Here is a list of free On-Page SEO tools that can help you increase your ranking in SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). If you are not yet serious or don’t have enough money or running a pilot blogging project, there are plenty of free effective SEO tools, applications or plugins that can be handy. Learning SEO has its own learning curve and every digital marketing expert must learn SEO at some stage of their work. But in the meanwhile, use these tools to get by in your day to day blogging requirements.
When it comes to On-Page SEO optimization, newcomers are often burdened with tones of advice, plugins, and recommendations. There are plenty of paid and free On-Page SEO Tools available for optimization. Here I would politely request the new blogger, to not worry much about SEO in the early stages and spend most of the time creating original and plagiarism free content. SEO has its own learning curve. I am not saying to ignore it, but I am emphasizing it to keep learning it bit by bit rather than to spend weeks learning it and not creating good quality content.
Another thing I have come across from my own experience is that unless and until you have considerable command with SEO, don’t tinker with coding or robots.txt file. Take this as a prescription and not just advice. You’ll thank me for that. All the tools which I have mentioned below are effective. But the question is can you interpret them? You may think you can, but can you take some constructive actions with full confidence? It takes time and knowledge to build such confidence. You will acquire it within 3-4 months max. Till that time, I will suggest, not to fall for any Youtube influencer tutorials and ruin your blog.
Also, remember that it may take 4 to 6 months to see the actual impact of an SEO, so don’t just jump to reports then tinker with your blog setting, and then be in the loop and miss the tree for the woods. Content Marketing is an art in itself. How can you master an art by not practicing it and spending all the time just watching SEO tutorials? Improve your writing skills, make your blog valuable. Learn basic skills first. In a rush to get instant results, don’t forget that in the end, it is the user experience and not to serve an algorithm.
Below I have mentioned a few very effective and workable tools that are free and can be deployed quickly. I could have given a long list, but I have kept the list deliberately small so that you can get the best and not waste time in experimenting, as I had done that part already.
(This page has no sponsored or affiliated content. All the content is my genuine research to enable the readers to be a better blogger and content creator)
Optimize Your Blog with These Free On-Page SEO Tools in 2021
Google Search Console
You want to rank higher in Google Search Results, guess what, Google itself is helping and guiding you in that. ‘Google Search Console’ is a free On-Page SEO Tool that can be used by anyone having a website or a blog. It does not matter if you are a novice or some tech grand-master. If you are dealing with SEO then you cannot afford to miss this tool.
You know what is surprising? Many of your paid SEO tools need to stand the performance test of Google Search Console. This tool lets you analyze:
- How you are performing in search results?
- To what extent is your site mobile friendly?
- Is your site/ blog discoverable and crawlable by Google search engine or not?
- On what keywords search your site come up in Google’s search pages?
- Are your SEO efforts really paying off? Yes, the Google search console can answer this in a very conclusive and authoritative manner.
The console will tell you, what keywords are you ranked for? It will also tell you on which pages does a user lands when he searches for the given ‘keyword’. It will reflect on how your ‘Headlines’ and ‘meta tags’ are performing. Take care of that ‘Title Tag’.
Effectiveness: For a newbie, you must know, that it is a kind of diagnostic tool. It will point out various issues Google is facing in indexing or crawling your blog/ website. It will mark pages with errors. It will in most of cases mail you with any issues it encounters on your website/ blog.
It is an SEO diagnostic tool. It will tell you the disease and deficiency in your blog but cannot cure you or deliver certain remedies as many commercial and paid SEO plugins do. But one thing for sure, its reports are the final authority to check if your SEO is going in the right direction or optimization is giving desired results or otherwise.
Yoast SEO Plugin
For a WordPress Blog owner, SEO becomes handy in the form of the Yoast SEO Plugin. It is one of the most recommended plugins by millions of bloggers. Surely, it is the most downloaded and has its Pro (Paid Version) which has more features, but ‘Free Version’ is also very useful for you.
