Six essential tools to optimize your SEO

If you regularly check our blog articles, the terms "Google Friendly", internal mesh or meta-description are not unknown to you. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an ant task that requires useful tools to achieve long-term results.

Because we want to simplify your task, we have put together a list of 6 of the best tools to optimize your SEO strategy.

But, before going into the thick of it, remember why it is so important to healing your SEO.

Why take the time to work on your SEO?

SEO optimization refers to all the techniques that consist of improving the visibility of a website's web pages in search engine results.

According to the OnCrawl site, the top 5 search results represent 2 out of 3 clicks, and 89% of Internet users do not even visit the second page of results.

The report is therefore without appeal: having a poorly referenced website meaningfully reduces your chances of attracting new interested prospects. Conversely, developing an SEO strategy will cause your site to slowly climb into the results of inquiries that apply to your business, and it will be even more complicated for your competitors to dislodge it.

In addition to significantly improving the visibility of your site, SEO can drain targeted traffic to your web pages. It will be less challenging to convert this audience later, especially on specific queries (long tail).

To do this, we generally distinguish three fields of SEO actions:

On-page optimization (content quality, URL, page structure, ...)

Off-page optimization (mesh, netlinking, ...)

Technical optimization (loading time, mobile friendly, ...)

If the optimization of your SEO is mandatory and often complex, several tools make it easier for you.

Here is our selection of 6 essential tools to boost your SEO strategy

Six tools to improve your SEO

Analysis of the keywords of your site, those of your competitors, evolution of your positions, follow-up of your backlinks, those of your competitors, suggestions of keywords to integrate on your pages ... These tools cover a big part of the needs of the SEO. Follow the guide.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider:

Screaming Frog is free software used for site crawling the web. It allows you to explore the URLs of websites and to go through the architecture of a place. It will enable you to list URLs, internal and external links, images, or CSS and JavaScripts files of a home. You can use Screaming Frog to organize your silos, identify your broken links, manage your redirects, manage your duplicate HTML tags, ... Be careful though; the free version is limited to 500 URLs per crawl.

Yoast  :

Yoast SEO, formerly known as "WordPress Plugins by Yoast SEO," is the easiest SEO plugin that exists for WordPress. From an excerpt editor and a real-time page analysis feature, it helps you optimize your SEO on-page by organizing your tags (title, description, ...), content (indexing) and Sitemaps. He even suggests ways to improve, page by page.

Google Keyword Planner:

The Keyword Planner is an essential tool for all digital marketing professionals. A wealth of information, this keyword planning tool analyzes trends based on researching the Google ecosystem. It provides directly exploitable data on keyword search volumes based on geo-targeting and selected categories. Warning, first designed for AdWords users, this tool is open to all but now reserves accurate statistics of search volumes to its large customers.

Google Search Console:

The Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free tool to control and optimize Google search results data for your website. Among the proposed features, the GSC allows you to follow the evolution of the indexing of your pages, to test your robots.txt file, to track your backlinks, your appearance on Google Search and to be informed about security issues on your site. Site. Finally, Google suggests several technical optimizations, prioritized according to their degree of criticality.

MozBar:

Developed by the leader of natural SEO Moz, the MozBar is an extension for browser web page SEO analysis. When you visit a web page, this kit releases metrics in real time on the authority of the page, its SPAM score and the tags used. Plus: by activating this extension from a Google search results page, you get metrics directly on each page for comparison.                  

SEMrush:

SEMrush is an SEO competitive analysis service. Offered to the public for the first time in 2008, it is one of the most used software by SEO agencies. Paying alternative to Google Keyword Planner, it allows among other things to collect data from search results(positions, ...) and presents them in graphical and understandable form.

Applying the basics of SEO is not a real challenge, however, continuously analyzing your results to learn concrete and applicable takes a lot of time. It is so essential to carrying out this research and analysis work in the long term.

We hope that the tools we have just presented will make your life easier and help you improve your SEO. It's now up to you! Feel free to test these different tools and give us feedback in the comments.

