Welcome to part three of this three part series on SEO tools and resources. In the last two articles we discussed the variety of Firefox extensions used for SEO as well as an assortment of other free or affordable SEO tools. In this article we’ll discuss some of the resources you’ll want to access on a regular basis to keep up to date and informed on the goings-on in the search engine and SEO realm.

We’re doing to cover a few different types of resources below and I’m going to try to keep this article to a reasonable length so let’s begin …

Media

when there’s a breaking story or you want an expert opinion on a subject, a good first place to hit is the media sources in that industry. The SEO industry is no different and there are some amazing albeit often unconventional media sources. Some of my favorite are:

Webmaster Radio

Webmaster Radio is an Internet-based radio station with some great programing ranging from affiliate marketing to PPC to organic optimization and much more. With shows hosted by experts in their fields from Danny Sullivan (Search news) to Dave Szetela (PPC) you’ll solid information that is well-sounded. I’d list my favorite shows however what I like may be different than you and what I need to know may be different than what you need to know so look through their programming and either listen through your work day as I often do or download the podcasts for later listening.

WebProNews

WebProNews offers up-to-the-minute information on virtually every event. They have reporters writing constantly and have other scoring SEO blogs and other news sources, compiling the information in one place for easy access. They also have great articles by third-party writers and a very active readership that is proactive in their commenting. Definitely near the top of my go-to list when I’m looking for news and current feedback.

Addme

This site is difficult to classify as it fits into a couple categories but I decided to include under media as that’s my primary use. They include tools, resources, a directory and much more on their site. My primary use of this site is for the articles and newsletter.

Search Engine Watch

No list of SEO resources would be complete without including Search Engine Watch. This site is the one that started it all. Search Engine Watch provides everything from fantastic articles to breaking news to search engine stats and an awesome forum. A definite bookmark.

Blogs

As with many industries – blogs are a great way to keep informed on the latest goings-on in the SEO realm. The trick, however, is figuring out which blogs are worth reading and which authors are truly knowledgeable. Over the years I’ve read many blogs and to be honest – I still do. Below are some of the key blogs I reference on a regular basis.

SEO Book Blog

Aaron Wall over at SEO Book has an excellent blog worth reading on a regular basis. I have yet to visit his blog and not find some tid-bit of information that was worth reading either because of the information itself or because often he’s just entertaining. Another to add to your weekly reading list.

Matt Cutts Blog

It’s nice to get it from the horse’s mouth. For those who don’t know – Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team. He blogs about Google, technology and occasionally his cat. One has to read what he writes knowing that he’s a Google employee and as such can’t really give away the farm BUT he gives tons of great advice, insight and tips. The perk being – this time you don’t have to ask if following his advice will get you banned.

SEO By The Sea

Bill Slawski (the author) focuses his attentions on the more technical side of things with tales of patents, algorithmic possibilities, statistics and functionalities. For many, his would be one of the more dry blogs if not for his gift with words and ability to make even the most bland of subject, palatable. You don’t need to visit his blog daily but adding it to your weekly journey through the web is recommended.

SEOmoz Blog

What blog list would be complete without the inclusion of the SEOmoz blog. Rand Fishkin and crew keep their visitors up-to-date of some great research, news and SEO tips. From opinion pieces to months-long whitepapers you’ll find useful information. Again – not necessary to visit every day but a weekly pass is always worthwhile.

Forums

Forums are a great place to gather information, especially on current events such as ranking updates. That said, reading forums can be a risky thing. Almost anyone can join a forum and post their thoughts. While this format allows us to capture a wide range of information and knowledge – it also results in less qualified people giving advice as well. So while I recommend reading forums – I also recommend taking things with a grain of salt – at least until you figure out who’s who.

SEO Chat Forums

The SEO chat forums are easily one of the largest and most popular of the SEO forums. They cover a HUGE array of issues from Google to social media to Alexa rankings to (hold your hats) Ask Jeeves (that’s right – the forum’s been around for THAT long). Users worth noting are rustybrick, fathom, and randfish.

DigitalPoint Forums

DigitalPoint also is an ancient forum (2000 – ancient by web standards at least). They cover a wide range of topics from SEO to PPC to affiliate programs. Some users worth noting there are shoemoney, daven, and of course digitalpoint. A great place to ask your questions. Heavily visited and they have a ranking system for their users so you can get a decent feel as to whether they’re reliable.

