My Best Internet Discoveries During 2004

I was thinking tonight about the various Internet tools, ideas, strategies and new businesses I've found in 2004 that made an impact on me (personally and financially).

I dug up this list of great finds since I refer to them fairly often when speaking with clients. These are the tools I use practically every day, and they span all the various types of projects I am involved with: Search Engine Optimization work, Internet Business Strategies, website content management, blogging and gadgets for Podcasting.

These tools have proven reliable - meaning, I plan to continue using them. One very significant trend in 2004 was my move to web-based tools (away from buying and downloading more desktop tools). This has made it possible for me to be anywhere on any machine and continue to work.  It has helped my productivity and reduced my stress from trying to put everything on a single machine at my desk and then figure out how to get to it when I'm at a different location. That's all changing now, and take a hint from me for 2005: start moving all your tools to the web. Just begin with keeping all your bookmarks on the web and work your way out from there.

Blogging Software and Content Management System

http://www.typepad.com - this site seemed to be the best way for my clients to get started blogging in their business with little fuss or hassle. Good price, professionally supported and constantly improving. The search engines seem to find the blogs well there, too. I've used www.blogger.com and www.radiouserland.com to a lesser degree. There are many such sites, free and for-pay. These are just the ones that worked well for me in 2004. I'm not a big fan of Blogger.com - I think Google has dropped the ball here, but maybe that will change in 2005.

http://www.Plone.org - as you know by now, I moved all my websites to Plone. It's an Open Source content management system that does everything I want it to, and it's free to use. It includes the ability to easily organize and maintain web content using only a web browser and creating practically any kind of look and feel (they call it skins).  I'm using the Plone SimpleBlog to write this article directly on the web.

I plan a number of articles on my use of Plone (and my clients' use of it), and a Podcast with the Quintagroup, a user from Burning Man, and, hopefully, one of the Plone developers. I have had excellent success with it, and so have my clients. You truly don't need a webmaster anymore once you get set up.

I gave back to the Open Source community by funding the addition of a very cool little add-on for Plone that gives you the ability to search engine optimize every page 'easily.'  The Quintagroup did the heavy lifting: the coding. I just provided the financial support and technical requirements.  It's called qSEOptimizer and you can find out more at http://4webresults.com/qseoptimizer.

SEARCH-ENGINE RELATED

http://www.signposter.com - If only this were a web-based tool like everything else this year. Regardless, I found myself coming back to it over and over again.  This tool steps you through the SEO process to optimize pages, create the meta tags correctly, and efficiently submit the pages to a huge selection of engines and directories. It also does ranking reports, though I don't use that much in this tool. I also DO NOT use the tool for Doorway pages.  I mainly like the way the tool helps you build all the meta tags.

http://www.googlealert.com -  Google Alert (this is not a Google company). This is a wonderful service, though, and highly recommended. For a very small fee you can monitor who's linking to you and who's mentioning you in their blogs and various web pages all through the Internet.  I do this with new SEO clients to monitor how well the link-building strategy is evolving. Google Alert is a perfect research tool for monitoring the day-to-day events in a very specific topic or area. I'm monitoring RSS Video, bitTorrent, Podcasting and other technology developments that will be big in 2005. I get an email every day with the latest links in Google that match the keyword selections I have in place for each alert.  This is the kind of business intelligence tool I recall costing hundreds of dollars a month at Motorola. Now you can use them for $10 a month.

KEYWORD RANKING REPORTS

SearchMaster - http://www.searchmaster1.co.uk is a unique internet application product for SEO professionals or website owners to track their position in the major search engines against their chosen keywords. All my clients have an account. I have an audio interview with the author of this handy application. I just need to get it posted.

If you're getting into SEO work, you'll find out what a pain it is to get keyword-ranking reports to the client. The simple way is to use this program and give the clients login access to view their reports online directly. Saves you a lot of time.  It's not as complete as Bruce Clay's SEOTOOLKit, which I also used in 2004, but it's easier to use and costs a lot less. For the majorty of SEOwork I've done, it's been fine.

A free keyword-ranking tool that clients like and which is web-based is www.gorank.com. However, you'll need a Google API account (which is free).

KEYWORD RESEARCH

WordTracker - if you're serious at all about SEO work, then get a year's membership to Wordtracker for keyword research. It's a great tool, though the user interface sure feels outdated to me. But hands down, it's a good tool. You can access to it for one week for short projects. For quick-and-dirty keyword research, I use this free tool: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/. And if you haven't tried the Google keyword suggestion tool, you should. There are many other SEO-related tools on my SEO Tools and Tips page that I refer to fairly often - all of them web-based. The free search engine submission tool is another favorite.

