Tech Review

I started becoming involved with web things last year. Like many of my previous hobbies, I threw myself at my forum and later, my blog, with true nerd abandon- the kind of enthusiasm that increases one's knowledge of a particular subject quickly, but, just as quickly, makes one insufferable ("oh no, he's going to talk about his web site again") and angers wives.

In those heady days of October, 2006, I would scour the internet for products that would make fast work of SEO tedium. Since I couldn't imagine going to the Thailand Google every time I wanted to submit a site, for example, I purchased All-in One Submission Tool, an uncheap product that automates search engine submissions (and which accomplished its task with aplomb).

One thing about the internet, though, is if you look hard enough you're very likely to find what you need for free. And, so it was when I encountered iWEBTOOL, the best SEO-service site and the one I visit most frequently. Most of the services are free and the ones that cost money, like directory listing and SEO checklist ($19.95) seem reasonably priced.

The site itself is attractive and well organized. The list of "webtools" is long, but I'll discuss the ones that I most often. The complete list is here.

Search Engines:

1. Backlink Checker

Find a list of backlinks linking to a specific website. Backlinks are web sites that reference another. I created four backlinks above.

2. Google Banned Checker

Discover whether a website is banned on Google. Mine isn't, but some warez (illegal software) sites are.

3. Google PageRank Prediction

Predict your future Google PageRank. I love this tool. I enter the different web sites under Asymmetric and it tells what it thinks it will be pageranked by Google. Pagerank determines in which order sites will come up during searches. If you type "Asymmetric Blog" in Google, Asymmetrical Information comes up two ahead of mine as Jane Galt's blog is ranked higher than mine.

It takes a little while for you site to be ranked, so this could be a handy tool in the early days of a blog. If your blog experiences rapid growth, one can also tell how that will affect it's ranking. Since Google's methods are a secret, many doubt whether such a thing is possible, but although I'm not privy to the voodoo that they do, in my experience, iWEBTOOL seems to approximate the Google pagerank algorithm fairly well. It's correctly predicted every page except for once when it said Asymmetric would be a six instead of its current five.

4. Visual PageRank

View the PageRank of links visually rather than in text. This one is very cool. It'll place a number next to every link on your site to tell you its page rank. You can check the PR of every link on your blogroll, for example. Again, seriously useful and, amazingly, free.

Using visual pagerank checker, I can see the rankings of some of the blogs on my roll.

Domain Checkups:

The domain checkup tools are just as practical. Although some, like the domain lookup tool which you'd use to see the availability of a domain name, can be found on many other SEO-oriented web sites, it's nice to have so many tools in one place.

1. Alexa

If a site is in the top 100,000 web sites, the Alexa link on iWEBTOOL will give you your traffic graph without having to go to Alexa (otherwise, it's just a link to Alexa).

2. Link Price Calculator

iWEBTOOL also has something called "Link Price Calculator" that'll tell you how much to pay for a backlink on a certain site ($10.69 a month for Asymmetric compared to $64 for Asymmetrical Information).

iwebtool has a nice interface.

Other site goodies:

You can participate in an active forum with other SEO nerds, place your site in its directory, and red tech-related headlines.

If there's one thing that's missing from iWEBTOOL is a search engine submission tool. I'm sure there's a good reason it doesn't and, as I mentioned before, other tools exist to accomplish that task.

Anyways, give it a shot. If you're concerned about your site, you'll go back again and again. The price is right, too.