Online Tools to Improve Your Blogging Productivity
One of the three main things you need to succeed with blogging is your tool set. Having the right online tools will help you a great deal. It would put you ahead of most of your competitors. In this post you’ll find a wide range of tools that you can use to create, optimize, promote and monetize your website. I’ll be adding more over time, so make sure to check this post once in a while.
Domain Name Tools
Domain Name Generator: This exclusive tool for Online Profits members will add hundreds of prefixes and suffixes to any keyword you input. After that you can check if the generated domains are available for registration or not.
DomainTools.com: You’ll find a wide range of domain related tools on this website, including a very detailed whois service, the registration and DNS history of domain names, server lookup and so on.
Who.is: One of the first and most popular whois services on the Internet. Simply type the domain name that you want to research and it will tell you its availability.
Instant Domain Search: This tool enables you to see which domains are registered, and which are free in real time, as you type letter by letter.
Ajax Whois: This is a real time domain search tool which behaves similarly to Instant Domain Search. The advantage is that it includes more extensions.
Psychic Whois: Another real time domain lookup, but with an auto-complete feature enabled.
BustAName: This is one of the best domain research tools on the Internet. Simply insert any number of keywords, prefixes, or suffixes, and the service will mix and match them for you.
NameBoy: A basic tool that offers domain name ideas. All you need to do is type in a primary keyword (and a secondary one if you want), and it will display a list with relevant domain names.
Xona Domain Hacks: A domain hack is a trick used to form a word by combining both the domain name and its extension. Examples include bla.st (blast), del.icio.us (delicious), and blo.gs (blogs).
DomainsBot: This tool operates like a domain name search engine. After you type in keywords it will create a list for you (the more keywords included the bigger the list) with related domains.
MakeWords: This tool creates a list using random domain names, outlining those that are already registered and the ones still available.
Banned Domain Checker: Before considering to purchase a registered domain, it’s a good idea to check if Google has banned the domain in the past.
Website Downtime Monitoring Tools
Down for everyone or just me?: If you tried to visit your website and it is not loading, use this tool to confirm whether the site is really down or if it is a local problem on your machine or domain name server.
Pingdom: One of the most reliable monitoring services on the web. They perform checks from servers dispersed around the world, and you’ll be notified within 5 minutes if your site goes down. The free accounts allows you to monitor one website.
Binary Canary: Offers a similar service to Pingdom, but the free account here can monitor up to 5 websites. The monitor interval is 15 minutes.
Are My Sites Up?: This service has a free version as well, but the checks are performed only once every hour, so it is not recommend for sensitive sites. It could still be used for your less important sites though.
SEO Tools
Google Webmaster Tools: A must use for any webmaster. These tools will allow you to diagnosis crawling and indexing problems, to customize how Google should interact with your website and so on.
Yahoo! Site Explorer: A very useful tool provided by Yahoo! that reports all the backlinks pointing to a certain domain or web page. You won’t be able to filter and customize the results, but the total number of backlinks should be relatively accurate.
Link Diagnosis: This tool will analyze all the backlinks of a certain domain. It evaluates the PageRank, the anchor text and the presence of nofollow tags. The filtering options are quite useful as well.
Smart Links: The main difference of this tool compared to the previous one is that it analyzes backlinks to individual web pages. A side benefit is the speed of the tool.
Keyword Density Analyzer: This tool will analyze the keyword density of your pages, highlighting whether the keyword is included in important locations or not. You can also customize some options before using the tool.
SEO Browser: This browser tools allows you to see your website just like search bots would. It is useful to identify the order of elements, the distribution of keywords and links and so on.
Bad Neighborhood: This tool will check the external links present on a URL to determine whether or not they are pointing to “bad neighbors” (i.e., spammy or malicious websites).
Digital Point Keyword Tracker: This tool allows you to track the search rankings of keywords within your website. It supports the three main search engines (i.e., Google, Yahoo! and Bing), and it also tracks historical data.
GoRank: Another tool that let’s you track the search rankings of your keywords. It works with Google only, but it offers daily, weekly and monthly trend reports, as well as graphic reports.
SEO Analyzer: The tool will created a detailed report with a list of SEO components that might require a closer assessment on your website.
Strongest Subpages: This tool gives you an organized list of the strongest pages on any web site. This is important because by looking at the results you can easily determine what pages are carrying the most amount of inbound links.
Firefox Extensions
Google Toolbar: This toolbar allows you to check the Google PageRank of any page you are visiting. It also comes with some Google related features (e.g., a search box, quick links and so on).
Search Status: Apart from telling you the Google PageRank and Alexa rank of the website your are visiting, this tool allows you to highlight nofollowed links, to check the number of backlinks, the robots.txt file and so on.
