We all know that to have a successful blog that gets tons and tons of traffic, you have to create good content, build links, guest post, submit articles, submit your blog to directories and do lots of other things. However, driving that traffic to your blog is only half of the battle, once that traffic arrives at your blog, the other half of your job begins and that is how to keep this traffic coming back over and over again.
When it comes to turning one time visitors to regular readers, usability is one of the most important factors. Things like fast loading pages, easy navigation, readable text, useful information and explanatory page titles are what make visitors wanna come back to your blog.
That is why it is important to test these things and see them not from a blogger’s point of view, but rather from a visitor’s point of view. Thankfully there are a lot of great free usability tools out there that can help you test your blog’s usability. Here are 9 free usability tools that will help you see your blog the way your visitors see it and improve the performance of your blog:
FiveSecondTest (fivesecondtest.com)
Use this tool to upload an image from your blog to find out how users react to it and what element of the image captivate them more, all in 5 seconds!
Google Website Optimizer (google.com/websiteoptimizer)
Google Website Optimizer lets you test different scenarios of the same text, images, content, headlines and etc. For example you can test to different images in a post to see which one works best and draws more attention.
Website Grader (websitegrader.com)
Website Grader helps you analyze 22 factors that lead to a successful SEO and gives you suggestions to improve them.
ClickHeat (labsmedia.com/clickheat)
It lets you see where your visitors click on your blog via a heatmap. If you use WP which I assume most of you do, you can use the WP ClickHeat Plugin to integrate ClickHeat on your blog to gather real and live data from your visitors.
SMT- Simple Mouse Tracking (smt.speedzinemedia.com)
A free tools that tracks the mouse movement and the clicks visitors make on your site.
Google Analytics (google.com/analytics)
I hope you are using Google Analytics already, if not, GA is a fantastic tool that gives you a divers set of data tracking and analysis tools. You can use it to learn so many things about the behavior of visitors on your blog including how long they stay on a specific page, which pages do they enter or exit from most, the number of pages the view on your site and etc.
Concept Feedback (conceptfeedback.com)
A great tool that enables you to get feedback from experts. You simply post your site and their experts will give you free advice and suggestions for improving your usability.
Userfly (userfly.com)
This one is a paid tool, however, you can use it to do 10 free tests. It simply records your visitor’s mouse movements and and lets you see it in a video format.
Google Page Speed (code.google.com/speed/page-speed)
Another great free tool from Google that accurately analyzes the performance of you web pages and how fast or slow they load. And if your page is having some issues, it will give you suggestions on how to improve your load time.
Although there a lot more usability tools out there, most of them are not free and if they are, they aren’t much of a use to us bloggers. The above mentioned tools are some of the few free tools that are actually USEFUL for bloggers. Please feel free to add to this list by leaving a comment in the comment box below, if you use or know of any other good free site usability tools.
EasyAzon Plugin
These tool are very useful in SEO campaign.Mostly people use Google Analytic to see the traffic on their website.
mincir recently posted..Maigrir sans effort
Thanks for your comment Mincir. Yes, using these tools can really help improve your blog’s performance which not only makes it more user friendly and inviting for your visitors, it also make your blog a more search engines freindly blog by improving things like page load time and etc.
satrap recently posted..53 Ways to Make Money Online
Twitter: SheilaAtwood
says:
Satrap- Thanks
This is great list of tools for doing a deep inspection of your blog. I will be checking out SMT and Website grader. I have not used them before.
I like using SEO Quake, a Firefox addon. It is an easy way to keep track of my rankings.
Sheila Atwood recently posted..How to Get Better Visibility on Google
Glad you like it Sheila. I use SEOBook which is a very similar tool to SEO Quake. It really helps a lot.
satrap recently posted..How to Increase the Money Value of Your Website
Twitter: lavenderuses
says:
Hi Satrap
Thanks for sharing all this helpful information with us. I only use Google Analytics so will have to investigate the others too. Learning heaps from reading all these posts too.
Patricia Perth Australia
Patricia recently posted..So Little Time- So Much To Do
You are welcome Patricia, glad you find it useful.
satrap recently posted..53 Ways to Make Money Online
oOo nice nice nice!
I’ve heard that my site has a somewhat slower load time than before (understandable due to the graphics) but knowing where to go to get usability tools…it helps bunches.
lingstar recently posted..57 Stellar 2010 Black Friday Bright Shiny Resources You Do NOT Want To Miss including Red Friday to boot!
Thanks for your comment Barbara. I didn’t experience that much of a slow loading on your blog, but either way its worth looking into it and speed it up if possible.
satrap recently posted..10 Fun Ways to Make Money Online
Great list of very nice resources. Especially looking forward to checking out the ClickHeat plugin.
scraperpro recently posted..Scraper Pro Software Bonus Offer
Twitter: gilbertocintron
says:
@Satrap this is some very good information. I’m not the writer that I’d like to be, so I have to depend on things like ease of navigation, images and fast loading pages. This list is an invaluable asset to me. With tips like this I know I’ll improve significantly.
