SEO & analytics help grow site traffic
Whether you're working on your own blog, a news site, building a product, you absolutely must care about your site's SEO. If your site is not optimized for search engines, it is harder to find, leading to fewer visitors and potential customers. SEO tools can help you improve the usability of your site, making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for.
These are the tools that I use to monitor and enhance my sites' performance. The can help you build a site that is easier to find and use, too.
ahrefs webmaster tools
"You only need to spend a few moments researching SEO online before ahrefs pops up somewhere in your results. In addition to their incredible blog and studies on how search works on the web, they provide a fantastic suite of free tools for monitoring and improving the SEO on your sites. Similarly, Nightwatch.io offers advanced rank tracking and in-depth performance analytics, enabling you to monitor keyword movements, backlink performance, and site visibility across different
There's always room to improve SEO, and ahrefs webmaster tools makes it easy to digest
I have found ahrefs webmaster tools to be absolutely invaluable in keeping an eye on my sites' content. Once you register a free account and verify that you have control of the sites you want to monitor, ahrefs will kick off a weekly audit of all the pages on your domain. It will check for common pitfalls, and give your site a health score from 0-100. If you're a dev, it may be helpful to think of it as a linter for SEO.
I've used it to find and fix countless problems with my sites, from broken links to missing Canonical URLs, removing unnecessary redirects and finding opportunities to link existing articles to one another.
You will get weekly audit reports in email, which let you know when things change - this can be helpful in situations where things out of your control end up affecting your site. Ever had someone take down an article that you link to? Ahrefs will find it.
Google Search Console
My adoption of Google Search Console come from what I learned taking Monica Lent's Blogging for Devs course.
Google Search Console gives you reports on how and when people see your site pop up in Google Search results. Note that it won't track people on your site like Google Analytics and Fathom do - just your performance in search. This is a useful litmus for your site's organic growth and authority. If you're investing in sharing your expertise and building a searchable site, your performance on Google Search Console should grow over time. In other words, you can see whether you're gaining traction via SEO or not.
To get started, you'll need to register your site with the Google Search Console. Verifying your ownership takes a few quick steps, and doesn't require you to add Google Analytics (which is helpful if, like me, you've chosen Fathom for its privacy-first features).
Best of all, it's free! Just register and follow instructions to add a DNS record, or upload a file to a specific place to verify that you own the site you're interested in monitoring. You should make sure to have a sitemap on your site - they're easy to generate, and worth the time to get right. This is what Google's crawlers primarily use to index your articles for search results.
I use the Search Console to make decisions about things to write about next, and track the progress of my site over time. At the moment, Google will keeps 16 months of your site's traffic history around for you to analyze, but that history starts once you've registered you site with the Search Console. So, the sooner you get set up, the better!
Fathom Analytics
Fathom is privacy first analytics for the web. According to their site, Fathom is a Google Analytics alternative that doesn’t compromise visitor privacy for data. We revolutionized website analytics by making them easy to use and respectful of privacy laws (like GDPR and more).
If you've never paid attention analytics for your web properties, Fathom will be a revelation - it's super useful to have an understanding of which pages on your site are getting traffic, where that traffic is coming from, and what times of day are most busy.
If you've used Google Analytics in the past, you may be surprised just how freeing it is to use an analytics tool that prioritizes analytics. You really don't need to know who is on a given page - instead, focusing on the content on your site which is being visited, and the journey readers take to get there is a super useful tool to have when you're researching and writing new articles.
It's great, and puts your readers' privacy first. Google's advantage is quickly vanishing due to new regulations, and privacy tools that are being built into browsers and operating systems. Fathom does a great job of providing value without fishing for every minute detail about your readers.
Fathom is lightweight and ridiculously easy to use. The Fathom team provides docs for a variety of platforms and JAMstack site builders, including Gatsby, ConvertKit, Next.js, Vue, Webflow, Wordpress, and quite a few more.
