SEO Tool Chest - Special Tools 1

In the past few weeks, I have been reviewing cool search engine optimization type tools in my SEO Tool Chest, today I am going to show you a few non-glamorous "special" tools that you need to have as well.

http header checkers are not very exciting, but they can reveal some important information about how a URI responds. As you may know, search engines are picky about redirects. "301 Moved Permanently" redirects are fine in most cases, but the more widely used 302 temporary redirect can cause you lots of problems with the search engines and with what is known as 302 page hijacking (more on that in a separate post). So for this reason it is important to know what a server reports back on a URI or web address (http status codes).

One of my favorite ones is Server Header Checker, it's my old stand by (it's fast, dependable and easy to read the results). Web-Sniffer is also good, but not quite as easy to read.

There are numerous free tools to check your http headers on the internet, just find one that you are comfortable with. If you see a potential problem, be sure to check it in more than one tool for a second opinion, I have seen results differ between tools occasionally.

I once had a client's site that wasn't getting spidered by Google and Yahoo! (even with a Yahoo! Directory listing) and I couldn't figure out why. While I was looking at the character encoding, it was suggested that I check the http header response. I checked the domain with one of these tools and I found an ugly mess. Because of the shopping cart the client's host was using, they had a double 302 redirect. One from domain to www.domain and one from www.domain to the index page. Once I got that situation resolved to using one 301 from domain to www and having the default page name changed to match what I was using, the site started getting spidered and ranking. Since then, whenever I suspect a problem, one of the first things I look at is the http headers. As I said, it's not glamorous, but it really can make a major difference to your site's visibility in the search engines.

A great collection of DNS/Domain related tools can be found at DNSstuff.com. They have everything you need when dealing with DNS and domain names. The DNS Report shows you how your hosts DNS setup is performing and flags potential problems (not some of their warning messages are common among hosts). While these tools aren't as much fun to use as some of the ranking and link tools, these will show you potential problems that can prevent your site from ranking or being attractive to a link partner.

Links to all these tools can be found on in my SEO Tool Chest.

As always, feel free to comment below or email me by clicking on my name.

martin