There's some terrificly useful new tools on the market that very few SEOs are aware of or using (at least, if my experience is any indication). It's my duty, therefore, to share with some of these shiny new sites and let you explore, engage and apply to your campaigns and efforts. Hopefully, these will add great value for you, and expose them to folks who really need their help.
Link building is hard - really, really hard. Ontolo tries to productize many of the manual tasks, searches and tracking processes of link building with an extensive, diverse toolset. You can see a big list of their link building tools here, everything from .gov/.edu finders, to competitor link searches, to content research and backlink tracking/monitoring. They even have some nifty "productivity hacks" (small, simple tools to help with menial tasks like combining keywords or removing duplicates from lists).
Below is a screenshot of Ontolo's Authority Links searching tool. As you can see, there's a multitude of options including clever sorting/filtering systems.
Ontolo isn't for everyone - you should be a professional or semi-pro link builder (the tools and their results, rely on a lots of prior knowledge), but for those it's geared toward, the reviews have been outstanding and Ontolo's team (Ben Wills + Garret French) are constantly upgrading the service and functionality.
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Richard Baxter is constantly lauded as one of the SEO industry's best, brightest and most driven minds. I curse myself for not smuggling him into the US, forging documents so he can stay, slapping an American accent on him and chaining him to a desk at SEOmoz (OK, maybe that's a little extreme).
Luckily for you, my evil plans are for naught, and Richard's talent has born fruit for all of us in the field with his remarkable new keyword research tool (currently in beta).
You create campaigns (similar to the SEOmoz web app), plug in your Google Analytics account, and sort keywords into relevant groups. The tool then lets you visualize potential opportunity for keywords you're already ranking for and those you haven't yet targeted by combining rank data, traffic data + search volume data (via Google's AdWords API). It's a brilliantly useful tool for those seeking new ways to ID the keywords that matter and take action on the low hanging fruit.
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Trunk.ly is a deceptively simple, currently free, application from the brilliant minds at BinaryPlex (who also built the much more full-featured Tribalytic, an Australian-focused social platform for measuring influence and share of voice).
Plug Trunk.ly into your Twitter account and you'll get a page like the one below that shows a timeline of the links you (or your friends) have tweeted.
How is that useful you say?
Because people tweet some pretty brilliant stuff and they show, through tweets, what they care about. Whether you're relationship-building with a new contact, seeking topics for linkbait or content creation, attempting to determine the impact a particular individual has on clicks/rankings via their account or just interested in what someone has to say, Trunk.ly's a great way to do it.
I've been surprised at how often I use it just to find the things I tweeted!
(BTW - Trunk.ly's currently in private beta, but Alex + Tim, the creators, may have some invites if you leave comments in the post or tweet at them)
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You know what's a pain in the butt? Taking a screenshot of a page, pasting it into Photoshop, adding notes to it, saving the file to be small and emailing it as an attachment to a developer/designer/marketer/manager/co-worker.
Markup.io to the rescue!
In a stroke of simplicity made brilliant, markup.io lets you drag a bookmark to your broswer that will, on click, show an overlay that lets you "mark up" any page on the web with text, lines, arrows, boxes and circles of various thickness, size and color. From there, you can directly export or share the resulting screen image. It works so intuitively that our team at SEOmoz has been finding massive utility and time savings by employing it vs. a manual process.
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I already knew Russ Jones and the team at Virante were pretty smart, but this time they're just making me look bad :-)
One of the biggest frustrations with our Labs LDA tool (warning, it's still in super beta and may not be particularly performant if lots of folks are actively using it) is that it doesn't recommend words and phrases to add or take away from a piece of content to help make it more "topically relevant" to a query. Building that would require a ton of very hard computer science work... Or would it?
The team from Virante got impatient (a great trait in any startup) and built their own recommendation system. It's not perfect, but in many cases, like the example above, it can help. Basically, it grabs the top results from Google, checks for words those pages have that your page doesn't and runs LDA scores for your page (through the labs tool) with and without those keywords. Pretty sweet hack, right?
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A couple months ago, I presented a methodology of how to understand the ranking algorithm for an individual search result graphically to help figure out why the top ranking results are ahead of those below them (and what metrics you might need to tweak/improve to reach the top). It's certainly not a perfect strike, but many folks were excited and interested.
In fact, Andrew Wright, one of the crackerjack consultants from Bloom Media in the UK, put some serious time into improving my models and the Excel spreadsheet to make it more usable, understandable and useful.
But, that's not all. SEOmoz's own Ben Huff looked over Andrew's work and had some tweaks of his own. In the Box.net folder I've linked to, you'll find both versions of the Excel worksheet. By Q2 of next year, we hope to have this SERPs analysis system included in our web app (so they'll be no need to go crazy in Excel). In the meantime, though, we invite you to check out the work of these two, building one on the other (Ben Huff worked on the initial version with me for the face-off in London) and give feedback. It may not be the most scalable way to analyze a search result, but currently, it's the most comprehensive and likely to produce a good answer.
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If you've got any other great, lesser-known tools that will benefit web marketers and SEOs, please feel free to share them in the comments.
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