If you find the nitty-gritty of On-Page SEO very overwhelming, then this tool is perfect. Astonishingly, many SEO experts, also rely on this for a faster and simpler method instead of dealing with tags, going to code to write meta description, gauging keyword density etc. If you are new to this field and wish to experience the tool before paying for it, then I must say, it is a wise choice. Though in WordPress you need to have ‘Business Account’ to install plugins.
Yoast automatically creates a Site Map for your website or blog. This is one of the major SEO headaches faced by a newcomer in addition to meta data and keyword research. Then you need to add the site map to Google Search Console. Within somedays, Google Search Console will crawl and index your website. Now it totally depends on Google Search Policies and Algorithms and also the Quality of your content, that Google will decide what pages it wants to index and what it wants to leave.
With Yoast Plugin you don’t need to go to your HTML coding to write your Meta Description. Click here to know about meta description. Yoast plugin gives you a form like a page within draft where you can fill a few lines which concisely tell the reader, what your article is all about. And that’s it. Rest all will be handled by the plugin. What’s more interesting is that Yoast lets you have a different ‘title tag’, which appears in the search results than what you have written in your article.
Yoast SEO also tells you which articles or pages on your website need to be updated. Even in the free version you can do 1 keyword research and can get 10 similar related queries. Additionally, it will also tell the indexability of your site. Do check the link given below for more.
Ubersuggest
This tool lets you research and finds those ‘long-tail keywords’. You will find many variations of the same long-tail keyword. Wait! something is more to it. This online tool conducts an SEO audit of your site. But is limited to only giving a summary. So what in for the free user? Well, here it goes. All the mantra lies in long-tail keyword research. On this tool, you can do 3 searches daily. Do use it wisely. How can it help you? Those ‘long-tail keywords’ are new buzzwords in SEO optimization. They are inputs to frame your title, headings, especially that H1. What all keywords are listed in your research, you can or should integrate most of them in your article. For a beginner, this is a huge help to know which words should be appearing in your headings and around which keywords one should waeve the article skillfully.
These keywords can be effectively used in your meta data. These keywords are arranged in terms of popularity and difficulty.
The importance of keyword research can never be overstated when it comes to creating online content. It is a quintessential part of your On-Page optimization effort. For free users, it is an effective keyword research tool.
Google Analytics
One of the biggest players or rather a giant in SEO. You can never miss it if you are even remotely related to content development in the online world. Missing Google Analytics is like, being on Earth and not seeing the Sun. The deep insights and real-time analysis of your website/blog enable you to change or adapt your SEO strategies quickly. This free On-Page SEO tool is more than analytics, it is an insight into all the traffic coming to your blog/ website. This is the biggest tool to measure the success of your SEO and other content efforts. That too in realtime. How?
It tells how many users are coming to your website, which keyword got them here? How long did they stay? From which device had they visited your website, was it a desktop, a tablet, or a mobile device? How many new users came and how many old ones returned? Demographic data, i.e. what was the age, gender, etc.? Not to forget the geography? Continent, country, city, or some locality. You’ll be amazed to see the depth of this analysis too and the parameters it offers. It is like more than getting into the head of your target audience.
For many people, Google Analytics is a bit overwhelming for the first time. Rather I must say that scary for the newcomers. I’ll suggest that don’t jump on the bandwagon. It has a learning curve that demands time, but the results are extraordinary. Just like Hammer is for Thor, Google Analytics is for any commercial website. Plus point is not that it is free, but Google has its own Analytics Academy to train you to understand those complex charts and tables.
Again I must emphasize that it is a diagnostic tool, which will tell how your website is performing in the real world. Is your paid promotion worth it? How many bids should you put on any particular keyword? How is your ad-campaign going and what is your return for money?
For the free user, if you are doing your SEO, you need to know how many people has it reached? Who they are? Their preferences? Which pages are generating the most responses? Which pages are making readers go to another site? All this data and much much more than what you can imagine is available to you. All is free and there is no restriction on a free account or paid account. Full functionality and support.
