You will find the following tools useful if you are a Realtor who manages their own website or you want to check the health of a website a webmaster firm is managing for you.
Tool 1: Copyscape
It's so frustrating when you have spent many hours, sometimes days and sometimes even weeks perfecting and writing original content on your website and someone has jacked your page, your hard work and is claiming they wrote it!
Copyscape is a tool that allows you to enter your webpage url and it will scan the internet to find pages that are copying your content. It's good to keep on-top of this as Google and other search engines hate this just as much as you do.
You can use CopyScape here http://www.copyscape.com/
Tool 2: W3C Code Validator
Is the code that makes up your website flakey, have you forgot a closing </p> or a closing speech mark? Some errors are more serious than others and while the page may look perfectly fine visually it may not be the same underneath.
Search engines and text readers may be having problems working out where a link ends or where a heading tag ends. The good news is you can check validate your code quickly and easily using this tool:
http://validator.w3.org/
Tool 3/4: Jaws/Cynthia (Accessibility)
It's really, really important to ensure your website is accessible. As a website owner you are legally obliged to ensure this and failure to do so can lead to heavy fines. Having an accessible site also means you have a search engine friendly site.
The first accessible tool is Cynthia which is a reporting tool. You enter your website/webpages and it examines the code. You can run this tool here http://www.contentquality.com/
The second accessible tool is jaws which is a text reader and used by the blind. Sometimes I have seen people using Cynthaia and to get the webpage passed this tool they have used image alt text like button 1, button 2, button 3. Where this will pass Cynthia you will be able to listen to jaws and quickley identify where you need to be more descriptive. You can get this tool here http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jaws.asp
Tool 5: Broken Link Check
Nothing is more frustrating for a visitor when the visitor lands on your site to find broken links to pages of interest to them. Xenu's Link Sleuth is a great tool that will scan your whole site and report any broken links aswell as validate the syntax in those links. You can download this tool here http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
I hope that you find the tools and information in this article useful. If you have any questions or need help getting the tools installed or working please just leave a comment.
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