Welcome to our guide to the best resources for webmasters, based on the web page resources that we have found to be the most useful for our web sites over the past few years. From free counters, traffic boosters, internet marketing tips, free newsletters to search engine tips, web site templates and free content for your web site - its all here! Best of all, almost all of these web tools and webmasters resources are FREE. Why not bookmark this page now, so that you can refer back to us when you have followed the links.

There are an abundance of free web tools and other items for webmasters available on the internet - the following are particularly good resources for increasing traffic and improving your web site - all of which we have tried and selected as the best on the net:

• Clip Art, Photos and Fonts: You can get good quality clipart site at Art Today . Instant access and unlimited downloads to 1.2 million Clipart images, Fonts, Photos and Sounds - recently voted 'best clip art site on the web' by PC World, (August 2001). For links to more web sites offering clip art, web graphics, photographs and animations for your web site try this useful guide to finding images for your web site.

• Free Counters: Tracking your visitors is important and you can get a free counter from Extreme Tracking or The Counter. Of the free counters we have used, these two are our favourites. If you want a counter which is not visible to your visitors, you can get one by paying a $5 monthly fee at Extreme Tracking. By finding out where your visitors are coming from, you will know which search engines are sending you traffic and where you need to resubmit. You will also know which keywords are being used to find your site - very helpful for meta tags and improving your search engine position. The countries your visitors are from is also useful in targetting your advertising and your site content.

• Free Search Engine Submission: Submit your site to search engines; web directories and awards sites at the excellent Self Promotion Site or use the free search engine and directory submission service at Jims Tools, which has several other useful free tools for webmasters and is part of the Virtual Promote site. For more information on search engines we recommend the excellent Search Engine Watch web site.

• Free Autoresponders: These useful e-mail marketing tools for your site can be had free from Send Free. If you want a lot more features, then an excellent auto-responder service can be purchased online at AWeber.

• Free Web Promotion Newsletter + Win $1000 (£700) for your web site promotion idea: If you think you can come up with a good traffic generating idea, you could win a cash prize! Every month, the idea that is judged to be the best earns $1,000 cash (about £700); the second-best idea gets $250 and the third-best gets $100. There are some good (and some unusual) ideas for increasing traffic and best of all the newsletter is free. Click here for more details.

• Free Traffic: An excellent free way of increasing traffic to your web site is to add a "recommend this site to a friend" service to your site by placing a small graphic; button or text link to one of several free services of this kind available on the Net. The best of these goes one better by allowing you to earn money every time somebody recommends your site - so you win both ways by earning money and increasing traffic. This is another service run by MailBits who will pay you 20c for every person who recommends your site to a friend. This is paid for by them placing a small ad for their free newsletters in each recommendation e-mail they send out. To start using this excellent traffic booster on your web site you just need to sign up for their affiliate program.

• Message Boards and Web Polls: Adding a message board to your site is a fantastic way to build a community and get your visitors to return again and again. An excellent message board is offered by VBulletin. If you are looking for a free message board, then ezboard is recommended. Building a community is one of the key ways to get visitors to return to your site and to increase your traffic.

• Free Mailing List Manager: Starting an e-mail newsletter is one of the best ways to get people to return to your site by keeping them up to date. You can also earn revenue for your site by having e-zine adverts placed in your newsletter or placing your own ads using affiliate links. Topica offers a free mailing list manager.

• Free Banner Exchanges: If your site is new, these can be a way of boosting traffic and for promoting affiliate programs. One of the best on the web is the Exchange-it Banner Exchange. You can have up to 5 banners (with different urls if you like, so ideal for promoting more than 1 affiliate program or for testing banners). Also recommended is Linkbuddies Banner Exchange. You get a generous ratio of banner displays and receive 500 free displays just for joining. However you need to target your banners, as banner click throughs generally are low and dropping!

  
  

• Free Content For Your Web Site: An excellent way of increasing visitors to your web site is to offer interesting content and links. A good way to increase your site content with little effort is to add news headlines to your site - isyndicate offers free, dynamic content for your website, including news and weather. If your site has anything to do with technology, computing or business, then you can add technology news to your website for free at Vibrant Media.

