Even though the paradigm in the world of search engines and ranking has shifted towards the quality of the content, SEO optimization still plays a very important role. In this article, we’re going to give you an overview of the best, completely free SEO tools that can help you boost your website in the search rankings. Here we go!

Smallseotools

This website is a pure goldmine for those who need to optimize their content on budget. If there were a competition between the most full-featured and versatile SEO tools, the top award would most likely go to smallseotools. The number of tools it offers is simply ridiculously bonkers. With its help, you can check your content for plagiarism, compress images, find keywords, analyze links on your website, and a lot more. It would probably take you a while to become familiar with all of the options. If you’re wondering, here is a list of tools you will find there:

• Content tools;
• Images editing tools;
• Keyword tools;
• Backlink tools;
• Website tools;
• Proxy tools;
• Domain tools;
• Meta tools;
• Password tools;
• PDF tools.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is an easy to use tool, which allows you to keep track of relevant information on the Internet. Here’s how it plays out. You enter a keyword and whenever someone mentions it, you receive an instant notification. For example, you can use it to find places where your website was mentioned, i.e. monitor backlinks, and detect plagiarism. It’s especially helpful for competitors’ content analysis. Finally, you can use Google Alerts to simply follow trends in your industry.

A good alternative to Google Alerts would be Feedly, which offers a much more robust functionality, including the ability to create your own feeds, topics boards, and, of course, keyword alerts. But, unfortunately, the latter feature costs around $5 per month. Despite that, Feedly is still one of the best RSS tools you can find today.

LSIgraph

LSIgraph is a web service that’s very helpful when writing content. It allows you to generate Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords. Simply put, LSI keywords are the words that comprise the context of a text page, allowing search engines to understand what it’s about. Typically, LSI keywords are synonyms for the main keyword. They help users find content that is relevant to their query. For example, the LSI keywords to the keyword “web development” would be “web development software”, “find a web developer”, “web development training”, “web development company”, etc.

SEO Spider

SEO Spider is a great website crawler. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “a crawler, sometimes called a spider, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing”. Simply speaking, crawlers update search engines on the web pages that haven’t been indexed, allowing them to rank much higher. With the help of SEO spider, you can access detailed information about every URL on your website. Specifically, it enables you to find broken links and duplicate content, analyze page titles and meta data, audit redirects, etc. Oh, and did we mention that SEO spider is also available as a desktop program for Mac, Linux, and Windows?

One of the alternatives to SEO spider is Xenu, which also enable finding broken links. Even though it’s much poorer in terms of overall functionality, all of its features are available right off the bat.

XML sitemaps

With the help of this service, you can quickly create an XML sitemap for your website. You can then submit it to the most popular search engines like Google to help them crawl your website better. Here’s how it works. To generate an XML sitemap, you need to enter your website’s URL, specify a few parameters in the form, and click “start”. When the service finishes crawling your website, it will redirect you to the page with details about the generated sitemap. Then, you’ll need to download the sitemap and place it in the root folder of your website. Finally, upload the sitemap to your Google Webmaster account. Keep in mind, however, that the service can index no more than 500 pages for one sitemap.

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is a tool made by Google that allows you to measure the load speed of the pages on your website. The results are based on how fast your website loads on both mobile and desktop clients, allowing you to see which version of the website you need to improve. Depending on the results, the score may vary from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better it is for your website.

Hemingway App

Since the quality of content is now one of the main ranking factors, it’s important to make sure that the text on your website is also well optimized. Hemingway is an online web application that provides you with ample opportunities to improve your content and make it easy to read and understand. It allows you to detect unnecessarily complex sentences, which can be too challenging for users. The app gives you suggestions on which parts of the sentence you should rewrite. Every type of suggestion has its color: lengthy sentences are shown in yellow, adverbs and weakening phrases are highlighted with blue, words that have a better synonym are colored in purple.

Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress

If you have a blog, chances are it’s running on WordPress. One of the reasons why this CMS is so popular is because it offers an immense number of plugins and extensions for all possible scenarios, including SEO optimization. Yoast SEO plugin is considered the most popular WordPress plugin for SEO purposes. The plugin provides you with features to customize the title, slug, meta description, and, most importantly, focus keyword of your article for better ranking.