I've written a bit about my experiences with Fathom before. You may want to check out my other articles, including: Why I switched to Fathom for Analytics and How to add Fathom Analytics to your Remix.run app
Self-host Fathom for free - Fathom Lite
If you're hesitant to pay for Fathom, they do also provide an open source version called Fathom Lite - you'll need to configure and host it yourself, but it should give you an idea of what Fathom's premiums service is like.
If you're interested in trying out Fathom's paid service, use my referral link for a discount to get you started.
Cloudflare
I use Cloudflare to manage the DNS records for all of my sites. In addition to having a really straightforward UI for DNS management, they offer a host of other features to keep your sites running well. This includes automated protection for DDoS attacks, maintenance mode, and performance enhancements such as origin server optimization and caching.
Cloudflare provides a Free Tier that will work for most personal sites. You'll need to set up an account, look for the instructions to add your domain to your Cloudflare account, and then update your DNS settings as needed.
Because I own domains from a variety of registrars, it's really nice to be able to manage DNS for all of them in one place. They also provide a ton of other great dev tools, like Cloudflare Workers, which you can use to add interactivity to your site.
F5Bot
F5bot is free, and dead simple to set up.
The pitch for f5bot is simple - as they say, it is a service that will help you to "Get an email when you're mentioned online!".
It's completely free, and takes just moments to set up - you just need to create an account, and set up keywords for the service to track. When your keywords are mentioned on Reddit, Hackernews, or Lobste.rs, you'll get a tidy little email in your inbox.
This is what typical notification from f5bot looks like.
Notifications come very quickly - in my experience, I see them within minutes of my sites being mentioned online. This is hugely helpful because it allows you to respond quickly, strike up a conversation, and make a connection with the people who are sharing your work. Those connections are the backbone of building a great personal brand online.
You can set up any search keyword you want, so if there's a competitor or topic that you're hoping to keep an eye on, it's great for that, too.
Overall, I highly recommend f5bot - it's an incredibly useful tool, it's free, and it couldn't be easier to set up.
Related reading
If you're going on the SEO-improvement journey for your sites, you might find these helpful:
- Why I switched to Fathom for Analytics
- How to add Fathom Analytics to your Remix.run app
- Don't center-align paragraph text - this is utterly unrelated to SEO, but c'mon, do better.
- SEO for Devs - I absolutely cannot recommend this free course enough. Monica Lent has a masterful understanding of SEO, and I've learned a ton from her over the years.
The above is the detailed content of SEO tools I used to grow my sites to visitors/month. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!
Hot AI Tools
Undress AI Tool
Undress images for free
Undresser.AI Undress
AI-powered app for creating realistic nude photos
AI Clothes Remover
Online AI tool for removing clothes from photos.
Clothoff.io
AI clothes remover
Video Face Swap
Swap faces in any video effortlessly with our completely free AI face swap tool!
Hot Article
Hot Tools
Notepad++7.3.1
Easy-to-use and free code editor
SublimeText3 Chinese version
Chinese version, very easy to use
Zend Studio 13.0.1
Powerful PHP integrated development environment
Dreamweaver CS6
Visual web development tools
SublimeText3 Mac version
God-level code editing software (SublimeText3)
How to make an HTTP request in Node.js?
Jul 13, 2025 am 02:18 AM
There are three common ways to initiate HTTP requests in Node.js: use built-in modules, axios, and node-fetch. 1. Use the built-in http/https module without dependencies, which is suitable for basic scenarios, but requires manual processing of data stitching and error monitoring, such as using https.get() to obtain data or send POST requests through .write(); 2.axios is a third-party library based on Promise. It has concise syntax and powerful functions, supports async/await, automatic JSON conversion, interceptor, etc. It is recommended to simplify asynchronous request operations; 3.node-fetch provides a style similar to browser fetch, based on Promise and simple syntax
JavaScript Data Types: Primitive vs Reference
Jul 13, 2025 am 02:43 AM
JavaScript data types are divided into primitive types and reference types. Primitive types include string, number, boolean, null, undefined, and symbol. The values are immutable and copies are copied when assigning values, so they do not affect each other; reference types such as objects, arrays and functions store memory addresses, and variables pointing to the same object will affect each other. Typeof and instanceof can be used to determine types, but pay attention to the historical issues of typeofnull. Understanding these two types of differences can help write more stable and reliable code.
