Free For Your Site

You read many SEO guides and apply their tips to your sites, but it takes along time before you see whether your SEO campaign is effective. How do you know that a search engine can really index your site for the right keywords? That’s where Keyword Crawler comes in. This application crawls your entire site, attempting to determine your top keywords from your content. This gives web masters a better idea on how search engines see their site.

The program interface is minimalist - all you have to do is enter your site URL into a text box and click “Explore”. Depending on your settings and the size of your site, the search can take from a few seconds to several minutes. The final output is a comprehensive keyword list and a generated META tag that contains those keywords. Keyword Crawler doesn’t just list your web site’s top keywords, it also lists the internal links going to specific pages. A broken link feature even provides a list of dead links found on the page or site that was crawled. Lastly, to make your site more search-engine accessible and user-friendly, Keyword Crawler will also generate a sitemap for your site.

Overall, this application is easy to use, even for new web masters. However, using the sitemap generator requires some XML knowledge.

Keyword Crawler is a Windows app and requires Win98 or later.

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If you’re a wordsmith looking to trade your rusty ol’ typewriter (or quill, if you’re that old) for an electronic medium, you’ll need a quick way to compile your pages. Since your book will be in a digital format, you can easily include images and audio for added interactivity. Natata eBook Compiler makes it simpler for you to do this, since it can compress multiple file types including JPEG, GIF, HTML, WAV, CSS, and JavaScript. However, if you want to use Flash, PDF, and MS Word files in your eBook, you’ll have to use the paid version.

People who are new to eBook creation can easily use Natata because the program works like a simple wizard. All you have to do is follow the steps indicated and click on a “Next” button. Just make sure that you read the instructions carefully - going through the wizard needs a test trial before you get the hang of it.

The final eBook output is an executable file (.exe), so your readers don’t need to download special software to read it. As for the file limitations of the free version, you can work around it by saving your MS Word files as HTML files instead. If you want to use Flash animation, you can opt to export the file in GIF format. If you want to check out how your final product can look, you can go to the Natata website and download their sample eBooks.

The program requires at least a Microsoft Windows 95 operating system to run.

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Sometimes your web site grows so fast that you’ve lost track of the simplest things, including its links. If you want to check whether all your links are working, you can click on every single one of them for testing. If you’re running a big website with over 20 pages, you better clear a few hours of your time for that.

Or you could just use Dead Links.

Dead Links is a free online tool that makes it easier for web masters to check for broken links within their site, whether these links point to other pages within the site, or to other domains altogether. All you have to do is enter your site URL into a text box, and the Dead Links spider will crawl your site. You’ll get a full report within a few minutes.

As a free tool, Dead Links can only crawl up to 25 pages per domain and 150 external documents. However, if the spider finds a link to the Dead Links homepage, the page limit extends to 150, and the external document limit upgrades to 500.

If you need to understand the results or if Dead Links doesn’t work for you, you simply go to the FAQ page to find out more. The explanations are very brief and easy to understand. The tool page is straightforward, making it usable even for novice web masters.

Dead Links works on most browsers, including Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera.

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Search engine crawlers have improved their efficiency over the years. The result is that search results are now more targeted and updated. However, they’re still far from perfect. If you want Google to index your site the best way possible, don’t rely on crawlers. After all, who knows your site better than you yourself?

Google Sitemap Generator takes away the guesswork and helps you optimize the way Google sees your web site. It is a Python script that lets you automatically generate an XML sitemap for your site, using URL lists, web server directories, or form access logs. Just make sure you don’t include folders or files you don’t want the search engines to see. Conversely, don’t include pages with broken links. It’s important to update your sitemap files especially if you have deleted or added any pages in your website.

What do you do with the generated XML sitemap? You can input it to search engines, like Google’s webmaster tool called Sitemaps. Through this tool you can tell Google which pages are more important to you. Google Sitemaps allow webmasters to include additional information about each URL in the web site. These include change frequency, last update, and importance of each page. These pieces of information help the search engine to crawl the website more intelligently and more effectively.

In order to use the generator script, your web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, and you must be knowledgeable in Python commands. A step-by-step guide is provided in the documentation.

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