Free For Your Site

Let’s go back to the basics. In order to publish a website, one usually works on an HTML editor and a separate FTP program to upload files onto a web server. This system works great for some, but not for others. The keywords here are simplicity and convergence. With a program called Planarchy, you can compose your pages and upload your files on a single platform.

Planarchy enables anyone to publish text and images onto a server with ease. No HTML background or external FTP client is needed – everything is taken cared of by Planarchy in the background. Just enter your newest post and click Publish. In a minute, you’ll be able to see your new entry on your web site. Before uploading the pages, the files are saved on a specified directory on your computer. This feature means you’ll always have an up-to-the-minute local mirror. In case something goes wrong, you’ll have a backup ready on your computer. The output pages are highly configurable. Choose how you’d like your entries to appear: a single page, spread across numerous pages, or specified by an entries-per-page value.

Consider it an alternative all-in-one blogging engine. Development and support for this software has stopped, with the latest version being Planarchy 2. However, it’s simple enough to use, and if you’re feeling adventurous, you might want to try it out. Planarchy 2 is compatible with Windows and requires Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 or higher.

Go to Planarchy

Picture this: red text on a black background, with pink and blue highlights. Ugly.

How many web sites have committed this kind of design mistake? Many, unfortunately. What do people do when they accidentally land on one? Unless the content is particularly intriguing, chances are they’ll click away as fast as they can. All of us want to have a snazzy looking site that grabs attention. However, most of us mortals just weren’t born with the eye of an artist.

COLOURlovers.com tries to bridge that artistic gap. It’s a large community of designers with a sizeable database of color palettes you can adopt for your own site, posters, brochures, or any other design needs. The Trend section of the site will keep you abreast of the latest buzz in magazine and web site design. They feature some of the best known sites and review their color schemes. If you want to learn more about related topics, head on to their site blog to read articles, news, and interviews with some of the most compelling contemporary visual artists. There’s also a forum where you can join discussions or post questions you’ve been dying to ask.

It’s a fact. People do judge a book by its cover. Even the best of products won’t sell if you don’t get that point across effectively. If you want your site to reflect an air of professionalism and competence, do your homework. Have a look at COLOURlovers.com and learn as much as you can.

Go to COLOURlovers

Podcasting is gaining ground. Based on an annual study conducted by Edison Media Research, awareness of the term “podcasting” has increased from 22% to 37%. Among those surveyed, 13% said that they have listened to audio podcasts. If you want to spice up your site and provide unique content, this is the way to do it. Not quite sure how to put audio on your web site? With AudioFlash, podcasting has never been easier.

AudioFlash is an uncomplicated program. Hook up a microphone to your computer, press record and start talking. The podcast will be saved in the MP3 format. You can choose the look you want for the Flash-based audio player your visitors will see. Listeners have ample control with play, stop, back and forward buttons. AudioFlash automatically generates a script for you to paste on your site where you’d like the podcast to appear. However, if you’re not quite satisfied with your podcast, you can edit the .mp3 file on a third party audio editor before uploading on your server.

Use AudioFlash to amaze your friends and impress your customers. The same study shows that podcast listeners can be a big market. A majority of these listeners tend to come from high income households, spend a lot more time online than the average person, are advertising-friendly, and actually purchase products over the Internet. What more can you ask from your target market?

AudioFlash is currently on version 1.2, and runs on the Windows platform.

Go to AudioFlash

These days, before purchasing a product or downloading software, most of us do one thing: go to the Internet and look for reviews. No wonder it’s such a big market. A review can make or break a product, and they can also mean big bucks for the aspiring web content provider. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML to create a review site of your own, because with the new software called Reviewer, you can accomplish this with just a few clicks.

Reviewer is an application that streamlines the whole process, making you a potential review factory. With practice, you’ll be churning out dozens or even hundreds of pages in a matter of hours. Generate original content and be loved by Google. Affiliate links and AdSense banners are also easily added, which makes it a great strategic marketing tool.

The program simplifies the critique process by taking care of the nitty-gritty of coding, leaving you with an almost effortless fill-in-the-blanks interface. Type in keywords for products you’d like to evaluate, and the websites that carry them will auto-populate on a pane. Then, create your categories – visual impact, content, speed, overall score – you name it. Fill in the text boxes beside those categories with your insightful comments. After that, just press a button and everything you wrote will be pasted onto the clipboard, so you can transfer it to a ready-made HTML template. Piece of cake.

Reviewer is compatible with all Windows versions up to XP.

Go to Reviewer

Webmasters live and breathe SEO. However, it can be tiring to study a site by flipping through various tools to know more about its Page Rank, keyword density, and all that good stuff we obsess about. Well, some guys back at Russia thought so, too, and they were nice enough to make a tool called SEO Quake.

