The post-modern era has introduced a new generation of bloggers, who are using their blogs as a platform to share their valuable insights and experiences with the world. Bloggers are becoming more popular than ever before, and yet there is still something missing when it comes to promoting your blog and increasing traffic.
The best way to promote your blog is through social media. This can be done by creating accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc., but if you want to take it one step further, then you should consider using SEO tools for bloggers. These tools will help you get more traffic from search engines such as Google.
SEO stands for search engine optimization, which refers to the process of improving your website’s visibility on search engines like Google or Bing. If you want people visiting your site then you need SEO tools for blogger because they will help improve your rankings in search results so that more people will find you when they search online!
Seo Tools For Blogger
In the digital world, online presence matters more than big productions and huge investments in paid ads.
Well, money always helps. But doing your SEO right is what makes any strategy worth its price.
So, it doesn’t matter how much you have to invest, with good SEO tools and intelligence is possible to climb the ranks and put your company’s website at the top of the search results.
But which ones to use? We listed the 14 best SEO tools to improve your blog’s performance and use Content Marketing to amplify your visibility online.
Keep reading!
1. SEOCrawler
When any professional plans the company’s SEO strategy, they need to follow a logical path from building a structure, producing content, and analyzing data.
It is a cycle that rewards those who never stop improving. So let’s give you an idea of some of the best tools in each stage of that process.
We start with on-page SEO. The right tags, the right experience, and speed can help a lot when Google is analyzing your blog for ranking it and keeping visitors around longer.
SEOCrawler is a full suite for Search Engine Optimization, but its brightest points are its Site Auditor function.
The tool can automatically analyze your site in search of technical problems like bad titles, missing tags, and broken links.
Then it shows you a report so you can address them and avoid dropping positions on Google — or move up quicker.
SEOCrawler is free to try, so you can see for yourself if its benefits will give you the return you expect from paid plans.
2. Keyword Explorer
After on-page SEO is sorted, a blog needs content to fill it and find the right audience. Then we go to the planning stage of this strategy.
Your main work will be finding keywords relevant for your buyer persona and generating more interest.
Keyword searching is all about understanding what your buyer persona is searching for and offering high-quality content about it. The purpose of Content Marketing is to educate the lead until he’s ready to purchase from you.
For that to be done, it is important to discover the relevant keywords and their volume of search.
Keyword Explorer, by Moz, analyzes keywords, suggests similar (but better) options, and even predicts performance when using each one.
The feature allows you to do 10 searches for free per month. The Pro paid version integrates it with a lot of other tools to complete an SEO strategy.
3. Google Keyword Planner
And if you are going for search results data, why not get it right from the source?
Google has its own tool to explore and analyze performance from keywords.
The catch is that the Keyword Planner is focused on Google Ads, a paid service. But if you are already investing in that other side of an online presence, you can use it to help you write the right content.
4. Yoast SEO
With the best keywords found, what will make them work for you is producing good content. And there are some tools to help you here too.
Google will always value unique, relevant, well-structured content — posts, videos, images, and the combination of all of them.
If your blog uses WordPress, you have at your disposal one of the best, most used SEO tools in the world for writing and publishing online.
Yoast SEO is a plugin that helps you write more attractive texts, but not only that. It can check for keyword usage and its variations, readability, and internal linking.
But not only inside the text content itself, it can also boost your content improving indexation, telling Google what your page is really about, and even giving content insights based on what you have already written.
The free version will give you the core features to start, but Yoast Pro is not expensive and can give you great SEO returns.
5. Copyscape
Copyscape is not an SEO tool (it is actually a plagiarism checker), but it is really useful to boost your position on Google.
When going for more popular keywords, your content will have to compete with many people and companies. Even if not deliberate, it is common that some of those texts seem very similar.
Google rewards unique and relevant pieces when there is a lot of the same subject online to be read. So, even the free version of Copyscape can help you analyze and compare how your content will perform when published.
6. Google My Business
If the company going for an online presence is a physical shop or a restaurant, it can’t be just digital. You have to attract people to where you are.
In this case, local SEO is the main strategy for CMOs and marketing teams. And no other tool is better for that then Google My Business.
With it, you can create an official profile for your company that is shown as an informative card when someone searches for businesses close to them.
You can have contact information, photos, posts, opinions, all embedded in a Google search. When your brand comes first, it will begin to convert a lot more people in your area.
If you want to know how to set up and optimize your Google My Business account, read our guide about it!
