45 SEO and Social Media Tools #SESLondon
Posted on 22. Feb, 2012 by Lee Odden in Blog, Search Engine Strategies, seo tools, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media tools
I really lucked out after moderating the morning session at SES London on Social Media Tools by joining the SEO Tools of the Trade session that followed. Both sessions had great speakers and I’ve decided to combine my notes for both into one post about social media automation tools and SEO tools.
The sources for the SEO tool recommendations include: Richard Baxter of SEOGadget, Dave Naylor from Bronco, and Neil Walker from Just Search. The social media tool recommendations came from Andrew Girdwood from bigmouthmedia, Paul Madden from Automica and Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics.
Before I get into the list of tools, I feel compelled to share a quote that I’ve often used to give people context for tool use, since it’s so important to use them for scale, efficiency and to gain a competitive advantage:
“Tools are only as effective as the expertise of the person using them.”
I think that’s an important perspective, because some online marketers use a small handful of tools but their expertise is very deep. Therefore, they get a tremendous amount of productivity from them. Others use many, many tools without deep expertise in anyone area and as a result, effectiveness may be lacking. Once you find a handful of tools that work for you, get really, really good at using them. At the same time, always be open to trying new tools as they come along.
Ok, let’s start off with SEO Tools:
- RedFly GoogleGlobal Firefox & Chrome Extension – See SERPs in other countries
- Netcraft - Hosting, DNS, site uptime and many other features
- MajesticSEO – Link tracking, research and analysis. Export links by country code (TopRank uses MajesticSEO
- Copyscape – Find copies of your content elsewhere on the web to avoid duplicate content issues
- Google Webmaster Tools – How does Googlebot interact with your website. Check for crawl errors that could affect inclusion and ranking of your content
- Firebug – Firefox extension for reviewing code, look for hidden text issues that could affect search engine penalties
- Google Page Speed - Check the load time of your web pages. Slow loading pages are not your friend and certainly nothing Google will reward you for
- Pingdom – Monitor uptime of your website. If your website is down neither customers or search engines can get to it.
- Xenu Linksleuth or Screaming Frog to spider your website
- Open Site Explorer – Download data and segment anchor text for identifying good/bad inbound links
- KISSinsights – Find sales objections and test them with a super short survey
- Fivesecondtest – Show an image and see what people think of it. Analyzes most prominent areas of your design
- Google Website Optimizer - A/B test your page designs
- Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Official keyword research tool from Google
- Spyfu – Perform competitive PPC and SEO keyword research
- Alexa - Wide range of traffic and keyword information about websites
- SEMRush – Get competitive SEO and PPC keyword information on websites found on Google.com and many other country domains
- KeywordSpy - Keyword research tool
- Wordtracker - Keyword research tool
- Wordstream – Keyword research tool
- Keyword Discovery – Keyword research tool
- Socialmention – Social search tool allows you to download to csv file of social keywords and influences that you can pivot to see what what kinds of mentions are you getting, on what kinds of social media sites and how it compares to the competition.
- Analytics SEO – page load time, pages indexed, ranking overview, reveal potential keywords, next opportunity keywords, reporting.
- Sistrix toolbox – Tracks PageRank over time, ranking, position, search volume, traffic index
- Searchmetrics Essentials - Suite of SEO and social media tracking tools
- GTmetrix - Compare multiple sites for their page download speed
- Link Research Tools – Link research and profiling tools
- Keyword Density - DaveN tool providing a wide variety of data points about a website according to a specific keyword phrases
- maxmind – Geographic ip detection down to the city level
- wipmania – Geographic ip location tool
Social Media Automation Tools (Some are a bit Grayhat SEO)
- Evri – Social content aggregator
- Trapit – Topical news aggregator that leans your preferences with AI
- Strawberryjam – Shows the links your social network shares the most
- ifttt – Rules based automation of actions through social channels/media sites
- Paper.li – Crawls links contained within RSS feeds, Twitter lists you supply and creates an online newspaper that auto-tweets the most popular twitter handles that share
- Pearltrees.com – Tool for aggregating content and sharing content with a rich visual interface
- Tweetguru Multi – DM up to 12 people on Twitter at the same time
- RSS Graffiti - Pull in RSS data feeds into a Facebook page automatically
- Tweetadder – Auto follows people on Twitter (um, kinda spammy no?)
- Socialoomph – Schedule social content and status updates (Twitter and Facebook)
- dlvr.it - Takes a RSS feed, filters content based on rules and publishes to Twitter, Facebook and other social channels
- Odesk – Not a tool but a resource to outsource redundant tasks. Use for research, writing small content, etc.
