With all the trends and information on the Web, and with more popping up daily, how does Google stay on top of it all? According to Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, the search giant focuses on satisfying the customer. Even if customers want outdated information, Google strives to meet their needs.

Norvig also discusses the search engine’s famous PageRank and how it is often misinterpreted. As he explains to WebProNews, PageRank is a technical formula that is a way to evaluate links between pages. However, he quickly points out, “That’s just one component of how we rank the pages…”

In addition, Google wants to understand what the pages, images, and video across the Web are talking about. It wants to connect people, places, and companies not only in a hyperlink way, but also in a way that connects these items with objects in the real world.

Mike McDonald of WPN also asks Norvig about Google’s stance on consolidating formats. Since users can distribute content through Email, Twitter, Blogs, Google Buzz, and many other outlets, will these distribution channels ever consolidate?

Norvig says the Web is structured in a way that gives users multiple options. He goes on to say that we are starting to see “bridges” such as a retweet, which allows users to take media off of one page and publish it on another media outlet. From this model, he believes the best aspects will evolve and form into new formats.

What are your thoughts on these trends and how they affect users?

When you think about the future of search, what do you think of? WebProNews recently had the opportunity to talk with Eli Goodman of comScore about this topic when we visited the company’s New York offices. While some might think of mobile and social media, Goodman thinks about search technology and the searchers themselves. As he explains, technology and the searcher affect one another and will continue to do so moving forward.

When we look at the future of search, we must also look at the history of search. In the early days, the technology did not deliver relevant results for users. But now the technology has caught up. As a result, the user is now doing more specific, longer tail searches and is still getting relevant results.

Moving into the future of search, will the users or technology change? Up to this point, Goodman says that the technology has been changing. In regards to the future, he says, “Technology is going to be driving what are some changes as far as user behavior goes, or where you might go.”

On the searcher side, where users search is another influencing factor in the future of search. Although searches within social media sites are growing, the major search engines are still the biggest drivers of search, since they power most social sites.

So, as search evolves, how will SEO change? Goodman says search engine optimization will always change but will always remain important.

How do you see searchers and technology influencing search in the future and how will SEO evolve?

Posted by great scott!

Earlier this week Facebook announced its ‘Open Graph’ at F8. There was all sorts of hubbub (much of it the bye-product of well-orchestrated buzz) about Facebook finally making strides to kill Google’s dominance of the web.  So should you hangup your white hat, your black hat, your grey hat, and trade it all in for a blue hat?  Much as we love Facebook, the answer, dear reader, is no: SEO is not dead. 

Watch this week’s video to hear Rand’s take on how Facebook’s ‘Open Graph’ will impact web marketing and all the ways it won’t.  There are all sorts of opportunities that will likely emerge out of this new technology, so you should pay attention. So go ahead and keep an eye out for a nice fitting blue hat in the near future, but don’t plan to throw away your white hat anytime soon.

The sticker we received

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by JoannaLord

When it comes to marketing your brand online there is just so much to do. We spend our days researching, creating, implementing, and then measuring the success of our efforts. There are dozens of channels to participate in, and obviously thousands of ways to go about marketing your brand, but however you slice it—online marketing comes down to introducing new audiences to your brand, keeping your current brand users happy, and evolving the brand/company itself.

Unfortunately I think the first two steps often overshadow that third step to the process—evolving the brand/company itself, probably because to grow as a company you really need to take a pause and evaluate where you are currently standing. As marketers, the idea of pausing is equated with losing momentum which scares the hell out of us all. This industry moves too quickly, and pausing to reflect on where your brand is compared to your competitors seems like time poorly spent.

I am here to argue just the opposite. A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at PubCon South on “Competitive Intelligence on the Social Web,” and I wanted to extract a few of my key arguments and offer them up the SEOmoz audience both as thought provokers and for feedback. In my opinion competitive intelligence is one of those marketing steps we all say we did, but few of us rarely do. It’s true. Most of us are big fat liars when it comes to “doing competitive intelligence.”

For example, competitive intelligence IS NOT:

• Sitting in a room and ranting about your competitor’s latest marketing move
• Grabbing lunch with your Product Manager and creating a roadmap based on what your competitors have that you don’t.
• Putting together a grid of you and your competitor’s website’s traffic stats, never to be looked at again.
• Googling your competitor’s brand name to see what latest things are noted in the SERP’s

Sorry friends that is not competitive intelligence.