7. Google Analytics
After finding the right keywords, writing great content, and publishing it, your job is only starting.
SEO is an ever-improving game.
You have to gather data, analyze, and find the rights and wrongs that can be addressed now and in the future.
Google Analytics is the world’s best as a full SEO suite. It can show you not only the blog’s performance but also keywords, conversions, traffic sources, and everything you need to guide your strategy.
It is even a great way to know your audience better: when and how they visit your pages, where they are, what content generates more interest, and keep them longer.
8. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another SEO tool for blogs from the world’s largest search engine and has great value for SEO professionals.
It allows you to track relevant data for blogs, correct errors, and demand faster indexing.
Among the available resources, the ones that ensure highlighting when it comes to blog performance are:
- Search queries — indicates what searches guided users to your blog.
- Sitelinks — unwanted links to your blog.
- Web crawling errors — informs about errors founded in your blog by Google search engine.
There are several other resources of Google Search Console, of course. We listed some functions which are part of the SEO professionals’ routine and can help you to guarantee excellent performance on your blog strategy.
9. Stage Analyzer
Stage Analyzer is one of the most complete SEO tools for blogs that will help you to analyze your website’s performance. We can highlight among its resources:
- SEO tips and optimizations.
- Technologies’ diagnosis.
- Traffic estimate.
- Alexa Rank.
- Server information.
In addition to checking your site, you can analyze other sites ranking and also which technologies, servers, and frameworks to use.
Thus, it is possible to see which are the main points to improve your website and outmatch your competitors.
10. SEMrush
SEMrush is a keyword research tool and one of the most famous SEO tools for blogs, even though many bloggers don’t know that.
It is also an excellent resource for monitoring your blog. First, you enter your domain to access essential data in an SEO strategy, such as:
- Keywords that bring more traffic to your blog.
- Keywords your content is ranking for.
- The estimated cost of PPC according to your organic traffic.
- Number and analysis of backlinks.
Intuitive charts and graphs present all the information collected on the blog. This data visualization model helps to gain valuable insights into the right actions in a Digital Marketing strategy.
SEMrush is not limited to your blog’s data. After all, it is also a competition analysis tool. It displays strategic data from other blogs, which support comparative reports between related domains.
It is possible to compare the number of keywords, traffic, organic positions, among other information, all of them displayed in detail in the user interface.
11. MozBar
MozBar is a browser extension provided by one of the leading companies in SEO software development for marketing in the world.
It gives a score from 0 to 100 for specific domains and pages. So, the higher the grade, the better and more reliable the webpage is.
Moz’s SEO tool for blogs scores your domain based on several factors, such as the number and reliability of backlinks, organic positions, and consistency of blog posts.
In your SEO strategy, it is always important to keep track of that score. But it can also help you to make comparisons between your domain and the ones from your main competitors.
12. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a valuable tool to do a complete SEO audit on your blog. It helps to identify optimization errors on multiple URLs, making it easier for professionals who deal with SEO optimizations every day.
SEO errors can damage the domain and affect the ranking in SERPs. With an SEO tool for blogs, professionals can act more quickly, identifying problems and correcting them automatically before the website is penalized.
The free version is available with some feature limitations.
13. Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is one of the best SEO tools for blogs dedicated to backlink analysis. It has a free version for blog owners and a premium version for marketers who demand more robust information. It is necessary to subscribe to one of the available paid plans to evaluate competitors’ domains.
The tool offers valuable metrics to track. Among the main ones that can help you to analyze your blog’s performance regarding SEO efforts we can mention:
- Number of backlinks.
- Main reference domains.
- Main referenced pages.
- Main used anchors.
Majestic SEO also evaluates two relevant metrics that help to rank and assess the relevance of a domain on the web. These metrics can also help prioritize link building:
- Trust Flow — a metric that shows the level of trust and authority that a domain has on the web.
- Citation Flow — a metric related to the earning link, that is, the number of citations (links) received by a domain on the internet.
14. Google Page Speed Insights
At last, we list Google Page Speed Insights, a very intuitive SEO tool for blogs that aims to evaluate the loading time of a page, just as its name suggests.
As you can imagine, the webpage load-time is a relevant factor for SEO. From the user’s point of view and for search engines, a speed-based web page with the best loading times provides the best experiences for users.
For that reason, loading time and responsiveness are essential for a good SEO strategy. Therefore, you can use Google’s Page Speed Insights to check your blog’s performance and ensure a better user experience for your visitors.
There is not a recipe for the success of an SEO strategy. But you can improve your website considering factors such as website security, page loading speed, and user experience.
