Owner Responses To Google Maps Reviews Buggy
A Google Business Help thread has complaints from some business owners who are trying to leave responses to some negative reviews on their business profile.
Google began allowing owner responses in 2010 and since then…
Google’s Matt Cutts On Using ccTLDs
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, in another video answer, responds to the question about using ccTLDs (country code top level domain names). The question was “Should
Google Doesn’t Care if it Ranks Your Site Properly
If you’ve been negatively impacted by an algorithmic update, it’s easy to blame Google. Instead, try to figure out what your site has in common with other sites that were targeted. Finding the bad signature and fixing it is the key to your recovery.
Google+ Local Reviews Now Pop Up As Overlay, Rather Than In New Page, In Google Search
If you search for a keyword phrase that triggers local listings in Google’s Web search results, such as searching for [barber], Google will show you Google Business listings. If you click on the reviews on one of those listings, instead of taking you to the Google Business Local page, Google…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
6 Ways To Leverage Merchant Feeds To Optimize Product Listing Ads
Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are the new hipster ads of search marketing, but many retailers aren’t fully capitalizing on this huge opportunity. (I guess many don’t know how cool they are yet.) But, what goes into optimizing your merchant feed for your PLA campaigns, and what best…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Broken Link Building: How to Find Thousands of Broken Link Opportunities at a Time
Broken link building can play a valuable part in most people’s link building strategies, but is an underused white hat strategy. Here’s why broken link building is so attractive, outreach tips, and some tips for doing it at scale.
Bridging the Gap Between Social Media and PR
As the web puts an increasing influence on trust and authority, merging social media into PR initiatives becomes even more important. Here’s where can you integrate PR and social media to increase mentions, awareness, and overall brand kickass-ness.
Tripadvisor is most visible travel site in organic search: report
The scores are based on
- The number of times a domain appears in the search engine results.
- Its prominence within those SERPs.
- The competitiveness of the keyword.
Here’s a quick look at the results from the organic listings, and for more on this topic check out our blog posts looking at mobile search in the travel industry and common usability flaws on travel sites.
Organic visibility
Holidaymakers search using millions of different keywords so it’s important for travel providers to achieve an organic search presence at every stage of the customer journey to maximise their sales.
The report shows that Tripadvisor dominates in terms of overall visibility and the number of keywords it’s visible for, with TravelSupermarket the second most visible site despite only appearing for 86,000 keywords.
It is likely that sites that appear for a small number of keywords yet achieve high overall rankings are targeting more keywords with higher search volumes, have higher rankings overall, or both.
Specialist sites, such as Cheapflights and Skyscanner, target relatively small numbers of keywords yet are obviously ranking well for a lot of important search terms.
Domain authority
Domain authority (DA) is generally accepted as one of the best measures of a website’s ability to rank for its target keywords.
This graph shows the DA of the most visible sites in order of organic search visibility ranking and, as expected, the more visible sites have a higher DA.
Domain authority vs. organic visibility
There are obviously a few exceptions to the rule though, such as Low Cost Holidays and Teletext Holidays, which achieve high visibility despite relatively low domain authority.
The report suggests that as they are online-only companies they likely have a targeted SEO strategy built around specific web content and aim to rank primarily for competitive keywords that generate high volumes of traffic and conversions.
Link acquisition
Link building is obviously a key part of any SEO strategy, so the most visible sites will likely have spent time creating interesting and useful content that results in a high number of quality links.
The report investigates how many new links each site built over a 90-day period according to Majestic SEO.
As expected, there is a correlation between the DA of a website and the number of links it has and the number it has acquired in the previous 90 days.
TripAdvisor once again performs well in terms of link acquisition, while Booking.com has a particularly high number of links relative to other sites and visibility; it’s much the same for EasyJet, British Airways, Ryanair and Hotels.com.
Digital Marketing Template Files
Overview
Digital Marketing Template Files
Authors: James Gurd, Econsultancy and other expert contributors
Files available: 11 file bundles, 50+ individual template files
File titles: See sample document for full breakdown of section and file information.
About these files
Need help with an area of digital marketing and don’t know where to start? This pack of downloadable files contains best practice templates that you can use in your digital marketing activities. Feel free to adapt them to suit your needs.
Contents
In this release we have 11 template bundles containing over 50 individual template files for digital marketing projects.
Download separate file bundles below:
- Affiliate Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Display Advertising
- E-commerce Projects
- Email Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing: PPC
- Search Engine Marketing: SEO
- Social Media and Online PR
- Strategy and Operations
- Usability and User Experience
- Web Analytics
There’s a free guide which you can download to find out more about exactly what is included.
Video SEO on a Budget: Quick & Dirty Tips
Videos are a powerful content marketing format. Ben Holbrook shows us how to get bigger & better results from your budget video SEO campaign.
