Here are the top takeaways from the first morning session with more to follow later on today!

Social Shares | New Link Building from @LisaDMyers

• Rel=Author one of the key factors of Link signals in years to come, mixing in the need of SEO & Social Media
• If your not there already understand and begin to use Google +, as research has shown a direct correlation for companies having better SERPs because of using G+
• The end game has not changed in terms of link building, in essence creativity is essential to build great links
• Examples of short term Social SEO link building: post and publish blogs, articles, breaking news, infographics, competitions and interviews
• Example of long term Social SEO link building: create a social community, developing a blog, writing white papers and making yourself seem a social authority
• Understand your target market in making sure they will share your items, relevancy is key
• Makes the most of what is happening now in the market

Making Waves Not Ripples: Effective Syndicatoin to Drive Social Sharing from @mrjamescarson

• Social Shares are like links its good to have a mix not just G+, don’t just focus on what social media platform
• Understand where you should invest your time for social media, as for different industries work better  for example:
• Facebook better geared for big brands and the media
• Google + and Twitter better geared for Technology
• Reddit & Youtube caters for a wide market
• Tumblr better geared for fashion and music
• Pinterest better geared for gifts
• Focus on quality of your audience who will retweet you and like you in the long term rather than just vanity figures
• How to find your social media influencers: G+ Search, Follower Wonk & Klout
• Create a list in understanding and segmenting your list | Step by step
• Aiming for the big shot influencers may not be the best for you and aim for who they are influenced by!
• Celebrity endorsement probably the best way to get celebrities to retweet and social share your brand
• Good Tip | Within product pages create a competitions for long term social value
• Understanding different local trends for Twitter check out trendsmap.com
• Even though research has shown in general people are better receptive for different social media times – your actual target social market might be better receptive at night times rather than day times
• Ultimately game and engage with your customers for better results from your social media marketing campaign

Google+ify or die from @basvandenbeld

Discussing the similarities of key human interactions in real life social terms and how Google+ has taken this and developed the idea further:

• The question?  How can G+ translate what people do to our social network?
• Understand that there are essentially two uses of G+: For Users (Which Bas Discusses) & Businesses (Discussed by Kevin)
• Google + aims to offer people: Authority, Trust, Envy, Peer Pressure, People enjoy interacting with one another
• Authority – How Trust worthy is that person
• Trust – Word of Mouth Marketing is key
• Envy – People naturally are curious and are influenced by what others have and if they see it they will want it, even subliminally!
• Interact – We enjoy interaction and socialising with one another
• G+ is essentially growing to help better understand their users and can be seen as an “Identification Management Tool”
• Rather than seeing G+ as a competitor to Facebook, it is not!  G+ essentially maps out and shows where everyone is connected and then brings the data together
• Use G+ to get into the mindset of your target market and understand what they like to talk about and see who they perceive as influential

How much SEO juice do you get from Google + from @kevgibbo

Kevin Gibbons discusses the value of Google+ for businesses:

• Used two case studies of brands using G+ signals actually lowers CTR’s – which makes sense as +1 results are often less relevant than standard listings
• Using a Tool called Analytics Canvas found that brands with G+ brand page found a drop in 19.5% in organic traffic for those that did not use G+ & then 42.6% in organic traffic for clients who actively use Google+
• ASOS is leading the way in terms of utilising a G+ brand page – using stats from Search Metrics found a significant uplift attributed Year on Year from the implementation of G+
• Ultimately having a G+ page does this mean you will get better rankings and better search results? NO! G+ is just an attribution that can have an effect.
• Read the signs quote from Greg Boser “SEO is like being a weather man” – Understand where things are going at the moment and you will be market leading
• When opening up plus.google.com it seems that this is now crawlable and being indexed by Google!
• Google Panda has made link building harder, its more about long term results now
• 5  tips for G+ businesses – 1) Focus on great content and stop chasing the algorithm, 2) Build a great content team or you can outsource it using Pro Blogger Job Board  3) Use the Rel=Author Mark up Now! 4) Create a G+ brand page and link to your site for example Mashable 5) Share content daily, force yourself to do it!
• Tools to check out for G+ – View your social connections, find your influencers via findpeopleonplus, Google ripples in showing the outreach of key influencers and Google Analytics information
• Read the full slides below:

