33 Free Tools to Make Your Website Better
1. Site-Perf – get an accurate, realistic, and helpful estimation of your site’s loading speed. The script fully emulates natural browser behavior downloading your page with all the images, CSS, JS and other files – just like a regular user. A unique feature is that site-perf.com allows to measure packet loss ratio with reasonable precision.
2. Customer Focus Calculator – will analyze the words on your page and determine if your copy is more about yourself or your customer. This tool will measure if you are we-we-ing all over yourself.
3. BT Buckets – Engage your users with a free segmentation and behavioral targeting tool.
4. 4Q from IPerceptions – developed with web analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik. When evaluating how you website is doing obviously it helps to get your customers’ opinions. This free tool helps you answer four important questions:
* How satisfied are my visitors?
* What are my visitors at my website to do?
* Are they completing what they set out to do?
* If not, why not?
* If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?
* What are my visitors at my website to do?
* Are they completing what they set out to do?
* If not, why not?
* If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?
5. What’s the Buzz? – a keyword research tool with one simple aim: to find out who’s talking about a certain keyword. To do that, it does five things:
* It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days
* It displays the Google Trends chart for the keyword
* It finds blog posts tagged with the keyword
* It finds blog posts containing the keyword (a straight-forward search)
* It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords
* It displays the Google Trends chart for the keyword
* It finds blog posts tagged with the keyword
* It finds blog posts containing the keyword (a straight-forward search)
* It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords
6. Bad Neighborhood Link Checker – scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.
7. Backlink Social Celebrity SEO Tool – discover who bookmarked a webpage and who linked to that webpage. The bookmarks are searched for in the various social bookmarking services, such as del.icio.us, Raw Sugar, and others. The backlinks are found using Google and Yahoo!.
8. Webbed-O-Meter 2.0 – can help track how effective you are at inspiring consumer generated content online, call it buzz marketing, social media marketing or viral marketing.
9. Website Grader – provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
10. Spider Simulator – help you find out for yourself how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your visibility.
11. Spider Test – Shows the source code of a page, all outbound links, and common words and phrases.
13. Google Website Optimizer – Free A/B and Multivariate Testing
14. Yahoo! Analytics – still in beta, but incredibly powerful. It is currently available with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store plans.
15. Microsoft adCenter Analytics – by invitation only, but you can apply at the link provided.
16. Piwik – This is an open source web analytics solution.
17. Linkscape – allows access to link information on more than 30+ billion web pages across 200+ million domains.
18. BacklinkAnalysis – Get a look at what keywords websites are linking to you with.
19. Trifecta – Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain.
20. Firebug – this plugin for Firefox provides a number of development tools. For the purposes of analysis, Firebug will allow you to monitor and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within your browser.
21. YSlow for Firebug – YSlow will analyze your page to make suggestions for how you can speed up the page. YSlow is integrated with Firebug.
22. Google Webmaster Tools – see which phrases your ranking well for, what pages are causing problems for Google when crawling your site, which pages are getting the most links, rss subscribers, etc.
23. Morgue File – offers free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.
24. OpenAds – for sites that want to serve and track advertising.
25. Sitescore – analyzes the quality of incoming and outgoing links, keyword density, page titles, plagiarism, popularity rank, the usage of popups and the effectiveness of site’s structure. Sitescore also grades the printability, readability, spiderability and usability of the page as well as spelling and W3C compliance. This is no longer available for free, sorry.
26. mon.itor.us – use this to monitor uptime, website performance and other hosting abnormalities.
27. Orangoo Spell Check – spell check your website.
28. The Scrutinizer – offers 283 tools to test your website in one place.
29. Product Indexation Check – use this handy tool to check how many of your category or product pages are included in the major search engines.
30. Kamplye – allows your visitors to give feedback on your site, via a little button that sits at the edge of each webpage.
31. Google’s Free Custom Search Engine – create your own custom search engine, indexing your website or add additonal websites as well.
32. Feng-GUI – generates heatmaps for your website (upload a screenshot) by simulating human vision during the first five seconds of viewing your website.
33. Scrutinizer browser – a web browser, based upon the Adobe AIR toolkit and the WebKit browser, that offers a simulation of the human visual system. Using this simulation, you can get a better idea of how users interact with your site design.
What are some of your favorite free tools to make websites better? Are you having success? If you aren’t satisfied with your progress, or aren’t sure what to do with these tools, maybe you need an OnTarget subscription for continuous improvement. Contact us and find out how we can help.