Post from Ben Holbrook on State of Search
Video SEO on a Budget: Quick & Dirty Tips
The 100 Best Free SEO Tools & Resources for Every Challenge – Interactive
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
At Moz, we love using premium SEO Tools (especially our own). Paid tools are essential when you need advanced features, increased limits, historical features, or online support.
For other tasks, a free tool does the trick.
Below you’ll find an interactive list of 100 best completely free tools, tools with both free and paid options, and free trials. Simply select the checkbox for the area you’re working in, and view the tools forr that category.
Free Tools
Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool
http://www.removeem.com/ratios.php
Link Research, Technical SEO
Worried about Google’s Penguin algorithm hitting you for over-optimized anchor text? Simply type in your URL for a full report of which links might raise flags.
Bing Webmaster Tools
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster
Tools Suite, Diagnostic
Similar in function to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing offers a suite of interesting research tools and resources for webmasters.
Bitly
Social, Analytics
Most people use Bitly for URL shortening, but the real power of this platform comes from its analytics.
Boomerang
http://www.boomeranggmail.com/
Email, Productivity
Boomerang lets you follow up on emails, even when you forget. Great for link building or any time you send a lot of emails.
Buffer
Social
Optimize your online social media sharing. Buffer allows you to share with your audience at the optimal times for greater visibility.
BuiltWith
Competitive Intelligence
Use BuiltWith to discover what technology nearly any website was, well, built with. Great for competitive intelligence as well.
Buzzstream Tools Suite
http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building
Link Building, Tools Suite, Email
Most people know Buzzstream as an outreach platform, but they also offer a number of free link-building tools. This company gets it.
Caption Tube
http://captiontube.appspot.com/
Video
Free and easy resource used to create captions for YouTube. Helps with usability and offers viewers a readable transcript.
CircleCount
Social, Analytics
Google+ analytics ramped up. Free resource to track your followers and analyze your shares. See how many followers you’ve gained over time.
Content Strategy Generator Tool
http://seogadget.com/content-strategy-generator-tool-v2-update/
Content
This tool from SEOgadget helps you plan your content strategy intelligently, using keyword research and estimating your audience size.
Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML
Content, Productivity
Despite the rise of Google Docs, Word still dominates much of the world. Copying and pasting has always been a hurdle, but this tool makes it easy.
Copyscape
Content
Copyscape serves both as a plagiarism checker and a duplicate-content checker. Great to use if your content has been distributed across the web.
Domain Hunter Plus
Link Building
This magic extension for Chrome not only helps you find important broken links, but also tells you if the links point to an available domain.
Easel.ly
Infographics
Free tools for creating and sharing inforgraphics. The templates allow anyone to create a professional-looking graphic.
Email Format
Email, Productivity
Email Format helps you find the proper structure for thousands of companies and organizations across the web.
FindPeopleonPlus
http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/
Social
The ultimate Google+ directory that’s great for research, outreach, and link building. Sort by keywords, profession, country, and more.
Frobee Robots.txt Checker
http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check
Robots.txt, Technical SEO
Many robots.txt files contain hidden errors not easily visible to humans. Run your file through this tool and you never know what you’ll discover.
GetListed
Local, Moz
This awesome local SEO tool scores your local SEO visibility and gives you actionable next steps to raise your score.
Google Keyword Planner
http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner
Keyword Research
The tool to replace Google’s popular keyword tool has been derided by some, but still offers data not available anywhere else.
Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Analytics
The most popular of all the analytics tools available, Google Analytics continually innovates and sets the standard.
Google Analytics API
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008004?hl=en&ref_topic=1008008
API, Analytics
The Google Analytics API is great for building custom reports and tools, and also for pulling data straight into Excel or Google Docs.
Google Map Maker
http://www.google.com/mapmaker
Local
Among other things, Google Map Maker allows you to contribute to public map information, which may be shared and incorporated into Google Maps.
Google PageSpeed Insights
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
Speed
Tools, data, and insights to improve your page speed. Page speed is correlated with better rankings and user engagement, so this matters.
Google Public Data
http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory
Content
Drawing on vast public databases, Google public data offers a great starting point for content research, infographics, and more.
Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool
http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html
Technical SEO, CRO
That SEO Mofo! Use this tool to see how your snippet may appear in Google’s search results. Add structured data, review stars, and more.
Google Structured Data Testing Tool
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Structured Data, Technical SEO
If you use Schema.org microformats or any other type of structured data, this tool will verify your markup.
Google Trends
Keyword Research
See what’s trending in Google search results and view keyword search popularity over time. A must for trends.
Google Webmaster
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Tools Suite, Diagnostic
The interface recently received an overhaul, and Google Webmaster remains a must-have resource of diagnostic and health tools for site owners.
IFTTT
Productivity
IFTTT stands for IF This, Then That. The tool allows you to create automatic triggers between various apps, like Gmail and Twitter.
Infogr.am
Infographics
A great free Infographics resource that allows you to easily create graphics and data visualizations.
