Free SEO Tools and Plugins for Beginners

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SEO tools and plugins are software applications or extensions designed to assist website owners, marketers, and SEO professionals in optimizing their websites for better search engine rankings and overall online visibility.

These tools and plugins aim to analyze, track, and improve various aspects of a website’s performance, content, and technical setup to align with search engine algorithms and best practices.

SEO Tools

Keyword Research Tools: These tools help identify relevant keywords and phrases that users commonly search for, assisting in optimizing content and targeting the right audience.
On-Page Optimization Tools: These tools analyze web pages to ensure they meet SEO best practices, including title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, and keyword usage.
Backlink Analysis Tools: Backlinks (links from other websites to yours) are crucial for SEO. Backlink analysis tools assess the quality and quantity of backlinks to a site, aiding in link building strategies.
Rank Tracking Tools: These tools monitor a website’s search engine rankings for specific keywords over time, providing valuable insights into SEO performance.
Website Audit Tools: Website audit tools examine a site’s technical aspects, performance, and SEO-friendliness, identifying areas for improvement.
Competitor Analysis Tools: These tools help understand competitors’ SEO strategies, keyword rankings, and backlink profiles, providing a competitive edge.

SEO Plugins

Content Optimization Plugins: Plugins that analyze content for keyword usage, readability, and SEO elements, making suggestions for improvements.
XML Sitemap Generators: Plugins that automatically generate XML sitemaps, which help search engines crawl and index website content more efficiently.
SEO-friendly URL Optimizers: Plugins that structure URLs to be more user-friendly and SEO-friendly, improving search engine visibility.
Social Media Sharing Plugins: Integrating social media sharing buttons on web pages to facilitate content sharing and increase exposure.
SEO Analytics Plugins: Plugins that integrate with analytics tools to track website traffic, user behaviour, and SEO performance.

These tools and plugins play a vital role in enhancing a website’s SEO efforts, increasing organic traffic, and achieving higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Are you seeking efficient methods to streamline research and competitive analysis tasks? If so, these five convenient SEO tools and plugins, offered completely free of charge, can prove invaluable:

Data analysis: Copy Selected Links

Suppose you possess a spreadsheet with a collection of linked article titles, but you require adding the corresponding URLs in a separate column. Instead of the laborious process of right-clicking and copying each URL individually into new cells, you can streamline the task using the “Copy Selected Links” extension available for Chrome and Firefox.

Here’s how you can do it:

Copy the linked text from the spreadsheet.
Right-click and paste the copied text into the spreadsheet.
You now have a comprehensive list of URLs corresponding to the content you copied.

When to use “Copy Selected Links” extension:

If you are making edits across multiple pages on your website, the usual approach would be to log into your CMS, open each page, and then click on the “Edit” option. Alternatively, you might search for each page in the CMS dashboard and click on “Edit” for each one.

However, if your CMS is WordPress or a similar platform, you can often copy the list of pages, along with the “Edit” links, directly from your CMS dashboard and paste them into the same spreadsheet.

Using this method, you can:

Create a spreadsheet.
Select and copy all the pages to be edited in your CMS using Ctrl/Cmd + C.
Paste the list of linked pages into your spreadsheet.
Right-click the page titles in the spreadsheet and paste the live URLs into one column.
Right-click the “Edit” links and paste them into another column.

By following these steps and using the “Copy Selected Links” extension, you can efficiently populate the URL column and streamline your editing process.

Competitor research: Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is an underappreciated gem among free SEO tools. It not only allows you to access historical versions of your own website but also provides insights into your competitors’ changes.

While there are numerous tools and methods available for competitive SEO analysis, such as Fluxguard and Visualping, the Wayback Machine stands out as a cost-free option that works on any website. Additionally, it circumvents the problem of being blocked by a competitor’s firewall, which can happen when using your company’s VPN.

By utilizing this tool, you gain the ability to explore past versions of your competitors’ pages, observing their updates, tests, and reversions, including changes in design and layout elements, calls to action (CTAs), content and headline alterations, and keyword focus.

Moreover, Web Archives offers browser extensions for all major browsers, enabling you to instantly view page versions while you browse the web.

When to utilize it:

– Spot and monitor trends over time, or generate ideas to test on your own website.
– Utilize the Changes tab to track the evolution of a page over time, which can provide insights into competitors’ regular update patterns.
– For websites organized with a category or folder structure, the Sitemap tab offers a visual map of the site’s layout, especially useful for sites lacking an evident or public sitemap.
– If you lack access to previous versions of your page, consider sharing before and after screenshots as an alternative.