- Socialenhancer – In beta: Auto reply to tweets by keyword. Export followers for analysis
- Tweetdeck – Twitter management tool
- Hootsuite – Twitter, Facebook and other social channels management tool
Richard Baxter, Dave Naylor, Neil Walker
There you go. I hope you find these tools useful. Some are quite old and some are new. Some are a bit iffy in terms of being more mechanical than meaningful for social engagement. Take care when checking them out. Tools can be a bit of a time suck so think about what your goals are, what tasks do you want to achieve. Look at these sites if you have time or ask other SEO and Social SEO professionals about them to decide what you want to try or test out.
What are some of your favorite SEO tools? What tools do you use to improve efficiency and automate redundant tasks when it comes to Social SEO actions? Would you like to see us do more reviews of tools?
Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
45 SEO and Social Media Tools #SESLondon | http://www.toprankblog.com
3 SEO Tools to Crush Your Competition
Posted on 10. Jan, 2012 by Jeffrey_Smith in Blog, DWS, seo tools, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Our friends at Themezoom/Network Empire have an exclusive, limited-time offer allowing you to access exclusive tools like the Krakken, The Last Keyword Tool and Domain Web Studio (DWS) at a significant savings off normally published prices.
3 SEO Tools To Crush Your Competitors
Whether you are an agency (who has clients), an affiliate (looking to leverage your assets for maximum ROI) or a small business owner (trying to carve you own slice of a market), these tools represent the pinnacle of market research, SEO implementation and syndication, allowing you to create an unfair advantage over your competition.
There are 3 videos below (each is over 1 hour) and shows you how to unleash the power of DWS (using data from the Krakken and Last Keyword Tool). Consider them your training videos (after you sign up) and you can watch the layers unfold. Keep in mind, these offers will not last long, so take action or pay the full price later (you have been warned).
These are not common ideas or loose theory, they are methods we use to literally dominate search engines for competitive verticals for our clients and ourselves.
We start with the silo framework module and take keyword research and theme the website architecture, from there, we move on the the DNA braid and put together the on page and off page internal / backlink profile and see how steep the competition is, then we move to the third step in the Project Management Module and coordinate the team, structure the on-site content and then push the site live and start promoting it through the syndication blueprint. Trust me, give yourself a few hours, watch the videos and then get access to these tools before they go underground again.
The Silo Framework Module
To get the job done you need the right tools and having advanced SEO tools like DWS, Krakken and The Last Keyword Tool are critical for accessing intel that allow you to (1) assess your market (2) data mine competitors and (3) implement exclusive tactics from a vantage point that few competitors are privileged enough to observe.
Superior intel allows you to work smarter and identify weaknesses, overlooked niche phrases and markets that overlap on the way up the ladder to the more lucrative / crowning market-defining keywords.
But, if you didn’t know what those market defining phrases were, or whether or not those keywords have “actual” dollars attached to their rankings (once you reach the top 3 positions of the traffic band); then you could waste weeks, months or years of time chasing phantom-like silhouettes that merely deliver a fraction of the traffic you had over zealously anticipated.
Wasting time is not an option. Insulate yourself from futility of targeting duds by using metrics like the Krakken’s Total Search Market Value (TSMV). TSMV is an assessment for each market that corresponds to a dollar figure based on organic and PPC ranking value.
This way, once you now where the money is, and whether or not there is commercial intent, you can tactfully implement website silo architecture to scale a plethora of lucrative keywords (like layers of an onion) through using one or multiple websites.
Using multiple properties allows you to liberate your revenue model from being overly dependent on any one property. To accomplish this feat, you need a solid strategy and system based repeatability that targets entire cluster of phrases, (The DNA Braid) vs. a few poultry keywords.
The DNA Braid Module
Would you rather rank for one keyword or rank for hundreds to thousands of keywords, that allow you to reach that “one” keyword faster while you enjoy the fruit of keyword stemming (ranking for stemmed variations) along the way?
Time is the real asset in SEO and the extent of the volume of work you can accomplish depends on the tools you have at your disposal, and the team that you have to implement those tactics; especially when it comes to SEO and competing in saturated markets.
To use an analogy, working with the wrong tools (against a seasoned competitor) is like bringing 3 men to a battle when your adversary has an army. No matter what strategy you implement (with those 3 men) their limited scope and resources will fall short when the numbers game creeps into the equation.
For a website to knock an authority site off the pedestal of the #1 position, it needs both (1) a foundation that is broad enough to support the ascent (by leveraging semantically structured supporting content) and (2) enough vertical milestones (categories and landing pages) to reach the apex for the primary phrase. This means for competitive markets, you may require thousands of pages (to support the mid tail and lucrative / competitive keywords) and dozens to hundreds of links to critical internal pages to reach the aggregate tipping point to reach the apex of a market.
