Nearly every week someone asks us "what is the best tool for SEO" and this inspired us to write this short article.
Nearly every week someone asks us "what is the best tool for SEO" and this inspired us to write this short article.
Many of these businesses have been paying hundreds of pounds per month to various agencies and for online tools, but are amazed to find out that the best tools are actually available for free.
The most popular online tools will give you a snippet of information, until you set up a monthly subscription. They will then send people in circles, report on hundreds of minor issues and have you chasing your tail.
Paying for SEO scores, broken link and referring link reports are nice but they only play a tiny part in the real world among millions of other websites.
The free methods below are used by the world's top professionals and our team have been using some for over 15 years.
(1) Among the youngest of our top free website checkers is Google’s very own PageSpeed Insights. We use this every day and it is the most accurate and targeted tool.
If any of your website's scores are below 80% or 90%, then this needs addressing first, otherwise you will be wasting time and money fixing the small stuff.
(2) One of our simpler but more manual favourites is to view the source code of your website and see how many pages of code the website creates. You can view your website’s homepage code by right clicking your site and clicking View Source and see how many pages it would create if printed.
If each of your pages produces more than 2 or 3 pages if printed, this is an indicator that the code is too long. This is often due to messy templates and bad plugins. Multiple pages of code lead to additional load times and additional code for search engines to wade through, sometimes blocking them from what they need to index before they time out and skip to the next site (in summary: quality x speed = score).
(3) Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and he didn't just stop there. He set-up W3C to continuously improve the standard of the Internet and websites within it.
W3C provide a free service to check websites and although coding experience is needed to fix most issues, it is among one of the best for a free overview.
When you run this site checker pay particular attention to Errors and Fatal Errors as these are the most important. Experienced developers use this tool frequently and value its worth (It even has a broken link checker).
https://www.w3.org/developers/tools/
Performing any of these free tests will give you the most honest and high level view of the quality of your website. These are the important items to address before you embark on your website travels or pay for online tools that are unlikely to remedy any of your site’s main and structural issues.
