10 Great Webmaster tools

This article is a must read for everyone who owns a site or a blog, the article was originally published on Site Pro news. Hope you'll enjoy and learn something from it.


Here is a collection of what we consider "must have" tools for webmasters. These tools will benefit any webmaster, both novices and experts alike. Arm yourself with these tools in order to achieve a more professional online presence.

1. Custom 404 Page

Use a custom 404 page, so that if a user incorrectly types a webpage URL, they will still retain navigational options within your site and be provided alternative solutions. When a domain is correctly entered, but a specific webpage's URL is entered incorrectly, it is possible to display your custom error page to the visitor. By providing users with a navigational bar and further assistance, rather than leaving them with a generic "page not found" error screen, you can often keep prospective customers on your site by providing them with navigation alternatives.

2. UrlTrends

UrlTrends is a service that shows historical trends, so that webmasters can see how their SEO efforts are affecting websites in the search engines. UrlTrends should be used in conjunction with web-logging software.

UrlTrends - www.urltrends.com

3. Favicon

Polish your website by adding a Favorite Icon. When a "favicon" is available on your site, and the site URL is entered in the user's web browser URL box, the favicon will be displayed beside the URL. This gives the website a more professional and polished look.

Favicon HTMLKit - www.htmlkit.com

4. Color Matching

Match the primary web colors with those used in your logo. Simply choose a preferred color using the ColorBlender service below, and a 6-color matching palette and blend will be automatically calculated for you.

ColorBlender - www.colorblender.com

5. Online WYSIWYG Editing

Online webpage editing allows for collaboration, so that different users can log in and edit web pages.

Edit - www.edit.com

6. RSS Feeds

No longer considered to be just a nice addition, RSS feeds are now a "must have" for popular websites! Create RSS feeds for newsletters, press releases, educational articles, product tutorials, new product promotions, or just about any other sort of web content. FeedForAll - www.feedforall.com

7. MaxEmail

MaxEmail's very affordable Internet fax and voicemail service allows a fax message to be delivered to an email address as a PDF formatted attachment. This allows fax messages to follow you regardless of your location. And, it also eliminates the need for a costly extra telephone line and a dedicated fax machine.

MaxEmail - maxemail.com

8. Royalty-Free Images

Locate stock photos to incorporate into your web design. Use royalty-free stock photography to add professional, high-quality images to your website.

Photo Wizard - www.photo-wizard.net

9. Submit Corner Web Assessment Tools

These web assessment tools help you use search engines to effectively monitor who links to your website, how many links, and who your competitors are. The tools include search indexing, link tracking, and competitor identification.

Submit Corner - www.SubmitCorner.com

10. Ranks.nl

This service assesses keyword density and prominence of a domain. The tool parses keywords and assesses the number of times a keyword occurs, and then discerns the density of the keywords.

Ranks.nl - ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

11. Webmaster Toolkit

The Webmaster Toolkit is a collection of webmaster tools developed to help webmasters with daily webmaster chores. The suite of free tools and resources included continues to grow, and contains something useful for the beginner and the advanced webmaster alike.

Webmaster Toolkit - www.webmaster-toolkit.com

12. HTML Web Templates

Make it clean and professional. Use easy-to-edit HTML web templates for web design.

Web Design - www.webmaster-templates.net or www.webdesign-elements.com

13. TrafficZap

This website includes script, page rank checker, link popularity checker, and more.

TrafficZap - www.trafficzap.com

14. Compete.com

Web Analytics - Stay on top of rivals with site metrics and audience profiles for the top 1,000,000 web domains. Identify rival search marketing strategies to take your SEM and SEO efforts to the next level.

SiteAnalytics - siteanalytics.compete.com

15. Thumbshots

Easily add thumbshot images to your webpages. Integrate website thumbnails by simply copying and pasting HTML code. Additional software is not needed.

Thumbshots - www.thumbshots.org

Use top-notch tools to make web maintenance and management a little easier.

By Sharon Housley (c) 2009

Internal links and why they matter

My experience with SEO has not been very pleasant. SEO is time consuming and a tedious work. To generate good keywords within your post reqires patience and presence of mind. And for above mentioned reasons, i have totally overlooked an simple and yet effective SEO tip that is easy to implement, and you can't go wrong with it.

Internal links, they are magical in the SEO sense and can hardly be overlooked by anyone. Every blogger who wants good ranking should do it.A simple way to do this is to add a widget at the sidebar which focuses on the most read posts or the most commented ones. Frequently changing links could be a more effective strategy, however for a start you can concentrate on few posts. You might have noticed that i haven't included any of those in my sidebar. That is because it takes space and wouldn't look neat along with the ads. A more effective thing, form my point of view, would be to add these posts in the bottom. SO if you are under same situation as i am, you can go ahead with adding those posts at the footer of your blog, or at the top of your blog.

Making a living in the woods

Have you ever given thought to moving out of the city altogether? At some point in your life, you may have thought of living in the country and away from the hassle of city life. What better way to find peace than in nature? It's the peace of the country and the woods that give spiritual and mental healing.

Our lives seem to be governed by our own actions. We choose our way of life. At some point things may go awry due to unforeseen events. It seems the cities often suffer with crime and crowding, making it more difficult to live in peace. The ever increasing threat of terrorism in metropolitan areas have forced people to move out of the cities altogether. More and more people choose to live in places where population is scarce. For all the above mentioned reasons, it is really advisable to consider making a life and a living in the woods.

However the biggest question that remains unanswered is how do you make such a move? No one can just pack their bags and shift to the live in the wilderness. It requires proper planning, and also being comfortable and ready for the move. There are many books out there in the market that provide tips to start a new life in the country. Perhaps one of the best ebooks out there is a 14000+ words pdf report that is more than a practical guide of living a peaceful life in woods. It provides all the details there is to know about living in the wilderness. The report can be purchased for $15 at http://www.thewoodsguide.com/

The website is unique and provides various e-books including Making a Living in the Woods. So go ahead and give it a shot . It might just be a life changing idea that you won't regret.