10) Blogged – Chatter

Similar to Twitter, the chatter page on Blogged allows anyone who is following you to see what you are “chatting” about. Great for those who are following you, not so great if this is a low number! I prefer Twitter just because of how well known it is.

9) FriendFeed

Another one like Twitter, FriendFeed displays any messages you post to your “friends”. As I said before, I do prefer Twitter for the larger audience and the use of Trending topics but in saying that, I haven’t had change to use FriendFeed that much.

8) Twitter

Twitter is a great place to announce any new blog posts. Whoever is following you can see the tweet and is then able to click on the link. The only problem here is getting people to follow you. In order to announce your article, you have to actually have people following you. I try to use Twitter on a regular basis for new and old articles – while trying not to spam and annoy those following me! The trending topics in Twitter are good to use because the tweet is published to a large audience.

7) Stumbleupon

This site has been built based around a great idea. Articles are randomly (Or so I believe) chosen and displayed to the user. This gives your article chance of appearing to a great variety of users. However, with the number of articles on there, the probability is low. Nevertheless, still submit!

6) Delicious Bookmarks

Delicious is a site where you can add your favorite bookmarks. It is a great way to share your articles and anything that you find interesting. Delicious allows you to see how many others have bookmarked the same address. Similarly, you can see who has bookmarked the site.

5) Propeller

Similar to Digg and other article sites, Propeller allows the visitors to decide which articles get more publicity. The user can either “prop it” or “drop it” where “propping it” will raise it’s position and “dropping it” will lower it’s position. From looking at the home page, you only need between 10 and 20 “props” to appear on the popular stories. This can be great for traffic and for gaining subscribers to your blog.

4) Reddit

With a Google PageRank of 8, Reddit is a great site to submit your articles to. Popular articles will appear high on the home page while a list of categories allows the user to browse articles relating to their interests. The submission of an article is extremely easy with Reddit and I have never had a problem with them. I highly recommend submitting here.

3) Technorati

Technorati has a PageRank of 9 and is a great site to submit your blog to. You can see straight away from the Home Page that the intention of the site is to discuss what people are saying in their blogs. Articles that are submitted to Technorati will appear more often if they get more attention. Therefore you need to get some visitors to begin with in order to get more visitors – as usual. I have always submitted to this site and will continue to do so.

2) Digg

I am sure everyone knows what Digg is. An extremely popular site to submit articles to. Article sare ranked on whether people “digg it” or dislike it. Recently, Digg have changed their position on links so that they are “no follow”. Not a problem if you are not after “site juice”, the traffic you receive will still remain the same.

1) Dzone

My favorite at the moment is Dzone. Dzone advertises itself as “fresh links for developers” which is great for my blog because it is website-development related. I have received a lot of traffic from Dzone and it always appears on my top list of referrers. I recommened a submission to this site!

Now, this is not a difinitive list. This is my list. I will submit to these 10 submission sites – and more – once I have written an article (as with this one!). A great way to do it if you are using WordPress is to use a simple plugin. The one I use is “Add to any” which places a button at the bottom of my articles. I simply click which site I wish to submit to and the plugin does most of the hard work.

I hope you found this useful. Do let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

Regards

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I appreciate any suggestions of other great tools as I am sure they will help me.

Anyway – here we go, number 10.

10) Keyword Density Tool
There are quite a few keyword density tools out there and they really help me when looking at sites I create in the way a spider may see them. Some tools allow keywords and phrases, others give you a ‘tag cloud’ with the keywords in. Here are a few links to some I have been using:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

Allows you to choose between 1, 2 and 3 length phrases/keywords as well as allowing you to include or exclude meta tags, title tags and alt tags.

http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

A very simple keyword tool that lists the occurrence and density of each word within the site.

9) Sitemap Generator
A Sitemap, I believe is of great importance when submitting your site to search engines. Since I’ve been creating websites, I have come across a few different sites, and programs for a variety of cases.

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

This is a really good generator to use if the website has less than 500 pages. The only problem is when the page is bigger than that. I created a website for a client that had around 1000 pages and so this was not feasible.

http://gsitecrawler.com/

A great program for those of us running Windows. Unfortunately I use Ubuntu so for me to run this program means a Virtual Machine, which is fine by me. If anyone knows of a similar program for Ubuntu I would be very grateful.

8) FTP Client
For FTP Connections to my server, I use my File Manager Nautilus. It makes easy work for dragging and dropping images, files, fonts etc. I don’t really have anything else to say about this because the program I use for actually designing the websites has an FTP client built in.

7) VMWare
This really only matters for those using a Linux Development Environment. As we all know, Internet Explorer and other browsers parse some CSS code differently. VMWare helps here by allowing the use of both browsers without having to use Wine. This works great if you have a powerful enough machine to run it alongside your development tools.

6) Firebug
Now I’m sure that we all know what Firebug is. It’s a great tool for viewing exactly what is happening on the site you are developing. I especially like the inspection tool that allows you to highlight divs and display their markup.

5) GIMP/Photoshop
GIMP, Photoshop, in my eyes are both great graphic design tools. I use GIMP because of the operating platform I am running but after seeing the amount of tutorials available for Photoshop as apposed to GIMP (I know there are lots out there for GIMP but when searching for help I mainly came across Photoshop) I am tempted to get Photoshop for my Virtual Machine. (I will never go back to Windows).

4) Google Webmaster Tools or SEO Toolbar
Google Webmaster Tools is a great site allowing us developers to view the top search queries, submit our sitemaps, view how many pages have been indexed and see what errors Google has found.
The SEO Toolbar can be found http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/ and sits on my Firefox toolbar giving me a lot of information about each site I visit. The Pagerank, the number of inbound links, DMOZ Directory entries and lots more. It helps me keep a track of my performance when trying to promote a website.

3) Google!
Where would I be without Google? Especially with me not being on the scene for that long, Google has helped me find solutions to my problems.

2) Host Gator Hosting
I use Host Gator for hosting my sites and I have  – never – had a problem with them. The hosting is Linux based and uses cPanel. SSH Access has to be acquired by an email, but other than that I have not had to raise a support query. I do recommend them.

1) Netbeans IDE
Now I am not sure how many people will agree with me upon this. When I design websites, it is ALL done by hand. Hence why I use Netbeans. Before I started getting involved in more Website Design, I used Netbeans for a Java Development Project. The IDE was great and so I decided to carry on using it for PHP Development.
Netbeans has its own FTP Client built in so once any changes have been made to the work it’s a right-click upload. I can manage many different sites with this client, using its ability to have multiple FTP connections.

Now I know that some or even most of you may think I have missed out some important tools but these are my tools that I find I use on a day-to-day basis. Please do comment with any suggestions that can make my life easier – afterall – I am still learning!

Regards,
Jack

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