However, competitive intelligence IS:

• Understanding what direction your competitor’s are headed & how that might intersect or parallel your own
• Knowing what products you are pushing out and how they match up or differ from your competitor’s
• Mapping out a list of key differentials and attributes for your biggest competitors and yourself
• Researching & monitoring a variety of platforms to better understand your competitors

Okay now that we all have a better sense of what it is, let’s talk about how to do it.  Instead of throwing a 20-slide PowerPoint at you I thought I would dilute it down to a few key steps toward understanding your competitive landscape, and perhaps more importantly I want to tie those into how you can use this information for company gains.

The Grid of Awesomeness:
Okay maybe that name is a bit of an exaggeration, but either way, the first key step toward understanding your competitors is getting them all down on paper and forcing yourself to research key attributes. I have included below an example grid that you can use to get you started.

You might ask yourself—how do I know which competitors to include? This can differ depending on the size of your company and the scope of your industry but a great place to start is the “3-1-1 rule”. I usually suggest you pick 3 brands that are often grouped with yours, either in roundup articles, or in conversation. Those are your primary competitors. Then choose one “dreamer,” which would be the brand in your vertical you hope to be one day. Lastly, I suggest including one “newbie” in your competitive analysis, this is assuming that isn’t you of course. By picking a newbie in your industry you can often gain perspective into where your industry is moving, and key marketing channels to consider since they tend to operate pretty lean.

After you have chosen your competitors I suggest filling out the following for them: name, size, products, features, price points, affiliate program description (do they have one? What are the key attributes?), playing grounds (what channels, platforms, communities are they dominating?), advocates/influencers (who is lobbying for them?), notes. Don’t forget to fill this out for your company as well!

Example Grid:

Product Growth & Benchmarking:
This is perhaps the most time consuming element to competitive intelligence when it is done well. There needs to be someone in charge of competitive intelligence maintenance. This person should subscribe to your competitor’s blog so you are hearing about product launches as they happen, and all company announcements in real time. You can also gain a lot of insight from reading the comments to those posts.

In addition to this you should set up Google Alerts for your competitor’s brand plus the words “launches” and “announces.” We all know that Google Alerts are limited and somewhat unreliable, but you should have a daily digest set to notify you of any big moves your competitor’s are making. You never know which could be a real momentum changer.

The last step to this is really to keep a pulse on the traffic growth to their sites by checking Alexa or Compete monthly. While it may seem a strain on your time and resources it’s beneficial for you to know what momentum trajectory your competitor’s are on.

Monitoring Mentions:
This is what most people think competitive intelligence is. While it’s not the only piece to the competitive intelligence puzzle, it certainly is an important one. There are so many tools available to us (most free) that help us keep an eye on what our competitors do…it’s actually a bit creepy how many tools and sites are out there to help us be shady. I personally support this shadiness.

Some examples would include sites like: Whostalkin, SocialMention, Backtype, etc. All of these allow you to search a competitor’s brand or products and find out the latest things said about them. These social web aggregators search a number of channels like images, videos, blogs, new feeds, etc. They are great for understanding how a product launch might have gone for a competitor or how any other announcement was received.

Other ways to spy on your competitor’s in the social web—create private twitter lists and monitor their brand and employee’s feeds, sign up for competitor’s newsletters, etc. The key is know where they are pushing out the most crucial information and then making sure you have someone dabbling in that space.

Hiring Espionage:
Now that you have a sense of where your competitor’s currently stand and what they are doing right now, it’s time to spy on them and try to figure out their next moves. Hiring espionage is a great way to do this. You can gain a great sense of where your competitors are moving by looking at who they are investing in from an employee perspective.

A great way to do this is to keep an eye on their company job listings, and occasionally throw their brand into a job meta-engine. The best possible place to spy on hiring moves is by going to LinkedIn and finding their company profile page. There is a section down at the bottom that shows recent hires. You can defer tons of information from this section—are they hiring a bunch of sales people? Top-level engineers? Whatever team they are stacking up is probably the team they are focusing on.