King Content versus Panda: How to Survive & Thrive with New Content Rules

Expanding on Panda and Penguin, rebounding and capitalizing on these algo changes. The speakers were:

Andy Atkins-Krueger is Group CEO at WebCertain Speakers (moderator)

Vince Blackham is director of social media at 97th floor

Stephen Croome is heads of seo delivery at seogadget

Ken Dobell is president of digital at DAC Group

Simon Penson is founder at Zazzle Media LTD

• Semantic search means its now about more than counting links, we need to fulfill deeper personal engagement
• Must get people to like you and not just notice you shouting in the SERPs
• Tool rec: PAGEtorrent
• The more specific queries are leading to higher conversions
• SEO is not an end within itself, we must push into content solutions
• Understanding site penalties is key, often times site owners are confused
• “Continuum of link understanding in a penguin context” – translation: link evaluation with penguin update
• The old evaluation of links includes count, anchor text, location of link on page, age of page, last time page was edited
• How to best understand your links?
• 1 -The relevance of content on page is now playing a much larger role in link evaluation
• 2 -Density of links and keywords on page
•  Then compare your links with competitors: where on the page are links placed?
• Lastly is knowledge, check out your back link acquisition graph.
• Use at least 20% branded links as minimum for
• How to perform panda recovery
• 1 implement a good monitoring system
• This may include awr, gwmt, twitter, email, analytics, search metrics, Somoza
• 2 use data to prove that shit content needs to be deleted or improved
• 3 cleaned up the sites index that had Los of ugly URLs
• Use no index follow and canonical
• 4 deleted or rehomed the orphaned pages
• 5 reorganized the navigation and internal linking
• 6 threw away product feed descriptions so affiliates don’t create duplicates. For a few money rich products the site content were rewritten
• 7 too many target niches, throw away. Like gifts for moms vs mums
• 8 adding UGC to product pages, like fb comments
• 9 use l
• What do you need to consider with your content: Diversity freshness quality and authority
• Content vs link buys – content is the long term win
• Infographics rock with embedded links
• Tool suggestion TINEYE

Comments

You may have a link in the footer or the sidebar of someone else’s web site. Yet you need to find out what the surrounding text is around those locations. You don’t want to appear to be nothing more than on a list of paid links located on another site. Instead, you want those links to be promoting you as a trustworthy site that has something of value to offer them. You want the links to your web site surrounded by text, as if the other site is “talking about” and thus pointing to your web site.

Let’s take a look at an example list of links:

- Search Engine Watch
- Search Engine Land
- Search Engine Roundtable

That above is a list of links. Although it is a list of some of my favorite search engine related web sites, those links are not really the “ideal” type of links. Sure, they all include keywords related to “search engines”. Let’s take a look at the next paragraph of text:

The search engine news web site that has been around the longest is Search Engine Watch. SEW was run by Danny Sullivan, who now operates Search Engine Land. Barry is in charge of Search Engine Roundtable, which updates their site several times each day–and tends to have information that you won’t find on those other search engine sites.

The text that is around the links in the paragraph above provide context and are relevant to the paragraph. So, the search engines (mainly Google) tend to “like” those links better than if the links might appear as a list (as shown above). While there are other factors involved, such as whether or not those links appear on a sidebar, in a footer, or somewhere lower on the site (perhaps you have to scroll down a bit to see them), it is always preferred to have your link surrounded by text.

If you already have links to your web site, or are analyzing your current links, you may want to see the the text that surrounds your links. If you aren’t happy with it, or if the text that surrounds your link is not on-topic, take the time to talk to the web site owner that’s linking to you–you may be able to get it changed.

Read more of my search engine optimization tips for more info about link building and overall SEO.

