Alexa is a search engine that records visits to each site from its toolbar, which must be installed on the Internet browser. The statistics shown are updated every week.

Using Search Status, we know the position of a site on the Web by moving the mouse on the blue bar, it displays a numerical value that is the rank of the site on the Web. For more details, you go on the site of Alexa, click on “Traffic Ranking” at the top of the screen, you enter a domain name and click on “Get details.”

Alexa is also at the origin of archives.org that stores all websites over time, and it was bought by Amazon in 1999.

How to interpret the values given by Alexa?

Sandbox for directories in Alexa graphs

Search Status displays a blue bar, which represents the average position for the past three months. This is the rank and is given primarily on the Alexa panel .
The traffic rank is a geometric mean of the number of unique visitors and the number of page views.

Then the page width is occupied by a graph, whose peried may be defined (six months in the example below), which represents changes in position. The value in the y axis is the percentage of visits for a site on Internet. By giving multiple site names, we can compare the curves.

Three tables are then drawn up over three periods: the last day, last week, and the last three months (here we retrieve the value at top of the panel), with also changes as compared with the previous three months.
The last column (3 ms change) show the difference between the last three months and the three previous three months.

The first table shows the percentage of users of the Alexa toolbar who visited the site.
The following is the rank of the site on the Internet for its traffic.
The third table provides the number of pages viewed by visitors for the same periods.

Then are given the visitors by country as a percentage of the total number of visits, the rank in each country, and the distribution for subdomains if there is ones.

The limitations of the system

According to the search engine Alexa itself, values given are more relevant as the number of visitors is more important. In fact only the first 100000 sites have a graph displayed because it is estimated that the lower values are unreliable.

Moreover statistics come from the Alexa toolbar, which must be installed. The theme can influence. Certain categories of netsurfers use rather the Google toolbar and visit more often some sites whose position is undervalued.

Assessing traffic of a website

The traffic is a logarithmic function of the position. In fact to get closer to the top it is necessary that the traffic increases exponentially. To pass from the rank 400000 to the rank 200000, for example, one must not double the traffic, but triple it (this is an example, not an exact ratio).
In fact you need to properly assess the traffic statistics by comparing with a site of the same rank. Yet the comparison is valid only if both sites have a high rank. You can not use Alexa in connection with the acquisition of a site based on traffic, because it is very easy to manipulate those numbers, either by visiting the site frequently with the Alexa toolbar installed, or by using a script. You should rather ask the person who sold the site the statistics to evaluate it, and you should verify the origin of traffic.

New Algorithm

On 16 April 2008, Alexa has changed its algorithm, which was based on visits counted on the Sparky toolbar, to expand the statistical sources. That changed the general classification, without making it more exact, on the contrary.

There are a lot of tools out there for web developers and marketers that do all kinds of different things. It is hard to know what is important and what isn’t important when you are using some of the tools available. When it comes down to it, the best way to get search traffic is to get more links to your site. But once you have those links coming in, you have to make sure that you have relevant content to ensure that the search robots (and your visitors!) know what your site is about and where the content is located. But don’t over do it, keep it simple stupid applies to search marketing also.

I’m sure there are tools that I don’t know about but I can share the ones that I find the most helpful in my day-to-day operations for the search engine optimization things that I do at work and for my personal projects.

Useful SEO tools for web developers and marketing professionals

#1 Search status

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/321
This tool is actually a Firefox extension, whatever browser you may use is up to you. But the browser of choice for web developers, designers and internet marketing professionals should be Firefox for its wide array of plugins. This handy little tool will tell you the pagerank/alexa/compete ranking for the current site you are on. Which is helpful information, but it also allows you to right click and bring up a menu which will let you search for backlinks (on yahoo, google, msn), indexed (on yahoo, google, msn) pages and keyword density.

#2 SEO for Firefox

http://seobook.com/
This one is also a Firefox extension, it allows you to see information within search results about the various pages that are being displayed. This one is mostly handy to do research on competitors and reasons why they may be ranking better then a site you are optimizing. Some of the information is less important than stuff like backlinks or edu and gov links. But all in all you can get a pretty good idea about a site by just looking at that information.

#3 Webmaster Central

http://www.google.com/webmasters/
This is a Google provided service that will allow you to see some really great statistics about a site. You have to sign up for a Google account and verify that you have access to the domain, but once that is done there is a treasure chest of information available. You can see the most popular search results your site showed up for, you can see what the most popular search results you received a click for and all kinds of other helpful information. This can assist you in trying different methods of getting that user to click on your link in the search results.