The Takeaway:
The important thing to remember is that competitive intelligence isn’t something you do once and never revisit again. It also isn’t something that you can base on intuition or informal conversations with coworkers. Competitive intelligence is a key process that can be used to inform instrumental decisions you make. The better you understand your competitors the clearer perspective you have on your industry and audience as a whole. Competitive intelligence enables you to better speak on your strengths, brainstorm ideas for quick gains, and make more data-driven decisions all around.

Plus you get to pretend you are a spy which is just all sorts of fun (please note trench coat and night vision goggles are optional).
 

Do you like this post? Yes No

A few weeks ago I asked readers to submit video blog tips to share with the wider ProBlogger readership. The idea was that we’d get a variety of useful blog tips on how to blog – but that we’d also get a bit of a snapshot of some of the faces and voices of the community here at ProBlogger.

To this point we’ve had 30 blog tip videos submitted and over the next few days I’m going to feature them (10 at a time) here on ProBlogger.

Before I get to them – a HUGE thanks to those who submitted these videos. There are some great tips in them and it is great to see such a variety of techniques and creativity used in the production of the videos (I also found it really inspiring to see all your faces – it’s amazing how wonderful it is to see and hear the people who read this blog in this way) – so thanks!

please click through on the links to visit the blogs of those who created these videos and if you find one that resonates with you please share the video with your own network.

by Nate Riggs

by Julie Weishaar

by Eric Dobson

by Susan

by Brett

by Ciprian Rusen

by Paul Cunningham

by Greg Friese

by Nick Stewart

by David

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Blog: 10 Great Blog Tips from Our Readers

Share This

It’s been a couple of days since we launched the 2nd edition of ProBlogger the book and I’m hearing from many of readers who bought a copy that they’re finding parcels with it enclosed in their mail boxes.

The above video was produced by our publishers (Wiley) and is both a preview of the book but also holds some tips for bloggers from my co-author, Chris Garrett and I (filmed in Austin earlier in the year – one of the few times Chris and I have met in person).

In it we talk about some of the new stuff in the book but also talk about the challenges and benefits of blogging as well as each sharing 3-4 tips for bloggers wanting to make a living from the medium. View the video at full size here.

Bonuses for Owners of the Book

In my post earlier in the week when I launched the 2nd edition I mentioned some bonuses for those who buy it yet I failed to mention what they were. There are a growing numbers of bonuses included.

The bonus area includes:

• a number of interviews with bloggers making a living from blogging
• a video on installing WordPress
• a pdf report with 102 headline ideas for posts
• a pdf on blog traffic strategy.

Chris and I will be recording a few others in the coming week to add to this list. There are details on how to get access to the bonuses in the book itself.

If you don’t yet have a copy – it’s just $16.49 on Amazon.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

More on Why You Need ProBlogger the Book [Video Tips and Bonuses]

Share This

Just as people want to get-rich-quick, they also want their business to take off quickly and be successful. Unfortunately, in the real world, success doesn’t come that easily.

WebProNews recently spoke with Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV and VaynerMedia about finding success in business. He told us, “You cannot build a real business unless you work your butt off.”

As he further explained, to build a lasting and sustainable business or brand takes years. He advises people to get heavily involved and interact with their community. In addition, he says brands need to understand the power of social media and realize that there is power in it.

To get further advice from Vaynerchuk, check out his latest book, Crush It!

Conductor recently conducted a report regarding search trends and Fortune 500 companies. As Seth Dotterer of Conductor tells WebProNews, the company did the report to determine where it is that Fortune 500 companies are spending their money.

They found that these companies are spending a lot of money on paid search. Interestingly enough, they are not investing in natural search despite the many opportunities there.

In the report, Conductor looked at 6.7 million keywords and found that only 2 percent of the companies involved showed a significant percentage of keywords in the top 30 results. In other words, these companies are spending millions of dollars daily on PPC and yet only 2 percent showed up in the top 30 results.

The report also found that more than 50 percent of the companies were not showing up at all. In reality, Dotterer says that these keywords would be found if these companies ranked in organic search. In addition, the companies would not have to spend as much for natural search.

“As people started to get more and more specific about what they were searching for, Fortune 500 tanked even further,” adds Dotterer.

In the end, natural search has many opportunities that PPC does not. In addition, companies could save a lot of wasted money by investing some of their time on the organic side of search.

Are you utilizing the opportunities natural search provides?

