Top Marketers Say: Stop Doing These Things for Greater Success in 2017

It’s always easy to find advice on what new strategies, tactics, and tools marketers should add to their mix. Especially this time of year, the internet overflows with advice. Start this new habit. Try this browser extension. Use this time management plan.

It’s good to learn and grow, of course. It’s great to add to your skill set or your toolbox. You can’t add on forever, though—eventually you need to take a few things out to stop from getting in your own way.

We asked some of our favorite marketing experts what you should stop doing in 2017 to be more productive, more efficient, and achieve better results. Here’s what they had to say.

Marketing Experts Say: Stop Doing These Things in 2017

1. Ardath Albee, CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist, Marketing Interactions

In 2017, marketers should stop thinking in terms of campaigns. Every time a campaign ends you give your audience a reason to reconsider how relevant your company is to their needs. This is especially true if the campaign ends before they know everything they need to make a buying decision. Most B2B campaigns do, forcing your buyers to go find someone else who’s telling the rest of the story they want to hear.

Marketers who choose campaigns are also choosing to alienate their audiences when the campaign ends. Instead, focus on a continuum of engagement that builds momentum over the course of the customer relationship— at a minimum from prospect to customer, and if possible through to advocate. This requires the continuity, compassion, and commitment that campaigns inherently lack.

2. Gini Dietrich, CEO, Arment Dietrich, Inc.

The one thing marketers should stop doing in 2017 is THE WRONG MARKETING AUTOMATION. Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell that, but let’s get real. Just because you CAN send multiple emails if someone doesn’t open a previous one, doesn’t mean you should.

I’ve seen two big trends this year: 1) The email that says, on the third or fourth try, “You haven’t responded to me, which means you a) must be rude; b) must not need us; c) must be trapped under something heavy and can’t call for help.” And 2) The email that says, “You must be busy so I’m popping this at the top of your inbox so you can get to it more quickly.”

Both of these approaches assume marketers have the correct list and the people they are emailing are, at best, warm leads. When, in fact, most are cold leads and are from purchased lists. This strategy does not work. So stop it. Stop it now!

3. Amy Higgins, Strategic Marketing Consultant

I wish marketers would stop deciding on their tracking parameters as the last step to their marketing campaigns. Many marketers will publish and promote content without adding trackable data parameters. Or, they add one-off trackable data parameters that are not related to a high-arching goal or campaign metric.

Worse, many add the tracking parameters at the last stage. This is where mistakes can happen in a last-minute effort to getting a campaign launched. You could even end up with trackable data that goes nowhere or adds extra complexity to your data reports.

If you develop your data strategy while you are developing the campaign, you can map the customer journey and decide what metrics you need and do not need to track.  Ask yourself, what's the main goal of the campaign? What journey do you want your customers to follow? What are you trying to get your audience to do at each stage?

4. Doug Kessler, Creative Director & Co-Founder, Velocity Partners, Ltd

Marketers should stop kissing the asses of our executive 'stakeholders' and start standing up for what we know to be great marketing.

A dumb idea from a Senior VP is still a dumb idea.

Marketers need the backbone to point that out, instead of rushing off to execute it.

They know their stuff. We respect that. We need to start insisting that we know ours.

5. John Lincoln, CEO, Ignite Visibility

I can give you a long list of things that marketers should not do next year. There's so many ineffective strategies that people are wasting their money on right now. It's really sad to see. That being said, the one thing that really resonates with me is that marketers should absolutely not be blogging without any clear goals in mind. I cannot tell you how many blogs I see out there with absolutely no purpose.

What these people do not realize is that their blog traffic can be used for remarketing, it can be used to capture email addresses, it can be used to push people into their sales funnel, it can be used to strategically target large keywords on the internet that have buying intent, it can be used to grow the size of your social media community significantly, it can be used to create ecourses and it is the single most important part of your business for thought leadership (in most cases).

