There's some terrificly useful new tools on the market that very few SEOs are aware of or using (at least, if my experience is any indication). It's my duty, therefore, to share with some of these shiny new sites and let you explore, engage and apply to your campaigns and efforts. Hopefully, these will add great value for you, and expose them to folks who really need their help.
Ontolo: An Expert Link Builder's Dream
Link building is hard - really, really hard. Ontolo tries to productize many of the manual tasks, searches and tracking processes of link building with an extensive, diverse toolset. You can see a big list of their link building tools here, everything from .gov/.edu finders, to competitor link searches, to content research and backlink tracking/monitoring. They even have some nifty "productivity hacks" (small, simple tools to help with menial tasks like combining keywords or removing duplicates from lists).
Below is a screenshot of Ontolo's Authority Links searching tool. As you can see, there's a multitude of options including clever sorting/filtering systems.
Ontolo isn't for everyone - you should be a professional or semi-pro link builder (the tools and their results, rely on a lots of prior knowledge), but for those it's geared toward, the reviews have been outstanding and Ontolo's team (Ben Wills + Garret French) are constantly upgrading the service and functionality.
_
SEO Gadget's Keyword Research Beta
Richard Baxter is constantly lauded as one of the SEO industry's best, brightest and most driven minds. I curse myself for not smuggling him into the US, forging documents so he can stay, slapping an American accent on him and chaining him to a desk at SEOmoz (OK, maybe that's a little extreme).
Luckily for you, my evil plans are for naught, and Richard's talent has born fruit for all of us in the field with his remarkable new keyword research tool (currently in beta).
You create campaigns (similar to the SEOmoz web app), plug in your Google Analytics account, and sort keywords into relevant groups. The tool then lets you visualize potential opportunity for keywords you're already ranking for and those you haven't yet targeted by combining rank data, traffic data + search volume data (via Google's AdWords API). It's a brilliantly useful tool for those seeking new ways to ID the keywords that matter and take action on the low hanging fruit.
_
Trunk.ly: Terrific Tracking for Your Twitter Links
Trunk.ly is a deceptively simple, currently free, application from the brilliant minds at BinaryPlex (who also built the much more full-featured Tribalytic, an Australian-focused social platform for measuring influence and share of voice).
Plug Trunk.ly into your Twitter account and you'll get a page like the one below that shows a timeline of the links you (or your friends) have tweeted.
How is that useful you say?
Because people tweet some pretty brilliant stuff and they show, through tweets, what they care about. Whether you're relationship-building with a new contact, seeking topics for linkbait or content creation, attempting to determine the impact a particular individual has on clicks/rankings via their account or just interested in what someone has to say, Trunk.ly's a great way to do it.
I've been surprised at how often I use it just to find the things I tweeted!
(BTW - Trunk.ly's currently in private beta, but Alex + Tim, the creators, may have some invites if you leave comments in the post or tweet at them)
_
Markup.io: Flawlessly Simple Screenshots + Notes
You know what's a pain in the butt? Taking a screenshot of a page, pasting it into Photoshop, adding notes to it, saving the file to be small and emailing it as an attachment to a developer/designer/marketer/manager/co-worker.
Markup.io to the rescue!
In a stroke of simplicity made brilliant, markup.io lets you drag a bookmark to your broswer that will, on click, show an overlay that lets you "mark up" any page on the web with text, lines, arrows, boxes and circles of various thickness, size and color. From there, you can directly export or share the resulting screen image. It works so intuitively that our team at SEOmoz has been finding massive utility and time savings by employing it vs. a manual process.
_
Content Optimizer: Leveraging LDA for Keyword Suggestions
I already knew Russ Jones and the team at Virante were pretty smart, but this time they're just making me look bad :-)
One of the biggest frustrations with our Labs LDA tool (warning, it's still in super beta and may not be particularly performant if lots of folks are actively using it) is that it doesn't recommend words and phrases to add or take away from a piece of content to help make it more "topically relevant" to a query. Building that would require a ton of very hard computer science work... Or would it?
