| Written by Jean-Loup Rebours-Smith,
on 16-10-2007 01:28
|
Views : 272  |
Favoured : 57 |
Published in : The News, Articles |
As a web developer, I like to keep on top of the various tools that the internet offers to enhance the usability and effectiveness of a website.
I'm not fooling myself, I check my stats on a regular basis and I know that my content isn't very popular at all. Even if it was more regular, I'm not sure it would gain in popularity. Still if these tools can help some people, it would be worth it ...
The first and, I want to say 'obvious', one is Google Analytics. It's not a secret I'm a huge fan of Google. Between Adsense, Desktop, Anaytics, Mail and so on it's a huge part of my daily routine on-line to use Google, and not just for searching the web.
Google Analytics is a very powerful statistics tool. You can see where your visitors are from, how many pages have been seen per day, which keywords have been used to find your site and thus further enhance your SEO and also who refers to your site. It can be amusing to see where visitors come from. It gives tons of other information as well, including 'goals' which are useful for sites with forms, in particular eCommerce ones. And for those with AdWords campaigns, this can be tied in too. There's a lot of strange jargon to be accustomed with, things like ROI still don't make much sense to me but the data it gathers can be invaluable for those who know this kind of business.
The second one is another Google tool, specifically, Google Webmasters Tools. This contains more Google-specific information such as what the Google Page rank is, which pages return a 404 error, which pages link to yours (for those to be seen in Analytics you site need to actually be accessed while this is done through the Google robots) or what popular keywords are likely to return your site in a search.
Since I maintain quite a few websites through work, this is actually a very good tool to compare various levels of popularity. In fact it's by doing just that that I came across Aboutus.org.
At first glance this looked to me like a WiKi to which one can submit their site but by checking a little more I realised that they seem to either have their own crawlers or they have a very dedicated team entering data. Indeed, it turned out that they have http://www.aboutus.org/j-lweb.co.uk. Check your own website, you might actually just be on there. I'm guessing this could be handy to improve page linking...
I also found a very informative site analyser called http://builtwith.com. It basically analyses the technologies used to create a site and can send you a full report with suggestions on how to improve your site... for a fee presumably
Finally through clicks I also found tonight Website Grader, which seems to be a good SEO anaysis tool. It certainly confirmed that my own optimisation wasn't particularily good... no surprise there 
I'd be curious to hear what people make out of these tools...
Last update : 16-10-2007 01:34
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