What tool are you using to improve your SEO?🥇

Hey Naveh, SEO changed a lot in 2020.

But as you stated above BACKLINKS are still crucial but now google made a lot of updates that bounded the relevancy of the backlinks.

Now SEO is a whole different game and you should focus on On-Page, Content, and UX.

For the paid tool, I don't recommend you anything because they are not providing that much value for the price point.

If you are good with some basic calculations you can do good in SERPs because naked eyes can judge the website on a lot of factors that crawlers can't!

But you can use free SEO tools for each purpose like:

👉 Keyword Research - Google Keyword Planner (Spend a few dollars on ads and after that google will show you exact keyword volume), Keyword Surfer, etc.

👉 On-Page - Always check your competitor's website manually because each keyword has a unique ranking rule. And always try to find a sweet spot for yourself.

👉 Link Building - Use advance googles search strings to find authority rich prospects.

👉 Backlinks Checker - This is something where I got pinched and need a premium SEO tool but I figured out a way to break the TOOL MYTH.

First, install SEO Quake & Moz Bar then do the google search for your targeting keyword, now turn on both the extensions.

And after that, you can see some metrics under each SERP result, that way you will get a quick idea like how many backlinks you need to outrank.

For deep analysis you can use ubersuggest or one quick search links:url with this string you will able to check all the indexable backlinks.

👉 For WordPress - Use Rank Math, Install schema manually.

Bonus - Use Yandex Metrica to record visitor's sessions and find your website pain point.

I hope you find this quick comment :P helpful, If you're interested in SEO you can follow me! https://twitter.com/VanshAggarwal_

Cheers!

I use ahref tool for all of my SEO work (keywords research, backlinks, competitor research etc). I think its complete SEO tool package and you don't need to use any other tool.

I don't think Yoast plugin is of much use, expect to check your title and description tags are not exceeding the characters in Google search results.

Try to follow all of the SEO best practices (content, speed, meta tags, responsive, backlinks) to get good results from the SEO

I utilize the free version of the ubersuggest extension for Chrome when researching keywords, but I use Yoast when creating content. It's basic and it's free.

One thing that has helped me is to perform a Google search for a term that I want to rank for or incorporate into my content. However, I don't necessarily look at any of the results. I scroll all the way down and look for recommended related searches that might relate to the original term searched.

The ubersuggest extension will show you how many searches the term generates per month. I do best by targeting keywords with 0-20 searches per month. These are low competition keywords that will enable you to establish authority on the topic, thus setting you up for the SEO for the long haul.

I published an article with pictures showing show I do this that be viewed at: https://siterankassist.com/latest-seo-techniques-for-2020/

Backlinks are still a vital component, but stay away from cheap and automated services. I always manually enter each and every backlink to ensure that I'm not penalizing my SEO by appearing in some PBN or spam network that I'm unfamiliar with.

Hope this helps! Please feel free to reach out if you need some help with building backlinks.

Nice thread. My recent favourite goes to Surfer and Shortlist @NavehMevorach

I wrote a post about SEO assessment and tools before. You can find all the tools here.

Backlinks are important but IMO they usually mean less without solid technical and on-page SEO.

I built a website to 130k monthly sessions, 90% from organic search, without focusing on backlinks. It takes longer, but it's not impossible.

As for link building, I wrote a pretty extensive article about this recently:
https://bloggingfordevs.com/link-building-strategies/

The "tools" you need heavily depend on the project you're trying to build links to and the types of strategies you're using. Personally, I use Ahrefs but obviously the tool doesn't build links for me. It's just a tool for research.

Hope that's helpful!

Just for the record backlinks won't help at all if you don't have keywords that are searched for in your content and metas, and use LSI to compliment. On page SEO has to be done, and images have to be tagged. Once this is done, you can then focus on the backlinks :)

It depends

You can use in conjunction with other SEO tools out there to maximize your efforts whether it is ranking for keywords to bring in organic traffic, backlinks, auditing your site, etc., etc..

The question is a bit generic. There are on-site tools, Yoast for example that give you tips and automatically set specific SEO elements on page for you and there are also off-site tools (such as ahrefs or semrush) that help you find the right keywords to target and type of content to create.

I wouldn't focus too much on SEO itself and the tools to improve SEO, as in the end the content is what matters. If you are consistently providing better content than others and let people know about it, you will rank higher.

What exactly do you mean by "self-development websites"?