Online Marketing Blog

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:

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.

Quality inbound links are an essential element of web site marketing and search engine optimization programs to increase traffic and online sales. The greater the number of relevant and authoritative links to a web page, the greater the potential for higher search engine rankings and qualified traffic.

A recent survey from SEOmoz illustrates just how important inbound links are to rankings. An impressive 4 of the top 5 ranking factors involve inbound links:

• Keyword focused anchor text from external links: 73% very high importance
• External link popularity: 71% very high importance
• Diversity of link sources: 67% very high importance
• Trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted domains: 66% very high importance

The first post-lunch session of day 3 of Pucon brought together a great mix of SEO experts including: Todd Malicoat, Rand Fishkin and last minute fill-in for Jessie Stricchiola, Andy Beal. Moderator duties were handled by Joe Laratro.

First up is Todd who covered 30 different tools which are too many to mention here but included tools for: browsers, domain server, keywords, competitive research, ranking checkers, backlink checking, on page optimization, spidering, productivity and tools for fixing duplicate content. but the most interesting included:

• User agent switcher allows you to surf the web as if you were a bot from an engine so you can see sites the way search engine spiders see them.
• Search Status Firefox plugin shows you various time saving information all in one place 

[Note from Lee: We tend to get a bit heavy on the industry observations and strategy, so a nice tactics/tools post is in order. ]

There are many different tools out there for SEO’s to use on a website. Each one has different features and benefits depending on how you use them. That’s why TopRank provides SEO Tool Reviews from time to time. We showcase different tools that you may or may not know about. Some free, some paid, all good.

The basis of this SEO tool review is Firefox. “Firefox a SEO tool”, you say? Alone, Firefox is not an SEO tool, but there are many extensions and toolbars that can be added to Firefox to extend it’s possibilities past basic web browsing.

What makes Firefox so great?

The Internet Marketing instructional program including videos and tools conceived by We Build Pages, has officially launched. I think a lot of people in the search marketing industry will be wowed by the sheer volume of quality information that’s available. Currently there are a series of 12 videos from the likes of Aaron Wall, Shoemoney, Neil Patel and Jim himself. Plus, most of the famous We Build Pages SEO and link building tools have been taken offline and included in the program along with many of the private WBP tools.

I was fortunate to be included in the program and Jim was good enough to take some time and answer a few questions about Internet Marketing Ninjas during the launch to cover how/why it was started, how he was able to get some of the smartest search marketers to give up their secrets and what future enhancements are in store.

Even though she’s moved on from Google to Zillow, Vanessa Fox still carries quite a bit of passion for her creation, Google Webmaster Tools which was renamed from Google sitemaps about a year ago. She was even spotted at the Google Dance giving advice to SES attendees at the Google Webmaster Tools product demo table.

Many webmasters and beginning search marketers could benefit a great deal from the features offered by Google Webmaster Tools so I asked Vanessa if she’d do a short video with me to provide a few tips.

For more info on Google Webmaster Central visit the blog.

The poll is closed and the results are in with 154 votes for the most recent TopRank OMB Reader Poll: Best Keyword Research Tools. The two long standing tools of choice for many search marketers, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker, battled it out and in the end, tied.

What surprised me was how popular the old Overture tool continues to be despite not being updated since January 2007. Perhaps that should spell an opportunity for Yahoo to somehow use the url for a new and improved keyword tool with ads for Panama on it.

• Keyword Discovery (18%)
• Wordtracker (18%)
• WordZe (15%)
• Google Keyword Tool (14%)
• SEO Digger (12%)
  
• Overture Keyword Selector (6%)
• SEO Boook Keyword Tool (3%)
• KeywordSpy (3%)

Aaron Wall published a number of nifty custom buttons for Google Toolbar in the past and now that Google Toolbar 4 is out, he’s posted a very nice collection:  Google Toolbar SEO Buttons under categories such as:  Link reputation/popularity, domain age, on-page content analysis, competitive analysis, blog link search, official search engine blogs, a nice collection of SEO related blogs and a “how to create your own buttons” tutorial. Nice.

A new keyword research tool called WordZe has launched this week and here is a quick review:

WordZe is a keyword research tool that shows detailed keyword searches, plus ways to track keywords well past their estimated daily search volume. The user data that powers WordZe comes from Internet portals and ISP logs from around the world.

“The tools that WordZe provides do more then just give users a general idea of how often a keyword is being search for, they also allow the user to track daily trends as keywords or industries fall and rise in popularity due to seasons or events in the news.”

WordZe also offers insight into the difficulty of ranking for certain phrases through a tool called WordRank.

Keyword Research Tool

Rand and company over at SEOmoz have come up with a slick tool called “Page Strength SEO Tool” for determining the importance and visibility of a web page. Factors considered range from age of domain to link quantity, sources and Page Rank. Basically, it serves as an alternative to Page Rank. More importantly, it serves as a form of linkbait for SEOMoz. But that’s been true about SEO tools for quite a long time. Tools that help webmasters and marketers promote their sites offer excellent linking opportunities.

While it’s not the same thing, Aaron’s SEO for Firefox tool also offers a way to get various pieces of information on a web page.

Aaron Wall announced in his “Above the Fold” newsletter yesterday the launch of a new SEO tool for Firefox. He also posted about SEO for Firefox on his SEOBook blog, generating a TON of feedback.

Says Aaron, “This tool was designed to add more data to Google and Yahoo! to make it easier to evaluate the value and competitive nature of a market.”

The tool allows you to perform various SEO research functions as you search Google or Yahoo – which is very different than the toolbar and right click options offered by tools like SEOpen. With SEO for Firefox, after each search result you’ll see a variety of information for each URL ranging from age of domain name to .edu & .gov links to del.ico.us and dmoz info. The SEO for Firefox tool can be toggled on or off universally, plus there are settings for each data point.