If you want to increase your SEO traffic to make it a profitable and reliable acquisition channel in the long term, we will be happy to discuss your situation and your challenges during a free consultation of 20 min.

Optimizing a Website: Things to Improve

One of the most critical tasks of an Internet site administrator is to make visitor navigation as comfortable as possible. The loading time of the home page is already decisive: long loads take up a lot of visitors. This is a topic that has become even more important with the increase in mobile traffic.

If you keep the performance of your website in mind and improve it regularly, you'll quickly see that your visitors spend more time on your site and leave it less quickly. On the contrary, they will open more pages. Another positive effect of such an acceleration of loading times is the improvement of your web referencing by search engines.

You can test the speed of your current website, for free with Google PageSpeed Insights or kingdom. These tools measure and evaluate the performance of a site independently of the network, but taking into account aspects such as media content or the structure of HTML codes. The Google tool analyzes both versions of your site for desktop computers and mobile variants. It then shows you suggestions for improvement.

Which aspects influence the loading speed? We inform you of the typical factors of the slowdown of Web page loads, and we show you solutions approaches.

Accommodation

In the first place, you should ask yourself if your current web hosting solution meets the requirements of your web project. Many users want to save money on the performance and capacity of their server and opt for cheap offers. If you receive a large number of user requests, you will not have enough bandwidth, and this will have adverse effects at a critical time for your business.

These cheap hosting solutions, where different actors share the resources of a server, show their limits regarding capacity during peaks visits or strong growth of activity of hosted sites. Another typical error is to host your website on a server abroad, even if the offers are sometimes limited in a national market. If your site is held from a server overseas, it increases the loading time for your visitors.

Here's what you can do:

·         use flexible hosting solutions with unlimited capabilities

·         rent a server located where most of your visitors are

·         use a content delivery network if you are addressing an international target

·         take charge of hosting yourself and harmonize it perfectly with your project

HTML, CSS and JavaScript

When visitors load your website, their web browser requests the HTML file from your server and then represents the corresponding CSS spreadsheets. This also applies to JavaScript elements such as banner ads or news. The larger the files, the longer the code line swap and the longer the loading process. However such design blocks and scripts are essential, especially for dynamic websites. Renouncing these CSS and JavaScript elements to increase the speed of your site is therefore impossible. Your attention should be focused on code optimization.

For this you can:

·         Use HTML only for data with which CSS does not work

·         Use separate files for CSS and JavaScript. Just write CSS and JavaScript code in the HTML page as an exception (JavaScript always at the end of the document and before the conclusion body element)

·         Summarize the code files and compress them

Images and external content

Multimedia content is an integral part of a good website.

Along with the design and layout, the photos serve to illustrate your comments in your content. It is strongly recommended, especially in e-commerce, to present your products with quality photos. However, each image or Photo added increases the loading time of your website, especially when they are not saved on your server, but on a foreign server. This also applies to other media files such as music, videos or PDFs.

That's what you can do:

·         limit as much as possible to load external page elements

·         avoid redundant images and videos

·         Compress pictures with tools

·         store images on an external server

·         Indicate the width and height of the images (otherwise, the browser sets them by default)

·         use SVG icons (scalable vector graphics)

·         use the jQery Lazy Load plugin to delay the loading of images when they are exposed on the screen (appearance after scrolling)

Cache memory

A problem of many slow sites is the renunciation of cache mechanisms. A well-organized buffer helps to optimize a website and requires little investment. The contents stored in such an intermediate memory must not be loaded from the server to each user request, which increases the speed of a site. This significantly reduces the load on the Web server, which must, therefore, handle far fewer applications. So you can set caches for all static items such as JavaScript and CSS, or images or documents and choose how long they will stay in the buffer.

Here are the different options:

·         use the browser of the visitors as cache (cache of navigator): It is for example with an Apache web server module "mod_expires," to define how long the corresponding files must remain in the cache. The user's browser does the rest.

·         Configure a reverse proxy server as a cache or attach to a content delivery network (CDN) to access an entire system worldwide.

