Monday, 8 April 2013
Thursday, 31 January 2013
Best SEO Tools for WordPress Site Owners
Here are some great tools that can help you optimise your SEO efforts and analyse your competition.
Let us know what other SEO Tools you use, and don’t forget that with regards to plugins, there are some great SEO ones that help you cover the basics. I’m talking about plugins like WordPress SEO and All in One SEO Pack.
The tools below can help you take SEO to another level however, and are ideal for those who want to spend some time optimising their site seriously for improved rankings.
SEMrush
SEMrush tracks an immense amount of organic data in Google and Bing SERPs. You can therefore see where your competitors are ranking in the top 20 Google and Bing results for the top 95+ million organic keywords. SEMrush collects data on both a domain level as well as landing page rankings for all of the keywords that they track, and they can provide you with an in-depth look into how a website REALLY stacks up in search.
You can easily review your competitors’ ad data via SEMrush by using the SEMrush detailed and pin-point accurate ad data. They track ads through Google and Bing with a wide variety of metrics and datasets including CPC, competition score, positions, traffic, ad text, and much more. All ad data comes from the advertising that each domain is currently running so that you can always be certain that the basis of your campaign planning is from the most current, real-world data and values
SEO Powersuite
SEO PowerSuite is made up of four software tools in one pack that, when put together, guarantee you leadership in search engines and new streams of visitors. You can check out all SEO tools one by one, and decide to invest in just one or two out of four for the good start. Or get the full SEO PowerSuite and take advantage of the complete website promotion software set.
SEOMoz
Weekly Crawls & Rank Tracking
Go to the beach without worrying about your SEO. The SEOMoz web app crawls your site each week, notifying you about issues that might impact your performance. SEOMoz even monitor rankings for all the keywords you care about on the search engines your audience uses. Less busy work, more time spent optimizing (and tanning).
Open Site Explorer
Access unparalleled link data with Open Site Explorer (OSE). Identify powerful links, analyze link anchor text, and compare domains side by side. Powered by a proprietary web index of over 9.2 trillion links, OSE is invaluable to understanding your SEO’s effectiveness—and essential to conquering the SERPs.
PRO Training Webinars
Become an SEO black belt with the SEOMoz PRO training webinars, held twice each month. Topics range from SEO basics to advanced techniques. Watch the presentation, chat with other PRO members, and participate in a Q&A session with the presenters.
SEO Profiler
- Ranking monitor: Get detailed ranking checks on Google, Yahoo and Bing with actionable items.
- Website optimizer: Reliable website optimization. Get high rankings for your keywords.
- Competitive intelligence: Get the most detailed competitive backlink, ranking and AdWords analysis.
- High quality backlinks: Get great backlinks with powerful backlink buildings tools and a sophisticated link manager.
- WOW! reports: Impress your clients and your boss with comprehensive white-label PDF reports.
- Fully compatible with Google’s new algorithm: SEOprofiler works with Google’s latest January 2013 algorithm.
SEOBook
SEOBook started its life as a downloadable ebook but the site now has grown tremendously and is probably the best place to learn SEO. Membership will give you access to over 100 training modules covering topics such as keyword research, link building and much more.
This is the place to start from if you want to learn about SEO, at any level.
Monday, 28 January 2013
The Responsive Slider with Advanced CSS3 Transitions
The Responsive Slider with Advanced CSS3 Transitions
Free
Sliding Horizontal Parallax moves multiple elements at the same time but at different speeds to create a parallax effect.- Touch Support
- Cross Browser
- Easily Modified
Free
Apple Style replicates the sliding theme used on apple.com for the Apple iPhone4 release.- Touch Support
- Cross Browser
- Easily Modified
- Unique Theme Features
Free
Modern Slide In is a minimalist theme for showcasing products. Fully responsive.- Responsive
- Touch Support
- Cross Browser
- Easily Modified
- Layered PNG Included
Thursday, 24 January 2013
15 Great Chrome Extensions for Web Designers and Developers
We have excellent browsers that increasingly incorporate more extensions, plugins and add-ons, often developed by their users, that help make them more powerful and can help us to improve our productivity. From Awwwards, in our eagerness to offer youthe best resources and tools on the Web for you, we will do a series of articles on our blog with the best extensions and plugins for major browsers. This time we focus on extensions that are offered in the Chrome Web Store, freely available and easy to install.
Among the tools we highlight those that are most useful for web designers and developers. We hope you will find them very helpful and that they help you get better results.