Internet Marketing Ninjas SEO Tools
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/tools/
Tools Suite
The Ninjas are some of the best SEOs and online marketers out there, and they’ve put some of their best tools online for free.
Linkstant
Link Building
This nifty analytics tool alerts you anytime someone links to your website. Great for outreach and intelligence gathering.
Linksy.me Email Guesser
Email, Link Building
Need to send an email, but you don’t have the recipient’s address? Type in what you know and this nifty tool will help you figure it out.
MailTester.com
Need to send an email to an untested address, but you don’t want to spam them? Check it first with this mail tester to verify.
MozCast
SERP Tracking, Moz
Want to know if Google is testing its algorithm this week? MozCast gives you a daily weather report to track changes in the SERPs.
MyBlogGuest
Link Building, Content
Guest blogging is still alive and thriving. MyBlogGuest helps you find the good opportunities out there.
Panguin Tool
http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
Analytics
This awesome tool connects with your Google Analytics account to help you see if and when you’ve been hit by Google Algorithm updates.
Pingdom
Speed
Pingdom offers an entire suite of speed tools to help analyze page load, DNS issues, and connectivity.
Piwik
Analytics
Piwik is a lightweight web analytics solution, and a great alternative to Google Analytics.
Rank Checker for Firefox
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/
Rank Tracking
This light and easy desktop tool checks rankings with the click of a button. Quick, easy and free.
Rapportive
Email, Link Building, Productivity
Rapportive works with your Gmail inbox to give you near-instant rich contact information for almost everyone you want to reach. A must-have for marketers.
Remove Duplicate Items
http://ontolo.com/tools-remove-duplicates
Productivity
Ontolo offers a suite of link building software and a few helpful productivity tools for link builders. The remove duplicates tool solves a common problem.
Robots.txt Checker
http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml
Robots.txt, Technical SEO
Use robots best practices and discover hidden errors in your robots.txt files that may cause search engine crawling problems.
Schema Creator
Structured Data, Technical SEO
Everyone loves using Schema.org, but the microformats are difficult to write by hand. This generator from the folks at Raven simplifies the task.
Scraper for Chrome
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/
Productivity
If you’ve never scraped a webpage, you’re missing out. Scraper for Chrome puts the power of simple web scraping in your hands without the need for code.
Seer Toolbox
http://www.seerinteractive.com/seo-toolbox/
Tools Suite, Analytics, Link Research
SEER opened up its internal toolbox for everyone in the world to use. These are the same tools used in-house at SEER, and they rock.
SEO Toolbar
http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/
Tools Suite, Toolbar, Technical SEO
On of the most popular tools available, The SEO Toolbar puts a ton of information at your fingertips including backlinks and competitive research.
SEO Tools for Excel
http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/
Tools Suite, Analytics, Social
You don’t need to be an Excel ninja to use Niels Bosma’s SEO Tools for Excel. This plugin does so many things many SEOs won’t work without it.
SEOgadget Links API
API, Link Research
The SEOgadget Links API lets you easily gather not only backlink data but contact information as well. A huge time saver.
SEOgadget Tools
Tools Suite
This suite of tools from the Gadget lab includes several Excel plugins, a content strategy generator, and more.
SEOQuake
Toolbar, Tools Suite, Technical SEO
More raw data than any other SEO toolbar out there.
SharedCount
Social, Analytics
Want to know how any piece of content was shared socially across the major services? This is the tool to use.
SharedCount API
http://www.sharedcount.com/documentation.php
API, Social
Harnessing the combined statistics of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and more, the SharedCount API puts a ton of social data at your fingertips.
Similar Page Checker
http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php
Content, Technical SEO
Use this tool to check for duplicate content issues. The Similar Page Checker will give you a score of how closely the HTML of two pages resemble each other.
Sitemap Generators
http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators
Sitemaps
Google offers a slew of free, top-notch sitemap generators. Most of these live on your server and generate new sitemaps automatically.
Social Authority API
https://followerwonk.com/social-authority
API, Social
How much reach and social authority do your followers have? How about the people you’re trying to connect with? The free Social Authority API will tell you.
Social Crawlytics
Social, Analytics
Social Crawlytics allows you to conduct competitive research by showing you your competitors’ most-shared content. Lots of other features as well.
Social Mention
Social
Social mention offers real-time social media search and analysis. Enter a search term and see who’s sharing what, right now.
Text Cleaner
Content
Some of the best tools solve the simplest problems. Text cleaner cleans up all kinds of text formatting when copying and pasting between aplications.
Ubersuggest
Keyword Research
Every SEO loves Ubersuggest for its ease of use and wealth of keyword research ideas. Utilizing the power of Google Suggest, it returns hundreds of potential results.
URI Valet
Technical SEO
A great tool for digging into server headers, canonical information, analyzing redirect problems and more.
Virante SEO Tools
http://www.virante.org/seo-tools
Tools Suite
Virant offers a number of high quality SEO tools to the public. These are often the same tools developed for the Virant team, opened up for public use.