SitePoint Forums

There are a variety of reasons I like SitePoint and I own a number of their books. Their forums focus on design and development (not SEO) but every SEO needs resources on the design and development side.

Newsletters & Other Resources

Of course there are other resources that every SEO or webmaster needs to be able to get their hands on. Here they are:

Google Webmaster Guidelines

These are the guidelines set out by Google telling you what you can and can’t do and what tactics to look out for. Worth a look over periodically as the do change from time-to-time. If you’re heading into the forums for advice you’ll definitely want to gander at the guidelines first to make sure that if you get lead astray – at least you’ll know what can get you banned or penalized first.

Sphinn

A social media site for SEO. Here you’ll find user-submitted stories on a wide array of Internet Marketing topics. Obviously the quality and relevancy of the stories ranges from brilliant to utter crud but the cream usually rises to the top with good stories hitting page one. That said – an occasional peek at specific threads often reveals some hidden gems.

Search Engine Land Newsletter

Perhaps I should have included this in the media section above as it’s a fine site unto itself but it was the newsletter component that I find most helpful and so I have decided to place it here. Sign up for their newsletter and you’ll get daily notification as to when some of the major search engine events happen and some solid advice as to what it means for you.

High Rankings Newsletter

Jill over at High Rankings puts out a solid newsletter where she provides tips and advice including replies to visitor questions. While I may disagree with some of her points from time to time (the same can likely be said for more of the resources noted and I’m sure others can say the same about my writings and opinions) I’ve never seen her provide bad advice – my advice just might be different from time-to-time.

Conclusion

Obviously there are a ton more tools and resources available. In this series of articles I’ve tried to include those that apply to the broadest spectrum of people and that are the most helpful. I highly recommend hunting for your own – especially if you’ve got issues that you can’t find help for here.

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Welcome to part two of this three part series on SEO tools and resources. In the last article we discussed the variety of

Firefox extensions used for SEO. In this article we’ll discuss some of the free and affordable tools you can use to better your organic optimization efforts. By affordable I mean for virtually everyone so I’m going to set the bar at $100/yr or ownership. Admittedly, we use tools that cost more than this but many of those tools will be out of some people’s price range.

Here are some of the key tools you need to use to help insure the successful optimization of your website.

Google Keyword Tool

Many of you are likely familiar with Google’s keyword tool, but it needs to be noted. This is a great resource for researching keywords. As with all keyword tools, it has its limitations and most would agree that it seems to overestimate search volume but nonetheless it is probably the best of the keyword tools out there, especially at the price.

Keyword Discovery

No individual set of data is perfect and no stage of the SEO process is more important than keyword research and selection. Keyword Discovery is a great tool to compare with the Google keyword data. Where you find commonalities you know that 2 independent sets of data agree. With a free trial that may itself work for many – it’s certainly worth looking into.

Keyword Spy

While the paid version of this tool is more than the $100/yr. max I noted previously – the free version provides some great data. Simply enter a competitor URL and you’ll find out some valuable data about the keywords they rank for both organically and in AdWords. This is great for competitor analysis as well as for finding keywords you might not have thought of.

Xenu Link Sleuth

A fantastic free tool that crawls websites, reporting back all the broken links. Over time, almost all sites get broken links. Running this tool periodically will help you find them so you can fix them.

Google Webmaster Tools

Arguably one of the most important of the SEO tools. Google Webmaster Tools allows webmasters (and SEO’s of course) to see their website the way Google does. With this tool you’ll get to see what your site is appearing for in the results, what pages on your site are linked to but don’t exist, and a wide array of errors and statistics.

With this information you can repair a number of issues. If your site is appearing for phrases that you’re not getting traffic from, you can review your titles and descriptions to see if you can improve your clickthrough rate. Xenu won’t show you the links from other sites that are pointing to pages that don’t exist – Google Webmaster Tools will. You’ll also find good backlink information for your site as well as a lot more.

Page Prowler

Page Prowler is a backlink research tool that allows the user to collect large amounts of potential backlink information, sort that data by site strength, and then proceed to pursue those backlinks. The value of this tool is primarily in the time it saves. It has no function that could not be done manually, but it can compile data that would otherwise take a person hours or days to collect quickly and easily.