Best Google Chrome Extensions for Web Designers and Developers:
Thursday, 10 January 2013
3 Analytic Tools to Improve Your Social Media Performance
#1: Mention – Monitor Your Brand Anywhere on the Web
Mention is an excellent social media and web monitoring tool. You set up alerts based on keywords, and content related to those keywords is displayed through the Mention application or sent to you via email or social media.When you monitor and track keywords, you can find potential business, build relationships with new people and respond quickly to situations that could damage your brand.
There are many monitoring tools available, but many either are very expensive or have limitations.
For example, you may use Google Alerts to track keywords mentioned on the web. However, I’ve found these alerts are not nearly as comprehensive as Mention. Google Alerts also does not provide the functionality that’s essential to manage and proactively respond to these alerts. Mention provides this functionality.
Mention is a very cost-effective and comprehensive solution that monitors your alerts across a variety of sites.
Mention provides a free version to get you started, as well as a very affordable Pro Plan, with a free trial for a month. If you decide not to go ahead after the trial, your account just reverts to the free plan, so there’s no need to remember to cancel it.
Mention has a clean user interface that makes it extremely easy for you to manage your alerts and track all activity.
Mention provides a very user-friendly interface to
track alerts.
Here are the key features:
- Set up alerts for your brand, keywords and competitors and view these within the application, social media or via email or text-based alerts.
- You can track mentions of your keywords on blogs, websites, social media sites and forums.
- Displays the source of each mention within the user interface so you don’t have to click off to other sites and open additional windows.
- A nice feature is the ability to interact with alerts that are
displayed directly within the application. For example, if an alert was
related to a blog post, you can respond to the blog post within the
application. Similarly, for tweets you can see not only the tweet, but
also the bio of the person so you have context before you respond to the tweet.
Details of the alert are displayed to the right of the alert.
- The application adjusts the results displayed based on your interaction. For example, if you consistently remove alerts from specific applications or websites, it will not display results from these sites.
- There’s a priority queue, which attempts to identify the important alerts.
Priority is set because your name is mentioned or it’s from a site with a lot of
traffic. There is also a new feature not released yet which will prioritize
based on someone’s Klout score.
View mentions that are flagged as "priority" based on certain criteria, so that you can take action immediately.
- Share your alerts with other team members and assign tasks
to them. When you first share an alert with someone, an account is automatically
created for them.
Assign tasks to other team members to spread the workload.
- Perform actions on your alerts such as share positive mentions on your Facebook Page or Twitter, or just send an email to someone.
- Mention takes information from a broad range of resources (not just social
media) and shows you the breakdown of where your mentions come from. You can
also filter the list to display only mentions from a particular
source.
Mention gathers information from a wide variety of sources and shows you the breakdown of where the mentions come from, so you can filter the list to a specific source.
- The application is available as a mobile app so you can
monitor your alerts when you are out of the office.
Mention is also available as a mobile app.
- Examine stats for a particular alert to see the trend of mentions over a period of time so you can identify peaks and dips in activity.
For registration, provide your basic details or sign up via one of your social media accounts.
Registration with Mention can be completed if you use
your email address or register through your social media profiles.
Specify the keywords you want to be alerted about and
even the ones you don't.
In the next step, specify the sources you want to monitor. For example, you may only be interested in monitoring blogs or websites.
Indicate the sources you want to keep an eye on, block
sites from your search and finally choose if you want to make use of some of the
more advanced technology features.
- Block sites – This is where you list any website you do not want Mention to monitor. For example, maybe you want to exclude your own blog as you might have someone else tracking this internally.
- Technologies – Mention has a priority inbox. Based on the results found, it attempts to separate priority mentions in a separate priority queue. For example, if there’s a mention of keywords in a tweet and your name is also mentioned, the alert can be placed in a priority queue. It’s best to leave this switched on.
- Anti-Noise Technology – Mention has some smart technology that tracks what you do with any results found. For example, if you repeatedly delete results from a particular site, then Mention will not show you results from that site. It’s useful to have this feature switched on.
Be alerted to mentions via your Facebook and Twitter
accounts and choose to share these alerts with colleagues or team
members.
Track all of the mentions of your keywords across a
range of websites and social channels.
The price is very competitive, taking into account the level of functionality that Mention provides and what other competitors charge for this type of service.
Benefits of Mention
There are some great benefits to Mention:
- You can monitor alerts close to real time and use the mobile app to monitor alerts while you are out and about.
- You can create tasks based around alerts, email alerts to other team members and get alerts sent to your Twitter or Facebook account.
- Mention can be your only monitoring tool, as it finds content from a variety of sources that include social media, websites and blogs.
- There’s a management component to it, which allows you to manage the alerts as they happen.
