Review of Advanced Link Manager & Advanced Web Ranking
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Advanced Link Manager
You know the questions that constantly nag an SEO when thinking about link popularity: how many backlinks have I got? What’s the inbound text? What’s the page rank of the inbound link? Has anyone removed a juicy link to me? Who’s linking to my competitors? What inbound link text do my competitors have? Have I got any deeplinks? Where are they linking to? Oh my god, my head is spinning…
To try and deal with all this information, you go to Google :site, you go to to Yahoo: links, you review and review your site and your competitors, then you’ve got to write down all the info, you out it in a spreadsheet, which rapidly gets big and cumbersome, you forget to update it, your head starts to spin even more…yes, welcome to SEO hell…and Enter Advanced Link Manager.
Dudes, this program is simply awesome, it takes all the grunt work out of tracking and analysing links, leaving you to sit back and focus on strategy.
Setting it up is easy, simply enter your URL, select the search engines that you want to check backlinks for (there’s a bunch of options, but let’s face it it, all we care about is Google and Yahoo!) - then Advanced Link Manager goes off and queries those search engines for all available back links to your site.
Of course, not all your links will show up in those search engines - so you’ll want to add tracking for your lovingly crafted list of backlinks that you’ve been building up. That’s easily done, either one by one, or by a batch CSV update.
Once the program has built a list of all pages linking to you (both those it finds from the search engines, and those that you’ve manually added), it goes off and checks those pages, bringing back a wealth of information - not least of which is whether that page does in fact still link to you! Domain info? You got it! Number of outbound links? Page rank? You got it! Inbound link text? Oh baby, you got it!!!
So now what do you do?
Well, for one, keep updating it on a regular basis - manually add the links as you build them, and update the report either by triggering it manually or scheduling it to run late at night (this is a better option if you’ve got a big site with a lot of backlinks, as Link Manager needs time to check all the incoming links - though you can use the “check new only” option if time is short).
My favourite reports:
Inbound link text - this is of course a vital factor in SEO, you don’t want to over-do the money term for the target page, but neither do you want a bunch of random crap, so this report helps you identify what to focus on.
And to keep you motivated, back links over time. If this flat-lines (or worse still, nose-dives!), then you know that your SEO effort has faltered - get back to work!
Want to do some competitor analysis? Just add their URLs in your project, and you can get hold of the same info: who’s linking, the value of that link, and the inbound link text. Sit back, take a look - can you identify a winning pattern? Can you duplicate it? Can you get a link from the same source?
Want more? There’s even a feature to enter the keywords you want to target - Advanced Link Manager will then check the search results, and then analyse the backlinks of the sites that appear in the search results! Like I said, no more grunt work 
Advanced Link Manager is available in a variety of license options depending on your needs, and in both Windoze and Apple flavours - and best of all, they have a 30-day free trial! Download it, try it out on your next SEO project, and be amazed at how much you can achieve.
Advanced Web Rankings
As an SEO, there are basic reporting and reviewing activities that you need to do on a regular basis to check your website ranking. These reports are your bread and butter, your whole raison d’etre as an SEO, and include:
- Where you are ranking for your target SERPs
- Where your competitors are ranking for your target SERPs
If, like me, you obsessively check your search engine rankings, then I’m sure that you’ve wished there was an easier way to do it. You probably not only want to know where you rank today, but where you ranked yesterday, last week, last month - and hey, wasn’t that guy below me last week? Damn, I can’t quite remember - did I take a screenshot of the SERPs? Now, where’d I put it? What else does he rank for anyway?!?
Well, I’ve discovered a great tool that gives you a wealth of information, and now I’m wondering how I managed without it. The tool is Advanced Web Rankings, and I’m in lurve…
My favourite features
- Selecting the right search engine: I have sites that target regional search engines, in their native languages. I don’t care about ranking on google.com, I want google.es in Spanish, or google.de in German - I want to know where I’m ranking on those
- Filter the rankings report based on search engine, website, and keyword - great for drilling down!
