Best SEO Software

What is the Best SEO Software?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is used for organic search marketing. SEO software helps to improve the ranking of websites in search engine results without paying for placement. These tools provide SEO insights to businesses through features such as trend analysis, backlink tracking, and keyword analysis. They can be used to identify and implement the best strategies to improve a website’s search ranking. Many apps also offer analysis of competitor data and industry trends. SEO tools and SEO Software is used by SEO experts, along with marketing and product teams to identify areas for improvement on websites that can improve rankings in leading search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The best SEO software tools also offer features to analyse ad placement, conversion metrics, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and paid search optimization. Start by checking our leader MOZ Local, and other recommended solutions in this category.

SEO Software Tools:

1. Moz Localis a cloud hosted SEO platform built for link analysis and content marketing. It offers an array of basic as well as advanced research tools to help you optimize your search rankings.

Among its core features are:

• SEO keyword generator and keyword research
• Link analysis and quality link building
• Competitor tracking/competitive analysis
• Weekly crawls and rank tracking
• On page recommendations
• Online marketing guides
• Open site explorer

SEMrush

As SEMrush provides valuable engagement information, digital marketers are better armed to position the brands they work with higher in the search engine rankings and in the consciousness of their target market via other media and tactics. Moreover, SEMrush enables marketing professionals to gain leverage over their competition by giving them valuable insight into what their consumers and prospects are interested in. Once they have identified those topics, they can use them in creating more engaging content.

SERPstatis

SERPstatis an SEO software designed for businesses looking to improve their marketing, search analytics, and content marketing performance, among others. It lets you determine how optimized your websites are compared to those of your competitors.

Its features include the following:

• Search analytics
• Advertising analysis
• Keyword research
• Competitor research
• Rank tracking
• Market intelligence
• On-page audit
• Reports

AgencyAnalyticsis an SEO software reporting platform designed for marketing agencies. It provides automated reporting, social analytics, custom branded dashboards, SEO auditing, mobile apps, and more.

You can count on it for:

• SEO rank tracking
• Local and global rank tracking
• Website SEO performance monitoring
• Daily accurate refresh
• Keyword research
• Competitor tracking
• Automated reporting
• Backlink monitoring
• Custom branded dashboard and reports

The important thing to consider when it comes to SEO software is how it can help you pinpoint and apply the best strategies to improve website search ranking. It should be easy to use and provide capable tools to assist you in your SEO goals.

SEO Cost

Factors that Influence the Cost of SEO:

• The industry you are in, for example, the insurance industry (very competitive) VS selling plants online (slightly competitive)
• Number of competitors online for relevant keywords
• Your competitor’s SEO strategies
• Your website development (is it built or aligned to what search engines are looking for?)
• Website size (small company profile website or a large website with lots of content)
• Competitiveness of keywords targeted on the various search engines
• Website scripts such as AJAX or Javascript which prohibits search engines from indexing or crawling your website.

Whenever someone is thinking about incorporating an SEO campaign in their overall marketing strategy, one of the first questions that online business owners typically ask is “How much does an SEO campaign cost?” While the question remains the same from one owner to the next, the answer often varies since businesses tend to differ, even within the same industry.

HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU INVEST?

Any ethical and results-driven SEO agency will need to know three specific factors before determining the cost of your SEO campaign, namely your business, industry, and marketing goals by taking these factors into consideration along with your marketing budget, you’ll be able to determine how much you should invest.

Your business – defines the scope of investment in the campaign. SEO agencies must understand the following:

• Geographical market (local, national, or worldwide)
• Products or services offered (the more you have to offer, the larger the investment)
• Target marketing (does your business target multiple markets or is it more of a niche or vertical business?)

Your industry – this is another factor that will influence the cost of your SEO services. Based on the type of industry, you may have to invest less or more to reach your business goals. Two factors that impact the size of the investment are how competitive your industry is and how effectively you leverage your SEO.

