Technical SEO tools you probably haven’t heard of

Technical SEO is defined by configurations that can be implemented to the website and server (website’s code and server configuration). With technical SEO, you can help search engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems. As such, technical SEO doesn’t include analytics, keyword research, backlink profile development or social media strategies. By improving your website’s technical SEO, you can earn higher rankings in search results, drive more traffic to your website, and increase your conversion rates. There are literally hundreds of free technical SEO tools out there, so in this article I want to focus on only the best and most useful ones. You don’t have to be a developer to use them as they are all fairly user-friendly and can save you time having to bother a developer as well.

• httpstatus.io - Easily check status codes, response headers, and redirect chains.
• Structured data markup helper - The Structured Data Markup Helper helps you mark up elements on your web page so that Google can understand the data on the page. Once Google understands your page data more clearly, it can be presented more attractively and in new ways in Google Search. In addition if you send HTML-formatted email to your customers, Markup Helper can show you how to change your email templates so that Gmail can present the data to the user in new and useful ways.
• hreflang tags testing tool - hreflang annotations can be hard to implement properly. This tool allows you to quickly check if hreflang tags for a page (HTML and HTTP headers), or in an XML Sitemap, are correct.
• The hreflang tags generator tool - Generate the hreflang tags for your multi-language or multi-country site easily and fast! This tool wil help you to generate the hreflang tags patterns to use in the different language and country versions of your pages, using the correct values and syntax following Google’s specifications, with ISO 639-1 for languages and ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 for countries.
• Redirect path - Redirect Path flags up 301, 302, 404 and 500 HTTP Status Codes as well as client side redirects like Meta and Javascript redirects, bringing potential issues that may not otherwise be seen to your attention immediately. As well as flagging up redirects and errors, the plugin also displays other HTTP Headers (such as server types and caching headers) and the server IP Address at the click of a button.
• SEO spider tool - The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler, that allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key elements to analyse and audit technical and onsite SEO.
• Google search console - Search Console tools and reports help you evaluate search traffic and performance for your site, troubleshoot problems, and improve your site’s visibility in Google search results.
• WebPagetest.org - Free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more. Your results will provide rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.
• Mobile-friendly testing tool - Test how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device. Just enter the page URL to see the page performance.
• Structured data testing tool - Validate your code using the Structured Data Testing Tool. Paste your code into the tool and click the validate button.
• Markup validation service - This validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc.
• PageSpeed insights - PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved. PSI provides both lab and field data about a page. Lab data is useful for debugging performance issues, as it is collected in a controlled environment. However, it may not capture real-world bottlenecks. Field data is useful for capturing true, real-world user experience - but has a more limited set of metrics.
• GTmetrix - See how your site performs, reveal why it’s slow and discover optimization opportunities.
• Siteliner - Siteliner is a free service that lets you explore your website, revealing key issues that affect your site’s quality and search engine rankings.