ROR Sitemap Generator
Sitemap is an essential part of a website. This helps the search engines to crawl your pages easily and smoothly. The easier your web pages can be crawled by the search engines, the more pages of your website can be indexed. Likewise, the more web pages the search engines can crawl, the more information they can stock in their databases. Hence, Google actively recommends to all websites to submit sitemap in suggested XML or plain text format.
Here is a free ROR Sitemap Generator that will crawl your website and generate an ROR Sitemap for up to 1,000 URLs, which is compatible to ALL search engines, not just Google, Yahoo or MSN.
ROR is a rapidly growing XML format for describing any object on a website (sitemaps, products, services, menus, images, reviews, contact info, business info, etc), so any search engines can better understand its content.
Note: To make your ROR Sitemap automatically readable by all search engines, choose the “ror/rss” format.Website Grader
Website Grader is a free search engine optimization tool that you should be using if you’re a webmaster. Website Grader will give you a report of many aspects of your site and a final grade out of 100. When I first ran it on my site, I was at 56, now I’m up to 98. And my traffic has gone from 100 visits a day to 5000. I’m not saying it’s because of Website Grader, but it helped me determine problem areas.
Xinu Returns
Another web site I had written about a couple of months back that lets you quickly check things like your pagerank, rating, backlinks, and indexed pages. Xinu Returns is a great tool to get a quick overview of your the status of your site in the blogosphere. It also gives you tips for your title tags and meta keywords.
BrowserShots
This site is really awesome for webmasters. You type in your web address and then choose all of the browsers and OSs that you would like to see your website shown in. You can see how your web site looks on Linux, Windows or Mac and in all of the different browsers, including Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera. You can also choose the screen size, color depth, etc. BrowserShots is really great tool.
YSlow
YSlow is a Firefox only addon, but it is an amazing tool for analyzing a website in terms of performance and speed. It checks 13 different factors for a web page and generates a final score for the site. It also lists out the improvements that need to be made to ensure the highest possible grade. How it helped me reduce the load time of my site by 50% by using it.
WebSiteOptmization
Another tool you can use that is similar to YSlow, but no need for Firefox. This tool gives you a breakdown of various aspects of your site, including HTTP requests, DNS lookups, etc and gives you recommendations on how to make it load faster, etc.
BuiltWith
BuiltWith is a very cool site that creates a profile of your website based on what technologies your site is running on. This site really focuses on the actual technologies that your site is built with, i.e. PHP, Apache server, Google Analytics, etc. It also gives you a score out of 5 stars depending on how good those technologies are. Microsoft.com has a rating of 2/5! IIS sucks!
CSS Optimizer
Just about every website uses CSS in some way or another and each call to a CSS file takes time to download. If you can shrink the size of your CSS files, even by a little bit, you’ll save a lot of time on page loading. You can also go to the W3C CSS Validation site to make sure your CSS is valid. Visit its site for more info.
Minify
A very powerful tool that will take your JavaScript and CSS files and combine them together and remove all unnecessary comments and whitespace. I have used this tool before to reduce the size of my Javascript files by almost 40%. You can imagine the savings in load time because of that, especially if you use Wordpress where each plugin usually has it’s own Javascript file.