Mention is a powerful monitoring application that provides comprehensive functionality at an affordable price. There’s a good free option so it’s certainly worthwhile to test it for your business.
#2: LikeAlyzer – Improve Performance of Your Facebook Page
LikeAlyzer is a very simple (and free) tool to assess your Facebook Page and provides suggestions to improve it.The analytics for your Facebook Page provided by Facebook can be very useful, but also can be confusing.
LikeAlyzer is not complicated to use and provides some simple but valuable insights.
Features of LikeAlyzer
- It analyzes your Page to assess how well it performed in relation to other Pages.
- Your Page is graded from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better.
- Suggestions for improvements on your Page are provided based on the
analysis. You can see at a glance what you do well, but it also draws your
attention to the areas you need to focus on.
Report highlights what you do well, but more importantly, what you need to focus on.
- Details of the top-performing Pages according to LikeAlyzer are provided. Learn from other Pages that get a high score.
What’s great about this tool is that there’s no setup or registration required. Just put in your Page name and an online report is produced.
Be aware, however, that the report you run is not private. Other people can see reports run in LikeAlyzer.
Just enter your Facebook Page name and the report is
produced.
- Recent– This displays a list of the most recent Pages that were analyzed.
- Popular – This displays the most popular Pages analyzed. These are listed in the order of number of fans.
- Toplist – This is a list in the order of the Pages that achieved
the highest score. This can be very useful to analyze why some Pages
performed better than others.
This shows the highest-ranked Pages that completed the LikeAlyzer assessment.
- There are lots of posts from users, so there’s a good community.
- This Page keeps up with important updates to Facebook. On a recent post, it asked fans to add the Page to their Interests list. This means fans will be more likely to see posts.
- They use questions and try to show personality on the Page. One of the posts asks what their fans are doing over the weekend.
- There are lots of engaging posts and pictures of interest on the Page and
they try to get feedback from their fans for the pictures.
A good question related to a interesting and relevant picture.
LikeAlyzer in Action
WeForest is an international non-profit organization set up to counter global warming by planting lots of trees.
We ran the report on the WeForest Page, which currently has close to 4,000 fans.
The overall score for the Page was 70 out of 100, which is good but there’s room for improvement.
There were recommendations made on how to improve the Page, such as
responding to fans’ comments and questions more frequently.
Recommendations are based on an analysis done on specific areas of the Page, such as the frequency of posts, whether fans post on the Page and so on.
The analysis shows:
Benefits of LikeAlyzerWeForest is an international non-profit organization set up to counter global warming by planting lots of trees.
We ran the report on the WeForest Page, which currently has close to 4,000 fans.
The overall score for the Page was 70 out of 100, which is good but there’s room for improvement.
Recommendations on what you need to focus on to get
more from your Facebook Page.
Recommendations are based on an analysis done on specific areas of the Page, such as the frequency of posts, whether fans post on the Page and so on.
Analysis of the WeForest Page.
- Posts per day: WeForest does not post fewer than once per day. It’s important to post frequently.
- Posts per type: There is a good variety of posts. There are 16.0% of posts with text updates, 40% with links included, 4.0% with videos and currently 0% questions.
- Average length of posts: Posts are quite short, which is good. Longer posts don’t tend to do well.
- Curiosity: There are not enough questions. Facebook rewards interaction, so with more questions you’re more likely to get interaction.
- Encourage to like: This is listed as poor. One way to get interaction is to encourage people to like content. Brian Carter (author of The Like Economy) had a great tip to use “Click Like if…” on posts. This can be used in so many ways and really does help with acquiring likes.
- Comments: There’s also a suggestion to post photographs around 4:00 pm. The time of posts can really affect interaction rates.
- Posts by others: While fans of the Page can post on the timeline, it does not happen regularly enough. Also, when they do post, the Page does not respond to their post in a timely fashion.
The key benefits of using LikeAlyzer are:
- Get immediate practical tips on how to get better results from your Facebook Page.
- Review your competitors’ Pages to get some additional ideas.
- Implement the tips and get more of your fans to see your updates.
On average, only about 16% of your fans see updates from your business Page.
Facebook rewards Pages that get more interaction on their updates. If you want to be successful on Facebook, you need to analyze your results to improve performance.
LikeAlyzer provides a very simple and free way to do this.
#3: Social Crawlytics – Identify Your Competitors’ Most Shared Content
Social Crawlytics is a free tool that analyzes how popular or unpopular content is on a website. It’s very useful to assess the performance of your or your competitor’s blog.It analyzes the content and produces detailed information on where content is shared and how often it’s shared.
Sample report on SocialMediaExaminer.com.