If you know how to blog correctly and you're adding something new to the conversation it can dramatically increase the size of your business. It is at the heart of your entire marketing strategy and most people are doing it just dead wrong. In 2017 I encourage everybody to really define their goals for blogging and study up on how to get there and really maximize the potential of their blog. Most marketers are leaving money on the table there. They don't realize the power that their blog has and next year they really need to grab a hold of it and not continue to make this mistake.

6. Katie Martell, Marketing Consultant

Please, stop buying technology when you really need to solve your strategy problems. Many tools create efficiency, many tools make you more effective, but no tool will help you if you are lacking a foundational strategy. Invest in understanding your customers. Invest in improving your story and your content. Invest in aligning with sales.

With so many options in MarTech, many teams face a new challenge: managing their existing tech stack. Don't get caught up in the hype and when you do make a purchase, hold your vendors accountable to helping you get the most out of your money spent. 

7. Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute

According to CMI/MarketingProfs latest research, 70% of marketers are planning to create more content in 2017.  For most companies, I believe this is a mistake.  The majority of enterprise content does nothing for the intended audience. 

I would focus on creating less, but more impactful content on fewer channels...on initiatives that are truly differentiated and truly help us to create better customers.  Consolidate what you are doing so that what you keep makes the most impact possible.

The Importance of Lead Validation in Internet Marketing

After building a lead generation campaign, one thing should be clear: how you are going to manage the many inquiries your site will generate. If you mismanage your leads, your site can turn into a wasteland, and that won’t be good for anyone. While many companies rely on Google Analytics for this task, there are a few holes in that type of tracking:

• There is no qualitative analysis; it only counts form submissions.
• Sixty percent of vital data is excluded because phone calls are not included.
• The Google Analytics goal doesn’t show the actual form submission.
• Most importantly, you cannot validate that the completed Google Analytics goal was a sales lead.

Those kinds of holes can cause you to miss out on valuable opportunities — so, what is the alternative? Lead validation, which is the process of separating sales leads from non-sales-related conversions, will give you the most accurate data from your lead generation campaigns.

“The Critical Importance of Lead Validation in Internet Marketing” study reveals that half of a company’s website inquiries are not sales leads. Other key findings from the lead validation study:

• The highest number of leads, with 19 percent for both days, converted on Mondays and Tuesdays, followed by 18 percent on Wednesdays and 17 percent on Thursdays.
• Most leads, 85 percent, converted on the first visit. After the first visit, the drop-off is significant, proving that site quality is a big deciding factor for website visitors.

Having this critical data will aid you in filling those holes in your lead generation campaign because you will discover:

• Which online marketing channel was responsible for each validated sales lead.
• The accurate number of sales inquiries versus other non-sales conversions (e.g., customer service communication, sales solicitations, job applications, phone misdials, spam form submissions, etc.).
• The cost per lead will be accurate as opposed to the cost per conversion, which the study proves can be misleading.
• How to optimize campaign performance based on sales leads instead of only inquiries, which can include a large amount of other types of conversions.

When marketers judge the success of their campaigns (SEO, PPC, email, etc.) on the number of inquiries they receive, there is a chance their results are largely overstated. A campaign that brings in a lot of inquiries may in reality be generating very few leads, whereas a campaign that generated few inquiries may be generating more solid leads.

Lead validation will ensure that marketers work off reliable data so that they can adjust campaigns accordingly to generate an abundance of quality leads.

This will improve the efforts of your sales team as well, and who doesn’t love great sales and marketing alignment? When the marketing team validates leads, the sales team spends less time sifting through a lot of non-leads and more time moving prospects further along the funnel.

This will get the best leads into their hands in the most effective way, improving follow-up response time and quality close rates.

Why Lead Validation Is a Necessary?

Based on our extensive data, an extremely high percentage of inquiries — roughly 50 percent — are something other than actual sales leads. Without a validation process, clients will easily fall into two serious traps:

First: they will overestimate the results of their campaigns, possibly by as much as 50 percent. This will lead them to invest in campaigns judged to be contributing ROI — campaigns that are in reality generating minimal returns or even losses.

