13 of My Best Tools and Resources for Websites & Blogs

SEO Tools This is a mixture of tools specifically related to helping you with your SEO and managing your website in general (which will indirectly help your SEO).

Quick Sprout’s Website Analyzer is a free tool created by the blogging guru Neil Patel on his website QuickSprout. All you have to do is enter your sites URL in the field on the page and then wait while they analyze it. Here is his post explaining the tool and the results you will see. Basically, it analyses many aspects of your site, and helps you improve your site’s SEO.

Market Samurai is a tool to help take your website to the next level on Google. Basically, this tool will help you analyze keywords and then check your chances of getting on page 1 of Google. It has helped me do this with a number of posts recently, and you can see my review here.

Google Analytics and are two tools you should make sure your website is registered with and that you are using. Google Analytics shows you all the juicy details of who is visiting your site, from where (site, browser, location etc) and when.

Google Webmaster Tools is ideally joined to Google Analytics (so don’t forget to do that) and shows you what is going on with your site from Google’s point of view. It gives you a massive amount of information such as which of your pages Google has indexed. If there are any problems with your website (missing pages, resources, images etc). And one of the best things is that although Google is hiding most of the search information from people finding your site, Webmaster Tools still shows a lot of this (which Google Analytics no longer does).

Pingdom Tools or Google Page Speed Insights both of these tools will help you check how fast your website (or page) is. On top of this, they will provide you with the data to see what is slowing your site down. The Google tool, takes this one step further and shows you what you can do to improve your site speed to. Simply enter your URL that you want to check and go!

One of the biggest killers of page load speed is image size, and I wrote a post on this to show how you can fix this with the help of Google Page Speed Insights.

*Just in case you are wondering why page speed is under SEO, it does have an effect on search ranking according to Google, so make sure your site loads as fast as possible (it makes your readers happy too).

Photo Tools & Resources The following tools and resources are the ones I use daily to create all my blog related images (and also some outside my blog).

Pixlr Express is my favourite tool for resizing, cropping and tweaking my photos. It also has some great effects (like instagram) and text adding capabilities. Basically anything you need for your images for your next post.

If you need some image tips, check out all my image posts

PhotoPin and CompFight are my two favourite resources for finding awesome images for my blog posts (and everything else). I mention how I use them in the posts above, because you do need to make sure you have the right license and attribute the author. If you know nothing about Creative Commons and free image licensing, you can check out my guest post on TomJamieson.com below:

Understanding Creative Commons Licenses

Miscellaneous Tools and Resources This is a mixture of tools and resources for increasing your blogging influence, network, traffic and improving your daily workflow.

Evernote is a great allround tool for saving the things you find on the web. On top of that you can also use it on your phone to capture things with your camera. It also has a note taking feature that I use, along with my saved pages, to start researching and writing my latest posts.

SlideShare is full of great slide presentations where you can learn a lot for free.

best things you can also do on this site is share your own posts. You can do this either as a direct PDF capture of your post, or rework your content into a slide presentation. Check out my slide show on how to get more Twitter Followers, to see how cool these presentations can look and the number of views it can get.

Blog Post Sharing

Viral Content Buzz is a website where you can share other people’s content for points, then get them to share your latest post on social media. At the moment, you can share and be shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest and StumbleUpon. If you want to expand your social media reach, this is a great booster.

Triberr is another website where you can share and be shared. The difference with Triberr is that you join Tribes of likeminded bloggers and share. Not only that but you will get to know some great bloggers, grow your network and perhaps get in touch with some powerful people. When you first start out it can be difficult to get into Tribes, so I wrote a post about how to do that.

I hope you enjoyed my lists of resources and tools. If you want some more information or have some tips of your own to share, feel free to contact me at Zurich Web Design – CLICK HERE.