SEO For Beginners - Free SEO Tools Online

The Internet not only offers website owners ways to reach millions of prospective clients around the world, but it also gives the tools necessary to generate the type of content that those prospective customers will enjoy. If you are new to SEO, then it helps to have free tools you can use to get the most out of your search engine results. To help SEO beginners out, we offer a list of the types of tools you can find online that will assist you in maximizing your SEO potential.

Plagiarism Checkers

If you post content that appeared on another website without permission, then that is plagiarism. You can also commit plagiarism if you copy parts of published content for your own articles. If there is one thing every search engine frowns on, it is plagiarism. There are plenty of free online plagiarism checkers you can use to make sure that every piece of content you are posting online is original.

Even if you buy your content from professional writers, you should still run everything through a plagiarism checker. While many of the more reputable content sites check content for you, there could be issues if you buy content directly from writers or if you use those content websites that do not check content before selling it to you.

SEO Score

Many marketing sites offer a free SEO score checker that can give you great advice on what you need to do to improve the reach of your website. You will find that each marketing company has its own way of computing an SEO score, so be sure that you become familiar with the meaning of the score and how it is calculated for the website you are using before you take action based on your score.

Grammar Checker

The Internet used to be filled with writing from people who could not really speak English, but they could copy and paste a keyword into an article several times over to improve the search engine results. These days, Google and the other search engines frown on keyword stuffing and bad grammar.

Even if you speak English as a native language, you may not have the best grammar when it comes to writing content. That is why every piece of content you put on your site should be run through a grammar checker first.

Keyword Checker

While keywords are not quite as important as they used to be, you can still get better SEO results if you use popular keywords in your industry. Google and a few other search engines offer comprehensive tools that will help you to either find the best keywords for your content, or tell you if the keywords you want to use will be effective.

The Internet content industry and rules change constantly, but the effectiveness of good SEO practices never go out of style. The biggest issue that website owners who are new to SEO have is developing content practices that deliver the very best results and put their websites as high as possible on the first page of search results. With the free tools that are available online, any SEO newcomer can make sure that their content is ready to reach their target audience and generate plenty of traffic.

What Is A Bad Link

As Google continues to refine how people search for websites, it is also changing the way that websites develop content. One of the more recent changes Google has made is that it basically outlawed the use of purchased links on a website to try and enhance traffic. Google wants you to grow your website organically through strong relationships with websites that are complimentary to yours. But even if you gather your links through hard work and online networking, there are still link characteristics that can cause the links you use to damage your website's Google results status.

You Link To Questionable Websites

Before you accept a link swapping arrangement with a website, it is extremely important to do research to make sure that the website you are swapping with is considered reputable. Websites that have a history of creating spam content or breaking Google's SEO rules are considered to be questionable, and using links to those sites will damage your Internet presence as well.

The Linked Website Has Content Irrelevant To Yours

Google is getting very picky about what kinds of links it will accept, and that means that you have to stay up to date on all of the new guidelines for link swapping as they are released. It used to be that a website that featured content on gardening could team up with a personal finance website to help drive traffic. But with the new rules Google has in place, the personal finance content would be considered irrelevant to the gardening content, and using that link would cause problems for the gardening site.

The Link Is Overused

After months of communicating with a relevant and reputable website, you are extremely happy to finally get the chance to swap links. You are so happy that you decide to put that new link in several spots on your website to maximize exposure. This is something Google now frowns on, which means that using a good link too often can have the same effects as if you used a disreputable link just once.

Too Many Links To The Same Sites

You and your brother develop websites that offer similar content, so you decide to swap links to generate traffic for each other. This sounds like a great idea, but it is something Google frowns upon. If you are putting links to the same website or set of websites throughout your content, then you could incur a Google penalty for excessive linking.

You Use Keywords As Anchor Text

For years, the best way to get the most out of a link was to use industry keywords as anchor text. But Google now considers this practice to be taboo, and will hit your website with stiff penalties if you do this. Google wants to see your links used naturally in the flow of an article, and not crammed into the middle of content using keywords.

The definition of a good SEO link seems to change frequently, and using bad links can bring about serious penalties. If you want to make sure that your website is using the right kinds of links, then you need to invest in the services of an Internet marketing professional. When it comes to links, hiring a professional could mean the difference between great web traffic, or devastating Google penalties.