Tools for SEO’s and Web Developers
In this article of the SEO (search engine optimisation) feed, I am going to be talking about tools helpful for both SEO’s and web developers. There are hundreds of tools available across the web both for free and at a price. Of course with the paid for tools you are more than likely going to get a better experience and better support, but the free tools can be just as good and provide you with as much information as their paid for counter part. Lets go through a few of them.
Web Developer Tools
Dreamweaver
Adobe Dreamweaver is a great tool, it has been around for years and almost everyone has either used it or at least heard of it. It is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, meaning the user can insert page content and design elements directly onto a page and see how it looks, you also have the ability to drag and drop objects to rearrange the page. It also contains a vast amount of tools to make the web developers life even easier, like the ability to create functioning PHP files that are able to retrieve data, insert/edit data and also remove from databases. There are tools for using Adobe Spry (an Ajax framework) for dynamic content.
Zend Studio
Zend Studio is another fantastic tool for web developers, it has much of the same ability of Dreamweaver. However, it doesn’t give you the option of a WYSIWYG view like Dreamweaver does. But is superior in the world of PHP IDE’s and I would even go as far as to say it was the best choice when choosing an IDE editor for PHP coding purposes. It has a great debug features built in which makes debugging code extremely easy. Another great feature which I think is a huge advantage over other editors, is the ability to find functions on a page merely by selecting it from a list in the sidebar. This is great when working on websites with a huge list of functions.
Notepad2
This is another great tool which I use on a regular basis. From the name you can tell it is very much like the normal Windows Notepad in look and ease of use. However, it adds a lot of functionality which are there to help the programmers of the world. It has the ability of real time syntax highlighting for many different languages, from web languages to actual application programming languages. For example PHP, JavaScript, VBScript and also C/C++. This is a huge advantage over most editors which only normally cater for only a few simple languages.
Navicat
Navicat is great tool which I have only come to find about in recent months, however since downloading and trying the tool I must say I am greatly impressed. What Navicat does is it allows the user to connect to databases, both locally and externally. Allowing the user to make alterations to the database. Anything you need to do in your database can be done through Navicat. It gives the user a nice clean and easy to use interface. After playing around with it for an hour you will likely have mastered everything you would need it for.
Web Developer Toolbar
The web developer toolbar is another great tool which gives web developers a lot of more functionality. The Edit CSS option allows you to edit the current pages CSS in real time allowing you to see how the changes look as you make them. This is a great feature when debugging problems with browser incompatibilities. It also gives you the ability to validate code using w3c’s code validation services. You can validate allsorts of code from HTML to CSS. Another great feature of the toolbar is the ability to view the generated source code of the page, this is great when developing JavaScript applications which change the output. Debugging errors in your JavaScript is much easier with this feature.
SEO Tools
Google Toolbar
Google toolbar is a great tool available to anyone and everyone. It adds many features to the browser, including a search box to search Google directly from your browser, it also saves a search history (which you can clear at anytime). It also adds buttons to the browser which allow you to open your Google mail simply by clicking a button on the toolbar. It also gives you the ability to add custom buttons to the toolbar. Another great feature of the Google toolbar which benefits the SEO is the PageRank bar, it displays a graphical representation of the of the PageRank of the site you are currently browsing.
Netcraft Toolbar
Netcraft is another toolbar I have recently discovered and been playing with. What Netcraft does is it gives gives you a run down of the site being viewed. Including a risk rating, date the domain has been live since, ranking of the website, the hosting country and much more. The great thing about this is that it allows you to see how risky a site might be (to the search engines) and also the hosting country. Another great feature of this tool that I like is the ability to see the hosting company.
I hope this article has been interesting for you and I hope that you give each one of these tool a try, as they can all greatly improve productivity which of course will improve profits.
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