Promoting small websites or finding out about large ones

In doing some poking around to research the background behind a domain, I came across three websites which all offer similar tools. Depending on how you choose to use them, they can either be used to carry out some background research on competitors, or to promote your own small website or blog.

AboutUs.com

AboutUs asks you for a domain or website URL, and then wanders off and retrieves information from the site. It analyses the site contain, and pulls back a summary, related domains, other sites linked to, and information about the domain itself.
The interesting thing about this is that AboutUs presents all this information via a Wiki, which can be edited and update by the site owner, or by visitors.

Check out this example page for Finance-Portal.co.uk

DomainTools.com

DomainTools uses a whois lookup to pull back registration information about a domain, as well as the server it's hosted on, and any other relevant sites. On top of that it also retrieves a site's rank from Alexa and Complete.com. Most interesting though is the analysis DomainTools does on the homepage content. As well as counting the number of internal and outbound links on the homepage, it works out the relevancy of the meta description and site title against the homepage content. Create a free account to get access to more tools and goodies.

Compare the Finance-Portal.co.uk page against the one for AboutUs.

BuiltWith.com

BuiltWith works in a similar vein to AboutUs and DomainTools. The difference with BuiltWith is that it's tools are more concerned with the optimisation of a site, and the technology and software used to build it. BuiltWith will report on things like the advertising systems being used, the scripting framework, the analytics and tracking software being used, and so on.

Get a flavour of what's available with this report on Finance-Portal.co.uk

Taken individually, these are all interesting and useful tools. However, when combining their reports together, they can be used to fully map out the web presence for a given domain. Equally, they can produce powerful pages and reports which can be used to promote a small site or blog.

Give them a go and try them for your sites.