Full disclosure – Shawn (the developer) asked me to advise on the development of this link building tool and I’m also assisting in it’s marketing. I was extremely impressed with Shawn’s first version of PR Prowler which includes some great functions and information. I felt the need to note this, but I’ll also note that we at Beanstalk use this tool regularly. I would not include it here if it didn’t deserve to be and I’d include it here if I had nothing to do with it other than my using it.

Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking is probably the most affordable of the better rank checking software programs. It has a ton of great features including scheduling and auto-report generation. You can set the searches to take place slowly to reduce the impact on the search engines. I still recommend to run it in the evening to further minimize your impact during high-volume search periods.

Multiple Keyword Rack-Checking Tool

This is probably one of the most popular tools on the Beanstalk site. One of the pet peeves I always had with online rank checking tools was checking rankings one-at-a-time. This tool allows you to check your rankings on Google ten at a time. Apparently others agree as it’s the most used tool of our set.

136 SEO Tools

While we’ve tried to include a solid set of very affordable tools in this article, you might find value in tools we don’t use. The “136 SEO Tools” page is regularly updated and includes some very interesting (though not part of my daily arsenal) tools. Highly recommended to visit at least once. I have it in my bookmarks and check back every couple months to see what new tools have been added.

Next Part

In part three of this article series we’ll be taking a look at a slew of invaluable SEO resources that you need to visit regularly to keep up-to-date on this ever-changing industry. While there are more than can be listed in a single article, I’ll be covering my first points of access when I’m looking for news or others’ opinions on SEO and search engine events.

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Every SEO uses different tools and resources. Some tools are paid, some are free and some are internally developed tools that we use for ourselves and our clients – but we all use them. Very often I get asked what tools people should use if they’re looking to optimize their own sites and what resources they should use to keep up with the latest going’s on. While telling people how to optimize their own sites and what the tools we use isn’t generally the best of business practices – I just can’t help myself. If your budget doesn’t allow for the hiring of a professional SEO company – trying it yourself may be the only option. I also try to remember that once-upon-a-time I was optimizing my own sites and was new to SEO and without the open advice of others already involved in the community – I wouldn’t be running a successful SEO company today. To this end, it only seems right to provide a list of some of the main tools we use on virtually every site.

When I initially started writing this article I was going to cram a slew of various tools and resources into one article, but the article was going to end up running WAY too long to hold your attention (or mine) so I’ve cut it into three EZ parts (as opposed to three EZ payments which you’ll be familiar with if you too watch late night TV with a laptop in front of you writing things like SEO articles). But let’s get to the meat of this article shall we? The series will be divided into three parts:

• Firefox
• Free & Affordable Tools
• Resources

So let’s begin with Firefox. Let me first say, I don’t know if Firefox is officially the browser of SEO’s, but if not – it should be. You can download it at Mozilla.com.

And now the extensions that make this browser invaluable to SEO’s …

SEO Quake

If I had to lose all but one of my SEO tools – this would be the one I’d keep which is why it gets listed first. This little tool allows me to quickly look at the top 10 results in the SERPs and within seconds see all the PageRank, indexed page numbers, backlinks to that page, domain backlinks, the age of the site and much, much more.

This tool doesn’t provide any revolutionary information in that it’s all data that can be accessed directly. However, it reduces the time taken for tasks that would take minutes to seconds. It then provides easy links to more detailed information. A fantastic tool.

Oh, and it also adds a line through all nofollowed links. Very handy when link building.

SEO for Firefox

Aaron Wall over at SEO Book has added a great tool to the mix that duplicates a lot of functions of SEO Quake but which has enough additional features to be very useful. Basically – neither is a replacement for the other.Like most tools – it provides information that can be accessed in other ways, BUT with this Tool Aaron allows users to find tons of relevant site and keyword information quickly and painlessly. From keyword traffic to keyword trends, from backlink counts to social media mentions – this tools gives
quick access to tons of information.

Admittedly, I prefer the layout of SEO Quake and some of the easier functionality.

SEO Link Analysis

A HUGE thumbs way up (two of them in fact) to Joost de Valk who made all our lives simpler when this tool launched. What this tool does is display the PageRank and anchor text of every link when you perform a backlink check on one of the major engines. I suppose you could visit every single site and get this information yourself and there’s value in that to be sure, but when you need a quick analysis of a site’s backlinks – this tool is invaluable.

As a sidenote – it works VERY well with SEO Quake.

Web Developer

With this tool we’re getting a bit more advanced. For those of you who understand coding or are learning (and you should be), this tool is incredible. It allows for quick testing and viewing of a site’s structure including, image info, table and cell information, W3C compliance, CSS details and MUCH, MUCH more.

