New web tools appear daily. Often I don’t even manage to bookmark them all, let alone try them. Nonetheless I try as many Internet tools as I can, I’m just a serial early adopter. I can’t stop it. These are mostly 30+ free tools which are either web tools or tools for the web I discovered and bookmarked as useful.
I tested most of these tools and I use some of them regularly as a web professional. Most of these social media, web design & development, search, SEO and analytics, e-commerce, blogging and Internet tools are not yet widely known main stream tools. The average webmaster will hopefully find them useful. I selected the 30 most useful tools from the hundreds available out there.
Social Media
- Topsy is a search-like interface showing the most popular links on Twitter
- Trunk.ly collects all your links from Facebook, Twitter, Delicious etc. and also show those shared/saved by your friends
- Browzmi is a real time social browsing and chatting tool, it’s like a more advanced StumbleUpon
- Hellotxt lets you collect and organize social media activity or crosspost to several sites/networks
Web Design & Development
- Cushy CMS makes any static site a CMS site, it’s so easy I’ll recommend it to my mother who already uses Jimdo
- Pokform is a Jimdo-like Flash online CMS that allows you to create smooth websites with ease, currently it’s a nono for SEO though so you should only use it for an artists or photographers page
- Pingdom allows you to test whether your site is up and how fast it is
- Splashup is the real web based Photoshop, the Adobe online app can’t match
- BricaBox allows you to create your own social site, be it a map mashup site, a wiki, or a voting site. They compare it to WordPress and Ning to underline the ease of use of creation of a site but it appears to be even easier than WordPress
Search
- Blekko is a highly customizable search engine for power users (English only)
- Grooveshark Lite is a music search engine that lets you listen to what you find
- Tineye lets you search for images or rather their sources and appearances based on the image itself
- Google GEO Search Tool allows you to see Google results from other locations as Google localizes your results based on your IP usually
SEO and Analytics
- Piwik is the best open source Google Analytics alternative. Some aspects of it are already better than GA.
- Rank Checker by SEOBook, been around for several months now but after more traditional ranking checker software has been crippled recently by Google a very good alternative
- Raven SEO Tools, this a a whole web based suite of internet marketing tools which will also track your rankings over time among others
- Woopra is an advanced web analytics suite which can compete with Google Analytics and in some cases offers better and more timely data
- Google Insights for Search is a keyword research tool similar to Google Trends but much more exact
E-Commerce
- Shopify is a very simple online shop application virtually anybody can set up a shop now, it’s been around since 2005 and nobody told me!
- PPCalc is a “PayPal fee calculator”. As you know PayPal is very widely used but rather expensive and also not the most reliable solution. I’d recommend Moneybookers as alternative
- ChipIn is a PayPal connected tool that facilitates so called crowdfunding. It’s like crowdsourcing but with money. You ask many people to fund your project
Blogging & Internet
- BuySellAds does exactly that buy and sell banner ads taking 25% commission, it’s easy to use ideal for bloggers and worked fine for me
- Proxify “is a web-based anonymous proxy service which allows anyone to surf the Web privately and securely.”
- xrl.us by Metamark is the better TinyURL, I use it daily
- issuu is a YouTube like website for magazines and other print publications, you can upload them and allow people to read them only using a sleek Flash interface
Bonus
- MagMyPic – You always wanted to get famous and end up on the cover of a magazine? Now you can! ;-)
You might know some of these web tools, especially if you’re a SEO expert you probably will know the SEO tools. I made sure that the list contains both the best tools currently available and those which not everybody outside a certain industry knows yet. Also these 30 tools can be used by anybody. You don’t need to be a full fledged web professional for most of these.
Last updated: April 21th, 2011 – Several defunct tools removed and new tools added.
Definitely the dark horse on this list would have to be Ranksense. But also, for help building out keyword lists for Adwords and other PPC campaigns… try Keyword Lizard, http://www.keywordlizard.com/
Hi!
Thanks for the mention!
Audun from Secondbrain
I have another perspective of SEO for blogs. This article might be very helpful and interesting to read.
http://www.hurricanesoftwares.com/2008/08/15/7-tips-to-optimize-your-blog-for-seo-success/
I have written this article for the bloggers looking for SEO Success.
Hope it helps!
Cheers
Cuil? Really? What Google do you use that makes Cuil even look close to that? Did you miss their launch day that made them a laughing stock?
Great list, not to sure that Cuil was worth of it however :)
I think rank checker is a pretty sweet tools, it is fast and easy. Sometimes it is a couple of spots off. But it sure beats the days of SEO Elite, when I would wait for an hour to get the rankings.
Thanks for the list ;)
Good article, thanks for the links. There we definitely some on there that I hadn’t seen. But honestly, I was with you until you made the comment that “Cuil’s results were as good as Google’s”. You simply lost credibility at that point.
Thanks for the feedback. For all those who don’t like Cuil I recommend some vanity search compared to Google and others:
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/yahoo-search-results-total-crap-now
Cuil? Just that tout alone makes me weary of the judgment used to compile the remaining list.
Cuil??? Ugh.
Thumbs up of the day
If you like Pingdom FPT (full page test) tool – take a look at http://Site-Perf.com/ – another site performance tester, but more detailed and realistic :)
Good list, the one for Cuil is definitely a joke.
Great piece – and hats off to you for sharing it. People cannot expect all of them to be software superstars but there are quite a few in there I didn’t know about, which I may well add to my SEO arsenal.
it is the first time that I heard aboove tools . I only know google tools …
Brilliant info!
Thanx
Some really great stuff! Yeah the Shopify is a nice piece of appware from the people at headscape ;)
Great list.
It was probably difficult to choose the thirty knowing the amounts of such tools in the Internet. These are truly great. Thanks for the list!
This is really amazing list.Thanks for sharing. I found to know some new sites here.
your list in 2009 predicted some of the great tools for 2012 like Issuu.com and Grooveshark and Shopify