On the flip side I love playing with tools and figuring them out and maybe, just maybe, I spend a little too much time with them.

When I saw there was an SEO and Social Media Power Tools session at SMX with Mike King, Dixon Jones, Aleyda Solis and Neil Walker there was no way I was going to miss it.

Note: What follows was going to be a round up of the tools that we featured across all the sessions but at 2500 words and a fair few hours dropping in the links I only got Mike’s done. If there is sufficient interest I’ll write up the others for you!

You will see that I have included links to the relevant tools, given my quick overview and linked blog posts that go further into the tool.

Have fun!!

Mike King – @ipullrank - http://www.iacquire.com/

Learn to code:

Codeacademy

In a nutshell: Mike is a big believer in SEO’s having the ability to code. Codeacademy allows you to learn coding online for free with some gamification to keep you interested.

Find out more: My Thoughts on Codecademy

Udacity

In a nutshell: Ever wanted to learn how to build your own search engine? Need to brush up on your web application engineering? Fancy learning applied cryptography? Find all this and more for free!

Find out more: Stanford professor gives up tenure to start Udacity free online university

Tools for on page analysis:

Screaming Frog

In a nutshell: Install this on your PC or Mac and instantly crawl site to find SEO errors. There is a free and paid version and the ability to download to Excel for analysis. Used here at Hallam. Great for site audits.

Find out more: Crawler Face-off: Xenu vs. Screaming Frog

Scraper for Chrome

In a nutshell: Chrome plug in that I use quite often. Want to grab some information from a web page quickly. Right click, scrape similar and easily export to a Google Doc.

Find out more: Quick Link Prospecting with Scraper Extension

HttpFox

In a nutshell: For checking HTTP response codes on the fly. FireFox plugin.

Page speed plugin

In a nutshell: Chrome or FireFox plug in for checking any issues that your site may be having with page speed. Quick and easy to use.

Keyword research tools:

Yahoo Clues

In a nutshell: Pretty cool tool from Yahoo for getting demographic data at a keyword level, take your keyword research to the next level.

Find out more:  Yahoo Clues: New Fun Search Keyword Tool

Keyword Eye

In a nutshell: If you are more of a visual person keyword research can be a bit of an eye strain and headache. Use this tool to visualise your keyword data.

Find out more: Keyword Eye Review: The Visual Keyword Suggestion Tool

Soovle

In a nutshell: Nifty little tool used here at Hallam for expanding your keyword research – scrapes the suggest functionality on dozens of sites, can be customised for different verticals and niches.

Find out more: Review, Soovle Keyword Tool

Scrapebox

In a nutshell: Mainly used by the black hats, Scrapebox is now being used for creative white hat techniques. See the post below fora whole bunch of cool white hat uses.

Find out more:  Scrapebox’s Hidden Treasures for SEO

Ubersuggest

In a nutshell: Another tool that we use quite a bit. Scrapes Google Suggest and allows you export keyword data for your longtail keyword reseacrh.

Find out more:   Writer’s Block? Fret No More. Ubersuggest & Tag Crowd Are Here.

SEOgadget Api Excel Extension

In a nutshell: Streamline your keyword research by pulling the data straight from the adwords api into excel – like magic!

Content generation tools:

Gofish

In a nutshell: Put together by Mike, this tool searches Twitter based on a keyword you input to give you real time insight in to what kind of content people are after right now.

SEOgadget content strategy tool

In a nutshell: A Google Doc put together by Daniel Butler. Pop in a keyword and the Google Doc will throw back the content that is popular at the moment on a couple of dozen sites. Amazing stuff.

Find out more: 3 Steps to Content Brainstorming Productivity

Spreadsheet tools:

SeoTools for Excel

In a nutshell: I’m not sure what I did before I found this Excel extension. Instantly pull SEO metrics, Social Metrics (and loads of other cool stuff) into Excel at lightning speed. Uber productive.