While at SXSW, WebProNews caught up with Kyle Mulka of Congo Labs. Mulka is currently working on a Twitter application called Twilk that is quickly gaining popularity.

Twilk is a Twitter background generator that takes a user’s followers on Twitter to create a photo collage out of their icons. The application sorts followers based on how much the user tweets about them and gives prominent placement to the people tweeted about the most.

Many people are using Twilk as a way to reward their followers for following them. Others just like seeing their friends’ faces on their background. For businesses that use the application, Twilk allows them to exclude certain people such as competitors and other people that they do not want to show up.

Mulka told WPN that they would like to develop the background to the point that it is clickable. For more information on Twilk, visit their site.

Posted by randfish

Last November, I authored a popular post on SEOmoz detailing 15 SEO Problems and the Tools to Solve Them. It focused on a number of free tools and SEOmoz PRO tools. Today, I’m finishing up that project with a stab at another set of thorny issues that continually confound SEOs and how some new (and old) tools can come to the rescue.

Some of these are obvious and well known; others are obscure and brand new. All of them solve problems – and that’s why tools should exist in the first place. Below, you’ll find 20+ tools that answer serious issues in smart, powerful ways.

#1 – Generating XML Sitemap Files

The Problem: XML Sitemap files can be challenging to build, particularly as sites scale over a few hundred or few thousand URLs. SEOs need tools to build these, as they can substantively add to a site’s indexation and potential to earn search traffic. 

Tools to Solve It: GSiteCrawler, Google Sitemap Generator

GSiteCrawler: Downloadable software to create XML Sitemaps

Download a few files from Google Code and Install on Your Webserver

Looks like Google Webmaster Tools, doesn’t it?

Both GSiteCrawler & Google Sitemap Generator require a bit of technical know-how, but even non-programmers (like me) can stumble their way through and build efficient and effective XML Sitemaps.

#2 – Tracking the Virality of Blog/Feed Content

The Problem: Even experienced bloggers have trouble predicting which posts will "go wide" and which will fall flat. To improve your track record, you need historical data to help show you where and how your posts are performing in the wild world of social media. What’s needed is a cloud based tracking tool that can sync up with the Twitters, Facebooks, Diggs, Reddits, Stumbleupons & Delicious’ of the web to provide these metrics in an easy-to-use, historical view.

Tools to Solve It: PostRank Analytics

PostRank’s nightly emails keep me wracking my brains for better blog post ideas

PostRank sends me nightly reports on how the SEOmoz blog performs across the web – numbers from Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook and more. By using this, I can get a rough sense of how posts perform in the social media marketplace and, over time, hopefully train me to author more interesting content.

Addition: Melanie from Postrank added a discount code in the comments for SEOmoz users! Use the coupon code "SEOmoz" in order to get three free months instead of just one.

#3 – Comparing the Relative Traffic Levels of Multiple Sites

The Problem: We all want to know not only how we’re doing with web traffic, but how it compares to the competition. Free services like Compete.com and Alexa have well-documented accuracy problems and paid services like Hitwise, Comscore & Nielsen cost an arm and a leg (and even then, don’t perform particularly well with sites in the sub-million visits/month range).

Tools to Solve It: Quantcast, Google Trends for Websites

If a site has been "Quantified," no other competitive traffic tool on the web will be as accurate

Since both sites are "Quantified," I can be sure the data quality is excellent

I’ve complained previously about the inaccuracies of Alexa (as have many others). It’s really for entertainment purposes only. Compete.com is better, but still suffers from lots of inaccuracy, data gaps, directionally wrong estimates and a general feeling of unreliability in the marketplace. Quantcast, on the other hand, is excellent for comparing sites that have entered their "Quantified" program. This involves putting Quantcast’s tracking code onto each page of the site; you’re basically peeking into their analytics.

Sadly, Quantcast isn’t on every site (and their guesstimates appear no better than Compete when they don’t have direct data). Fortunately, one organization has stepped up with a surprisingly good alternative – Google.

Google Trends for Websites allows you to plug in domains and see traffic levels. Much like AdWords Keyword Tool, the numbers themselves seem to run high, but the comparison often looks much better. Google Trends has become the only traffic estimator I trust – still only as far as I could throw a Google Mini, but better than nothing.

