The Top 11 Tools You’ve Never Heard Of for Internet Marketers – SEO University
In my last SEO University (SES Toronto – Day 2 – SEO University) post I promised that I would provide you with a comprehensive list of the top free / cheap tools for building your business online. The recommendations come from Ken Jurina, a founder of Epiar and one of the panelists at Search Engine Strategies Toronto’s session: Tool Time: The Search Marketer’s Free-to-Cheap Goodie Bag. Ken’s presentation was my favorite from last year’s conference and I was excited to see what new tools he had to recommend.
- 1) Firefox Extensions (https://addons.mozilla.org/en‐US/firefox/) – Add-ons are extensions of the browser that add new functionality to Firefox or change its appearance
- Pros: Tools work right within your browser, very quick, very powerful, and very free
- Critiques: None ‐ critiques usually resolved with extension updates
- Cool: Audit a clients site live: SE issues, opt. improvement – SEO Extensions: SEOpen, Search Status, Web Developer, Groowe Toolbar, CustomizeGoogle, SEO Quake – Others: PDF Download, Google Image Preview, Roboform
- Cost: FREE
- 2) IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com/) – IceRocket is an Internet search engine specialized in searching blogs.
- Pros: Real‐time monitoring of blogs/social media, Link, topic & trend tracking tools
- Critiques: Can’t search videos directly, Some searches take up to a minute to load
- Cool: BigBuzz Search
- Cost: FREE
- 3) Google Geo Search (http://www.contentranch.com/google-geo-search-tool/) – The Google Search Tool is a simple tool that creates a url to the official google search page based on the location and data center you choose.
- Pros: Search Google by region, Simple to use, quick and streamlined
- Critiques: None
- Cool: No ads, No clutter
- Cost: FREE
- 4) Domain Report Tool (http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm) – The Domain Report tool will check Google, Yahoo! Search and Live Search to see how many pages for each site are indexed in each engine.
- Pros: Tally & compare search engine indexing, Determine competitor search presence
- Critiques: No export option, Can take up to 5 minutes
- Cool: Free! Even without ‘Bruce Clay’ subscription
- Cost: FREE
- 5) BackTweets (http://backtweets.com/) – Search for links on Twitter.
- Pros: Search Twitter for links to your site, See’s through compressed URL’s, Sort results by date or user
- Critiques: None
- Cool: Set up regular RSS updates
- Cost: FREE
- 6) Know’em (http://knowem.com/) – KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular Social Media websites.
- Pros: Check brand‐name availability for 120 social networks, Very quick and easy!
- Critiques: Occasional network error when pinging site(s)
- Cool: Promote brand cohesiveness, Monitor brand/identity theft, Can automatically register your username for extra$$
- Cost: FREE
-
7) Backlink Checker Tool (http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php) – Enables webmasters to check their pagerank, monitor the PR of competitor’s backlinks, estimate a value of their site, and more. - Pros: Quickly oversee a site’s backlinks, Show which links have the ‘nofollow’ tag, List anchor text for incoming links as well as their PageRank
- Critiques: Don’t forget the ‘http://’ or it returns no results
- Cool: Smartpagerank.com also has other useful tools
- Cost: FREE
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8) SpyFu (http://www.spyfu.com/) – Spy on your online competitors and download competitors keywords and adwords. - Pros: Great competitive insight on PPC & Organic, Works in browser, quick & thorough, Free stuff is good – though you can subscribe for more
- Critiques: Busy interface, Not intuitive as to what a particular button/tool does
- Cool: Dashboard: charts and data mash‐ups
- Cost: FREE plus subscription options
-
9) GSiteCrawler (http://www.spyfu.com/) - Windows Generator for Google SiteMap Files. - Pros: Crawl simulation provides detailed spidey‐vision, View canonical and duplicate content issues, aborted URLs, page, file sizes and more, Automatic XML sitemap creation
- Critiques: Large sites may take a few hours and need to be run overnight, Crawlers will get stuck in a loop on sites with dynamic URLs
- Cool: One‐stop audit shop, Exports multiple reports
- Cost: FREE
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10) Google Insights for Search (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#) - With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.
- Pros: Identify phrases by topic/brand/category you want to rank on, Geo‐target where to sell your products, Identify product seasonality, Identify if news stories relate to spikes in searches
- Critiques: No “real” search frequency number only relative comparison
- Cool: Breakout tool identifies phrases rising in search frequencies
- Cost: FREE
-
11) Epiar Negative Keywords Lists (http://www.epiar.com/ppc-negative-keyword-lists/) - Negative keyword targeting is becoming increasingly popular to weed out worthless impressions and clicks in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. - Pros: Save 5% to 40% on PPC spend! And maintain/increase sales, Quick! Set of 14 or 19 online questions, Premium NKL custom keyword research per PPC campaig, Instantly generates list of top 2500 or 5000 negative keywords
- Critiques: Not free
- Cool: Premium NKL prioritized: Top 250 for Yahoo! or Top 65 for MSN
- Cost: One time fee; no subscription
I hope you enjoyed the list of the Top 11 Tools You’ve Never Heard Of for Internet Marketers! I’m amazed at how many new resources continue to pop up every year.
