Is your site hot or not? 50 useful tools to help you decide …
August 14th, 2008 Posted in Great new URLs, Interesting stuffUseful tools for website success
I’m just about to start reading the book on the left hand side of this page, so brace yourselves for lots of features on search engine optimisation as I seriously set about getting my websites placed better in the search engines.
In the meantime, there are loads of great SEO ‘how to’ and ‘top tips’ articles out in cyberspace, and every time I find a new one that I like I try to give it an outing in this blog.
My latest discovery is from internetservicedeals.com in a feature that’s buried deep on the website.
Many of the recommendations will probably be familiar to you already, like Google webmaster tools and Technorati, but I’ve picked out five for review here which were new to me and will prove particularly useful.
I wish they’d got the links to open in new windows in this article as it gets a bit wearing having to navigate back to the original page every time.
Gripe over!
However you should check out the full article yourself, as it’s packed with juicy online goodness - there’s a lot in here that was unfamilar to me and very useful.
My ‘top five’ discoveries
This is a great site with lots of useful free tools and a few tantalising ‘paid for’ services.
It’s well organised, easy to use and gives some great data.
For instance you can check the following things for free:
- Strongest pages on your domain
- Whether your site has been indexed by the ‘big three’, Google, MSN and Yahoo!
- Check backlinks to your site
- Check page rank
Well worth giving this site the ‘once over’, it groups a lot of useful tools in one place and is extremely easy to use and navigate.
I really like this site, but it’s very much one to use when you’ve been around for a bit.
It will allow you to compare the performance of different sites free for a period of one year.
That’s no use to me yet with my recently created sites, but after a time, once established, this would be incredibly useful for comparing your performance with those who you’re competing with.
However, there are all sorts of useful keyword tools to use as well - like ‘Find out how two sites compare for competing keywords’ and ‘Find out which keywords are sending traffic to a website or catagory’ … frankly the sort of data that’ll send you mad eventually, but it is free, it is useful and if you like it a lot you can upgrade to ‘Pro’ status and get even more data to analyse.
My approach to this site is to suggest you explore it for yourself and try a few of the links that you’ll find.
I downloaded the free .pdf on building links with other sites and found some useful information on it.
When I went to investigate the place it tries to send you to to get you to buy the inevitable product, AVG gave me a ‘Do you trust this site’ warning and I was out of there.
The niche keyword tool is also extremely interesting to try out as well, so give it a look but prepare to meet a couple of dead ends.
Here’s one you’re going to have to wait a little while to use (at the time of writing, August 2008) as it’s just been taken over by Google.
You can leave your email (I have) and they’ll get back in touch once the site is up-and-running once again.
Here’s how the site itself describes its services:
Measure Map helps you understand what people do at your blog, and what influence you are having on the world.
- Easily navigate the numbers that matter
- Track links to see who sends you traffic
- Find out what people do at your site
- Setup is a breeze — it only takes a minute
You can read more about what’s happening with the site at:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/here-comes-measure-map.html
5) http://awstats.sourceforge.net/ (seems to prefer a Mozilla Firefox browser)
I’ve recommended Awstats elsewhere in this blog and as I’m using it regularly now, I’m finding its data superb.
It’s relevant, clear, useful and practical … and not overwhelming.
The link above is how you get hold of it if you don’t host your websites on a cPanel account.
It’s a great analytics tool … two things I’d find really useful as addon features though:
1) Email or download your monthly reports
2) Screen out analytics information that you’re not interested in
If you can already do these things in Awstats, please let me know, as I obviously haven’t read the instructions carefully enough!
The full 50 …
Here’s the link to the full list of 50 ‘hot or not’ website tools.
Some of them involve parting with cash, others I wasn’t very impressed with (I’m always wary of a terribly designed websites preaching to me about web success!) and the best 5 I’ve listed above.
If you disagree, or think I’ve missed any gems, please use the comments form below.
