Appendix III: Tools

The following list of tools are useful for optimizing websites.

Keyword Suggestions

This is a convenient tool that is a front end to the Wordtracker and Overture keyword databases and will show how often people search for keywords as well as proposing alternative similar keywords.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

PageRank Search

PageRank Search lets you query Google. The search results include a graphical representation of each site's toolbar PageRank. Remember that this value is only a representative of the real PageRank Google gives a site and is only one component of Google's algorithm. It does give a guide as to how many inbound-links a site has.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search

Keyword Analysis

This is a fantastic tool that will take your site and target keyword(s) and show how it stacks up against the top ten in terms of inbound-links, anchor text keywords, Google PageRank and overall content. It gives you an idea of what you need to do to get an important top ten position for the query.

http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp

SERPS Tool

Check your SERPS (Search Engine Results Position) on Yahoo, Google, All The Web. MSN and Hotbot for any given keywords to a depth of up to 10 pages of results.

http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/se-pos.php

Keyword and Backlink Tracking

You will need a Google API key to use this tool. The keyword tracker lets you monitor your target keywords to see your current position. It also shows your daily, weekly and monthly change. The tool is very useful if you are running a keyword campaign and will also alert you to any search engine positioning problems on your website. You can produce customized graphs of your keyword performance.

The backlink tracker monitors a site's Google PageRank, number of inbound-links and the total number of pages indexed by Google.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/

Note that the Google API has a limit of 1000 uses per key per day.

Google AdSense

AdSense Charts produces eight different types of charts for Google AdSense users. You simply have to export your Google AdSense data in CSV (comma separated variable) format.

Impressions
Impressions (Cumulative)
Clicks
Clicks (Cumulative)
Clickthrough Percentage
Earnings
Earnings (Cumulative)
Earnings Per Click

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-charts/

Remember that Google AdSense participants are not allowed to share their data.

Google Adsense Sandbox show's the Google AdSense links that will be displayed on a page.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox/

Bulk PageRank Checker

Displays the Google Toolbar PageRank of up to 40 URLs in one go. No need to install the toolbar.

http://www.top25web.com/pagerank.php

cUrl

Command Line URL. This tool lets you fetch the text of a web page from a comand line. It is a very useful utility as it gives you complete control over the information sent to a web server and lets you examine both the returned content and headers.

http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php

Perl

Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. A fast scripting language that is very useful for text processing. It is often used for programming on Web Servers.

www.perl.com

Active State have ported PERL to the Windows operation system:

http://www.activestate.com/

Xenu Link Sleuth

Xenu link sleuth is a free utility for checking links on a website.

<home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html>

AWStats

AWStats is a free log file analyzer.

<http://awstats.sourceforge.net/awstats.ftp.html>.

Mach5 Analyzer

Mach5 Analyzer is a commercial log files analyzer with many advance features such as the ability to follow paths through a website.

http://www.mach5.com/

Googledance Tool

McDar's Googledance tool will show when Google's monthly dance is taking place. It has been updated for the recent changes to Google's data centers.

http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php

NewsFeed Software

To integrate a news feed into a website you need a server or web hosting package that supports scripting and a software package. The following are three examples.

CaRP

Supports RSS formats, written in PHP

http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/

MagpieRSS

Supports both RSS and Atom feeds, written in PHP

http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/

KwRSS

Kattanweb kwRSS enables RSS newsfeeds to be integrated into a website hosted on Microsoft's Internet Information Server.

http://www.kattanweb.com/webdev/projects/index.asp?ID=7

Copyscape

Given a URL Copyscape will show any duplicates on the Web.

<http://www.copyscape.com/>

SamSpade

SamSpade is a front end for many useful Internet tools that return information about IP addresses and domain names.

http://www.samspade.org

Redhat Cygwin

The Redhat Cygwin toolset:

http://cygwin.redhat.com/

is an emulation of the powerful command lines tools found on Unix (Linux) operating systems. Individual commands can be built into chains to perform powerful text processing functions. They are useful for analyzing web server log files.

grep

Grep searches a file for lines matching a pattern. Patterns can be a single word, a quote string or can use regular expressions. Regular expressions are a powerful fuzzy matching syntax. By default grep prints the matching lines.

cut

Print selected parts of line, it can be used to extract columns of information.

sort

Sorts input lines into alphabetical order and prints them to output

uniq

Removes duplicate lines in a sorted list

HTML Validation

HTML Pages can be validate using the W3C online tool

http://validator.w3.org/