Free Bulk SEO Tools Everyone Should Know About
A while ago I made a blog post outlining my favorite resources for web development. And, while I still stand by every one of those resources, I’ve found some more great tools to help with Search Engine Optimization for websites. Although these tools mostly focus on making your website faster and optimizing images, I have found them to be a huge help when taking my Search Engine ranking to the next level.
Geotagging
One of the best ways to improve your website’s credibility and show up more in local results is to Geotag your images. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, Geotagging is a way to embed GPS coordinates in an image, making it clear to Google (and anyone else examining the image) where it was taken. This helps Google connect your website with a physical location, and helps it categorize your images on your site.
In the past, I’ve used the site Geoimgr.com, which allows free users to tag one photo at a time by entering the GPS coordinates and clicking “write EXIF tags”, and then downloading the newly updated image. However, this got quite repetitive when I had a lot of images to tag, and it costs almost $10/month to upgrade to pro, where you can edit multiple images at once. $10 seemed like too much to me, so I searched elsewhere for a Geotagging tool.
My first idea was to use Photoshop to Geotag my images, but much to my surprise, Photoshop does not support that (for the go-to editing software, I really expected that to work). After hunting around some more, I came across GeoSetter, a free Windows application that allows me to edit Geotags in batch quantities, and sometimes search for an address instead of entering the latitude and longitude.
UPDATE: I made my own Geotagging tool
I’ve gotten tired of the process of Geotagging images, then compressing them, then renaming them, then realizing the compression software removed the metadata so Geotagging them again. I made a tool that does all of that for me, and it’s free. You can find it here.
Compressing Images
Image compression - this is (in my opinion) the best way to improve your site’s load times, which not only affects Search Engine Rankings, but also makes people like your site a lot more, and stick around for longer. If you’re just looking to compress a few images, there are lots of free sites available to do that (like Optimizilla or TinyPNG). However, if you’re like me and have to deal with a lot of photos at once, I find the best way to implement a fast and surprisingly effective image compression is to use Photoshop’s Image Processor. You can specify the maximum width and height of the images, image quality, and more. It’s as simple as moving all your photos to one folder, and clicking File > Scripts > Image Processor and processing the photos. It might take a minute to get through all the photos, since it opens one at a time, but it’s a hands-free way to easily process a lot of photos.
Page Speed
In my previous post, I mentioned Google’s Page Speed test (now located at web.dev/measure/. However, I had someone reach out to me with a tool he created that takes page speed testing to the next level. Instead of checking one page at a time, this page speed test crawls your website, and check the speed of every page it finds. If one of the pages is showing up as not optimized or has a low score, you can click the link to open it in Google’s Page Speed test and see what the problems are. In my experience, this tool lines up almost perfectly with Google’s tool, which means it is a fast way to check a whole bunch of pages at once.
There you have it, these tools make up my toolbox for optimizing a site for a higher ranking in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If you have any ideas of other free tools for me to include, feel free to reach out to me at contact @ maxpelic.com