The Google Penguin update has changed the way search engine optimization was practiced. Gone are the days when you simply created hundreds of backlinks. Today, SEO is more about quality than quantity. Still, you need to take care of the SEO of your website. The key here is to choose the best SEO tools that can effectively improve your website’s ranking. Here are the top 5 free SEO tools that can help you keep going.

Google Web Teacher Tools

The first is, without a doubt, from Google. With Google Webmaster Tools, you can monitor for broken links, crawl errors, navigation issues, and duplicate metadata. This unique tool can monitor the health of your website and make it error free. At the same time, you can use this tool to analyze how your site is doing with different keywords. You can separately check which page is ranking for a particular keyword. When you link your Google+ profile to webmaster tools, authoring can also be handled. Google webmaster is one of the best SEO tools that are available for free.

google analytics

While webmaster tools allow you to monitor the status of your website, Google Analytics is a perfect tool for analyzing your website traffic. Understanding where your visitors are coming from and what they are doing on your website allows you to optimize your site and improve conversion rates. Google Analytics offers real-time reporting, audience behavior, in-depth traffic analysis, and conversion reports. You can even know how each page is performing in search engine rankings. Google Keyword Planner is an important tool that can help you choose the right keywords for your business. Once you choose your keywords, you can use analytics to analyze how your site is performing for those keywords.

MOZ Toolbar and Open Site Explorer

Moz is a good search engine optimization tool that combines features of Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics and presents them with an intuitive and easy to use interface. While this is a paid version, you can download MOZ Toolbar which is free. This plugin extension is available for Chrome and Firefox. This toolbar provides advanced metrics like metadata, tags, link data, domain authority, page authority, and other elements on the page. MOZ Open Site Explorer is a powerful tool that allows you to check your website’s backlinks. While the paid version has more powerful features, you can still use the free version to check backlinks, competitor performance, and other off-page elements.

SEO optimization tool

It is obvious that meta tags, meta description and title have a good place in SEO. However, newbies don’t know what to type in these fields. This free SEO optimization tool optimizes your title description and meta tag. Enter your keywords and country and this tool will adjust your SEO tags. The site provides screenshots to help you understand how to use this SEO tool.

screaming frog

Screaming Frog is an SEO spider that can be installed on your desktop. While Screaming Frog is a paid tool that requires £99 per year, the site offers a free version with a crawl limit of 500 URLs. With this comprehensive SEO tool, you can get key in-site elements of a website to be audited, analyzed, and reviewed with an SEO perspective. You can export this data to an Excel sheet and monitor your SEO strategies.