Wayback Machine
http://archive.org/web/web.php
Competitive Intelligence
Want to see the history of your website or your competitor’s site? The Wayback Machine allows you to step back in time and track important changes.
WebPagetest
Speed
Quick and easy website speed tool. Offers suggestions for improving performance.
Wordle
Content
Create beautiful word clouds. Great for visualizations, graphics, and research.
Wordstream Free Keyword Tools
http://www.wordstream.com/free-keyword-tools
Keyword Research, Tools Suite
In addition to its paid offerings, Wordstream offers a suite of free keyword tools offering access to thousands of keyword suggestions.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Diagnostic, Technical SEO
Winner of the ugliest-SEO-tool-on-the-planet award, Xenu is also one of the most useful. Crawl entire sites, find broken links, create sitemaps, and more.
XML-Sitemaps.com
Sitemaps
XML-Sitemaps offers probably the easiest sitemap creation solution anywhere. Great for smaller sites when you need a sitemap in minutes.
Yahoo Pipes
Content, Productivity
A great mashup tool that combines different feeds into content and other magical creations. Used for link building and whatever you can dream of.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
Technical SEO
If you could only choose one WordPress plugin for you site, the first would be from Yoast, and so would the second. This one sets the standard.
YouTube Analytics
https://www.youtube.com/analytics
Video, Analytics
Offers video-specific analytics for YouTube videos. A must-have for YouTube video publishers.
Free and Paid
Ahrefs
Link Research, Link Building
One of the more popular link research tools, Ahrefs offers a large index and nice anchor text distribution charts. Mostly a paid tool, but they offer some free data.
Banana Tag
Banana Tag allows you to track your emails after you send them. For example, check your email open rates from Gmail.
CloudFlare
Speed
How do they make CloudFlare free? It works both as a CDN and a security service to provide your website with speed and safety.
Followerwonk
Social, Analytics, Moz
Perhaps the coolest thing about Followerwonk is the ability to track your followers. Smart SEOs also use it for outreach and research.
Keyword Eye
Keyword Research
Keyword eye adds a twist to keyword research by adding rich visualizations — essential when you want to move beyond keywords to valuable concepts.
KnowEm
Social
KnowEm allows you to check 100’s of social profiles at once to check availability. Looking for the perfect brand name? Check KnowEm first.
Majestic SEO
Link Research, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building
You’ve probably seen Majestic SEO link charts all over the Internet. Great crawling technology combined with several free options make for great link research.
Majestic SEO API
http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/majestic-seo-api-now-explained/
API, Link Research
Majestic makes much of its backlink data available for free via its API.
MozBar
http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar
Tools Suite, Toolbar, Moz
The standard SEO toolbar for legions of marketers, the MozBar allows you to perform over 50 key tasks right from your browser. Highly recommended.
Mozscape API
API, Link Research, Moz
Companies everywhere incorporate the Mozscape API into their own products, but it’s also available to individuals, and much of the data is free.
nTopic
Content
nTopic is one of the few proven methods for giving your content a relevancy score and offering keyword suggestions to improve it.
Open Site Explorer
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
Link Research, Moz, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building
When Google and Yahoo started removing backlink data from the public, Moz built Open Site Explorer to fill a huge need. See backlinks, anchor text, popularity metrics and more.
Piktochart
Infographics
A cute and easy infographic generator. No experience required.
RowFeeder
Social, Analytics
RowFeeder allows you to track social usernames, hashtags and keywords and load that information into Excel for easy social media monitoring.
Screaming Frog
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/
Diagnostic, Technical SEO
A powerful website crawling tool with a ton of features and customizations. A must-have for most serious SEOs.
Searchmetrics Visibility Charts
http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research
SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence
Track the search visibility of any website, in addition to tracking winners and losers in Google’s search results.
SEMrush
Tools Suite, Keyword Research, Competitive Intelligence
The paid and organic keyword data offered by SEMrush is often scary good and comprehensive. Also great for researching competitors’ ads.
SERPmetrics
SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence
SERPmetrics flux charts track the flux for US search results across Yahoo, Bing and Google over a 30-day period. A paid API is also available.
SimilarWeb
Competitive Intelligence
Impressive competitive intelligence across a number of online industries. Competitor website stats are hard to come by, but Similar Web does a good job.
StatCounter
Analytics
Free, quick, and lightweight analytics solution. Often used by those who want to avoid using Google Analytics for privacy reasons.
Trello
Productivity
Project management and tracking made simple. Used and endorsed by Moz.
Whitespark Local Citation Finder
https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/
Local
Finding local citations is key to local SEO. Whitespark offers a number of free and paid solutions to find the local citations to rise above the competition.
Whois Lookup
Competitive Intelligence
Find registration, contact, and administrative information for any domain.
Wistia
Video
The king of online video, Wistia offers SEO-friendly solutions for video hosting. Both free and low-cost options available.
