Do you have a blog?. If the answer is yes, then how well do you understand your blog?. For example, questions like “Do you know what is the loading time of your blog?” or “Do you know where do most of your visitors focus on for your blog” and many more. With so many questions unanswered, you as a site owner can find out and understand your blog more with some simple and free online tools. Here’s a list of 5 important tools that allow you to understand your blog more.
1. Pingdom Full page test
Pingdom is a nice tool to test your website?s loading-time. With Pingdom, you can do a Full Page Test loads with a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). General speaking, it mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser. The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars. You can view the list of objects either in load order or as a hierarchy. The hierarchy view allows you to see which objects are linked to in for example a CSS file. Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects. Thus, based on the result, you can find out which scripts in your blog that are taking up most of the loading time.
2. CrazyEgg
CrazyEgg helps you visualize your visitors. With CrazyEgg, you are able to find out more information like where your site visitors are clicking, or more importantly, the areas of your site that your visitors are ignoring. For example is the heap map shown above, it is a cool visualization that will help you see which areas of your site are “hot” or which areas are “cold.” Based on the heat map results, you’ll see which areas your visitors are avoiding like the plague, and which areas they’re flocking to. It is also a good indicator on where you should place your ads or sponsored links.
3. Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster tools is a one-stop center where you can get comprehensive info about how Google crawls and indexes websites. Since Google is the current leader for search engine, you should ensure that your site is easily crawled and indexed by Google and access tools that will enable you to diagnose crawling issues, study statistics on how your site is doing in our index. You also have the choice to tell Google on how you’d like your site to be crawled and indexed. Refer to my previous post “10 Basic SEO steps by using Google Webmaster tools” to know more.
4. Google Analytics
One of the best free and brilliant tools for site owners from Google is Google Analytics. Google Analytics as a free service to help people to track all internet activities related to their web sites and measure the success of their Web sites. In other words, Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. Based on the information collected by Google Analytics, you can improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web. Check out my previous post “Tutorial Video on how to use Google Analytics” to learn more.
5. Browsershots
There are several types of different browsers out there e.g, Firefox, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Safari, Opera and many more. Thus, it is important to test your web design in different browsers. With Browsershots, you can test and even capture screenshots of your web design in different browsers. Browsershots with a number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server. As a site owner, you can see how well your site is displayed. For example, you can test and find out whether your site is having any problem with browser like Internet Explorer.
Hopefully with these tools you can understand your blog more and improve it to make more money online. Yay!. If you have any other good blog tools, please share them with me.
