The SEO Department here at Creare always submit our sites to Webmaster Tools and utilise the benefits of Google’s Local Business Centre. These free tools from Google are great, Webmaster Tools gives us data about interesting stuff like crawl errors and if a site has duplicate meta tags, title tags etc. Local Business Centre is fantastic for local searches, and for area specific SEO it is a definite must.

What’s changed in Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools has been a favourite place of mine for diagnosing problems with sites. It is now even better, with the addition of search results’ clickthrough data, which can tell you how many times somebody clicks on your site when they find it in their search results for a particular query. As well as all this it also tells you which pages are showing for each particular query.

This information is particularly useful for ‘Conversion Optimisation’, something that is extremely important for SEO. You can use the information to your advantage because if you know where problems are you are in a much better place to fix them. For example, it may be that your meta description needs to be improved, to increase the clickthrough, or it may be that your page title is turning people off from clicking on your link when it appears in the SERPs.

What’s changed in Local Business Centre

Well, the name for a start… Google have renamed Local Business Centre to… Drum Roll here please… Google Places. Yes, another name to remember (though I just refer to it as ‘Google Maps’ to my customers to avoid confusion), but it now has many more useful features such as:

• Service Areas – This is going to be extremely powerful and useful for any company that covers areas beyond where they are based. Also, if you are ‘working from home’, and there are many internet based business run from back bedrooms, you can now keep your address private. This has always been a stumbling block for us here at Creare, as we always prefer to put our customers on Local Business Centre (sorry, I now mean, Google Places), but when they work from home they often say, quite reasonably, ‘But, I don’t want my home address online!’ so we have to leave it off…
• Advertising with Tags – this one may not be useful yet in the UK as it is only available in a few cities as yet, but to give you the low-down: You can pay Google to highlight your listing in google.com maps results and in Google Maps. Whether they are beneficial remains to be seen though, so if I were you, I’d hold off until it’s been tested by someone else!
• Business Photo Shoots – You can get Google to take photographs of your business – though you can still upload your own photos. Personally I’d prefer to have control over my own pictures, but I guess if you want to take advantage of this, it is free, so why not…?
• Customised QR Codes – these will become more valid in time. The are a bit like barcodes but you use your smartphone to scan them. You can print them on your business cards, and other promotional material, and when the smartphone scans them you are sent to your Google Places page. Nice, eh?

Another new feature in Google Places, is information about who is searching for you, how they find you, and where they come from. All useful stuff methinks…

There are many, many lists of “101 free SEO tools that you must try” but who wants to try 101 of them? I know I don’t have time to test 101 tools, however useful they may be to others. So, I’m giving you a list of the free tools I use every day to test the performance of web sites. I use these 5 every single day. Of course I have other paid tools that I use as well.

1. Google Analytics
   Without this excellent tool I know I can’t measure successes (or failures). If you don’t install Google Analytics on your website you’ve got no way of knowing how well your site is doing. How can you tell if that new page you added is bringing in the visitors? Or if your new contact form is user-friendly enough for your visitors? Well you check your analytics of course!
2. Google Webmaster Tools
   Google have fairly recently updated their webmaster tools and now they are even better than before. Webmaster Tools give you so much information about your site, like how they crawled it, if error pages came up, if they encounter any deadlinks etc. You can also submit an xml sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, which is helpful in getting your site indexed, I recommend updating the xml sitemap every time you add a page to your site, then resubmitting it through Webmaster Tools. I would highly recommend this tool.
3. XML Sitemap Generator
   This leads me into the next free tool that we use every day here are Creare. The xml sitemap generator does exactly what it says on the tin. XML sitemaps are useful for the search engine spiders because it gives them the information they need to crawl the site effectively. We set the priority to “Automatic Priority” this gives the index page a higher priority than internal pages. Once you’ve generated your sitemap, upload it to your server and tell Google that it exists (see previous point above)
4. Google Adwords Keyword Tool
   We use this free tool to help us decide where to place keywords on a site. The search volume results tell us which keywords re more competitive and therefore need more effort in terms of both internal optimisation and external optimisation.
5. Yahoo! Site Explorer
   This tells us how many links our competitors have and the value of those links. This is extremely important for getting links because we can target sites where we know they give out links quickly and easily. Of course this isn’t the be all and end all of our link building campaigns, but it certainly helps us a great deal.

So, this is my top 5 free Search Engine Optimisation tools, every single one of these is incredibly useful and I can’t imagine doing my job without them.

What tools do you use to help with your search engine optimisation?

Have you tried all of these tools? If not, will you?