SEO: The art of search engine optimization

SEO targets unpaid traffic known as "natural" or "organic" results rather than direct or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different types of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Are you approaching the fantastic and immense world of SEO?

Would you like to find out which tools every SEO person cannot (almost daily) give up? Here, then this article is just for you! Let's go, let's discover them together!

Let's start from the basics: what is SEO?

SEO: an acronym that has been heard more and more in recent years. But what is SEO? How to define it in a nutshell?

SEO (an acronym for Search Engine Optimization) is a vast discipline that deals with improving the positioning of web pages within the organic results of search engines.

The SEO activity is mainly structured in 2 macro-areas:

1. The On-Page SEO, or the set of strategies applied within the pages of a website so that they are positioned in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages, or the pages of the search engine results)
2. Off-page SEO, or the set of all those strategies that are performed "outside" your websites, such as Link Building or Social Media. Off-page SEO wants to create signals for search engines to help understand the website's authority.

To these, it is important to add Technical SEO, which is all those activities that have to do with optimizing the speed of the site, canonicalization, structured data, hreflang, and much more.

The important tools in SEO

In this article, we report a set of extremely useful tools for those involved in this discipline. Let's see them together!

Google Search Console.

Google Search Console is a free service with which you can monitor (and manage) the presence of your website in the search results.

Search Console is a useful tool for anyone who owns a website as with it you can:

• resolve any problems related to AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages),
• solve problems of usability on mobile devices and indexing,
• verify that Google can locate your site and crawl it,
• consult interesting and useful data such as CTR (Click Through Rate), for which queries the site is shown to the user, the frequency with which a user has seen a link to the site, the ranking relative to the position of the link, the number of clicks, etc.

Google Analytics

It is a free Web Analytics service that provides analytical and statistical tools to help you understand, in a nutshell, if your site is having success online.

With Google Analytics it is possible to obtain various data such as the number of users, sessions, the average length of stay on the site, the origin of the traffic (from organic, referrals, from social networks ...), the bounce rate, the number of conversions, page trends, the acquisition funnel and much more.

SEO: Screaming Frog

In this case, it is a tool that, by simulating the behavior of a bot, crawls a website (crawling is the process of discovering and crawling content aimed at indexing it).

Thanks to Screaming Frog you can get a view of the website tree and identify, for example, duplicate titles, the absence or presence of headings, alt text of the images, and pages with Status Code 404.

This tool can be used for free, enjoying the basic functionality of the tool that allows you to scan up to 500 URLs; otherwise, you can decide to have access to all the advanced features of Screaming Frog by purchasing the Full License Version.

SEOZoom and Semrush

These two SEO tools, on the other hand, allow you to perform site analysis on traffic trends, authority, keywords, and positioning opportunities.

In particular, SEOZoom is an analysis tool with which the user can identify different aspects of SEO, such as the opportunities on keywords, how competitors work (you can therefore analyze the competition, the traffic trends from search engines, improve link building, create an editorial plan, view any fluctuations in the SERP).

Just like SEOZoom, Semrush is also SEO software that displays multiple site information that can be used to improve SEO strategies.

In a nutshell, these two tools - which have been included among the best SEO tools - are very useful for those who want to work on optimizing their website.

What are you waiting for? In the meantime, try them for free and then choose the plan that's right for you!

Google PageSpeed ​​Insight and GTMetrix

We are talking about two very useful tools for obtaining data on the speed and loading times of the website. PageSpeed ​​Insight will assign a rating from 0 to 100 on load times and its measurement will cover both desktop and mobile devices.

GTMetrix, by entering the URL of its site, will provide the performance metrics of the latter, assigning it scores and showing you tips for optimizing it.

It is one of the tools aimed at monitoring backlinks: it identifies the number of incoming links, which are extremely important for increasing the authority of your website. To access Ahrefs, you need to enter the website you want to examine, and then get lost in analyzing all the interesting data found there.

Google Trends and Answer The Public

Google Trends is a free tool with which you can identify the most searched words in a specific period. It is therefore an essential tool for planning upstream marketing strategies by evaluating certain trending topics.

Even with Answer The Public, you can understand the intent of users' research around a certain topic: in this way, you will be able to define your content marketing strategy at best.

To use these two tools, simply connect to the desired tool, select the language of interest, and enter a search key in the dedicated space. Et voilà, that's it.

Certainly, the useful tools for those involved in SEO do not end in this shortlist, being very many!

The advice, however, is to start familiarizing yourself with these tools and then discover even the most complex ones with which to become an unbeatable SEO! If you already know them, is there any tool you prefer?