Second: they will not be able to accurately determine which campaign elements are generating sales leads, as opposed to inquiries. This means campaigns will improve more slowly, or campaign changes judged to optimize lead generation will instead have a neutral or negative effect.

Article Source: SBWire

Best Ways to Promote Your Online Courses

Actually there is no specialize way to promote online courses, You’ve got to address the same challenges you do when promote a service or product online: build attention, interest, desire, and action in your prospective customers.

You do need to take into account the unique structure, timeline, and value proposition of your online course, and create online marketing campaigns that support it.

Here are ways that can help you market your online course effectively and grow your Audience (I believe so).

Make a blog 

Maintaining an active blog in order to support your online course activity as an educator is the best thing to do. Update your blog few times a week with engaging, useful and informative content about your online course.

Regular blogging also make your blog authority source in your niche. Becoming an authoritative source for information that meets users expectations more than search engine needs will become exceptionally important.

Social Media 

Οbviously using social media in order to communicate and connect with potential learner is important. What you should never forget is to always provide useful information and actual and useful knowledge. Also, keep this activity within reasonable limits. For example, post blog articles on Facebook not more often than 2, 3 times a week. Making “noise” in the social media will have a negative effect on your image.

Provide Authentic Information

Make testimonials and small stories for specific people who enjoyed your online courses recently. Publish these positive examples on your blog and social media pages.

Make Short, Free Courses and Share Them 

Giving things for free builds more engagement with existing and potential customers. It is an excellent way to grow your online community and to generate more new leads.

Newsletter 

Keep engaging your past, current and future potential learners with informative newsletters. Let them know about the latest on the industry, tell them about your content, interview industry opinion leaders etc.

Run a Forum 

As an educator you are an opinion leader yourself, most probably. Use this expertise and engage learners with a forum. Of course, it takes a lot of effort to properly administrate a forum but once you are up to it results will be fascinating. You can also use it in order to start discussions, get feedback and come up with new ideas just by listening to people.

eBook 

eBooks are used to provide information, engage online customers and provide the writer with an authoritarian role. You can make and share new eBook every couple of months. They should be anything between 10-20 pages and they must share clear and useful information related to your online course.

For example, if you are educating people on Website Design, you can make a 20 page eBook on how to design a basic website. You can then upload it on your website or blog and allow people to download it for free only by giving you their name and email. This way an eBook can also become a useful lead generator.

Of course, this list isn’t a road map to guaranteed success to Promote Your Online Courses. There are number of ways you can do in order to promote your online course and sell your courses. You can start by using these ways I just mentioned above and make them part of your core strategy, before using more advanced processes.

Cool Content Creation and Marketing Tools

For content creators, the right tools can help in several ways, from helping you organize your thoughts, come up with great ideas, and create a wider variety of content. And for content creators who also manage contributions from others, there are tools that can help streamline the pitch, submission, and editing processes.

Here are 25 Cool Content Creation and Marketing Tools that help.

Editorial Calendars

Whether you are a one-person content creator or part of a content development team, editorial calendars can help you keep things on track. For businesses that tend to focus on revenue-generating projects, editorial calendars also keep you from forgetting to update the blog that attracts business.

Here are some tools to use.

Google Calendar

Looking for something simpler? Google Calendar also does a great job at allowing you to manage content dates with people both inside and outside of your organization. If your content creation lies within your organization only, Outlook Calendar also works.

Trello

Trello is a project management tool that can easily be utilized as an editorial calendar for content. You can create a board for your blog, multiple lists that represent different stages of the editorial process (idea pitches, article submission, editing, publishing, promoting, etc.).

