(This is the first post in a series about building my side project cheapseo.co, a curated list of affordable SEO tools.)
My background is in marketing (mainly using ads and affiliate offers). SEO is something that I've dabbled in, but I was always too impatient to wait for the results.
Recently, after going down a YouTube rabbit hole, I decided it's something I should learn more about. I was getting tired of dumping money into ads, without knowing whether I'd be able to make it back.
One thing that I was shocked as is how expensive most SEO tools are. Wanting to test some of my ideas on a budget, I started a searching for inexpensive tools I could play around with to help with my SEO endeavors.
It turns out, there are a TON of free/cheap tools available. The only thing is, I was having to scour Google endlessly to find these free and cheap tools. Plus, it was difficult to keep track of what tools did what. After all, SEO has several components and each tool might be dedicated to just one aspect.
That's when I decided to compile a list of all of these tools so I could reference later, as my projects and needs progressed.
After I got to about 20 tools, I realized that if I were looking for an "Ultimate List of SEO Tools (Affordable Edition)" then other webmasters probably would be too.
At first, I was just going to dump the info into a spreadsheet or doc. But then, I figured I'd play around with my (very limited) HTML skills and throw together a simple 1-page list.
So, I wrangled up my go-to tools for every project I start: NeoCities and Simple.Css.
These two (awesome) tools are the backbone of anything I start. They are user friendly and dead-simple.
Simple.Css makes semantic HTML look good, without having to fuss with a lot of things. I can call the stylesheet using
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.simplecss.org/simple.min.css">
and just start building. This is really helpful because I'm not a programmer, and everything I do is still hand-typed (or copy/pasted😏) HTML.
One design decision I made, was to use HTML's native details/summary tag for the central design element of the website, mainly because I liked how Simple.Css had their styled out of the box. To me, a column of detail/summary boxes looked like a linktr.ee style landing page where you could nest a lot of information in the details instead of just a simple link.
You notice those cool company logos in the block? That was fun figuring that part out...but that will have to wait until the next part of the series.
In the meantime, go check out cheapseo.co and let me know what you think. I'm still adding tools every day. Are there any tools you think I should add? If so, comment here or click "Submit a Tool" on the website.
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