Small Business SEO Tools

Internet marketing and basic search engine optimisation for businesses is the key to get more visitors.But what should you be doing to give your business the best chance of getting ahead of the local competitors?

In order to get more traffic on your website, you should always consider optimizing your website, so that search engines can pick it up quickly. There are some useful tools which you can use from the beginning that will make your website to be discovered by search engines:

1. Google WebMaster Tools

Webmaster tools give you the ability to improve your target keywords for search results by providing indexing issues, keyword visibility, impressions, time spent on your site, average position of search terms, and the click through rate. You can even set up goals, such as converting a browser into a customer.

2. Google Insights for Search

Another great tool from Google is their Insights for Search tool. This allows you to input any keyword and see the distribution of how heavily that keyword is searched in areas, ranging from the whole globe down to the city level. Insights also provides a list of other relevant terms that gain search traction for that topic.

3. URI Valet

URI Valet is the Swiss Army Knife of SEO. This tool is great for performing technical audits and gives the user statistics on server headers, the time it takes to download, internal links, external links, object details, as well as a text to HTML ratio.

4. Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Another great tool for site audits that downloads directly to your desktop is Xenu’s Link Sleuth. This tool analyzes your site and gives you a report on any broken links, lost mail servers, and the type of code that is being used on specific pages. Not only is this tool great for site audits, but can be an amazing resource when scraping your site for link building opportunities.

5. SEO Browser

SEO Browser breaks down a web page into a text file that easily allows you to see the layout of the page, from the title tag to the H1 headers and so on. This is a great tool when looking for a quick report on page structure information.

6. Rank Checker

When you want to check multiple rankings and have little time, the Rank Checker tool offers a quick and easy interface that allows you to check where a site ranks on Google. This tool runs directly off your browser, which can pose a couple problems. One, localization of search results can affect true search results, and two, if you are signed into a personal browser account, it will use your previous browsing history and tendencies. Negatives aside, this is a great tool for quickly checking where sites rank for the keyword you input.

7. SEO Toolbar from SEOmoz

Possibly my personal favorite of all the SEO tools I use is the MozBar. This tool gives you an instant look at the page authority and domain authority of the page you are on and even offers an in depth link analysis for anyone mining for quality links.

8. Shared Count

Shared count moves away from the traditional SEO techniques and into the social side of SEO. Shared count gives the user the numbers of Facebook likes, Tweets, Google +1’s, Diggs, LinkedIn shares, Google Buzz’s, and stumbles on StumbleUpon. Not only does it show your social status, but it has an open API so you can build specific tools to build on your social statistics.

Building a high-ranking site not only involves onsite metrics, but finding great linking opportunities outside of your site. With these amazing tools and some practice, you can start building awareness through optimizing your current webpage as well as finding great off site linking opportunities.