Your marketing goals – this is probably the most influencing factor of the three where the cost of SEO services is concerned. The term “SEO” is all-encompassing in that it can help you become an industry leader, help you improve your sales conversion rate, help you increase the amount of visitor traffic you receive, and so on. Naturally, each one of these goals carries its own price tag.

Granted, the cost of your SEO campaign is influenced by these three factors. However, knowing the ethical and results-driven averages within your industry will enable you to budget for future campaigns.

VARIABLES AND PRICING MODELS

When determining the cost of SEO services, there are 3 variables to consider including:

• Where you are currently or your situation
• Where you want to be or your objectives
• How quickly you want to get there or your timeline

There are typically 4 pricing models for SEO services and just like with any type of business or industry, quality isn’t guaranteed. These include:

• Fixed-rate projects
• Hourly consulting
• Monthly retainers
• Project pricing

Website Submission

Also known as search engine registration or search engine submission, website submission is the submission of a URL to a Directory or Search Engine for inclusion in its Index. Registration is usually free but can also require payment. Website submission is a basic but important part of Search Engine Optimization.

Information

• At a minimum, submitting to a search engine involves adding the URL of the site or page that will be under consideration. Search engines sometimes ask for additional contact information, including name and/or email address.
• Policies for adding URLs vary among various search engines. Some search engines only ask for the main URL of a site, claiming that the rest of the site will be spidered; others require the submission of individual pages. Variation also exists about how often URLs may be added, as some engines have tried to discourage bulk submissions to minimize spamming.
• Submitting sites/pages can be done manually or in an automated manner. Manual submission involves going to each of the “Add URL” pages and filling out the form fields individually. Automatic submission involves filling out information only one time; the necessary information is then used by a software program to submit to many search engines.
• Confusing search engine submission with search engine optimization is a common mistake. The mere act of submitting does nothing to optimize the pages in question and achieve higher rankings. In fact, submitting poorly-optimized pages can do more harm than good.

Google SEO Tools

1. Google Page Speed Insights

Check the speed and usability of your site on multiple devices

Enter a URL, and this tool will test the loading time and performance for desktop and for mobile, plus identify opportunities to improve (and pat you on the back for what you’re doing well). The mobile results also come with a user experience score, grading areas like tap targets and font sizes.

2. Moz Local Listing Score

See how your local business looks online

Moz crunches data from more than 15 different sources—including Google, Foursquare, and Facebook—to score your brick-and-mortar business on how it looks online. Results come complete with actionable fixes for inconsistent or incomplete listings.

3. Keywordtool.io

700+ keyword ideas based on a single keyword

Enter a keyword, and the Keyword Tool provides a huge handful of long-tail keyword opportunities, organized alphabetically.

4. Google Analytics

Complete web stats and search insights

In addition to tracking pretty much every bit of traffic you could imagine on your website, Analytics also surfaces many keyword insights as to which terms people use to land on your pages.

5. Google Webmaster Tools + Bing Webmaster Tools

Constant website analysis, alerts, and error reports

These webmaster tools help give you a taste of what the two top search engines think of your site. It’s helpful to see any bugs, alerts, and indexing issues.

Pro tip: Each of these two tools requires a bit of installation on your site. If you’ve got a WordPress website, you can add the webmaster code automatically through a plugin like Jetpack or Yoast.

6. Open Site Explorer

Comprehensive link analysis

The free version of Open Site Explorer gives you a quick look a full range of link analysis, including a look at the most impactful links coming your way and your most linked-to pages.

7. Google Keyword Planner

Know what people search for

Enter a keyword or group of keywords into the tool, and Google will return all sorts of helpful stats to guide your keyword strategy: monthly search volume, competition, and even suggested terms you might not have considered

8. Google.com in an Incognito Window

Discover auto-fill opportunities

Searching Google.com in an incognito window will bring up that all-familiar list of autofill options, many of which can help guide your keyword research. The incognito ensures that any customized search data Google stores when you’re signed in gets left out. Incognito may also be helpful to see where you truly rank on a results page for a certain term.