Free Trials
Moz Analytics
Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Moz, Rank Tracking, Social
The flagship of the Moz software suite, Moz Analytics offers a dashboard of all your important marketing data in one place with actionable analytics for better marketing.
Optimizely
A/B Testing, CRO
Easy A/B testing and analytics to help you move toward success in your CRO efforts.
Raven
Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Content, Social
Raven offers a classic suite of SEO, content, and research tools popular with many marketers.
Visual Website Optimizer
https://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/
A/B Testing, CRO
Visual Website Optimizer allows you to run A/B tests with a simple online editor that lets you test content without knowing code.
Wordtracker
Keyword Research
A powerful keyword research suite used by many top marketers, Wordtracker offers a generous free trial option.
What’s your favorite free tool?
Narrowing a list down to the 100 best SEO tools and resources is not an easy challenge. Although I visited hundreds of webpages to compile this list, these four resources offered particular value:
- Annie Cushing’s Must-Have Tools for Marketers
- The Tools page at Inbound.org
- Dr. Pete’s APIs for Data-Driven Marketers
- Free SEO Tools – A Curated List
The format for this ultimate interactive post was inspired by Jon Cooper’s complete list of link building strategies. You should check it out — it’s a great post.
Despite researching hundreds of tools, a few great ones didn’t make the list. What’s your favorite free SEO tool? Let us know in the comments below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
The 100 Best Free SEO Tools & Resources for Every Challenge
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
At Moz, we love using premium SEO Tools (especially our own). Paid tools are essential when you need advanced features, increased limits, historical features, or online support.
For other tasks, a free tool does the trick.
Below you’ll find an interactive list of 100 best completely free tools, tools with both free and paid options, and free trials. Simply select the area you’re working in, and view all the tools listed in that category.
Free Tools
Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool
http://www.removeem.com/ratios.php
Link Research, Technical SEO
Worried about Google’s Penguin algorithm hitting you for over-optimized anchor text? Simply type in your URL for a full report of which links might raise flags.
Bing Webmaster Tools
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster
Tools Suite, Diagnostic
Similar in function to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing offers a suite of interesting research tools and resources for webmasters.
Bitly
Social, Analytics
Most people use Bitly for URL shortening, but the real power of this platform comes from its analytics.
Boomerang
http://www.boomeranggmail.com/
Email, Productivity
Boomerang lets you follow up on emails, even when you forget. Great for link building or any time you send a lot of emails.
Buffer
Social
Optimize your online social media sharing. Buffer allows you to share with your audience at the optimal times for greater visibility.
BuiltWith
Competitive Intelligence
Use BuiltWith to discover what technology nearly any website was, well, built with. Great for competitive intelligence as well.
Buzzstream Tools Suite
http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building
Link Building, Tools Suite, Email
Most people know Buzzstream as an outreach platform, but they also offer a number of free link-building tools. This company gets it.
Caption Tube
http://captiontube.appspot.com/
Video
Free and easy resource used to create captions for YouTube. Helps with usability and offers viewers a readable transcript.
CircleCount
Social, Analytics
Google+ analytics ramped up. Free resource to track your followers and analyze your shares. See how many followers you’ve gained over time.
Content Strategy Generator Tool
http://seogadget.com/content-strategy-generator-tool-v2-update/
Content
This tool from SEOgadget helps you plan your content strategy intelligently, using keyword research and estimating your audience size.
Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML
Content, Productivity
Despite the rise of Google Docs, Word still dominates much of the world. Copying and pasting has always been a hurdle, but this tool makes it easy.
Copyscape
Content
Copyscape serves both as a plagiarism checker and a duplicate-content checker. Great to use if your content has been distributed across the web.
Domain Hunter Plus
Link Building
This magic extension for Chrome not only helps you find important broken links, but also tells you if the links point to an available domain.
Easel.ly
Infographics
Free tools for creating and sharing inforgraphics. The templates allow anyone to create a professional-looking graphic.
Email Format
Email, Productivity
Email Format helps you find the proper structure for thousands of companies and organizations across the web.
FindPeopleonPlus
http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/
Social
The ultimate Google+ directory that’s great for research, outreach, and link building. Sort by keywords, profession, country, and more.
Frobee Robots.txt Checker
http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check
Robots.txt, Technical SEO
Many robots.txt files contain hidden errors not easily visible to humans. Run your file through this tool and you never know what you’ll discover.
GetListed
Local, Moz
This awesome local SEO tool scores your local SEO visibility and gives you actionable next steps to raise your score.
Google Keyword Planner
http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner
Keyword Research
The tool to replace Google’s popular keyword tool has been derided by some, but still offers data not available anywhere else.
Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Analytics
The most popular of all the analytics tools available, Google Analytics continually innovates and sets the standard.
Google Analytics API
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008004?hl=en&ref_topic=1008008
API, Analytics
The Google Analytics API is great for building custom reports and tools, and also for pulling data straight into Excel or Google Docs.
