The 10 Best Free SEO Tools For Blogging Beginners

If you don't already know, I love free things.  And, on top of that I love to research.  And because of this, every one of my blogging for beginners readers are in for a treat today.  Out of the kindness of my heart, I am going to give away some of my trade secrets.  I have my 10 favorite free SEO tools, and I am going to give them to you in one big, fancy list.  I like to call them The 10 Best, but they are my 10 favorite.

There are hundreds of SEO tools available on the internet.  A lot of them are wonderful.  But generally speaking, those wonderful tools are not cheap.  They, in fact, could end up costing you a small fortune, especially for us beginners that are still trying to learn how to do this thing called blogging.

So, since we are not forking out dollar after dollar, in order to get a whole lot of data that, generally speaking, we won't understand anyway, these tools are going to be more than adequate for you.  For you and me both.

Google free SEO tools are something I would always forget about.  But we are talking about the search engine that decides where are blog should be ranked.  Something tells me that they know what they are talking about and they are more than willing to provide us with tools that will help us succeed.  I am going to include Google on this list a couple times, and figure I should let everyone know, it's not because I have some love or connection to Google, it just happens that they provide useful tools for free.  And there UI is getting better.  In the years past, their tools were hard to understand and even harder to use.

SEO tools:

#10 Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is a must for any blogger who wants to improve their search engine friendliness.  There is way too much for me to give a lesson on such a powerful SEO tool today, but, needless to say, this tool is nearly a must have.  You will be able to force Google to crawl your web pages and report to you any errors it finds.  Eliminating these errors can have a great impact on your blog’s location in the most powerful search engine in the world, not to mention improving your overall Search Engine Optimization.  It is also not solely for Google properties, any of your blogs or websites can be added to your account, and I would recommend that all of them are added as soon as possible.
#9 SEO Quake Toolbar
The SEO quake toolbar is pretty awesome, to say the least.  It is going to give you critical information to any website you visit.  This means you can go snooping around any websites that are competing in your own niche.  It is going to give you backlink quantities, pages indexed by google WhoIs data, robots.txt, Keyword density reports and a whole lot more information.  You can install it as an extension for Chrome or Firefox.  I am not sure about Microsoft’s browser, as I do not really ever use it.
It is an invaluable, free SEO tool.  It is a must as far as I am concerned.

#8 Keywordtool.io
This tool is not a must have, it is along the lines of Google Keyword Planner.  It is free, but offers a premium account which will offer up more information about keywords, things like search volume and cpc and competition will be blurred out with a free account, but even so, basically what Keywordtool.io is, is a keyword suggestion tool.  You will enter your primary keyword and it will give you a list of related keywords and search terms you could use as well.  I like it for its simplicity.  Google’s Keyword Planner is a bit overwhelming for someone who doesn’t know what they are looking at or doing.  This provides a simple way to do some basic keyword research, which, of course it critical in your SEO, and blogging endeavors.

#7 WooRank
WooRank is similar to Google Webmaster tools.  But again, it is a little easier to navigate.  You lose some of the functionality with the free version of WooRank, but there is enough information there for you to improve the inner workings of your blog.  It will also give suggestions to make improvements, and it gives you a score you can work to improve upon.  I use this as often as Google.  It may be a comfort level, but in general, I find it more useful for me.

#6 lsigraph.com
Latent Semantic Indexing, if you don't know this term, I completely understand.  You shouldn't ever have to know what that means!  Actually, I'm kidding.  It's actually a very important. LSI Keywords is actually what the term is that you will usually see.  It is basically alternate keywords that will reaffirm your primary keyword in any particular blog post you write.  There are often times, you may feel like you’re cramming the same keyword into places it just makes your articles cumbersome
#5 Google Keyword Planner
#4 Jaaxy
#3 Google Trends
#2 Screaming Frog
#1 Chrome Developer Tools

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Are we Making Money on Blogspot?

