Web analytics is perhaps the most important discipline for businesses online. In case you don’t know who and why visits you, buys your products and talks about you, you are blind on the Web.

Web analytics goes beyond simple SEO metrics.

It’s about

• usability
• conversions
• branding

among others. Continue Reading »

Twitter search results for SEO. Very relevant, aren’t they?

Last week the new Twitter search “ranking popular tweets on top” went live. It’s a huge disappointment. It only shows two or three seemingly popular tweets on top of the latest tweets not ordered in any manner, just like hitherto.

Also the “popular tweets” seem to stem from some form of limited static white list of websites. Recently our hugely popular Google Analytics list didn’t even show up while other less popular but more reputable sources did on the same day. Continue Reading »

A year ago we’ve published a list of 30+ Google Analytics tools and resources. It was one of our most successful posts ever. The list has been even nominated for a SEMMY award. I’m not sure I can top that but I can provide a new list of 30+ more Google Analytics tools, apps, tweaks and other resources. Continue Reading »

Busy Bee Colony by No Minds Vision

Earlier this week I wrote about how we can’t ignore Google Buzz even if we’d like to. Also I complained about the huge onslaught of Google Buzz news and resources.

To deal with both I decided to compile a list of 30+ Google Buzz how tos, tools and other resources.

Here you’ll find out how to disable Google Buzz but also how to work with it in order to reach your business objectives.
Continue Reading »

Some people, even at Google, still think that Google hates SEO. In some cases it really does. At the same time Google loves SEO as actions speak louder than words. Google provides not a few, not several but by now 10 free Google SEO tools everybody should use. I remember the times when we had none of them. Today we have an abundance of data Google allows us to mine.
Continue Reading »

Roughly a year ago I published a list of 30+ not yet popular web tools you should know here on SEOptimise. It’s the most popular post on this blog ever since. While I considered updating the list I decided to compile a new one with a new generation of tools instead of just fixing broken links: 30 new & free Web tools you should know – 2009 edition

This is of course a biased list of Web tools (both web based tools or tools for the Web), my own one, but it is fueled by my business blogging, social media optimization and SEO practice so you’ll probably like it as well. Some of these tools are not really new but they are probably new for you as they are not widely known yet.

All of the tools below either offer free versions or are entirely free. I sorted the tools in 4 categories:

• Twitter
• Search, SEO & Analytics
• Blogging & Social Media
• Web Development & Misc. Web Tools

Continue Reading »

This week three Twitter topics have caught my eye. The spectacular growth of Twitter which accelerated even beyond what we were already used to, the proliferation of Twitter tools which surpassed previous outbursts.

Also intriguing was the emergence of a Twitter ethics debate where bloggers and SEO experts debated the ethics of using Twitter for marketing purposes or the perceived lack of them.

1. Twitter growth has been astounding both from a short term as well as long term perspective. Steve Rubel takes a very close look at these spectacular growth rates.
2. The number of Twitter tools was always astonishing. Still we’ve seen nothiung this far. Last week it became apparent that huge Twitter tools lists are not enough anymore. Now we see plenty of specialized tools lists for different tasks. Be it follower management tools or Twitter stream analysis tools.
3. In the SEO industry there has been an ethics problem historically. SEO was born in a time where actual optimization often failed while manipulation was easy and successful quickly. More than 10 years later you either optimize or you spam and the gray area in between is often subject of heated debates. Now that marketers and SEO experts are at the forefront of the Twitter hype this historical burden has repercussions on this new tool. So the question arose: What tactics are still acceptable and where to draw the line of unethical Twitter usage?

We used to say that one Internet year is like 7 “real life” years due to the fast changing pace of it. With Twitter it seems like one year equals twenty. Trends appear incredibly fast and issues we dealt elsewhere after years we have to face after weeks.

Last time I promised a post about the 10 Twitter tools you need for using Twitter for business and in a professional manner.

I used Twitter just for fun, testing and finding out what it is about for a while and decided to professionalize it myself. You can’t even follow tweets about you right unless you use some special tools. You will miss opportunities due to overlooking important tweets in a mess of info overload.