  Photos are a very popular feature too - PhotoPost is a full featured community photo gallery application written in Perl. It's MySQL based, very fast, and very easy to install. PhotoPost enables users to upload photos to a web site and allows visitors to submit comments, message board style. What's more, PhotoPost can either operate completely standalone, or it can utilize an existing user database from either vBulletin or phpBB, thereby requiring users to only register once.

  There are lots of other free services that you can add to get visitors to bookmark and return to your site. Two of the most popular ones are virtual greeting cards/postcards which you can add to your site for free by going to the Digital Postcard and personals which you can add by joining the One & Only Affiliate Program.
  

  
  
  Clip Art, Photos and Fonts for your site: Click here for more info.
  

• Other useful free tools for webmasters: Meta Tags are important in helping search engines to rank your site and you can check your Meta Tags at the Meta Medic or Meta Tag Analyzer and generate Meta Tags for your site before submitting it to the search engines at MetaGen. This tool also provides a detailed analysis of the generated Meta Tags. Make sure that your most important keywords are in your page title too!

  You can analyze the frequencies of the keywords used on a web page at Keyword Count and compare 2 keywords or phrases to discover which is most popular at SpellWeb. To test your search engine ranking with different keywords on 10 of the biggest search engines use RankThis. For a free weekly e-mail report listing the top 500 keywords and keyword phrases used on the internet, sign up at WordTracker.

  Keeping the links on your web pages up to date and avoiding frustrating your visitors with 'dead links' is also important. This can be a time consuming process, but an excellent service we have found that automatically checks all your links for you is LinkAlarm. This is a regularly scheduled check of the links on your web site. Every month (or more often) they scan your site testing every link on every page looking for problems. An email is dispatched to you summarizing the results, including your report URL where you can view all the problem links found at your site. Link Alarm costs just a penny per page - LinkAlarm checks every link on one of your pages for one cent (US$0.01). For example, checking a 100 page site every week is only $52 a year ($1 per week).

  It is important that your page loads quickly and if it has lots of large graphics it won't! You can speed up page loading by using the free Gif Cruncher to reduce your graphics.

  Another factor that is becoming increasingly important in search engine ranking is link popularity (how many sites link to yours) and you can find this out at LinkPopularity. To increase your link popularity, do a search for your web site's topic at a high traffic site. (At Yahoo, for example). Then e-mail sites which rank highly in searches for your topic and ask them very nicely for a reciprocal link. If you need free web site templates, then take a look at http://ifaces.radicalweb.net/templates.html or take a look at the list of sites offering this service at the brilliant Jim Tools web site, where you will also find many other useful free tools for webmasters. Finally, make sure you check your site by submitting it for a free 'check-up' at the Web Site Garage who will also send you a free monthly e-mail report on your site with lots of suggestions on ways to improve it.

  Search Engine Submission software is also a good way to ensure that you are well ranked in the search engines. We recommend WebPosition Gold (tm) as one of the best (although it is expensive) and the software can be downloaded for a FREE trial.

  
  

  
  

• Domain Names : Buying a domain name and domain name ideas: Having your own domain name is essential if you are serious about doing business online and is a prerequisite for joining many of the best affiliate programs. The best domain names are going fast, but you can search for domain name availability and reserve your domain name for free by doing a search at Internetregistration.com.

  The cheapest place we have found to buy a domain name is at 123-reg who offer .co.uk and .com domain names, as well as other extensions, such as .net and .info. Most importantly they do not charge to transfer your domain name - so if a domain name you want is avaialble you can buy it now and sort out hosting later. They also offer free email and web forwarding, so you can have a domain which forwards to a page or directory on your current site, saving you money on web hosting. The prices are a bargain too - only £2.89 per year for a .co.uk domain name or £8.99 per year for a .com domain name.

  If you are searching for ideas for your domain name, take a look at Unclaimed Domain Names who publish a weekly list of unclaimed / expired domain names. Another site to try to get the Domain Name you really want is NameWinner, a new service from ICANN accredited registrar Dotster, which provides customers with an easy, reliable, risk-free way of registering expiring domain names the instant they expire. Another good tip is to try and include your most important keyword or keyword phrase in your domain name.