Content Management Tools

Having content creators enter their content into WordPress is a great way to simplify the content submission process. For those who prefer to keep access to their CMS restricted to a small group, or those who have outside content contributors for other platforms such as YouTube, SlideShare, etc., here are some tools that will help convene content into one place.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a popular file sharing service that allows you to create shared folders with others to send content files such as documents, images, videos, and other media.

Google Drive

Google Drive (formerly Docs) is also a great file sharing service. It's especially helpful in the editorial process as multiple people can edit and leave comments on documents as well as upload files related to each piece of content.

OneDrive

OneDrive is the one place for everything in your work and personal life. It gives you free online storage for all your personal files so you can get to them from your iOS device, computer (PC or Mac), and any other devices you use.

Project Management Tools

Tools like Trello, Basecamp, and other project management tools can help you incorporate your calendar, file sharing, and editing all into one tool. Most allow for file attachments per task.

Topic Generators

If you're stuck on coming up with new content ideas, here are some tools that will help you discover what your audience is interested in and even lay out titles for you.

Content Forest Title Tool

Content Forest's Title Tool allows you to input a keyword and anywhere from 10 - 100 blog title ideas to go with it. Be sure to save the ideas and use them for future reference.

Portent's Title Maker

Want title ideas plus fun quips and tips? Try Portent's Idea Generator. You supply the keyword, and it supplies some witty titles to go with it.

Idea Generators

If you want to spark even more ideas for your content, here are tools you can use to see what your audience wants.

Feedly

Start by subscribing to popular blogs in your industry using Feedly. This will allow you to view lots of titles in one screen. You will also get to see which pieces of content are the most popular on social media.

Rank Tracker

Want to know what your audience searches? Rank Tracker will give you the top suggestions for keywords that you enter, which could leave you with over 200 new content ideas.

Image Creators

Great images are vital for content - they make your articles stand out on social networks when shared by others, they can help you get traffic from both Google web and image search, they turn dull presentations into captivating ones, and so much more. Here are some tools that make image creation simple

Canva

Canva is a free tool you can use to create images for different purposes, including blog posts and social media. While there is a specific category of templates for blog images, you may want to go through other categories to find different sizes, designs, and text options.

Jing

Jing allows you to capture custom-sized screenshots for your content. You can also annotate your screenshots with text, boxes, and highlighting to make them even more valuable for your audience.

Survey Tools

Surveys can be the foundation of great content. You can use them to collect expert tips, customer insights, and much more. Here are some tools you can use to collect and analyze survey data.

Survey Monkey

SurveyMonkey is a popular survey tool that allows you to collect responses for a survey, analyze the data, and export it in PDF format for easy sharing amongst other content creators on your team.

Google Forms

If you prefer a free survey solution, Google Forms are the answer. You can create a Google Form with different question formats, and Google will automatically create a spreadsheet to collect the answers. While there is no automatic analysis or easy PDF export of the responses, it is easy enough to copy and paste the answers out of the Google Spreadsheet and into a document.

Screencasting Tools

Screen recordings can make for great video content, especially tutorials and demos. Here are the top two popular tools for creating them, depending on whether you are PC or Mac.

Screenflow

Screenflow is a Mac-based software for screen recording and editing for video demos, tutorials, training, and presentations. You can connect Screenflow to Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms for faster sharing and publishing.

Camtasia

Camtasia is screen recording and editing software for both Mac and Windows users.  It's great for collaborating with content creators, regardless of whether they are using Mac or Windows. It even has a feature for imposing yourself within the video with a green screen effect.

Social Curation Tools

Sometimes, you don't have to actually create content yourself - you can use social media content that's already out there and ready to publish. Here are two ways to embed social media updates and turn it into a unique piece of content highlighting the views and opinions of others on specific topics.

Embeddable Social Media Posts

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+ allow you to embed public posts from their networks. Just look for the option to embed posts, which can be accessed using the "more" link when you hover over a tweet, the triple dots at the bottom right of an Instagram photo, or the dropdown arrow at the top right of Facebook and Google+ posts.