Finding out what is not popular is also useful, so you can understand what type of content does not resonate with your audience or your competitors.
“Social Crawlytics is the first of its kind. A fast and flexible web-based crawler, geared for social. Now marketers can maintain ongoing reports of social share history across all pages of any website.” Joe Griffin, CEO of iAcquire.If your competitor has a small number of pages you can do this manually, but what happens if your competitors have hundreds or thousands of pages?
Social Crawlytics makes this process easy.
Features of Social Crawlytics
- You can find out what content is shared most on social media on a competitor’s website.
- You can find out the authors on a blog who get the most shares. This will only work correctly if the website has implemented Google Author Tags.
- You can set up a scheduled report, which automatically sends you an updated report on a website at a time you choose.
The table indicates the amount of social media shares
each post gets.
In the example above, the post related to 30 social media experts making predictions had 5332 shares on Twitter. Could you do a post that performs similar to or better than this?
Tip: While this is not currently a feature of Social Crawlytics, you should also try to discover the influencers who helped share this content. These are the people you may approach in relation to your post. You could use a tool called Topsy to identify the key influencers who share the most popular content.
Mari Smith is identified (using Topsy) as a key
influencer who shared this post.
This report indicates which platforms get the most
shares for posts.
The following is referred to as the sunburst wheel. The center of the wheel is your website and the sections outside of it are the most popular areas and posts in your site in relation to shares. This is another great indicator of popular content.
The Sunburst wheel gives a graphic display of the most
popular content from the search engines' point of view.
- This is the Twitter tag on Social Media Examiner. This is a very popular area, as it takes up a large section of the circle, and is related to articles written that were tagged with “twitter.”
- This is the Getting Started area of Social Media Examiner. This contains a lot of posts for social media marketers who would like to know more of the basics. Still quite a popular area.
- This is for the author Andrea Vahl who is obviously very popular. Andrea guest posts on Social Media Examiner. So maybe this is an opportunity for you to identify authors who could potentially guest post on your site?
- This gives a breakdown of the most popular posts by Andrea. The one highlighted had over 10,000 shares and was related to Facebook changes that would impact businesses.
Go to Social Crawlytics and register with your Twitter account.
Sign up with your Twitter account.
We have highlighted credits in the image below. Although the tool is free, there is a restriction on how much you can use it within any one week. When you run out of credits you have to wait until the next week when your credits are refreshed. Unless you complete a lot of analyses on large sites, this should not be an issue.
Specify the website address you want to scan and the
depth to which you want to go.
- Website Address – This is the address of your website or your competitor’s website.
- Traverse Subdomains – A subdomain would be something like podcast.socialmediaexaminer.com. It’s on the same domain, but separated under a different section. By default Social Crawlytics will go through subdomains.
- Crawl Depth – This indicates how much of the website is analyzed. If you have a web page that links to another subpage, this is a crawl depth of 1. If the subpage links to another page, this is a crawl depth of 2. By default this is set to 2, which is good.
Schedule how frequently you want this report produced
(optional).
- Name this schedule – assign a name so you can easily identify the report when you get it.
- Date of first run – you may want the report to run immediately or at a later date/time.
- Repeat every – indicate here if you want the report to be repeated at a later stage. For example, you may want a similar report once a week.
- Times to repeat – indicate how often you want the report repeated. If you indicate that the report is to be produced weekly and you say that it repeats twice, then you will get two reports and the schedule will finish after this.
Enter the email address where you want to be notified
when the report is finished.
The amount of time it takes to complete the report depends on the number of pages on the website and the depth you want to go. For example, the report on Social Media Examiner’s website at a crawl depth of 2 took about 10 minutes.
Benefits of Social Crawlytics
Social Crawlytics could be beneficial to your business for these reasons:
- Your competitors may have delivered great content that was very popular but you can deliver better content or content in a different form (e.g., an infographic) that could do even better.
- You may identify content that is not popular, which you can then decide not to waste your time to write about.
- You could analyze your own content to get an overview of what works or does not work. This will help with your content strategy.
- If you consider guest bloggers to write on your site, you could analyze your competitor’s site to find out the most popular guest bloggers.
Social Crawlytics is a great tool to analyze your content or your competitor’s content and it’s completely free.
Use it to help you improve the content you deliver to your target audience.
It’s very easy to set up and you can have a report completed in less than a minute. Try it out now and let us know how it has benefited your business.
Final Thoughts
It’s important to analyze your social media efforts and try to improve your results.
The 3 analytic tools in this article can help you do this.
What do you think? We would love to hear your feedback. What are your favorite analytics tools? Have you tried any of these? Please share your comments below.
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