9. Google Trends

Changes in search volume for key terms

A quick browse or search through Google Trends can show you the hockey-stick rise of potential terms and SEO opportunities for your content.

10. Quick Sprout Website Analyzer

Full analysis of your website

The Quick Sprout tool does a comprehensive look at just about everything: SEO optimization, speed, tags, keywords, social, links, and even competitor comparisons.

WEB SEO

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation or SEO refers to the process of improving the position that your website appears at in the “organic” search results returned by sites such as Google.

As a rule of thumb, sites that appear higher up in the results will get more traffic to their pages, and so potentially more business. Your goal is to get to page one and ideally to position one, but whether that is feasible largely depends on the market that you are operating in. If you’re in the mobile phone space or travel, you’ll be fighting a losing battle unless you’ve got a sizeable budget to spend. However, if you’re offering a niche product or a service in a defined geographical area, you stand a pretty good chance of at least getting to page one if you are patient and follow these basic principles.

Keyword rich content

One of the key tools that search providers such as Google and Microsoft (Bing) employ to determine your rankings are “spiders”. A spider is a piece of software that crawls the web in a methodical, automated manner. They browse your website (and everyone else’s) to identify the actual copy written on the page along with things like use of key words and phrases. This data is then used to determine the relevance of your site when someone enters a keyword or phrase into Google, Bing or any other search engine.

You need to consider the search habits of your target audience and ensure that the terms they might use to find your business are reflected on your pages. For example, if you offer physiotherapy services, your website content should include words or phrases that people may search for, such as “massage”, or specific problems such as “lower back pain”. Remember that text included in images cannot be crawled by spiders, although alternative text associated with the images is, so you may wish to revisit the design of some of your pages.

A useful free tool for identifying your keywords is the AdWords keyword tool. This is designed to help prospective advertisers identify the most relevant keywords for their chosen market, but it is also very helpful when writing copy for your website. Once you have identified your keywords, ensure that they appear in the body of your pages, as well as in the metadata of your page, which is the unseen data that gives the spiders key information about your page. This can either be done by yourself, with a little knowledge of HTML and access to your server, or it can be done by your web designer.

Keep it fresh

The rate at which search engine spiders crawl your site is in part determined by how frequently the content of your pages change. You may want to create a monthly task to change text, images, or add or remove pages, to ensure that your content is regularly updated. Alternatively, set up a blog on your site and allocate time each day (or week) to write or curate some content that is relevant to your target market. This might seem onerous or daunting, but once you get into the habit it becomes second nature and shouldn’t take more than about half an hour a day. For reference material – which should always be credited – use Google Alerts to keep up to date with online content that matches your keywords.

Keeping up to date with SEO

The algorithms used by Google and Microsoft to determine the order of their results are subject to tweaks and improvements as they attempt to deliver ever more accurate search results. As a result, SEO is something of a moving feast and it pays to stay up to date. That said, these basic principles are unlikely to change significantly as they are key determinants of your ranking.

Google Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO? 

SEO refers to search engine optimization, or the process of optimizing a website to make it easy to find via search engines like Google.

So how do you optimize your site content for Google SEO? Fast Forward Marketing leads the way!

Google SEO Basics: Keyword Research

Ideally, it’s best to do your keyword research before you start writing content. This lets you know which keywords to focus on in your content. It’s best to use a mixture of broad and long-tail keywords.

Google SEO: On-Page Optimization

After you complete your Google SEO keyword research and have a list of Google SEO keywords you want to target, it’s time to write! Your SEO keywords need to appear in your content – just don’t overdo it or your content will look spammy.

