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The speed of a website is a very important factor for providing a better browsing experience to visitors (which directly effects the success of a website).

Specially, after Google announced that "speed" became one of the elements in its search ranking, it is clear that web designers/developers should be focusing more on this.

GTmetrix is a free and online website speed analyzer which uses Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow as the analyzing engines and display their results + recommendations online.

It enables you to compare multiple URLs and, once signed up, you can:

• view the past tests ran to compare with the current results
• schedule daily/weekly/monthly automated checks
• save reports
• set any report to be public or private

GTmetrix also has a bookmarklet which you can run a test for any website with a click.

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Many websites are using Ajax requests to interact with databases, load content, etc. in order to stay dynamic without page refreshes.

However, any content loaded with Ajax can not be viewed inside the "source of the website" which ends up in non-crawlable web pages.

Google is sharing a detailed information on "making Ajax applications crawlable" which shows how the search engine sees the web pages and things to improve that.

Google simply asks us to:

• use "#!" signs after any URL that generates content with Ajax (like: www.example.com/ajax.html#!mystate)
• create the HTML without Ajax (besides the Ajaxed version) when www.example.com/ajax.html#!mystate is browsed
• update the website's sitemap with the new URLs

The ! sign will be indicating that the content at that part of the web page is Ajax crawlable and Google will crawl the URL (which generates the HTML content) and add it to its search results as a part of the web page.

Although it seems pretty complicated, considering how important it is to getting indexed by Google, it is (almost) a must for Ajaxed websites.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit is a free tool from Microsoft for improving a website’s relevance in search results.

It simply analyzes a website & recommends how to make your new or existing site content/structure more search engine-friendly.

Some features of SEO Toolkit:

• full-featured crawler engine
• query builder interface that allows you to build custom reports
• display of detailed information for each UR
• ability to manage robots.txt file
• ability to manage sitemap.xml file

It requires an IIS7 enabled computer to run which is basically Vista, Windows 7 or Server 2008. After that it can analyze any local or remote website.

P.S. Besides standard installation, SEO Toolkit can be installed easily using the Microsoft Web Platform.

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GoingUp! is a free web-based website statistics service with powerful SEO features.

The service has a slick Ajaxed interface & offers a complete analytics package with web stats, referring keywords, action/goals & more.

GoingUp! tracks every activity & presents data nicely with charts, heatmaps, flags (for countries), etc.

Some of its SEO features are:

• Inbound Link Monitoring
• Google Page Rank Tracking
• Alexa Rank Tracking
• Keyword Research
• Keyword Position Tracking
• Page Optimizer Tool
• Keyword Density Tool

The service also has some other free SEO tools like "bulk domain analyzer" or "link & SEO optimizer" which can be used directly without the need of signing up.

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Exactfactor is a free web based service that enables you to analyze the positions of keywords of a website in major search engines.

It lets you to add competitors & compare your website’s results with a competitor.

Another nice feature is the ability to add alerts. You can get alerts when:

• keywords you mentioned become the top 1, top5, etc. in the search engines
• your website beats a competitor for the given keywords

Exactfactor is very easy to use with a clean interface & considering search engines are the most important "factors" of traffic, the service is definitely helpful.

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If you have ever advertised at Google Adwords, you probably experienced a keyword guessing process.

Google now helps this with the Search-Based Keyword Tool.

The example simply demonstrates, if webresourcesdepot.com was to be advertised with Google Adwords & web design was a keyword to be used:

• the tool checks the website to analyze the content
• suggests other related keywords

Definitely a time saver for Google Adwords users.

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Free Site Validator is a very handy free service for validating webpages.

When compared to W3C validation services, this solution scans not only 1 page but follows links, goes deeper & almost scans all webpages in a website.

The service uses W3C validation service at the backend & enables you to scan multiple websites.

Report generation can take some time considering it scans all webpages but the service can simply notify you when the validation is completed.

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In general Google & other search engines are the primary self-marketers of websites. So, checking your website’s credibility at search engines is a good way of improving it.

