice, but if you want a full suite of SEO tools then it’s best to look elsewhere.

Prices

Pricing varies with tracked keywords and starts at €99/mo for 1,000 keywords. This scales gradually all the way to Enterprise level for tracking 50,000 keywords at €1,979/mo

Features

Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) provides a few different tools for marketing and SEO professionals. You’ll find rank tracking features filterable by locale, region, and nation as well as an advanced reporting tool and competitor analysis.

The intelligent rank tracking software caches the SERPs so you can analyze historical data and allows you to track the performance of your media (videos and images) and even social media.

The competitor analysis tool is particularly good and allows you to monitor those rising up the SERPs.

Prices

Starts at $49 for startups allowing you to track 2,000 keywords – pretty generous functionality for the price. The Agency level provides 1-hour updates and a host of other features for $199/mo.

Features

The SERPWatcher by Mangools is a superb ranking tracker for small businesses and startups. The UI is incredibly easy to use for the SEO novice and pricing is incredibly reasonable, starting at just €29.90/mo.

You do only get to play with 100 keywords for that, but that’s enough for many small businesses.

Membership includes access to all Mangools tools including competitor analysis and link mining tools. This is an integrated set of tools, providing an all-in-one SEO solution that is highly scalable to smaller budgets – ideal for freelancers, in-house teams, and small agencies.

Prices

Starts at €29.90/mo for the basic plan. The highest tier is just €79.90, limited to 1,200 keywords.

Features

The rather utilitarian-looking Link Assistant Rank Tracker is trusted by huge global businesses. It’s worth mentioning that this is a standalone tool, so membership won’t grant you access to other Link Assistant tools.

But, it is reasonably priced at just £129 yearly and for that, you get access to a fully professional suite of SERP ranking tools filterable by mobile, desktop, and locale/region/nation. You can also add competitors for side-by-side comparisons (up to 5 on the Professional tier and 10 on the Enterprise tier).

Rank Tracker is probably best purchased as part of the SEO PowerSuite (£259 yearly for the Pro level).

Prices

£129 or £299 a year for Pro and Enterprise levels respectively. There is also a quality free version that has decent limited functionality for single users running just one site.

Features

SerpRobot is a free download SERP analysis tool. It’s basic, but you can pay per SERPBot at the humble price of just $9.99 per bot, each of which can perform 300 SERPs analyzes a day.

It’s a good option for those who’ve literally just finished building out their site and want a quick look at how it ranks for different keywords in the search engines.

Prices

Free for 14 days and then $9.99 / mo per bot that can perform up to 300 keyword searches a day.

Features

Ahrefs are a key SEO authority with a large market share and their suite of SEO tools is widely considered to be some of the best available.

There are 6 tools Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, Rank Tracker, and Content Explorer.

The Rank Trackers work extremely well and allow you to drill down into various keywords, analyze your search engine keyword ranking and traffic alongside competitors. You’ll also be able to track SERPs features like rich snippets to track whether you are receiving snippets for certain keywords.

Everything is highly filterable by device and area.

Periodical reports give you a quick rundown on your positions, allowing you to quickly tune declining pages to re-boost them back up the SERPs.

All in all, the Ahrefs suite of tools is very powerful and pricing starts at a reasonable $99 for 500 tracked keywords.

Prices

$99/mo for the basic Lite package with 500 trackable keywords over 5 projects, which is pretty good. The Standard package at $179 allows 1500 keywords to be tracked over 10 projects – decent for agencies.

Features

Pro Rank Tracker sports a quality interface and its headline feature is the provision of full SERPs covering the top 100 search engine entries for your keyword terms. All of your usual features and filters are present and you can track keywords across multiple devices and locations.

This is great for those looking to beat their immediate competitors.

Pro Rank Tracker starts at a highly affordable $25 too, which still allows you to track 200 terms. The pricing structure is fair and highly scalable.

Every tier allows access to full SERPs as well as daily updates and white-label report generation.

Prices

$25/mo for the Basic plan which provides up to 200 terms. The Business plan is $180 for full functionality and 3,000 terms, and that extends up to 100,000 at higher-price enterprise levels.

Features

This slick keyword and rank tracking software allows you to select and filter keywords to analyze SERPs by region, device, and many other factors. It’s streamlined for this purpose only, and works very well for those looking for a pure ranking tool without unnecessary bloat.

