Saturday, February 6, 2010

SEO Audit - Free Web Based tool

From the initial days of my career in IT industry, I got very much impressed by how SEO tactics help companies in increasing their profits without investing much on marketing efforts. Companies used to hire professionals and consultants like me who can help them to reap maximum benefit out of these online marketing strategies/efforts and help them to grow faster than their competitors.

In process of learning about search engine optimization, search engine marketing I tried to collect information from experts who have fair amount of experience in this field but somehow I felt that the due to the fear of competition some of them were reluctant in sharing the knowledge. After few efforts, I thought that its better to extended my search with the help of different search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL etc so that I can have an access to different forums, blogs and can connect with experts around the world. After collecting the high level information, first thing I did was to search the free tools which could potentially help me in doing the SEO audits of websites - based on which I can provide my recommendation to my potential clients.

Searching free tools for SEO Audits and website analysis was not a simple task since the list of the tools was huge and there was no single tool which can do all the required stuff. I remember that after completing the 1st level of search I was having a list of more than 140 tools, which went down to 20 after reviewing them one by one and again in those 20 only few were totally free tools and rest were partially paid (Incase you want to use full services). I will start sharing the details of those tools in my blog one by one so that in case any new comers wanted to search for this information, they can easily access it.


I will start with one of my favourite Web based instant SEO audit tool - Xinu Returns. It’s one of the best and freely available web based tool which is really helpful for beginners to understand the analysis, however it has one drawback - you cannot download the reports into excel (But you can copy past the stuff :) which is a good thing).

PS: I have seen few small companies using this free tool and charging their clients like anything!