Domain and website tools

Domain and website tools
By Clare Lawrence 29th October 2003 Clare is the CEO of Discount Domains Ltd a leading UK Domain name registration service.

I use several tools to monitor the performance of my own websites, by regularly reviewing their progress I can see what works and what does not.

Ranking tools

Where is my listing?
Want a tool that can tell you which page your site appears on by keyword?

www.top25web.com/cgi-bin/report.cgi

Top25web searches domain names by keyword for the following search engines:- Google, Alta vista and inktomi, drilling down for the first 500 entries on each search engine.

How many of my websites pages are indexed?
Do you have a large site? – it can be a pain using the site: command in Google, the following tells you how many of your pages are indexed in Fast, Google, Alta Vista and MSN

www.neutralize.com creates a pie chart of the % of your pages indexed in each of the engines.

Meta – Tag analysers

Meta tags are much less important than they used to be, though the Title tag is still very powerful.

The following are my favourites:-

http://www.sitesolutions.com/analysis.asp - select the website analysis option from the left hand, this is particularly good at telling if you’ve got the right combination of keywords in your tags and which keyword should be where.

http://www.sitescreamer.com/from22.html - this analyses your tags, and gives a narrative opinion – excellent being the best rating.

Traffic statistics

Good traffic statistics are essential for your own site, but how to get information on rivals traffic?, Alexa makes use of its own database of user and converts these to a traffic ranking.

The Alexa site can be found at www.alexa.com

Good HTML

Google and other search engines have problems with poor html – so cleaning up the glitches in your scrip can be helpful. The following is a good free html validator :-

www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator

Keyword density

Writing keyword rich copy isn’t the easiest task in the world, but to get a good ranking, your keyword density has to be right, not too low, not too high ( between 3% and 7%). The following is a good article on the subject and contains a link to a good density tool.

The article http://www.in-vancouver.com/members/news_item.php?record_num=48

The tool: www.keyworddensity.com

Selecting keywords

Not sure which keywords will bring what traffic?

Wordtracker has a great site – try their free report first, if it works for you, the sell a days usage from £4.00 ($6.00).

www.wordtracker.com

I hope you find these tools helpful, I use them on a daily basis and find them very helpful.

Every thought of a question you wanted to ask Google?

Google answers works by you posting a price for each question - the higher the price the more likely it will be answered. Higher bids also get more thorough explanations. Payment is by credit card and prices start from $2.00

This is a good place to get started with web site optimisation. Typically an experienced researcher will spend an hour or so looking at your site for £40-50. This compares very favourable to the £100's you can pay elsewhere.

A good tip is to read the last few weeks of questions - most likely there will be questions very similar to yours.

The answers given often are full of links to sites which are both reputable and amongst the leaders in their field.

The site is also full of helpful questions and answers on domain names and web tools

I hope you found this article helpful, my site now has a glossary full of similar ones.