The team from Virante got impatient (a great trait in any startup) and built their own recommendation system. It's not perfect, but in many cases, like the example above, it can help. Basically, it grabs the top results from Google, checks for words those pages have that your page doesn't and runs LDA scores for your page (through the labs tool) with and without those keywords. Pretty sweet hack, right?
_
Andrew Wright's + Ben Huff's SERPs Analysis Worksheets (MS Excel)
A couple months ago, I presented a methodology of how to understand the ranking algorithm for an individual search result graphically to help figure out why the top ranking results are ahead of those below them (and what metrics you might need to tweak/improve to reach the top). It's certainly not a perfect strike, but many folks were excited and interested.
In fact, Andrew Wright, one of the crackerjack consultants from Bloom Media in the UK, put some serious time into improving my models and the Excel spreadsheet to make it more usable, understandable and useful.
But, that's not all. SEOmoz's own Ben Huff looked over Andrew's work and had some tweaks of his own. In the Box.net folder I've linked to, you'll find both versions of the Excel worksheet. By Q2 of next year, we hope to have this SERPs analysis system included in our web app (so they'll be no need to go crazy in Excel). In the meantime, though, we invite you to check out the work of these two, building one on the other (Ben Huff worked on the initial version with me for the face-off in London) and give feedback. It may not be the most scalable way to analyze a search result, but currently, it's the most comprehensive and likely to produce a good answer.
_
If you've got any other great, lesser-known tools that will benefit web marketers and SEOs, please feel free to share them in the comments.
I have to agree with Stanley on Raven Tools. I have recently started using thier tool set and the reporting capabilities have saved me countless hours already. The integration of multiple channels is really fantastic.
As for ontolo, I went to their site and as I do with all new SEO tools, my first stop is always pricing. They only mention a Free Trial and do not give any information about what their service costs. I clicked around a few moments and did not find the info. With such competitive tools available in this industry, I do not have time to invest researching each one to later find out that it is not affordable for our services.
Make it easy for me to see if I am a target customer up front.
The link titled "See Plans and Pricing" provided no such informaton and was very misleading. It sent me to a page to sign up for a Free Trial, with no indication of price or plans. And no other link to such. Vey much like a spammers site would do.
Their tool may be great but unfortunately, I dont trust this kind of marketing and can not waste my time researching if this is an appropriate tool for my company or not. This is probably an oversite and hopefully they will fix it soon.
That being said, I do love that they have built thier toolset on Drupal!!!!
Hey there
Speaking from experience, it's so hard to get this right. I'm sure that Garret would really like to hear your comments - I think you'll find we're all really keen to improve, give you the info you need and of course, build a great experience in a useful tool set.
I know we have some way to go to get our messaging right too - so I'm grateful to read this type of feedback too.
Thanks Richard. I appreciate the feedback and responded in more detail below.
Ben
Hey Guys,
We don't have pricing listed because of some sales funnel and CRO testing we're doing. Being priced on the higher end and offering a new and uncommon way of link building, users are finding it much easier to understand the value with a free trial, working with them through the setup process, getting then a ton of great link prospects for free, then letting them decide if it's worth it for them. In short, the challenge was that it was difficult to interpret how useful it would be for their campaigns without getting their hands on the results. Only then did it make sense to compare the value received to the price tag.
We're also working on our pricing models and packages (For example, we're rolling out a new package level tomorrow) and this is another temporary test for this kind of trial. We don't expect to never having pricing up again in the future, we're just testing what it's like without it for now. Including a new service level that is rolling out tomorrow, our pricing ranges from $297 to $1,247 per month depending on how many link prospects you want and how many projects you will be managing from your account.
To date, once someone gets through the learning curve (if you're an SEO, you'll get it faster than others), most people are actually overwhelmed by the number of link prospects they get. No one yet has said there weren't enough and we consistently receive feedback that there are just a ton of great prospects in there for them. Feedback like this is the norm: https://twitter.com/#!/RossHudgens/status/15174578917609472
All of that said, I really appreciate the feedback on your experience. It's not common to get such a candid response of the signup experience and we treat this kind of feedback like gold. This is the first of it's kind we've had, but I'm can't imagine others aren't having the same experience.
