Great new RSS service

When a site you like doesn’t offer an RSS feed sometimes you can take things into your own hands by using Page2rss.com. I do this for clients so I can see what has changed on their site.

Gmail sends emails back in time

I can’t wait to use this for client delivarables

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html

Linkedin + Google = HR nirvana

It is much easier to find a niche skill set in a large company by searching people’s public profiles. Say for example you want to know who has experience in CPM at onlineshoes.com using linkedin.com; you could use the Google query below to find them:

[ cpm onlineshoes site:linkedin.com/in/ ]

The syntax is as follows:

[ skillset companyname site:linkedin.com/in/ ]

Employment and Hiring Opportunities

LinkedIn provides opportunity for people to search for new employees through the network. It seems that most job seekers and job posters on LinkedIn are involved in technical fields, such as web development: a search for “engineer” does not find jobs for mechanical or chemical engineers, but rather software engineers. However, non-technical jobs are posted and searched for here and there is no harm in advertising such jobs for LinkedIn’s audience.

Posting job openings is also easy and is similar to the services provides at sites like Monster.com. However, it is not free to post a LinkedIn job: the price is $145 USD as of 2008.

Answers Service

LinkedIn has recently released an Answers service akin to that of Yahoo. However, as would be expected on a network like LinkedIn, the quality, subject matter and style of answers is at a higher level than it is at Yahoo. The advice that applies to Yahoo’s Answers site can also be put towards LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s Answers pages to not tend to rank particularly well for the terms they contain, but they provide a professional forum where people will take the time to compose intelligent answers to you questions. It serves a good opportunity to solicit feedback from your community.

Using LinkedIn Answers for Customer Research and Though Leadership

A colleague of mine wanted to learn about customer service issues facing a communications service provider. He posted a question on LinkedIn Answers that resulted in dozens responses within a day. He was then able to engage the head of customer experience at that provider in a very well-informed discussion. As your answers are named top answers by your colleagues you will be increasingly deemed an expert. This strategy, when executed overtime, lends itself to a strategy for becoming a Thought Leader on any given space.

Google increasingly indexes your Linkedin.com profile if you allow it to be public. If linked to they will accumulate page rank. Of all the networking sites, LinkedIn may contain the least features, but a membership and presence at the site commands the most respect of all the popular networking opportunities available to you online. Although there are other professional networking websites that achieve similar things as does LinkedIn, this site is most popular with tech-oriented businesspeople.
The option to select your own anchor text for an outbound link also improves LinkedIn’s potential for helping you out with search engine rankings. Be sure to link out to all of your blogs and websites as well as to fill out your profile and add relevant contacts.

Aardvark firefox plugin

I have been playing around with an efficiency plugin for firefox, (its faster than the webdev bar). As you glide the mouse over the page, you will see a red rectangle framing each element under the cursor. You will also see a little yellow caption showing the HTML element type and its class or id if they exist.

SE analyst not too shabby

I have been trying out SE ANALYST, a new data mining and benchmarking tool that can be used by search marketers to measure primary search engine optimization attributes of the top-ranked web pages. It can also analyze user-defined, or custom, URLs. The SE ANALYST tool gathers more than 30 metrics in the three primary attributes and then blends the metrics to calculate page value relative to a keyword. Read more

WebCEO excellent free tool

After trying out WebCEO i have to say it is an excellent free edition tool. In order to help keep it free I am including a link from my blog. It has a very handy to see and edit multiple title tags for a variety of pages as well as give you a plain text view of what your average crawler should be seeing. It has a similar functionality to the Lynx view text browser over at delorie.com. It also has built in keyword density tools like the ones found here:

http://www.keyworddensity.com/

http://www.keywordcount.com/

http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/kwda.cgi

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

All in all its not a bad tool for the steep price of free

Leveraging Wordtracker

For those new to SEM wordtracker is a uniquely useful tool to help marketers identify appropriate keywords and keyword phrases to describe and promote their site online. WordTracker attempts to calculate and the actual “demand” for a specific keyword/keyphrase by reporting two different values:-Count: The number of times each result has appeared in WordTracker’s database in the last 2 months.

-Predicted: The maximum total predicted traffic for all of the major search engines/pay per bids and directories. It is based on the current 24-hour period.

In short, WordTracker is a tool that will help you immensely in choosing the keywords that are not only right for your products and services, but are the most advantageous for your particular ad campaign. It is simple to use, yet the information it provides is quick, accurate, and managed extremely well. It takes almost all the guesswork out of which keywords are going to be most effective by showing you what keywords people are using when they are searching out your type of business.

Finally, once on the basis of the above values you have selected your final set of keywords and keyphrases, you can utilize WordTracker to measure the actual supply, and demand- to-supply ratio (KEI) for each and everyone of those keyword combinations.

WordTracker actually allows you to measure the unique ratio between demand and supply of specific keywords and keyphrases providing a statistical and objective mean to identify effective terminology to bring relevant targeted customers to your Web site.

Try it out for yourself at
http://www.wordtracker.com/trial/

You can utilize the free WordTracker Trial as many times as needed.

Get Verified by Google

Using Google’s webmaster tools you can obtain comprehensive stats and and error information about the pages in your site.

Its as easy as adding a meta tag to your site.<meta name=”verify-v1″ content=”wUgn2fcqOau6b4u84ZVxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx=” />

Why do it?
To further take advantage of additional webmaster benefits from Google, we have introduced support of verifying site ownership with Google. Merchants can upload the account specific verification code provided by Google Once ownership has been verified, site owners will then be able to access additional tools and features (diagnostic/statistics) from their Google Webmaster interface.

Using Dart Search

DART Search offers extensive bulk upload tools to manage keywords bids. It uses excel to make mass changes to your to your keywords. It offers all the features of Googles PPC interface. It recently started offered site targeting allowing users to target particular sites that use Adsense. The Bid Management tools are the the real specialty:

You can bid by setting up certain rules and prioritizing them.
Position - Attain a desired position as an advertisers
ROI - Getting a better return on your investment
Click Target - Receive a specifically quantified amount of clicks

To learn more visit www.DARTSearchBlog.net