Free Webmaster Tools
Posted on January 28th, 2010 by Admin
Free webmaster tools are available all over the web but do you really have the time to trawl through hundreds of sites looking for the ‘cream of the crop’ ? As a webmaster myself I certainly don’t so I’ve collected a few sites and tools together for your convenience. I’m starting with one of the most important tasks any webmaster needs to do which is validation.
Validation
W3C is kind of the ‘governing body’ of validation, setting the standards that today’s browsers adhere to (excluding internet explorer of course, which tends to do its own thing!). Get yourself to W3C and have your pages validated during the design process to pick up errors early. If you have an existing web site and find that you have lots of errors don’t panic, often fixing one error will have a nock on effect and fix dozens of others.
1. Firebug is a free extension for the popular web browser, Firefox. If you haven’t tried Firefox yet, it’s a must have tool and a VERY secure browser. To get Firebug go to the Mozilla Firefox website and search the add-ons section, or open Firefox and go to tools > add-ons > get add-ons.
Free Local testing servers
My next subject is setting up a local testing server so that you can develop your pages, applications and mysql databases and locally test them. Why do this? It’s a lot quicker than using a web server and uploading your work all the time. You can have a folder directly linked into Dreamweaver and simply save and test.
1. WAMP Server is a fantastically simple, easy to use web server platform for local testing. It runs pretty much anything an Apache server will, has a built in mysql server and loads more. I’m not ‘clued up’ on installing servers by any means but this really was a breeze to get started with.
SEO
Not really an area for webmasters working as part of a team, but for us ‘one man bands’ we need to do everything from design to SEO so its always good to have a few SEO related tools under your belt.
1. PosiTracker.com tracks all of your positions at a very cost effective price. It goes 1,000 positions deep and provides a daily update with graphs.
2. GoogleMon is a 100% free SERP monitoring tool exclusively for Google. We all know that Google is the main search engine to optimize for.
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