#4 Seomoz

http://seomoz.com
By itself this isn’t really a tool in the typical sense of the word, but the amount of tools that they offer for free is overwhelming. Not to mention the fantastic content that is available so you can better understand all of their tools and others to best rank better and create more conversions for your clients. One of the tools is a backlink anchor analysis, which can help you to discover what sites are linking in to your site in the anchor text. It also has a Page Strength tool that will give you some information about how your site is doing in various aspects and assign a calculated “Page Strength.” They also have a premium membership that offers some more advanced tools for $49/month.

#5 SEO Chat

http://www.seochat.com
This is another web site that isn’t by itself a tool but does provide a ton of fantastic tools that can add to your arsenal of optimization. There are a lot of Keyword related tools that can help in your keyword research tasks for your client. One of my favorites is using Site Link Analyzer that will give you a ton of fantastic information about the links in your web site. The site also offers some great articles and a forum to help you even more with your search marketing needs.

I know not all of these are what you were expecting, I’m sure you wanted to see this link or that link for helping you to build up your site in search engines. But honestly, this is what I use to help me. It is important that you optimize yourself with these five resources and not get distracted by some of the other junk that may be offered in other sites. Nearly everything you need will be found in these five search marketing resources. You don’t need to spend a ton of time elsewhere that could be spent adding great content to your site. Really, that is the key to great search engine optimization.

Building Social Web Applications – Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site (2009)
O’Reilly Media, Inc. | 2009 | ISBN: 0596518757 | 434 pages | PDF | 10,4 MB

Building a web application that attracts and retains regular visitors is tricky enough, but creating a social application that encourages visitors to interact with one another requires careful planning. This book provides practical solutions to the tough questions you’ll face when building an effective community site — one that makes visitors feel like they’ve found a new home on the Web.

If your company is ready to take part in the social web, this book will help you get started. Whether you’re creating a new site from scratch or reworking an existing site, Building Social Web Applications helps you choose the tools appropriate for your audience so you can build an infrastructure that will promote interaction and help the community coalesce. You’ll also learn about business models for various social web applications, with examples of member-driven, customer-service-driven, and contributor-driven sites.

Determine who will be drawn to your site, why they’ll stay, and who they’ll interact with
Create visual design that clearly communicates how your site works
Build the software you need versus plugging in one-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf apps
Manage the identities of your visitors and determine how to support their interaction
Monitor demand from the community to guide your choice of new functions
Plan the launch of your site and get the message out

Free download link

If you want to have the same experience over multiple browsers and different machines then testing your website is vital. In this article I’ve gathered some of the most important tools that you can use in testing your site against various errors – CSS Errors, HTML Errors, Cross browsing Errors etc.

Validators

1. HTML Validator
http://validator.w3.org/
This HTML Validator – checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc.

2. CSS Validator
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
The CSS Validator – validates CSS stylesheets or documents using CSS stylesheets.

3. Links Validator
http://validator.w3.org/checklink
The Link Checker analyzes anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document. Useful to find broken links.

4. RSS Feed Validator
http://validator.w3.org/feed/
This is the W3C Feed Validation Service, a free service that checks the syntax of Atom or RSS feeds

5. Free Site Validator
http://freesitevalidator.com/
This service scans your entire site for validation errors and dead links and generates report status in real time.

6. WebAIM Wave
http://wave.webaim.org/
Wave is my favorite Accessibility service – it shows you the mistakes and it is quite productive.

7. Functional Accessibility Evaluator
http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/
Use this tool to evaluate the functional accessibility of your web site.

8. Hera
http://www.sidar.org/hera/
HERA is a tool to check the accessibility of Web pages accoridng to the specification Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(WCAG 1.0).

9. Xenocode
http://www.xenocode.com/Browsers/
Using Xenocode you can run any browser you want. Yes, even IE6, IE7 and IE8 simultaneous.

10. Browsershots
http://browsershots.org/
A great service for testing your site on all browsers on most operating systems.

11. IeTester
http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/
This is a tool that incorporates all version of IE in one desktop application.

12. Microsoft Expression SuperPreview
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/
The new tool from Microsoft is designed to help you compare your site on different browsers.

13. Pingdom Tools
http://tools.pingdom.com
Analyzing your website speed and breaking down the way elements are loaded.

14. YSlow
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
The authority tool in optimizing your website and gaining additional speed.

15. Web Page Analyzer
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
A simple yet very useful service that generates a report related to your website performance.
rel=”nofollow”

Conclusion

You can try and run these validators across your site and see what improvements you could add. I bet that everyone will find at least 10 improvements after checking with this services. Enjoy and Cheers!

Tab navigation has been one of the most fundamental element in any modern web structure. In order to make sure visitors can properly navigate through the website. One of the biggest challenge web designers and developers faced is to integrate a simple and nice tab navigation that not only don’t confuse, but helps visitors easily understand where they should be clicking.

Whether you are running a website or blog,  tab navigation is probably one of the element that helps drives traffic to internal pages. Here we’ve compiled a mass list of 50+ nice clean and sleek

CSS Tab-Based navigation samples you can adapt on your site. Full list after jump.