Using the best SEO techniques, you can increase the visibility of your blog, reaching better rankings in the SERPs and the perceived value by your visitors.
Search Engine Optimization needs work, time, and constancy. But with the right SEO tools, you can reduce all of those requisites and increase visibility at a faster rate.
Make your plan, define the steps towards your goals, and choose the right solutions to follow you in each of them.
Do you want to know more about how to do great SEO? Check our complete guide on the subject!
how to make seo tool website
SEO tool is a broad definition, and there are many niches you can get into, each with its pros and cons, this article will outline the most typical niches, and summarize what how to build your own SEO tool:
Backlinks explorer tool.
Keyword explorer tool.
Rank checker tool.
On-page SEO Audit tool.
Brand mentions tool.
How does an SEO tools work?
Before going into the details of how to create your SEO tool, it’s crucial to understand how SEO tools work, the tools (any SEO tool), has multiple stages:
Acquire the data from various sources: Public internet data, clickstream, 3rd party data, SERP.
Store it on a database: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redshift, custom database.
Process the data using specific algorithms to get insights from the data: Domain rank, which keywords a site is ranking for.
Show the results to the end-user via GUI or provide the results via SEO tools API.
How to create backlinks explorer tool
In this section, we will go over what does a backlinks explorer tool does, what are the parts needed to develop such a tool, and how to develop each part.
What is a backlink explorer tool?
SEO Explorer’s backlinks tool screenshot
Backlinks explorer is a tool that allows the end-user to:
Learn who links to his site, and how
Discover where the competitors are getting links from
Learn where sites link out to
Help in the process of domain vetting for:
Purchasing live domains
Purchasing expired domains
Deciding where to do guest posting
To summarize all the options, the goal of a backlink explorer tool is to help with link building and/or help with link disavowing.
How the backlink explorer tool works?
Three parts make the backlinks explorer tool:
Crawler
A crawler is a software that retrieves the content of public web sites, the crawler can be small, for small projects and low amount of webpages, or enterprise-grade to crawl the entire Internet, just like Google’s crawler, which is the largest that exists.
The goal of the crawler is to scrape the data on the web page. Once it has the data, the crawler or another component can parse the backlinks.
Database
Once the crawler got the links, it will store the links in a database. The database allows for fast retrieval of the data. The size and type of the database are dependent on the amount of data crawled, for a small project a single server can do. Still, for Internet-wide crawls, there’s a need for a distributed database, most likely with in house customizations.
GUI
For backlinks explorer tool, the product is mostly SAAS (Software As A Service), which means the GUI is web-based. The GUI should be intuitive as there’s many data point and the end-user should understand rather fast how to access the data he’s looking for.
How to create backlinks explorer tool
How to create backlinks crawler
There are numbers of open-source crawlers available, written in different languages. When we started with our crawler, we had two programmers build a Python-based crawler, and it was able to crawl ten pages per second on a VPS with one core, taking 100% CPU.
We had someone build a C based crawler, and it was able to crawl 100 pages per second on one core, taking 1-3% CPU.
So, choosing the right language of the crawler would impact the hardware selection, it’s a tradeoff between an expensive programmer and expensive hardware.
The essential traits of a crawler are:
Fast and light, use as little CPU as possible per downloadable page.
Honours robots.txt, to avoid abuse reports.
Able to parse sitemaps to get new data.
If it’s enterprise-grade, then it should be distributable.
Building a crawler with Python
Python is an easy to learn language, with a rich ecosystem and libraries; it cost us 100$ to have a freelancer build a basic crawler with Python and Scrapy. Also, Python has many libraries to parse the DOM and get only the essential elements like Page title, Page description, links.
The development would be fast and not too expensive; the downside is the need for more hardware.
You can download the scrapers/crawlers that was built for us: Python scraper 1, Python scraper 2
Building a crawler with Libcurl
Libcurl is the leading development library for HTTP/S communications, it also supports asynchronous connections, for single HTTP/S requests it’s straightforward and easy. Still, to write a crawler, that’s more complex but doable.
A preferred language would be C or C++, and you will also need some libraries to parse the HTML to extract the links and other information from the page.
You can download the scraper/crawler that was built for us using C and Libcurl: c scraper
Build it all yourself
Our experience shows that for core technologies that need to be highly customized and built for speed, it’s better to write it yourself, we assume you have a very experienced programmer up to the task, just like we have in house.
