Cool Tools & Articles About: Wikipedia, Link Love, Site Popularity, Social Search Engines

Here are some useful and very cool tools and resources for any webbie:

Maki, author of the extremly cool blog (which I just discovered today) Dosh Dosh writes an extremly thorough article aka The Ultimate Guide on How to Get Your Website Listed in Wikipedia which really is what it says. If you’ve ever wondered about getting some link love from the uber-encyclopedia Wikipedia, this is the place to find out how to go about doing it.

Ever wondered how popular your site really is? There are plenty of sites that measure different metrics, but the new Popuri.us (1169 diggs and counting) helps consolidate all that data. Just enter your url and find out: Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Quantcast Rank, Google BackLinks, Yahoo BackLinks, Live Search BackLinks, Technorati Links, del.icio.us Bookmarks, Bloglines subscribers, WHOIS Info, and DNS Info. If possible, I’d somehow find a way to integrate feedburner info to this, as it has become the de-facto metric for measuring a blog’s success.

There must be hundreds of lists on how to get others to link to your website, but Wendy Piersall guest blogging at Darren Rouse’s Problogger finds the best of the best in The Ultimate Guide to Getting Lots of Link Love. Broken down into categories including The Best of the Best, Link Strategy, Linkbaiting, Relationship Building, and Buying Links, the list covers pretty much anything you could ever think of when it comes to getting links. This will surely help newbie webbies!

Lastly, I wanted to share with you a site I learned about from the self-proclaimed evil one, John Chow’s frequent guest blogger Michael Kwan (that was a mouthful!). I have to admit that I no longer use Yahoo or MSN to do any searches, probably out of laziness, but Google has been my SE for a while now. That might change . . . the new search engine / social engine YouAnimous or AfterVote (calls itself both I think) combines the results from Yahoo, MSN, and Google with stats and the ability to vote on results. It is really cool and I believe, has a lot of promise. Search engines use algorithms to calculate ranking, but that ignores simple human logic. By adding the human element, it seems that results should be more relevant. Check it out and let me know what you think!