Here are some major web-based (excluding softwares and browser extensions) pagerank check & seo tools websites which have resources like backlink analyzers, search engine position finders, and more.

Info: This list is not the "all SEO tools" list, but they are the ones which provide you many tools at the same place with an easy-to-use interface.

If you find these tools handy, bookmark the post at del.icio.us.

iWEBTOOL

They have almost every seo tool you may need including keywork density checker and link popularity.

Khrido

Besides the pagerank check and other webmaster tools, they have some advanced tools like mx / ns lookup, HTML Encryptor & more.

Although Khrido is not the most popular one, it is very user-friendly.

LinkVendor

They have a social bookmark link checker,  visual pagerank checker tool and a free seo report tool which are nice besides the standard seo tools.

SEOmoz

SEOmoz provides advanced website analysis tools like finding how well your website is targeted for specific keywords or countries. Their pagerank checker & similar tools can be found here.

SEO Chat

They are providing some tools for analyzing AdSense returns or comparing Google & Yahoo search results as a chart.

SEO Book SEO Tools

Besides the standard SEO tools, they have an unique keyword analysis tool & a Firefox pagerank checker extension that can be handy.

Google Trends

A great Google tool that gives you an idea about the popularity of keywords, and websites.

If you know of a great one please share at comments.

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Making keyword & link analysis is the core of a succesful SEO process. Although search engines provide you the results of a keyword search, you can not reach the website link connections easily.

TouchGraph Google Browser is a web based tool which helps you to explore the connections between websites based on URLs or keywords (from Google search results) with an interactive visual interface.

Link analysis can be done really easily with this tool and it is very impressive to see a website’s importance for a keyword that clear.

Besides the Google Browser, TouchGraph also offers similar tools for Amazon and Facebook connection analysis.

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Robots.txt file usage is sometimes ignored. On the other hand, it is an important factor for the webpages being indexed properly and very easy to setup.

I know that robots.txt is not something new. But, I’ve been preparing a SEO sheet for a while and wanted to share this small & useful portion with you.

What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a file that is used to exclude content from the crawling process of search engine spiders / bots. Robots.txt is also called the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Why to use robots.txt?

In general, we prefer that our webpages are indexed by the search engines. But there may be some content that we don’t want to be crawled & indexed. Like the personal images folder, website administration folder, customer’s test folder of a web developer, no search value folders like cgi-bin, and many more. The main idea is we don’t want them to be indexed.

Is robots.txt file a certain solution?

No. Standards based bots like Google’s, Yahoo’s or other big search engine’s robots listen to your robots.txt file. This is because they are programmed to. If configured so, any search engine bot can ignore the robots.txt file. Result: there is no guarantee.

How to use robot.txt file?

Robots.txt file has some simple directives which manages the bots. These are:

• User-agent: this parameter defines, for which bots the next parameters will be valid. * is a wildcard which means all bots or Googlebot for Google.
• Disallow: defines which folders or files will be excluded. None means nothing will be excluded, / means everything will be excluded or /folder name/ or /filename can be used to specify the values to excluded. Folder name between slashes like /folder name/ means that only folder name/default.html will be excluded. Using 1 slash like /folder name means all content inside the folder name folder will be excluded.

There are also some other parameters which are only supported by all browsers. These are:

• Allow: this parameter works just the opposite of Disallow. You can mention which content will be allowed to be crawled here. * is a wildcard.
• Request-rate: defines pages/seconds to be crawled ratio. 1/20 would be 1 page in every 20 second.
• Crawl-delay: defines howmany seconds to wait after each succesful crawling.
• Visit-time: you can define between which hours you want your pages to be crawled. Example usage is: 0100-0330 which means that pages will be indexed between 01:00 AM – 03:30 AM GMT.
• Sitemap: this is the parameter where you can show where your sitemap file is. You must use the complete URL addres for the file.

Robots.txt example:

User-agent: * #allows all search engine spiders.
Disallow: /secretcontent/ #disallow them to crawl secretcontent folder.

Resources:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40360
http://www.robotstxt.org/
http://www.searchtools.com/robots/robots-txt.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

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