We developed our own crawler, written in C with BSD sockets and OpenSSL, our own HTTP and HTML parsers. Writing your own crawler allows for the best performance, but the cost was extra development time.
Bandwidth consideration
Bandwidth cost is also an essential factor; some hosts like OVH provides unmetered bandwidth based on the port speed (100MB, 1GB).
Some hosts like Amazon charge for the actual bandwidth, and you may end up paying more for the bandwidth than the hardware.
The bandwidth criteria mean you might need to use a host that requires more knowledge and expertise but gives cheap bandwidth over using an easy to use as Amazon.
How to build a database for backlinks
database
Once you have the data, it’s time to store it. How much data do you plan to have? Ten billion backlinks would take 4-5 Terabyte of database storage, for comparison the competitors (Ahrefs, Semrush) offer a database of over 1 Trillion backlinks.
The issues with open source databases (MySQL, for example) is that after 50GB in storage, the insert speed degrades exponentially. For backlinks database, there’s a need for sustained insert speed, for our needs it was about 50,000 inserts per second, and after 50GB of storage the speed started to go down, at 200GB of storage it was so slow, it was unusable.
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift database can be scaled easily to have a large storage, and shouldn’t have the same problem the open-source solution has, but 10 Terabyte of space would cost 30,000$ monthly on SSD storage.
Clustered database
Some hosting providers offer clustered MySQL or PostgreSQL out of the box. A clustered solution can get around the insertion speed issue if each node is limited to 200GB storage.
The problem is that the clustered solution costs 10,000-20,000$ per month for ten Terabyte of storage, depending on the hosting provider.
Commercial database
There are commercial databases that can handle this load, like Oracle database, we don’t know what the price is, Oracle database is an enterprise product, it may not be suitable for startups.
Percona MySQL database
Percona is a company that specializes in database optimizations, and they have a custom version for MySQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL. We wrote a long article in Quora about the database ordeal, and someone asked if we tried their Tuko engine, I didn’t. So it might help, we never tested it.
Custom database solution
We decided that paying 10,000-20,000$ per month for a database is too much. Besides we haven’t made a single dime yet, is not the way to go, we don’t have VC money, and that amount puts great pressure on finances.
We decided to develop a custom database that can handle the insert and select load. We can host it for 350$ monthly, but it took us two years to build it, so we traded time for money.
You can read our article about which database we use (hint: we built it), it covers in more detail about the limitations of current databases and how we solved it.
Integration and GUI for backlinks tools
Now that you got the database and crawler, it’s time to integrate and make sure you build a friendly GUI so people can see their link building efforts.
For web SAAS, there are several languages people use: PHP, NodeJS. We use PHP and a custom HTML theme; we cover more about GUI development later in this article.
Our backlinks API
Our API allows to get all the backlinks information regarding a site: Backlinks, Outlinks, Top pages, Referring domains, Referring classification, Top anchors and more.
Our API can be used for building:
Free SEO tools as lead magnets.
Commercial SEO tools.
Internal research tools for link building.
Other Internet marketing tools.
Check out our Backlinks API details.
How to create keywords explorer tool?
What is a keywords explorer tool?
SEO Explorer’s keywords explorer screenshot
A keywords explorer tool allows the end-user to gather keyword ranking information about his website, and the competitors, this allows you to know:
Which keywords does his site ranks on, and which position?
Which keywords do the competitors rank on?
Keywords opportunities and ranking difficulty.
Keywords search volume.
Keywords PPC costs.
Long-tail keywords.
Similar keywords.
A keyword explorer tool also helps with keyword research. Keyword research is crucial to any content marketing campaign. For example, we wrote a few blog posts without doing any keyword research (Like this one), we just wrote what came to mind, but since the post didn’t focus on anything the user searches, it gets about one hit per month.
BTW we wrote this paragraph in Nov 2020, and we will revise all of our content with proper keyword research, trying to salvage the content.
Why should someone use a keywords explorer tool?
A keyword explorer tool is used mostly for SEO and PPC:
Research which keywords to focus on, when writing articles.
Discover easy to rank keywords.
Discover cheap PPC keywords.
Keyword search volume tool.
How does a keywords tool work?
Keywords explorer tool has several components:
Keywords explorer scraper
The scraper is the component that gets the data from the search engines (mostly Google, but some products supports more engines), parses it and make it ready for storage.
Keywords’ search volume data
Keyword search volume data is static data that is displayed next to the keywords, and it might also contain keyword ranking trends.
Keywords’ PPC data
Keyword PPC data is static data that is displayed next to the keywords, and it shows the average cost for Google AdWords PPC.
