Posts Tagged ‘Search Tools and Resources’

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I’m big on reputation management tracking. I have well over 50 Google alerts set up at any one time. I track my own name, company name, blog name, names of my employees, names of my competitors, company names of my competitors and even my articles. All via Google Alerts.

So you know I had to be interested when I got an email about trackur, a new reputation monitoring tool from Andy Beal.

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We’ve finally been able to work out (most of) the bugs from CodeMonitor. For our users out there I apologize profusely. I know the darn thing has been broken for a long time and we’ve been working hard at getting it all put back together after several server changes. But it looks like that has finally happened.

As always, please submit any bug reports or upgrade requests to help us continue to make this tool better.

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Buying software is so 1999. I mean seriously, who wants to buck up and spend upwards of $500 on an office suite when you have bills to pay and lattes to drink. Plus, with everyone’s exciting New Year’s resolutions in full swing, saving money may be even more appealing. Enter the world of free web-based software and open source software. This list is obviously not comprehensive, nor authoritative, however, these ten programs are the ones I found most useful during 2007.

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In my last post, I linked to several helpful books and articles for anyone getting started or anyone interested in SEO Copywriting. I also included a few links to some blogs that I read regularly. Since last week’s post, those nine blogs have doubled (thank you to those who gave more suggestions).

Like many of you, I use a social bookmarking site to keep my blogs nice and neat and clean for me. I go to one site and am able to read all 18 blogs without having to go the actual blog site unless necessary. Pretty convenient, right?

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Site Clinic

The first session of the last day was site clinic, hosted by Shari Thurow and Matt Bailey. In this session, audience members’ web sites were reviewed from a usability and SEO standpoint. The site clinic brought about many good tips and ideas:

• Always have call to actions above the fold
• Keep higher ranking word links above the fold
• Stay away from blue text unless using it for links
• Give users a sense of place on every page by using breadcrumbs
• Use benefit-oriented copy to show users what your products would do for them
• Utilize a context rewrite module for long URL’s
• Check your site using Yahoo! Site Explorer to discover link structure

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Everyone, at some point, wishes they had a magic mirror like the one in Snow White. One place where you could get the scoop on yourself. In one moment, the Evil Queen could find out for certain whether she really was the “fairest one of all.”

And, really, it wasn’t how she looked that she was trying to figure out anyway. Any mirror can tell you that. She wanted to know what people thought of her- beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all.

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SEOMoz’s recent release of Search Engine Ranking Factors Version 2 has generated a lot of buzz within the SEO industry. More accurately it has received tremendous praise and is being hailed as the “final answer” to search optimization for Google. After carefully reviewing this hopeful work which is said to;

“…represent the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization”

which:

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Last week I wrote that a search engine friendly website is not the same as a search engine optimized website. While that is a good article in and of itself, I’m using that as a jump off point to start a short series on the topic of building a search engine friendly website. Just in case you haven’t caught on yet, this is the first post in that series.

As a quick aside, and along these lines, over at search engine guide I made an argument for website validation as an important part of the optimization process. I don’t believe 100% validation makes a difference for rankings, but I outlined there why it is worth taking the time to do. At the very least it helps you identify search engine unfriendly problems.

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I feel compelled to begin with a little disclaimer: in no way was today’s blogging activity here at PPM orchestrated to be a pick on Rand day. We openly praise and discuss much of Rand’s work here at the office and we are very much fans of SEOMoz.

With that said…

Today I was reading an interesting post over at SEOMoz in which Rand put forth the idea that perhaps submitting a Google sitemap could be detrimental as it may cause pages to be indexed which are unworthy of inclusion in the index (Google SpamMaps?) . The main point that I got from the post was that non-inclusion served as a pass/fail metric to indicate the strength of a given page.

I have a couple of problems with Rand’s position. Firstly I can state with a good deal of certainty that inclusion in a Google sitemap does not equal inclusion in Google’s index. I have experienced this first-hand and I’m quite certain that Google is still evaluating index worthiness of individual pages, even those crawled via sitemap.

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Everyday I see at least 1 new “SEO Tool” on the web. Generally they are copycats of existing tools as this is an area that SEO’s have beaten to death. Over the years I have encountered thousands of so-called SEO tools most of which are simply of no unique value. Occasionally I do however come across something truly valuable which either simplifies my life or enhances my productivity. If such a tool also proves itself to be useful into the future it is immortalized by gaining entrance into Jason’s SEO Toolbox..

Today I will be sharing 2 of my favorite search tools. These are either search engines which furnish search results in a new and innovative way or search services which enhance or refine the search results of traditional search engines.

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