Google Map Maker
http://www.google.com/mapmaker
Local
Among other things, Google Map Maker allows you to contribute to public map information, which may be shared and incorporated into Google Maps.
Google PageSpeed Insights
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
Speed
Tools, data, and insights to improve your page speed. Page speed is correlated with better rankings and user engagement, so this matters.
Google Public Data
http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory
Content
Drawing on vast public databases, Google public data offers a great starting point for content research, infographics, and more.
Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool
http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html
Technical SEO, CRO
That SEO Mofo! Use this tool to see how your snippet may appear in Google’s search results. Add structured data, review stars, and more.
Google Structured Data Testing Tool
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Structured Data, Technical SEO
If you use Schema.org microformats or any other type of structured data, this tool will verify your markup.
Google Trends
Keyword Research
See what’s trending in Google search results and view keyword search popularity over time. A must for trends.
Google Webmaster
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Tools Suite, Diagnostic
The interface recently received an overhaul, and Google Webmaster remains a must-have resource of diagnostic and health tools for site owners.
IFTTT
Productivity
IFTTT stands for IF This, Then That. The tool allows you to create automatic triggers between various apps, like Gmail and Twitter.
Infogr.am
Infographics
A great free Infographics resource that allows you to easily create graphics and data visualizations.
Internet Marketing Ninjas SEO Tools
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/tools/
Tools Suite
The Ninjas are some of the best SEOs and online marketers out there, and they’ve put some of their best tools online for free.
Linkstant
Link Building
This nifty analytics tool alerts you anytime someone links to your website. Great for outreach and intelligence gathering.
Linksy.me Email Guesser
Email, Link Building
Need to send an email, but you don’t have the recipient’s address? Type in what you know and this nifty tool will help you figure it out.
MailTester.com
Need to send an email to an untested address, but you don’t want to spam them? Check it first with this mail tester to verify.
MozCast
SERP Tracking, Moz
Want to know if Google is testing its algorithm this week? MozCast gives you a daily weather report to track changes in the SERPs.
MyBlogGuest
Link Building, Content
Guest blogging is still alive and thriving. MyBlogGuest helps you find the good opportunities out there.
Panguin Tool
http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
Analytics
This awesome tool connects with your Google Analytics account to help you see if and when you’ve been hit by Google Algorithm updates.
Pingdom
Speed
Pingdom offers an entire suite of speed tools to help analyze page load, DNS issues, and connectivity.
Piwik
Analytics
Piwik is a lightweight web analytics solution, and a great alternative to Google Analytics.
Rank Checker for Firefox
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/
Rank Tracking
This light and easy desktop tool checks rankings with the click of a button. Quick, easy and free.
Rapportive
Email, Link Building, Productivity
Rapportive works with your Gmail inbox to give you near-instant rich contact information for almost everyone you want to reach. A must-have for marketers.
Remove Duplicate Items
http://ontolo.com/tools-remove-duplicates
Productivity
Ontolo offers a suite of link building software and a few helpful productivity tools for link builders. The remove duplicates tool solves a common problem.
Robots.txt Checker
http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml
Robots.txt, Technical SEO
Use robots best practices and discover hidden errors in your robots.txt files that may cause search engine crawling problems.
Schema Creator
Structured Data, Technical SEO
Everyone loves using Schema.org, but the microformats are difficult to write by hand. This generator from the folks at Raven simplifies the task.
Scraper for Chrome
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/
Productivity
If you’ve never scraped a webpage, you’re missing out. Scraper for Chrome puts the power of simple web scraping in your hands without the need for code.
Seer Toolbox
http://www.seerinteractive.com/seo-toolbox/
Tools Suite, Analytics, Link Research
SEER opened up its internal toolbox for everyone in the world to use. These are the same tools used in-house at SEER, and they rock.
SEO Toolbar
http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/
Tools Suite, Toolbar, Technical SEO
On of the most popular tools available, The SEO Toolbar puts a ton of information at your fingertips including backlinks and competitive research.
SEO Tools for Excel
http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/
Tools Suite, Analytics, Social
You don’t need to be an Excel ninja to use Niels Bosma’s SEO Tools for Excel. This plugin does so many things many SEOs won’t work without it.
SEOgadget Links API
API, Link Research
The SEOgadget Links API lets you easily gather not only backlink data but contact information as well. A huge time saver.
SEOgadget Tools
Tools Suite
This suite of tools from the Gadget lab includes several Excel plugins, a content strategy generator, and more.
SEOQuake
Toolbar, Tools Suite, Technical SEO
More raw data than any other SEO toolbar out there.
SharedCount
Social, Analytics
Want to know how any piece of content was shared socially across the major services? This is the tool to use.
SharedCount API
http://www.sharedcount.com/documentation.php
API, Social
Harnessing the combined statistics of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and more, the SharedCount API puts a ton of social data at your fingertips.