1. jQuery Coda-Slider  [demo]

2. Perspective Tabs [demo]

3. Tab Accordian [demo]

4. Flexible Tab Navigation [demo]

5. jQuery UI/Tabs [demo]

6. 14 Free Vertical CSS Menus [demo]

I had collect a lot of useful portable applications and i would like to share those applications with my readers. Let’s look into these applications now:

Browsers

1. Firefox Portable Edition

Firefox is a popular web browsers and portableapps.com had created the portable version of this application. Install this application on your USB drive and you can bring your bookmarks along with you. I have this application in my USB drive together with some useful plugins.

2. Google Chrome Portable

Google Chrome is quite popular browser and it has advantages over other browsers. For example, Chrome will run different tabs as separate processes, which will prevents different windows to interfering each other. So, grab the portable version of Google Chrome and start chroming.

3. OperaUSB

Probably you want to try out your design in different browsers. We have Firefox portable, Chrome portable and IE installed by default. So, it is better for us to have OperaUSB installed on our USB drive so that we can try out our design in these popular web browsers no matter where we are.

Text Editors

4. Notepad++

Notepad++ is one of the most popular notepad replacement for Windows. You can download the portable version of this application from the portableapps.com website.

5. Web Design Toy

Web Design Toy is a simple application that will splits into two views where you can instantly preview the output when you type he HTML code. Download the application and double click the exe file to launch. No installation required.

6. Oiko Visual CSS editor

Oiko is a visual editor for CSS. It lets user design the CSS easily and use tree-node method to display the structure of the HTML and CSS. Choose the portable version when you download this application.

7. KompoZer Portable

Although we have Notepad++ and visual CSS editor, but an easy-to-use web editor will save us a lot of works. Kompozer uses the same Gecko engine that powered Firefox and Thunderbird.

Image Editors

8. GIMP Portable

Perhaps every web designers know this application. GIMP is the best alternative for Adobe Photoshop. With this portable edition, you can edit your image easily no matter where you are (as long as you can access a PC).

9. Inkscape Portable

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, which is also alternative for commercial product such as Adobe Illustrator. It should be included in your portable applications collection if you are web/graphic designer.

0. Fotografix

Fotografix has a tiny footprint – it is only 760KB after extract. It supports layer, scripts, filters and has features like Magic Wand, Eye Dropper, Clone, and etc. This application may be another alternative for you when you just want to do simple image editing and don’t want to open huge application like GIMP.

11. Artweaver

Artweaver is yet another alternative for Photoshop. It has bigger size than Fotografix and users can download the plugin pack which has filter such as Super Nova filter, Remove Red Eyes filter, and etc.

In my previous post about Wordpress SEO plugins, i had shared about Broken Link Checker, which is a Wordpress plugin that able to check your articles for broken links. However, if you are not Wordpress users, then you may not able to use this plugin.

So, i am going to share 15 helpful web based broken links checkers that able to use by everyone. These online tools able to check broken links without install any software or plugin.

1. W3C Link Checker

This Link Checker looks for issues in links, anchors and referenced objects in a Web page, or recursively on a whole Web site.

2. Link Validation Spider

Simply enter your blog or website URL in the textbox and the spider will then go to your website to read and check for broken links. This spider doesn’t crawl links inside frames or Javascript or flash.

3. Broken Link Checker from iWebTool

This is a simple and easy to use broken link checker from iWebTool. There is a simple tutorial on how to use this tool. iWebTool has a lot of tools for webmasters, including some SEO tools which i think worth a look if you have time.

4. Broken Link Checker from AddMe.com

In order to use this service, you need to provide them your email address and categories of your website. Enter your URL and other necessary details, they will analyze your website for broken links and then send you a link for the completed report.

5. LinkTiger

LinkTiger provides advanced link checking features such as email you when the broken links are found and has a dashboard with interactive interface. It manages to scan PDF, CSS, Flash and MS Office files for broken links too.

6. 2bone Link Checker

This link checker will only test regular HTML links. There are 2 different modes for you to choose: Express lane and ‘I can wait’ service. The Express lane will give faster result with 10 links being examine per page while the other mode will display all links all at once, with a longer waiting period.

More Online Broken Link Checkers

These are the extra broken link checkers that i found. In most cases, you won’t need all of them. But these alternative link checkers will be useful when the link checkers that i mention above are down or unavailable.

7. Link Checker from SubmitExpress

8. Link Checker :: Webmaster Toolkit

9. Website Goodies – Check Broken Links

10. IT-India.com’s Broken Link Checker

11. CreatingOnline.com’s Broken Link Checker

12. Site Link Analyzer

13. dead-link-checker.com

14. Direct To India’s Link Checker

15. Dead Link Checker