But also keep in mind, that for every primary keyword, there are dozens of mid-tail and long-tail keywords that are equally as lucrative (if you devour the entire market along the way).
The Project Management Module
To create websites and manage the process (using clusters and co-occurrence), you need a scalable system that allows you to (a) identify keyword and markets (b) model data, cost, time management and resources and calculate ROI from click through rates, time to rank, the volume of content and internal links required per keyword or the number of deep links you will need (that was our proprietary algorithm and you can see it work in Video 1 on the silo framework module above) – that is the power of DWS, Krakken and The Last Keyword Tool; that is the collective suite known as Network Empire.
The volume and extent of the work you execute depends on the system and tools you have at your disposal, especially when SEO and competitive saturated markets are the battleground.
Working with advanced SEO tools allows you to plan your roll-out with more depth, a more robust array of theme relevant supporting articles, categories and landing pages and allows you to work smarter and not harder when chipping away at market defining phrases.
I have had the distinct honor of working with some of the most brilliant minds (the team from Themezoom) over the past 5 years and I can assure you that there are only a handful of people who understand and implement SEO on this level.
While this was our best kept secret for years “The Krakken”, now it is time to borrow a phrase from Hades from Clash of the Titans and “Release the Krakken”!
This suite will allow you to walk into a market cold and within 20 minutes have the creamy keywords that float to the top in which to base your existing legacy site (by breathing life into it with a new blog) or start anew and scale the market in a fraction of the time.
If you are struggling to find theme relevant keywords (based on sophisticated information retrieval algorithms such as sparse matrix clustering, co-occurrence, Bayes, PaIR, LSI and semantic connectivity) then the Krakken (which drills into 60-90,000 keywords in under 5 minutes) only brings you back phrases which are (1) theme relevant to the parent cluster (original keyword) and (2) either have organic search value or PPC search value.
When you continue to refine, add synonyms and keep drilling, you end up with the perfect blueprint (like a skeleton) in which to build out your website into a robust authority site or niche specific entity.
This means that if you include these phrases (in their respective website silo architecture) then the entire cluster gets devoured and you rank for more keywords with fewer inbound links (since your own website becomes its own PageRank and link-flow spewing, top 10 ranking juggernaut).
Keep in mind that the Krakken transcends ordinary keyword research and uses the same type of natural data hierarchy information retrieval structures (such as Google, Yahoo and Bing) use to ascertain relevance.
In short, a blueprint from the Krakken is like mirroring the ideal on page SEO elements, synonyms and synonymic sets search engines grade relevance score with as a conditional metric when analyzing authoritative websites and sorting the wheat from the chaff for positioning.
Rarely would I share the exact tools we use to inspect, enter and dominate markets, but in the spirit of the New Year I do have one special offer I have been permitted to pass along (for a very limited time) to all of you who either get our email / blog posts, read whitepapers and updates from our plugin SEO Ultimate or know who we are and what we do.
In this special offer you get the opportunity to (1) unleash the Krakken in your market (2) it’s powerful and quite formidable little brother “The Last Keyword Tool” and (3) the DWS (Domain Web Studio) the most powerful SEO management suite ever conceived for:
a) mapping out markets
b) creating properly themed websites with silo site architecture
c) managing all elements of the campaign from outsourcing content creation, project management, web development and SEO tasks and most importantly
d) having a syndication blueprint that creates a timeline for every keyword, assesses its cost, time to rank, ROI and even lets you know how to cross the tipping-point with every keyword in a blueprint.
Put simply, this bundle is a must! We have paid $12,000 a year just to use the Krakken, in this offer, you will have to click and see for yourself the savings you can receive.
Do yourself a favor; you can win the battle before you even step on the field. I speak from experience on this one, we can do more in less time and completely crush seasoned competitors (such as brands, Wikipedia results, Amazon, Target, Wal-mart and other “strong sites”) using the formula’s developed from building sites (and links) in tandem with a search engines natural data hierarchy – and that is what you will learn from using this suite .
In essence, Network Empire silently slays competitors and uses unstoppable algorithms (that search engines love and reward), and now, for a limited time you can save hundreds by following this link and getting your subscription for a hefty discount.
In closing, for those naysayers, here are links to an exclusive webinar on the DWS 3.5 launch and other videos on the Krakken and The Last Keyword Tool.
This is not a marketing ploy; this is a special offer with bona fide savings for those of you who are serious about dominating your market. This offer will not last and will be pulled in the next 24-48 hours. Act now, or pay full price later. I leave the rest to you…
Related Posts
- Domain Web Studio 3.0: SEO Tools for SERIOUS Online Marketing!