Comments

Earlier this year, there was a story from Forbes, which got some attention in the press. It was covering something that was already covered by the New York Times, but the Forbes version with the more provocative title reportedly got shared a lot more, and as a result received a lot more traffic. Nick O’Neill wrote an interesting piece talking about this, which I followed up with my own take on the discussion.

The main point is that the title can make a world of difference. Having the right words in the title of an article can be the difference between 30 pageviews or 300 pageviews. It can be the difference between 1,000 pageviews or 50,000 pageviews.

It’s possible to get a lot of shares based on great content with a not-so-great title, but it’s a lot harder. I also believe a lot of people share content based on the title without even reading the article. Titles matter. A lot.

There’s something about this, however, that doesn’t quite sit entirely well, with regards to the increased emphasis search engines are placing on social signals for relevancy. Here, you’ll find Bing’s Duane Forrester talking up the importance of social. Google, as you may know, launched Search Plus Your World, the highly personalized (based on social signals) version of Google search that favors content you have a social connection to.

Google’s +1 system is all about a social connection to an article, to send Google a signal. If I +1 a piece of content and share it to Google+, I’m not only sharing it with my followers, I’m endorsing that piece of content as being something Google should be ranking well. The problem with that is that I may like that piece of content, and so may many others, but that does not necessarily make it better than some other great piece of content out there on the web that is similar, and just hasn’t found its way in front of my (and others’) eyeballs. Perhaps that other, better (more relevant to a potential search) piece of content just didn’t have as catchy a title, and didn’t inspire as much sharing because of it.

We don’t know how much weight Google gives to any singular signal (it has over 200). However, we can see various changes Google makes that do put social in the spotlight. The +1 button and Search Plus Your World are obviously two major components, but there are plenty of more subtle things. There were a few, for instance, in Google’s list of algorithm changes in March:

Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename "Prof-2"] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.

+1 button in search for more countries and domains. This month we’ve internationalized the +1 button on the search results page to additional languages and domains. The +1 button in search makes it easy to share recommendations with the world right from your search results. As we said in our initial blog post, the beauty of +1’s is their relevance—you get the right recommendations (because they come from people who matter to you), at the right time (when you are actually looking for information about that topic) and in the right format (your search results).

We discussed that first one in a separate article. It seems that Google+ profiles aren’t getting quite the special treatment that they were when SPYW first launched, but it clearly places great emphasis on social, with “improved comprehensiveness” related to 200 social sites.

The second one up there is very vague. Updates to signals used to personalize search results. I could be wrong, but something tells me the update wasn’t about making things less personalized (social, being a big factor in Google’s personalization).

Third, the expansion of the +1 is a no brainer. The title isn’t as likely to influence a +1 from the search result page, as a share on Google+ itself might be, for example, but it inspires more use of that social signal.

“The beauty of +1’s is their relevance,” Google says, but how many are driven because of a catchy title of an article the user didn’t even bother to read. Even if they did read it, who’s to say it wasn’t shared with them in the first place because it had a catchier title than some other publication that may have been competing for that user’s attention.

While it has the added value of sending a signal to Google search, we can probably agree that for all intents and purposes, the +1 button is Google’s (Google+’s) version of the Facebook like button. How many times have you “liked” a link shared on Facebook based on the title without reading the article? What if by simply doing that, you were getting that content (which may or may not have been a total piece of crap article) favored more in search engines just because of some title-based likes. What if that was ranking higher than a really thoughtful and original piece on the same topic, and was really much more suitable to searchers’ needs?

And that doesn’t even take into consideration the potential for real abuse. SEO strategist Trond Lyngbø wrote an interesting article talking about all of that. Most people blindly liking an article without reading it aren’t trying to promote a particular site or game search. But there are plenty who are.

For better or worse, it doesn’t look like social signals will play any less of a role in search engines for the foreseeable future. While titles should be relevant to the topic at hand (usually with relevant key words), you’d be wise not to undervalue the shareability of a headline.

