Archive for the ‘Search Tools and Resources’ Category

RSS feeds have made it easy to monitor and track news stories, blog posts and certain websites for important updates. But not every site has an RSS feed that you can track, nor does every change made constitute an RSS update.

In the world of online marketing, tracking changes to competitor, client and industry related websites can not only help you stay current on important issues, but can also help you gather additional competitive intelligence data simply and easily. RSS is great, but its not everywhere. For tracking what you can’t with RSS, we have developed the CodeMonitor Page Tracking tool.

While your reasons for wanting to track pages may vary, here are a few common reasons that don’t always lend themselves to RSS.

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I finally got the full results in the mail for the online marketing class I taught at our local community college. I was graded on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being “strongly disagree” to 5 being “strongly agree”.

Shows knowledge of this subject
average: 5.0

OK, so at least I know what I’m talking about. Though I have to admit that it’s not often hard to convey superior knowledge to a group of people who know little to nothing about a particular topic. It’s more important that they actually learn something!

Is well-prepared
average: 3.75

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Yes, you heard it, there will be a new Search Engine Marketing magazine coming out in May and will be a quarterly publication.

“Their first issue will hold about 40 pages, and would be the first magazine devoted solely to search marketing. Publisher Boris Mordkovich commented that, ‘The goal of the magazine is to bring all of the information that’s floating out there to end-users that need it to improve their advertising campaigns in a simple yet effective way.’ “

If you want to receive 4 free issues (a year’s subscription) of this (hopefully) awesome magazine, just go to the homepage at Searchmarketingstandard.com and fill out the short form.

The E-Marketing Performance e-book has finally arrived!

E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building Optimizing and Marketing Your Website Online

Go beyond search engine optimization and learn how to get maximum performance from your website starting from the ground up. Search engine optimization, while important, is only one component to increasing your web site’s exposure on the Internet. Learn how to incorporate your SEO campaign into a much broader e-marketing campaign designed to transform your site into a high-performance marketing machine.

Buy the E-Marketing Performance E-Book for only $97 today.

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CodeMonitor has just been upgraded from beta .3 to beta .5, with some exciting new features.

• Improved HTML Code Comparison
  Previously CodeMonitor would highlight an entire line of code when a small edit in that line of code had been made. This made it difficult to pinpoint the change made in exceptionally long lines of code. The new version of CodeMonitor will now only highlight the actual code changed, rather than the full line of code, making spotting coding changes that much easier.
• New Comparison Views
  CodeMonitor now allows you to switch to two new comparison views, along with the standard “code” view.

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A programmer by the name of Webmasterbrain has just put out a neat Firefox extension tool for SEOs.

“The SEO Links extension gives you tooltips specially enhanced for SEOs. When enabled, hovering any link in Firefox will show you Yahoo, MSN, and Google link popularity and ranking data for the URL and anchor text pair. For times you just want regular surfing and tooltips, the extension can be quickly toggled on and off in a single click.”

Check it out and see a screenshot of the tool in action.

Yahoo and MSN are working to bridge he gap between their two instant messengers making them compatible with each other. For years now Trellian has offered an instant messenger that integrates with other IMs, but this is a first time that the actual IM services have chosen to work together.

This is something that should have happened a long time ago. Imagine if your Sprint cell phone could only call other sprint customers. Or that your T-Mobile cell phone would not allow you to call your friends that use Verizon. We’d be carrying multiple cell phones just to be able to take calls from all our friends and family.

This is the mess that instant messengers have been in. Some people have messenger accounts for MSN, Yahoo, AOL, GoogleTalk and ICQ. Trellian had been about the only way to combine all of these into one service, but the downside to that was you had to register for an IM account at EACH one.

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A Cannadian search engine, Search for it has added a handy little tool to their arsenal. Search For It has “developed their own fraud-prevention technology for their advertisers.”

“Click fraud is an elusive problem for advertisers, and even industry experts disagree on the extent of the problem. Studies estimate that click fraud accounts for anywhere from 10 percent to 30 percent of all clicks.”

They call it “Fraud Print” and it runs a series of tests on the user’s computer’s electronic “fingerprint” to try to determine if the click was legitimate or not.

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I love analogies. I just thought of another one to describe search features such as Yahoo’s Instant Search and Google’s Suggest.

I think of it as walking into a library, asking for information on X and the librarian handing you a book and saying, here you go. Sure, the book may be just what you want, on the other hand, it might only provide you a fraction of what you need. Aren’t you better off being directed to the section of the library that contains dozens of book about your topic, rather than just one?

Recommendations are nice, but they should never be allowed to substitute the full spectrum of sources available.

PRESS RELEASE: Pole Position Marketing Releases Advanced ROI Calculator for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Online Marketing Clients.

Reno, Nevada September 1, 2005 – Pole Position Marketing (www.PolePositionMarketing.com), a leading provider of online marketing and search engine optimization solutions, has announced a major upgrade to its ROI (return on investment) calculator. The upgrade is designed to give their SEO clients greater leverage in tracking their online advertising campaigns.

An essential component to Pole Position Marketing’s client reporting suite, the ROI calculator now features comprehensive tracking capabilities that summarize expenses and results across a broad range of online campaigns including radio buys, sponsored ads and more.

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