Place your most valuable keywords in:

• Body of the text. No brainer, right? Remember not to just use the same keywords over and over again. Add in modifiers (ex. “best”, “top”) and long-tails.
• Title. Having the keyword in your title will improve your CTR from the SERP. (See our title tag guide for more help with writing SEO-friendly titles.)
• Subheads. Subheadings/H2 headings are valuable spots for Google SEO keywords.

Your work is not over yet! Don’t forget to add Google SEO keywords into the:

• Meta title: The Meta title appears in search engine results. Use some solid keyword here.
• Meta description: This description appears below your link in Google. Write an engaging Meta description that includes relevant keywords to boost your click-through rate.
• Image file names/ALT attributes: First, include pictures in your Google SEO content! Pictures are attractive and appealing for readers, and Google also likes them. Use the keyword in the file names (e.g., how-to-catch-fish.jpg). Also use the ALT attribute to tell search engines and users what the picture is with a keyword.
• Anchor text: Link to your new page from several other pages on your site, using your keyword as the anchor text. This makes it easy for Google crawlers to find and rank your page.

Google Optimize

Google Optimize is an online split-testing tool from Google that plugs into your website and enables you to experiment with different ways of delivering your content. It facilitates three types of testing – A/B testing, multivariate testing, and redirect tests. Optimize is typically used for conversion rate optimization (CRO).

How does Google Optimize work?

There are two key elements to Google Optimize:

• An Editor, which lets you create altered versions of your pages, to test different HTML content options against one another (e.g. in Version A, the web page shows a green CTA button; in Version B, the same button is yellow). The Editor works with a range of device type views, including mobile.
• A Reporting suite, which uses data from your linked Google Analytics account to provide insight into the experiments you set up using the Editor. The Editor is where you can see, for example, whether Version A or Version B got the best click-through rate.

The Editor and Reporting suite are used together to setup and analyse experiments into what works best on your web page.

How to get Google Optimize

There’s also an enterprise version of the tool – Google Optimize 360 – which carries a subscription fee. However, we recommend sticking to the free version while you’re getting started. Optimize is currently available in 37 languages, which makes it an ideal choice if you’re collaborating on your CRO experiments with colleagues around the world.

Digital Marketing Specialist

Traditional advertising is no longer as effective as it used to be. Companies must now provide meaningful content to consumers and allow themselves to be found quickly and easily online. A digital marketing specialist is someone who works alongside a company’s marketing team to identify a target market, create a brand image, and create and maintain a marketing campaign for the internet and for digital technologies. Marketing specialists can choose to specialize in certain areas, such as search engine optimization (SEO), paid search (PPC), display media, social media and shopping feeds. Additionally, they can have a more general digital marketing expertise and can still be referred to as a digital marketing specialist.

What does a Digital Marketing Specialist do?

The digital marketing specialist role has similar objectives and goals as a marketing professional – to increase brand awareness, promote company products or services and to drive prospects to conversions. Unlike using the more traditional marketing channels, digital marketers effectively communicate through appropriate technology platforms. Digital marketing specialists work to initiate effective marketing campaigns online, and to translate business goals into successful marketing campaigns. They are adept at evaluating the needs of the consumer market, and will understand how and where to acquire knowledge about consumer trends and demands. Digital marketing specialists are responsible for developing the strategy used in marketing a company’s product online. This is done by putting together various online promotions and e-mailing campaigns to get their company’s message out, and by performing consumer research to discover other ways of reaching customers by way of the Internet.

Black Hat SEO

What Is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO refers to a set of practices that are used to increase a site or page’s rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines’ terms of service. The term “black hat” originated in Western movies to distinguish the “bad guys” from the “good guys,” who wore white hats (see white hat SEO. Recently, it’s used more commonly to describe computer hackers, virus creators, and those who perform unethical actions with computers. Black Hat SEO is most commonly defined as a disapproved practice that nevertheless could increase a page’s ranking in a search engine result page (SERP). These practices are against the search engine’s terms of service and can result in the site being banned from the search engine and affiliate sites. A list of tactics and strategies employed by black hat SEO practitioners have been openly denounced on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Ask yourself:

“Is the work that I’m doing adding value to the user or am I just doing this for search engines to see?” is a litmus test on whether an SEO tactic would go against a search engine’s webmaster guideline. If no value is added to the user, but rankings are likely to increase, then your decisions are highly likely to be black hat. The same test can be applied to paid search practices to determine whether an activity is considered black hat PPC.

