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
  

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• 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
  

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• 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
  

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• 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

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  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

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  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

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  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

What other tools do you find useful to help you manage your online business?

For those of you who follow search engine news you’ll know that the biggest events that cover the industry are the Search Engine Strategies conferences. Being based in Toronto I was able to attend SES Toronto last year and am pleased to be able to attend again this year. It’s one of those must-attend events where you get to hear from the top experts in the industry, be able to directly ask them questions, and get valuable advice to help you grow your business.

“Although bigger isn’t always better, the biggest social media site is the right place to start.  And at 104.1 million unique visitors, Facebook reaches a lot more segments than just college kids these days.”

I’m also fortunate enough to have been able to connect with two of the experts who will be presenting at SES Toronto this year. I asked them about what factors they see as being important for website owners in the year ahead. The two interviewees were Greg Jarboe and Amanda Watlington. Here is a little more about them:

Greg Jarboe

Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization firm, public relations agency and video production company. Founded in 2003, SEO-PR has won a Golden Ruler Award from the Institute for Public Relations and PR News, and was a finalist for SES Awards in three categories: Best Social Media Marketing Campaign, Best Business-to-Business Search Marketing Campaign, and Best Integration of Search with Other Media.

“Over the past year, the change in the search engine world that’s had the biggest impact on my business has been the recognition that the #2 search engine isn’t Yahoo!  It’s YouTube.”

Amanda Watlington

Amanda Watlington is owner of Searching for Profit, a search marketing consultancy focusing on the interaction of the consumer with businesses, using search engines, RSS, blogs, podcasting, or other new media to deliver their messages. An industry thought leader and an internationally-recognized speaker, Amanda has led sessions on search marketing, web strategy, and social media at Search Engine Strategies, Webmaster World, Ad:tech, and DMA. She shares her views of where search marketing is headed on her blog, Blogs and Feeds, and as a blogger for Search Engine Watch.

I asked them both the same questions – here are their answers:

1)      What are you 3 favorite tools website owners should know about that you would consider “hidden gems”?

The first hidden gem is Wordstream. It’s a new keyword tool for taking long keyword lists for search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns and putting them in buckets that are segmented intelligently.  Another hidden gem is Radian6.  It’s an automated solution to monitor and analyze a variety of social media, including blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.  The third tool has been around for a while, but it’s unfortunately a hidden gem: Yahoo! Site Explorer.  It allows you to explore all the pages indexed by Yahoo! Search and find pages that link to that site or any page.

2)      In your opinion, how important is it for website owners to reduce their page load time and do you recommend they enable gzip compression?

I do think reducing page load time is important.  Gzip is a popular data compression program.  It’s main advantage is much better compression.  However, gzip 1.2.4 may crash when an input file is over 1200 characters. (info on gzip compression here: http://www.gzip.org/)

3)      LinkedIn, Twitter,YouTube, Digg, or Facebook? If website owners could only pick one to invest their time into, which would you pick and why?

I could say it depends on your target market, but that would be dodging the question.  Or, I could say YouTube, because I’ve just finished writing a book entitled, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day, but that would be self-serving.  So, I’ll say Facebook.  Why?  According to Compete, Facebook had 104.1 million unique visitors in April 2009, YouTube had 77.8 million, Digg had 37.8 million, Twitter had 19.4 million, and LinkedIn had 12.1 million.  Although bigger isn’t always better, the biggest social media site is the right place to start.  And at 104.1 million unique visitors, Facebook reaches a lot more segments than just college kids these days.  Plus, with more than 52,000 Facebook apps, there are countless ways to connect with social networks of friends and family.

4)      What change in the search engine world over the past year has had the biggest impact on your business?

Over the past year, the change in the search engine world that’s had the biggest impact on my business has been the recognition that the #2 search engine isn’t Yahoo!  It’s YouTube.  According to comScore qSearch, there were 9.8 billion expanded search queries in the U.S. during April 2009 on Google, 3.2 billion on YouTube, and 3.1 billion on Yahoo!  That’s game changing.  We’ve also found that video content can generate more links and higher rankings than text content.    In fact, The Technorati Attention Index for May 14, 2009, shows the top site with the highest number of blogs linking to it in the past 30 days was YouTube with 60,644, followed by The New York Times with 17,374,  guardian.co.uk with 8,039, The Wall Street Journal with 7,513, and The Washington Post with 6,891.  What does this mean to search engine marketers?  You are more likely to see a YouTube video in the top results pages than a news story, blog post, or website page.  That’s a change with a big impact.

