Tools And Plugins I Like
Last Update: 12/2/2019
.htaccess tester – Test your file for errors and issues.
301/302 Redirect Checker – A quick way to check a redirect to see what type it is.
Bit.ly – Shorten URLs and track the clicks.
BrightLocal Search Results Checker – Check international search results from any location – do in incognito mode.
Character Count Online – Counts characters live as you type them. I like to use stuff like this when writing metadata, social markup, and other things that need a specific count.
Colorblind: Dalton For Google Chrome – Test out a website to see how it works for various forms of colorblindness.
Convertkit – Great for email nurture campaigns.
Epic Privacy Browser – Browser with an on/off toggle to enable a proxy and hide the IP address.
Facebook Ad Library – See what ads are running for specific Facebook pages.
Facebook Debugger – Important to run between refreshes when experimenting with OG data
FindThat.email – Find e-mail addresses that would otherwise be hard to key in on.
Google Campaigns URL Builder – Super easy to use, and invaluable in helping you track the success of campaigns.
Google Keyword Planner – The remaining way to do keyword research straight from the source.
Google Rich Results Spam Reporter – I’ll need it someday, I’m sure.
Google Search Operators – A solid list of Google’s search operators.
Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool – Easily write titles and descriptions, and enter URLs while staying within character count.
Google SERP Title Tag Optimization Tool – MOZ’s updated tool for title tags.
Google’s Structured Data Helper – Looks like a pretty cool thing to check out. I usually make mine by hand, the hard way.
Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool – Great for seeing if structured data and/or Authorship is set up properly.
Google Trends – Find out what keywords are trending online.
GroupHigh – If you can afford it, it’s fantastic for finding influencers and guest blog opportunities.
GTMatrix – Solid speed testing tool for websites.
HEIC to JPG Converter – Because it looks like Photoshop doesn’t support HEIC images yet, and they’re not going away.
How Search Works – A virtual playground of SEO exploration I intend to visit more often.
How To Make YouTube Videos Louder – Just a little bit of script that I find incredibly useful, and how to set it up. Works with most other videos too.
Invision – Great for UX/Design collaboration
JSON-LD Generator – It’s a good start, but I’d tweak from there.
LatLong.net – Get the exact latitude and longitude of places.
Lucky Orange – My preferred tool for UX/CRO testing.
MobileTest.me – Test how your website looks in several leading mobile devices.
Mobile Friendly Test – Google Developer Tool to test mobile compatibility and get helpful suggestions.
MonkeyTest.it – Run a troubleshooting check of a given web page.
Omnicalculator – Does the math so I don’t have to be anxious about being wrong about it.
Online Chart Tool – This is an neat free chart tool I formerly used to create visuals when building SEO site evaluations.
Online HTML Source Code Viewer – Think you have issues with your cache, and need to see the code fast? Try this tool.
Regex Checker – Test out whether your regular expressions work properly. Refereed to me by the lovely fellow dragon Jannette.
SchemaAPP Schema.Org Generator – I’ll probably continue to do these by hand myself, but this is a cool way to make one if you’re new.
SilverPop’s 2013 E-mail Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study – An absolute wealth of data on e-mail marketing, conversions, and demographics.
Squoosh – Google’s image optimization tool
The Old Reader – My RSS Reader
Tweet Binder – Find out traffic volume estimates while doing hashtag research.
Video Rich Snipper Generator By Sistrix – Great for populating schema into videos. Sadly, now only available in German.
WaybackPack – Download the entire Wayback Machine archive for a given URL.
WebPage Test – A handy tool to find various website page speed metrics.
What CMS Is This? – Quickly scan a site and identify its CMS platform.
What Does My Site Cost? – Find out how much your site would cost, datawise, to run. Sorted by country.
Chrome Plugins
CMS Detect – Find out what CMS the site you’re on is using with a single click.
Let Me Out – You know those scam/spam ads that trap you in an infinite dialog loop, where you have to close your browser to escape? This makes that impossible.
Redirect Path – Find out what’s happening in your page redirects. Super useful.
SelectorGadget – Really helpful in isolating CSS elements when you’re trying to track stuff in GTM.
Siteimprove Accessibility Checker – Helps with ADA compliance.
Tag Assistant – A bread and butter plugin. Find out if GA, GTM, adwords, and other tags are running on the site.
View Background Image – It adds “View Background Image” to the right-click menu. Super handy.
View Image Info – Handy, faster way to see image sizes without diving into developer tools.
View Rendered Source – See how the rendered source code compares to the original.
WordPress Plugins
AWRStudyr: Learn various back-end insights on a website you’re viewing.
Image Pro: Automatically resize images on the fly. No gigantic images that only look small anymore.
No Image Link: Works out of the box. Stops images from linking to themselves.
Open External Links In A New Window – No fuss, no muss. Easy to install, and does exactly what it says. Great for UX, and keeping people on the site.
sh404SEF – I’ve had good experiences with this one so far for Joomla.
Sound Booster – Make tabs on Chrome up to 500% louder.
WP Force Lowercase URLs: Enforce URL parameters.
WP Site Mapping: A super easy to use HTML sitemap generator, albeit a little quick and dirty, and slow to load.
Yuzo – A great related posts plugin.
2 Comments
Free chart
Generally we used koolchart to create visuals for site evaluation.
Thanks for such a useful list of SEO tools.
Jacques
You’re very welcome! I’ll do my best to keep it updated as I go. 🙂