For a new blogger, I’ll suggest investing time in slowly learning this giant of an analytical tool available. Don’t rush or try to learn everything quickly. Blogging is a game of patience. Build slowly but permanently.
SEO Quake
For intermediate skills in SEO, this is a very good tool. It comes as your Chrome Browser Extension. And what it can do is very amazing. This free tool has tons of things for a person who has built some skills in SEO. It uses many tools like SEMrush, Alexa, Bing, Google Index, Webarchive, and SEMrushRank to analyze a page. You can even analyze your competitor’s page with this simple Chrome Extension. The most fascinating thing is the SEO audit or reports it gives by analyzing a particular page. It clearly highlights the strong and weak points, the warnings and errors, and where you need to make an effort. Also tells you the internal and external links a page has and keyword density on the page.
This tool can also be installed on Mozilla, Opera, and our own Internet Explorer. This tool provides plenty of data within minutes. And all the parameters can be tweaked as per your requirements. Even on the Google SERP, it analyses pages and tells what made them rank. And you can simply turn it off if you don’t want for a particular domain. Most flexible and versatile SEO tool.
It tells about your webpage being mobile friendly and other compliances related to SEOs. It tells,
- Whether your meta tags are long or short?
- Is the amount of text sufficient for your page (Text to HTML ratio)?
- Are your title tags effective?
- What about those ‘Alt Text’ for your images, how many did you miss?
- Are you integrated with Google Analytics?
- Is your website is having an XML sitemap?
Another feature is URL Comparison where you can compare your pages with your competitors and can intelligently understand what they are doing better than you. After all, you are not alone, there is competition. It utilizes the parameters given above to compare how the URLs or domains. It gets you a deep insight into the technical side of website building and blogging.
SEO Book
Well, you need an email to create a free account. Then need to activate that free account from your email. That’s it! Now coming to the most important point, how is it helpful. It has many free online SEO tools ranging from Keyword Suggestion Tool to, Robots.txt generator and analyzer too. Its extension or bar is available for the Mozilla Firefox browser, but you can use its website tools to do your stuff.
This is another great and Free SEO Tool. Rather a bunch of tools to help you in On-Page SEO optimization. First, to tell you, it can create meta tags for you. If you don’t know to code then this is helpful. It will use all your inputs like the title of your post, the keywords you are targeting, and the meta data you want to write. Then it provides you the same information in the form of HTML tag coding which you just need to copy and paste.
Similarly, it can do small but many useful tasks for you. If you want to see how your website appears to search engine spiders, then you are on the right page, it has ‘Spider Test Tool’. Wow! That’s great and again handy. ‘
Keywords Everywhere
It is a keyword research tool. It is also a Chrome Browser Extention. While you are searching, in the Google Search Page, it will tell you the monthly volume, CPC, and Competition figure. It also tells related keywords on the search page. Additionally, it also tells what long-tail keywords people searched are related to your keyword. You need your email ID to create a free account and use this tool. From the email, you need to verify the account by using an API key.
You can tweak your research for keywords by limiting the research countrywide which includes, United States, United Kingdom, India, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia. Otherwise, you can opt for a global search. The websites from which it takes research data is the main punch. Its supported websites include Google Search, Google Trends, Amazon, eBay, Keyword Shitter, YouTube, Bing Search, Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, Moz, Etsy, Answer the Public, and many more. This makes it one of the most comprehensive keyword research tools available to the beginner. Rather even for most of the digital market experts, it can do the needful.
You can save the keywords and can use the ‘my keywords’ feature and use the saved keyword from the lists in your search engines. This is one of the handiest features. Selecting a proper keyword is one of the most basic and fundamental steps to on-page SEO optimization.
Another really helpful post. Thanks so much.
Am really happy, that it was helpful. Hope I can serve all my readers with genuine and good content.
Thanks for reading and feedback. Really motivating.