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Free web tools: Analyse
and optimise on the cheap
Finding
out what's going on with you website no longer needs to be
a complicated task. With so many quality free tools available,
it takes little effort to get your head around site analytics
and optimisation.
We can hardly start without first mentioning Google Analytics.
This niftiest of tools provides anything from visitor numbers,
referral sites, popular entry and exit pages, whist also offering
an insight into your pay per click (PPC) campaigns. Well worth
a visit to http://bizsolutions.google.com/services/ before
doing anything else.
Sticking with Google, the next best thing you can get into
are the Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools offer an insight
as to how your site is indexed. You can upload your site map
and examine lots of facts and figures such as popular search
terms that lead visitors to your site as well as learning
about where site errors exist. Right after getting sorted
with Google Analytics your best bet is to go straight to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
If you are concerned about your page rank it's well worth
running a free test with SEOmoz. By visiting http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength
and entering your website URL you'll get a report showing
ranking statistics with most of the major search engines and
ranking sites such as Google, Alexa, Wikipedia etc. For a
general SEO health check Sitening provide a speedy analysis
of your website structure helping you to tweak a few elements
for better performance. Visit: http://www.sitening.com/seo-tools/seo-analyzer/.
For a quick check regarding search performance for specific
words and terms a trip to www.GoogleRanking.com will provide
you with a summary page showing how your site stands up in
Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.
With link popularity being one of the major drivers of traffic
a visit to http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/free-marketing-tools.html
will provide you with a quick way to check popularity with
Google, Yahoo and MSN. As well as several other useful tools
there is the search ranking check you can run against any
search term. The result will give you your current standings
with 9 of the most popular search engines giving you details
of where particular pages rank for specific key words / terms.
If you've ever wondered just how a search engine actually
sees you site it could be worth running your URL through a
spider simulator. The Summit spider simulator provides a visual
display which can be a little tricky to interpret but with
a little knowledge can offer some assistance in streamlining
your pages for better indexing. See http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/
We all know that web surfers are impatient and when it comes
to waiting for slow pages to load there can be no better way
to send your surfer running to competitor sites. So with speed
in mind it could be worth running your pages through SelfSEO's
speed checker. Giving you options to add multiple domains
or multiple pages it's easy to see if your site measures up
to competitors. Point your browser to http://www.selfseo.com/website_speed_test.php
and off you go. If speed does appear to be an issue then at
least you'll know about it and can begin cleaning up your
source code and optimising a few graphics here and there.
Right there alongside speed is always the dreaded dead link.
Having your visitors hit a dead link suggests your side is
not being very well maintained. But you've guessed it….the
W3 link checker will rip through your site and report back
all those lovely oversights. Go to http://validator.w3.org/checklink
and give it a whirl.
This
article is free to republish provided the resource information
below remains intact.
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