Seobook has released a very nice firefox extension call Rank Checker. This is a free open-source tool that will show your rank for specific keywords on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Using a rank checking tool is a real time saver. Rather than try to dig through results to find your site, this will give you the data in just a few seconds. The best way would be to export the data each time and name each file with the date it was run. This way you can track your ranking changes over time.

Do you have a small business and want to get a website up and running quickly. Wordpress just may be your answer. Wordpress is quite easy to learn and can create very professional looking results. There are lots of plugins and themes available to make your site exactly how you want it to look. You can download wordpress for free. Wordpress has some online learning resources to help you get started.

You can run the wordpress software with most hosting packages that supports PHP and MySQL. Don’t hesitate to get your business up on the web, register your domain name, and at least get something up and running. The longer you have your site out there the better it is in the long run for your website and business.

For me , web statistics are the lifeblood of your website. It is really the only good way to see how your site is doing. I look forward each day to browsing over my sites stats to see what is doing what. It is also a great tool to find problems with your site such as missing pages, or other errors.

My preferred method of getting web statistics is to download my log files, and process them locally on my own. To do this I use an ftp script I wrote to download the log files each day. Then I use awstats to process the log files into nice readable reports. Awstats works great for me, but it is a little bit more work to setup.

If you are looking for a super-easy way to get stats from your site, try Google Analytics. All you have to do is place a few lines of javascript code onto each page of your website everything else is done for you. Anaytics produces very snazzy graphs, and is simple to use, but I find there is SO much information there it can be hard to get to the basic stats I want to see.

Sometimes, you might think that you will just add stats later on once the site is running a bit, but let me tell you the best time to setup your stats is right there while you are putting your site up for the first time. It can be very hard (or impossible sometimes) to go back and get stats from the past. So just go ahead get it setup right from the get go. You’ll get addicted to your stats real quick.

A must have for webmasters is a free little software tool called ColorPic.

This tool lets you select virtually any color from anywhere on your screen. This can be useful when you see a color you like, simply fire up the software and grab the color.

Google BIG webmaster tools.

Google did a nice thing for webmasters by creating a handy tool to help track sites and also to upload your newly created sitemaps.

Visit Google Webmaster Tools and sign up account, or use an existing Google account if you have one.

XML Sitemap? What in the world is that you might ask. Well not so long ago Google came out with a way for webmasters to tell Google about their pages. The most common way is to use an XML sitemap. How does it work? You create a sitemap, then tell Google where that sitemap is, then they will download it and then maybe crawl some of your sites, and just maybe add them to their index of websites.

Since then a few of the other major search engines jumped on board the wagon, and now it is supported by Yahoo and Microsoft too.