A Dozen Kewl Tewl Sites for Webmasters

Webmaster ToolsHERE’S A LIST of (mostly) not-too-well-known Webmaster tool sites. Most of them come from my own stash.

Webmasters and web developers will find most of them useful, but some are just fun.

All are free, but some have upgrades that will remove ads, or add more functionality. But even then the prices are very reasonable.

    1. LINK CHECKERS
      DeadLinks.com (no longer available. Try PowerMapper.com)checks your site for dead links. They will spider your site for up to 45 minutes – if your site has a link to them – or for about 15 minutes without one, and give you a report on both internal and external dead links.  It found a bad link for me – the link went to computerbooksonline/tradepub.com instead of computerbooksonline.tradepub.com (slash instead of dot). They also have a Reciprocal Link Checker that will check for your links on sites that you have exchanged links with. For this, you have to enter the exact URLs of where the links should be.
    2. WEBSITE GRADER
      Hubspot’s Website Grader is a “free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website.” It analyzes several on-page and off-page factors and gives you a final “grade” on your site, plus suggestions on how to improve it.  They also have a Press Release Grader and lots of Internet marketing info on their main site.
    3. WEBMASTER TOOLS
      iWebTool has a whole set of tools – Google PageRank Checker, Google PageRank Predicter, Backlink Checker, Link Popularity, Website Speed Test, and many others. They also have a  Webmaster’s Forum and a Directory you can get listed in for a $9.99 review fee – and with 500,000 unique visitors a month, I think that’s a deal!
    4. IP LOOKUP
      Just paste in an IP address, and this tool from GeoBytes will show you where it originated. GeoBytes also offers other geographical customization tools and services. GeoServer allows you to customize your pages, or completely redirect to another page, based on the visitor’s location. SpamLocator lets you paste in the header from an email message to figure out where it originated. The Email Address Encoder converts your email address to escape sequences, to help fool the spam bots. Not all will be fooled, but some will. Check out GeoBytes for even more kewl tewls.
    5. PAGE RANK CHECKER
      Get the Google Page Rank of your site or any site. You can also add this Page Rank Checker to your site, for free, but it will take your users to their site, instead of keeping them on yours.
    6. PLAGIARISM PROTECTION
      Think someone is copying YOUR content, that you worked so hard to create, and using it as their own? Paste the page URL into CopyScape and it will find other copies, or very similar copies, of your content, and also – a good thing – anyone who has quoted you. They also offer free buttons for your site to warn potential plagiarists not to steal your content, and a paid monitoring service to help protect your content.
    7. POLLS AND MORE
      MyPageRank.net offers a free poll maker, an SEO Monitor, last time Google crawled your site button, free page counters, a Google Page Rank button for your site, spider views of your website, and several other tools. Here is a sample poll…

  1. WEBSITE TRANSLATIONS
    Do you have visitors from many different countries? Of course you do! And this tool can make your site user-friendlier to those visitors. AltaVista’s/Yahoo’s Babel Fish Translation (this one is gone too, but now we have Google Translate.) can be added to your website, and can translate your pages into 9 different languages. It can also do text excerpts. I used it just recently, when I needed a short summary for a Spanish computer book. The description was written in Spanish, which I couldn’t decipher at all. I pasted it into the online Babel Fish, chose Spanish-to-English, and was able to write my summary.
  2. CHAT ROOMS AND MESSAGE BOARDS
    Pliner.net offers several free tools – as long as you don’t mind a few ads. And the ads can be removed for a modest price.  They include free chat rooms ($4.95 month for ad-free), free message boards ($9.95 month for ad-free), forms, polls, page counters, and more.
  3. BROWSERSHOTS
    BrowerShots is a free open-source online tool that allows you to see what your site looks like in about 60 different browser/version/platform combinations. Computerbooksonline.com came out pretty much the same on all of them, except in SeaMonkey 2.0 on Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS.

    Most looked like this

    BrowserShots

    SeaMonkey 2.0 on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

    BrowserShots on Ubuntu and SeaMonkey

  4. SEO TOOLS AND WEBMASTER UTILITIES
    There are several unique tools at webconfs.com. The Keyword Cloud tool will create a tag cloud from the keywords it finds on your site. When you click on any of the tags, it takes you to a page that shows the number of searches for that word or variations of the word. The Search Engine Spider Simulator shows you what the search engines see when they crawl your page. The Link Price Calculator gives you an idea what an advertising link is worth on your site. Check the site for many more tools.
  5. EMAIL ADDRESS MUNGER
    AddressMunger.com lets you to encode your email address using ASCII or JavaScript. You can have a plain text link, use an image, or have a custom display. You can encode your email address with or without the “mailto:”. There is also a popup window that will show you how it will look on your website. Down with spam bots!

And there you have it! If you know of any other kewl tewls for webmasters that you’d like to share, just add them in the comments.

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