If you have any other questions, feel free to email me at [email protected]
Thanks guys,
Ben
Also, about setting it up on Drupal, we love it. :) I'm definitely a convert from WordPress and just really love the quality of modules, support, etc. There's a bunch of custom development to interact with our users' external link prospecting databases, but once we figured that all out, we were good to go!
Ben
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the New SEO Tool that I am currently getting the most out of!
Scans sites, reviews all sorts of issues around canonicals, titles, headings and more across a whole site, helps see where internal links are going through redirects - this takes so much labour out of reviewing these on a page by page basis its untrue!
Thanks for the mention Pete.
We've had a lot of positive response to the spider in the UK. We have loads in the pipeline :-).
You can find the SEO spider here btw - https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Welcome any feedback. Cheers.
Your tool is fantastic but limited..you can expand it by including social media stats, keyword rankings, competitor analysis
Thanks.
Thanks for the comments hyderalis.
The tool was built specifically for professional SEOs, purely for onsite technical analysis and recommendations. It was built to be quick and flexible so you can crawl any website in an instant and find SEO issues.
Adding additional things like keyword rankings, social media stats, 'Moz type scoring would develop it into something else and probably dilute what it is now.
Having said that, I totally get what you're saying and like your ideas - we may consider a hosted version in the future. Thanks for the feedback.
Cheers.
Any chance of a Mac or Web Version?
It's pretty much next on the list.
We are releasing a couple of extra features imminently, then the MAC version should be ready to go. :-)
I love the tool, thanks for the free demo! I'm not seeing any way to save the file for later opening... I'm assuming that I'd have to buy a license for that to be true?
Good question. You can export everything to Excel currently, but we don't have a save project feature just yet.
We will have very soon though. :-)
Going to try it.
Just a CRO suggestion: make more evident the download link and/or make linkable the Download Now text below the fold (I found myself clicking on it).
Fair point, you can see we whipped up the page quite quickly :-)
Sorry, didn't mean to takeover this thread. Feel free to ping me feedback via Twitter.
Cheers.
Hi
Your tool is very good and comprehensive.
susheel kumar
How 'bout a Mac version? Doesn't anyone use Macs in the UK? ;-P
LOL. We are working on it (answered this question above).
Cheers.
Rand you would like to add one more tool to your new arsenal. It is wordstream keyword grouper. Through this free tool you can easily organize up to 10000 keywords (downloaded from your analytics and WBT reports) into profitable groups in just few seconds which could otherwise take several hours or days. It is one of the best keywords tool i have come across lately.
Thanks for the additional tool Himanshu. I'm going to go check it out now. Today is turning out to be a playing-with-new-tools day. Let's home I can squeeze some productivity out of it too.
Personally I've tried the first three...
I gave Ontolo a pause (well, it is not that cheap), but it is a tool I will use surely for biggest clients, as I loved it. It reminds partly the concept behind the competitive link finder here in SEOmoz Labs, but with a boost of testosterone.
Trunk.ly: great way to track in an organized way all the things/links you maybe have missed in the timeline
SEOGadget Keywords Tool... cannot say enough praises to the Richard Baxter great tool... and it's still in Beta. As I told him, that tools just confirm his SEO Jediness.
Rand, Gianluca - I really ******* love you guys right now. Thank you for being awesome!
gfiorelli1 :
How much does Ontolo actually cost? They fail to put that information anywhere on their website and I'm still in the free trial phase.
thanks.
Hi Jami,
Our pricing ranges from $297 to $1247 per month, depending on how much link prospecting you want to do and how many campaigns you want to manage.
Let me know if we can help with anything else!
Thanks!
Ben
Hey Gianluca,
We've got a new service level coming out tomorrow, so keep an eye out for that. Also, we just rolled out new features that allow you to manage multiple campaigns from a single account. So for agencies like yours, the cost per project should go down pretty significantly.
Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help!
Ben
Thanks! That is what I call "Monitor, Listen and Talk".
Surely I will... right now I've to "fight" with my little SEO interns (my kids) ;)
Wow, there honestly isn't enough time in the day to keep up with this stuff. I've been using the Ontolo Tool for a while now and evangelizing its awesomeness to anyone that will listen (I've already written a couple of blogs on some new uses), but sheesh...for a small SEO company like ours it's almost a full time job just to keep up on these tools and figure out the best way to utilize them.
I simultaneously want technology to speed up and slow down...can anyone make that happen? Thanks. :)
-Adam Henige
I was going to start using the Markup IO tool, but I don't want my ideas for different sites to be available for the whole world to see: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amarkup.io+intitle%3Apublished&pws=0&hl=en&num=10
"slapping an American accent on him and chaining him to a desk at SEOmoz"
Hehe! You know I work for food, right? Food is a strong motivator for me...
What about beer?
Oh, yeah! That too! (Om nom nom nom / glug glug glug!)
I like the Virante tool a lot - BUT it would be so much more useful for me if you could choose a country specific version of Google as I expect I'm missing useful UK-specific terms.
I've also tried out the https://www.glenncrocker.com/ tool which gets around this as it just looks at whichever competitors you give it - this is already giving me actionable leads, so thanks to Glen for that one :-)
Jo
Sweet! I love the simplicity of the Virante tool, but you definitely give up a lot of control & detail. I think best is to have a button for "grab my competitors" that then shows which competitors are being examined & lets you edit the list, followed by automatically pulling the word lists & LDA %s. I'll get it done when I have time!
Anybody know what the rules of the road are for automated use of Labs tools like LDA?
Hey, I mentioned it above, the rule is just "always ask first". We asked a while ago and gave them a couple of looks at it in advance - the SEOMoz team really is interested in helping out the SEO community, just always be polite and get permission.
One of the most actionable posts of the year. Thank you for posting!
Lack of good tools set us on the path of developing our own, and after months of work and debugging and struggle you show me this??? What to do... drop our stuff and use tools like ontolo or adopt their ways and build your own. There are merits in having control over tools, for example 37 signals continuously refuse to make Basecamp more elaborate (and for a valid reason), also people behind tools like Raven are a bit more proactive, but still they keep all our data which makes me uneasy.
Thank you, thank you for the tools recommendation! I've heard of some, but no time to review. Already signed up for SEOgadget. It's the solution to my reporting woes.
A big thumbs up Donna - thanks for super nice comments :-)
I'm a big fan of WooRank.com - it gives a comprehensive and easy snapshot of your site.
Very useful thanks for sharing
Regarding Markup.io: Microsoft's One Note already does everything this does, and it integrates very well with Outlook. It has a screen clipper tool and allows markups/writing anywhere on the photo as well.
In addition, you can search through all the notes you have made on any images so you can find things fast.
Great set of tools, thanks for the info :)
I really like using Link Diagnosis, have you tried it? https://www.linkdiagnosis.com/
I've been using Ontolo for a few weeks now and absolutely love it. Working with it on a new client now, and it seriously saved us about a month's worth of time researching. Right away, we found major players and some data that was immediately actionable. Not to mention Garrett has been extremely helpful & patient.
Nice list of link building tools, Rand. Ontolo simply rocks. Some other great tools:
I love Raven!
From a viewpoint of a SEO Agency owner, the raven reporting and centralized dashboard gives us more value than just about anything has before!
Raven is amazing.
I really love Raventools,. it is a perfect seo tool for agencies and they are improving it almost every day.
Great list thanks for sharing! #1 is my favorite from this list and I would also suggest Raven Tools which is not included on this list.