Keywords explorer database
The database stores the data in the previous sections:
SERP results.
Keywords’ search volume data and trends.
Keywords’ PPC data.
GUI for keywords explorer
The answer is almost the same as for backlinks explorer tool the exception is that keywords explorer is only SAAS and not a local software. So with SAAS, the GUI is web-based.
How to create keywords explorer tool
How to write a scraper
Web scraper
Type of IPs
A scraper gets the search engine results. Google and the other search engines don’t like it, so they employ Recaptcha to stop the scraping. Even if someone is using anti Recaptcha methods, eventually Google will block that IP anyways.
There are various methods to scrape Google successfully:
Datacenter IP
Datacenter IPs are easy to come by, you can spawn a VPS starting from 2$ on low-cost providers, to 5$ on a leading provider.
The problem is – Google knows that too; it will display the captcha after about 100 requests.
There can be several solutions to this problem:
Replace the IP every time the IP is blocked, and most VPS providers have an API to do so, check the provider TOS before doing that, see that this is allowed.
Make a request every x seconds, depending on the results you ask for, the more results, the bigger the x. The problem here that you must maintain a large number of proxies.
Using residential IP
Since Google knows the IP came from a residential IP, it will not block the requests as long as you wait a few seconds, the problem is, how to get such IP?
If you live in the place, you plan to scrape the results from, and then you can install several connections and use them, the problem is, for an extensive keyword database, this will not scale well.
Another solution is to use a residential IP provider like Luminati, and the problem is the price, the charge per bandwidth, which makes the operation very expensive.
Which language to develop the scraper?
Unlike the backlinks crawler, the scraper doesn’t have to be very efficient, so Python or even PHP can be the right choice.
If there’s a need to render JS, then using headless Chrome or headless Firefox will be preferred.
Where to get search volume data?
Clickstream data
Clickstream data is collected from real users, and it contains every URL the users visited and every search phrase they searched.
The search volume of every keyword can be deducted based on the number of panellists that are part of the clickstream data in a specific country.
This data allows us to get an estimate of the search volume because it’s only a part of the actual users searching. Also, the way this data was collected affects the results.
When an Antivirus provides the clickstream data (like it was with Avast), it means the data represents the way that end-users that installed Avast behaves, it may be different from other types of end users that wouldn’t install Avast.
If the budget allows, purchasing clickstream data from multiple sources will allow for better estimation of search volume.
Search volume from API
Some companies such as ours are selling search volume metrics with an API, and there are two types of commercial API usage:
Internal API usage
When the data is used internally, which means it’s not displayed publicly, it can be used for the company’s internal needs, or to show private reports to SEO clients.
This usage should be cheaper than white label usage.
Whitelabel API usage
Is used when developing a public app or SAAS and you want to show 3rd party data, the best example would be Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest, he publicly revealed his monthly spending on the tool. Part of the expenditure is for development and role for the data.
Obviously, this data is more expensive, and most companies will perform due diligence before providing such API functionality.
Google API
Google offers an API that provides PPC prices information, search volume data. It’s all the data that is available via their Keyword planner tool. They provide the API after a vetting process, and the API can only be used for specific goals.
Where to get extra keywords
Google says that 15% of all searches are new, which means that even if you get clickstream data, it will not include all possible keywords (you can read more about it here).
On this blog we have some articles that ranked on keywords that our tool and other tools show no searches. When doing keyword research, keywords with “zero” searches may have enough search volume never the less.
Luckily we can get most of this data from Google itself (also from Bing and Yahoo), which you are already doing with a scraper.
Related search
In the bottom of each search results page, there are a list of keyword suggestions related to our searched keywords.
People also search.
Some pages show another pane with people also searches, which gives even more keyword options.
Google Trends
In Google Trends, there are two options:
Related topics – Shows related topics to our keyword, for example, related topics for “keyword research” are Niche market, content, Affiliate marketing.
Related queries – Shows what other people were searching for in relation to the keyword. It’s another data endpoint to the related searches in Google web search.
Google autocomplete
Google autocomplete suggestions helps the searcher do a search based on the previous searches, for example, let’s say a user enters “keyword research”, Google will add options based on past searches, for example, tool, Google, for SEO. It will not add keywords; however, without any meaning for the search like a cat, not that you can’t search: “keyword research cat”, it just that it has less meaning.
Google Search Console
Some products like ahrefs and Ubbersuggest request access to the Google Search Console, they then use the keyword data provided by Google to show improved keywords data.