By embedding social posts, you automatically give credit to the original source. If you can include an embedded post from your own social networks, you can encourage even more discussion about the topic on your own platform.

Storify

If you would prefer to select posts from multiple networks and embed them with one piece of code, Storify is a great curation tool to try. You can grab content from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Getty, Flickr, Instagram, and other sources.

Interview Recorders

Instead of just relying upon yourself to come up with great content, rely on others through one-on-one and group video interviews. In addition to giving your audience a new perspective on a topic, your interviewee will likely help you with the promotion of your content. Here are some tools that most are familiar with when it comes to recording interviews.

Skype

Skype allows you to conduct one-on-one and group video calls with up to five people. Use this when you want to record interviews to edit and share at a later time on your blog or YouTube channel.

Google+ Hangouts

For one-on-one and group video interviews with up to 10 people, try Google+ Hangouts. In addition to recording the video, you can stream it live and give your audience the ability to chat live with you and your guest(s). It's almost like having a webinar, but on a free platform.

Content Marketing Tools

Content marketing is a large part of SEO strategy today. According to new research from Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs and Marketo (B2B Enterprise Content Marketing 2015) bigger companies use more tactics to target more audiences and have a more difficult time with overall effectiveness and measuring ROI – especially compared to small businesses and B2B content marketers overall.

According to the report, enterprise marketers are more challenged with nearly every aspect of content marketing when compared with B2B marketers overall. Last year 70% of marketers were creating more content and in this year’s report, 65% are creating more. But is more better?

As it can be difficult to determine what content to publish when and where, marketers need plenty of valuable tools in their arsenal – it is even more difficult to calculate that content’s return on investment (ROI), manage the content marketing team, and curate content.

TrenDemon

TrenDemon is the perfect tool if you’ve been struggling to quantify ROI of your content marketing efforts. The tool analyzes your content and provides real-time, personalized recommendations to help boost your conversions.

ClickMeeting

ClickMeeting offers a teleconferencing software that makes it easy to meet with your team and flesh out the next phase of your content marketing plan.

Share your desktop with others to make it easier to demonstrate tasks. Save your teleconferences for later viewing, in case a team member could not attend the live event. The software is also useful for creating webinars that can be used to train team members on any company specific workflows. Since the webinars can be saved and shared later, you can create quick and easy a training library to make onboarding new team members easier.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a platform that allows you to work your social media activity into your editorial calendar, right within the WordPress platform. Multiple people can access the calendar if need be, and tasks can be assigned so you can easily see who is responsible for what. By managing your editorial calendar and social media posts in a single place, you save time.

The tool makes it easy to re-share old posts and bring fresh traffic. It integrates with many other tools besides WordPress, tools like Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Buffer, and more.

Curata

Curata offers content curation software and a content marketing platform to make your content management more efficient. It helps you cut through the “noise” on the Internet and find out what’s most likely to be relevant and interesting to your audience no matter your niche. Then, it gives you the chance to go through the list of resources, take notes and organize all so you can choose what to share, what comments to add, and where you want to share it.

Curata makes it easy to take the content you find and share it across all your channels on whatever schedule you choose. It integrates with many popular content management systems, social channels, and email marketing platforms to make sharing content easy.

With all these tools, content creation and marketing management becomes much easier. You’ll have everything you need to easily track and monitor ROI, communicate with the team behind content creation, curate content, and more. what do you think?

Google Welcome me to their Authorship Program

Yesterday I received an email from Google about Google Authorship Program. It seems that writers and bloggers who work with sites that have set up Google Authorship have received email confirmations from Google like me, confirming their participation.



Google welcomes the participant to their Authorship program by this email. Also Google mentioned on email that this is one-time notification & they're not going to send further email about this Authorship program.

Please share your though if you got already or not? Feel free to write in comment.