Nice post. The Virante tool is pretty awesome. If nothing else it's a great way to get a bird's eye view of how people think of the topic you're trying to write about. I was drooling over the SEOgadget tool yesterday, I see Richard has put up a post explaining how to use it. What I really need is something to help me track the long tail more easily - are keywords associated with "men's shoes" big this week, or are keywords associated with "kid's shoes" (or whatever your example may be).
One tool I would mentioned which was mentioned over at SEOgadget is Mergewords. I have been using it and I think it is AMAZING! https://mergewords.com/ Other tools do similar things but I guess I just love the usability of this particular one.
Thank you! Nice collection.
@ truk.ky I'd love an invite too if possible! twitter.com/searchplacement
Just sign up on https://trunk.ly - new invites coming out today.
I am trying ontolo from long time (Signed up for Trial version) - I used mostly of there tools - Search by Stats, Search by Link Type , etc.
Every time I search "No Results Match Your Body and Title Text Query Your text search returned no results. The best thing to do from here is to begin using a broader query of one or two words and only using it in the body text. Once you are getting results from a broader query, then begin narrowing down further. "
I first used my title, my description but same above results - then I read there document here : https://ontolo.com/docs/user-guide
Followed there instruction - to keep title blank for the first time added car*... stuff, then narrow, still no results match page.Not sure is this something stuff for $297-$12XX per month ? Also I saw ontolo is selling ebook for $97 - doesn't that is included in monthly subscription ?After all that guide is related to ontolo...
Just wonder if I am doing anything wrong - bz I feel i followed same procedure they have mentioned https://ontolo.com/docs/user-guide
This happened almost to all things I tested for all tools. Social Media Research too.. Not sure if they are rolling things ? or this is what it is meant ?
I raised ticket for Ben at https://ontolo.zendesk.com/requests - Lets see how it comes. I will post things here if any update.
A very good alternative to Markup, is SnagIt (https://www.techsmith.com/snagit/default.asp). I haven’t tried Markup or any other tools for screen captures yet, as SnagIt has met all my needs, but I’ll definitely check out Markup.
I'm also using Jing for capturing & marking up screenshots AND for doing quick screencasts for clients. It's so much easier getting them to set Analytics up or whatever when they can see a little video of how to do it instead of me making a long "do this, then this, then this" list.
I requested a Trunk.ly beta invite and a week later they sent me a beta code. It looks really neat.
Glad you're enjoying it!
I'm really enjoying Mark up right now. It makes doing a fast screenshot for a quick email really easy.
Alex or Tim
If you are reading I would love a beta invite code :-)
Feel free to PM me here
Make sure you sign up at https://trunk.ly and we'll be sending a new round of invites out soon.
I know I just commented, but after giving it some further thought, I would like to mention the 37 signals team. These guys did a killer job with Basecamp & the whole product suite. Another priceless tool in our arsenal! Not directly related to SEO, but it works very well to manage SEO campaigns with remote employees.
Is it really true that anchor text plays that big of a role? I'm looking at the last chart and I knew anchor text mattered, but not as much as it is expresses in that chart. If that is the case, let's lay out a basic scenario for a Landscaping business. Instead of making your navigation links like this - Home | Services | About Us | Contact --- it would be better to make it like this - Home | Landscape Design | Hardscape Design | Synthetic Grass | About Us | Contact | - because that way, the search engine realizes what the business actually does. Does that sound correct? Can I get some feedback from my fellow SEOmoz friends. Thanks.
Not the right place... my best feedback is to upgrade to Pro and ask in Q&A. The Staff and the Associates will be happy to help you :)
I read a little more and I noticed it is "Anchor Text of External Links." I guess that clears things up a little.
Internal Anchor text helps out a ton. I don't think you're out of line, with your previous question. That sounds like a solid strategy.
Hey Thanks a lot for the reply. I did some more research and noticed my statement could definitely be valid if we take into consideration that the navigation bar is one of the first things on the page and I've discovered that the first couple words of the page are definitely important.
Great post! All of these tools are fantastic!
I know it's been said, but awesome tools.
Oh, thanks for sharing so many seo tools here,Rand. But i know even none of them. I'd like to try them one by one. Just hope it's not too hard for me to promote baby monitor.