As an added benefit, even if this doesn’t translate into the search visibility you’re hoping for, if it’s being shared a lot on various social networks, there’s a good chance you will hardly miss the search traffic anyway. It’s better to diversify your traffic sources anyway. You don’t want to be too dependent on Google or any other one source of traffic. Any Panda victim can tell you that. Good titles that inspire sharing can help a great deal in getting shared through multiple social channels.

Do you think search engines are putting too much emphasis on social signals?

Comments

Earlier this year, there was a story from Forbes, which got some attention in the press. It was covering something that was already covered by the New York Times, but the Forbes version with the more provocative title reportedly got shared a lot more, and as a result received a lot more traffic. Nick O’Neill wrote an interesting piece talking about this, which I followed up with my own take on the discussion.

The main point is that the title can make a world of difference. Having the right words in the title of an article can be the difference between 30 pageviews or 300 pageviews. It can be the difference between 1,000 pageviews or 50,000 pageviews.

It’s possible to get a lot of shares based on great content with a not-so-great title, but it’s a lot harder. I also believe a lot of people share content based on the title without even reading the article. Titles matter. A lot.

There’s something about this, however, that doesn’t quite sit entirely well, with regards to the increased emphasis search engines are placing on social signals for relevancy. Here, you’ll find Bing’s Duane Forrester talking up the importance of social. Google, as you may know, launched Search Plus Your World, the highly personalized (based on social signals) version of Google search that favors content you have a social connection to.

Google’s +1 system is all about a social connection to an article, to send Google a signal. If I +1 a piece of content and share it to Google+, I’m not only sharing it with my followers, I’m endorsing that piece of content as being something Google should be ranking well. The problem with that is that I may like that piece of content, and so may many others, but that does not necessarily make it better than some other great piece of content out there on the web that is similar, and just hasn’t found its way in front of my (and others’) eyeballs. Perhaps that other, better (more relevant to a potential search) piece of content just didn’t have as catchy a title, and didn’t inspire as much sharing because of it.

We don’t know how much weight Google gives to any singular signal (it has over 200). However, we can see various changes Google makes that do put social in the spotlight. The +1 button and Search Plus Your World are obviously two major components, but there are plenty of more subtle things. There were a few, for instance, in Google’s list of algorithm changes in March:

Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename "Prof-2"] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.

+1 button in search for more countries and domains. This month we’ve internationalized the +1 button on the search results page to additional languages and domains. The +1 button in search makes it easy to share recommendations with the world right from your search results. As we said in our initial blog post, the beauty of +1’s is their relevance—you get the right recommendations (because they come from people who matter to you), at the right time (when you are actually looking for information about that topic) and in the right format (your search results).

We discussed that first one in a separate article. It seems that Google+ profiles aren’t getting quite the special treatment that they were when SPYW first launched, but it clearly places great emphasis on social, with “improved comprehensiveness” related to 200 social sites.

The second one up there is very vague. Updates to signals used to personalize search results. I could be wrong, but something tells me the update wasn’t about making things less personalized (social, being a big factor in Google’s personalization).

Third, the expansion of the +1 is a no brainer. The title isn’t as likely to influence a +1 from the search result page, as a share on Google+ itself might be, for example, but it inspires more use of that social signal.

“The beauty of +1’s is their relevance,” Google says, but how many are driven because of a catchy title of an article the user didn’t even bother to read. Even if they did read it, who’s to say it wasn’t shared with them in the first place because it had a catchier title than some other publication that may have been competing for that user’s attention.

While it has the added value of sending a signal to Google search, we can probably agree that for all intents and purposes, the +1 button is Google’s (Google+’s) version of the Facebook like button. How many times have you “liked” a link shared on Facebook based on the title without reading the article? What if by simply doing that, you were getting that content (which may or may not have been a total piece of crap article) favored more in search engines just because of some title-based likes. What if that was ranking higher than a really thoughtful and original piece on the same topic, and was really much more suitable to searchers’ needs?