Find out more:  Amazing SEO Tools for Excel: SEOtools By Neils Bosma

ImportXML for Google Docs

In a nutshell: There is a bit of a learning curve with this one, but get your head around ImportXML and you’ll be creating your own internal tools in Google Docs.

Find out more: The ImportXML Guide for Google Docs

Actionable link profile tools:

LinkResearchTools

In a nutshell: We don’t have an account with these guys but I recently road tested their tools and the link data that you can get is pretty epic. It’s a bit pricey but I suggest you give it a whirl.

Find out more: Link Research Tools Review

Link Detective

In a nutshell: The best tools are deceptively simple. Simply upload your link data (from OSE) and get your backlink profile analysed into types. Essential since the emergence of Penguin.

Find out more: How Garbage Ranks in the SERPs: a Case Study

Competitive analysis tool:

searchmetrics

In a nutshell: Get a deeper understanding of your vertical with what looks like an awesome tool. Alas I have never tried it myself so can’t really comment any further.

Find out more: Testimonials

Analytics tools:

Keyword level demographics

In a nutshell: From Mike’s words “I’m not quite sure when the idea hit me—and hit me it did—but one day I realized that if you can pull a user’s data from Facebook and couple it with Referrers from Search the result is demographics at a keyword level!” I suggest you go and read the post but it is difficult to explain in a nutshell!!

Find out more: Keyword-Level Demographics

Track social network users are logged in to

In a nutshell: Want to know which social network visitors to your site are logged into. Use the plug in to see the data and then make actionable decisions for your site based on real data.

Find out more: read the post or get the WordPress plugin

Google Analytics Debugger

In a nutshell: Check to see if the Google Analytics code on any given site is set up correctly.

Find out more: New Tools to Debug Your Tracking Code

Personas tools:

Facebook Ad Creator

Facebook Insights

Doubleclick Ad Planner

In a nutshell: To be honest I am not very familiar with these tools but are on my list to check out. Essentially Mike suggests these as great ways to help you build personas.

Link building quick hits tools:

Noob Guide to Link Building

6 month Guide to Link Building

In a nutshell: Mike’s guides to link building. Covers everything that you need to know (and a bit more) for creating successful link building campaigns. Even gives you a 6 month plan.

Simply Measured combined with majestic, open site explorer or ahrefs

In a nutshell: Use the free version of the twitter follower export to get all the details a of an accounts followers, which is pretty awesome on its own but when you combine it with link data…well just read the post below…

Read more: Using Twitter and Backlinks to Build Links

Data tools:

World Government Data

In a nutshell: Want to make something cool for your site? Then head over here for loads of data sets to create infographics. You’ll surprised what you might find. If you are struggling just think outside of the box a little bit

Google Public Data

In a nutshell: Who’s got the data? Google’s got the data – see what datasets you can get from them here.

Data visualisation tools:

Infogr.am

In a nutshell: I love this site – if you already have some data and want to spice up a blog post simply upload it here to create and embeddable interactive chart.

Dipity

In a nutshell: Easily create interactive timelines to make your blog posts a little more exciting.

Find out more: I created one for this post on the history of Google.

Storybird

In a nutshell: I have never used Storybird but put simply you can turn your data into an interactive book – and they look amazing

Link data source tools:

ahrefs

In a nutshell: One of the newer backlink data providers and pretty nifty it is too! Sign up for a free trial to get a feel for it – but really you need the paid version.

Find out more: AHREFS Review: An In-Depth Look at a New Link Research Tool

blekko

In a nutshell: Calling itself the spam free search engine blekko provides its users with some whopping transparency regards SEO and link data, I wrote about it briefly here and for the record all you need is a free account!

Find out more: The TNW Review: blekko – Is this finally a Google killer?

linkdiagnosis

In a nutshell: Recently acquired by iAquire [Update] Mike has pointed out to me that iAquire has always owned linkdiagnosis (my apologies!) and currently being worked on by Mike, this tool uses the Linkscape API to prettify all your backlinks. I touched on it here and it is a tool that I return to fairly often.

