Webmaster Tools

by Sharon Housley

With new technologies, algorithms and sources emerging on a daily basis, webmasters are constantly struggling to stay informed. The quality of content on the web and the number of products available to webmasters can seem overwhelming. The goal of creating a site that can be quickly found can be a struggle. Unless webmasters have a well-established brand, a great domain name and a huge marketing budget, it is important that they appear in search engines via specific keywords. With this in mind, we have compiled a list of resources and products that will benefit webmasters in their efforts to be found.

1.) Webmaster Articles & Tutorials The Internet is rich with resources for webmasters who are developing and optimizing web content. The web hosts a vast variety of web design tutorials and articles. For the novice, sifting through these resources can be daunting and overwhelming.

Site Point New Articles, Fresh Thinking for Web Developers and Designers - With a vast variety of web design tutorials and articles coupled with a vibrant and well informed community, SitePoint is the natural place to go to grow your online business.

WebProNews is an article portal for Internet and Technology professionals and has thousands of articles on web design and development. The articles are from iEntry's network of expert writers through hundreds of relationships with authors around the world.

2.) Webmaster Forums Not only can participating in various forums and posting your various views and ideas potentially bring new growth and life to your online business, it can help you stay informed about industry news or changes. This is particularly important when working in a new, quickly advancing industry like web design and search engine optimization. The following forums are great places for webmasters to participate and monitor.

ThreadWatch is a nifty tool. The concept of Threadwatch is very simple: finding the signal amongst the noise of internet marketing media takes too much of what we all value most, time. Threadwatch cuts through the chatter and produces a clear signal for the time-starved professional Internet marketer.

Webmaster-Talk The WebmasterTalk forum covers material related to Web Design, PHP Help, Coding, Hosting, Domain Names, graphic optimization and related webmaster topics. The forum is extremely popular and generally, posts will receive almost instant responses from knowledgeable professionals. Of course, like any forum, there are bound to be opposing views ensuring that all sides of every issue are raised.

3.) Website Submission Tools According to research more then 90% of Internet traffic is generated by search engines. Submitting your website to all major search engines is the most effective way of promoting your website on the Internet. In order for web surfers to locate your site you must be included in all the major search engines. There are a number of tools available to assist with the submission process.

Internet Business Promoter is a suite of 10 professional web promotion tools in one software application. All of the tools are designed to assist web developers with all aspects of web site promotion and search engine optimization. We found that IBP's strength was in the website submission options. Once a site is created it must be submitted to search engines and directories. IBP streamlines and simplifies the submission process, saving significant amounts of time.