The Click Depot Blog

Archive for the ‘SEO Tools’ Category

We work with people from around the world - customers, vendors, freelancers, partners, colleagues, trainers, Etc. In the past, communicating with people over the Internet was limited. Email and phone only goes so far. But recently, screen sharing applications have really reduced this communication gap. And what does this have anything to do with SEO? It doesn’t. Except that if you have a website and are trying to hire an SEO or a freelancer to do your work, you should be considering the use of one of these tools and ask them to explain what they are doing on your website.

Often times, SEO’s do work that is cryptic to you as webmasters. These tools will help your SEO’s explain what they are doing to you. It will also ensure better accountability.

So what are these great tools that I am talking about?

1. http://www.Webex.com - Bought by Cisco recently. They are THE best screen sharing application. Period. They are miles ahead of everyone else in this game. Their screen/application/desktop sharing is almost realtime and their features are the most advanced. Ease of use is amazing. Interface is really well thought out. However, they are the most expensive one too. As you add more meetings, the cost of using Webex can pile up. Starts at $35/month.

2. http://www.GoToMeeting.com: Like Webex. just a little less sophisticated than Webex though. In Screencast software, the compression/decompression algortihms are the key. GoToMeeting is second only to Webex in this case. Slightly cheaper than Webex as well.

3. http://DimDim.com - FREE: Now, this is my favorite. They were launched in late 2007 in Beta and recently launched themselves fully. Actually, one of the senior members of this team is a good friend of mine. The best part about this software - It’s FREE. Yes, they are the only ones that offer this functionality for free. They are still behind the paid users as far as features are concerned but their screen sharing seems to be flawless. I had some trouble using the audio and the screencast at the same time. No big deal. I used Yahoo Messenger Chat for Audio and DimDim for desktop screenshare. Smart huh?

On the same lines, another great software tool is Camtasia Studio. It helps you create quick videos of your screen activity. I can totally see this become the standard for documenting user manuals/guides in the future (already I see video demos of most software) everywhere.

Good luck sharing your desktops and collaborating with your team. Now you have no excuse not to try them out!

Thanks,

Srini

Whether you do SEO for your one website or manage an entire portfolio, you know two things. 1 - Quality backlinks are the number 1 way to achieve a higher search engine rank. 2 - You need tools to quickly identify quality backlinks and rapidly implement your link building campaign.

Now there are hundreds of SEO tools out there. I am not going to try and cover everything, just the top five seo tools that will get you everything you need to get started on a link building campaign without spending a penny.

5. Mike’s Free Search Engine Rankings Tool

If you don’t have a tool yet, please get one. It is way too time consuming to keep going back the the search interface and search for where your site shows up on the results. There are several free and paid tools out there that can make your life easier. This is one thing in which the paid professional tools do seem to offer much better functionality than the free ones. The paid ones like IBP 9 and Web CEO provide the ability to run the rankings at one shot for over a hundred key phrases and then compare today’s results with results from the past. This is very useful. Mike’s rankings tool does offer limited ‘memory’. It remembers your last 20 key phrases and their rankings. Anything beyond 20 is forgotten. Also, the memory comes from cookies. If you clear your cookies, the history is lost. Despite that, this tool provides the best of the free ones. I usually take snapshots of the results using SnagIT and so I can compare with results from the past.

4. Onlywire.com

Social Media sites are THE in thing these days. Between social networking sites (like myspace.com, http://www.facebook.com, http://www.orkut.com, http://www.linkedin.com) and social bookmarking sites (like http://digg.com, http://del.icio.us, http://stumbleupon.com, etc.) that’s where people hang out. For most niches, you will benefit immensely by participating in these networks and intelligently using them to your advantage. Onlywire.com allows you to submit to 15-20 of these sites at once. That saves you a ton of time and is a really useful handy tool that comes for free. Hats off to them. They have been able to scale as well. The tool has been on for months now and still performs, each and every time.

3. Brad Callen’s Article Submitter and Directory Submitter

Brad Callen is almost a celebrity SEO consultant. He has been around for almost 5 years now. His products are widely used. His paid tool SEO Elite is ranked as one of the best SEO tools around. His free tools, however, Article Submiter and Directory Submitter, make it into my list. Article Submitter allows you to submit your article to hundreds of article directories and directory submitter submits your sites to link directories. These can help you get much needed backlinks to prep up your page rank. However, remember that the overuse of this technique can actually hurt your SEO campaign. Only about 10-20% of your total backlinks should be from Article and lInk directories.

2. Yahoo SIte Explorer

This is a great tool, period. Google is a great company. But one thing I don’t like about them is that they don’ reveal search stats to you as openly as Yahoo does. This site basically shows you the number of backlinks pointing to a specific website. A great way to gauge the progress your link building campaign and to see whether your link building campaign is getting results.

1. Aaron Wall’s Backlink Analyzer Tool

This is my #1 seo tool. This is a brand new tool and it’s totally crazy that it is available for free. It allows you to look at the backlinks pointing to a site, and then look at their anchor text. You can also enter a keyword and get all the top sites for that keyword and then appraoch them for backlinks or link exchanges. A great great tool that you should be using.

At http://www.theClickDepot.com, we use all these tools and several other paid tools to optimize your campaign for you.