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Develop a functional website and share its content is one thing, but it is a whole different thing to get the right amount of attention for your site, more so, for your products and services. Services such as Serpbook and similar alternative services will give you an insightful breakdown on how much SERP should mean to every website owner: once you are aware of your position on SERP, it is time you figured out the best way to get on top of your game.
You will need the help of as many SEO tools as you can land your hands on. However, different developers have made their tools differently, which is why you are likely to encounter some ugly SEO tools. It is true visual appeal is of the essence, but some of the following ugly SEO tools can yield you amazing results too.
Blogscape
The Blogscape is an SEO tool by SEOmoz that has an ugly login page, especially for users who are not PRO members. However, with this tool, you can also conduct keyword research by checking out the popularity of particular keywords.
This tool also allows you to keep track of your brand and your web pages' URLs regularly. Like you would type in a word or phrase to check its popularity, you can input a URL or the name of a brand to check how much it has been mentioned online. It is an excellent way to track brand mentions and source out for websites that have linked back to your site.
The Shared Count SEO tool has an ugly interface with no design whatsoever, which might be your reason for turning it down. Before you do, you should know that this SEO tool is very resourceful when it comes to tracking social sharing statistics for all your content in the different platforms, including the most popular ones, that is, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Keeping track on the shares allows you to identify how well your social media marketing strategy is picking off, and whether or not your posts are attracting adequate traffic.
As a bonus, with the Shared Count SEO tool, you can comfortably build your tools to work with, which is made possible by the open API feature on the Shared Count tool.
Frobee Robots.txt Checker
Robot.txt files are in themselves boring to sort through, and it can be more annoying to check them through a more boring format. The Frobee Robots.txt checker has a very laid-back interface that can be unexciting, even for experts.
Nonetheless, this SEO tool is terrific for finding errors, hidden and unhidden, as to matters robots.txt files. The device can account for hidden codes on your files that might be causing search engines not to index your web pages correctly.
Motoricerca Robots.txt Checker
This SEO tool has an ugly fault similar to that of the Frobee Robots.txt checker. The device, however, comparable to Frobee Robots.txt checker, can help you point out traces of errors in your robot.txt files, even those hidden firm your average search spider. Simply put, the tool is primarily designed by webmasters to disallow files and directories of a website that search engine spiders should not access.
URL Valet
This SEO tool does not appear like any graphic designer ever worked on it. It has no colour pallet, and therefore strikes across as ugly, especially to people with a liking for flashy colours.
On the other hand, this ugly SEO tool pools more than ten structural tools that execute an audit for websites. This tool alone can accomplish so much for you as concerns SEO. You can use the URL Valet behind any page on your site to check for text to HTML ratio, download speed, among others. You can validate all the links on your website, both internal and external.
SEO Browser
The SEO Browser is made to help you view your website like search engines do, which happens to be the tagline of this tool. It does not have good use of colours or design to it.
Still, it is ingenious in the way that you can swiftly see all your web pages structure in one view. This way, you can scrutinise the SEO structure for each of your web pages, mainly when focusing on optimising your landing page. Take hold of insightful information like the presence of robot.txt files on your pages, analytics, among others.
Wayback Machine
You have probably not heard of this SEO tool. It has an old-looking logo and interface that might throw you off-bus at the initial step. However, the Wayback Machine is a rich library of archived websites from more than ten years back.
You know how sometimes broken links clutter your website? You can use this tool to track down old links that may have disappeared over time or track websites that have changed over time so you can update your link structure. If you are sourcing for a domain name, for instance, you can browse for old and expired available domain names, then reconstruct them from scratch.
Xenu's Link Sleuth
While you may have heard about screaming Frog spider, you may have overlooked the Xenu's Link Sleuth SEO tool. The first thing that strikes you at the onset of searching for this tool online is an awful landing page, with an alien to drive you away faster than you got in.
This tool may be ugly, but it is brilliant in matters mining for link opportunities. More to it, it has an easy-to-use interface and is quick and smooth for running site audits.
As much as these tools may not satisfy you visually, you may be missing out a great deal if you overlook the essence of the ugly SEO tools enlisted here. Furthermore, gold does not have to glitter to be gold!
