I use several tools to monitor performance of my own websites, by regularly reviewing their progress I can see what works and what does not.

Ranking tools

Where is my listing? Want a tool that can tell you which page your site appears on by keyword?

www.top25web.com/cgi-bin/report.cgi

Top25web searches domain names by keyword for following search engines:- Google, Alta vista and inktomi, drilling down for first 500 entries on each search engine.

How many of my websites pages are indexed? Do you have a large site? – it can be a pain using site: command in Google, following tells you how many of your pages are indexed in Fast, Google, Alta Vista and MSN

www.neutralize.com creates a pie chart of % of your pages indexed in each of engines.

Meta – Tag analysers

Meta tags are much less important than they used to be, though Title tag is still very powerful.

The following are my favourites:-

http://www.sitesolutions.com/analysis.asp - select website analysis option from left hand, this is particularly good at telling if you’ve got right combination of keywords in your tags and which keyword should be where.

http://www.sitescreamer.com/from22.html - this analyses your tags, and gives a narrative opinion – excellent being best rating.

Traffic statistics

Good traffic statistics are essential for your own site, but how to get information on rivals traffic?, Alexa makes use of its own database of user and converts these to a traffic ranking.

The Alexa site can be found at www.alexa.com

Good HTML

By Clare Lawrence 13th September 2003 Clare is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd a leading UK domain registrar

No matter what domain name you buy its unlikely to be worth $ millions straight away, but with some careful though and preparation you can maximise your domain names potential.

Using hyphens Almost every word in dictionary has been registered already so its more than likely that you will have to register a combination of words. Should you buy a domain name with a hypen in it? Generally speaking answer is no. There are several reasons why not. Describing a domain name with hyphens can be awkward. Customers have a habit of forgetting hyphen and typing in wrong URL. It’s a misconception that hyphens improve search engine rankings, leading search engines now concentrate on content and pay only limited attention to URL itself.