I am speaking specifically about Blogspot here, not talking about making money with blogging in general.  I am talking about "making money with Blogspot". And I am here to tell you I do make money with Blogspot.  Not getting rich from it of course.  But comparatively speaking, Blogspot is my biggest earner on the internet.  That is not with one single blog, I have, oh, more than four but less than ten Blogspot blogs.  With no overhead, anything made is pure profit, and Blogspot is geared toward the entrepreneur.  The platform is very strongly driven to help its users earn money online.  In the process, Blogspot, or Google makes money themselves, well, sometimes they do.

Blogging for beginners - Free blogs or paid domains?

I received a comment the other day talking about the only way to really do well with blogging is through a custom domain.  Or a paid blog, you may call it. 

So, it got me to thinking, what is the real difference I have noticed between free blogs and paid blogs?  Because I do also have blogs I pay for.  But I really do believe that free blogs are not so shabby, especially for individuals who are just learning the process and concept of blogging.

So, whether you are blogging with the intention of making money or just blogging for the fun of it, I thought I would explain in a little bit of detail the pros and cons of both free blogs and paid blogs.

Take this blog for example.  This blog would probably do very well as a paid blog.  I have given it quite a bit of love in order to place fairly well in the search engines.  And at times it does seem to be a bit of a waste of time to keep pumping hours and hours into a free blog.  And why is that you ask, well, lets break it down really plain and simple like.

Pros of a free blog
1.) There is no financial strings attached.  If you do something that negatively effects your blog, you really have lost nothing, except some time in order to try and fix what you have done.

2.)Wonderful place to really learn the art of blogging.  Free blogs are a great place to test your technique.  That means your writing style, and your SEO practices.  You can use them to determine what works and what sells and what just completely fails.  I have used my free blogs for just that purpose.  And in the process, I have had some serious failures.  I, in fact have one blog right now that has been slapped by google and taken right down....for, SPAM.  They are calling it a spam blog.  And although it may skate along that hairy edge of being legit and being a little questionable, none of my content on that blog would be something I would consider SPAM.

But I think that is a perfect example of the learning process you may face when beginning to blog yourself.

3.)Blogger and Wordpress.  How you may wonder am I going to call these sites pros?  Well, because they are power houses with huge communities, and that along can generate some traffic. And while having the Term Wordpress, or Blogspot within your url can hinder your place in the search engines.  The reality is, people see these and respect these names.  People who spend time reading blogs are very aware that there are hundreds and thousands of quality bloggers using these tools to start their own blogs.

And what are the CONS of free blogs
1.)You are under the thumb of a larger entity.  Case in point is the blog I mention above.  If I was under my own url with that blog, It would not be wiped out by google.  They would pull my adsense account, but they could not just delete it.  And that is a big deal.  That blog had about 100 posts and tones of content that is now just gone.  Hundreds of backlinks just wasted.

2.)Your URL is a sub domain of a bigger site.  What this means is, search engines give it less value than if it was your own URL.  A site called bloggingforbeginners.com is going to rank better on url alone than my blog, if all other factors are equal.

3.)Customization.  This is a big one, artistic freedom with your content is really big when it comes to proper page layout and structure.  And while both blogger and Wordpress offers a lot of options, they can never compare to the freedom you get with a custom URL.

So, what about a paid blog?  How does a paid blog stack up to a free blog?

Reality is, there is no comparison.  It is so much easier to build a successful blog with your own URL.  One of my paid blogs already has a better page rank than this blog and it has only been around for two months and I have given it almost no attention as far as SEO is concerned.  It just naturally ranks better.

1.)So, Number one Pro would be just that.  Google gives more weight to a paid URL.  It shows a level of commitment that is just not there when you use free blogs.  This means that more time and effort will have to be placed in a free blog in order to rank it within Google.  And this is big, because you will find that you will be spending more time trying to improve your standings in the search engines than you will writing content for your own blog.

2.)Worpress software.  Wordpress is by far and away the best blog software out there.  And it is free.  They have such a large community of great programers and code writers that you will be able to find an limitless amount of templates and widgets for your blog.  Everything you can imagine.

3.)Since of responsibility.  This is of course going to vary from person to person.  But if you are investing your own money into a blog, you will want to see it do well. And you will spend more effort in making sure it is as good as you can make it.

