There are a plethora of technical SEO tool lists and articles out there, with some free and freemium tools to full-on paid tool lists.
This list pulls together eight of the more unheard-of tools to help you on your quest to improve the technical state of your site (for free).
With all the factors there are to consider when it comes to technical SEO, these tools can help you with bigger and some small elements.
You don’t have to be a developer to use them as they are all fairly user-friendly and can save you time having to bother a developer as well.
Let’s get started and make these tools less unheard-of!
1. Merkle SEO Pagination Testing Tool
Making sure that the pagination across a website is vital to allow search engines to see all the pages in a series.
Pagination being implemented incorrectly is one of the biggest problems especially when it comes to ecommerce sites as well as sites with news and blog sections.
Simply put the URL in you want to check the pagination on and click run, it quickly tells you if the (rel=”prev/next”) tags have been implemented correctly.
2. Barracuda Panguin Tool
Probably the best go-to tool when your organic traffic has dramatically dropped off, or you are no longer seeing your site in the SERPs anymore.
You can quickly find out if your site has been affected by a Google algorithm change as well as any historical algorithm changes which may have affected the site.
This tools also links up to Google Analytics to gain the further insight needed.
3. Schema App JSON-LD Generator
The JSON-LD generator takes the pain out of having to write the schema code yourself, as you just choose the variables you need to tag up and it gives you the code.
This speeds up the process of putting structured data on your site.
4. Httpstatus.io
This is awesome for bulk checking URL status codes and redirect paths, it also allows you to export the data to a CSV file.
It is great for website migrations as well a just quick page checks and has a really clean and easy to use interface.
5. Ayima Redirect Path Plugin
On the subject or redirect paths, this wonderful free chrome plugin from Ayima shows really quickly the path and the status of the page you are on.
It will end up being one of the plugins you check whenever you land on a page, and will highlight problems you were otherwise unaware of on some pages.
6. Aleyda Solis Hreflang Tags Generator Tool
Creating Hreflang tags and making sure they are correct can be one of the most daunting things to do when it comes to technical and international SEO.
This handy tool created by Aleyda Solis takes most of the worry away. All you have to do is simply upload the URLs you want to tag or alternatively upload them through a CSV file.
7. Merkle SEO Hreflang Tags Testing Tool
If you have created your own hreflang tags or want to check some existing ones that are on a site then this tool is amazing to give you the sanity check you need.
It’s worth doing a check on this tool even if you’re sure on the code, just to save a big headache it can cause if the tags are wrong later down the line.
8. Google Structured Data Markup Helper
I know you may be a bit skeptical about using a tool created by Google to get higher up the rankings, but they’re trying to meet the users requests better. By using the tool you give them the data they need.
The structured data tool makes it easy to mark up the elements you want to tell Google about on your site and get them all marked up correctly.
Conclusion
As the technical elements and the code of websites progress and search engines try to become clever. Making sure that you make the search engines life as easy possible to be able to crawl your site is key to good and relevant rankings.
Hopefully, you hadn’t heard of at least one of these free tools otherwise this all seems a little time wasting, for that I apologise :). On the other hand, if you hadn’t heard of any then great this should make your technical SEO life easier and cheaper.
I do urge you to explore and see what free tools you can find out there to check the health of your site with. As they can save you money as well as show you problems you didn’t even know existed.
Mark Osborne is SEO Manager at Blue Array.