SEO Quake is an extension for your web browser. It can be integrated as a toolbar which sits conveniently on top of whatever website you’re browsing, while giving you a wealth of information about it. For example, SEO Quake can automatically display its Google Page Rank and the number of indexed pages, along with its Yahoo and MSN counterparts. It can show you the site’s current Alexa ranking, its age, and social bookmarking site indexes, like Del.icio.us, Technorati and Digg. You can even do a whois lookup, get the site’s IP address and study the site’s keyword density. If you’re curious about its backlinks, SEO Quake will give you a full list, complete with the Page Rank of each. Impressed? You should be.

Another great thing about SEO Quake is its design. It doesn’t take up a lot of space so the clutter is minimized. The interface is easy to use. Everything is laid out neatly in a table with rows of clearly labeled checkboxes. It would have been nice, though, if the documentation was more informative. The English version of the FAQ page was tricky to get to.

SEO Quake is compatible with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox 2.0, as well as Firefox Beta 3.

Go to SEO Quake

Let’s take a break from all the productivity and SEO tools. As they say, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So how about playing a game? Better yet, how about playing Free Games for Your Site?

FreeGamesForYourSite.com by CleverMedia Studios is a depository of fun Flash games you can add to your web site to give it more life. It’s a good way to attract visitors and keep them hooked. Forget the teenage boy online gamer stereotype. A study made recently by Forrester Research shows that half of the online gaming population lies between 30 and 59. Leading the trend in online games is Yahoo, which draws over 20 million unique visitors per month to its gaming channel. This is serious business. Don’t you want to get a piece of the pie?

Shoot down nasty aliens, solve puzzles, negotiate mazes, or play the classic Solitaire. Web masters familiar with HTML will have no problem using FreeGamesForYourSite. Select a game from their list and you’ll get a line of JavaScript code you can paste anywhere on your site or blog. Be sure the area where you’ll put it can handle 500×330 pixels, which is the size of the Flash games. You also have the option to purchase a license to use the games without the CleverMedia branding. They can even customize the games to suit your needs or develop your own unique game, which is how several high profile sites like Cosmopolitan, E! Online and CBS Sportsline have done it.

Visitors need the Flash Player plug-in to play the games, but it’s freely available for download so that shouldn’t be much of a problem.

Go to FreeGamesForYourSite

Getting indexed by the major search engines is a must if you want to generate a lot of traffic. But sometimes, it takes weeks or even months before your site gets crawled by search bots, even if you’ve done your homework by submitting the URL to every directory you know.

Eli of Blue Hat SEO, one of the most famous bloggers on SEO tactics, developed a tool to end this tiresome waiting game. He calls it QUIT, or Quick Index Tool. It promises to get your site indexed in less than 24 hours – impressive, to say the least. The full recipe for this CGI script is in tight wraps, but he spills the juice on some of the things that make QUIT work. First, it submits your site to social bookmarking sites, several times using different accounts, making your popularity soar. Second, it lures the Googlebot to your site by making it seem like you have new content that needs to get indexed. Third, QUIT pings all the blog directories to alert them of your new blog. The rest of the formula, he’s keeping to himself.

Give it a go. It’s simple and you won’t even have to install anything. Just go to Blue Hat SEO and fill out a short form with the details of your site like URL, page title, keywords, site category, a short description, and an excerpt from your site. Hit the button and relax. When you wake up the next day, go to Google and find yourself smiling.

QUIT can run on most web browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera.

Go to QUIT

If you manage a lot of web sites, I’m sure you’ve run into this problem: you type the best domain names you can think of, and all of them are already taken. So you do this over and over until you find an unregistered domain, but not before spending a few hours doing whois lookups. Here’s a program to end all of that trial and error – Domain Name Analyzer by Softnik Technologies.

With Domain Name Analyzer, the search becomes automated so it’s faster and easier. Just type the list of keywords you’d like in your domain name and it will mix and match all of them, as well as initiating a whois lookup for each. In a few minutes, you’ll know which are taken and which are still free, giving you a handy list to choose from.

You can also use Domain Name Analyzer to manage your existing domains. Add all of your domains in the main window and do a lookup on these. Then you can print their details with a single click, to store your information for safe keeping. Don’t worry about getting your IP address banned by registrars because of the persistent lookups. Unlike other domain lookup software, Domain Name Analyzer ensures that there’s sufficient time between queries so you won’t run into any trouble.

Domain Name Analyzer is compatible with all versions of Windows, including Vista, as well as Mac OS X.

Go to Domain Name Analyzer

My WordTracker subscription was going to expire soon, so I took the opportunity to try Nichebot.com, which they claim is more powerful than WordTracker. I played with Nichebot a good amount for the two-week trial period, here are the results.