Similar Page Checker
http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php
Content, Technical SEO
Use this tool to check for duplicate content issues. The Similar Page Checker will give you a score of how closely the HTML of two pages resemble each other.
Sitemap Generators
http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators
Sitemaps
Google offers a slew of free, top-notch sitemap generators. Most of these live on your server and generate new sitemaps automatically.
Social Authority API
https://followerwonk.com/social-authority
API, Social
How much reach and social authority do your followers have? How about the people you’re trying to connect with? The free Social Authority API will tell you.
Social Crawlytics
Social, Analytics
Social Crawlytics allows you to conduct competitive research by showing you your competitors’ most-shared content. Lots of other features as well.
Social Mention
Social
Social mention offers real-time social media search and analysis. Enter a search term and see who’s sharing what, right now.
Text Cleaner
Content
Some of the best tools solve the simplest problems. Text cleaner cleans up all kinds of text formatting when copying and pasting between aplications.
Ubersuggest
Keyword Research
Every SEO loves Ubersuggest for its ease of use and wealth of keyword research ideas. Utilizing the power of Google Suggest, it returns hundreds of potential results.
URI Valet
Technical SEO
A great tool for digging into server headers, canonical information, analyzing redirect problems and more.
Virante SEO Tools
http://www.virante.org/seo-tools
Tools Suite
Virant offers a number of high quality SEO tools to the public. These are often the same tools developed for the Virant team, opened up for public use.
Wayback Machine
http://archive.org/web/web.php
Competitive Intelligence
Want to see the history of your website or your competitor’s site? The Wayback Machine allows you to step back in time and track important changes.
WebPagetest
Speed
Quick and easy website speed tool. Offers suggestions for improving performance.
Wordle
Content
Create beautiful word clouds. Great for visualizations, graphics, and research.
Wordstream Free Keyword Tools
http://www.wordstream.com/free-keyword-tools
Keyword Research, Tools Suite
In addition to its paid offerings, Wordstream offers a suite of free keyword tools offering access to thousands of keyword suggestions.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Diagnostic, Technical SEO
Winner of the ugliest-SEO-tool-on-the-planet award, Xenu is also one of the most useful. Crawl entire sites, find broken links, create sitemaps, and more.
XML-Sitemaps.com
Sitemaps
XML-Sitemaps offers probably the easiest sitemap creation solution anywhere. Great for smaller sites when you need a sitemap in minutes.
Yahoo Pipes
Content, Productivity
A great mashup tool that combines different feeds into content and other magical creations. Used for link building and whatever you can dream of.
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
Technical SEO
If you could only choose one WordPress plugin for you site, the first would be from Yoast, and so would the second. This one sets the standard.
YouTube Analytics
https://www.youtube.com/analytics
Video, Analytics
Offers video-specific analytics for YouTube videos. A must-have for YouTube video publishers.
Free and Paid
Ahrefs
Link Research, Link Building
One of the more popular link research tools, Ahrefs offers a large index and nice anchor text distribution charts. Mostly a paid tool, but they offer some free data.
Banana Tag
Banana Tag allows you to track your emails after you send them. For example, check your email open rates from Gmail.
CloudFlare
Speed
How do they make CloudFlare free? It works both as a CDN and a security service to provide your website with speed and safety.
Followerwonk
Social, Analytics, Moz
Perhaps the coolest thing about Followerwonk is the ability to track your followers. Smart SEOs also use it for outreach and research.
Keyword Eye
Keyword Research
Keyword eye adds a twist to keyword research by adding rich visualizations — essential when you want to move beyond keywords to valuable concepts.
KnowEm
Social
KnowEm allows you to check 100’s of social profiles at once to check availability. Looking for the perfect brand name? Check KnowEm first.
Majestic SEO
Link Research, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building
You’ve probably seen Majestic SEO link charts all over the Internet. Great crawling technology combined with several free options make for great link research.
Majestic SEO API
http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/majestic-seo-api-now-explained/
API, Link Research
Majestic makes much of its backlink data available for free via its API.
MozBar
http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar
Tools Suite, Toolbar, Moz
The standard SEO toolbar for legions of marketers, the MozBar allows you to perform over 50 key tasks right from your browser. Highly recommended.
Mozscape API
API, Link Research, Moz
Companies everywhere incorporate the Mozscape API into their own products, but it’s also available to individuals, and much of the data is free.
nTopic
Content
nTopic is one of the few proven methods for giving your content a relevancy score and offering keyword suggestions to improve it.
Open Site Explorer
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
Link Research, Moz, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building
When Google and Yahoo started removing backlink data from the public, Moz built Open Site Explorer to fill a huge need. See backlinks, anchor text, popularity metrics and more.
Piktochart
Infographics
A cute and easy infographic generator. No experience required.
RowFeeder
Social, Analytics
RowFeeder allows you to track social usernames, hashtags and keywords and load that information into Excel for easy social media monitoring.