And that doesn’t even take into consideration the potential for real abuse. SEO strategist Trond Lyngbø wrote an interesting article talking about all of that. Most people blindly liking an article without reading it aren’t trying to promote a particular site or game search. But there are plenty who are.

For better or worse, it doesn’t look like social signals will play any less of a role in search engines for the foreseeable future. While titles should be relevant to the topic at hand (usually with relevant key words), you’d be wise not to undervalue the shareability of a headline.

As an added benefit, even if this doesn’t translate into the search visibility you’re hoping for, if it’s being shared a lot on various social networks, there’s a good chance you will hardly miss the search traffic anyway. It’s better to diversify your traffic sources anyway. You don’t want to be too dependent on Google or any other one source of traffic. Any Panda victim can tell you that. Good titles that inspire sharing can help a great deal in getting shared through multiple social channels.

Do you think search engines are putting too much emphasis on social signals?

Comments

As Google is quoted, “Knowing more about your own account activity also can help you take steps to protect your Google Account. For example, if you notice sign-ins from countries where you haven’t been or devices you’ve never owned, you can change your password immediately and sign up for the extra level of security provided by 2-step verification.”

With this tool, users can know the number of emails they have been sending and receiving and with whom. Their search queries as well as the time they spend logged in from different devices. The dashboard has Gmail, Latitude and search but more services- notable Google+ will be incorporated soon.

Why this is worrying the search industry?

Google may convince users to sign up for all its platforms and allow the search giant to use the social data for search and maps, but this will not benefit webmasters and search professionals at all.

Google has now started encrypting search data (keywords) of the users that are logged in. This means no referral data for SEOs or webmasters, except advertisers. This move by the search giant has been opposed strongly by the search community. Recently, Firefox also announced its plan to switch to Google Secure Search by default further dimming the chances of the webmasters and SEOs to access referral data.

How will the search industry be affected by this? Do share your views here.

Comments

As Google is quoted, “Knowing more about your own account activity also can help you take steps to protect your Google Account. For example, if you notice sign-ins from countries where you haven’t been or devices you’ve never owned, you can change your password immediately and sign up for the extra level of security provided by 2-step verification.”

With this tool, users can know the number of emails they have been sending and receiving and with whom. Their search queries as well as the time they spend logged in from different devices. The dashboard has Gmail, Latitude and search but more services- notable Google+ will be incorporated soon.

Why this is worrying the search industry?

Google may convince users to sign up for all its platforms and allow the search giant to use the social data for search and maps, but this will not benefit webmasters and search professionals at all.

Google has now started encrypting search data (keywords) of the users that are logged in. This means no referral data for SEOs or webmasters, except advertisers. This move by the search giant has been opposed strongly by the search community. Recently, Firefox also announced its plan to switch to Google Secure Search by default further dimming the chances of the webmasters and SEOs to access referral data.

How will the search industry be affected by this? Do share your views here.

Comments

As Google is quoted, “Knowing more about your own account activity also can help you take steps to protect your Google Account. For example, if you notice sign-ins from countries where you haven’t been or devices you’ve never owned, you can change your password immediately and sign up for the extra level of security provided by 2-step verification.”

With this tool, users can know the number of emails they have been sending and receiving and with whom. Their search queries as well as the time they spend logged in from different devices. The dashboard has Gmail, Latitude and search but more services- notable Google+ will be incorporated soon.

Why this is worrying the search industry?

Google may convince users to sign up for all its platforms and allow the search giant to use the social data for search and maps, but this will not benefit webmasters and search professionals at all.

Google has now started encrypting search data (keywords) of the users that are logged in. This means no referral data for SEOs or webmasters, except advertisers. This move by the search giant has been opposed strongly by the search community. Recently, Firefox also announced its plan to switch to Google Secure Search by default further dimming the chances of the webmasters and SEOs to access referral data.

How will the search industry be affected by this? Do share your views here.