Thank you Randfish! I found a lot of good information in this article. I think this tool will be so cool and very useful too.
The Serp Analysis Excel Doc is great. Now I just need to get it converted into Google Docs so it can be with all my other tools.
Article/PR submission, link submission, blog commenting, blog review, social bookmarking, social media marketing, social networking, blogging, paid ad- what next???? Competetion is tough now!
How long to cotinue all this???!! When to stop? what's more? Lots of quetion?? :(
Hey, Any chance this has been updated and we can get a 2013 version ?
Ooh that's a great idea! We've added it to our list. :)
Great tools @Rand! Thanks for the info!
Thanks for sharing your knowledge...
Just seen that Screaming Frog is now available for Mac, so am going to try DL and try this out now.
It's the link-building assistance and competitor analysis I need the assistance on as a freelance webdesigner and SEO - as any time lost is time I cannot necessarily get back. So I'm going to stop by Screaming Frog and SERPs Analysis Excel Spreadsheets - thanks again :-D
Hi,
My name is Dave and I would also like to bring your attention to Trunkler - an iOS client I built for Trunk.ly. It's super easy to use. Now you can get all the goodness of Trunk.ly directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Here's the link: https://trunkler.com
dave
Thanks soo much for sharing!
i think this is a very good info but i have something also.
Indeed this is a grate list of tools, but the problem is that the most of them are costing a lot of money. You can suggest some free ones that are doing the same things or the free ones are not that good?
Thank you for this list!
Will check it carefully after the holidays
Great recommendations. Loved the SERP Analysis spreadsheets, been doing similar style reports, the time spend on these really does justify the information you get out of it. It becomes a great reference if you update these with monthly or even bi-monthly intervals to track how well your link building efforts have been stacking up!
A tool we use find useful for link discovery & management is Buzzstream. https://www.buzzstream.com
Thanks, Rand. I've used your pie chart for understanding search algorithms in several presentations on SEO, as well as in client presentations. (Siting my source, of course!) Everyone loves this chart and it makes everything I'm already telling them actually make sense to them!
Also, I just signed up for Ontolo last week and am finding it confusing in terms of usability -- are there any instructions on how to use their service anywhere?
Hi Jami, (At least, I hope your name is Jami :)
We'd love to help either via email or telephone! If you submit a support ticket through https://ontolo.zendesk.com, we can start helping you out right away.
Thanks!
Ben
Very useful especially the LDA tool. Does any one have any advice for the best PPC tools around?
Concentrate -- https://www.concentrateme.com/features/ from Juice Analytics is 1000X better than the Wordstream Keyword Grouper for segmenting keywords. Though it's not free.
I like the Screaming Frog tool also.
I give 2 thumbs up to ScrapeBox as well.
I really like Markup! Can't wait to try it out. Another interesting tool is Optify.net, if you haven't tried it, you should!
Awesome post, Rand. Really great tools - most I knew about and use but also a couple complete unknowns to me.
As a prophet of LDA and it's benefits I am very grateful for the information on virante. This is exactly what i needed. Thanks Rand!
Great stuff! Thanks, Rand. Signed-up for Trunk.ly and checking out Screaming Frog. Love Markup.
Thanks! We are working on getting a whole new range of invites out today so you should see one in your inbox soon...
Triffic list, it's great to keep up with super news tools that are coming out all the time!
Also some great additional tips in the comments, thanks to you all too!!
Tool opportunity to combine the LDA tool with the Wordsfinder uniqueness tool. Spider top 10 SERPs and push out relevant but unique content.
More manual than Virante's tool, but I think this is along the lines of what you're wanting:
https://www.glenncrocker.com/lda-word-diff-visualizer/
I didn't realize it was fair to mashup the LDA Tool like Virante has. I'll have to see about automating mine a bit more.
Cheers that looks interesting, Ill have a play around
We asked special permission in this case and know that they can turn us off at any time. I suggest that you send an email to the SEOMoz team whenever you have a cool idea that takes advantage of their technology - they are very reasonable and helpful.