I can’t possibly list off all the functions this tool offers and admittedly I don’t use them all but I use enough of them regularly for this tool to make my top 10 list.

IE Tab

This is an odd tool to add and it’s purely a convenience tool but like adding a second monitor to your system – once you have it and realize that it saves you just a few seconds dozens of times per day you quickly realize that your productivity relies on it.

With a simple click of a button, this tool loads Internet Explorer into your Firefox tab so you don’t have to go back-and-forth between browsers when testing. I could survive without it, but since you have Firefox anyways…

Search Status

This is another tool with many uses. On the surface it simply displays PageRank, Alexa and Compete rank and mozRank data but with a right-click of the icon you get access to a whole slew of additional information, including fast links to whois, the robots and sitemap files, keyword density information, Archive.org info, and it will even highlight nofollow links.

A lot of these features overlap other tools noted above, but I will say – I have it installed and so should you.

These are the main extensions I have installed for Firefox (read: the ones I use virtually every day). This isn’t to say that’s all there are, and I can’t stress enough the benefits of
visiting addons.mozilla.org and looking for more useful extensions specific to your needs (RSS, Twitter, coding, etc.) I have about a dozen more installed than are listed here, but those above are the main Firefox SEO tools I use daily.

In the next article, we’ll be taking a look at free and affordable tools that you can use to help improve your website rankings. Be sure to keep your eyes open as there will be many invaluable tools listed there too.

You might think that writing 100 articles in a year is a Herculean feat that only the most advanced or professional writer can accomplish, but the truth is that even a beginner can reach this goal with a little bit of planning and consistency.

What’s the benefit of having a ‘100 articles’ goal?

When you’re doing article marketing, a pivotal factor of your success will be how consistently you submit articles. Many amateurs decide to try article marketing and then give up prematurely when they don’t see immediate results.

What a shame! Article marketing is one of the most effective, reliable, and user friendly website marketing tools, but you need to submit articles consistently over an extended span of time in order to reap the benefits.

Even when you know you should be submitting articles every month, it can be a challenge to stay focused and write articles on a regular basis.

This is where the ‘100 articles’ goal comes in–focusing on that long term goal and coming up with a plan on how to reach it is like building consistency into your marketing plan. Instead of thinking of each article as a one-off, you start to see each article you submit as contributing to a larger goal.

Why should you aim to accomplish this goal in a year?

The goal is not just to submit 100 articles–the goal is to do it in about a year’s time. There are SEO benefits for trickling out your article submissions consistently over an extended span of time. This allows you to build links in a more organic way, which is attractive to search engines.

So, a year’s time is a good time frame. Space your articles submissions out evenly over that time. Submit just 8 articles a month, and you will reach your goal with ease.

Strategies For Submitting 100 Articles In A Year:

Just 8 articles a month will let you accomplish this goal in a little over a year. That’s just 2 articles a week.

• Write one article 2 days a week. Create regular ‘writing days’ where you have a block of time set aside for writing.
• Or schedule, one or more extended writing sessions where you produce multiple articles at one sitting.
• Or you can stockpile articles: Write 5 articles a week for 5 weeks. That will produce enough articles to last you about 3 months and will allow you to take a break from writing for a couple months (while still providing you with articles to submit during that time). Then do it all over again.

Need Writing Ideas?

Easy enough to decide to write 2 articles a week–the hard part is coming up with ideas of what to write about. Here are some suggestions to keep your creative juices flowing:

1. Use a free article writing template that gives you a basic structure for crafting an article on your topic. I’ve created some of my own, and I use them all the time.
2. Adapt content from your blog to create articles.
3. Remember to write for newbies and more advanced readers–you can cover the same topic in two different articles geared towards groups with different knowledge levels.
4. Use customer frequently asked questions as the basis for an article.
5. Use a keyword suggestion tool such as WordTracker to see what keywords your target readers are typing into search engines. Then write articles to satisfy those searches.

Your Assignment:

1. Commit to writing 100 articles in about a year’s time.
2. Develop a plan to reach your goals using one of the strategies I’ve outlined here or customize your own plan.

Imagine how you’ll feel at the end of a year when you know you’ve stuck to your goal and made a huge and lasting impact on your website’s health. Consistency is the key–it is not hard. It just takes writing a steady amount of articles every month. You can do this!