Find out more: Link Diagnosis Launches New Tool: A Review

Broken link index by iacquire

In a nutshell: A secret project by Mike so get yourself signed up. Looks like it could be a winner for anyone who dabbles in broken link building.

Still hungry? Check this out: Backlink Data – Who is the Best Provider of them All?

Bookmarklets:

Bookmarklets for SEO by Tom Critchlow

In a nutshell: Bookmarklets are massive time savers and I use a whole bunch of them to quickly access link data, share on social media and organise my day. Tom put together this amazing posts and shared dozens of them, when you start using them you will never go back!

Find out more: 30 SEO Bookmarklets to Save You Time

Open Graph Helper

In a nutshell: It use to be that the only way you could tell how something would render on Facebook was by testing it or checking the code. Until this bookmarklet came along!!

Wirify

In a nutshell: Another bookmarklet that lets you instantly turn any website into a wireframe – magic!!

Find out more: Wirify: turn web pages into wireframes

Ranking tool:

GetStat

In a nutshell: I’d heard Mike mention this tool before but have never got round to testing it out. After revisiting their site it looks like I might need to! Check out some of the features here.

Link building tools:

Followerwonk

In a nutshell: I use this regularly and so should you. Find influencers on Twitter, build link prospecting lists using stats that matter or just get some pretty reports to share. You get free credits that top up everyday or you join for a very modest sum. Indispensable.

Find out more:  LINK PROSPECTING WITH TWITTER TOOLS AND APIS

Outreachr

In a nutshell: Don’t search for contact details when link prospecting – get a tool to do it for you! Also includes link metrics and other useful tidbits

Knowem

In a nutshell: Designed as a way to claim your user name across hundreds of social media platforms (and very useful for it too!) but why not use to find spy on your competition or further you link prospecting research – a little gem!

Mentionmapp

In a nutshell: Want to know how people are connected on Twitter, who influences the influencers but is more accessible for outreach? Do it here, amazing tool and looks great too!

Ontolo

In a nutshell: One of the big link building suites, prospect and organise efficiently. Also has a number of free tools that are helpful in the link building process.

Find out more: Ontolo Reviewed

ifttt

In a nutshell: if this then that puts the Internet to work for you. Has possibilities beyond just SEO and Social Media for making your life a little easier. Uses triggers from certain platforms to create an action on another. I have been using this for 6 months or so now and it is a great time saver.

Find out more: fttt Ideas & Review

rapportive

In a nutshell: A simple idea elegantly executed. A gmail plug in that allows you to see the social profiles of the people that send you an email. Quickly hook up with them on multiple social networks or alternatively use it in your link building outreach to help gauge someones influence or make the emails that you send them that little bit more organised…”I saw you tweet the other day about….”

Find out more: RAPPORTIVE – THE NEW LINKBUILDING TOOL

Boomerang

In a nutshell: Another Gmail plug in, this ones allows you to schedule your emails for later, test different times to getter return for your out reach bucks. Schedule follow ups, the list goes on…

Find out more: Scalable Link Outreach with Gmail and Boomerang or Using Boomerang for Link Building Outreach

Still hungry? A Linkbuilder’s Gmail Productivity Setup (with Outreach Emails from 4 Industry Linkbuilders)

Buzzstream

In a nutshell: Ah Buzzstream, probably my favourite tool of the bunch. Essentially a CRM for link building…but much more. Ditch the spreadsheets and use a team collaboration tool for maximum ROI. Use it prospect for links, use it to automagically get SEO metrics for your prospects, connect to your email for outreach tracking, create and use outreach templates, use it to find social media profiles associated with prospects and emails and………

Find out more: Buzzstream Review: How Does it Measure Up? and more and more

Zemanta

In a nutshell: Essentially a blog publishing assistant – as a blog owner if you need pictures or other media or related articles for your post Zemanta will make recommendations for you. However if you are looking for links, sign up to have your content pushed to relevant bloggers…win – win!!