One thing to consider is that for low search volume keywords the bots can skew the data, as you can see in the graph for one of the keywords we are ranking for, one the same day of the week a bot searches Google for this keyword.
Google search console affected by bots
Database for keyword explorer
Unlike the backlinks explorer, the data is not too big, and the insert speed requirement is low. One or two instances of MySQL would be enough; the challenge here is the sorting based on search volume, searching for similar keywords, and searching for similar phrases. For example:
How to sort big data
A site like eBay is ranked for millions of keywords in the SERP. When showing eBay’s result (or any other results), they are sorted by the search volume.
It doesn’t matter if the applications display five results, or a hundred results, the database will have to fetch all the results (millions) and sort the result before providing an answer.
The speed will depend on the database’s hosting computer performance, and number of jobs the database is currently doing, but even on an idle server, this will take at least a few seconds which can make the site look slow.
The way we solved it is to precompute the sorting. We developed a multithreaded C++ program to precalculate sorted results, which means we have a table that holds all the keywords for the sites, and the search volume is already sorted.
Using this method – fetching the results is almost instantaneous.
How to sort similar keywords
Similar keywords are keywords that contain a seed keyword, for example, for the keyword “seo services”, has the following similar list of keywords: professional seo services, affordable seo services, white label seo services reviews.
SEO Explorer’s Similar keywords tool screenshot
We have 270 million keywords just in our primary database, doing a similar search even with full-text indexes can be time and resource consuming.
The way we solved it, we used a C++ program (again) with Aho-corasik algorithm to precalculate those keywords lists, and then we store it in a table.
Aho-corasik is an algorithm that allows doing a fast search on a string; in one pass, it finds all the keywords in our dictionary.
Even with that algorithm in place, it takes the program up to 48 hours to go over all the keywords, think how long it would take to do it in the database level.
The Aho-Corasick version we developed and use can be downloaded for free: Open source Aho-Corasick.
How to sort similar phrases
Similar phrases are phrases that contain the seed word, just not in the same order, for example, the seed keyword: “free mac pdf editor”, has the following similar phrase list:free pdf editor for mac without watermark, adobe pdf editor mac free, free pdf editor mac download, pdf editor mac free online software.
SEO Explorer’s similar phrases screenshot
I’m not sure it’s even possible to design a database query to fetch such a list, the way we have done it, is use the same program from before, but this time we take each keyword and build all the permutations, and then we search those permutations.
When we first ran the program, it was “stuck”, when looking deeper we found the problem, a phrase with 12 keywords, generates 479,001,600 options, which will take two days just to search.
We had to limit the phrase building to 9 keywords, which generates “only” 362,880 results, we put this on a 40 logical thread server, it takes a month to go over all the keywords.
Keyword difficulty tool
Part of a keyword explorer is to gage the keyword difficulty, and each company has its own way to calculate this score, at the end all the numbers are estimates.
The data that can be used to calculate the keyword difficulty is:
Website Page rank (also referred to as domain authority)
Number of links (unique or total) to each link in the result
On-page factors
The way we calculate it is by creating the average of the page rank of each site in the results; in the future, we plan to look at this again.
Integration and GUI for backlinks tools
The GUI is always the same for all tools; later in the article, we provide a detailed explanation on how to write GUI.
Our Keyword API
Our API allows to get all the keyword information for specific geographies: Keyword search volume, similar keywords, related keywords, also ranking for keywords, and more.
You can use our API to build:
Keyword research tool
Augment on page content creation tool with keyword data
And more
Check out our Keywords API details.
How to create a keyword position rank tracker
What is a keyword position rank tracker?
A rank tracker is a tool that tracks a site rankings and keyword position in the search engines. It will:
Track keywords across different geographies.
Track keywords in specific cities which is needed for local SEO.
How does a keyword position rank tracker work?
Rank trackers are search engine scrapers that use proxies or other means to use different IPs to scrape the SERP in a specific geography or cities.
How to build a keyword position rank tracker?
The rank tracker should be the easiest tool to create, that’s why there’s so many out there, the entry barrier is low.
Because there’s little data, any database will do, you can go with MySQL.
Since you need to track keywords position across various geographies, using a residential IP proxy provider makes sense since the number of tracked keywords is tied to the number of subscriptions, the cost of the IP provider should scale well with revenue.
The “crawler” section on similar keywords tool in this article covers how to write a SERP scraper which has the same applicability to the rank tracker scraper.
How to create a on-page site audit tool?