Russ,
Thanks for the nudge & inspiration. I've updated my tool to takes a keyword phrase, your site, and up to 9 competing sites to use as the basis for the word cloud. Much easier than iterating with the LDA tool and pasting in all those word sets. Here's the update: https://www.glenncrocker.com/lda-word-diff-visualizer-version-2/
You're right that the SEOmoz team is very reasonable & flexible when they can be. (Google is less reasonable & flexible, so I'm not scraping their results to automatically get competing sites. ;-)
Thanks for this Rand, I have seen a few of these before but 1 or 2 new ones =) Will check them out mate.
Alex & Tim - I'd love a trunk.ly invite!! twitter.com/klikkiscott
Great post Rand.
Thanks for sharing the Mark Up tool, I'll certainly be using it.
Nice tools, Rand. In fact, I'm already using some of them, but this linkbuilding tool sound like smth really cool.. will check out their trial :)
Excellent rundown - I was unaware of ontolo - which looks fantastic.
I've also been playing about with seogadgets keyword tool a bit over the last week and that does have some pretty extraordinary functions that should make my life a bit easier in 2011.
I will be putting together a case study of its usage on youmoz either late december or early january, depending on the results that I see from the changes made on-site which have been driven by its suggestions.
niche but nice. wordsfinder duplicate content checker. Copy and paste 2 sets of text and get a raw metric for their similarity. They have an API for some of their stuff.
The one major sector that misses clever tools is IA. Anyone know tools that display site layouts with data such as PR etc?
Great reviews here - I'll be checking all of this out.
Ontolo is very useful and as @ismepete mentioned screamingfrogs app rocks too!
Thanks Yousaf!
Very cool. Ontolo looks very cool. As far as the screenshot tool, do you find it's better to have to access a new page for a screenshot rather than just use an extension like Awesome Screenshot for chrome?
Wow, awesome tools rand.
Tried Mark Up absolutely great tool.
Fireshot - FF plugin is also a brilliant markup tool. Use it all the time.
Thanks a lot for the information about the Ontolo tool. I am really interested in trying this out and reviewing it myself. Also the spreadsheet breaking down ranking factors is a great tool for anyone.
The tool from Virante is very very cool.
I know there is this whole issue of correlation and statistical reliability, but I don't think you can ignore the importance of taking a holistic approach to SEO and the use of topically relevant keywords on your pages.
looks like I've got some work to do this weekend putting these tools through the ringer.
That Markup tool is really cool and we'll be using it, although at the risk of sounding like a NUMPTY, the guys need a usability expert to give them a few suggestions.
Sometimes efforts to make text explanations simple just result in confusion.
Great post, Rand. In particular, I'm excited about the Markup tool. I think it'll save me a lot of time when creating tutorials and such for clients.
Great post, Rand! I'm really looking forward to using Markup.io!
OH yeah, It's awesome!
Great tools Rand! Thanks for the info!
Well written!
I am recovering from the deep shock that I haven"t hear about ANY of the tools mentioned. Feeling like a failure.
Markup.io is AWESOME! I had been using the "Note Anywhere" pluggin for Chrome to do stuff like this, but Markup is definetly my new tool. Thanks!
I'd love to see an updated version of the Excel spreadsheet that uses VBA to automatically pull data using APIs. It would be fantastic to be able to change the query, and have the workbook automatically update.
My favorite new tool right now is SpyFu Recon. It generates extremely detailed SEO reports for domains. It's free to use while it's in beta, and highly recommended. Make sure to check it out before it goes live!
I would love a Trunk.ly invite.
Thanks Alex and Time :-)
Nice list Rand, but I would like to see more of the free tools then the paid one. What do you think https://websitegrader.com/ & https://www.semrush.com/ they are also really good.
I do not find website grader to be very useful tool. It just collects info from various sources and displays it in one location. This info is anyway easily available.
perfect xmas gift, thanks