Find out more: Making Blogging Easier with Zemanta

Blog management:

ManageWP

In a nutshell: If you run multiple blogs (I bet a few of you do ) it can be a pain to individually update all of them with new plug ins

or back ups. Make life easier with ManageWP

Find out more: Features

Most important tool:

Your brain

Read about Mike:

Interview with Link Building Expert Mike King

An SEO Interview with Michael King (aka iPullRank)

Posts by Mike

Agency vs In-House vs Freelance SEO: The Endless Debate

Yahoo Sunsets Site Explorer (A Eulogy) 

The New SEO Process (Quit Being Kanye) 

Just How Smart Are Search Robots? 

Using Social Media to Get Ahead of Search Demand 

Throw Away Your Form Letters  

As the wettest April ever in the UK passes we turn our attention back to Team Hallam’s favourite blog posts of the month. It has been a bit of hectic month with issues surrounding negative SEO, the Penguin update and quite a bit of panic by webmasters who have (or haven’t in some cases) participated in some SEO techniques that are against Google’s Guidelines.

Without further ado…

Susan’s favourite posts

Google Analytics Custom Report Sharing Library - the new forum for sharing custom reports and dashboards by Jill Whalen. We featured this in our Google Analytics round up but it is worth mentioning again. Whether you are SEO, PPC  or Social Media orientated you can find custom reports and dashboards that you can copy over to your Google Analytics account.

Code Venice: Google’s Big Local Search Update 2012 - slideshare presentation by Hanns Kroneneberg. Covering the Venice update this set of slides is a data driven look at what has happened since the update and how to ‘unlock the hybrid result’.

Wayne’s favourite posts

20+ resources for prospecting, organising & researching link opportunities by James Agate. An awesome round up of some of the industry tools for finding and organising your link prospects with mentions for some awesome tools like Buzzstream, Link Prospector, MyBlogGuest and CustomRank.

Improve Your Link Prospecting With Reductive Queries by Ross Hudgens. A deceptively simple technique for improving the quality of your link prospecting.

Helen’s favourite posts

New Matching Behavior For Keywords by Shirin Miller. “Starting in mid-May, Google will allow searches for phrase and exact match keywords to be extended to it’s misspellings and plurals.” A quick overview of the new changes to Adwords new matching behaviour.

7 Creative Social Media Marketing Mini Case Studies by Phil Mershon. I hadn’t seen this post until Helen brought it to my attention and it is well worth your time. Actionable Social Media advice for your business (and it features Sharpies – the best pens…ever).

David’s favourite posts

9 Evil Ways to Build Links by Peter Attia. It’s in the title, some of these examples are truly evil – if you are easily offended you may want to stay away – but the creativity involved here is pretty incredible – make sure you read the comments as well.

A Guide To Well Designed Sign-up Forms With 15 Examples by Jurian Bass. Do you pay much attention to the sign up forms on your site? This is a highly recommended read for creating sign up forms that actually do what they are supposed to.

Sarah’s favourite posts

The Best Way to Engage with Other Pages on Facebook Timeline by Donna Moritz. A great post on Timeline engagement without the spam – are you doing it right?

35 Beautiful Landing Page Design Examples to Drool Over [With Critiques] by Oli Gardner and Carlos Del Rio. Drool being the right word here – 35 examples, each with commentaries on what works, what doesn’t and what the pros would change.

Hallam’s Most Popular Internet Marketing Posts of April

What Is Negative SEO? 

Team Hallam Top Tips: Google Analytics

How to Setup a Non Branded Traffic Report in Google Analytics

So what is Negative SEO?

Boiled down to its key concept, Negative SEO is the act of purchasing spammy links and pointing them at your competitors’ sites with the intention of getting them penalised. This allows your site with its non spammy links to rise above them (in theory).

Why is everyone talking about it at the moment?

Google has been a very busy bunny over the last few months and has been rolling out algorithm updates and announcing new ways of combating spam in their search results. As ever, the announcements are vague and some of the tactics employed by Google have had an element of FUD to say the least.

