Free SEO Tools

These tools inspect and generate the technical signals a page sends to search engines and social platforms. They are useful for catching mistakes, and it's equally useful to be clear about which of them measure something that actually influences ranking.

robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing

This is the most consequential misunderstanding in technical SEO. Disallowing a path in robots.txt asks crawlers not to fetch it. It doesn't remove the page from search results. A blocked page can still be indexed on the strength of links pointing at it, appearing with no description because the crawler was never allowed to read it.

Worse, blocking a page in robots.txt prevents crawlers from seeing a noindex directive on that page, so the two mechanisms interfere. To keep something out of the index, allow it to be crawled and serve a noindex instruction. To reduce crawl load on genuinely unimportant paths, use robots.txt. They solve different problems.

Keyword density is a diagnostic, not a target

Keyword density has not been a ranking factor for a very long time, and writing toward a percentage produces worse copy than writing naturally. The reason to check it is the inverse: an unexpectedly high density is a signal that a page has drifted into repetitive over-optimization, which is something search engines do act on. Treat a high number as a prompt to reread the text, not a dial to tune.

Titles and descriptions do different jobs

A title element carries real weight and is worth composing carefully. A meta description doesn't directly influence ranking, and search engines frequently ignore the one you wrote in favor of an extract from the page that better matches the query. Its value is in click-through rate on the occasions it's used, which makes it worth writing but not worth agonising over.

A sensible sequence when shipping a page: draft the title and description, check how they truncate in a results preview, confirm the social card renders with the right image and text, and only then verify that nothing in robots.txt is blocking the page you just optimized. Checking the crawl rules last catches the case where a page is perfectly optimized and entirely unreachable.