How to Report Black Hat SEO:

There are two reasons why you may report black hat SEO. Either your website has been attacked through a malicious hack, virus or negative SEO campaign of spammy links, or you see spammy web results on a competitive keyword your website is ranking on. For the latter, you may file a web spam report through Google Webmaster Tools. Please use this tool with discretion. SPAM does not stand for search positions above mine! Falsely reporting web spam could be considered black hat SEO.

In the event that your website has been attacked through a malicious hack, virus, or malware, request for a malware review after you’ve removed the malicious code. If your website is the target of a negative SEO campaign of spammy links, use the Disavow Links Tool in Google Webmaster Tools after you’ve tried to contact webmasters whom are pointing these links to your website to have them removed.

Why Should You Avoid Black Hat SEO? 

Black Hat SEO tactics can get your website banned from Google and other search engines. Though there may be some short-term success through increased traffic to your site, Google penalties are getting more and more sophisticated and can have devastating effects on your rankings and traffic. With hundreds of millions of users searching on Google per day, can you really afford to be de-indexed?

Are Black Hat SEO Techniques for You?

It depends: Are you trying to build a long-lasting business? If your answer is yes, you should avoid Black Hat SEO at all costs. Rather, you should look for alternative means of improving your search engine rankings.

What is SEO Marketing?

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. SEM may incorporate search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC) listings.

Search engine marketing uses at least five methods and metrics to optimize websites.

Keyword research and analysis involves three “steps”: ensuring the site can be indexed in the search engines, finding the most relevant and popular keywords for the site and its products, and using those keywords on the site in a way that will generate and convert traffic. A follow-on effect of keyword analysis and research is the search perception impact. Search perception impact describes the identified impact of a brand’s search results on consumer perception, including title and Meta tags, site indexing, and keyword focus. As online searching is often the first step for potential customers, the search perception impact shapes the brand impression for each individual.

Website saturation and popularity, or how much presence a website has on search engines, can be analysed through the number of pages of the site that are indexed by search engines (saturation) and how many backlinks the site has (popularity). It requires pages to contain keywords people are looking for and ensure that they rank high enough in search engine rankings. Most search engines include some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. The following are major tools measuring various aspects of saturation and link popularity: Link Popularity, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Market leap’s Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation.

Back end tools, including Web analytic tools and HTML validators, provide data on a website and its visitors and allow the success of a website to be measured. They range from simple traffic counters to tools that work with log files and to more sophisticated tools that are based on page tagging (putting JavaScript or an image on a page to track actions). These tools can deliver conversion-related information. There are three major tools used by EBSCO: (a) log file analysing tool: Web Trends by NetIQ; (b) tag-based analytic tool: WebSideStory’s Hitbox; and (c) transaction-based tool: Tealeaf RealiTea. Validators check the invisible parts of websites, highlighting potential problems and many usability issues and ensuring websites meet W3C code standards. Try to use more than one HTML validator or spider simulator because each one tests, highlights, and reports on slightly different aspects of your website.

Whois tools reveal the owners of various websites and can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues.

Google Mobile-Friendly Website Checker: This test will analyze a URL and report if the page has a mobile-friendly design.

Search engine marketing is a way to create and edit a website which can be relative to the search engines than other pages. It should be also focused on keyword marketing or pay-per-click advertising (PPC). The technology enables advertisers to bid on specific keywords or phrases and ensures ads appear with the results of search engines.