Let us review:

1. Early in 2011, Google starts sending out messages via Webmaster Tools to sites that it believes are essentially selling links in order to increase the rankings of other sites. Paid links for increasing rankings are against Google’s guidelines.

Excerpt from the message:

“We’ve detected that some or all of your pages are using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which are available here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. For more information about our linking guidelines, visit http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356&hl=en”

2. Mid 2011, Google starts sending out messages for buying links and pointing them at your domain.

Excerpt from the message:

“Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.domain.com/, 

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.”

3. November 2011 – Google slightly amends the wording on their guidelines (thanks to Shaun Anderson for the following information)

“Also if you look at the changes Google has made to their guidelines, it paints another picture again.
“Can competitors harm ranking? There’s nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.” Then, in November, it got “slightly” modified… just a TINY fraction too:
“Can competitors harm ranking? There’s ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”

4. March 2012 – Google sends out 700,000 messages via Webmaster Tools to sites, a lot of which appear to be about unnatural linking techniques.

image via: searchengineland

The message:

“Dear site owner or webmaster of xxxxxxxxx,

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team”

5. March 2012 – Matt Cutts (head of Web Spam at Google) mentions an algorithm change that will specifically target over optimisation. You can hear the audio here.

Excerpt:

“We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site.”

6. Google de-indexed the blog network Build My Rank (a network of blogs where you could submit articles with keyword rich anchor text links pointing back to your site to artificially inflate your rankings in Google).

7. SEOs start talking about Negative SEO, again:

• Ok – Let’s Talk Negative SEO
• After Deindexing, Negative SEO Becomes A Major Issue
• What Is Negative SEO? The Rise of Competitive Google Bombing
• Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google
• Negative SEO Works? Keep An Eye On Your Link Acquisition Velocity

What should you do about Negative SEO?

Although there has been some evidence that Negative SEO can work (although the sites that were used could be considered a little questionable for the test), the main advice is don’t panic.

If you have bought or paid for questionable links in the past (or are worried that you may be a target), you need to :

1. Keep a close eye on your Webmaster Tools messages.  It appears in most cases that sites see a drop 2-3 weeks after receiving the message.

2. If you get a message, don’t ignore it; start an investigation into your backlinks (use a tool like Open Site Explorer, Majestic or Link Diagnosis)

3. Try and remove the possibly offensive links, document everything and write a nice email to Google detailing all that you have done. Show willing!

If you have never done anything naughty ever, you should still keep an eye on your Webmaster Tools as the Negative SEO trend takes off (there are already a number of companies offering this service) and make sure that you continue to encourage great sites to link to yours (the more your site is trusted in Google the less chance it has of falling foul of Negative SEO).

Other articles on Negative SEO, what to look out for and what to do if you get the dreaded message:

• The End of ‘Easy SEO’
• What to do if you receive a Google Webmaster Tools Notification about Unnatural links
• Unnatural Link Warnings and Blog Networks

Recommended Articles

• Google Warns Site Owners Of Bad Linking
• How To Carry Out A DIY SEO Health Check
• The Perfect Inbound Link: 21 signs a link is great

Main Image: http://popinfluence.blogspot.co.uk

Google Analytics

It’s free, it will pretty much fill the analytics needs of most businesses, it can help you make informed business decisions that affect the bottom line…and yet so many businesses just don’t understand how important Google Analytics can be for their company.

When you first dive into Google Analytics it  can leave you overwhelmed, with this in mind I have gathered together the resources, blogs, books and tools that can help you learn how to use Google Analytics effectively for your business.

Background Reading

Getting Started

Some blog posts:

HOW TO: Get Started With Google Analytics by Meghan Peters. Exactly what you think it is going to be about – how to add the code to your site, how to change date ranges, how to share reports – basic stuff that you need to know when starting out.

A Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics 5 by Cameron Chapman. The present version of Google Analytics was released in the summer of last year (you can still toggle between new and old versions though). This guide by Cameron looks at the what the new Analytics offers that the old didn’t.

