Reinvigorate Website Analytics
One of the newest services to hit the website analytics market is Reinvigorate. It has been under beta for quite some time, and we’ve had the chance to use it while it underwent its testing and development phases. It has a very polished and clean interface, easy to use graphs and charts of your visitor detail. Overall it gives you everything you would need to clearly analyze your website traffic. However, one additional feature that sets this service apart is the heat mapping functionality. This gives you the ability to observe where users focus their mouse and consequently their attention on your website pages. It also shows you where users click on your pages. So, you can easily run A/B and split tests to determine the success of something based on whether or not it is grabbing your users attention and whether or not their mouse and cursor is drawn to whatever you may be testing. It’s a real nice feature that we’ve used internally to examine how users navigate our site and how to best streamline content to get users the information they want quickly. Here’s the link to reinvigorate: http://www.reinvigorate.net/
SERP Keyword Ranking By Site or Keyword
Have you ever wondered what keywords and positions you currently hold on Google organic search results? Well, there’s one tool that we strongly recommend to be able to monitor and discover this information. SEMRush is a website tool that gives you this information, and the basics are free. With a subscription you can see a ton of detail, but for free you have access to valuable Google keyword information. This is especially useful when you are not exactly sure where you rank on Google and for what particular keywords. It also gives you some guestimates of traffic volume, PPC competitors, Ad spend, and possible advertisers. Most likely more information than you may ever need, but the core offering is valuable to everyone interested in monitoring their Google rank. While you’re working on those organic search results, you can always buy website traffic to give you an immediate boost in traffic and help gauge the performance of your website and to also test various landing pages and their marketing scores.
Search Engine Optimization Engine
SEOEng is a tool that we have found which allows you to gain insight into deep metrics of your content, it’s value, and very precise calculations with respect to duplicate content and linkflow. We find the results very surprising when analyzing some of our more high profile clients. It’s definitely worth taking a look at, and might be useful in your SEO efforts. Here’s the link: http://www.seoeng.com/.
Link Popularity Checker
One of the most important SEO tools is the ability to see how many back or inlinks you have from other websites to your own. It’s a vital part of SEO and there are many tools that will allow you to see this information. One of these tools is available here: http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/link-popularity/. You can use it to get a quick look at how many inbound links are registered on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Keep in mind that Google usually never shows you the full list of your inbound links. You need to use Google Webmaster Tools to really be able to view the entire list of links it has for you.
Website Grader – A Cool Tool
We always like to bring attention to a cool tool that can help you on your quest for the perfect website that brings you endless amounts of quality traffic. You can always have us send you an endless supply, but having the organic and natural results to supplement that is a necessity. So, we recommend you use a tool by Hubspot called Website Grader, located at www.websitegrader.com. This tool gives you some persepective as to key things that search engines look for in your overall ranking. Things like how old your domain is, how soon it expires, how many inbound links you have, whether or not you have an associated blog and twitter account, and a few other goodies that are staples of a good SEO plan. Be sure and check out the tool, see what your grade is, and take some of the advice it gives and see if you can improve your overall rankings and website traffic.
Free Website Monitoring
Everyone that owns or operates a website will find this service useful. Montastic is a free service to monitor the uptime of your website. It is free and very useful. You can register and setup your account in minutes, and in the event of your website becoming unavailable, you will be notified via e-mail. You also have the options of having an RSS feed that contains the status of all your websites. You can setup multiple websites, and login at any time to see the status of everything. So, check them out and i’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised by this free service. Here’s the link:
Adroll Advertising Network
Adroll is an advertising network that works for both people who want to advertise across the web, and for site owners who are wanting to make money from their website traffic. Adroll is free to join as either a publisher or an advertiser.
As an advertiser, you can select any “roll” of websites that you want to advertise. A roll is basically a grouping of similar websites, which allow you to target a specific niche or website traffic. If you want to target “celebrity gossip” websites, you can pay for ad impressions on sites that cater to that niche. Overall, the rates seem fair, at times a bit high, but compared to other networks they are pretty good. They also have a technology called Retargeting which uses a snippet of code thats placed on your website, to take users who visit your website, and then continually show your ad to that same visitor as many times as possible on other websites they may visit while online. This sort of lets you stay in front of the one that got away, and with luck, you may just have that person come back to your website and make a purchase.