- The handy Keyword Research Tool
- Set up a scheduled task to automatically check the SERPs - ok, nothing beats actually taking a look at the SERPs themselves, but let Advanced Web Rankings alert you to when there’s been a change worth looking at!
Easy competitor review
Monitoring the competition - it’s as simple as clicking the “Top Sites” tab, then checking out the report. Combine this with Advanced Link Manager to analyse your competior’s backlinks, and you’ve got a powerful winning combination!
Advanced Web Rankings is available in a variety of license options depending on your needs, and in both Windoze and Apple flavours - and best of all, they have a 30-day free trial! Download it, try it out on your next SEO project, and be amazed at how much you can achieve.
Domains and trademarks
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In the purchase of cialis.co.uk by an independent client of ours, Lilly Icos the trademark owner of cialis immediately made contact requesting the domain be handed over… initially our client had bought the domain hoping to use it for marketing purposes as they run one of the UK’s largest online pharmacy’s selling cialis, amongst other medicines.
We discussed various options with them including the idea of handing (selling) the domain over to a family who had the surname cialis (there had been some press about this family being upset by their surname being given to an erectile dysfunction drug).
Another idea was to use the domain to write a history of the cialis family and the impotence drug together- to justify retaining ownership versus the trademark and not handing it back to Lilly Icos.
As with all trademarks there are grey areas where ownership rights may not be as clear cut as you might think- our client, ukmedix, took specialist legal advice from Charles Russell and decided it best to hand over the domain to Lilly Icos and avoid a lengthy legal tangle with a manufacturer it needs.
Trademark ownership can be tested and there may be some creative ways to challenge the Trademark owner- but more often then not the Goliath and not the David comes out on top- sometimes out of necessity to maintain relationships (as with the case above) and sometimes out of sheer financial clout.
Even domain mispellings and proven copycat techniques that play on a trademark can land you in the soup as was the case with zuccarini- although this is usually too hard to prove.
Landing a great domain in your market can be very lucrative and holding onto it well worth your while, just keep your eyes open as the big boys are protecting their interests now.
For further reading on trademarking try looking at the Lanham act (its US based but covers the topic well).
20 resources for landing pages
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- Discussion on SEOMoz on an article written by Rand Fishkin
- How to use Google website optimiser
- 10-step guide to optimising your landing page by Copyblogger - excellent how-to guide, plus worthy comments
- More landing page tips from Digital World
Are you doing your best to convert your traffic?
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Getting traffic is not the be-all and end-all of the SEO game: you’ve also got to do something useful with that traffic. If your conversion rates are low, check out this post on 50 Ways Your Web Site Is Discouraging Conversions — and How to Fix It
101 left-field ideas for link-building
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- Join local chambers of commerce, they should link to you, and they are usually linked to by .gov sites and .edu sites. Write articles for the local chamber and they will link to you.
- Rent a managed server and offer to host nonprofits for free or at a deep discount, and they will link to you, and they are usually linked to by .gov sites and .edu sites.
- If your are a developer, offer your services for free or at a deep discount, to others, and they will link to you.
- Provide a place for anyone to publish content for free or at a deep discount, and they will link to you.
- Provide a quick reference to specific [ niche ] content sites, and they will link to you.
- Publish your local sunrise, sunset times, daylight hours, and average temperatures etc, and they will link to you.
- Create a flash of a street billboard as it changes over the year on a corner near you, and they will link to you.
- Create a two page formatted page layout as a test, and explain the process of doing it, and they will link to you.
- Be nice to people in forums, and they will link to you
- Join forums where there are profile pages, link back to yourself. If the profile doesn’t get indexed quickly enough, try linking to it yourself
- Be an active participant on forums and blogs that allow link-dropping in posts. Spamming will get you thrown out, but useful posts won’t.
