Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Webscale: Another Useful Tool for Webcomics

Webscale is a simple, clean site offering "site fitness" tools. My favorite, available elsewhere but not in such a nice layout, is the word count. 

You may find it sobering to see which words the search engines see as most frequent -- and important -- when measuring your site. (For most of us, "words" like "com" and "php" are near the top.) If you assumed your site name, keyword filing and general chatter would surely put your most important words high in the ranking, this will sober you up.

I'm not a keyword fanatic, but I like to see the name and subject of my site up high on the list. I don't fret much about secondary words, though I keep an eye on plurals.

I highly recommend running the word count feature on your site. Keep in mind, the tool only counts the exact page you enter, and doesn't do the whole site at once.

Here's a little tip for pumping up the word count of a particular word, such as your title:  work it into a paragraph of "fine print" at the bottom of the page, with copyright and author information, like this:


Intrepid Guinea Pig is ©2008 Inky Jones
Characters appearing in Intrepid Guinea Pig are based on people from school.
Intrepid Guinea Pig, Intrepid Guinea Pig's friends, and Intrepid Guinea Pig's author
can be reached at IntrepidGuineaPig (AT) somehost.com


Don't go overboard, or you'll risk search engine penalties. If it starts looking devious, you should back up a bit. The example above is too much.

Webscale also offers a site timer, a very clean and clear read of your page's HTML, the links on the analyzed page, and some other odds and ends.

Webscale is a recommended addition to any webmaster's toolbox, if only for the superior clarity it offers over other variations.