Roughly a year ago I published a list of 30+ not yet popular web tools you should know here on SEOptimise. It’s the most popular post on this blog ever since. While I considered updating the list I decided to compile a new one with a new generation of tools instead of just fixing broken links: 30 new & free Web tools you should know – 2009 edition

This is of course a biased list of Web tools (both web based tools or tools for the Web), my own one, but it is fueled by my business blogging, social media optimization and SEO practice so you’ll probably like it as well. Some of these tools are not really new but they are probably new for you as they are not widely known yet.

All of the tools below either offer free versions or are entirely free. I sorted the tools in 4 categories:

• Twitter
• Search, SEO & Analytics
• Blogging & Social Media
• Web Development & Misc. Web Tools

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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.