Making a living online can be a difficult and time consuming process. Fortunately there are many free tools that website owners can use to help achieve success. Here are 3 of the tools that I use on a regular basis:

LinkAdage Reports: Link Adage has two free reports that I find very useful. The first is a metrics report. It allows you to enter in your domain name and two keywords. It then goes out and searches a number of the Google data centers, Yahoo and MSN to tell you where you rank for those keywords. The second report is the PR-data report which looks at your wesite’s Page Rank in 50 Google data centers and tells you how you rank. This tool is particularly useful as a Page Rank update is being released. Changes will often occur in a few data centers at time so you can get the early scoop on new updates as they come out.

Alexa: Alexa is free tool that gives you an estimate of how popular your website is as well as your competitors. The lower the number you have the better. For example, Yahoo is #1, MSN is #2, Google is #3, ebay is #17, and Amazon is #30. YoungEntrepreneur.com is #20,964. They chart your progress so you can see how you are improving (or losing ground) over time. Your Alexa ranking is also a key factor that advertisers look at when they make sponsorship decisions. The number is not completely accurate, however. I have had a number of months, including this one, when my traffic has been at record highs but my Alexa ranking has decreased - but it is the best measure available at the moment.

StatCounter: StatCounter is an analytics tool that tells you who is coming to your website, what search terms they are using, and most of the other features you would expect in a web statistics package. I use Google Analytics for the detailed number crunching that needs to be done on a regular basis to support my advertisers but the data is always a day late. I like to keep track of my numbers on a live basis and that is where StatCounter comes in with its up to the second information. StatCounter is free for a limited number of page impressions and they have inexpensive upgrade options.

Which web tools can you not live without?

Evan Carmichael

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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