Some of the more useful free tools you can get. Find how many links point to your site. Check your keyword density. Clean up your HTML code. The importance of such functions is far from small.
Look on the left side after the page loads. You'll see a list of subjects -- W3c offers many tutorials for free that can teach you the basics in subjects like CSS, Java, and XML. While these tutorials won't take you to the most advanced levels, they should be enough to help you understand what's going on with your website.
If you plan on conducting a pay-per-click campaign, this free service can give you some basic cost analysis. Those numbers can also be used to get a generic feel for how competitive the area is, and what an ad campaign would cost you.
This tool can give you a grasp of seasonal interest. By checking what stories it uses as news after a search, you can also find some PR resources that work.
This website has in-depth analysis of what factors go into your search engine ranking. While they focus on Google, Google's techniques are certainly not too different from that of other search engines. Just ranking in the top on Google would be enough, anyway, considering its incredible share of the Search Engine market.
Read this carefully.
Spybot is a free anti-spyware tool that can do a few other tasks like clean parts of your registry. Very useful and quite popular. The creator dedicates it to his love, which is rather sweet.
You may have heard of robots.txt. If not, in brief summary, it's a file that manages the behavior of automatic web-surfing programs. For instance, using it you can tell Googlebot (Google's automatic websurfer) to not index a page on your site. If you are feeling particularly private, you can tell all robots to stay away with a catchall exclusion.
The problem is that spambots ignore robots.txt. Spambots are automated tools that search the web for unpleasant reasons, the top three of which are:
To stop them you must go on the offense and construct a no-spam-bot policy. Read the page above for the basics on how to do it. You may also find useful a basic tutorial on the .htaccess file.
A site that provides links to 13 tools that create high quality, Web2.0 graphics you can use on your website. Create Web2.0 badges, backgrounds and logos -- and more. Though nothing on this site is generated by one of those links, it's mainly because this site has more of a Web1.5 look than Web2.0. We're just not cool enough.
A website with the colors that hip websites use. You'd be surprised at how powerful a color change can be, and the colors featured here are dynamic and successful.
Paint.net is like a free Photoshop. Unlike most free image editors, it can do layers and powerful image manipulation you won't normally get for free. Recently voted 19th best product of the year by PCWorld.com, and for good reason.
A website that lets you generate color schemes. Not as fine-tuned control as you might like, but useful for generating quick and easy color schemes. Useful for finding complimentary/clashing colors and so on.