Cons of a paid blog
1.) There really is none, except maybe the fact that it is not free.  That you will be paying for hosting and you will have to pay for a domain name.  Sites like GoDaddy and Host Gator make the costs as reasonable as possible, but you will still be looking at a monthly investment.

Other than that.  I really see no downside to owning your own URL.  So, am I telling you to go out and get one?  No.  I am telling you to look at it all as a bigger picture.  The way I look at this process is, The paid blog is the top of my food chain.  but off that I have several smaller micro niche blogs, I have Hubpages, I have Bukisa articles and other article sites, and I link from all these places.  Some go back to the main blog, some don't.  But my goal and intention is, to create a web of information, because the longer my readers spend reading MY content, the more likely they are to click on something that in some way will make some money for me.  And that is really my intention with the efforts I put into my blogs and other online properties.  I try to provide value with the hopes that I will get something in return. Not asking for anything in return, because that is just not my style.

Thank you for reading blogging for beginners.  I have appreciated the increase in traffic.  It has really been a breath of fresh air in a time when I have had trouble finding ideas for writing.

What are the Best Blogging sites for you?

Since this is going to be my first real post on blogging for beginners, I figure the number one most important topic to get squared away would be helping you find THE BEST BLOGGING SITES to use. Finding the site that will offer you easy use, high PR and reliability. Tools that will make your experience better, and Blogging sites that will best fill your needs.

While all Blogs are basically the same, every free site listed here offers a little different opportunity in the way of tools and freedoms.

What is the best blog site to use? Blogger?

I personally, mostly use Blogger.com. I am most familiar with them and they have provided me with reliable and easy to use tools. And being in the Google Family, it was an easy transition for me, being that I already had accounts set up with Google. But, Blogger.com is not necessarily the best Blogging site out there. In fact, I will rate them in my opinion and you can decide for yourself, which will be best for you.

Blogger.com is going to be the site I would recommend most. It has a strong page Ranking of 8 and it has been around for some time now. Originally launching in 1999. But in 2003 Google purchased blogger.com. This gives blogger.com some pretty strong backing in the Internet world. I would consider Blogger as the best Blogging site to use for many reasons, but mostly for ease of use. With Blogger, you can have a Blog up and running within minutes. They offer lots of plug-ins and add-ons to give you all the tools you need to make your Blog look just the way you want it. That and they have quite a few free templates to choose from when deciding on a layout for your Blog. But Blogger is not the only site to consider.

Many people will feel that Wordpress is the best blogging site to use.

Another would be Wordpress.com. Not to get confused with Wordpress.org, Wordpress.com is a free to Blog site that has a huge following. With a Page rank of 9 you are starting at an excellent place as far as site strength and to date, wordpress.com has over 10 million Blogs under their belt. Wordpress offers lots of free templates and in my opinion tend to be some of the most professional looking blogs created. The biggest downside to Wordpress.com is the limited ability to monetize your Blog. Which is something we will be discussing at a later date.

LiveJournal is a great choice for free blogging

Third Blog I would like to talk about is Livejournal.com. This is another site that has been around for a long time now, also since 1999. And they too have a very strong page rank of 8. Blogs are called journals here, and they tend to be very clean looking. I have never used live journal, but there are millions who have, and do so with great luck. This would be a solid choice when choosing a Blog platform.

There are many other choices. Personally for someone just starting in the Blog world, I would consider blogger.com or wordpress.com to be the best choices. But sites like Vox.com and Blogsome, or Xanga, are others well worth consideration. And for something a little different, Hubpages.

Hubpages are like single page blogs that can be linked together. The pages are called hubs. Here you can dedicate each page to one topic, they do allow you to monetize your hubs, and they have a great community with lots of folks willing to help. They have a pretty strong Page rank of 6 and depending on your hubs, you will be linked to other hubs, generating backlinks that require no work. Again, backlinks are something to be discussed in another post.

Well, there you have it. A handful of possible sites to start your own Blog on. What is the best blog site to use? I cannot tell you for sure. I can tell you that in my mind blogger.com is the best of the Blogging sites, but all of these choices should be considered as the best of the bunch.

Thank you for reading and please check back soon for much, much more!
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