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August 14, 2008

30+ Great Web Tools You Might not Know Yet but Should

Filed under: blogging, seo, social media, website analytics — Tags: , , Tad Chef @ 11:28 am

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 just recently in 2008.

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

  • Social Median is a unique combination of a Mixx-like social news site and Ning-like community functionality
  • Browzmi is a real time social browsing and chatting tool, it’s like a more social StumbleUpon
  • Social Browse is very similar to Browzmi according to NetHackz, invitation only as of now
  • Hooeey is half social browsing if you want it to, half a web based browser history that renders bookmarking obsolete according to the site
  • Second Brain is often mistakenly referred to as a lifestreaming tool like the popular FriendFeed, but its focus is to collect and organize “all your content” available online
  • Muxtape is a very simple kind of music community which allows to listen to predefined user “generated” playlists
  • Twitbuzz is a Digg-like interface showing the most popular links on Twitter

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

  • Cuil is a new search engine which claims to have more pages indexed than any other, for me its results are as good as Google’s
  • Grooveshark Lite is a music search engine that lets you listen to what you find
  • Muxtape Stumbler is a music search engine for the Muxtape community
  • Picitup is a very advanced visual search engine for images which also allows you to find Creative Commons licensed images you can use for free
  • 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

  • Trifecta by SEOMoz is an updated blog/website worth measuring tool
  • 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
  • Ranksense is a an advanced SEO software by Hamlet Batista for all those who do go beyond ranking checking, it’s out of beta for a few months now
  • Raven SEO Tools, this a a whole web based SEO tool suite 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 THE new keyword research tool for every webmaster or website owner, it’s Google Trends “on steroids”

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

  • Feed Compare lets you view and compare the subscriber numbers of blogs using Feedburner for their RSS feeds over time
  • 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 suing 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.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • bodytext
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • Propeller
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis

17 Comments »

  1. 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/

    Comment by Paul Burani, Clicksharp Marketing — August 14, 2008 @ 9:50 pm

  2. Hi!

    Thanks for the mention!

    Audun from Secondbrain

    Comment by Audun Kjelstrup, Secondbrain — August 15, 2008 @ 10:36 am

  3. 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

    Comment by Ash — August 15, 2008 @ 3:17 pm

  4. 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?

    Comment by Smarmy — August 15, 2008 @ 6:39 pm

  5. Great list, not to sure that Cuil was worth of it however :)

    Comment by SEO Canada — August 15, 2008 @ 9:40 pm

  6. 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.

    Comment by Utah SEO — August 15, 2008 @ 10:28 pm

  7. Thanks for the list ;)

    Comment by ahnShev — August 16, 2008 @ 2:42 am

  8. 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.

    Comment by Jason — August 16, 2008 @ 6:33 am

  9. 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

    Comment by Tad Chef — August 16, 2008 @ 10:18 am

  10. Cuil? Just that tout alone makes me weary of the judgment used to compile the remaining list.

    Comment by The Linkback Project — August 17, 2008 @ 12:57 pm

  11. Cuil??? Ugh.

    Comment by Todd — August 19, 2008 @ 2:56 pm

  12. Thumbs up of the day

    Comment by web design company — August 23, 2008 @ 11:05 am

  13. 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 :)

    Comment by zuborg — September 4, 2008 @ 2:54 pm

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