and today I'm going to be talking about some of my favourite tools at the

moment. These range from social media tools to keyword research tools, and

I've picked these 10 just because they are personally ones I like to use.

We'll start with similar pages. This is a Chrome plug-in. So if you find a

page that you are getting particular value out of, maybe it's good as a

link-building resource, you can use the similar pages plug-in to see other

pages that Google thinks are similar. This can uncover some great new

resources to get links from. It's also nice at the beginning of a project

if you're looking to see what Google perceives as similar to your site.

It's a good way of finding that out.

Wayback Machine is a really cool tool if you've got a site and, for

example, conversions have dropped just before you took it on. You need to

think, has something on page changed, but you don't maybe know what the

site looked like previously. You can use the Wayback Machine to look at a

cached version of the site, so you can see what it looked like previously

and decipher whether, maybe, something has changed which has caused the

drop in conversions.

GSiteCrawler is a brilliant tool for XML sitemaps. It's nice because you

can set priorities for the pages and frequencies, and it also formats it

nicely with a good GSS file.

Crowd Booster is a social media tool which lets you see how much your

followers have increased or decreased by, who interacts with your posts

most, and who are your most valued followers. It's great at evaluating any

social media campaign. It gives you a good indication of what's going on,

and it can be used for Facebook and Twitter.

Google Webmaster Tools is kind of an obvious tool, but at the moment I

think it's particularly important, because with all the algorithm updates

that are happening, if Google are giving you information from Google

Webmaster Tools, then these are obviously things that they are taking into

consideration. So anything you read in Webmaster Tools and any information

you can get from that is obviously important to your website's performance

within Google.

Copyscape is a brilliant tool for checking if you've got any duplicate

content issues. For example, it could be on page on your own site, or it

could be on another site, because it's checked on a page-by-page basis. It

can be either way. It doesn't matter where it is online, Copyscape will

find it. It also shows you the degree to which the content is

copied. So if it's the odd sentence, it will highlight that, or if it's

anything more, it will let you know as well.

Screaming Frog is a brilliant tool. It's another crawling tool. It can be

used for so many different things, from sitemaps to pretty much anything.

The reason I like to use it is as it nicely shows you a column of your status

codes, so you can quickly export any 404s that you've got. Also, it's quite

useful if you're doing keyword research. You can put a competitor's site

through there and export their title tags and from that maybe see new ideas

for keywords you could go after.

Uber Suggest is a keyword research tool. It's brilliant because it's based

on current searches. So anything that's in Google Suggest at the moment, it

scrapes the data from that, basically taking your keyword and looking at

what all the suggestions would be before it and after it, kind of going

through the alphabet. So it's really nice for current and up-to-date ideas

for titles and content and anything that needs to be really fresh.

Majestic SEO is something I use all the time for backlink analysis. In

particular, within Majestic, I would pay attention to your IP analysis and

your anchor text. This can show you if you've got an unnatural kind of

balance of brand and non-brand anchor texts, and within your IPs, whether

you've got too many links from one IP.

Panguin is a fantastic tool at the moment. It accesses Google Analytics

from your profile, and it will overlay recent algorithm updates against

your traffic. So if you've had a huge drop in traffic and there's an

algorithm update just before, it could be that that's something that's

causing the issue. With that tool, though, it's important to not jump to

conclusions and think, "This must be the reason for the drop." There might

be other reasons. Although, it's a really good indication if you've got a

suspicion that an algorithm update is behind the drop, you should still do lots of

research and background to make sure you've checked all other avenues.

So that's all the tools I've covered today. Obviously, there are lots of

other tools out there. If you've got any you want to share, feel free to

leave them in the comments below. If you want to follow us on any of the

social media profiles, they are also listed below.