10 Essential Tools Every Webmaster Should Use

Before we get into essential tools for any webmaster, we should first review who and what a webmaster is.

A webmaster is a person or group of people who oversee the development, maintenance and performance of a website.  For a lone blogger or small business, this is most likely the owner of the website or a geek friend they know who helps out. For a bigger website, it may be an in-house team or a third party company that maintains the website.  Most webmasters are knowledgeable when it comes to html and even java script and other programming languages.  If you're a business owner or blogger, this may not be the case, but you can still perform most of the functions a webmaster is required to perform.

If you're the person that is responsible for maintaining your website or blog, below are 10 essential tools that any webmaster should have on hand to help better manage their website.  Some of them are monitoring tools, while others will help you get better performance out of your website and will help you to become a better webmaster.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster tools is the first place any webmaster should start.  Within Google Webmaster Tools you can submit sitemaps for your website, set your preferred URL type (www or non-www) and even your websites preferred country for displaying in the search results.  You'll also get detailed statistics on your website such as your ranking for certain keywords and the type of search queries people use when finding your website.  Lots of useful data for any webmaster.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Though Bing and Yahoo won't drive the same traffic that Google will, Bing's Webmaster Tools is a great resource.  While it will give you similar data for your website as Google, except from the perspective of Bing and Yahoo search, there are a few tools here that are really useful that Google Webmaster Tools doesn't have.  Yahoo Site Explorer used to be a tool that every webmaster and seo used….that is until Yahoo discontinued it.  Well it looks like Bing Webmaster Tools has integrated it back into it's service under the name Link Explorer, which can be found under the Diagnostics and Tools section of the site.  You'll also find other cool resources such as an seo analyzer and keyword research tools.

Google Analytics

Every webmaster should be monitoring their websites visitor statistics and luckily Google offers one of the best analytic tools for free.  Once Google Analytics is integrated into your website you'll be able to view detailed visitor statistics such as how much time they spent on the site, what pages they viewed and how they found your website in the first place.  It's a goldmine of data for the webmaster who loves statistics.

Uptime Robot

A free service that will monitor your website every 5 minutes and will notify you via email, text or on Twitter if your website goes down.  It takes 2 minutes to set up and is an invaluable tool for monitoring the uptime of your website.

Pingdom Page Test

While a fast loading website has always been critical to a great user experience, Google has announced that they officially consider your websites load time as one of their search engine ranking algorithms.  Pingdom Page Test is a free service that will perform a speed test on your website, showing you how fast it takes to load as well as the load time of every image, file and function on the page.  It will give you a quick view of what plugin, image or application is slowing your website down.

Google Keyword Tool

Part of the Google Adwords toolbox, the Google Keyword Tool is a great place to start when conducting keyword research.  Find estimated search engine traffic (globally or country specific), the competitiveness of the keyword, as well as related keywords and terms.  Use this tool as a starting point when determining what keywords and terms you're trying to rank for in the search engines.

Smush.it

Part of the Yahoo Developer Network, this free tool is great for compressing image files in a lossless way before adding them to your website.  Large image files can really slow your website down and this tool will create a smaller file of your image without losing image quality.  If you use WordPress, there is a great plugin called WP Smushit that does the same thing automatically.

Evernote

Probably the best productivity tool on the web, at least in my opinion.  This is one of the tools that I use everyday and rely on to keep me organized.  From creating written and audio notes to saving images where the text inside is fully searchable to clipping websites and articles when conducting research, Evernote is just awesome.  As a webmaster, create a notebook with all of your reference materials and resources so you can access them easily in one place.

Code Academy

An easy to use and interactive way to learn programming.  Every webmaster should know html as well as some java script  at the very least, but if you don't….you can learn it here for free.  The lessons are easy to understand and your progress is tracked and saved.  A great resource if your new to programming and would like to learn it.

Symbaloo

A free visual bookmarking service that I use as my startup dashboard in my Chrome and Firefox browsers.  Create a webmaster dashboard with all of the tools listed in thei article!  You can build multiple dashboard pages, create your own customized bookmarking tiles and get suggestions for services you've never heard of before.  I've covered Symbaloo before on my small business blog, The Small Business Playbook.

What webmaster tools do you use?

These are 10 of the tools I think are essential for any webmaster, especially a novice webmaster.  There's lots of other great tools out there, i'd love to hear about them so leave them in the comments below!

 

 

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Gary

CEO at 3Bug Media
Gary Shouldis is the founder of 3Bug Media, a web marketing company that helps businesses create 360 Marketing Strategies to dominate their market. His blog is read by over 20 thousand small business owners a month and has been featured in the N.Y. Times Small Business, Business Insider and Yahoo Small Business.
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