Free Web Tools

Free web tools are always a popular topic – whether you are planning a new site, or just tweaking your existing site.

Here’s a round up of some of my favourite free web tools:

Keyword research tools help you to discover the best phrases for both SEO and PPC campaigns. I have previously reviewed and recommend SEO Book’s Keyword Research Tool.

Research your competition using the Google Toolbar and Alexa Toolbar. For those Firefox users amongst us, I strongly recommend SearchStatus toolbar. And don’t forget to research your competitors in DMOZ to see what categories they have indexed themselves in.

Promote your branding or logo with a favicon, that little icon that appears when I bookmark your site, or when your address appears in a browser. Try using Dynamic Drive’s Favicon Generator.

What colours are safe to use in a web browser? Your Pantone colour might not display safely, so use Lynda’s Browser Safe Colour palette when planning your website design.

Do you have a sitemap? You can use the free XML Sitemap Generator to scan through all the pages of your website, and create either an HTML or XML sitemap, no charge.

Is your website bloated and overweight? How long does it take your website to load? Websiteoptimization.com’s free speed test will analyse your site, and tell you how specific ways to improve your site.

Have you done a check of the quality of your website code? Or better yet, check the quality of the web designers quoting for your shiny new website? W3C’s quality assurance tools will validate your HTML, look for broken web links, as well as check out your cascading style sheets (CSS).

How well do you write? Check out how hard it is to read your web copy using this Readability Testing Tool. And whilst you’re at it, check out whether you are using your keyphrases in your copy using a keyword density analyser.

iwebtools has a great collection of tools, including a spider simulator, Page Rank predictor, bank link checker and loads more

And last but no means least, take full advantage of Google’s free tools:

• Google Analytics provide high quality, free statistics
• Google’s Webmaster Central is a toolbox full of statistics and diagnostics
• Google Alerts is a great way to spy on your competition, or manage your own reputation
• Google Checkout is offering free credit card processing til 2008
• Google Mashups lets you plot your own data on a Google map
• Get all those essential Google toys in the Google Pack: toolbars, Google Earth, Picassa….

I’m sure you have other free utilities, let me know!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Google, SEO, Toolkit, Web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.