SEO Blog - UK Search Engine Marketing

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.

Do you use Google Analytics? Well, a recent study shows that you’re not alone, roughly one third of the Alexa top 500 websites traffic wise use it. That surprised me a little. Anyways, I use Google Analytics myself and noticed before that some numbers are inaccurate or downright wrong. In May I discovered how wrong, completely wrong.

The numbers of search engine referers, more specifically, are wrong. I’ve noticed that before but wasn’t panicking as no statistic tool is perfectly accurate, you always should use at least 2 of them and compare the numbers. Now this time I checked my stats over at SEO 2.0 I was unable to ignore it anymore.

SEO 2.0 is mostly about social media and blogging SEO and it relies on traffic from other sources than Google. I only get insignificant numbers of visitors from Google on my blog, mostly due to very specific “long tail” queries. The only really important keyphrase is “SEO 2.0″ itself. Now looking at my May stats I was very surprised that one of better performing keywords was “site seo vs blog seo” without quotes.

I looked deeper into that just to discover that all 60 visitors looking for this keyword is one person from Bucharest, Romania. Google Analytics counted her or him several times a day for more than 2 weeks.

Now I sometimes create returning visits just by launching my FireFox with my saved tabs but how can a person search for the same query every day several times and then click the search result each time? This one riddles me. I’ve seen that kind of behaviour with Google Analytics in the past but always thought it was due to myself or several developers from my client working on the same site.

Not this time, there is certainly no Romanian developer working on my site. Now try to multiply these numbers for one of the top 500 sites and you end up with completely worthless statistics.

I’m not here to bash Google for their great analytics solution. I love checking and comparing bounce rates etc. but it’s more than strange that a search engine gets the search referers wrong in its own analytics solution. So if they don’t want people to make up conspiracy theories about Google overstating their search referers numbers they better fix this quick.

What can you do about it? Look out for some alternatives and either use Google Analytics and at least another solution or even more. What alternatives are there?

Well, if you’re running a “top 500 website” you better rely on a solution used and recommended by leading search marketers. This is ClickTracks in most cases. Also Omniture has been recommended by many professionals. Many people outside of Germany probably don’t know it but some German marketers prefer Etracker. Just to name three of them. There are plenty of high end solutions out there you surely can afford if you run such a huge site.

For the average webmaster seeking a low cost or free solution there is no single alternative to rely on. There is Piwik, an open source alternative recently hailed by many, but it’s in alpha now and didn’t work for me, it produced SQL errors instead.

Another solution is to use Google Analytics along a specialized search analytics tool like:

• Hittail
• 103bees
• Enquisite

Have you experienced similar issues with Google Analytics or am I the only one to discover this?

There have been a post at SEOmoz, by SEO theory blogger Micheal Martinez already in 2006 and a post in 2007 from AimClear focused on the reliability on Google Analytics with another topic, outages.

My conclusion right now is a grim one: Google Analytics is cheating you, I hope not on purpose. Unless you do not care about accurate search referers and visitor numbers you should use one of the solutions above or resort to log file analysis.

I know the Alexa stats are normally inaccurate anyway but today seems to be worse than usual!

All of the traffic seems to be missing for 17th September, here’s a graph to show the huge drops seen by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft:

Logging into my Google Analytics account this morning I noticed the following alert:

“Over the next several weeks, we will be migrating all existing Analytics accounts to the new Google Analytics interface. You will be notified by email once your account has been migrated. For an entire month you will be able to access both the original interface and the new interface. During the migration, you should experience no interruption in service and you will be able to see all of your data regardless of which interface you use.”

The Google Analytics blog announced the new version yesterday, which generally looks like a cleaner, easier to use system.

Here’s a list of the new improvements:

• “Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
• Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
• Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
• Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.”

So far my account has remained the same but the Analytics tour shows some of the new features, focusing quite strongly upon the integration with Google AdWords.

Alexa have added some new information to their traffic stats page. This now displays a percentage reach of internet users who visit this site, the country users come from and the sites traffic rank for an individual country.

Here’s a screenshot of the traffic rankings for seoptimise.com:

These rankings are only based upon users with the Alexa toolbar installed, so the higher the traffic/Alexa ranking the more accurate the information should be. I would recommend using Google Analytics (or similar website analysis program) to collect this information about your own site, but Alexa definitely gives a good idea about your competitors website stats, such as which countries their users are coming from.

I wrote a post on the FeedBurner forums yesterday asking how to track RSS subscriptions as conversions.

The reply from Dick Costolo confirmed that:
This is on our roadmap but not yet possible. We have four or five more things we want to add to site stats to make it “whole” and then we will begin to bridge this blind spot between site visits, subscriptions, and conversions from site visitors to subscribers and the crossover therein.

This probably takes us a couple/few more months as this also implies that we need to stop having two separate stats dashboards and create a common content-centric view of stats in which you see your subscription conversions and crossover traffic (eg, “28% of commenters are subscribers”). We are very excited about this, but as always, the good stuff takes time to build :)”

This sounds like an excellent feature and one which I would definitely be keen on using to track the type of traffic and keyword phrases which convert into RSS subscriptions.