Screaming Frog
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/
Diagnostic, Technical SEO
A powerful website crawling tool with a ton of features and customizations. A must-have for most serious SEOs.
Searchmetrics Visibility Charts
http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research
SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence
Track the search visibility of any website, in addition to tracking winners and losers in Google’s search results.
SEMrush
Tools Suite, Keyword Research, Competitive Intelligence
The paid and organic keyword data offered by SEMrush is often scary good and comprehensive. Also great for researching competitors’ ads.
SERPmetrics
SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence
SERPmetrics flux charts track the flux for US search results across Yahoo, Bing and Google over a 30-day period. A paid API is also available.
SimilarWeb
Competitive Intelligence
Impressive competitive intelligence across a number of online industries. Competitor website stats are hard to come by, but Similar Web does a good job.
StatCounter
Analytics
Free, quick, and lightweight analytics solution. Often used by those who want to avoid using Google Analytics for privacy reasons.
Trello
Productivity
Project management and tracking made simple. Used and endorsed by Moz.
Whitespark Local Citation Finder
https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/
Local
Finding local citations is key to local SEO. Whitespark offers a number of free and paid solutions to find the local citations to rise above the competition.
Whois Lookup
Competitive Intelligence
Find registration, contact, and administrative information for any domain.
Wistia
Video
The king of online video, Wistia offers SEO-friendly solutions for video hosting. Both free and low-cost options available.
Free Trials
Moz Analytics
Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Moz, Rank Tracking, Social
The flagship of the Moz software suite, Moz Analytics offers a dashboard of all your important marketing data in one place with actionable analytics for better marketing.
Optimizely
A/B Testing, CRO
Easy A/B testing and analytics to help you move toward success in your CRO efforts.
Raven
Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Content, Social
Raven offers a classic suite of SEO, content, and research tools popular with many marketers.
Visual Website Optimizer
https://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/
A/B Testing, CRO
Visual Website Optimizer allows you to run A/B tests with a simple online editor that lets you test content without knowing code.
Wordtracker
Keyword Research
A powerful keyword research suite used by many top marketers, Wordtracker offers a generous free trial option.
What’s your favorite free tool?
Narrowing a list down to the 100 best SEO tools and resources is not an easy challenge. Although I visited hundreds of webpages to compile this list, these four resources offered particular value:
- Annie Cushing’s Must-Have Tools for Marketers
- The Tools page at Inbound.org
- Dr. Pete’s APIs for Data-Driven Marketers
- Free SEO Tools – A Curated List
The format for this ultimate interactive post was inspired by Jon Cooper’s complete list of link building strategies. You should check it out — it’s a great post.
Despite researching hundreds of tools, a few great ones didn’t make the list. What’s your favorite free SEO tool? Let us know in the comments below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
.@ViperChill: great content is over-rated, Google still values spammy links + we are all blackhats
Probably what we already know and what we quietly tend to agree: The New SEO
read more
SearchCap: The Day In Search, July 30, 2013
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Google: Links In Press Releases Should Use Nofollow Like Paid Links Friday we broke the news that Google updated th…
Google+ Local Reviews Now Showing as SERP Pop-Ups – Goodbye Google+ Local Pages?
Not sure if I am seeing a test or if this is rolling out everywhere but now when I click on the “[#] Google reviews” link for a business from the SERPs, I am seeing a lightbox type of pop up display instead of being sent to the Google Plus Page for the business. Check […]
The post Google+ Local Reviews Now Showing as SERP Pop-Ups – Goodbye Google+ Local Pages? appeared first on Local SEO Guide.
Proven Paid, Earned and Owned Social Media Tactics – Nov. 20-21 in Las Vegas
Attend Search Engine Land’s SMX Social Media Marketing for two days of tactic-packed sessions on paid, earned, and owned social media. View the topic sneak peak agenda. All Access, Workshop, and Boot Camp passes currently available at our lowest rates. Register now to save!
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Authority Labs Review
There are quite a few rank tracking options on the market today and selecting one (or two) can be difficult. Some have lots of integrations, some have no integrations. Some are trustworthy, some are not.
Deciding on the feature set is tough enough bu…
Google Relaunches the Zagat Experience on the Web and for Mobile
Google has announced the relaunch of its rating and review site, Zagat, along with a mobile app for both Android and iPhone. With the relaunch, Zagat offers access to its rating information on local restaurants and nightlife without registration.
In-Depth Workshops at SMX Social Media Marketing – Best Rates Available Now
Attend a comprehensive workshop conducted by leading experts in internet marketing on November 19, immediately preceding SMX Social Media Marketing November 20-21 in Las Vegas. SMX Social Media Marketing registration is open and super early bird rates …
“No Data Available” In Google’s Links To Your Site Bug
It seems there are many webmasters complaining that the “Links To Your Site” section within Google Webmaster Tools is showing the error message…