  You can also back-order the Domain Name you want with SnapBack™ - Currently, 90% of domain names registered are not being used, so it's no wonder 25,000 expire daily — ready to be picked up by you. How do you get the domain name you've always wanted when it becomes available?
  
  Until now, watching, waiting, and checking with registrars has been the only way to get "next in line" to buy an expired name. But beating the sophisticated speculators with their powerful computers is difficult or impossible. Now, patent-pending SnapBack™ technology will stand in line for you. If the name expires and becomes available, they are the best chance you have to get it registered, in your name, before anyone else can get it.
  
  And if they don't get the first name you wanted, the $69 SnapBack (registration included) can be transferred to another name, so you risk nothing. So reserve the domain name you want now before someone else does. There's even a FREE version called SnapShot.™ Check your name now!
  
  

  
  

• Web Hosting: So you have found your perfect domain name - the next step is to find somewhere to host it. This will depend on a number of factors: your budget and what requirements you have. Do you need web hosting with autoresponders; multiple POP3 Email Accounts, pre-installed CGI scripts and CGI-Bins, Streaming Audio/Video, web hosting with shopping cart facilities for your own store, etc. There is no point in paying money for features you don't need, but most good web hosts will include many, if not all of the above features.

  So, how to find a web host - there are thousands of web hosting companies out there - so how do you choose a reliable host for your domain? Word of mouth is a good way - speak to other webmasters, see who they recommend and find reliable. We have heard very good reports of FutureQuest Web Hosting, they are currently offering a number of good hosting freebies & discounts for new site owners.

• Free Web Hosting: Most free web hosting providers are not reliable enough if you are running a commercial site and usually have restrictions such as banners or pop ups on your page. A good place to try for free web hosting with no banners is at Dot Easy - ideal for creating affiliate 'mini sites'. As long as you purchase your domain name through them, the hosting is free.

• Other sources of free stuff: Of course there are dozens of other sites on the internet offering these and other services for free, however the ones just mentioned are the best we have come across in their respective categories. Another good site is Grantastic Designs which offers some excellent website design and online marketing tips.

If you know of (or even provide) a useful free service or tool for webmasters, please e-mail and let us know. We will add a link to the site if we consider it one of the very best of it's kind!

Other Useful Web Sites: Sites for webmasters that you may find useful include: Virtual Promote which is an excellent site on web promotion and also includes a free search engine submitter - submit your site to over 35 top search engines and more than 400 directories; with one form - for free! They also have free tutorials and advice on web site promotion and search engine placement as well as an excellent free newsletter and dozens of free tools for webmasters. All in all, a very impressive site which is highly recommended.

Another excellent site is Search Engine Watch which contains just about all you ever wanted to know about search engines. For information on affiliate programs, take a look at our Top Ten Affiliate Programs.

There is also an abundance of internet marketing advice available on the net - much of it free - but one very worthwhile source of information is the Internet Marketing Challenge Web Site which is highly recommended. Subscribe to their excellent free weekly e-zine. You can also find experts willing to answer your Internet marketing problems for FREE. All you have to do is post your question at Neil Shearing's Internet Success Forum.

Last, but not least, take a look at the Make My Site Sell Web Site where you can sign up for an excellent free e-zine and also download a free book on affiliate programs, which is useful if you join their affiliate program but also contains valuable advice that applies to all affiliate programs. The Make My Site Sell Web Site also has the excellent book of the same name for sale at a very reasonable $17 US dollars (or just over ten British pounds) - this is without doubt the best value for money internet marketing book on the net. A free sample chapter can be downloaded here.

Webmaster Quick Links:
# Domain Names: 123 reg - Buy Domain Names at Low Prices - .com .co.uk .net etc #
# Web Hosting: FutureQuest Web Hosting - High Quality Web Hosting with lots of features. #
# Internet Merchant Accounts: Accept Credit Cards on your web site - Low rates and no set-up fee. #
# Web Design / Usability Advice: 'Don't Make Me Think' - An excellent book on web usability. #

Web page by Mark Southgate, Affiliate Programs Guide, Edinburgh, UK.
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