People auditing charts
What is a site audit tool?
Site audit tools are used to detect on-page SEO issues like:
Find Broken links.
Check for missing or incorrect robots.txt.
Discover missing or incorrect sitemap.
Check for internal linking issues.
Detect missing meta description tag.
Find incorrect usage of header tags (for example, H1).
Discover duplicate content.
Generate a sitemap.
Check for missing hreflang.
Technical SEO issues.
And more.
How does a site audit tool work?
A site audit tool works by crawling the site it audits and analyzing the link structure and meta information on each page. Once it has all the data, it processes it to show the auditor the relevant information to fix.
How to build a site audit tool?
The core component of such tool is the crawler, the first decision would be whether that crawler is based on SAAS (the crawler is hosted at your servers) or the crawler is a downloadable software.
Crawler as a SAAS
Unlike the crawler for backlinks tool, this crawler usually needs to crawl less data, which means you can get away with Python-based crawlers, which will speed up development time.
Once you have your crawler in place, you’ll need to analyze all the factors mentioned, and Python has many libraries to do so, so a fair Python programmer should do the job rather easy.
All the data would go to a database since there’s not a lot of data, a single MySQL instance would do the job.
On Code Canyon there are several scripts to do SEO audit, they can be used as a base for the final SAAS software and save development time.
Script language or C++
When developing the backend for the on-page audit tool, the selection of the development language should fit the market size.
If the amount of web pages scanned is small, a scripting language like Python or PHP would be a good selection.
If you plan to have many users and many sites scanned, the technical SEO analysis and other on-page analysis will tax your servers, and this means you might need extra servers.
In this case, the tradeoff is between development speed and hardware cost; there’s no right and wrong answer.
Crawler as a download
The main decision, in this case, is which OS to support, if the plan is to support multiple OSs, you should use a development language that is not OS depended like: Python, Java, NodeJS. The drawback is the need to install the development language runtime locally, which on some computer can fail for various reasons.
If the software is meant for a single OS, it can be written in C/C++, with minimal dependencies, this will allow for a higher success rate when installing the software. Also, a good programmer can write C/C++ code that will port easily to Linux/Mac if it’s known upfront.
For a local database, you can use SQLite, which is the gold standard for local databases (I wouldn’t try to install MySQL locally, that would lower installation success rates)
Javascript rendering
Some sites are using Javascript to render their content, which means that if you scrape them with a regular scraper, it will take some or all of their elements.
The solution is to use Headless Chrome, which can be invoked from the command line or controlled via a package called puppeteer.
One thing though, Headless Chrome mentions it’s headless, it does so in the user agent, on our main site we block headless browsers.
Using a script to create a Site Audit tool
Sometimes you need to have a site audit as a lead generation, and it doesn’t need to have all the bells and whistles.
You can find ready-made scripts that do basic site audits on sites like Code Canyon, and you can search for PHP SEO. You’ll find many SEO related scripts.
Keep in mind that we don’t endorse any script, and you should do your due diligence before using any script.
How to make an SEO tool website (small SEO tools)
There is numerous type of sites that provide many small utilities for SEO, like:
• Image conversion
• Image editing
• Various keyword tools
• Various backlinks tools
• Plagiarism Checker
• Article Rewriter
• Grammar Check
• Word Counter
• And more
The site smallseotools.com has an Alexa rank of 2000 (Checked May 2021), which means it gets a lot of traffic from SEO-oriented users.
Creating and promoting such site or adding such features to an existing site can add valuable traffic to any SEO venture.
The easiest way to achieve this is, like we mentioned before, to go to a site like Code Canyon and search for PHP SEO. They have many scripts that allow you to deploy a site similar to smallseotools relatively fast. (remember we don’t endorse any script, and you should do your due diligence)
Some of those sites are also affiliates to the SEO big sites (for example, Semrush). That’s why they can show data such as Backlinks data and Keywords data. If you want to show such data, you could develop your own, use an API, and be an affiliate in exchange for data.
Other tools
Other SEO tools are not mainstream. Obviously, we can’t cover how to create every SEO tool, for example, our SAAS has built-in URL Classification, it allows for better domain vetting, we integrated our URL Classification SAAS with the SEO SAAS.
I could theorize for most products the core principles shown here for the other tools:
If the tool needs fast data additions, it needs a distributed database solution which is expensive, or a custom solution which is costly to develop.
If the tool uses AI, you can use a premade dataset from GPT-2, or use a library by Huggingface.