When it may not be applicable:

– The major drawback of the Wayback Machine is its inability to display pages that haven’t been previously archived.
– While the Archive is extensive, boasting 813 billion web pages in its collection, it doesn’t cover every webpage on the internet, amounting to around 18% of the estimated 4.5 billion indexed webpages.
– You can add any page to the archive yourself, ensuring it’s available for future reference, but historical data won’t be accessible beyond that point.

Design and layout: GoFullPage

With your spreadsheet now containing a comprehensive list of page links and corresponding edit links, there’s a convenient way to open all the “Edit” links in new tabs simultaneously, instead of individually opening each page.

To achieve this, you can use the “GoFullPage” Chrome browser extension, which enables you to capture a screenshot of an entire page in a single snapshot. This extension offers several advantages:

Capture entire pages on both desktop and mobile without the need to scroll and take multiple screenshots.
Save your screenshot in PDF or PNG format, or annotate it with notes before saving or sharing it.

When to use the “GoFullPage” extension:

Save search results for specific keywords to observe how the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) changes over time.
Compare SERP results side-by-side for users in different locations or using different devices.
Share before and after screenshots of page changes, aiding in visualizing alterations over time.
Conduct user tests with various versions of the same page without the requirement of a designer.

By leveraging the “GoFullPage” extension, you can efficiently capture full-page screenshots, making tasks like comparing SERP results or observing page changes much more convenient and productive.

Reformat content from an image: OneNote

OneNote serves as a reliable program for organizing notes and managing work-related tasks. Besides its well-known features, there’s a hidden gem: the ability to copy text from images.

To utilize this feature:

Insert any image into a OneNote page.
Right-click on the image.
Choose “Copy Text from Picture.”
Paste the extracted text into your Note using Ctrl/Cmd + V or right-click and select “Paste.”

While this functionality isn’t flawless in copying text, it can still be impressively accurate, particularly for images with structured text, reaching up to 80% accuracy.

However, it’s important to note that you might need to manually verify certain letters and numbers. Occasionally, OneNote may misinterpret characters like confusing a “1” for an “L,” for example. Despite this limitation, the text extraction feature proves incredibly useful for various purposes.

When to use the image-to-text feature in OneNote:

This functionality proves valuable in multiple scenarios:

1. Extracting content from an image: You can use this feature to pull out data or information from an image, allowing you to analyze the data or convert it into on-page content.

2. Enhancing accessibility: Since Google and screen readers cannot read content directly from images, even with proper alt text, it’s crucial to include the same information in a more readable format. Utilize this tool to convert images, such as diagrams or tables, into text, or provide both an image and an HTML table on your page for improved accessibility.

3. Versatility and availability: The image-to-text feature is accessible with both the free and premium versions of OneNote. Additionally, OneNote is compatible with both PC and Mac, allowing users from various platforms to benefit from this tool.

Research and data formatting: Docs Online Viewer

Performing an advanced web search using the “filetype:pdf” query is immensely valuable when seeking specific data types, such as sample files and reports. However, some websites necessitate downloading PDFs instead of allowing direct browser viewing, making the process less seamless. Although you can open PDFs in Chrome from your Privacy and Security settings, this approach isn’t entirely foolproof.

To enhance your experience with PDFs, there’s an effective solution: “Docs Online Viewer,” a browser extension available for both Chrome and Firefox. This extension adds a linked cloud icon next to any PDF you encounter. By clicking on this icon, you can easily view the PDF directly in your browser, saving you from the hassle of downloading files first.

When to use the “Docs Online Viewer” extension:

1. The most obvious use case is to avoid downloading PDFs before determining if the content is useful. The extension enables instant previewing without the need for downloads.
2. In certain instances, this plugin allows you to view PDFs that are behind email signup buttons, ensuring you can access the content without providing your email address.
3. Viewing PDFs in your browser also allows you to combine this extension with others. For example, you can utilize it alongside “Copy Selected Links” to copy all URLs in a database of links.

By employing the “Docs Online Viewer” extension, you streamline your interaction with PDFs, ensuring convenient and efficient access to valuable content without unnecessary downloads or email disclosures.

Maximize the benefits of your SEO tools.

To maximize the potential of your SEO tools, foster collaboration by sharing the top-performing tools and valuable tips you’ve discovered with your team, clients, and peers.

SEO professionals thrive on experimentation, so make an effort to explore novel tools and features whenever the opportunity arises. By doing so, you can amass a wealth of knowledge and insights to pass on to others, contributing to the growth and success of the entire SEO community.

Would you like to read more about free SEO tools and plugins for beginners-related articles? If so, we invite you to take a look at our other tech topics before you leave!

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