Online Marketing Blog

With the TopRank BIGLIST at over 450 blogs, it can be a more than a challenge to read so many RSS feeds to stay current on SEM industry news. SEO blogs and news feed aggregators can make it much easier to track what’s going on whether its news, tips or events. This post highlights two services that have launched recently including Alltop from Guy Kawasaki and socialblogroll from Nick Wilsdon along with several others.

Alltop

Launched by Guy Kawasaki, Alltop is based on popurls and shows top stories for selected SEO blogs plus a preview pop up.

socialblogroll

Nick Wilsdon launched socialblogroll along the lines of a popurls style blog aggregator, but ranks them according to the number of links identified in blogrolls of the known SEO blogs. The more other SEO blogs link to a certain blog, the higher up it shows. Clever.

With our BIGLIST of 400+ SEO blogs, it’s a great resource, but can be a bit overwhelming. There’s simply too much to monitor. That’s why I tend to favor a small number of news aggregators and sites via RSS or on the web. Here are a few of those tools:

The most recent SEO news aggregator I’ve been using is a new SEO channel from Original Signal that is not unlike popurls. It aggregates feeds from the likes of Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch and our own Online Marketing Blog. You can subscribe to the aggregated RSS feed or if you like visiting the web pages like I do, then there are some useful tools like being able to physically re-arrange the site feeds on the page and sorting the most popular posts of the entire category by day, week or month. You can also get code to syndicate the feed to your site or tap into the mobile version.

Everybody loves the social media site Digg, or they think they do. It happens to be the social news site that everyone wants to get on because of it’s history, possible traffic and exposure that can come from it. However, Digg is not good for a lot of industries. Instead, look for a Pligg site that is a better match for your news.

What’s Pligg? Pligg is an open source social news & voting software. Basically Digg. Anyone can download it for free and install it on their servers. Sites are popping up all over the internet that are like Digg, only targeted to different topics. This means that their users may be a better match for your stories and you may have better success with a Pligg powered site than Digg.

The Sphinn Dashboard Widget has been updated!

New in this version include the ability to choose between ‘Hot Sphinns’ and ‘New Sphinns’. You can also open two widgets and have each one showing different content so you never miss a thing.

The Mac widget can be downloaded on the Sphinn Dashboard Widget page.

[tags]sphinn, mac, dashboard, apple, widget[/tags]

Sphinn is showing up everywhere and, if you have a Mac, why not put it on your Dashboard with the Sphinn Dashboard Widget!?

The Sphinn Dashboard Widget pulls the ‘Hot Today’ and ‘New’ lists from the RSS feeds and displays them in the widget. This will help you keep up to date on the most popular or newest Sphinn topics without leaving your desktop.

A big thanks goes out to Fernando-Graphicos.com for putting up the basic feed reader tutorial.

Post any issues or feature requests in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

Download the Sphinn Dashboard Widget. – Mac Only.

[tags]sphinn,mac,dashboard,apple,widget[/tags]

Yesterday I gave out the Sphinn buttons, today you get a bookmarklet!

Sphinn This

To use the bookmarklet right click on the link above and bookmark the link. If you are in Firefox or Safari, you can also just drag it to your bookmarks bar. Then, when you are on a site with a great SEO/social media story, simply go to your bookmarks and hit the ‘Sphinn This’ button. You’ll then be sent to Sphinn.com’s submit page with the URL automagically inserted.

Enjoy!

[tags]Sphinn,Social-Media,bookmarklet[/tags]

You can now add a Sphinn button to your site to let visitors quickly submit your post to Sphinn, the SEO Digg clone from Search Engine Land.

Here is the button:

Feel free to download it and host it yourself. It also does measure up to Danny Sullivan’s button standards.

WordPress Code:
<a href="http://sphinn.com/submit?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>"><img src="http://www.toprankblog.com/downloads/sphinn.png" border="0" alt="Sphinn" title="Add to Sphinn"></a>

JavaScript Code:
<script type="text/javascript">
var URL = window.location.href;
document.write("<a href='http://sphinn.com/submit?url="+URL+"'><img src='http://www.toprankblog.com/downloads/sphinn.png' border='0' alt='Sphinn' title='Add to Sphinn'></a>")
</script>

I’ll be working on getting the Sphinn button into the social bookmark tool too in the upcoming week or so.

[tags]sphinn,search-engine-land,social-bookmark,digg[/tags]