As I’ve been working on developing my affiliate sites this past year, I’ve come across some other cool sites with some absolutely great information, and just general COOL stuff. I figured I’d put it in one place, and share it with everyone. Oh, most of these are not affiliate links - only where I’ve specifically stated so.
- This first one, is a collection of “cheat sheets”, everything from CSS Cheat Sheets, to Mod_rewrite Cheat Sheets, to Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheets, to PHP Cheat Cheat Sheets, to HTML Cheat Sheets, to even a World of Warcraft Cheat Sheet. This is one of the best reference sites, I’ve stumbled upon… Added Bytes by Dave Child. This guy is WAY more organized than I am, or ever hope to be.
- Another site I found that may interest some of you is this one: The Perfect 3 Column Liquid Layout by Matthew James Taylor. It provides you with a series of website layouts that use percentage widths and relative positioning, that work with all the common web browsers. They are SEO friendly, and contain no CSS hacks. This one was referred to me via Stomping the Search Engines 2.
- Thesis Theme (affiliate link) for Wordpress, by Chris Pearson. Although you can get many free word press themes, and I started out using free themes, I found that they really limit your ability to do what you really need to. Also they tend to not be as SEO friendly as you would really want. This theme is what I use here at LifeStyleByChoice and it’s very customizable, SEO friendly, and upgradeable without losing your valuable customizations. They also offer fantastic support, and a very knowledgeable user community via their forum.
- Create .xml sitemaps for google with this site… XML-Sitemaps.com. Very useful when using google’s webmaster tools and submitting a sitemap to google.
- Use Compete.com to research potential competitors in a niche you are considering entering. Then continue to use it to check on them as your business grows. You can check 3 domains without signing up, and if you sign up for a free account, you can check up to 5 domains at a time. You can compare daily/monthly visitors, daily/monthly growth, as well as other metrics. They also offer keyword analytics - showing the top keywords driving traffic to the site. The keyword analytics only offers a short listing of the keywords, and then you have to purchase the “pro” version to get the full listing. The biggest advantage of Compete.com for me, is researching who the true market leaders are in a niche you are considering, and tracking that information over time to see if it changes.
- KeywordSpy and KeyCompete are both great key word research tools. Use them to “spy” into what your competitors or even your vendors are using for keywords to drive traffic to their sites. KeywordSpy by far has many more features, but is quite a bit more expensive. You can try out either service and get a very limited result set to work with, before purchasing the expanded versions.
- Almost forgot this one… Traffic Travis. I learned about it, as a free bonus. I’ve just started playing with this one myself, so I don’t have alot of details on it yet, but from what I’ve seen so far, there is some pretty cool information available at your fingertips. Plus the base product which has alot of functionality, is Free. Granted it’s kinda got a goofy name, and it’s not the slickest looking, but some of the information you have available icludes:
- page analysis of every page on your site, showing the top 20 links with % of link value each is getting, top 20 page words, all your h1, h2 and h3’s on the page, and your google page rank. This is some useful info all in one place.
- keyword research tool with daily search counts from google, yahoo, and MSN. I did find a few that I did not see via google’s keyword tool
- run analysis on your PPC keywords and see how many competitor ad’s are running for each keyword, also use the search engine tools and see the top ranking sites for each keyword.
As I think of more I will update!
To your success!
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