Nichebot uses a credit system for certain functions (vs. unmetered use for WordTracker.) I started with $15.00 in credits and now am down to $6.90. I performed eight or nine searches; I felt like I was eating up credits pretty fast and wasn’t sure if I was using them in the best manner. Depending on what you’re doing, things cost partial to 3 credits, and you get charged separately for each variation (i.e. bagel, bagels).

Nichebot recommends a five-step system, which is time-consuming and confusing. There are “quick-digging” tools, which are free, including WordTracker and WT’s thesaurus. However, while it is free to search WordTracker via Nichebot, it only turns up the counts; if you want the competition data and KEI that’s a premium search. However, you can click on a word or phrase in the list and “dig deeper” for free, which gives you a list of phrases associated with the phrase you clicked on. The main purpose of using Nichebot’s is “to find as many keywords from multiple sources to cover as much territory for the maximum traffic for your Web site.” You go from a broad search and just keep refining, merging, narrowing in.

NicheBot Pros

• Gathers data from more sources than WT (Keyword Discovery, LSI and Google.) Lots of explanatory videos and screenshots.
• Lets you know how many credits you’re about to use.
• Nice system of organizing projects into folders. You can “merge” searches (i.e. bagel and bagels) and “clean” your list to eliminate unwanted words from your list.
• There are multiple ways to view results. For example, Google Keyword Cruncher or LSI shows search volume, competition and ratio on a 1-5 graph, but you can also look at it organically, or (for a fee) get Pay Per Click data on a search you’ve already performed. It will show you on a graph which keywords and phrases are good deals for advertisers and which are good deals for publishers.
• Can search for misspellings.
• You can find the addresses of the sites with the most backlinks to a particular keyword or phrase.
• It can find thematically related keywords.
• It can check for keyword density on your sites, to see if it’s bothering Google.

NicheBot Cons

• Not particularly intuitive.
• Time investment of figuring out the search process. All these different choices like LSI (Google’s own keyword suggestions), Keyword Cruncher, etc.
• Because of the pay structure, does not really lend itself to brainstorming or stream-of-consciousness style searching.
• Hard to keep track of the pricing structure. I accidentally ran the same search twice, in a row, as if I had clicked twice, and it still debited.
• Some of the same results anomalies as WordTracker
• Suggests keywords are labeled “Jackpot” if they have no competition, even if they have no competition because they’re anomalies
• You have to have a Google API key (which Google isn’t giving out anymore) if you want to use some of the functions; otherwise it will return Yahoo data
• When I tried to export the data, it looked all funky (spreadsheet and notepad both left out fields)
• It seems like everything is a separate step. You get the list of keywords, then you have to click everything you want to get competition/KEI data for and run another search.
• When you run some advanced searches, it puts it in a queue and it could take 5-20 minutes to get the results back.

Conclusion: WordTracker is so much easier, but the possibilities are greater with Nichebot. I do miss WT, because of the nature and volume of the searches I was doing (random stuff) but Nichebot is a good prompt to rein in the focus and follow each project through to the end before making a decision on whether to launch a site. It takes a lot of the guesswork out. But the getting there is somewhat painful.

Also, the credit-based system makes me nervous. My favorite tool was the Keyword Discovery 9-in-1 (especially the backlinks). It can go up to 10,000 keywords deep and the more you pay the deeper you can get. I also like LSI, because it finds related keywords Google likes, and it was interesting being able to see the top sites for each keyword. (However, sometimes it doesn’t show any sites when I know there are some.) Nichebot looks like it takes time and discipline.

To be fair, I’ve been using WordTracker for three years, and have been using NicheBot for only two weeks. Nichebot may provide more information, but it has a steep learning curve and much harder to learn than WordTracker. I will be switching back to WordTracker.

Every web site owner craves one thing: traffic. More visitors equals more money, fame, and self-satisfaction. One way to increase that traffic is thru advertising, but who has that much money to burn? For smaller blogs, you have a new alternative: BlogRush.

BlogRush is a blog syndication network. When you register for free, you will be given a JavaScript code for a widget that you must paste on your website. This widget will display five titles from blogs with similar subjects to yours. Conversely, your blog posts will also get displayed on sites which have this widget as well. You can customize the color of this widget to better fit the look of your blog.

The frequency of your posts’ appearance is determined by the number of times the widget loads on your site. So let’s say you got 100 page views for today, which is equivalent to 100 user credits. This means your post titles will get their share of the BlogRush limelight 100 times as well. Sounds neat? It doesn’t stop there. If you refer other people to the network, you’ll also get more user credits. This is also true for the people they refer, and so on until the 10th level of referral. So jump into the bandwagon early to maximize the returns.

Because of its tremendous potential, some people have tried to game the system and make their sites appear more frequently. BlogRush has since responded with stricter measures to make sure the honest blogs get fair promotion. If your blog host allows you to post JavaScript codes, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get it now.

Go to BlogRush