As a webmaster, there are a variety of tools used to track and monitor progress, links, rankings, and overall health of your website. The following 20 ‘tools’ are either URLs or actions you may take to gain valuable insight into the condition of your website.
1. Google Sitemaps
Want to increase website traffic? Add more pages to Google with sitemaps. Use the power of database-driven content to generate and submit thousands of dynamically optimized pages. Use an htaccess mod rewrites to clean up URLs and make SEO friendly. So, URLs such as this www.domain.com?keyword=title can become www.domain.com/title/ and be included as a separate page in Google’s index. One the power is harnessed, you can potentially have as many unique URLs as your database entries.
2. Google Analytics
Google analytics is your friend. The great benefits of this service outweighs any privacy or confidentiality concerns. Track accurate visitors, their clickpaths, goals, the ROI from Google AdWords, and more.
3. Nameboy.com – choosing domain names
4. Good Keywords – putting the keyword search tools all in one place.
5. Competitive analysis: compete.com / alexa.com
6. Check # of pages in your site: type into Google or Yahoo: site:www.domain.com
7. Check # of links to your site: type into Google or Yahoo: link:www.domain.com
8. Test value of text links:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/link-price/
9. Compare links to your content with other websites. http://www.text-link-ads.com/blog_juice/
10. Useful all-in-one views for a website and domain: http://whois.domaintools.com
11. Yahoo Site Explorer – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
12. Bulk PR checker: Copy and paste URLs from an expired domain list into this box. An easy way to see if it’s worth buying domains or not, or quickly checking the value of your own, in bulk
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-lookup/
13. Website grader – assigns a grade to your website, based on several criteria.
http://www.websitegrader.com
14. See what websites share your IP address (and how many) (and find an IP address for any domain): http://www.seologs.com/ip-domains.html You want to check and make sure you’re not associated with bad IP addresses (used for spam sites, porn, etc). Why this is useful:
a. It can also see if your host is giving you a good deal or not. If too many websites hosted, you may reconsider hosts.
b. If you ever have problems with your website (speed of page loading, etc), you can check the speed of the other sites sharing the same IP (since they are likely on the same server), and determine if it’s your site or the server itself.
15. HTML/XML validator: http://validator.w3.org/
16. CSS validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
17. Check Google listing position:
http://www.iwebtool.com/search_engine_position
18. Keyword suggestion tool:
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
19. Website server speed tests: http://www.selfseo.com/website_speed_test.php
http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test
20. Keep track of RSS subscribers and share feeds: http://www.feedburner.com/