Suppose you have created a great website for the whole world to enjoy. Now it’s up to you to get visits from users to generate traffic. Despite the growing popularity of social media, people still use Google to look for stuff, don’t they.  So, while it can be of extreme use to implement SMM (social media marketing) strategies for promoting your website, it is still crucial to employ SEO to make your website as visible as possible in the search results.

Just as with anything you do, having the right choice of tools at hand makes the job not only easier but also more pleasant. There are thousands of tools out there that claim to help you boost your page rank, more than enough to get you confused. This post puts together some of the more proven and productive online SEO tools to help you ensure that your website is at the top of Google search results:

Google Tool

This one is a no-brainer. It is only logical for the world’s biggest search engine to aid webmasters with tools for optimizing their website for this engine. Let’s check out what Google has in store for us:

– Analytics. Here you can keep track of the activity surrounding your niche keywords: which keywords and keyphrases are big right now, which bring you the most traffic, etc.

– Keyword Planner. It gives you comprehensive statistics on your keywords of choice: monthly searches, competition, etc. It will also suggest other similar keyword variants.

– Webmaster tools. This will require additional installation on your website, and it will give you instant real-time access to all the relevant search statistics you can think of.

– Trends. This one will show you the graphs of the popularity of your keywords, as well as those of similar search terms.

– PageSpeed Insights. You just enter a URL, and you see how fast it loads on both desktop and mobile. This influences the user experience (UX) rate, which ultimately influences the PageRank. Other UX-shaping factors like fonts and tap targets are also paid attention to, and you get tips on what you might want to consider improving your website.

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Keywordtool.io

If you are having a hard time thinking of possible keywords that might be relevant to your website’s niche, don’t hesitate for a moment and go to keywordtool.io. Here you just enter your keyword of interest, and you instantly get several hundred suggestions to consider. If your website is targeted at foreign audiences, this tool also offers you to specify the localized version of Google to consider, as well as a number of languages other than English to choose from.

BROWSEO

If you want so have a display of how exactly the search engine crawlers see your website, this is what you need. This tool will show you the stripped down version of your website – no fonts and headers, no images or backgrounds, just the most basic and relevant data. Having such an illustration at hand will help you to get a more visual understanding of how SEO works within your website and which aspects might be improved.

It is utterly comprehensive, and you don’t need to download and install anything. You just enter the URL, and you instantly see the picture.

Screaming Frog

If you have no time to dig into the SEO structure of your website, you can have it done for you automatically by Screaming Frog. It is software that you download for free, and when you start it, it will crawl your website the same way that search engine crawlers do.

It analyzes all the metadata, points out broken links and duplicate content for you to fix, generates an XML map of your website, and much more.

A paid version is available if you would like access to the more advanced functions.

SEO Tips for the Holidays

Open Site Explorer

This is an online service that gives you all out statistics on your links: both the ones on your website and those referring to your pages. Its main value is that you can instantly get a glimpse of the link, its page rank, and its impact on your page rank, thus discovering your link opportunities and raising your awareness of harmful or potentially harmful links that refer to your website.

QuickSprout Website Analyzer

This one is the ultimate favorite of a great many webmasters. QuickSprout gives you a detailed and comprehensive look of all that matters about your website. This includes but is not limited to SEO details (keywords, tags, links, etc.), social media performance, load speed, and more.

It will also compare your rates on all these aspects to those of your competitors.

SimilarWeb

Speaking of competitors, there is a tool that will provide you with the statistics on the traffic generation and its sources of any given domain. SimilarWeb is a genius in its simplicity. You just enter the domain name that interests you, and you see the figures on its sources of traffic.

To sum it up, there is no tool that will instantly boost your website’s SEO performance once you start the app, for better or worse. Yet, these are the tools that will significantly facilitate your work on helping your website on its way to the top of Google’s search results. Feel free to try any or all of them, in any combination that you like, and will surely find an easy – and, perhaps, even enjoyable – way to monitor and develop your website’s performance with the search engines.

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Author Bio:

Sophia Clark is a creative writer from New York who loves to share her thoughts with readers. In her free time, she enjoys writing fiction as well as reading it. Her big dream is to publish a novel one day. Connect with her on Twitter and Google +.