Free Tools For SavVy Internet Marketer

If you’re an Internet Marketer and love the World Wide Web; you’re going to LOVE this list of free Internet marketing tools for your various needs. The list is based on cloud tools offers free or freemium services. I'm not going to brief description but a small overview for every tool that can help you know, what is & how thus tools work.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most popular free analytics platform available online. You can access analytics through your Google account(if you have one already) or you can open Google account by any of your existing email accounts. Once you create an account, you are asked to insert a few lines of JavaScript on your site. After that code is in place, you’ll be able to start monitoring your site’s traffic through the Google Analytics interface. If you already use Google webmaster tools for your website, Google Analytics will then be able to display some data from your webmaster tools in some analytics reports.

Currently, the interface is divided into 5 main sections: Audience (Detailed information about the people visiting your site), Advertising (information about your site’s advertising campaigns), Traffic Sources (information about where your site’s traffic is originating from), Content (information about your site’s most popular pages), and Conversions (information about your site’s goal completions and sales conversions).

Google Webmaster Tools

Google is the most popular search engine in the world, and as a result, Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is one of the most useful free SEO tools available because it gives you direct access to some of Google’s information about your site.

GWT presents information in 5 categories: Configuration (allows you to configure your GWT account), Health (displays crawling errors or malware found on your site), Traffic (shows search queries, backlinks, and +1s for your site), Optimization (helps you improve your site’s content and indexing), and Labs (experimental features).

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing isn’t as popular as Google, but Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) is still an extremely valuable tool because it allows you to view your site through the eyes of yet another search engine.
BWT displays information in 5 main sections: Dashboard (shows traffic, index, and crawl summaries), Crawl (displays crawled pages and errors), Index (presents indexed pages and backlinks), Traffic (identifies traffic sources and CTRs), and Keywords (Bing’s keyword research tool).
 

Google PageSpeed

Google PageSpeed is a free online tool (plugins are also available) that tests a URL’s load performance. You enter a URL, and then, the tool presents a list of performance-based suggestions (e.g., optimize images, minify JavaScript, etc.), which are categorized into high, medium, and low priority items.

Pingdom Full Page Test

Pingdom offers a free online tool that analyzes a URL’s load time. You simply enter a URL, and the tool displays a summary of the page’s load time, size, and a number of corresponding HTTP requests.
Here’s a screenshot of Pingdom’s results:

As the screenshot shows, the tool also presents a waterfall visualization that displays the load time and size of each of the page’s objects.

Alexa

If you are not familiar with Alexa, you should be. This popular website ranking tool is owned by Amazon and carries a lot of clouts. Alexa works by having individuals install the Alexa tool onto their computer. Once this toolbar is installed, users are tracked and their habits are used to create website rankings.

Alexa is one of the leading internet statistics engines. It keeps a "top billion" chart, where every webpage on the planet has its place. It's a chart that gives you insight on how your business is doing through calculating the popularity of your site.
 

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer one of the most popular backlink checking tools now-a-days. Open Site Explorer uses the freemium model, and without an account, you are limited to running only 3 reports per day.

If you register for a free account, you have access to 1,000 backlinks for a given URL, and the first 15 backlinks include additional information such as the link’s anchor text, Page Authority, and Domain Authority. Each report also includes summary information about the requested URL: its Page Authority, Domain Authority, the number of linking root domains, and number of total links. 

Majestic SEO Site Explorer

Majestic SEO Site Explorer is another popular backlink checking tool, and like Open Site Explorer, it uses a freemium model. Without an account, you are only able to access general summary information about a requested URL or domain.

If you register for a free account, you receive additional summary information (e.g., a backlink breakdown), and you also get access to the top 5 backlinks, top 5 referring domains, and top 100 pages for your request.

SEMRush

 

SEMRush is one of the older free SEO tools on this list, and its age is a clear endorsement of its value. The tool focuses on competitive research as well as keyword research. When you enter a domain or URL, you receive a report that includes the corresponding organic keywords, advertising keywords, organic competitors, advertising competitors, and more.