The main advantage of Yoast SEO plugin is that it comes with content analysis panel, which gives you tips on what you should improve in your article. For example, it can determine if the content is long enough; has outbound links, focus keywords, etc. In a nutshell, the plugin gives you comprehensive insights on the SEO aspects of your content. Also, it has quite good sitemap functionality.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the creme de la creme of the tools for SEO and marketing. The tool provides you with the most comprehensive analysis of your website’s performance as well as insights on its users’ behavior. If you’re a beginner in SEO, this is undoubtedly a must-have tool for you. It’s functionality is so robust that it can satisfy the needs of any types of businesses: from startups to large corporations. With Google Analytics, you can:

• Monitor users’ behavior;
• Analyze conversion rates;
• Keep track of everything that’s related to your website;
• Conduct A/B testing;
• Compare and analyze efficiency of different marketing channels;
• Monitor performance of your website in real time, etc.

The number of features you can find in Google Analytics is actually so big, that it’ll hardly fit in a phone-book-size manual.

Google Keyword Planner

Today, there is a whole bunch of tools for generating keywords for your content. But, in the end, Keyword Planner has one indisputable advantage over them. It’s made by Google, which means it provides you with access to the most accurate keywords that are relevant in the world’s most popular search engine. Google Keyword planner

Google Search Console

Another web tool by Google that was created specifically for webmasters. With its help, you can check how your website is displayed in search results and monitor its performance. Here’s a quick list of things that Google Search Console provides you with:

• the number of indexed and displayed pages;
• possible violations that may affect the ranking positions of your website;
• the number of inbound and outbound links;
• possible issues with HTML code of the pages;
• how well your website is displayed on mobile devices;
• search queries related to your website, etc.

Moreover, Google Search Console allows you to delete pages from indexing, optimize the structure of data on your website (this is necessary for Google to display the snippets of pages properly), and automatize the markup process.

Quick URL Opener

If you’re conducting a link building company and need to open a whole bunch of links at once, you can use Quick URL Opener. The marketing community unofficially calls it one of the best free tools for working with links. You just need to select the links you want to open and paste them in the field, which slightly below the header, and Quick URL opener will open all of them in separate tabs.

Tools that are also worth checking out

Google Analytics Referrer Spam Killer

This tool allows you to get rid of spam referrers so that you can keep your Google Analytics reports clean and accurate. Why are spam referrers bad? They’re domains that get into your Analytics not as a result of people actually clicking on links, but through spam bots. Because of that, your Analytics reports can contain the wrong data.

Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Mobile-friendliness is one of the most important ranking factors of a website in 2017. Google’s test checks whether your website is optimized for proper display on mobile devices.

Test my site

Test my site allows you to check the load speed of the mobile version of your website. As we’ve mentioned several times, whether your website is fast enough greatly affects the SEO ranking.

JustReachOut

If you’ve been looking for ways to get links from A-class websites, you should try JustReachOut. Just enter a keyword and the tool will find relevant journalists and bloggers, who can create a compelling story on your topic. However, you should know that JustReachOut is available on a freemium basis.

LinkMiner

LinkMiner is a Chrome extension that is used to check for broken links on a page. It’s completely free and provides you with a wide range of information. While similar tools can only show whether this or that link is broken, LinkMiner can display detailed information about a link and even allows you export all links from a page. This makes LinkMiner extremely helpful for broken link building. The extension itself is available here.

Marie Haynes’ Disavow Blacklist

If you want to know whether this or that link badly affects your SEO, check it with Marie Haynes’ blacklist tool. The tool will be of great use for those who need to conduct an audit of a website or evaluate how much traffic has dropped.

Copyscape

Copyscape is one of the best websites for finding duplicate content on the Internet. It uses advanced searching algorithms to go through online forums, PDF documents, blogs, listings, and other places. Needless to say that duplicate content negatively affects to search engine ranking. Simply speaking, where there a several places with the same-looking content, it’s difficult for search engines to understand which one of them is more relevant to a specific search query. If neglected, this issue may even lead to a penalty.

Conclusion

Just some five or ten years ago, finding an available, free SEO tool with solid functionality was like a total “mission impossible”. Luckily, that’s no longer the case in 2017. Nowadays, you can choose from a wide range of free tools that offer almost the same functionality as their much more expensive, paid counterparts. As you can see, you don’t necessarily have to spend a fortune to optimize your website for better rankings in search engines.

Top 12 Completely Free SEO Tools In 2017 was originally published in JetRuby on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.