Google Webmasters
This page has an amazing number of tools you can use to monitor and manage your website. You can login using your gmail account login. You can check to see if your site is actually being indexed by googlebot, see if there are any errors in your site and heaps more. Google webasters.
Check what the flavour of the month and the popularity of your keywords
See what other people are searching for on the web. You can use this as a rough guide when you are thinking of your next blog topic.
- To check for how popular your adwords are
- check out google trends.
- To see what yahooers are searching for.
Analytics
Google Analytics – This allows you to monitor who visited your web page, from where they came, and how long they stayed on your site. You have to start by cutting and pasting some html/javascript onto your website. Ideally you want to paste this in your template so it’s automatically on all you pages. This is useful because you might be trying to generate traffic through many channels. This will show you from where the traffic is coming (refered) so you will know which channels are successful. It’s much smarter than a web-counter.
Ping-o-matic
Ping-o-matic – For those bloggers out there this is an invaluable tool. It notifies all the main stream Blog and web search engines of updated content. Please note that blog hosting services such as WordPress can be configured to ping ping-0-matic. While hosts such as Blogger may or may not be doing it. It still doesn’t hurt to use this service once regularly, just to make sure everything is updated. www.pingomatic.com
Technorati
This is a blog rating site. If you just join you will have an authority of Zero, which means you will be given the least preference when it comes to search results. This also means that the chances of users actually visiting your blog through Technorati is virtually zero. The only way to increase your authority is to have other sites/blogs link to you. The best way of doing this is through blog carnivals (tip 9). The next best way is to do some link exchanging. Building up your authority is tough work. Still, lot’s of people talk about it so it wouldn’t hurt to create an account and claim your blog in Technorati. The more you put your blog out there the more chances of getting noticed.