- The Last Keyword Tool You’ll Ever Need
- 4 Indispensable “SEO TOOLS” for Competitive Research
- SEO Marketing Analysis: How to Gauge The Competition
- Real SEO Tools, Serious Results!
3 Tools To Instantly Boost Your Online Marketing
Posted on 02. Nov, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, seo tools, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, tools
[Note from Lee: This week's guest post is from someone I've known from the Search Marketing world for a long time. Bryan Eisenberg is a Wall Street Journal & New York Times Best Selling Author, popular keynote speaker and well respected guru in all things related to marketing and conversion optimization. We serve on the SES Conference Board of Advisors together and as he's elevated his status in the business world, has always been helpful and full of practical advice. You'll see that in this post about several tools for which he is an advisor.]
True or false? You never seem to have enough time in the day to get your job done.
If you answered “true”, then lets explore some tools/services that will maximize your time and effectiveness. Marshall McLuhan said “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” If the explosion of tools to improve your website and marketing efforts over the last 3 years is any indication of how we are being shaped then there may be hope for the time and resource starved.
If you agree that content is king then we should serve a feast that uses our customers’ own words. All we have to do is leverage all the social and search data that uses our customers’ words. I offer that as a common sense recommendation. However, all too often I see people (even experienced SEMs) failing to leverage this data in their everyday workflow. Don’t you think that access to search and social intelligence while writing content that it would make you a more effective writer?
A recent study I co-authored helped prove that it provided: a significant and consistent impact on search engine results, an increase in reader engagement. and an increase in conversion. It did all that and improved content relevance across a variety of writers and online content types who used a new content coaching tool called Inbound Writer. It’s free for up to 8 documents and month and costs only $19.95 for unlimited documents.
Never write an ad your landing page can’t cash! Do you know who the most successful PPC advertiser of all time is? Amazon! That is because they built their PPC program opposite of the way most people do it. They built and continuously optimize each of their product and category pages to convert at maximum efficiency. They have loads of content to help customers make a buying decision. Only then do they focus on what ads would drive you to that page and then what keywords should trigger that ad. Most advertisers start at the keyword first. One way to avoid that mistake is using a tool like TagCrowd.
TagCrowd will make a word cloud from any text you paste in (i.e. a press release), a plain text file you can upload or a web page url. The larger that words appear on the tag cloud the more times those words appear on the page (tweak the setting for a minimum frequency of 2 or 3 to filter out some noise). One quick look at the tag cloud should give you a good clue about what your landing page is about. Use those words in your ads and as starting points for the keywords you’ll target.
Example of TopRank Newsroom Tag Cloud
What if you could get an army of writers who would compete on a regular basis to improve the effectiveness of your PPC and FaceBook ads and the only time you ever paid them was when they beat your best effort? Well thanks to crowd-sourcing company BoostCTR you can take advantage of that opportunity today. While this company is relatively new, they have been producing guaranteed lifts in click through rates (CTRs) and conversions (by around 30%) for their clients. In fact, they are so confident about their service you can get started with a free trial. You pick the ad group you want their network to optimize, then they will start a contest where their writers compete in an A/B test against your best “control” ad (you pick which of the variations you choose to be included in the contest) and you only pay when you have a winner.
I hope these tool recommendations were useful to you. As an online tool junkie I review tons of other great online marketing tools you can leverage to improve your website and marketing efforts but hopefully these 3 will give you a good head start over your competition.
Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
3 Tools To Instantly Boost Your Online Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com
Boost Your Digital PR & Marketing Skills with Social Media Optimization
Posted on 21. Oct, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, content marketing, Marketing PR Conferences, PR Conferences, public relations, seo tools, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media optimization, social media seo, social media tools
By now you know I’m as sold as one can be on the intersection of Social Media, SEO and Content Marketing. It’s the essence of the core principles of information Discovery, Consumption and Engagement that I talk about in Optimize and at conferences like PRSA International in Orlando this week.
Information production, sharing and consumption is accelerating faster than marketers (or consumers) can keep up with. A lot of that information is user generated content from social sharing and networking sites. Internet Marketers have long been savvy about creating, optimizing and promoting content that’s findable and relevant for target audiences. Marketers aren’t the only corporate departments creating content in need of an audience though.
Public Relations, Media Relations, Corporate Communications, Investor Relations and many other groups part of corporate MarCom publish content to the web. Audiences may vary, from journalists and reporters doing story research to investors and potential business partners. Increasingly, PR departments are publishing direct to consumer news content, ala “brand as publisher”.