- Write in your own blogs. New blog post + blogroll = new link to sites in blogroll
- Write a blog post about something on one of your sites, and include the link naturally in the blog post. Works better if it’s not obvious that the blog and the site are both yours! (And be nice - link to other sites as well, not just yours.)
- Social interaction of any type leads to links. Speak at a conference? Someone will likely blog about it. Want to get thought leaders to promote your site? Create a community project or contest and ask them to participate. Or give out awards. Lack the budget needed to go to conferences? Moderate forums, comment on related blogs, and build social relationships.
A big thanks to Minnapple over at WebMasterWorld for the thought-provoking original post.
Video Search getting clever
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Looking Inside Video
Video search engines are starting to look inside the video itself. Here are some of the things that were mentioned during the SES San Jose session:
1. Detecting flesh tones to find adult content
2. Checking for audio match with the sound track
3. Logo detection
4. Face detection
5. Object detection
6. EveryZing generates a transcript from the audio
7. On screen text recognition
It will be fascinating to see how this marketplace unfolds. As broadband usage expands, and as more and more people become aware of the quality and quantity of videos which are available, this market will continue to grow. As video search engines get better and better at looking inside videos, the quality of their results will improve. Clever stuff!
In internet marketing, everything from the hosting service to the marketing moves matter. Plans like pay per click do help, but cannot make up for a disastrous web design.
Online Productivity : Resources to Get Things Done!
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Many thanks to Mashable for the guts of post, I’m duplicating it here for my own reference!
Being unproductive on the web is easy: click over to YouTube, surf Facebook profiles or go on a Wikipedia binge for a couple of hours. But thanks to the many free and useful new applications on the web, it’s also getting easier to keep your life in order:
Web Portals
You have the potential to be productive the moment you turn on your computer and fire up that web browser. You can have all the information you want and need accessible to you immediately by using one of the following services.
Netvibes - Generally considered to be the first successful, independent startpage.
Pageflakes - Pageflakes could be considered the brother-in-law to Netvibes and both have very similar offerings in customization and content.
iGoogle - If you have a Google account, then the iGoogle comes part of the package deal, and since many of us have Google as our home page anyways, why not give iGoogle a trial?
My Yahoo - The offerings are somewhat more customizable than iGoogle, but essentially the same concept from a different provider.
Calendar Services
Let’s say you have your parent’s anniversary, project deadlines, and finally taking the family pet to the vet all coming up this week. Having all these things on a calendar is undoubtedly the way to go for keeping track of these events. Unless you prefer writing it on your hand…
Google Calendar - I personally use Google Calendar on a daily basis. It is just that freaking awesome!
Yahoo! Calendar - Yahoo provides a pretty good, but basic, calendar application for organizing your life
30 Boxes - Has a lightning fast interface that is really easy to navigate makes this a good contender.
Kiko - A very nice calendar application with a drag & drop interface.
Contact Management Services
Your cell phone and e-mail program are likely your primary sources for keeping information about your contacts. This is fine. You must ask yourself though, what happens if your cell phone is lost, your webmail account goes down or you lose all the data on your computer? You are pretty much screwed. Time to rethink the way we do contact management.
Plaxo - One of the best known services which allow you to keep track of contacts. Other services that can tap into your Plaxo account and utilize your contacts with your permission.
Tabber - was created with the notion of linking together friends from many social sites and services, but it still serves very well as an address book and contact management application.
Highrise - A premium option to manage your business contacts. If you are more serious about keeping your contacts and have hundreds of them, this could be a cost efficient solution depending on your needs.
HyperOffice - Another premium service that offers control of your contacts. This is for more serious contact management.
News Readers
Why bother with the daily newspaper when you can receive all your information through the Internet? These news readers will help you stay on top of current events with nothing but a browser and a connection.
Google Reader - If you would like a straight and simple news reader, then Google Reader might be worth your time to check out.
