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| What are the Best Online Marketing Tools for This Year? |
If you have made a focus on search engine optimization (SEO) one of your priorities for 2013, then you have a number of possibilities at your disposal for making it happen. Hiring a professional SEO services company might be your ideal scenario, but the costs may prove to be prohibitive, especially if you are a small business. This doesn't mean you should dismiss the potential to improve your SEO performance. If you are able to give some time to your online marketing, a number of excellent programs can help you to achieve your aims.
We explored some of your options, most of which come with free subscriptions or an option to pay a small fee for much more capability. In addition, we looked briefly at what each one can do, so that you have the best chance of choosing the service, or group of services, that will help you see your SEO performance improve over the coming months.
Google AdWords
The first part of any SEO campaign should be keyword research, and using Google’s AdWords keyword tool is a great place to start to ensure you are targeting the most relevant keywords for your market.
Keyword Spy
This service is excellent for analyzing what your competitors are doing. You can track the keywords they are targeting and even how long optimization efforts appear to have been going on for.
Remember you aren't looking to ape your competitors. See what they’re doing well, and improve on it!
Google Webmaster Tools
Google are not only the kings of search, but also the best place to get advice around building yourself a high performing website. Google’s webmaster tools are a must for many when it comes to the on-going optimization and auditing of a site, providing you with coding suggestions, checking for broken links, and so much more.
SEOmoz
As well as offering some excellent optimization tools, SEOmoz is a brilliant resources website, so even if you don’t use a service make sure you bookmark it for great articles and advice from the word of search.
We’re here to look at the tools, however, and their SEO dashboard is one of the best in the business, perfect for novice website owners and experienced webmasters alike.
Ontolo
Link building is the cornerstone of any successful SEO campaign, and Ontolo is a great tool for helping you to do well in that regard. This tool checks sites against your keywords to discover the best and most relevant link building opportunities, including websites that will be best for you to offer guest posts to.
HootSuite
If social media is part of your SEO campaign – and it should be – then you want a site from which you can manage all of your interests. HootSuite is a great option that supports many social networks, with the premium account options allowing you to produce a multitude of analysis reports.
Google Analytics
We go back to Google for our final suggestion. Google Analytics will help you to track the performance of your SEO activities, and give you an indication of things that are working and what you could be doing better.
Using these tools, even an SEO rookie can quickly get their sites well optimized and moving up the search rankings. Try them out, and see the success they can bring to you.
This guest post was brought to you by the team at Bright Local who specialize in delivering the best SEO tools for businesses.