In the Twitter optimization series overview post I wrote about 5 tools you’ll need, this time I’ll add another 5: Continue Reading »

New web tools appear daily. Often I don’t even manage to bookmark them all, let alone try them. Nonetheless I try as many Internet tools as I can, I’m just a serial early adopter. I can’t stop it. These are mostly 30+ free tools which are either web tools or tools for the web I discovered just recently in 2008.

I tested most of these tools and I use some of them regularly as a web professional. Most of these social media, web design & development, search, SEO and analytics, e-commerce, blogging and Internet tools are not yet widely known main stream tools. The average webmaster will hopefully find them useful. I selected the 30 most useful tools from the hundreds available out there.

Social Media

• Social Median is a unique combination of a Mixx-like social news site and Ning-like community functionality
• Browzmi is a real time social browsing and chatting tool, it’s like a more social StumbleUpon
• Social Browse is very similar to Browzmi according to NetHackz, invitation only as of now
• Hooeey is half social browsing if you want it to, half a web based browser history that renders bookmarking obsolete according to the site
• Second Brain is often mistakenly referred to as a lifestreaming tool like the popular FriendFeed, but its focus is to collect and organize “all your content” available online
• Muxtape is a very simple kind of music community which allows to listen to predefined user “generated” playlists
• Twitbuzz is a Digg-like interface showing the most popular links on Twitter

Web Design & Development

• Cushy CMS makes any static site a CMS site, it’s so easy I’ll recommend it to my mother who already uses Jimdo
• Pokform is a Jimdo-like Flash online CMS that allows you to create smooth websites with ease, currently it’s a nono for SEO though so you should only use it for an artists or photographers page
• Pingdom allows you to test whether your site is up and how fast it is
• Splashup is the real web based Photoshop, the Adobe online app can’t match
• BricaBox allows you to create your own social site, be it a map mashup site, a wiki, or a voting site. They compare it to WordPress and Ning to underline the ease of use of creation of a site but it appears to be even easier than WordPress

Search

• Cuil is a new search engine which claims to have more pages indexed than any other, for me its results are as good as Google’s
• Grooveshark Lite is a music search engine that lets you listen to what you find
• Muxtape Stumbler is a music search engine for the Muxtape community
• Picitup is a very advanced visual search engine for images which also allows you to find Creative Commons licensed images you can use for free
• Google GEO Search Tool allows you to see Google results from other locations as Google localizes your results based on your IP usually

SEO and Analytics

• Trifecta by SEOMoz is an updated blog/website worth measuring tool
• Rank Checker by SEOBook, been around for several months now but after more traditional ranking checker software has been crippled recently by Google a very good alternative
• Ranksense is a an advanced SEO software by Hamlet Batista for all those who do go beyond ranking checking, it’s out of beta for a few months now
• Raven SEO Tools, this a a whole web based SEO tool suite which will also track your rankings over time among others
• Woopra is an advanced web analytics suite which can compete with Google Analytics and in some cases offers better and more timely data
• Google Insights for Search is THE new keyword research tool for every webmaster or website owner, it’s Google Trends “on steroids”

E-Commerce

• Shopify is a very simple online shop application virtually anybody can set up a shop now, it’s been around since 2005 and nobody told me!
• PPCalc is a “PayPal fee calculator”. As you know PayPal is very widely used but rather expensive and also not the most reliable solution. I’d recommend Moneybookers as alternative
• ChipIn is a PayPal connected tool that facilitates so called crowdfunding. It’s like crowdsourcing but with money. You ask many people to fund your project

Blogging & Internet

• Feed Compare lets you view and compare the subscriber numbers of blogs using Feedburner for their RSS feeds over time
• BuySellAds does exactly that buy and sell banner ads taking 25% commission, it’s easy to use ideal for bloggers and worked fine for me
• Proxify “is a web-based anonymous proxy service which allows anyone to surf the Web privately and securely.”
• xrl.us by Metamark is the better TinyURL, I use it daily
• issuu is a YouTube like website for magazines and other print publications, you can upload them and allow people to read them only suing a sleek Flash interface

Bonus

• MagMyPic – You always wanted to get famous and end up on the cover of a magazine? Now you can! ;-)

You might know some of these web tools, especially if you’re a SEO expert you probably will know the SEO tools. I made sure that the list contains both the best tools currently available and those which not everybody outside a certain industry knows yet. Also these 30 tools can be used by anybody. You don’t need to be a full fledged web professional for most of these.