Comments

People over at Google Webmaster Help have noted that changes began showing on the 14th of March itself. However, Google has commented on the fluctuations as not being a Panda update or a data refresh. None of these or rather any, algorithmic changes have been administered by Google. So the mystery remains, why such changes are happening to the search results.

A webmaster says,

“I’m seeing the “older” data set this morning so far, deffo different from yesterday PM. This is the first time in quite a while where I can remember the SERP’s changing for the terms I check like this. However, despite the SERP’s looking good GA shows a massive traffic DROP yesterday! So when the SERP’s look good for us we lose traffic! Both sites had just gone green again in GA (JUST!). Bounce rates are still very high.”

Another one says,

“Seeing a fairly big change in the SERPS in the last 24 hours, however even though positions are down for us traffic is up 30%.”

What do you think? Have you noticed any fluctuations? Do share your views.

Comments

Calculating the value of a number one ranking is a worthwhile exercise as it allows you to look at the return on investment (ROI) from any SEO campaign you might be considering.

Here are the steps to calculate the value of a number one ranking for your business.

Step 1 – Search Volume

The first step is to calculate the number of people searching for your target keyword.

The Google AdWords keyword tool is perfect for this. Just enter your search phrase, select the country and language targeting options and hit search. The tool will then display the number of global and local monthly searches for your specific keyword, as well as a whole bunch of other related terms.

For this example, I’ve chosen the key phrase flower delivery sydney which has 4,400 local searches per month.

Step 2 – Click Through Rate

The second step is to calculate how many times people click on the number 1 listing from those 4,400 monthly searches.

The latest data suggests that a number one ranking has a click through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent. Using this figure we can calculate the number of visitors a website would receive in the number one spot for flower delivery sydney,

Visitors = # Searches x Click Through Rate

4,400 Searches * 36.4% CTR = 1601.6 Visitors per month.

Step 3 – Conversion Rate

The third step is to calculate how many of those 1601 visitors are likely to turn in to customers. To do this we need to use the websites conversion rate.

Many webmasters will be able to determine their conversion rate from their analytics, however if you’re unable to come up with a figure you can always use a benchmark of around 1-2%. Calculating the number of sales is as simple as using the following formula,

# Sales = # Visitors x Conversion Rate

1604 Visitors x 1.5% Conversion Rate = 24 Sales

Step 4 – Average Order Value

The final step to calculate the value of a number one ranking is to multiply the number of estimated sales by the average order value of each sale.

If we use an average order value of $100 for our flower delivery example, we can use the following formula to calculate the value of a number one ranking,

$ Sales Revenue = # Sales x Average Order Value

24 Sales x $100 Average order Value = $2,400 per month for a number one ranking for flower delivery sydney.

So there you have it. Simple Right?

I should add that there are a lot of variables at play here so while the figure is by no means exact, it should help to give you a rough guide to the value of a number one ranking.

If you have any questions or comments please let me know below.

P.S. Thanks to the post on espire marketing for the inspiration.

The sources for the SEO tool recommendations include: Richard Baxter of SEOGadget, Dave Naylor from Bronco, and Neil Walker from Just Search. The social media tool recommendations came from Andrew Girdwood from bigmouthmedia, Paul Madden from Automica and Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics.

Before I get into the list of tools, I feel compelled to share a quote that I’ve often used to give people context for tool use, since it’s so important to use them for scale, efficiency and to gain a competitive advantage:

“Tools are only as effective as the expertise of the person using them.”

I think that’s an important perspective, because some online marketers use a small handful of tools but their expertise is very deep. Therefore, they get a tremendous amount of productivity from them. Others use many, many tools without deep expertise in anyone area and as a result, effectiveness may be lacking. Once you find a handful of tools that work for you, get really, really good at using them. At the same time, always be open to trying new tools as they come along.