JavaScript time object, someone builds an eactexe, faster website on Google Chrome, etc.
Jul 08, 2025 pm 02:27 PM
Hello, JavaScript developers! Welcome to this week's JavaScript news! This week we will focus on: Oracle's trademark dispute with Deno, new JavaScript time objects are supported by browsers, Google Chrome updates, and some powerful developer tools. Let's get started! Oracle's trademark dispute with Deno Oracle's attempt to register a "JavaScript" trademark has caused controversy. Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js and Deno, has filed a petition to cancel the trademark, and he believes that JavaScript is an open standard and should not be used by Oracle
Handling Promises: Chaining, Error Handling, and Promise Combinators in JavaScript
Jul 08, 2025 am 02:40 AM
Promise is the core mechanism for handling asynchronous operations in JavaScript. Understanding chain calls, error handling and combiners is the key to mastering their applications. 1. The chain call returns a new Promise through .then() to realize asynchronous process concatenation. Each .then() receives the previous result and can return a value or a Promise; 2. Error handling should use .catch() to catch exceptions to avoid silent failures, and can return the default value in catch to continue the process; 3. Combinators such as Promise.all() (successfully successful only after all success), Promise.race() (the first completion is returned) and Promise.allSettled() (waiting for all completions)
What is the cache API and how is it used with Service Workers?
Jul 08, 2025 am 02:43 AM
CacheAPI is a tool provided by the browser to cache network requests, which is often used in conjunction with ServiceWorker to improve website performance and offline experience. 1. It allows developers to manually store resources such as scripts, style sheets, pictures, etc.; 2. It can match cache responses according to requests; 3. It supports deleting specific caches or clearing the entire cache; 4. It can implement cache priority or network priority strategies through ServiceWorker listening to fetch events; 5. It is often used for offline support, speed up repeated access speed, preloading key resources and background update content; 6. When using it, you need to pay attention to cache version control, storage restrictions and the difference from HTTP caching mechanism.
JS roundup: a deep dive into the JavaScript event loop
Jul 08, 2025 am 02:24 AM
JavaScript's event loop manages asynchronous operations by coordinating call stacks, WebAPIs, and task queues. 1. The call stack executes synchronous code, and when encountering asynchronous tasks, it is handed over to WebAPI for processing; 2. After the WebAPI completes the task in the background, it puts the callback into the corresponding queue (macro task or micro task); 3. The event loop checks whether the call stack is empty. If it is empty, the callback is taken out from the queue and pushed into the call stack for execution; 4. Micro tasks (such as Promise.then) take precedence over macro tasks (such as setTimeout); 5. Understanding the event loop helps to avoid blocking the main thread and optimize the code execution order.
Understanding Event Bubbling and Capturing in JavaScript DOM events
Jul 08, 2025 am 02:36 AM
Event bubbles propagate from the target element outward to the ancestor node, while event capture propagates from the outer layer inward to the target element. 1. Event bubbles: After clicking the child element, the event triggers the listener of the parent element upwards in turn. For example, after clicking the button, it outputs Childclicked first, and then Parentclicked. 2. Event capture: Set the third parameter to true, so that the listener is executed in the capture stage, such as triggering the capture listener of the parent element before clicking the button. 3. Practical uses include unified management of child element events, interception preprocessing and performance optimization. 4. The DOM event stream is divided into three stages: capture, target and bubble, and the default listener is executed in the bubble stage.
A JS roundup of higher-order functions beyond map and filter
Jul 10, 2025 am 11:41 AM
In JavaScript arrays, in addition to map and filter, there are other powerful and infrequently used methods. 1. Reduce can not only sum, but also count, group, flatten arrays, and build new structures; 2. Find and findIndex are used to find individual elements or indexes; 3.some and everything are used to determine whether conditions exist or all meet; 4.sort can be sorted but will change the original array; 5. Pay attention to copying the array when using it to avoid side effects. These methods make the code more concise and efficient.
