Tools are all about making you productive and I love that. The fact that they remove the tedious elements of a job and enhance productivity is awesome, in my opinion. On the other hand, you could say that I spend a little too much of my time looking for these resources and figuring them out; so when I heard about the SEO and social Media Power Tools presentation at the Social Marketing Expo, I had to check it out. Below are a few of the resources I learned about from their presenters.
Become a Programmer – Coding Instruction
- Codeacademy provides lessons in programming, which many in the SEO industry believe is necessary for anyone doing SEO. Codeacademy also provides courses on writing game code as well.
- MIT Open Course Ware is a resource that provides more than just computer science related courses, but we’ll just present those here.
- Udacity is another resource that provides helpful instruction. It can help you to build your own search engine and to engineer web applications. It also provides help with applied cryptography, all at no charge.
Analyze On-Site SEO – On Page Analysis Resources
- HTTPFox is an add-on to Firefox for checking http response codes.
- Page Speed Plug-in is available for use in both Chrome and Firefox and is used to check page speed on sites and to troubleshoot issues. It is fast and easy to use.
- Scraper for Chrome is for those who want to work primarily in your browsers. It is a Chrome plug-in that will get SEO info from a page quickly.
- ScreamingFrog can be installed on Mac or Windows and will crawl your websites looking for SEO errors. You can get either the free or paid version and get it to provide results in Excel if you want.
- WooRank – This tool will evaluate the SEO-friendless of a website in real-time by looking at several factors.
Get an Idea – Keyword Research Tools
- Keyword Eye is also used for keyword research, but it presents the information in a visual format instead of text-only.
- Scrapebox allows you to gather URLs from search engine results and has been used for blackhat SEO in the past, but is now being used for various whitehat purposes.
- SEOGadget API Excel Extension exports keyword data right from Google’s API into Excel.
- Soovle explores the suggest feature on various websites as a means of providing you with keyword ideas. It can be customized for your subject matter.
- Ubersuggest harvests information from Google’s suggested searches and can also export data that you can use in researching long-tailed keywords.
- Yahoo Clues gets you tons of demographic information for use in SEO. This kind of information can be very important for keyword research.
- We didn’t mention Google Keyword Tool, RavenTools or SEOmoz suite of tools but they’re well known already.
Publish like a Newspaper – Content Idea Generators
- Gofish allows you to use Twitter for your keyword research by showing you relevant Tweets in real time.
- SEOgadget Content Strategy Tool is made with Google Docs. Basically, you open it in Google Docs and put in a whatever you are researching and it will produce results with relevant data that are currently popular on a variety of websites.
- TweetStats – This tool will show you what is currently trending on Twitter.
Speed up that Number Crunching! Spreadsheet Enhancers
- ImportXML for Google Docs is more complex than most of the tools on this list and will take more learning to use effectively, but it can enable you to make your own SEO tools within Google Docs.
- SEOTools allows you to work with a variety of web metrics in Excel, including SEO metrics.
- SEJ’s 5 SEO Spreadsheet Resources is a great list of spreadsheet enhancers that you can use during your SEO work.
What’s your Competitor Doing? Check with these Competitive Analysis Tools
- Link Detective uses your link data to analyze your backlinks and separate them into types. Useful, especially since Google’s Penguin update.
- LinkResearch Tools is a set of link-building resources that provides you with automated link profiling. It’s expensive, but could be worth it to try.
- Searchmetrics allows you to analyze both your own and your competitor’s rank in search engine results.
Don’t OverPay! Use these Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Resources
- Facebook Ad Creator is Facebook’s tool for creating Facebook ads.
- Facebook Insights provides you with content metrics and a means of analyzing trends within demographics. You use the information to create your content.
- DoubleClick Ad Planner helps you to identify and target your audience by finding websites that are likely to interest them.
Starting Mining with these Data Resources
- Freebase has information on 20 million topics and provides this on a open creative commons license.
- Google Public Data belongs to the people with more data than anyone else: Google. Check this site out to get data for your content.
- Medicare Data is data about hospitals, dialysis facilities, health agencies, nursing, and medical equipment suppliers.
- World Government Data provides you with all the information you need to create infographics. The site allows you to search all of the world’s government data from one place.
- Also check out this thread on Quora.
Quick & Easy Data Visualization Tools
- D3 Data Driven Documents is a javascript library that is utilized to visualize data by using HTML, SVG and CSS.
- Dipity enables you to provide your visitors with a new way of looking at content via timelines that you can build on using their tools.
- Infogr.am allows you to create slick graphics and charts for your website that can be embedded in a blog post or page.
- Storybird allows you to format your content like a book that you can play like a game. The books look fantastic.
Automate that Link Research
- AHREFs is a tool for researching backlinks and comes with a free trial and a paid option. The paid version is worth it.
- Blekko is a search engine that is promoted as being devoid of spam. It provides loads of data regarding inbound links and other information useful for SEO. You will need to sign up for a free account in order to get the full benefit.
- Broken Link Index identifies links to content that is no longer online, improving on it and contacting those who are still linking to the old version.You will have to sign up to take advantage.
- Link Diagnosis uses the Linkscape engine to provide you with the ability to analyze your backlinks.
- Xenu Link Sleuth finds all broken links on a website
Bookmarklet Resources
- Open Graph Helper allows you to see if your content renders correctly in Facebook without having to check the code.
- Wirify can be used to turn any site into a wireframe – brilliant!
- Gmail This! Helps you email websites quicker by prefilling out the subject with the title of the page, and adding a link in the body.
Know Where You’re At With These Rank Trackers
Start Building Those Links – Backlink Building Tools
- Boomerang helps you to schedule your emails for the best results when reaching out for links.
- Buzzstream is a collaborative tool for link-building that you can use to analyze your prospects and track your outreach emails. You can also use it to link social media profiles with those to whom you are reaching out for links, among many other things.
- Followerwonk helps you to get your link prospecting done by finding influential people on Twitter. You can build lists for prospecting purposes or get stats. The cost of joining up is very affordable.
- Ifttt stands for “if this then that”. Use an event to launch a corresponding event. If something happens, then you can use ifttt to do something else in response. It can save lots of time when working with social media.
- Knowem allows you to claim your name on multiple social networks. You can also use it for competitor analysis and to build links.
- Mentionmapp is excellent for visualizing the connections between those on Twitter. Use it to find the people who influence the influential but who might actually follow you back.
- Ontolo is a suite for efficient and organized prospecting. Many of the tools included in it are free.
- Outreachr gets contact details for you when you are link prospecting, that way you don’t have to do it manually.
- Rapportive in a plug in for Gmail that shows you the social network profiles of people you correspond with via email. You can get an idea of how influential they are and also contact them. It can also clean up your emails to them. Recently got purchased by Google as well.
- Zemanta gives you help with your blog publishing by finding relevant media and articles to which you can link. It can also get you linked to as a “relevant blogger.”
Just a final word
These tools have been categorized for the sake of this blog post, but realize that their uses often expand past the one(s) provided. Some of our backlink building tools can be used to build your social media followings as well!
We provide these tools for your reference but do not endorse, provide support for them, or have used all of them. We hope you enjoy the list and have success with all your SEO and Social Media campaigns!