Ok, let’s start off with SEO Tools:

1. RedFly GoogleGlobal Firefox & Chrome Extension – See SERPs in other countries
2. Netcraft – Hosting, DNS, site uptime and many other features
3. MajesticSEO – Link tracking, research and analysis. Export links by country code (TopRank uses MajesticSEO
4. Copyscape – Find copies of your content elsewhere on the web to avoid duplicate content issues
5. Google Webmaster Tools – How does Googlebot interact with your website. Check for crawl errors that could affect inclusion and ranking of your content
6. Firebug – Firefox extension for reviewing code, look for hidden text issues that could affect search engine penalties
7. Google Page Speed - Check the load time of your web pages. Slow loading pages are not your friend and certainly nothing Google will reward you for
8. Pingdom – Monitor uptime of your website. If your website is down neither customers or search engines can get to it.
9. Xenu Linksleuth or Screaming Frog to spider your website
10. Open Site Explorer – Download data and segment anchor text for identifying good/bad inbound links
11. KISSinsights – Find sales objections and test them with a super short survey
12. Fivesecondtest – Show an image and see what people think of it. Analyzes most prominent areas of your design
13. Google Website Optimizer – A/B test your page designs
14. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Official keyword research tool from Google
15. Spyfu – Perform competitive PPC and SEO keyword research
16. Alexa – Wide range of traffic and keyword information about websites
17. SEMRush – Get competitive SEO and PPC keyword information on websites found on Google.com and many other country domains
18. KeywordSpy – Keyword research tool
19. Wordtracker - Keyword research tool
20. Wordstream – Keyword research tool
21. Keyword Discovery – Keyword research tool
22. Socialmention – Social search tool allows you to download to csv file of social keywords and influences that you can pivot to see what what kinds of mentions are you getting, on what kinds of social media sites and how it compares to the competition.
23. Analytics SEO – page load time, pages indexed, ranking overview, reveal potential keywords, next opportunity keywords, reporting.
24. Sistrix toolbox – Tracks PageRank over time, ranking, position, search volume, traffic index
25. Searchmetrics Essentials – Suite of SEO and social media tracking tools
26. GTmetrix – Compare multiple sites for their page download speed
27. Link Research Tools – Link research and profiling tools
28. Keyword Density – DaveN tool providing a wide variety of data points about a website according to a specific keyword phrases
29. maxmind – Geographic ip detection down to the city level
30. wipmania – Geographic ip location tool

Social Media Automation Tools (Some are a bit Grayhat SEO)

1. Evri – Social content aggregator
2. Trapit – Topical news aggregator that leans your preferences with AI
3. Strawberryjam – Shows the links your social network shares the most
4. ifttt – Rules based automation of actions through social channels/media sites
5. Paper.li – Crawls links contained within RSS feeds, Twitter lists you supply and creates an online newspaper that auto-tweets the most popular twitter handles that share
6. Pearltrees.com – Tool for aggregating content and sharing content with a rich visual interface
7. Tweetguru Multi – DM up to 12 people on Twitter at the same time
8. RSS Graffiti – Pull in RSS data feeds into a Facebook page automatically
9. Tweetadder – Auto follows people on Twitter (um, kinda spammy no?)
10. Socialoomph – Schedule social content and status updates (Twitter and Facebook)
11. dlvr.it - Takes a RSS feed, filters content based on rules and publishes to Twitter, Facebook and other social channels
12. Odesk – Not a tool but a resource to outsource redundant tasks. Use for research, writing small content, etc.
13. Socialenhancer – In beta: Auto reply to tweets by keyword. Export followers for analysis
14. Tweetdeck – Twitter management tool
15. Hootsuite – Twitter, Facebook and other social channels management tool

Richard Baxter, Dave Naylor, Neil Walker

There you go. I hope you find these tools useful. Some are quite old and some are new. Some are a bit iffy in terms of being more mechanical than meaningful for social engagement. Take care when checking them out. Tools can be a bit of a time suck so think about what your goals are, what tasks do you want to achieve. Look at these sites if you have time or ask other SEO and Social SEO professionals about them to decide what you want to try or test out.

What are some of your favorite SEO tools? What tools do you use to improve efficiency and automate redundant tasks when it comes to Social SEO actions? Would you like to see us do more reviews of tools?

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