Bloglines - A competitor to Google Reader, and offers most of the same services, just a matter of personal taste as to your selection.
Netvibes - Netvibes, as well as being a web portal, serves the other critical purpose of being a news reader for any page that provides an RSS/ATOM feed.
Pageflakes - Like Netvibes, provides RSS modules and can be used as a news reader.
Communication Services
Stickam - If live video conversations are your thing, then Stickam provides you an excellent opportunity to mingle with friends, coworkers, or just random people if you so desire. We wouldn’t use it for business calls, though.
Google 411 - This service from Google is likely something you have never tried before, but once you do, you might use it for a long time coming. A good 411 replacement. (US Only)
Meebo - If you prefer to communicate with friends and colleagues through IM, then Meebo is the site for you to do it all in one easy to use program.
Gmail - The king of e-mail? We think so. Much more efficient at handling large volumes of email than rival services.
Charting & Diagram Services
Ever heard of brainstorming? Of course you have! Well, the following applications follow the same line of thought, but now you can throw your ideas in charts and diagrams often referred to as “mind maps” to plan any future project you may attempt. I personally use these types of applications very often.
Flowchart.com - The title says it all really. Flowchart allows you to create charts and diagrams in a nice drag & drop interface. (Private Beta)
MindMeister - Offering both a free and premium version, MindMeister focuses on collaboration in an easy to use “mind mapping”environment.
Mind42 - Yet another “mind mapping” web app that allows you to collaborate with others. This one is completely free.
Gliffy - Likely the most technical and detailed option on this list. It has many more options available than the others.
Mapping Services
If you need to find out where you are going, and how to get there, these tools can help prevent (or at least reduce) the amount of times you get lost on those long road trips.
Google Maps - Recently has taken over as one of the best mapping tools out there. Not only does it have streets, but you can get an insane amount of data displayed on Google Maps through other services like StreetAdvisor.
Yahoo Maps - Google has obviously driven Yahoo to improve its mapping services, and it shows here.
Mapquest - A very reliable source for getting you from point A to point B.
File Storage Services
Box.net - A very nice solution to uploading and backing up your files, as well as sharing them. You can sign up for free and get a gig of space, or you can have additional storage with the premium options.
MediaMax - Another powerful and useful service to regularly back-up all your important data.
After web hosting, the next major step should be adsl. Only than can you really manage pay per click as well as other marketing plans.
Ask.com’s new search
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Ever asked yourself what would search be like without Google? Well, take a look at the new 3-column search at www.ask.com (doesn’t appear to be live as yet on regional versions, just www).
Once you’ve submitted your search query, you get a very interesting perspective on what to do next.
- On the left, you have your search box to refine your query, complete with a variety of options for narrowing or expanding a search, and related searches.
- In the middle, your search results, complete with the “Binocular” view to get a quick snapshot of the site before actually clicking on the result.
- Best of all, on the right, we have multiple modules, who’s content varies depending on the query. It might be videos, or weather, or images - whatever comes up, it’s an interesting way of exploring your original query.
Much more info on Ask’s new strategy.
Go, take a little traffic away from the Googlopoly and Ask instead. (Though personally, I preferred the butler!)
Link-baiting
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SEOMoz have posted a great video clip explaining link-baiting, both the logic and the process. Link-baiting : it’s about adding useful content to your site, and if others judge it useful, you get the link-lurve!
StumbleUpon
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I’ve finally got around to checking out StumbleUpon, in a few spare moments before catching a plane back to Barcelona. It’s an interesting concept, and a novel way to browse the web. Using this social networking site, or “stumbling”, takes you from person to person - either randomnly, or according to your interests. You can see what sites are popular with users, or visit profiles to find like-minded friends or contacts. Only downside is that you need to download a plug-in/add-on in order to vote for the sites you like, but it’s a painless sign up process.
How useful it will be as a means to generate quality traffic to your site remains to be seen, but some people have found it useful to get user feedback!