My presentation at PRSA International in Orlando focused on how PR practitioners can realize the emerging opportunities for shifts in consumer information trends, how PR content can be optimized and socialized, tools to scale and practical social media optimization tactics to elevate search visibility of social media and social news content. Here’s the embedded deck from Slideshare:
Here are the specific SEO tactics for social media in this presentation and links to other more in-depth articles on those topics:
- Blog SEO Tips – Blog Optimization – also check out our Blogging category with nearly 8 years of blog marketing tips.
- Facebook SEO - Facebook SEO Tips: Optimizing for an Audience of 800 Million
- LinkedIn SEO – Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile to Improve SEO for Your Company
- Twitter SEO – How to Use Twitter for SEO
- YouTube SEO – 5 Basic Tips for Video Optimization
- Google+ SEO – How Google+ Will Affect SEO for Your Website
Kikolani has some great social content SEO tips posted recently as well.
Also, here are the tools mentioned in the presentation:
- RavenTools – Paid tool. For basic SEO project management & reporting.
- SocialMention – Free social media search engine and social topic search tool.
- Google Keywords Tool – Free. Basic tool for researching which words/phrases are most used on Google and how competitive they are.
- Google Insights – Free. Shows trends and comparison of keyword phrase popularity (interest) over time plus geographic information.
- Ubersuggest – Free. Handy tool that makes Google autocomplete suggested search phrases usable. Works for Google.com and Google News queries.
- Scribe – Paid tool. WordPress plugin and standalone web service that provides real-time feedback on article keyword optimization.
- Majestic SEO – Paid tool. Think of this as a clipping report for links, including information about quantity, quality and type. Has a historical feature that’s quite handy for trending.
- SEMRush – Paid tool. Want to know what your site or your competitors’ sites are ranking for organically on Google? And their pay per click ads? This is the tool. Also has a trending and comparison feature.
There are many, many more Social Media Optimization and straight SEO tools out there – certainly many more that are advanced, private or for enterprise sized sites. These are basic, easy to use tools that are free or low cost that Public Relations and Communications professionals can use to optimize their news and social content for better keyword relevancy. More relevant (and links) means better visibility in search and a better user experience.
Thanks to PRSA for another great International conference!
Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
Boost Your Digital PR & Marketing Skills with Social Media Optimization | http://www.toprankblog.com
Core Content SEO Tools: Keyword Glossary & Editorial Plan
Posted on 18. May, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, content marketing, content plan, editorial plan, keyword glossary, seo tools, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
It’s funny when you work in an industry for a long time that the basic things you create to make life a little easier can save others who are new to the field, a lot of time. I’ve done a few webinars and speaking events in the past few months where one of the tools suggested was a Keyword Glossary (spreadsheet) for managing category and page level optimization, keyword mapping and competitor keyword mapping.
Another tool was an Editorial Plan that documents articles/blog posts, media, promotion and planned re-purposing. There are basic building blocks for becoming more efficient with search engine optimization tasks, but I’ve received a lot of requests for them. I thought they might be useful to our readers to use for inspiration to create their own and maybe even modify and mashup into something better.
Below are screen shots which you can click to see larger versions.
Basic Keyword Glossary
After conducting research using one of the various keyword research tools, organizing that information in a useful format like a Keyword Glossary helps SEOs manage their on page optimization and it brings a measure of accountability as well. The example of above shows a matrix of competitors sites that have been optimized for the target phrases, a list of primary and secondary phrases with measures of popularity and competitiveness. The phrases are also mapped to category levels or individual pages so you know which pages are being optimized for what keywords.
Basic Content Plan for a Blog
It’s no mystery that we like blogs as an online marketing, Social, SEO and content marketing tool. Planning content through an editorial calendar (as a magazine other publication would) is essential for producing content that is of interest to the target audience, that represent target keywords, and keeps authors on track and flush with ideas on what to write about.
The spreadsheet above shows dates for publishing, titles, keywords, categories, media used, cross-posting, promotion channels/tactics and future re-purposing of the content. Organizing an editorial plan like this helps online marketers gain maximum value for their investment into content creation and also makes curation more valuable.
The best tool or format depends on your own needs and applications. That’s why I don’t link to the actual spreadsheets – at least part of the reason. 
However, will be making the actual spreadsheets available at BlogWorld New York and the Vocus User’s Conference in Baltimore. Be sure you check out my sessions if you’re attending those events.
What kinds of templates have you created for managing SEO and content marketing tasks?
Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
Core Content SEO Tools: Keyword Glossary & Editorial Plan | http://www.toprankblog.com
Connect With Us Here:
