Handmade Artists and Crafters, do you have your own website? Here's some handy dandy internet tools for search engine optimization and etc.

Hey artists and crafters out there, do you have your own website? I know that there are a lot of Etsy sellers that just use their Etsy shop as their website, but I'm talking about your very own registered domain name (a .com or .net address). I personally like having my own website outside of my Etsy shop and blog. I feel like it is very helpful for integrating all of my online venues and providing information and resources that don't belong elsewhere. I admit that I'm not that web design savvy, but I did manage to build my own site, and I'm constantly looking for little ways to improve it. For instance, I spent some of this morning updating my meta tags which I'll probably be updating again. I thought that I'd pass along some useful links in analyzing and improving your personal websites. Some of these tools also work on your Etsy shop and blogs. If you have a great online tool to share that will help improve our websites, shops, and/or blogs, please leave a short description and link to the tool in a comment. Also, if you'd just like to share your personal website link, I'd like to see those as well.

RESOURCE LIST

Page Rank Tool
http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Meta Tag Analyzer
http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html

Link Popularity Check
http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop

Backlink Checker
http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker

An Explanation of How Search Engines Work
http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/keyword-basics-part-1-how-search-engines-work

Improving Search Engine Results: Using Meta Tags
http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html/chap15.shtml

Major Search Engines and Directories
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156221

A List of Search Engine Submission Pages
http://www.freewebsubmission.com