Some how to guides for using Google Analytics:

How To Gain Great Insights With Google Analytics Dashboards by Klaas Knook. A brief introduction into the multiple dashboards that are such an important feature of the latest version of Google Analytics.

11 Analytics Metrics That Are Actionable by Paddy Moogan. When using Google Analytics you need to make sure that what you are measuring is important for your business – you also need to know that what you are tracking is actionable – Paddy has 11 for you.

The Executive’s Guide to Google Analytics by Justin Cutroni

Maximising Google Analytics Insight For SEO With Custom Reports by Taylor Pratt. Utilising the custom report sharing option in Google Analytics Taylor talks us through some of his favourite custom reports for SEO and PPC. He has shared his custom reports as well so that you can add them straight to your Analytics.

A couple of books that you should think about reading:

Web Analytics: An Hour A Day by Avinash Kaushik

Cult of Analytics by Steve Jackson

Blogs

The Official Google Analytics Blog - get it straight from the horses mouth. Tips, advice, updates and changes are all included here. If you are more of a video person you may want to check out the official Google Analytics YouTube channel.

Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Analytics Talk by Justin Cutroni

Not a blog but a pretty new forum that everyone should check out: Custom Report Sharing by Jill Whalen. If you didn’t know custom reports can be shared via Google Analytics and Jill has put together a forum that pulls together some custom reports that industry experts have shared. Covering SEO, Social, ecommerce, PPC and more. It is still in its infancy but there are some great custom reports that you should consider adding to your Analytics.

Tools

 Google Analytics Configuration Tool by Raven Tools. If you are struggling to set up some of the configuration for Google Analytics head over here for some help.

Recommended Reading

Team Hallam Top Tips Social Media

Team Hallam Top Tips Twitter

Team Hallam Top Tips Facebook

How quickly time flies! Welcome to the monthly round up from Team Hallam with some of their favourite blog posts form March. Facebook seems to be quite popular with the team this month (as expected – as Facebook have just swapped over to the new timeline) but you can also find great round ups of SEO tools, tips on website navigation and plenty of other goodies…

Susan’s favourite posts

Lug Wrenches to Bieber: Unpacking Ultimate SEO Tools @ #SESNY by Lauren Litwinka. A great round up of all the tools featured in this presentation by Mike King as well as a whole host of other tools mentioned at this years Search Engine Strategies.

EU Cookies Directive. Interactive guide to 35th May and what it means to you by David Naylor. Keep clicking okay for a little bit of fun.

Wayne’s favourite posts

 Future Proof SEO Strategy: Real Life Link Building by Tad Chef. In this article Tad directly discusses the techniques that he himself uses for obtaining high quality links through relationship building. Awesome stuff.

Stop Paying for Terrible Links [& How to Check for Low Quality Links] by Richard Baxter. A brief but worthy argument against the purchasing of terrible links complete with video and walk through to help you check for these kinds of low quality links.

Helen’s favourite posts

AdWords Editor Shortcuts: Cheat Sheet by Wijnand Meijer. If you use Adwords editor this pretty little cheat sheet can be printed and taped to your desk to make life a whole lot quicker.

How Serious Is Facebook About Search? by Greg Sterling. Anyone who has ever used Facebook’s internal search knows that it is rubbish – shoddy in fact! Greg ruminates on whether recent reports about a Facebook search team are for the internal search only or if they have other plans in mind.

David’s favourite posts

 3 Like Gating Alternatives for the New Facebook Timeline by Nate Riggs.  If you previously used fan gates or fan only content for improving the number of likes for your Facebook page then you need to read this article on what to do now that all has changed at Zuckerberg Towers

The Elements Of Navigation by Petter Silfver. Smashing Magazine always produce high quality articles on design and usability of websites – this article is no exception – a great guide to what your users will expect and how to create successful website navigation.

Sarah’s favourite posts

How to Market Your Fan Page With the New Facebook Change by Penny C. Sansevieri. The change is upon us and this is a great overview of what you need to be doing. Contains a bunch of examples and actionable tips on what you need to do for your business.