#4 – Seeing Pages the Way Search Engine Do

The Problem: Every engineering & development team builds web pages in unique ways. This is great for making the Internet an innovative place, but it can make for nightmares when optimizing for search engines. As professional SEOs, we need to be able to see pages, whether in development environments or live on the web the same way the engines do.

Tools to Solve It: SEO-Browser, Google Cached Snapshot, New Mozbar

_
A longtime favorite site of mine, SEO Browser lets you surf like an engine

_
Poor Google; that’s all they see when they crawl our pretty site

SEO-Browser is a great way to get a quick sense of what the engines can see as they crawl your site’s pages and links. The world of engines may seem a bit drab, but it can also save your hide in the event that you’ve put out code or pages that engines can’t properly parse.

_
I wonder if Googlebot ever gets tired of blue, purple and gray…

Google’s own cached snapshot of a page (available via a search query, as a bookmarklet, or in the mozbar’s dropdown) is the ultimate research tool to know what the engine "sees." The only trouble is that it works in the past only (and only on pages that allow caching). To get a preview, SEO Browser or our friend below can be useful.

The mozbar lets you dress up like Google whenever the occasion is right

One of Will Critchlow’s feature requests in the new mozbar was the ability to switch user agents, turn off JavaScript and images and, in essence, become the bot in your browser. Luckily, he also forced us to place a gray overlay in the right-hand corner that alerts you to the settings you’ve changed and gives you an easy, one-click "return to normal." Browsing like a bot = solved!

#5 – Identifying Crawl Errors

The Problem: Discovering problems on a site like 302 redirects (that should be 301s), pages that are blocked by robots.txt (here’s why that’s a bad idea), missing title tags, duplicate/similar content, 40x and 50x errors, etc. is a task no human can efficiently perform. We need the help of robots – automated crawlers who can dig through a site, find the issues and notify us.

Tools to Solve It: GSiteCrawler, Xenu, GGWMT

Mmmm… Parallel Threads

She canna hold on much longer cap’n!

We’ve already covered GSiteCrawler in this post, but for those unaware, it can be a great diagnostic tool as well as a Sitemap builder. Xenu is much the same, though somewhat more intuitive for this purpose. Tom’s written very elegantly about it in the past, so I won’t rehash much, other than to say – it shows errors & potential issues Google Webmaster Tools doesn’t, and that can be a lifesaver.

Doh! I think we messed up some stuff when KW Difficulty relaunched

Google Webmaster Tools is extremely popular, well known and well used. And yet… lots of us still have crawl errors we haven’t addressed (just look at the 500+ problems on SEOmoz.org in the screenshot above). Exporting to Excel, sorting, and sending to engineering with fixes for each type of issue can save a lot of heartache and earn back a lot of lost traffic and link juice.

#6 – Determine if Links to Your Site Have Been Lost

The Problem: Sites don’t always do a great job maintaining their pages and links (according to our data, 75% of the web disappears in 6 months). Many times, these vanishing pages and links are of great interest to SEOs, who want to know whether their link acquisition and campaigning efforts are being maintained. But how do you confirm if the links to your site that were built last month are still around today?

Tools to Solve It: Virante’s Link Atrophy Diagnosis

Does that mean Stuntdubl & SEOmoz are "going steady?"

This tool comes courtesy of the great team over at Virante, and it’s a pretty terrific application of an SEO need and Linkscape data through the SEOmoz API. The tool will check the links reported from Linkscape/Open Site Explorer and determine which, if any, have been lost. Many times it’s just links off the front page of blogs or news sites as archives fall to the back, but sometimes it can help you ID a link partner or source that’s no longer pointing your way in order to facilitate a quick, painless reclamation. The best part is there’s no registration or installation required – it’s entirely plug and play.

Addition: Russ from Virante added a discount code in the comments for SEOmoz users! Use the coupon code "seomoz30" in order to get more results from these tools.

#7 – Find 404 Errors on a Site (without GG WM Tools) and Create 301s

The Problem: Google’s Webmaster Tools are great for spotting 404s, but the data can be, at times, unwieldy (as when thousands of pages are 404ing, but only a few of them really matter) and it’s only available if you can get access to the Webmaster Tools account (which can stymie plenty of SEOs in the marketing department or from external consultancies). We need a tool to help spot those important, highly linked-to 404s and turn them into 301s. 

