While looking for some internet marketing tools, I landed on Evan Carmichael's post The Top 11 Tools You’ve Never Heard Of for Internet Marketers - SEO University. I found these tools very important so featuring the same on my blog.
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
- 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
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
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
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
7) 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
8) 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
9) GSiteCrawler (http://www.gsitecrawler.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
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
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