What other tools do you find useful to help you manage your online business?
Evan, thank you for posting this list. I am sure many marketers just like me will find it very helpful.
Tanny
Low Budget Business Ideas
Some nice tools in here, will take a closer look when I have more time, later today.
Thanks Evan
Nice list, Evan, thanks.
Here are a couple of useful tools:
1. Don’t just check keywords for traffic, check them for commercial intent too:
http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx
2. Running a split test but not sure how valid the results are so far…? Try this tool:
http://www.splittester.com/
Cheers!
DH
Nice list, Evan, thanks.
Here are a couple of useful tools:
1. Don’t just check keywords for traffic, check them for commercial intent too:
http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx
2. Running a split test but not sure how valid the results are so far…? Try this tool:
http://www.splittester.com/
Cheers!
DH
OH! You’re my new favorite blogger fyi
Thanks for the feedback and the kind words David. I hope you enjoy the posts to come!
Another great tool would be surchur.com. It is a real time search engine that pulls up results from various sources aggregating them into one space. It’s true that we’ve been serving up real time search for a while now, but we’re getting better with every passing month as we update according to customer feedback. Great article for Internet marketers.
Monika Lorincz
http://surchur.com
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Hi, Evan:
An interesting and informative list. You are right – I hadn’t heard of some of those resources prior to your blog post!
SEOCentro has an extensive list of tools and resources as well.
GT :)
Here is another tool you can use.
It called Xmarks, it is an add-on for fireFox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2410
Xmarks helps you pick the best Google results by highlighting those that people have recently bookmarked. Learn more about these sites by hovering over the Xmarks icon. You can turn this feature on or off in the Xmarks Settings menu.
Thanks for the great suggestions everyone – even more tools that most people have never heard of!
Hi Evan,
That’s a great list of tools. Thanks for posting them. Some I haven’t heard of before.
Hi Evan
Thanks for the list. some I had heard of others not will take some time to go through all of them. Tanny and David thanks also for your contributions.
MichelleJ
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MY husband is starting to show more and more interest in my online work, and yesterday he came to me all excited “Honey, I found the best resource for you to learn html, css and php here it is… w3schools”
It was so funny, I told him that i am using their school for 2 years, now, and he was so disappointed, but I let him know that this is a great tool and he should take a second look at it.
So here it is:
http://www.w3schools.com
If you never heard of it, go ahead and take a look
Hi, Tanny:
Yes, that is a great resource. I used it for a while when I was first losing hair over learning HTML, but I haven’t looked at it recently. I remember it being a user friendly resource with excellent information.
I had a similar experience with my wife last week. She came home from work, excited, and said that she had just learned about a great resource that I should use in my Internet Business where you can check all kinds of statistics, like visitors and entry pages and where they came from and more.
“Have you heard of it?” she asked. “It’s called Google Analytics.” …
… I gave her a hug and said, “Thank you, dear… but I’m way ahead of you.” :lol:
GT :)
After my long hiatus from ec.com here is my big contribution!
firebug firefox addon is an indispenable tool for me to trouble shoot my websites especially since I’m not very good at CSS.
Couple it with the info on w3schools and you’ll soon know exactly what you need to change.
How do you use it?
On any page all you have to do is click on the firebug icon (bottom right of browser) and then on inspect. Now you can hover over eny page element and it will reveal to you all the code and CSS.
you can make changes directly to the CSS to see how it looks on the page. If it looks right then you ca make the final changes to your html or CSS files where ever it is hosted.
It’s a good troubleshooting tool.
Hi, Andy:
It’s great to see you back! That is an excellent explanation of Firebug. I haven’t yet progressed to that stage in my technical ability, but when I hear about such resources and when they are explained as well as you have done, it gets me interested in checking it out. Thanks!
GT :)
Agreed! Welcome back Andy and thanks for sharing!
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I am I living under the rock? I have never heard 8 of them , yet i am an internet marketer.
Hi Andy,
It’s nice to see you back.
Firebug sounds really cool. There’s times where I see something I like on a web page and would like to get the code for it. This tool would be a lot easier than having to sift through the page source code. Thanks for the recommendation!
Hey, Alan:
Thanks for pointing that out. I wasn’t thinking of that particular use for the tool. Hmm. Lots of potential there!
GT :)
That’s the first thing that crossed my mind. It would make the task of finding particular code much faster, that’s for sure! Obviously there’s other uses as Andy pointed out. I’m glad he pointed out this nifty tool to us.
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One of my absolute favorites…google alerts…shhhhh don’t tell anyone :D
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Thank you so much. Valuable information I will use over and over.
a complete list, but what about SEO elite or market samurai, aren’t they good?
The Top 11 Tools You’ve Never Heard Of for Internet Marketers – SEO University http://bit.ly/7GRwr
Great list of tools — some are new to me :D
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There is noticeably big money to comprehend this. I suppose you have made specific nice points in functions also.