Hey bloggers, everyday I check my blog stats with Google Analytics, may be you do it with SiteMeter, both are pretty good. Both give you stats about your unique visitors, where they came from, which operative system they use etc etc… In this entry I’ll give you some webtools which you can not even check your main stats, also you could check your alexa rank, google page rank, amount of backlinks and more useful stuff.

Lastly I was participating on blogcatalog discussions and I found some useful tools. Due to this I was investigating on google for more tools like which I found, and I could make a little compilation, I hope you like :

• iWebTool: I found this service very useful, it provides you a lot of tools to check your website ranking, backlinks and others. Although this tools are very useful, are not too accurate. Tools particularly those which give ranking will usually provide different results than when you check yourself. This is because the server where the tool retrieves the data from is different to the server you retrieve the date from. Therefore, when the tool extracts the data, it will be different to when you check yourself. However, those tools are very good, check them for yourself .

Some features of iWebTool

• Xinu: This is another website which provide us a statistics about PageRank, Indexed Pages from the different search engines and backlinks from the different social networks. The difference with iWebTools is that this site provides you all those numbers at the same time, you only need to enter your url and it will give you all the data it can give you. Instead in iWebTools, all those tools are separated.

• GoingUp: I really like this one, if you’re interested in how your site is performing and how good your SEO efforts are, GoingUp! is for you. GoingUp! offers a wealth of information about your site from visitor tracking to SEO tools, they can help you to achieve great results by giving you cool stuff to track and manage your websites. This service is very similar to Google Analytics, I really recommend it!

• iWebTrack: with this you can track and monitor the activities of every individual visitor to your website, web statistics, visitor system information, advertising campaigns, conversion tracking, and graphical statistics with the fastest growing web analytics provider in North America and the U.K. Knowing what your web page statistics are is the key to successful online business. This service looks great but is not free =(, so you check your demo and then you can try their service 30 days Trial, then you need to pay, I don’t know how many because I don’t use it and I’m not interested on it, I think that with Goingup!, Site Meter and Google Analytics you can know everything you want for free .

Well my friends, you have four webmaster tools to enjoy and have fun , with them you can see all your data in the same place, for example alexa rank, technorati rank, backlinks… I found it very useful because you don’t need to load all those site individually to check your data , what do you think?

Happy blogging! and don’t forget to check my birthday contest .

Hey people, for those who follow me through my feed via email, probably noticed at the end of each post a line talking about my birthday contest. This is possible thanks a wordpress plugin called RSS Footer, which let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, but you can edit this with any html code:

How this plugin will help you to monetize your blog?

This plugin is very useful to add a copyright to your feed, also may be to do a contest, you only need to use your imagination to find the way to use it. Thinking on all the possibilities, I found it useful to monetize your blog. How? well you could sell a line at the end of your RSS Feed promoting a website or service by a low cost. Despite the fact that too many people ( all your subscribers ) will read this promotion on every post from your feed, this is something that can’t be expensive for 3 reasons:

1. Is not visible for everyone: unless you be John Chow or Darren Rowse, a handful of your readers will see the promotion instead the totality of your visitors. In my case, about 100 persons will see it daily vs 15k or 40k of Chow and Rowse respectively.
2. It’s just a line: this is a little text backlinking to other website, you can’t charge a lot for it. Unless you place a horizontal banner, you can’t charge more than a text link in your blog.
3. There’s no reason three, it’s just cheap!

Ok once you know how to monetize your blog with an RSS feed line, you need the plugin right? To install it, just download the plugin zip file, unzip it and upload the rss-footer.php file to your plugins folder. Then, go to the plugins panel and enable it, it’s quite simple and it has no complications.

Pinging is a very important action that every blogger should do everyday. Refreshing the concept of ping of the latest post, ping is a computer network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network; it is also used to self test the network interface card of the computer. When you ping a service it means that you are sending it a signal and it will answer with a “pong”, taking a look on your blog for new content and update it on the service website.

