10 Free SEO Tools Every Wedding Blogger Should Know About

Tweet This is the first article in a 10-part series from BrideTide that highlights how SEO (search engine optimization) can be used to help those with a wedding blog achieve more visitors, better rankings and targeted quality of traffic.

SEO For Wedding Blogs: Part One

Hey all you wedding bloggers! Today's lesson will highlight 10 SEO tools that anyone can use to help improve their overall search engine marketing efforts. Each one comes with a detailed description about the tool and how it can be beneficial to a wedding blogger. Oh yeah, all of these SEO tools are 100% FREE to use! Enjoy, and don't forget to leave us a comment if you find this lesson useful and educational!

Check your Website Grade
Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. Simply type in your blog URL and the tool will do the rest!

Analyze your backlinks
Search engine optimization greatly depends on quality of inbound links to increase your rankings. Backlink Watch helps you find info about your existing inbound links. It includes anchor text, pagerank, quality of backlinks by finding total outbound links any restriction of the nofollow tag. This is a good way to make sure most of your back links have the keyword "wedding" or "weddings" implemented.

Know your Google PageRank
PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page's relevance or importance. Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet. The higher your PageRank, the better. PRchecker is a free and simple way to check your blogs PageRank. If you check the URLs of some of the more popular wedding blogs, you will see that their PR is high, which shows why you see their website in a lot of your bridal search queries.

Use better keywords
Using the correct keywords in your blog post title and article copy can make a huge difference in the amount of traffic your blog receives. Did you know that the term "wedding gown" is searched 550,000 times a month while the term "wedding dress" is searched over 4 million! Choosing the right keywords in your post title is an easy way to help boost your traffic. Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to help you target the terms your visitors are looking for.

Build backlinks
Building quality backlinks is one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization. A backlink could be considered as a quality backlink if:
1. The Theme of the backlinking website is the same and relevant as your website.
2. It links to your website with the keyword (keyphrase) that you are trying to optimize for.
In other words, if you have a wedding blog, try to build a back link profile from other wedding related websites. With that being said, we'd like to introduce you to BrideTide.com. Our website is dedicated solely to everything wedding. Not only is this a way to build quality backlinks to your blog, but it's an awesome way to introduce your site to a ton of our regular readers searching for wedding related info! Totally Free!

Get Analytical
Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed web tracking statistics about the visitors to a website. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features allow you see and analyze your traffic data in a simple visual way that will help any blogger with their overall marketing initiatives. You can greatly benefit from this data by finding out how your visitors are finding your wedding blog on the Internet. Once you know this info, you can then optimize your blog to rank higher for other searches that could help drive traffic.

Keyword Analysis
The Keyword Analyser can be used to analyze your blog and give a report on what words are used, and how many times they are used. This will give you a look at the keyword density of your site and allow you to focus more on the keywords that you want to rank for. This is a great tool for any region-specific wedding blog to make sure they are targeting local web traffic. 100% free to use.

Optimize your meta tags
The use of meta tags in web pages are often used by search engines as a source of information to help them to decide how to list and rank your website. Meta Tags are not always required, but as a rule of thumb, it makes more sense to take advantage of them than to leave them out. Use this free Meta Tag Tool to generate a targeted wedding meta listing for your blog.

Be unique
This Similar Page Checker allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between two pages or two websites. Why is this important? Because search engines are known to act negatively upon websites with duplicate content. It's also a nifty way to find out if another similar blog is copying your creative content.

Stay on Alert
Google Alerts is a free service offered by Google which notifies its users by email about the latest web and news pages of their choice. From a SEO standpoint, this tool can be used to notify you each time your blog is mentioned by someone on the Internet. Simply enter in your blog name, type in your email and click "Create Alert". Presto! You will then be sent an email each time someone talks about your wedding blog on their blog!

We hope you enjoyed Part 1 in our wedding SEO series. Part 2 will be coming out shortly so don't forget to subscribe here!