Photo by Wonderlane - Creative Commons Attribution License https://www.flickr.com/photos/71401718@N00 Created with Haiku Deck • XML-Sitemaps.com (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com) creates a sitemap for your site • Google XML Sitemaps (http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemapgenerator) - plugin that creates and maintains a sitemap for WordPress sites. Also, pings search engines whenever new content, such as a page or post are created. Photo by boxman - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License https://www.flickr.com/photos/33947185@N00 Created with Haiku Deck • Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools) - view how Google sees your site – submit your sitemap, learn about crawl errors, see what keywords Google thinks your site is about, learn how many pages are being indexed by the search engine, see keywords you’re ranking high for and getting clicks from • Bing Webmaster Tools (http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster) - similar functionality as Google’s only from a Bing perspective • Microsoft Free SEO Tool (http://www.microsoft.com/web/seo) - a free tool from Microsoft that gives SEO suggestions Photo by dan taylor - Creative Commons Attribution License https://www.flickr.com/photos/56783767@N00 Created with Haiku Deck Use these tools to see how fast your website is loading, learning what things are slowing down your site and what actions you can take to improve your page load speed. • Google PageSpeed Insights (http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights) • GTMetrix (http://gtmetrix.com) • Pingdom (http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt) • Web Page Test (http://www.webpagetest.org) Photo by brizzle born and bred - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License https://www.flickr.com/photos/20654194@N07 Created with Haiku Deck • CloudFlare (http://cloudflare.com) - a content delivery network (CDN) that offers a free plan • Compressnow (http://compressnow.com) - upload images to compress them and make them a smaller size • Online YUI Compressor (http://refresh-sf.com/yui) - a tool that can minify javascript and css files which you upload to your site • JSCompress (http://jscompress.com) - Javascript (JS) file minifier that combines .js files • W3 Total Cache (http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache) - WordPress plugin that improves the site’s performance with caching, minification and integrating with CDN’s • WP Supercache (http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache) - WordPress plugin that caches content for faster page loading Photo by peasap - Creative Commons Attribution License https://www.flickr.com/photos/21314760@N00 Created with Haiku Deck • Alexa (http://www.alexa.com) – see some of the keywords that are leading to visits to competitor site • Bing Keyword Tool (http://www.bing.com/toolbox/keywords) - use Bing’s advertising platform to get keyword ideas (and see search volumes). You don’t need to run a paid campaign to use the tool. • Follow.net (http://follow.net) - see the keywords your competition is: ranking high for, getting traffic from, and advertising for • Google AdWords (http://thinkstrategy.com/free-seo-tools/www.google.com/AdWords) - similar to Bing’s tool, use Google’s keyword tools to get ideas • Google Analytics (http://google.com/analytics) - once you’ve set this up, it will tell you terms people are searching for to get to your site; what you’re ranking high for, and what words are turning into leads/sales for you • Keyword Eye (http://www.keywordeye.com) - they offer a free plan where you can do 10 keyword searches per day to get ideas on what you should be trying to SEO • Uber Suggest (http://ubersuggest.org) - free service that provides a ton of keyword suggestions based on common variations of the words you enter • Wordstream (http://www.wordstream.com/keywords) - offers a limited number of free searches you can do for keywords Photo by hjl - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License https://www.flickr.com/photos/92605333@N00 Created with Haiku Deck • Moonsy (http://moonsy.com/google-keyword-rank-checker) tells you where your site ranks for a given keyword, if you rank in the top 100 on Google • SEOCentro (http://www.seocentro.com/tools/searchengines/keyword-position.html) - tells you where you rank for a keyword, allows you to compare yourself to competitors, and shows the URLs of the top ranked sites along with if they are using the keyword in metas Photo by heipei - Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License https://www.flickr.com/photos/97859317@N00 Created with Haiku Deck • Meta Length (http://www.metalength.com) - counts the characters you enter for your meta tags so you can make sure that they are as description as possible without being too long • SEOmofo (http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html) a cool tool that will show you what your web page will look like in Google in search results as you enter your meta tags Photo by anasshad - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License https://www.flickr.com/photos/65070219@N02 Created with Haiku Deck • Image SEO Tool (http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/alt) checks images on a web page to see if they are tagged for SEO (i.e. alt tag) Photo by incurable_hippie - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License https://www.flickr.com/photos/49503155381@N01 Created with Haiku Deck • Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com) - Checks to see if your content is unique or if someone has copied you. If search engines think that your website content isn’t unique and/or you copied it from another site, then you will fall in rankings. Photo by Sam UL - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License https://www.flickr.com/photos/69382478@N00 Created with Haiku Deck Use these tools to see what other sites are linking to you. If you find that they are sites that are low quality, not relevant to you, or otherwise spammy, you may consider disavowing them in Google Webmaster Tools. • Backlink Watch (http://backlinkwatch.com) • Digbacklink (http://www.digbacklink.com) • Open Site Explorer (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org) • Rank Signals (http://www.ranksignals.com) Photo by Melissa Maples - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License https://www.flickr.com/photos/84392129@N00 Created with Haiku Deck • Remove’em (http://www.removeem.com/ratios.php) - Checks links to your site to determine what anchor text is being used. Your site can be hurt in search rankings if you aren’t diversifying your anchor text enough. Photo by david.nikonvscanon - Creative Commons Attribution License https://www.flickr.com/photos/12568962@N00 Created with Haiku Deck • Google Structure Data Testing Tool (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets) tests that your rich snippets are correct for a web page • Google Structure Markup Data Helper (https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper) helps you do the coding for a web page to make rich snippets work • Schema.org (http://schema.org) - the labeling format used by the search engines for rich snippets Photo by Mark Pack - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License https://www.flickr.com/photos/20175310@N00 Created with Haiku Deck Local directories where you can list your business for free and boost your local search ranking. • Bing Places (https://www.bingplaces.com) • Foursquare (http://foursquare.com) • Google Places (http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter) • Hotfrog (http://www.hotfrog.com) • Yellow Pages (http://www.yellowpages.com) • Yelp (http://yelp.com) Photo by La Citta Vita - Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License https://www.flickr.com/photos/49539505@N04 Created with Haiku Deck • Moz Local (https://moz.com/local/search) - Checks that your business contact info is consistent across the internet. If your info is inconsistent then the search engines may be viewing each unique address/phone number as a different location, lowering your position in local searches. Photo by Dave77459 - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License https://www.flickr.com/photos/25499247@N00 Created with Haiku Deck thinkstrategy.com