When you enter a keyword, the report presents summary information (CPC, level of competition, average volume, etc.), similar keywords, organic competitors, and advertising competitors.
The tool uses the freemium model, and with a free account, you have access to 10 reports per day (and 10 results for each section of the report). For more information, consult the SEMRush manual. It provides useful videos and detailed descriptions of the tool’s functionality.

SEO Workers - Analysis Tool

 

SEO Workers Analysis Tool Firefox & Chrome Extension analyzes any page/site very easily. Access the addon from the status bar or just right-click on the page you want to analyze. The tool will provide you with the comprehensive page SEO analysis grouped in the following sections.

1. HTTP Headers check;
2. Meta tags analysis;
3. Keywords Relevancy;
4. The page displayed within search engine results;
5. URLs found in the page;
7. Keywords found in the anchor tags;
8. Keywords found in the image 'alt' attribute text;
9. Heading & Phrase Elements;

WooRank

 

WooRank offers an instant website review. The tool also uses the freemium model, and without a premium account, you are limited to generating only one free report per week (but you can still query reports that have been previously generated).

Here’s an excerpt from WooRank’s report:
The tool’s report is currently divided into 13 sections: Top 5 Priorities, Visitors, Social Monitoring, Mobile, SEO Basics, SEO Content, SEO Links, SEO Keywords, SEO Authority, SEO Backlinks, Usability, Security, and Technologies.

Link Diagnosis

 

Link Diagnosis is a completely free backlink checking tool, but unless you install the corresponding Firefox extension, you will only receive a limited view of the results (the “lite report”). Without the Firefox extension, the tool displays the first 250 backlinks, along with each backlink’s anchor text, mozRank, Page Authority, and Domain Authority.

With the extension installed, the 250 backlink restriction is removed, and the tool presents each backlink’s title (i.e., the title of the linking page), link type (e.g., nofollow), PageRank, outbound link count, modified outbound link count, and LinkStrength (in addition to the information displayed without the extension).

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs is one of the newest backlink checking tools, but it already has a very loyal user base. Similar to most of its competitors, the tool uses a freemium model.

As a guest, you are allowed to perform 5 requests per day, and if you register for a free account, that allowance increases to 15 requests per day. Each request returns a backlink overview as well as specific information about individual backlinks (for free accounts, only the first 5 backlinks display additional information).

The backlink overview includes information such as the total number of backlinks, the number of referring domains (and a corresponding TLD breakdown), and a breakdown of the backlink types (e.g., text, image, nofollow, etc.).

For a given request, free accounts receive access to the first 500 backlinks. The first 5 backlinks display the link’s Ahrefs rank, source URL, source title, destination URL, anchor text, type, and crawl date. However, the remaining backlinks only display the link’s Ahrefs rank, source URL, and source title.
 

W3C Markup Validation Service

 

The Markup Validation Service is a free online tool that checks the markup validity of the Web document associated with a given URI. You simply enter a URI, and then, the tool checks its correctness (based on the syntax of its document type). Finally, the tool displays an itemized list of errors and warnings (with corresponding line and column numbers) that it finds during the validation process.

Here’s an excerpt from the tool’s validation output: 

BuiltWith

 

BuiltWith provides a technology profile for a given site, which includes information about the site’s server, frameworks, advertising, analytics, JavaScript libraries, and much, much more. You enter a website’s URL, and the tool essentially performs a technology X-ray.
Here’s a screenshot of the tool’s technology profile:

The tool also provides a simple SEO profile, which checks a page’s title, meta description, H1 tag, content keywords, images, response speed, and social sharing.

SpyOnWeb

 

SpyOnWeb identifies multiple sites that probably belong to the same owner. On the backend, the service clusters sites that share an IP address, Google AdSense ID, Google Analytics ID, Yahoo! Publisher Network ID, or Yandex.Direct ID. Then, when you query a website’s URL, the tool presents a list of sites that have been clustered together with that URL using the previously listed information.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

 

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a free desktop application that checks for broken links on your website. The tool also displays page titles and meta descriptions, but its primary purpose in life is to quickly crawl a website and identify the status codes of the site’s links.

