In this day and age, being a web designer means that you are also supposed to wrap your head around SEO. But no panic! There are lots of tools out there that make the whole shebang just a snap. As a matter of fact, you just need to learn the nuts and bolts of search engine optimization. That done, you'll be able to lay back and enjoy designing stuff as always.

SEO Basics

So, I take it that you already know the basics of SEO. Should it not be the case, you can easily learn it with help of The Beginners Guide to SEO. Now that you are aware of all the search engine pitfalls (you checked that link I just gave, right?) you need something that will keep track of your SEO metrics while you sip that mojito or what not.

How to Start

You can just sign up with Moz.com for one of the plans they offer. Actually, you can even set up a trial account so that you can test all their tools in the wild. By the way, they rolled out a brand new design the other day. Pretty neat and slick.

That said, you probably want to know what's exactly so cool about their services and why you'd want to use them.

For starters, you can run up to 5 SEO campaigns given that you signed up for the Pro plan. So, if you need to keep track of a few sites - say, yours and your customers - they got you covered.

Keyword Rankings

This Moz feature allows you to monitor your keyword rankings over time. That allows to see the dynamics of how you perform on search engine results pages. That's extremely important for any site. Regardless of whether your site is a reputable online resource or you're just trying to get your foot in the web design door, you need to rank well and be visible in search engines. Long story short, if your site does not rank high enough (like number 1-3) , you're gonna have hard time trying to either make a difference or earn some cash with your blog.

Crawl Diagnostics

You totally need to know how search engines see your site and what they think about it. That's exactly what the crawl diagnostics feature allows you to do. It'll automatically find and show all the errors that you need to fix on your site. Just to name a few: 4xx client errors, 5xx server errors, missing or empty titles, duplicate title or page content. All of them are very important to keep an eye on because otherwise you may be preventing your site from high rankings without even knowing that.

What's more, you also will be able to see SEO warnings. They are not game-changers for the most part, but you still need to take care of them as well. That's especially crucial if you have a competitor who has similar SEO metrics. If you fail to rectify even an trifle issue, the competitor that you go neck in neck with can overcome you before you know it.

Other than that, your Moz SEO campaign will offer you a few crawl notices. As the name suggests, they are downright notices. So, you're not supposed to run around like a chicken with its head cut off if you have a slew of crawl notices. Still, it's a good idea to take a look at them from time to time just to know how your site is configured in terms of SEO.

On-page SEO

It goes without saying that you also need to track your on-page SEO metrics. Failing to do so can hold you back from high rankings. On-page SEO reporting allows you to monitor a whole lot of aspects such as your keyword in URLs, title tags, H1 tags, image alt tags. You name it. What you're absolutely gonna love is that they not only point to issues on your site, but actually explain why that's a problem and what you need to do to fix that.

Link Analysis

This feature offers you a competitive domain analysis which makes it easy to see why you rank worse or better than your competitors. In case you still need to overcome your rival, you have the option to find out what SEO metrics you need to improve. If you already rank #1, you can use your competitive domain analysis report in order to behave proactively. That makes it possible to change your SEO activities till your competitor wins over you.Your link analysis report shows you what the competition works on at this particular moment.

Organic Traffic Data

It provides you with a report that highlights which keywords and URLs (pages) bring you most traffic. Plus you can see how that changes over time so that you can adjust your SEO activities properly.

Social

Since Moz.com is best in class, they also implement new features that allow you to monitor new ranking factors. Though backlinks are still superior, social signals are clearly used by the major search engines as well. Plus you can say that Google has something in the pipeline that will make social factors even more important for SEO.

Other Awesome Stuff You Wanna Know About

Moz.com (previously known as SEOmoz) has a great SEO community willing to help you with any search engine optimization issue that you may have. And you don't want to sell short that fact when you have a burning question that you need answered fast.

And you'll surely appreciate in-depth weekly Whiteboard Friday videos that Rank Fishkin creates on a regular basis. He touches on every single aspect an SEO has to consider day in and day out. Plus they are super inspiring.

Bottom Line

Moz.com both teaches you how to do SEO and monitors your major SEO metrics so that you always stay ahead of your competitors and know about the things they have no idea about. Since all that is done for you automatically, you can switch over to more pleasant or lucrative activities. That means big time when you have tons of things to take care of in order to get your web design business off the ground.