Which hosting provider to use
Host with many connected computers
When developing this kind of tool, you must have an experienced sysadmin, so the answer is written with that assumption in mind, besides for a project at that scale, you must have someone that experienced, or you’ll end up paying a premium for mistakes.
Database hosting provider
We host our custom database at Hetzner, from our experience Hetzner is the best-dedicated server hosting company we worked with. We had a hard drive replaced within 5 minutes; the entire motherboard replaced within 30 minutes.
In general, a dedicated server will be cheaper and faster than any cloud VPS, for example, we use a server with 12 logical threads and 256GB that costs 80$ per month, getting an equivalent in the cloud costs around 1000$ per month.
If you plan to use a distributed database, you can go with a provider that has a built-in option to deploy such a database, like DigitalOcean. You can also use Amazon Redshift, keep in mind it may be more expensive than going with the distributed database.
If you feel that your team is highly technical and able to deploy a distributed database by yourselves, you can save by using a cheap dedicated server host like Kimsufi.
VPS for proxies
For VPS, you can go with the big players: DigitalOcean, Linode, their smallest VPS costs 5$. Amazon LightSail smallest VPS costs 3.5$ and we’ve found some good providers that you can get an IP for 1.75$.
There are smaller players which offer 2-4$ VPS, the more technical your team is, the more leeway you have with picking up the providers.
Buy complete IP ranges for your proxies
Some hosting providers offer to buy or lease an IP range. For example, OVH sells a class C (256 Ips) for a one-time price of 756$.
But, most of those ranges come from countries that sold their IP pools because of the IP4 shortage.
For example, you could buy a range claimed to be in USA, but in reality, the IP4 range belonged to Pakistan before and not all of the IP geo providers changed it to the USA.
Furthermore, it’s possible that all the IP GEO providers changed the detection of the IP to the USA, but Google didn’t.
It means you’ll need to check with each GEO IP provider and even with the vendor how the IPs are identified. We refunded a few deals just because the IP wasn’t identified correctly.
Front end hosting
Unlike our recommendation to use dedicated servers, with the front end a VPS might be a better pick, the reason is, it’s easy to backup, deploy more instances on the go, and usually, at the start, there’s no demand for high performing hardware.
In later stages, when the traffic is high, you can go with a dedicated server and various CDN solutions like Cloudflare, that will help with the high traffic.
It’s essential to make sure your website loads fast from the geography of your end-users; you can use a tool like Pingdom to benchmark your site.
Which development language to use for the frontend?
Here at SEO Explorer, we love PHP. It’s very similar to C/C++, which is the language we use for our backend.
At the beginning we thought if we should use a framework, we read the reviews, and decided against it, the tipping point was that the inventor of PHP – Rasmus Lerdorf was against it, as written here.
Some people will swear by PHP frameworks. It’s a matter of opinion, and there’s no right or wrong answer.
For the design itself, we use a theme called Metronic, which saved us a lot of time since the theme is responsive and automatically supports desktop and mobile browsers, we paid about 80$ for it. Still, the saving in development costs was crazy.
The good thing about HTML themes is that you can add any development language to it, PHP or others, which gives excellent flexibility.
There are many other good themes you can purchase at Themeforest for a low price.
Which framework to use for your blog?
For our blog (the one you read now), it was a no brainer, and we use WordPress, it’s the most supported blogging ecosystem, you can’t go wrong with it.
One dilemma we had, for SEO, should we use our domain as a standalone subdomain or as part of the domain, we decided it should be part of our domain for higher domain ranking.
Should you build your own SEO tool?
If you reached this point, you should have a high level of understanding of what is required for every tool.
Some tools will be cheaper to develop, some tools require many servers and programmers, and you should research the tipping point between using 3rd party SEO API and development of SEO tools.
Building your own SEO Tools is never free, and the time spent on SEO tool development is a time you are not reaching the market.
In our case, our business is selling SEO tools, so it made perfect sense to develop it, but if we were an SEO agency, we would use existing tools or data.
Summary
It’s possible to develop your own SEO tool or DIY SEO, each type of tool has a different entry barrier, some are very hard, some are easier.
There’s an option to speed it up rather than build your own SEO tool– white label SEO API. We provide an SEO API that is available for private or SEO Whitelabel use case that supports:
Backlinks checker API.
Outlinks checker API.
Keywords search volume API.
Similar keywords API.
And more.
It’s possible to integrate our SEO API into an existing solution or build a new solution.
I hope you enjoyed our article about do it yourself SEO software.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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