All posts in tools

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Sharing is the key activity when it comes to proper social media participation and beyond. When you don’t share anything on the web today, you can’t compete with those who do. They get all the attention, links and ultimately sales or whatever they are after.

  • So where are we sharing online?
  • How do you actually share?
  • What tools help you with sharing?

I compiled a list of 36 Social Media sharing resources that cover a variety of content types, such as how to articles, statistics, tools for business people.

Good project management is the backbone of any successful SEO campaign. With the right planning and execution, good management can keep the project profitable, lower stress and maintain client satisfaction. This blog post will identify three key tips to help you become a better project manager and highlight three tools which can help you along the way.

1. Communication
Communication is central to any good working relationship. It’s important at the project kick off stage to establish this relationship so that you can move forward together. Developing a friendship with your client allows you to manage their expectations.  Working in the industry, it’s often easy to forget how alien the topic of SEO can be to some people. Therefore as a project manager it is your job to educate your client on SEO and to explain the nature of SEO as a marketing tool. By improving your client’s understanding of SEO and developing a communicative relationship, you will be able to create realistic goals and will be better equipped to deal with any unexpected problems.

Typing cat*
2011 has been another very busy year on the SEOptimise blog, with nearly 400 posts generating over 400,000 visits and well in excess of half a million pageviews (oh and one best blog award).

With the year drawing to a close, and Christmas just round the corner, I thought it would be a great opportunity to try and summarise the best and most popular posts of the year, and hopefully give you a few early SEO Christmas gifts. While I am personally not a fan of list posts, judging by the most popular posts a lot of you are. So ever eager to please, here is a list of the 58 best/most popular posts of the year.

Our 10 most popular posts

What better place to start than the most popular posts of the year? Between them, the posts below generated almost 100,000 pageviews. So, working on the basis that 100,000 people (ok, maybe not people) can’t be wrong, there must be some awesome SEO gems contained within them.

  1. 30​ Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011 – the first post of the year is also the most popular, with Tad’s post about what was going to happen to search and social in 2011 receiving over 17,000 pageviews. As you would expect, there were a few predications that didn’t come true, but a fair few that did.

In an ideal world everybody uses analytics tools in a way that ensures that

  • conversions
  • leads
  • sales
  • ROI

get tracked and both client and SEO can

see where the most valuable visitors come from and how SEO efforts contribute to the overall success of a site.

Sadly, in reality it’s not always as easy to accomplish. While it’s now easier to sell analytics services to clients (as everybody agrees that you need them and clients are quick to give you access to Google Analytics), in many cases there are lots of issues that combined make you apply SEO tactics blindly.

Bookmarks are now links. The artist formerly known as social bookmarking site Delicious.com has been relaunched by the new owners Avos, run by the former founders of YouTube.

The new site is clean, simple and image oriented.

Obviously Delicious has learned from the many image bookmarking sites out there that have sprung all over the Web in the recent years. On the other hand the new site focuses on social sharing and commenting as well.

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Recently there has been much talk about Klout. You could call it a swelling hype. Usually a new service goes all out to get noticed but Klout has been around for quite a while. Over time the service which attempts to identify and classify influencers on social media has gained considerable influence itself.

There are already lots of lists with Klout score optimisation techniques.

Some remind me of old school SEO. Indeed, some people propagate short cuts to boost your Klout influence artificially.

While many people rightfully contest the true importance of the Klout score, it’s still one of the best ways to measure influence on the Web without resorting to simplistic metrics such as followers counts. Klout also combines several profiles into one metric. You can connect your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts among others, so that you get an overview of your overall authority or activity.

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When recently asked “what is your favorite SEO tool?” I could think of none other than Google Webmaster Tools. While many SEO experts will probably disagree and suggest to use some paid SEO tools suite, I’d like to explain my choice and present you with 44 Google Webmaster Tools resources.

Over the years Google has greatly improved the free Webmaster Tools. They’ve added lots of very useful new features and it’s now a must-use for regularly checking out your site.

If you have worked in SEO for any period of time, I’m sure you will be familiar with a number of the better known tools around, tools such as SEOmoz Pro Tools, Majestic SEO and the Google Keyword Tool. For a lot of SEOs and situations these tools can provide all the help you need, but there are a number of awesome low profile tools that can take SEO campaigns and agencies to the next level.

Tool: Linkdex
Use it for: Competitor analysis, back link analysis, on-page keyword analysis, rank checking…
Price: from $49

Linkdex is probably one of our favourite new tools in the SEOptimise office as it offers visual analysis of back link profiles as well as anchor text reports, rank checking and on-page keyword analysis (among a host of other things).

By far its most useful feature is the ability to analyse the type of links in your profile as well of those in your competitors’ profiles (powered by a quality filtered version of the Majestic SEO index), and it even has the capability to add a time dimension to the analysis. Basically, if you want to know why you’re being outranked and what type of links to build to beat the competition, it’s all laid out in bar chart form. That’s a pretty epic tool to start with, right? Well in addition to this, if you click on any of the bars to see a list of the links (which you can sort by “influence”), you can then explore them and add them to your “to build” list. And finally, you can hit a tick box and see what links have been built recently, effectively giving you a sneaky peek at your competitors’ SEO efforts.

linkdex screenshot

It’s still pretty new and there is some stuff that needs work, but it’s still a great tool that gives you loads of actionable stuff and they are constantly updating it.

If you want a more detailed write up check out this Linkdex review from Sam Stratton at Koozai.

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The Google+ honeymoon might be over but many people are still active on the site. As Google+ has some shortcomings, lacking features and usability flaws, there are now numerous tools to deal with these issues. I’ve compiled a list of the most promising ones.

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Initially Google+ was the darling of most media pundits. It was shiny, new and it grew like no other social network before. It was a typical infatuation with a new hype. Now that most Internet power users have already joined and been trying Google+ for a while the honeymoon seems to be over.

Several issues have marred the rise of the new Google social network.

Most of the issues are home grown. The dynamics of a top down social media launch, where the tech celebrities and social media mavens get the invitations first, can scare off the average user. However, these people are the backbone of Facebook’s success.

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