Pricing is also very fair and even the Starter package at $24/mo allows up to 100 daily on-demand updates across 100 keywords. The Agency package is still only $179 and allows analysis of 1500 keywords. It’s not scalable to enterprise-level, but provides advanced ranking tools at a budget.

Prices

Starts at $24/mo for 100 keywords. The second-tier Beginner package is $97/mo with 500 keywords. It’s best suited for those with lower keyword demands.

Features

This is an all-in-one reporting suite with beautiful, minimalist UI and covers SEO, PPC, social media and review tracking. You can import info from other services such as Ahrefs and SemRush too. The Agency Analytics Rank Tracker is simple and streamlined for rank tracking purposes but you get the benefit of Agency Analytics other excellent tools.

This tool is designed for agencies that work with multiple clients. The Freelancer package allows you to run 5 campaigns tracking a total of 500 keywords. This is more flexible than your average rank tracking tool.

Prices

Starts at $49/mo but this includes 5 campaigns (for 5 clients) tracking a total of 500 keywords. The Enterprise level allows you to track over 4,000 keywords across over 50 campaigns for $399/mo.

Features

SerpWatch’s super-scalable business model allows users to start at as low as $1 a month! This only allows you to track 5 keywords, $25 a month allows you access to 250 keywords with 3 client portals. This provides a super low-cost way to add SEO juice to smaller clients if you’re a freelance or do some SEO work on the side of another marketing job.

SerpWatch isn’t thin on features either. You can track by locale or region, create beautiful ranking reports and delve into new keyword suggestions for you and your clients. Updates and notifications can be sent to a Slack group, which is cool.

Prices

Starts at just $1/mo. $25/mo allow you access to 3 client portals, tracking 250 total keywords a month. It’s highly scalable from there, but is hands-down one of the most affordable ranking trackers around.

Features

Rank Tracker is designed to be an all-in-one keyword research, tracking and website position software. There are actually 5 tools; Ranktracker, Keyword Finder, SERPChecker, Web Audit and Actionable SEO Tasks.

If you want to do both within the same application, then that’s very useful. It works on locale, regional, national and global scales and has in-depth competitor analysis features.

Researching keyword data within the same tool is very easy too, so you can research new keywords as you measure their success in the SERPs and analyze whether you can compete for them. The report generator is excellent too and you can discover PPC savings by analyzing how you’d rank without them.

Prices

Rank Tracker has a generous pricing structure starting at just $6/mo for single users tracking 5 keywords. Even that allows you to analyze 3 competitors. The Premium Plan comes with all features and costs just $44/mo at base. These scale up with keywords, so the Premium Plan for tracking 500 keywords is $67/mo – still pretty reasonable.

Features

Moz is another leading light in the SEO game and their pro suite of tools covers everything from keyword research and analysis to link building rank tracking. The crawler is particularly good and will audit your site thoroughly to suggest actionable SEO improvements.

The rank tracker itself is straightforward but it has advanced competitor analysis features that gather holes in your competitor’s strategies so you can plug them yourself to rise up the SERPs. It integrates with the Moz keyword tool so all of your keyword research and ranking analysis is contained in one dashboard, which is great.

You’ll have access to all the usual locational and device filters, allowing you to siphon through your ranking data and compare results from desktop vs mobile.

Moz is a highly professional outfit and pricing doesn’t start particularly low with the Standard plan weighing in at $99/mo for just 300 keywords. But, you do get access to all other Moz Pro tools.

Prices

The Standard package is $99/mo for 3 campaigns and 150 keywords, but you can only do 5 crawls per month to update your analyzes. The $149/mo Medium package extends this to 800 keywords and 30 crawls a month for daily updates. It scales up from there with the Premium package costing $599/mo.

Features

Summary

Choosing a ranking tracker will be tricky and depends primarily on your SEO task.

For SEO professionals that work with a number of clients, the big guns like Moz, Ahrefs, SemRush, and Agency Analytics are hard to beat. These have all the extra functionalities on top of just tracking keyword positions. They also allow for more in-depth reporting to combine with data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

But, there are tonnes of awesome options here suitable for businesses of any and every size. If you’re just starting out with one site, a personal site maybe, then it’s always a good idea to keep costs low and scale up from there as your business grows.

Those with proven professional SEO experience can throw themselves into more advanced suites of rank tracking tools at higher prices.

Plus, you can always switch from one rank tracker to another if you don’t like it or feel it’s limited.

Be sure to check for offers and extended free trials too, as these can pop up at any time.

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