5)      Which session (apart from yours) are you most looking forward to at SES Toronto and why?

I’m looking forward to the keynote by Emanuel Rosen.  I’ve read his book, “The Anatomy of Buzz,” and can’t wait to hear about his latest book, “The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited.”  As for one of the conference sessions, I’m looking forward to “How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively with Your IT Department to Get Things Done.”  Why can’t we all just get along?

1)      What are you 3 favorite tools website owners should know about that you would consider “hidden gems”?

There are lots of tools that a website owner should know about. I personally advocate trying a large number of tools and then determining which suits the individual’s workflow best. Here are three tools that I consider really powerful: Spyfu for keyword research. It is an excellent second line of research that enhances and enriches the data gathered from Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker. With Spyfu, I particularly like the Keyword Kombat feature that lets me clearly see comparative strengths and weaknesses relative to competitors. A second tool that I consider valuable is Crazy Egg. I use this tool on a regular basis to check how users are interacting with my pages. This gives me quite a few insights into how I can improve conversion and improve the user’s experience.  I must include in my tool kit the Web Developer Plug-in for Firefox. It is a super tool for analyzing sites. I use this in conjunction with YSlow to understand how a site is performing.

2)      In your opinion, how important is it for website owners to reduce their page load time and do you recommend they enable gzip compression?

Page load time is important for both users and search engines. Users want to receive the information immediately and are increasingly impatient. Speed issues also impact search. Every site has a “crawl budget,” and performance issues can impede how much of a large site is crawled. Managing performance is essential to indexing for large sites. Gzip compression is a recommended speed enhancement. The choice and recommendation would, of course, depend on the site. As I indicated above I use YSlow as part of my tools for evaluating sites. Speed is an issue.

“If I was looking to promote my business, YouTube is the place that I would choose to target. Twitter is the current media darling, but I’m not sure that I would recommend it at this time over YouTube.”

3)      LinkedIn, Twitter,YouTube, Digg, or Facebook? If website owners could only pick one to invest their time into, which would you pick and why?

My choice would be YouTube since the sheer volume of traffic that comes to the site is so huge. YouTube’s traffic is the second largest online. It is also readily optimizable so the site owner can ensure take measures to get maximum performance from their videos. If I was looking to promote my business, YouTube is the place that I would choose to target. Twitter is the current media darling, but I’m not sure that I would recommend it at this time over YouTube. As a professional, I would urge the website owner to have a personal LinkedIn account and a Facebook page. Both are good networking tools. I personally prefer LinkedIn.

4)      What change in the search engine world over the past year has had the biggest impact on your business?

The biggest impacts have come from the global recession. As a result I have seen an increase in the demand for SEO services as businesses that previously were prepared to spend lots of money on SEM are now reconsidering the virtues of SEO.  Many are taking budget from other marketing efforts to put them into SEO and SEM. There is also an increasing demand that search deliver results.

5)      Which session (apart from yours) are you most looking forward to at SES Toronto and why?

I am keenly interested in the future and use conferences to tune up my radar for what is the next big thing. For this reason I am looking forward to the session entitled “Follow the Carrot: Cool Mobile Apps.” As search migrates to the phone we all need to understand mobile marketing. Overall, the session line up is so good that it will be difficult to chose one session vs. another being held at the same time. I am moderating the session “SEO Then & Now: What’s the Same? What’s New?” which should be very interesting, but at the same time there is also a session entitled “Signals: What Relevancy Indicators Are Search Engineers Watching For Today?” that should be an excellent forward-looking session. Overall, this should be a terrific conference.

Thank you to both Greg and Amanda for spending the time to answer these questions. To learn more from them you can always attend SES Toronto! If you’re planning on coming out let me know and we can have lunch together.