From the publisher standpoint, Adroll is pretty standard, You can setup for free and start serving ads immediately. You essentially have the option to serve another networks ads when Adroll hasn’t sold any space, so you don’t end up with dead zones on your website. You can also name your own rate when it comes to Adroll, but you can’t get too carried away or you’ll never sell any impressions. Because it is impressions, you get paid just for having the traffic, regardless of whether or not that user clicks on any of your sponsors ads.
So, overall, it’s a nice network to be a part of, but the biggest challenge I see is that from an advertiser perspective, they don’t have a lot of high quality, high traffic websites to choose from. From a publisher standpoint, they don’t seem to have a lot of advertisers outside the main stream news, gossip, and tech industries.
Adroll is located at www.adroll.com
Search Engine Webmaster Tools
While you are in the pursuit of more visitors to your website, it’s important to use the free tools provided by the “big 3″ search engines to aid you in your quest for top organic search result appearances.
Google provides it’s Webmaster Tools which provide a reasonable amount of helpful information for site owners. You’re able to submit sitemaps, view indexed keywords Googlebot finds in your pages, view inbound and internal links, test your robots.txt file, view any crawl errors, see which keywords your website has shown up for, and a few other less useful tools.
Yahoo provides a tool called Site Explorer which provides some basic functionality to webmasters. Mainly, it allows you to submit a sitemap to give Yahoo’s spider a helpful hint as to the pages on your website. It also allows you to remove pages from the index. Outside of that, it doesn’t do much and it’s not the easiest interface to use.
Bing provides a set of tools called Webmaster Tools that allow you to do some basic functions. You can submit sitemaps, test a keyword against your indexed pages, and view crawl errors by the MSN Bot. The interface is very basic, and doesn’t provide much functionality outside that.
Overall, it’s a must to be familiar and use these three tools from the Search engines that dominate 99% of all searches on the internet. By far, we prefer Google’s tool, and after all, they were the first to provide such a tool. The main thing you want to accomplish with all three is getting them information about your sitemap xml file that they can use to continually spider your website and you need to make sure that you keep it updated as the contents of your website change.
Re-invent your business with a new logo
One of the most important parts of your online presence is a consistent image and professionally designed logo. Logos provide an easy way for customers to recognize you and your brand. In this economy, with the nature of online businesses, you have to be ahead of the game and having a nice looking logo is key. Logomaker is a great way to get a really professional looking logo for an awesome price. Logomaker is a part of HP, so you know you’re getting a good deal and you’re using the latest in technology.
You can get a professional looking logo for only $49!
SpyFu – A Website Owners Competitive Edge
When you come face to face with the reality that you aren’t the only game in town when it comes to selling your products and services online, you have to find a competitive edge to stay ahead of your competition. We’ve found that the services offered by SpyFu are extremely useful when it comes to sniffing out the other guys and seeing who it is that you are really competing against when it comes to paid and organic search. SpyFu offers the ability to view results based on either a keyword or a domain name. This means that you can run reports a few different ways to really discover what you’re up against.
SpyFu basically works by indexing search results and capturing who is running what ads, where they appear, and who is in the organic or “regular” search results. It then lets you cross reference this so you can find keywords and phrases that your competitors are using that you may not have thought of. It also lets you see who else is advertising on similar keywords that you may not even be aware of. You also get a short list of keywords where you appear in the organic search results, and which position you occupied. This information in SpyFu is updated atleast monthly, so it is relevant to the here and now since Google doesn’t make very many sudden movements, atleast not on a more frequent than monthly basis.
Probably the most important feature that is easily available to all SpyFu searches is the guestimated daily spend of your competitors along with a graph detailing if their spend is on the increase, decrease, or just maintaining the same levels. These numbers have a somewhat wide range, since SpyFu has no way of knowing click-through rates of each ad, so it seems to be based on industry trends of pay-per-click advertising.
All in all, a definate must for anyone serious about gaining the competitive edge when it comes to Google search results and your PPC campaigns.