W3C Link Checker

 

W3C Link Checker is a free online tool that checks the validity of links for a given URL. You simply enter a URL, and then, the tool recursively checks the URL’s links for URI scheme errors, redirects, and error status codes.

URI Valet

 

URI Valet is a free online tool that displays the HTTP headers exchanged during a request for a given URI. The tool also presents a summary of the corresponding HTML’s <head> tags and a breakdown of the various objects (e.g., scripts, images, etc.) that are downloaded when accessing the URI.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

The AdWords Keyword Tool is one of the most popular free keyword tools available. The tool gives you three options for querying keywords: (1) input a list of keywords, (2) input a URL, which the tool scrapes to identify keywords, or (3) select from a predefined list of categories.
Once you select a querying method, the tool allows you to slice and dice the results using a variety of filters, match types, and keyword term inclusion/exclusion lists.
To learn more, visit Google’s help page for Using the Keyword Tool. It answers popular questions and offers helpful videos that showcase the tool’s functionality.

Wordtracker

 

Wordtracker is one of the oldest keyword research tools, and it uses the freemium model. With the free version, you enter a keyword phrase, and then, the tool presents up to 100 related keywords, along with estimated search totals.

SpyFu

 

SpyFu is a competitive keyword analysis tool that uses the freemium model. When you enter a domain, the tool displays summary information, which includes the domain’s daily PPC ad budget, the domain’s daily organic SEO traffic value, and a graph of the domain’s historical budget. The tool’s domain report also shows the domain’s top 10 paid keywords, ad competitors, organic keywords, and organic competitors.

When you enter a keyword, the tool presents summary information, which includes the keyword’s CPC, average click count, and search volume. The keyword report also displays the top PPC domains, organic search results, and related terms.
Here’s an epic video that introduces SpyFu:

Copyscape

 

Copyscape is an online duplicate content detection tool that uses a freemium model. You simply enter a page’s URL, and the tool returns a list of pages that are duplicating the URL’s content. With a free account, the tool only displays the first ten results, and the tool only allows a certain number of monthly requests for any given site (this limit is irrespective of the IP submitting the request).

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool

 

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a freemium desktop application that allows you to crawl and analyze the pages on your website. The tool is free for the first 500 URI requests and £99/year after that.

For each request, you receive a wealth of information, including the page’s title, meta description, heading tags, image info (e.g., alt text), link info (e.g., are they nofollowed), and much, much more. Rather than bombard you with screenshots, here’s a video that demonstrates the tool’s functionality:

SEO Browser

 

SEO Browser is one of the oldest free SEO tools, but it is still incredibly useful. The tool is 100% free, and it offers two modes: Simple and Advanced. The Simple mode displays a given URL like a text-based Web browser (e.g., lynx). The Advanced mode provides a text-based view of a URL, and it also includes useful information that summarizes the URL’s content (e.g., page title, meta tags, page size, word count, IP address, etc.).

 

Feedly

 

Feedly is a mulch-platform, cross-browser web app that syncs with Google Reader and displays your RSS feeds beautifully – it practically invites you to sit down and read through every article. Beyond its attractive interface, Feedly lets you share articles via social networks and save content to read later.

Free SEO Analysis by Web Gnomes

 

The last tool on the list is a shameless plug for our free SEO analysis. You simply enter a URL, and then, the tool sends you a report that covers 20 important on-page SEO best practices, which are divided into 5 categories: Accessibility, Content, HTML Markup (<head>), HTML Markup (<body>), and URL.
Here’s a screenshot of the report’s summary gnome:

What Do You Think?

I would love to hear from you in the comments. Which of these tools is your favorite? What other free SEO tools should everyone know about?