http://inspiredm.com/8-tools-that-make-a-webmasters-life-easier/

This list isn’t about designing websites; it’s about running websites … you know, “webmastering.”

Contrary to what some people want you to believe in, running a website takes some time on a daily basis. You can’t just leave everything unattended and hope that nothing will crash, get hacked, or simply stop working for whatever reason.

And it only gets worse if you’re running more than one website. Probably somewhere around six or eight websites the whole “webmastering” becomes a fulltime job.

Thankfully, there are some tools you can use to speed everything up a bit. And I’m not only talking about website maintenance tools. There are also tools for managing a publishing schedule, keyword research tools, checking if your sites are up, and other things. So in the end, the main theme of the list is to make a webmaster’s life easier, not to focus on a specific aspect of the work.

1. Uptime Robot

Quite simply, this is a tool that lets you know whenever one of your sites goes down. Trust me, you want to be the first person to know such a thing, and not to find out after a reader sends you an email.

Uptime Robot is free, lets you monitor up to 50 sites. Sends alerts by email, SMS, Twitter, RSS, and checks your sites every 5 minutes. I’ve been using this tool for over a year, and I haven’t experienced any problems with it yet. Highly recommended.

2. Google Webmaster Tools

This is one of those Google tools that’s a little less popular. And I can’t see the reason for this because the tool is great. I actually think that every webmaster or person managing any website should sign up for an account.

GWT provides you with a lot of information on what’s going on on your site from Google’s perspective, which is exactly what you want to know if you’re trying to build good rankings.

Among the information you’ll find: search queries that have returned pages from your site, links pointing to your site, the most significant keywords on your site (according to Google), +1 metrics, malware diagnostics, list of crawl errors, “fetch as Googlebot” tool, site performance stats, and more.

3. Google Keyword Tool

For some webmasters this is a must-use, for others not so much. Not everyone runs their websites with keyword focus in mind. And it’s quite understandable.

If you’re running a personal blog or a news site then keywords are not that significant. For personal blogs it’s because … well, you just don’t care. And for news sites you’re essentially publishing completely new stuff every day, which means that there have been no trends for relevant keywords yet.

For most other pages, however, keywords are very important. Google Keyword Tool lets you find some valuable keywords and phrases worth targeting in your SEO efforts. The tool gives you estimated traffic numbers and other statistical data. Even though it has been designed for AdWords’ users it can be successfully used by anyone else too.

Bonus tip. Don’t forget to track your rankings. You can use some tools for this too, but they usually require a small investment. The simplest way of tracking your rankings, however, is to google your desired phrase and look for your listing in the results. Only remember to use the private browsing mode of your browser while you do that. Otherwise your results will be customized to your previous behavior and user account.

4. Teambox

A webmaster’s work is rarely a one man’s work. In most cases you have to collaborate with other people. There are content writers, designers, developers, marketers, social media managers, and so on. Communicating can be difficult, and email is not the best possible solution here. This is where Teambox comes into play.

Teambox is an online collaboration tool (you can sign up for the basic plan for free). It lets you create tasks, share them with others, create wiki-style pages to share knowledge, upload files important to your current projects, communicate in a social-network-like Seguir leyendo “8 Tools that Make a Webmaster’s Life Easier” →