Getting great natural search traffic is important for almost any affiliate website. By maximizing natural search, you can get more traffic and commissions without the headache and expense of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You’re also developing a traffic source that lasts over time.
Your traffic means a lot. The more you get, the more money your site makes. But to get more of it, you’ve got to have great SEO.
The SEO game is getting more complex every day. In order to keep up, you need to use a suite of tools. Over the years there have been a lot of different tools purporting to make the job of optimizing your website easier. Some are worth buying, some are not. And some of the free tools are often better value than the bought ones.
This list of SEO tools will do a great job helping you maximize traffic to your casino affiliate marketing site.
SEO Toolbar
SEO Toolbar combines competitive research data and SEO research tools. This Firefox extension pulls in a number of useful data points allowing you to easily get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market. As you browse, the toolbar pulls useful market research data right into your browser, including:
* Domain link, page link, .edu and .gov links from Yahoo!
* Unique linking domains from Majestic SEO
* Listings in DMOZ, dir.yahoo.com and BOTW
* Google PageRank
* Domain age from archive.org, and
* A number of other advanced options
SEO Toolbar also helps with competitive research links and keyword research. It can highlight nofollow links and has a built in Rank Checker. But one of the most useful tools is the SEO X-ray, allowing you to analyze content and behind-the-scenes meta information quickly and easily.
SEO Quake Toolbar
SEO Quake is another powerful Firefox toolbar, which also comes as a “light” version for Chrome and Safari. It allows you to obtain and investigate a number of important SEO parameters on the fly, including Google Trends information, Quantcast Rank, Digg index and Seodigger details.
With these two toolbars, all important SEO analytics are at your fingertips.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the only stats package you’re ever going to need, providing you with rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Discover where your traffic is coming from, what each visitor does when they arrive (including bounce rate), and track them right through to a sale, allowing you to determine exact ROI figures for all paid advertising. Very powerful, very easy to use, and very easy to understand, you should have Google Analytics plugged into every one of your websites.
Google Keyword Suggestion Tool
This tool is part of Google AdWords, but you don’t need to be spending money on a PPC campaign to use it. It allows you to determine what keywords people are searching for in your particular niche, how many searches are made each month, and local search trends. It also suggests keywords you might not have thought of, and allows you to export your final list as a CSV, either to be used in AdWords or your own database.
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools allows you to see how and when Google crawls and indexes your website. It allows you to verify yourself as the owner of a website, and once you have, opens up a suite of powerful tools for determining how your website is performing in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs). This tool not only tells you how many visitors you received for what keywords, but also how many times your site appears in a SERP but wasn’t clicked on.
Another power feature allows you to submit your sitemap to Google, ensure every page of your website is indexed. Other features include email alerts any time Google detects and error or malware on your website and backlink analysis.
SEO PowerSuite
SEO Powersuite is a suite of four different tools:
* Rank Tracker helps you discover profitable keywords and check your website’s current rankings for those keywords.
* WebSite Auditor helps you build search engine friendly webpages targeted toward your list of keywords.
* SEO SpyGlass lets you analyze a top-ranking competitor and understand why they rank well, which gives you a blueprint for a #1 ranking.
* LinkAssistant helps you with link building campaigns, digging contact info, managing emails, building a link directory and monitoring your link popularity over time.
Each tool can be purchased separately, or together as a “PowerSuite.” The Enterprise version sets you up as an SEO profession, writing formatted reports for your SEO clients.
Spyfu
SpyFu is a search analytics tool which allows you to “spy on” the keywords that competitors use and improve SEM and SEO strategies based on those. It shows the keywords that your competitions are buying on Google Adwords as well as the keywords that websites are showing up for within search results. The service also gives cost per click and search volume statistics on keywords and uses that data to approximate what websites are spending on advertising. Historical advertising budgets offered by SpyFu also help advertisers project what an advertising campaign will cost in the future. A monthly subscription is currently $69.95.
Open Site Explorer is an online link popularity and backlink analysis tool put together by the nice people at seomoz.org. The free version provides basic summaries of linking domains and pages, plus anchor text distribution and the like, but a paid membership gets you a full list of link metrics. A monthly subscription is currently $99.00 and the service is used by household names such as eBay, Sun Microsystems and Walt Disney Pictures.
Raven provides a full service suite of tools that covers all aspects of your internet marketing. They help their customers research, manage, monitor and report on SEO, email, social media and other internet marketing campaigns. Raven is used by thousands of online marketers worldwide, from Fortune 500 companies to solo SEO shops.
Editor’s Note: Feedback after we published this article strongly suggested we expand our list from eight to nine tools and include the excellent Raven Tools.