Max web design

2 Comments Written by Robert on April 10, 2008 – 7:36 pm

Every webmaster uses a bunch of tools to see the evolution of his websites. I also use a few and I must say that some of them are necessary for each and every website owner.

Checking for Broken Links

Link checkers are always handy, whether you’re interested in optimizing your site for the search engines or not. After you’ve created a few pages, you should run a link check to make sure you didn’t make any mistakes in your links. Again, many, many link checkers are available, including paid services such as LinkAlarm, that will automatically check links on your site and send you a report.

I’m currently using a little Windows program called Xenu’s Link Sleuth, it’s free, which is always nice! (The creator of Link Sleuth requests that if you like the program, support some of his favorite causes. I placed a link to his website. ) This program is very quick it can check tens of thousands of links in a few minutes and it’s very easy to use. It produces a report, displayed in your Web browser, showing the pages containing broken links; click a link, and it opens the page so you can take a look. You can use the program to check both internal and external links on your site. Note also that your Web design software package may include a built-in link checker.

Google Toolbar -

The Google Toolbar is a great little tool. I mainly use it for two purposes: for searching Google without having to go to the Google site first, and for seeing if a Web page is in Google’s cache (click the i button and then click Cached Snapshot of Page). Oh, and also I can see each of my website’s page PagaRank.

Alexa Toolbar

The Alexa Toolbar can be handy, too. I sometimes use it to assess the traffic of Web sites I may want to work with. For instance, if someone approaches you trying to sell advertising space on their site, how do you know if it’s a good deal? So many sites get almost no traffic, that it may not be worth the expense. The Alexa Toolbar can give you a very general idea of whether the site gets any traffic at all; you can view traffic details for the site, such as the traffic rank, an estimate of the number of visitors to the site out of every million Internet users, and so on. Reportedly, Alexa’s numbers are pretty good for the world’s most popular sites, but very inaccurate for the average site. However, you can still get a general feel.

If the site is ranked 4,000,000, you can bet it doesn’t get much traffic at all. If the site is ranked 4,000, it’s far more popular. Alexa also provides a list of the most popular sites in thousands of categories, a good way to track down affiliates, for instance, or link partners. And it has an interesting search function; use the Alexa Toolbar to search Google, and you’ll get different results. Sites are ranked differently, though the data comes from Google, and you’ll also get small images of the home page of the top few sites. And point at the Site Info link to see site information such as how long the site has been online, the number of sites linking to it, similar sites, and so on.

IBP

Being able to produce a list of pages linking back to a Web site is extremely useful (and a great way to impress a boss or client). I use a link analysis tool (IBP) to find out how many links are pointing to a client’s site in comparison with competitors’ sites, and also to find out who in particular is linking to competitors — a good start in a link campaign. This tool, shown in

Seeing What the Search Engines See

I admit I don’t often use this type of tool, but it’s interesting now and then. Some utilities will read a Web page and display the content of the page in the manner in which a search engine is likely to see it. When looking at a competitor’s pages, you can sometimes see things that aren’t visible to the site visitor but that have been placed on the page for the benefit of the search engines. When viewing your pages, you may want to check that all the links are readable by the search engines (these tools generally provide a list of readable links).

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