I’ve been here at Imagistic, oh, closing in on about five years now. Tack onto that the amount of project management history that precedes me, and you may end up with the age of antediluvian dust. So, by that calculation: my experience + the history of project management = lots of dirty wisdom, right?
Well, as a PM in the online realm, time feels a lot more compressed. A few clicks will get you to Friday. A few thousand more, and before you know it, it’s March. You lose all sense of time, and you start to learn things at breakneck speed.
Then, to complicate things, I have this copywriting and marketing background. That makes me more word-nerdy than normal, but thankfully nobody (thus far) has told me to go jump off a pier with Kristina Halvorson and Bob Bly.
Thirdly, as a time-challenged wife and mom, I’ve morphed into the Flo-Jo of short-tailed searches on Google. Over time, I’ve latched onto Darwinian principles in my adaptation as a parent in the online world. Translation: it’s afforded me a new hybrid of instincts to retrieve an abundance of how-to data for instant consumption.
I say all this, because these traits all form the basis of this new blog, rooted in the good tenets of Web development.
My goal is to help. So, if you have limited budgets, time, and resources, I’m your quintessential triple-threat to this triple-constraint.
So without further ado, here is my list of five fast and free tools to help you check how your site is faring online. Fingers crossed…
1. Social Meter
http://www.socialmeter.com/
Does your site have good social skills?
This tool will help you find out, by scanning the major social Web sites to analyze your site’s social popularity.
Some included sites: Del.icio.us, Digg, Google, Linkroll, Netscape, Reddit, Spurl, and Technorati.
2. Google Banned Tool
http://www.iwebtool.com/google_banned
Want to find out if your URL is playing well with the big guns at Google?
Take a quick go at this and see if your site is on their banned domain list.
If so, there could be many reasons, all fairly easy to rectify. Some of those reasons can include:
• your server was down when the Googlebot came around to reindex your site,
• excessive spamming,
• a bad robots.txt file,
• lots of duplicate content,
• your site lost some incoming links,
• a matter of a faulty spider.
Contacting Google at help@google.com is your best bet to find out exactly why your site was banned.
3. SiteScan
http://sitescanga.com/
Here’s a quick and gratis way to check if your Google Analytics Tracking Code is installed properly on your Web site.
It’s a diagnostic tool from EpikOne, and they scan up to the first 100 pages of your site. There’s a limit on the number of times you can scan the same URL, and it only identifies, and not resolves, issues. If you’re having problems with your Tracking Code, then I would suggest you to talk to Michael Weiss.
4. Quantcast
http://www.quantcast.com/
This is a highly regarded tool, with a resume to match. Used by 9 out of the top 10 media agencies and more than half of the top publishers, Quantcast is tops for providing detailed audience profiles.
This insight is hard to come by without a ton of effort and monetary outlay, so take this for a drive to learn more about what your consumers are doing on the Web.
5. PopURI
http://www.popuri.us/
If you want to mix it up a little bit and get a broad assortment of data analyzed, such as page rank, social bookmarks, and subscribers, then PopURI is a fun way to get a quick data fix.
OK, that’s all for now. Please feel free to comment and add your own thoughts. Also, if there is a tool you have a question about, please feel free to ask.
Thanks very much for reading a piece of my mind.
Ciao for now,
Chris