EMAIL AND BROWSERS

I have all my email forwarded to a GMAIL account.  If you haven't started using GMAIL, then find someone to send you a free account. I could go on and on about it, but you need to just experience the interface. It's FAST.

I switched to the FireFox browser in the fall of 2004. I hadn't realized how out-of-date and clunky Microsoft's IE browser had become. FireFox is also Open Source, like Plone. Meaning, there are a lot of dedicated people around the world continuing to improve this amazing little browser that is fast and full of features. The ability to create tabs and save them all in a folder makes working with a ton of browser windows (like I do during an SEO project) easier - a LOT easier, really.  I had some relearning to do, but not much. I still use IE, though, because it will show Page Rank. Hopefully, Firefox will get this soon.

Another change for me is the move to Amazon's A9 search engine, which is essentially Google with a more intelligent skin. A9 keeps a complete history for me of all the sites I visit so I don't lose them as I move between machines or locations. It looks different and feels a bit more cluttered to me, but I'm getting used to it. It offers more information about each site you visit, so it's a good tool for SEO folks to use.

I admit I was skeptical of personalization tools, but I think the folks at Amazon are breaking some new ground here, and I decided to get on board. Glad I did, as this tool is also saving me time.

I have also used and like www.ikeepbookmarks.com for keeping track of all my bookmarks on the web. But this is really an outdated site and I'm using the Bookmark syncronizer with FireFox to push a copy of my bookmarks to an ftp site then resync them with a broswer I use on different machines. Lovely!

Lately I've started experimenting with a social bookmarking tool at http://del.icio.us/. It's really pretty neat. Set yourself up an account and try it out. It's easier than explaining how it works. I added the tool bar feature so I can slide a page up to my account quickly. Again, this gives me the ability to put another aspect of my work in the web so I can be machine-independent and share my work with others as I choose.

RSS Readers

I started out with Pluck but just battled it. It does have a rich interface, but the thing that bugged me was not being able to move to another machine at another location and be able to read the RSS feeds I had subscribed to. There were some odd behaviors and slowness of the user interface that bugged me too. So I moved to www.bloglines.com and I like it - a lot. 

Robin Good and his Online RSS Directory

If you're wondering where to submit your RSS feed or weblog URL for more exposure and search engine visibility, then you must get Robin Good's Maximum ExpoRSSure - Best Blog Directory and RSS Submission Sites: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/.  He has a dedicated RSS feed to notify you of any changes to the 100+ directories where you can list your blog.  If you want to significantly increase traffic at your blog, GET LISTED.

Audio

Articulate - this is a PowerPoint add-on that converts PowerPoint to FLASH. It's one of those tools that just WORKS. It's not cheap; it's a pro tool. I tried some freebie editions and some cheap ones, and they all just sucked in comparison.

So why is this important to me? I have a number of clients where I record audio sessions with product managers or technical consultants. I record their presentation and slice it up into audio files and use Articulate to marry them up with PowerPoint, then output everything into an beautifully crafted FLASH file.
Here are a couple of examples:
1. My SEO Basics Training Course
2. The Linux Explosion - Interview with Editor and Chief of LinuxWorld

There are many more if you're  interested. See the webcasts at http://www.dbazine.com.

My  audio studio is in my office and it includes a professional telephone patch using a Gentner, and a seperate audio workstation for editing with Steinberg's Wavelab. Lots of microphones and mixer-related gear. Send a note if you want more detail. I've used Wavelab for years with more than 200 interviews at this point. So, I'm looking forward to taking these tools and my experiences to move into Podcasting.

GADGETS

The iRiver H320 mp3 hard disk player is a little quirky compared to the more elegant-looking and -operating iPod Photo (yes, I have both). I plan a more detailed article on these two. The iRiver H320 has built-in mp3 recording capability and a fairly good omnidirectional microphone. It's PERFECT for Podcasting because the hard drive is 20 Gigs. You can also record directly into the iRiver with a Line Input. I've used it all through the holidays while visiting my relatives in Michigan. Great battery life (12 hours), good quality and reliable. I love the iPod too :)

More on all this coming in 2005, as I'm in the process of creating a Podcast program about the lives of people and how they use technology. This program will cover significantly more than just SEO topics. If you're interested in being interviewed,  drop me a line.

4 Web Results is an Austin SEO company that provides proven content-rich search engine marketing strategies, safe search engine optimization techniques and Internet web site promotion using business blogs. We focus on search engine marketing that promotes business growth for your company with steady, logical steps. Contact Tom Parish for assistance.

Monday, April 21, 2008 in Business  | Permalink |  Comments (1)

       

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