Thank you.
Gilberto Cintron
Gilberto Cintron recently posted..A winner never quits and a quitter never wins
I am glad you like it Gilberto. I hope these tools will help you. I myself am not very much of a writer either, but we all have our own unique way of writing and telling stories, whcih makes our writings unique and interesting to other, no matter how bad we think we write.
By the way, I noticed your link (last post) in your comment is pointing to feedburner and not to your blog. You are losing a lot of backlinks. I wrote an article about the issue and how to fix it on FamousBloggers.net. You might want to read it:
http://www.famousbloggers.net/commentluv-backlinks-feedburner-rss-feed.html
satrap recently posted..53 Ways to Make Money Online
Twitter: jbiehl20
says:
Awesome SEO tips. I missed the boat on google analytics, but I finally got it now and it has given me nothing but great info. Thanks for the post!
Jeff recently posted..Working Out When Sick
Twitter: clifftheitguy
says:
thanks for the tips. A lot of these tools I never come across except GA. I used seo doctor, a firefox plugin to check grading of a page and I’m these ones that you’ve put up are even better.
cheers,
Clifford
Twitter: 6s4us
says:
Thanks Satrap, I’ve used and heard of a lot of these but the one that I had not of and probably would find most beneficial is the ClickHeat testing site. I’m going to check that out…
Here is one more that you could look in to and maybe add to your list -
http://www.feng-gui.com/
This site uses an algorithm to simulate users, and generates an eye tracking map to show which areas of the page attract the most attention. There is a free demo that allows you to test one image every few hours.
Excellent post, so thanks for spreading around the information!
Daryl Austman recently posted..Young-star discovery hints magnetism common to all cosmic jets
Hi Daryl,
Thanks for your comments and the link. The only reason I didn’t add feng-gui was because it wasn’t free (though they have a free trial). I just wanted to list completely free tools since I know most of us newbie bloggers, don’t have the money or don’t feel comfortable yet to spend on secondary tools. Any way thank you fro bringing it up, so any interested reader can visit and decide for themselves.
satrap recently posted..How to Make Money on YouTube- Step by Step Guide
Twitter: Andre_Kalis
says:
Wow, great stuff, thanks! I knew only about a few of these tools and you’re sharing a whole arsenal of web optimization tools here.
I struggled a lot with a slow loading blog and had to learn about jt and css files, before I got it right eventually.
I see people talk about using a CDN (Content Distribution Network) for hosting some of your sites external files I think, which also increases speed. Do you know anything about that?
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I really don’t knwo much about CDN other than it does speeds up your loading time because you load data onto a content distribution network which then serves it to your readers. So, basically your using less bandwidth which makes your blog load faster. I haven’t used it myself yet, but I am becoming interested after seeing how some blogs like copyblogger with a lot of data load so quickly because they use CDN.
satrap recently posted..53 Ways to Make Money Online
These are awesome tips! I haven’t look at SEO related stuff in awhile, but its nice to see there are many new tools there are innovated each day.
thevictorchen recently posted..2GB Free Online File Storage with DropBox
Yeah, SEO tools are constantly being changed and upgraded and of course many new tools come into play as well.
satrap recently posted..an Easy Way to Make Money Online With Google Trends and CPA Offers
Twitter: rakesh_narang
says:
These can really improve blog performance specially click heat map because that will guide one where to place the ads.
wizardjournal recently posted..Amazon Puts a 75 Year-End Sale on Video Games
Exactly, that is one of the best benefits of using usability testing tools and specifically heat map tools.
satrap recently posted..an Easy Way to Make Money Online With Google Trends and CPA Offers
Twitter: RetroCollage
says:
Thanks. I have been trying a new one called “seevolution” which also has a click map, a region map, and shows mouse clicks too.
retrocollage recently posted..Wholly Holiday Assemblage- Bergdorf Goodman’s Phantasmagorical Window Montages
Seevolution seems like a very nice cool, though I have never used it personally. There are lots of great tools out there, you just have to knwo where to look. Thanks for sharing.
satrap recently posted..55 Get Paid To Write Websites
Twitter: sureshpeterss
says:
thanks for the list. i never used none of your list..will try the tools for a better blogging great help :0
suresh peters recently posted..how to import and export web browser bookmarks to delicious
That FiveSecondTest tool looks awesome. I can never get enough of landing page optimization.
Twitter: opportplanet
says:
Thanks for sharing these useful tools, I mostly use Google Page Speed and Google Website Optimizer but I didn’t know most of the other tools, I will certainly use most of them…
Kostas recently posted..5 Website Usability Tips that Drive Results
Another great tool is IntuitionHQ.com