·         use caching software like memcached to temporarily drop dynamic contents into the RAM and minimize access to the database.

Other tips and tricks for optimizing your website

Apart from these significant steps to improve the performance of your project online, there are many other small steps to reduce the loading time of a site, such as: 

·         minimize referrals

·         Indicate the character encoding in the HTML document

·         regularly delete the wrong contents

·         avoid excessive use of plugins in the CMS

·         limit the information collected in cookies

·         use favicons (because browsers still search the web servers for the favicon.ico file)

If so far you have not taken steps to increase the speed of your website; you should start now. In 2015, the Israeli technology company Radware published an infographic on the theme of the speed of loading in e-commerce and presented surprising results with e-commerce companies that are part of the world's top 100. About 50 percent of all commercial sites, for example, gave up compressing images posted online while twelve representatives found a loading time of three seconds. But a loading time of three seconds is considered as the maximum time before losing patience to the user.

What are the most used web technologies in 2018?

When you have to choose a web technology, be it a CMS, a JS framework or a simple marketing tool, you have to find the right horse. The one that will continue to grow during the next few years. Nothing better for that than to follow the evolution of the market shares of different technologies. For this, we relied on the figures of Similar Tech which analyzes the technologies used by millions of websites.

Marketing Technologies

Analytics                                                     

Google is unsurprisingly in first place with Google Analytics, which holds nearly 66% market share of Top 10K sites and nearly 28% for all sites. Facebook Domain Insights is in second place followed closely by Quant cast. Note that, apart from Google Analytics, none of the other tools can reach the 10% mark of market share.

Email Marketing

Whether for the Top 10K sites or all sites on the net, Mail chimp comes in first place. This platform has become a reference regarding email marketing. There are two times more sites using Mail chimp (454669) than Constant Contact (226650).

Ad Serving

Google is the undisputed champion of advertising on the Top 10K websites but also on all sites on the net. Indeed, DoubleClick was bought by Google in 2007 to sit a little more dominance in the field of advertising. Competitors OpenX and Crate arrive behind.

retargeting

As for retargeting, Google Remarketing is leading (1.95%) followed by Crate (1.17% if we add Crate and Crate Publisher) and Facebook. However, it is interesting to note that for the top 10K websites, it is Facebook that leads (largely) the dance with more than 22% of market share, followed by Crate (21%). Facebook is coming in 3rd position with 9%.

Live Chat

64 tools have remained listed for the live chat. Snap Engage and Zen desk Chat are very close to each other with just over 0.2% market share, which is more than 500k sites that use Snap Engage and 450k sites that use the Zen desk.

Affiliation

As for membership, Skim links is in 1st place with 2.28% market share, followed by Amazon at 1.39%. It should also be renowned that Amazon is well ahead of the top 10K sites and Skim links are only in 3rd position, with Baldur Promote appearing second.

E-commerce Technologies

E-commerce CMS

For E-commerce, there are very strong variations to emphasize. In footings of the entire Internet (more than 3 million websites analyzed), Woo Commerce is well ahead at 0.44%, more than twice as many as Magneto and Magneto 1. However, for the top 10K sites, Woo Commerce only comes in an 8th place far from IBM WebSphere Commerce and Magneto.

Payment

90 payment technologies were identified to perform this ranking. Unsurprisingly, whether in the top 10K sites or the entire Internet, it is the PayPal service that comes first. Note the very important development of the platform Stripe, used by more than 300K sites and the difficult rise of Apple Pay only 5th.

view

As for the generation of opinions on websites and the Internet in general, only 12 technologies have remained listed. For the top 10K sites, Trust pilot leads with 0.33% market share, followed by Verified Reviews and Komi (0.11 and 0.10%). For the entire Internet, there are three locomotives for this market, Yitro, Trust pilot, and Komi. The 12th and last in this ranking, Reeve, is used by 439 sites.

