Tools for SEO auditing on yours or competitors websites

These tools help you understand the SEO status of your website.

(www.google.com) Google Webmaster Tools - Google makes available a ton of useful information. While the original Webmaster Tools service was not terribly useful, they've been improving it steadily and it's now very good. You can learn the keywords being used to reach your site, various problems on the site, and more.

(www.screamingfrog.co.uk) Screaming Frog Spider - this spiders a site, giving you lots of data.

Google Sitesearch - Google has advanced searching options that can be used to learn SEO characteristics of a site. Here's some examples:

  • site:rootdomain.com shows all indexed pages under a domain
  • site:rootdomain.com -www. shows subdomains indexed
  • site:subdomain.rootdomain.com shows all content indexed on a particular subdomain
  • site:rootdomain.com inurl:keyword shows all URLs containing a particular keyword
  • site:rootdomain.com intitle:keyword shows indexed pages with a specific keyword in the title

Faster sites rank better with Google et al. (www.webpagetest.org) http://www.webpagetest.org/ is one service to test page speed. The Google Webmaster Tools also tells you how quickly Google's spider was able to load the page.

Other tools run inside web browsers to measure page loading speed.

Who's linking to you? This information is useful because it's a big factor in the ranking of each page. Google Webmaster tools gives some information, but we do want more.

(ahrefs.com) https://ahrefs.com/ - Runs a service, the Site Explorer and Banklink Checker, that has a huge collection of link data and can present a report showing the links to a given site. The report is very nice looking, and extensive.