Tools to Solve It: Virante’s PageRank Recovery Tool

3.99 mozRank for ~0.00 effort

The thinking behind this tool is brilliant, because it solves a problem from end to end. By not only grabbing well-linked-to pages that 404, but actually writing the code to create an .htaccess file with 301s to your choice of pages, the tool is a "no-brainer" solution.

#8 - See New Links that are Sending Traffic (and Old Ones that Have Stopped)

The Problem: Most analytics tools have an export function that, combined with some clever Excel, could help you puzzle out the sites/pages that have started to send you traffic (and those that once were but have stopped). It’s a pain – manual labor, easy to screw up and not a particularly excellent use of your precious time.

Tools to Solve It: Enquisite

I love the ability to look across the past few months and see the trend of new pages and new domains sending links, as well as identifying links that have stopped sending traffic. Some of those may be ripe for reclamation, others might just need a nudge to mention or link over in their next piece/post. This report is also a great way to judge how link building campaigns are performing on the less-SEO focused pivot, sending direct traffic.

#9 – Research Trending/Temporal Popularity of Keywords

The Problem: Keyword demand fluctuates over time, sometimes with little warning. Knowing how search volume is impacted by trending and geography is critical to SEOs targeting fields with these demand fluxes.

Tools to Solve It: Google Insights, Trendistic

Hmmm…. Maybe we should launch Open Webmaster Tools next?

We need to make it out to India & Brazil more often, too!

Google Insights is great for seeing keyword trending, related terms and countries of popularity (though the last of these we’ve found to be somewhat suspect at times). However, sometimes you’re really interested in what’s about to become popular. For that, turning to trend sites can be a big help.

Although it doesn’t yet have a "suggest" feature to help identify terms & phrases that may soon become popular searches, it does help establish the "tipping point" at which a buzzword in Twitter may become a trend in web search. As we’ve discussed in the WhiteBoard Friday on Twitter as an SEO Research Tool, finding the spot at which search volume begins spiking can present big opportunities for fresh content.

#10 – Analyze Domain Ownership & Hosting Data

The Problem: When researching domains to buy, considering partnerships or conducting competitive analysis, data about a site’s hosting and ownership can be essential steps in the process.

Tools to Solve It: Domaintools

We should make sure to re-register this domain…

Long the gold standard in the domainer’s toolbox, DomainTools (once called whois.sc) provides in-depth research about a domain’s owners, their server and, sometimes most interestingly, the other domains owned by that entity. BTW – they’re spot on; SEOmoz owns about 80 other domains besides our own (though we only really use this one and OpenSiteExplorer right now).

#11 – Investigate a Site/Page’s History

The Problem: What happened on this page last month or last year? When conducting web research about links, traffic and content, we all need the ability to go "back in time" and see what had previously existed on our sites/pages (or those of competitors/link sources/etc). Did traffic referrals drop? Have search rankings changed dramatically? Did a previously available piece of content fall off the web? The question really is – how do we answer these questions?

Tools to Solve It: Wayback Machine

Before 2005, we were on a different domain!

_
If you remember this version of the site, you’re officially "old school"

Yeah, yeah, you’ve probably heard of the Wayback Machine, powered by Alexa’s archive of the Internet and endlessly entertaining to web researchers and pranksters alike. What might surprise you is how valuable it can be as an SEO diagnostic tool, particularly when you’re performing an investigation into a site that doesn’t keep good records of its activity. Reversing a penalty, a rankings drop, an oddity in traffic, etc. can consume massive amounts of time if you don’t know where to look and how. Add Wayback to the CSI weapons cache – it will come in handy.

#12 - Determine Semantically Connected Terms/Phrases

The Problem: Chances are, the search engines are doing some form of semantic analysis (looking at the words and phrases on a page around a topic to determine its potential relevance to the query). Thus, employing these "connected" keywords on your pages is a best practice for good SEO (and probably quite helpful to users in many cases as well). The big question is – which words & phrases are related (in the search engines’ eyes) to the ones I’m targeting?

Tools to Solve It: Google Wonder Wheel

_
Nothing about "Yellow Shoes?"