SEO for Firefox: This tool will give you PageRank, cache date, domain age, backlinks in Yahoo, number of .edu links, the number of cached pages, and many other stats for any given page with a simple right click.
Web Developer: A must have extension for any developer. It comes with many features, including the ability to edit the CSS, view the source code, separate the divisions and so on.
CollorZilla: Quick way to pick color from any pages (text or image) and get its color hex code.
DevBoi: A sidebar offers easy access to web-development documentations and reference manuals (HTML4, CSS2, DOM2, XUL). Very neat way to get reference on syntax especially for CSS.
Keyword Research Tools
Google AdWords Keyword Tool: By far the most reliable keyword research tool out there (it comes from Google itself, after all). It gererates hundreds of related searches for each keyword you input, and you can access broad and exact search volume for each.
WordTracker Free Version: WordTracker is a paid keyword research tool, but it also offers a free version. Results will also contain 100 keyword variations, but search volume is estimated at a daily level, and it might not be accurate for long tail keywords.
Keyword Country Free Version: The free version of the Keyword Country software will only output 10 keyword variations, but it also reveals the number of competing pages for each keyword.
Google Trends: Very useful service provided by Google that reveals both the relative search volume and the trend for specific keywords.
Keyword Discovery Free Tool: Another free version of a paid keyword research service. It is very similar to the WordTracker one, but you can use it to cross check the search volume numbers.
Website Optimization Tools
Google Webmaster Tools: A suite of tools provided by Google that any webmaster should use. The features range from crawling tests to keyword analysis and malware detection.
BrowserShots: Very useful tool if you are redesigning or making tweaks to your website. It allows you to check how your website is looking on a wide range of browsers, to make sure things will not break for other visitors.
Web Page Analyzer: This tool will analyze the loading speed of a certain web page inside your domain (it can be the root too). After that you’ll see a report with information about each element that was loaded and how long it took. Useful to identify bottlenecks.
Page Size Extractor: This tool will analyze the total size of a web page, and break down the individual elements that are adding up to the total.
Web Design Tools
W3C Markup Validation: This service allows you to validate the code on your website. Validated sites will display correctly in most browsers, and that is why this aspect is important.
Favicon Generator: Easy to use tool that will create a favicon for your websites. You need to have an image as source file.
Kuler: With Kuler, you can choose, create, modify, mix and match colors, until you happen upon the perfect color scheme for your website. It was created by the Adobe guys.
Social Media Tools
Google Alerts: Once you activate this service you’ll receive an email every time someone users your name or the name of your website around the web. Very useful for reputation management.
TweetBeep: This tools works like Google Alerts, but instead of tracking the web it tracks that messages that are published on Twitter.
SocialToo: This service offers a wide range of tools to simply your interaction with both Twitter and Facebook. It allows you to automate some tasks like unfollowing people who unfollow you.
SocialOomph: Another set of social media tools packed in one place. The free version allows you to schedule tweets, track keywords, auto-follow those who follow you and so on.
< p>BackTweets: Simply enter a URL into the search bar and it will provide you with a list with every tweet that has ever contained a link / reference to that website.
Klout: This will allow you to identify some of the key conversation drivers in the areas you are interested in.
Social Mention: It can give you a pretty decent look at brand / subject mentions across blogs, microblogs, video sharing sites, social networks and much more.
Traffic Estimation Tools
Alexa: Some people love Alexa, others hate it. Regardless of the controversy, Alexa is still one of the most used traffic tracking services around the web, and for big websites their ranking system is relatively accurate.
Compete: Compete offers an alternative to Alexa, and for U.S. based sites their traffic estimations are pretty accurate. Smaller and non-U.S. websites will not be tracked correctly, though.
Quantcast: Some very large websites (e.g., Digg.com and Mahalo.com) use the Quantcast tracker deliberately. This means that Quantcast knows exactly how many visitors they get per month. For other websites, however, the estimates are not that accurate.
Google Trends for Websites: This version of the Google Trends service can be used to estimate the traffic levels of specific websites. It does not provide absolute values, but the comparison between two or more sites usually is accurate.
To learn more about Blogging Tips and Blogging Productivity, please read through our previous posts or through the related posts listed further below. You should also subscribe with your email address, RSS, follow me on Twitter, become my friend on Facebook, become my friend on Linkedin and become my fan at www.facebook.com/jadesojiadegbulu so as to get more effective posts delivered to you as soon as they are made available here.
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Adesoji Adegbulu is the Founder of Maven Technologies Nig. Ltd (aka 9jacorp). He is a social/internet entrepreneur, business consultant, network marketer and a problem solver who loves helping people and business succeed.
I write, research, inspire, teach, empower and serve as a resource person. I am a social media enthusiast. You can connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