Site Creation - Custom Pricing

La Barbeque du Net has developed a reference engine that allows you to obtain a free detailed price estimate and an assortment of software and breadwinners tailored to your wants for website creation.

Web development technologies

Accommodation

Web hosting, a capital part for all websites on the Internet. For the top 10K sites, Amazon is impressive with 5 of the top 8 places. About all websites, Amazon is also leading the way with almost 18% of the market share. That's more than 39 million sites that use Amazon Hosting. The second, Go Daddy Hosting, represents "only" 15 million sites.

Framework

Regarding the framework and, whether for the top 10K sites or all sites on the Internet, there is PHP, and others. Indeed, by itself, PHP represents more than 19% of market share. His dolphin, ASP.net, owns only 8%. The other competitors are very far behind.

Web servers

In the server category, angina is leading with a 42% presence on Top 10K sites. On the other hand, Apache is in the lead for all the websites followed by noggin. Between them, they share more than 50% of the market. In total, nearly 200 technologies are present on more than 213 million websites, making it one of the most diversified markets.

Forms

18 technologies present on 1 million 300 thousand websites, the forms are not yet a very developed market. But, this little game, Gravity Forms is doing best with 0.2% and especially 442k sites that use it. The rest of the technologies are very close to each other with 165k sites using Google Forms and 145k sites using Woof.

Conclusion

In this article, we have presented the main technologies of the year 2018. From retargeting to payment platforms and web hosting, you have in your hands all the tools you need to perform on the web. What technologies do you use for your website? Do not hesitate to tell us in a comment below.

Why SEO is important for businesses

SEO is good for the visibility of your brand

When people are looking for your products and services, you want to appear as high as possible in the search engine rankings.

It's not enough for people to click on your link to join Google's ranks, it's even more advanced.

There are hundreds of factors that are calculated to appear in the search results.

For example, most users do not just do a single search, click on some websites, and finish.

They search, click on specific sites, modify their search terms, carry out a new search, click on individual sites, refine their search terms, carry out a new search, etc.

What does this mean for your business?

The more you have a good ranking on google, the more the user will cross you many times and take confidence in seeing your site.

You too, are used to clicking on a site that you have already visited or had some notoriety.

It's the same for everyone.

SEO provides credibility

Users take "mental" ratings of the rankings of terms they enter into Google and other search engines.

They may not understand it consciously, but they do.  And in the minds of customers, your position is a ballot of sureness: "Google says that this case is relevant, so that must be the case."

It may sound a bit far-fetched, but let's look at things like this:

In the golden age of yellow pages, if you were looking for a plumber, did you feel more confident calling the guy on the seventh page of the list, or did you, like most people, jolt after the first sheet.

Your clienteles may not comprehend it, but high search places make you more trustworthy to them.

Natural referencing brings you qualified traffic

Why SEO is significant for industries In itself, the traffic is not successful to make you money (and again, possibly with the ads on your site).

But do you prefer to install your window on the Champs Elysee or in the middle of the Lozere?

All those people who walk around the fields every day will not make money, but chances are many of them will eventually become your customers.

Just like the Champs Elysee, you should always do your best to sell to your clienteles when they are on your website, but it's improved to do corporate on a packed street corner than to relax on an isle. Deserted.

The persons who come to your place are almost all competent prospects - they were looking for companies like yours when they found you, so they already have a need or interest in your products or services.

In adding, SEO is cheap than maximum other levers.

You can for sample go through an establishment that does your SEO, such as Web gear which takes care of your SEO in Montpellier.

SEO has one of the best ROI in advertising.

The SEO is one of the best levers purchase online. Well in front of offline ads (newspapers, TV ...) but in front of online ads too.

The SEO is a stratagem of inbound marketing, that is to say, it allows you to sell to persons when observing for the products and services your business delivers.

You do not have to interrupt their favorite TV show; you do not have to take up space on a page where they read a news article.

You show up when they look for companies like yours. You do not have to convince them that they need your product or service; you only have to persuade them that you are the right company to buy.

In other arguments, with SEO, half of the battle is won even beforehand it starts.