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.

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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