Search engine optimization (SEO) is one aspect of web development which can seem more like a burden than any other aspect. SEO is one of the most important things you can do to improve traffic, and revenue generated from your site. Here are five tools which will allow you to better optimize your site, and save you time.

Web Page Analyzer

Web Page Analyzer is a very simple tool. You provide it a website, along with keywords you wish to check on the site. Web Page Analyzer then will search the provided site for that keyword. After crawling the site, the tool gives suggestions on how to better optimize your site for that keyword. These suggestions can be as simple as stating the keyword was not in bold on the site, or wasn’t included in the site’s header. It can also be a vague as saying that some images don’t have alt tags on the site.

Google Tool Bar

Google Tool Bar is very useful at getting an accurate PageRank for any site while you are visiting the site. By having accurate, real time information about PageRank eliminates having to switch tabs or windows in order to see the PageRank of a site. Not only does Google’s Tool Bar provide page rank information, there are a lot of additional SEO related features that can be added from third party sources.

Robot.txt Checker

Robot.txt files can really benefit your site’s optimization. Being able to tell a search engine that they should and shouldn’t be searching allows you more control over what keywords a bot may find. If you are using a CMS you would want the bots to leave your admin directory alone since that is something that a limited number of people have access to, and shouldn’t be searched. Robot.txt Checker is designed to make for sure that if you have exceptions like so in your robot.txt, that those exceptions don’t have any issues which may allow a bot to search those areas.

URL Rewriting Tool

One aspect of SEO is making user friendly URLs. The issue with user friendly URLs is that there are aspects of coding which make it hard to do so. If you ever use had to pass variables from one page to another you know that you get the ugly ?variable=value at the end of the next page. With URL Rewriting Tool that is a thing of the past. This tool will generate a rewrite rule for your .htaccess file which can turn a not so user friendly URL like www.example.com/buy?itemid=42&amount=8 into a more friendly URL such as http://www.example.com/buy/itemid/42/amount/8/. The great thing about this tool, is that you don’t have to know to much about creating a MOD rewrite since it generates the code for you and all you have to do is copy and paste the code into your .htaccess

SiteMap Generators

This is actually a list of tools, with the same concept. Sitemaps are XML files that provide search engines additional information about the pages they are crawling. To be effective, sitemaps must be updated on a regular basis, and doing this manually can take a while especially if your site is very large. This list of tools will automate the updating process and make the site’s maintenance a lot easier. The list contains sitemap generators for custom coded sites, and for popular CMS software, like Drupal, phpNuke, and Wordpress.