As you can see, pinging is very important for us, the bloggers. With this tool you can refresh your content or feed across the web: search engines, technorati, social media networks and may be another service like web profiles, and you can use it to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. This gives you a big SEO advantage, as it ensures your content is seen immediately by search engines and indexed quickly. This can help your posts rank right away for less-competitive keywords.

How To Ping ?

Pinging your blog is a really easy task and you can do it in different ways. When I started blogging the past year, I used the service provided by Ping-o-Matic!. It let you ping your blog on many services like Technorati, Weblogs, FeedBurner, Blogrolling etc etc… You only need to put your blog URL and feed URL (optional), check the services which you want to ping and press the ping button. Then Ping-o-Matic will send pings to those services and your blog/feed content will be updated instantaneously on this sites!

That is a good way, but is boring because is it manual. For our luck, there is a way to do it automatically with wordpress ( I’m don’t know about blogger or other platforms but probably is something similar ). WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!

WordPress makes easy the manual task of checking all your services in ping-o-matic by listing Ping-O-Matic’s server (rpc.pingomatic.com) by default. All you need to do is sit back and let it work for you!

Where to add or remove pings on wordpress?

By following this steps you will be able to add or remove pings to your wordpress blog:

1. Log in to your WordPress weblog.
2. Select “Options” from the top menu.
3. 
4. Select “Writing” from the sub-menu.
5. The last option on the page is “Update Services.” You will see a text box with probably the ping-o-matic ping by default "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping", but you can add more pings if you want.

Is recommendable to ping each service separately instead using Ping-o-Matic (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/) ping. For example, I recommend pinging Technorati directly with every new post and update instead waiting for ping-o-matic to ping our blog. The following is a list of english blog pinging services:

http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

If you use one of thus services, place the related link into your Update Services text box to ping automatically your blog on it . If you are not using wordpress as blog platform, search in your panel of a pinging tool, I pretty sure it must be there, the only thing that you need to do is to add the url of your service and start to ping your blog across the web!.

There are too many plugins for wordpress which help you to improve your search engine optimization, but you can eventually download and install a couple of them and test which one work best for you, because in the blogsphere there are many plugins which do exactly the same.

Now I’m going to share with you a couple of plugins excellent for SEO, but also you can check the wordpress plugins data base for other plugins.

SEO Title Tag

As you now the page titles are very powerful in the Search Engines, so this plugin really helps your WordPress blog’s optimization allowing you to give to each post its own unique title tag – one that is uncoupled from the title of the post. This enables you to write a title tag what is good for the Search Engines while keeping a post title that will appeal to humans. If you want to improve your SEO, you should start by downloading this plugin .

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using. It have too many useful options as for example, add a description of the post for the meta tag, so when a potential reader find your post in a search engine it will see that description you wrote. Download this great plugin, I recommend it !.

Related Posts

Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts list based on your tags, and also it add the related posts to your feed. You can set the mount of related posts you want to show plus another features like showing a comment counter.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

This plugin creates a tag cloud for your blog by enabling you to group posts together based on “tags” you include when you write your posts. Tag clouds help your SEO by creating internal links to relevant pages using good keywords. Ultimate Tag Warrior is not compatible with WordPress 2.0 by itself, so be sure you download the Compatibility Thing. This plugin may be a bit difficult for non-coders to get working right.

Lucia’s Linky Love

This is a variety of “dofollow” plugin. It’s main function is to strip “nofollow” tags from links in comments. The purpose is to encourage comments by rewarding commenters with “dofollow” links which boosts their rank in search engine. However, this particular plugin also has features that thwart human’s who are paid to visit blogs and leave insipid comments simply to boost their companies back links.

Social Bookmarking

I personally dislike this plugin, I don’t like to see all those many little icons at the bottom of my posts. Instead, I prefer to use the feedflares of feeburner, with them you can see a couple of links which I previous selected them.

If you use another plugin and you consider it’s very useful, please comment on this post to share it with all the community. In the following days I will be talking about search engine optimization on wordpress, stay closer !.