On-page optimization is undoubtedly one of the most critical factors in your website’s digital marketing strategy. With all the Google updates that keep rolling from time to time, it is a must to wade through all of them and be ready for future updates. In simple words, if your on-page SEO is not up to the mark, it would be difficult for your website to have a good ranking on search engine result pages.
We have compiled a list of top 10 free on-page optimization tools to help you with your website.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a must-have for on-page optimization. You need to register your website by adding a piece of code in your website or you can do it easily if you already have Google Analytics setup. You can use Google Search Console for checking the indexing status and optimize visibility of your website. You can check the keywords that people use to find your website, submit a sitemap, check the websites that link to your website, identify website security issues, etc.
How does it work?
- Sign-up on Google Search Console with your Google account
- Register your website
- Start analyzing your website’s performance
- You can look for these:
- Search queries
- HTML improvements
- Crawl issues
- Mobile usability
- Backlink details and many other things
Google Developers PageSpeed Insights
This tool measures the page loading speed of a website on both desktop and mobile devices. It not only measures but also provide suggestions for improving the page loading speed. It grades on a scale of 100. As you must be knowing that page loading speed is one of the most important factors that affect user experience which directly affects keyword rankings. Hence, Google Developers PageSpeed Insights is a must have tool for improving the user experience of your website.
How does it work?
- Open PageSpeed Insights on your browser
- Type in or paste the URL of the web-page which you want to scan and click on ‘Analyze’.
- Check out the results and start working on improving the page loading speed
Google Structured Data Testing Tool
Website schema markup helps search engines return more informative results for users. Structured Data Testing Tool checks the schema markup for your web pages. It displays the schema and shows errors if there are any. You can create schema markup for all the pages of your website, copy the correct code and directly update it on your website.
How does it work?
- Go to Structured Data Testing Tool
- If your webpage is live, enter the URL and click on ‘Run Test’
- If your webpage is not live, switch to ‘Code Snippet’, paste your code and click on ‘Run Test’
Copyscape
Copyscape is a great SEO tool for finding duplicate or unauthorized copies of your content anywhere else on the web. Search engines always prefer unique and quality content and Copyscape can help you check if your web page content is unique.
How does it work?
- Open Copyscape.com on your browser
- Type in or paste the URL of the website for which you want to check duplicate content and click on ‘Go’
- Check out the results to see the duplicate content
- You can also add Copyscape warning banners on your website to warn potential plagiarists against stealing your content
Siteliner
Remember, the times when you are creating product descriptions and you are unsure if a similar product has been described in the same way? Siteliner can come to your rescue. It checks internal duplicate pages which Copyscape cannot do. Siteliner not only checks for internal duplicate content but also provides reports for broken links, XML sitemap, related domains, etc.
How does it work?
- Open Siteliner.com on your browser
- Type in or paste the URL of the website which you want to scan and click on ‘Go’.
- The tool will crawl and scan through all the pages to find broken links, duplicate content, and related domains, etc.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the best and free on-page optimization tool available for the complete website audit. It crawls 500 pages in the free version which is more than enough for most of the service based websites. It saves a lot of manual work. You can check Meta tags, URL status, H1 tags, alt text for images, canonicals, etc. You can also check the SERP snippet of your webpage with this tool.
How does it work?
- Download and install Screaming Frog SEO Spider on your PC
- Enter the URL and click on ‘Start’
- The audit results start to appear. You can even export these results.
GTmetrix
GTmetrix is another tool that analyzes the performance of web pages and grades them for their page loading speed. It also provides the page loading time and suggests ways to improve the website’s performance.
How does it work?
- Open GTmetrix.com on your browser
- Type in or paste the URL of the web page which you want to scan and then click on ‘Analyze’.
- Check out the results and start working on improving the loading page speed if needed
Pingdom Website Speed Test Tool
Pingdom provides the exact loading time of the webpage along with a list of issues that result in increased loading time. You can select the location from where you want the test to take place. Pingdom grades the webpage performance out of 100 and also provides the exact page size.
How does it work?
- Open tools.Pingdom.com on your browser
- Type in or paste the URL of the web page that you want to scan
- Select the location from where you want to test and click on ‘Start Test’
- The test will begin and results will be displayed
XML-Sitemaps.com
XML sitemaps help Google know about all the pages on your website. Here’s a tool that can help you create perfect XML sitemaps! The free version provides indexing of 500 pages and you’ll have to buy the pro version if you want to index more than 500 pages.
How does it work?
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- Open XML-Sitemaps.com on your browser
- Type in or paste the URL of the website for which you want to generate an XML sitemap
- Click on ‘More Options’ to set ‘Page Last Modification’, ‘Page Priority’ and ‘Frequency’ attributes
- Click on ‘Start’ and the XML sitemap creation process will start
- Click on ‘View the Details’ and download the XML file.
Google Chrome Extensions
Apart from all these on-page SEO tools and software listed above, there are also a few Google Chrome extensions which can help you with better on-page optimization of your website:
Page Analytics (by Google)
Do you remember the ‘In-page Analytics’ section that was removed from Google Analytics a few years back? Page Analytics provides you with the same data, the data on how viewers interact with your web-page. It provides the click rate on the links as well as the traffic and time spent on pages. You can make use of this data for optimizing the website layout and to improve the user experience.
How does it work?
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- Add Page Analytics from Chrome Webstore
- Open the website you want to analyze in a new tab
- Make sure that you are logged in the Google Analytics account of the website which you want to scan. Only then this extension will work.
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Redirect Path
Redirect Path is a very useful tool for checking 301 and 302 redirects. This Google Chrome extension will help you identify the redirects on your webpage along with its status. For e.g.: if any web page is redirected to a customized 404 page, whether the status of that redirected page is 301, 302 or 404. This extension can help in HTML improvements of your website.
How does it work?
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- Add Redirect Path from Chrome Webstore
- Open webpages on a browser and check if there are any redirections
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Check My Links
Check My Links is a link checker that crawls through your web pages and check for broken links. Broken links are bad for SEO as that directly affects user experience. This is a great tool for checking pages with a lot of links and it can effectively improve the user experience by fixing the broken links. You can also save all the links and the related data in a CSV file with a single click.
How does it work?
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- Add Check My Links from Chrome Webstore
- Open the webpage for which you want to check the links
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These on-page optimization tools will help you with improved user engagement, and better rankings for your web-pages. If you use some other tools for on-site optimization of your website then please do tell us about them in the comments section. It will really be useful for all the digital marketers around.
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Ankesh is a professional having more than 5 years of experience in digital marketing. As an Account Manager at DigiNekt and Project Manager at GMR Web Team, he is responsible for managing projects from strategy development to implementation. He is handling a digital marketing team and helping them achieve the set goals defined by clients.