We don’t know for certain that this is a technique that provides massive benefit, but we’re optimistic that tests are going to show it has some value. If you’d like to participate in the experiment, take related phrases from the Wonder Wheel and employ on your pages. Please do report back with details

#13 – Analyze a Page’s Optimization of Images

The Problem: When image search and image accessibility/optimization is critical to your business/client, you need tools to help analyze a page’s consistency and adherence to best practices in handling image dimensions, alt attributes, etc.

Tools to Solve It: Image Analyzer from Juicy Studio

 
Doh! We need to add some dimensions onto our images.

It’s not the prettiest tool in the world, but it does get the job done. The image analyzer will give any page a thorough evaluation, showing missing alt tags, image dimensions (which can help with page rendering speed) and informing you of the names/alts in a thorough list. If you have image galleries you’re aiming at image search optimization, this is a great diagnostic system.

#14 – Instant Usability Testing

The Problem: Fast feedback on a new landing page, product page, tool design or web page (of any kind) can be essential to smoothing over rough launches. But tools aren’t enough – we need actual human beings (and not the biased ones in our friend groups or company) giving fast, functional feedback. That’s a challenge.

Tools to Solve It: Five Second Test, Feedback Army

It can’t be that easy, can it?

Wow… It totally is! Here I am helping give feedback to a local geek squad.

Users are easier to come by than we think

Both FeedbackArmy & FiveSecondTest offer the remarkable ability to get instant feedback from real users on any page, function or tool you want to test at a fraction of the price normal usability testing requires. What I love is that because it’s so easy, it makes that first, critical step of reaching out to users a low barrier to entry. Over time, I hope systems like these help make the web as a whole a more friendly, easy-to-use experience. Now there’s not excuse!

#15 – Measure Tweet Activity to a URL Across Multiple URL Shortener Platforms

The Problem: You’ve got your bit.ly, your j.mp, your tinyurl, your ow.ly and dozens more URL shorteners. Between this plethora of options and standard HTML links pasted into tweets, keeping up with all the places your URL is being shared can be a big challenge.

Tools to Solve It: Backtweets

Tweeting links in the middle of the night is fun!

Bit.ly can track bit.ly and many other services offer their own tracking systems, but only Backtweets is aggregating all of the sources and making it easy to see what people are saying about your pages no matter how they encode it. Now if only we could get this to integrate with PostRank and Search.Twitter.com and Trendistic and make the interface super-gorgeous and have it integrate with Google Analytics… and… and…

#16 – BONUS: Determining Keyword Competition Levels

Bonus! I mentioned last week in a comment that I’d make a post about the new Keyword Difficulty Tool. Since this post is all about tools anyway, I figured I’d toss it in and save you the trouble of clicking an extra link in your feedreader.

The Problem: Figuring out which keywords have more/less demand than which others is easy (and Google does a great job of it most of the time).

Tools to Solve It: New Keyword Difficulty Tool

The real problem was that our previous keyword difficulty tool attempted to use 2nd order effects and non-direct metrics to estimate the competitiveness level of a particular keyword term/phrase. While it’s true that more popular/searched-for keywords TEND to be more competitive, this is certainly not always the case (and in fact, SEOs probably care a lot more about when a keyword has high traffic and relatively weak sites/pages in the SERPs more than anything else). The new tool attempts to fix this by relying on Page Authority (correlation data here) and using a weighted average of the top ranking sites and pages.

Running five keywords at a time is way better than one
(we’re working to add more – promise)

The best bet here looks like "best running shoes" – relatively lower difficulty, but still high volume

Oh yeah, looking at the top positions, a few dozen good links and some on-page and we’re there

Reversing the rankings is never easy, but parsing through KW Difficulty reports certainly makes it less time-consuming. Watch out for the scores, though – a 65% is pretty darn tough, and even a 40% is no walk in the park. At last, I feel really good about this tool; it was suffering for a good 18 months, and it’s nice to have it back in my primary repertoire with such solid functionality.

---

I’m sure there are plenty of remarkable tools I’ve missed and there are likely questions about these problems, too. Feel free to address both in the comments!

p.s. This was written very late at night and I need to be up and on a plane at precisely butt-o’clock tomorrow morning, so editing will have to slide until Jen wakes up and gives this a good once-over. Sorry about any errors in the meantime

Note from Jen: I finally woke up and made a few minor edits. I also added a discount code from Virante "seomoz30" AND a discount code from PostRank "SEOmoz". Tools Rule!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Newer Posts »