10 tools to improve SEO + 5 WordPress SEO plugins

SEO is one of those we’ve come to love and hate at the same time. Many agencies boast about their SEO services and they don’t even swap columns to put the main content at the top, one of the most easiest and simplest SEO techniques. However, the SEO war gets tougher every time with more attention paid to things like canonical URLs, microformats, geolocation, sitemaps, domain age, and a long etcetera. In this post we will check 10 tools that will help you to analyze your blog and get some feedback about how you can optimize it. We will also explore 5 WordPress plugins that will improve the SEO friendliness of your site.

Online tools for SEO Analysis

pearanalytics

http://www.pearanalytics.com/

Another site analysis tool which offers complete information about page loading times, inclusion of Flash, redirections, sitemap, PR/Alexa ranking, domain age, checks for duplicate content, etc. pearanalytics maintains a blog with useful information covering a wide range SEO issues with tips and tricks to enhance your site’s SEO.

KeywordDensity

http://www.keyworddensity.com/

With this tool you will be able to analyze the ratio between specific keywords and other content on your site according to some keywords that you can enter before the analysis starts. In addition to usual Description and Keyword meta, it will explore your visible text, alt tags, comment tags, domain, images, and others looking for keywords relevant to those that you want to measure.

WebsiteGrader

http://websitegrader.com/

Although basic, the information presented is clear and easy to understand. Collects information regarding content, internal optimization, social networks buzz and Alexa ranking.

dnfame

http://www.dnfame.com/

Provides information about how well your domain performs on social bookmarking sites, search engines and its positioning on several rankings, such as PR, Alexa and Compete.

OpenSiteExplorer

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Offers complete and extensive information about your internal link structure, inbound links segmented by post, page or site root, redirections, etc.

Spider Viewer

http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/spider-test/index.php

The Spider Viewer will show you how robots assimilate your site’s content, including the visible text, any link found and the markup.

The Reaction Engine

http://www.reactionengine.com/

Analyses how well a certain URI performs for a given keyword or keyphrase. Analysis includes content, search engines positioning, XMHTL validation, page size. One issue found on this tool is that it will return the results for the first URI, redirected or not as it is found. So yourdomain.com might seem to perform poorly but in fact might be due to the redirection to http://www.yourdomain.com. Make sure you enter your correct base domain.

WooRank

http://www.woorank.com/

Maybe the best tool in this round-up, WooRank not only provides comprehensive analysis but also gives tips about how to fix it including links to relevant articles. The design is very clear and easy to read. This tool will analyze your site’s visits, content, the internal optimization (such as title, keywords), the external optimization (popularity, social network mentioning), usability, and even your downtimes, server location, whois, etc. In addition, this nifty tool is localized so you will get the report written on english, spanish and french, with information links pointing to resources written in those languages as well.

Social Mention

http://socialmention.com/

Although not strictly an analysis tool, gives a wide view of how is your domain appreciated in social networks, showing statistics for emotional feelings (I’m guessing through keywords) towards your site (or your product), top users mentioning it, top hashtags referring links and top keywords.

SEO Workers

http://www.seoworkers.com/

The analysis in this tool might be good, but it’s not clear and issues, whether good or bad are not easily spotted by the user. Still, it’s included here due to the comprehensive information next to each issue along with interesting videos from Matt Cutts.

Extra tool: Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html

This last tool offers an interface to create a Google snippet by entering your page title, meta description and URL, and preview it as it would look on Google’s search results.

WordPress Plugins for SEO enhancement

As a WordPress user, you might be wondering what are your options when it comes to enhance your website or your blog. Fortunately, there’s a myriad of plugins to enhance your website’s SEO performance, just browse the repository by the proper tags, like search engine optimization, or seo and you will find a ton. Here you have 5 plugins that will do the job perfectly

All in One SEO Pack

By default, WordPress doesn’t provides you with an easy way to set your description and keywords for each page or post. Providing a proper description about the post content and include targeted keywords is key for your site’s SEO strength. This plugin enhances your post/page writing area with a panel to enter a different title, description and keywords for each post. It also prevents duplicate content and sets canonical URLs. Works also with custom post types.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

SEO Friendly Images

Alt attributes on images are crucial for image search optimization, not to mention that they are crucial for a page to be considered XHTML-valid. This plugin generates tags for the alt and title attributes  for all your images using the post title and the image filename.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/

Search Engine query in WordPress

Most visitors arriving from search engines leave the site after consuming the content they were looking for. This plugin helps mitigating this user behaviour by suggesting related posts or pages based on the terms of their search query.

http://wordpress.org/…/search-engine-query-in-wordpress-related-contents/

Google XML Sitemaps

Generates the XML sitemap for better indexing of your blog by search engines, allowing them to know the structure of your site.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

SEO Smart Links

Aims to increase the internal link density of your website by suggesting links on specific words on your content and comments targeting other posts or pages of your site.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/

Extra: Simple Google Sitemap

A lighter version of Google XML Sitemaps which requires less resources like RAM memory on your servers.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-google-sitemap/

One last thing before closing: efficient SEO is not about cheating a search engine. Google’s algorithms are very smart and you won’t cheat them just by completely stuffing your posts with keywords. Good SEO is simply about being easy on search engines and expose all the content on your site in the most structured and clean way.