3 Quick Actions to Stay Ahead of the Latest Social Media Trends (Pinterest, Timeline and Google+) by Amy Porterfield. Heard of Pinterest, Google + and Facebook Timelines but are unsure how to use then for your business? Get some great ideas here…

Hallam’s Most Popular Internet Marketing Posts of March

Are you ready for Facebook Page Covers? by David Beastall

For goodness sakes. What is Google changing now?by Susan Hallam

Why Duplicate Content is Bad for Your Website by David Beastall

Extra Time:

How to get your inbox down to zero from the Kissmetrics blog. If you have more emails than you can possibly answer then have a quick read of this post for some tips on keeping your inbox low.

If link building is your bag I also put together a list of the top 18 link building posts from March over on Google+ if you want to have a quick peek.

There are loads of tools that can make you more productive in your working day and plenty of blog posts out there that can teach you how to make the most out of your time at work – work smarter, not harder!

When it comes to social media you may find that it is a bit of a time suck and if you aren’t careful it can take over your day. There are quite a few tools out there for making the most of the time on Twitter – today I am going to run you through one of the most elegant solutions for scheduling tweets.

Just to clarify though…

Scheduling is not the same as automation and you shouldn’t treat it that way. Automating a Twitter account will not allow you to get the best for your business that the platform offers. Scheduling is way to maintain a presence on the social network without having to spend all day scanning it! Remember that amidst your scheduled tweets there should always be real interaction with peers and your target market.

Schedule don’t automate!

So on to Timely from Demandforce – a great little tool that will let you effortlessly schedule tweets for a more balanced Twitter presence and help you get more followers, mentions and retweets.

The first thing that you will notice is that it’s free – so sign up and get started. Once you start using Timely you will notice how easy it is to use and that is always a bonus.

So how do you use it?

Sign up for an account and authorise Timely to access your Twitter account – don’t panic, it’s all very safe.

Schedule a tweet (there are a couple of ways that you can do this)

The first and simplest way is to simply pop your tweet into the scheduling box:

Just pop in whatever it is that you want to tweet into this box and press ‘Add to Queue’. As you would expect Timely then pops that tweet into the queue for posting later.

As if by magic Timely will choose a time for the post to go out – the great part of this is that the more you schedule and send, the smarter Timely gets – learning the best times to send your tweets for maximum impact!

If you want to tweet a link you simply copy the and paste the link into the schedule box alongside your wonderfully chosen words, like so:

Timely automatically shortens the link using bit.ly – making sure that the tweet isn’t too long for successful retweeting.

Scheduling using the bookmarklet

If that isn’t easy enough for you, there is always the bookmarklet. The bookmarklet can be dragged to your bookmarks bar on your browser and now whenever you are traversing the web and come across an interesting page that you want to tweet you can do so with one click.

Simply drag the bookmarklet and – hey presto – you are ready to go!

When you find something that you want to share click on the bookmarklet and you get a handy little box pop up:

As before, you simply adjust the text that the bookmarklet creates for you (you don’t even have to write the tweet now, although I would suggest some personalisation or comment) and  ‘Add to Queue’. timely then does the rest for you.

The Queue and Performance

Want to know what is in your queue? It is right there on the dashboard:

You can quickly move, edit and delete any of the tweets that you have in your queue (across multiple days if you are queueing a lot in one go):

On the performance tab you can carry out a range of important tasks quickly and see how well your tweets are performing:

From here you can also reply to the people who react to or retweet your tweets – an easy and elegant solution for making sure that you are engaging with those who reach out to you.

Finally after you have played around with Timely for a little bit you just need to make sure that your settings are all in order and a simpler more effective life on Twitter awaits you!

Have fun scheduling (not automating) – and by the way have you downloaded our FREE Social Media Content Calendar?

Recommended Reading:

Eight Tips For Improving Interaction On Twitter

Twitter: Why Aren’t People Following Me?

Crowdbooster: Measuring Your Social Media Efforts

I started to review some of the recent changes and jot down a few links (possibly with the aim of writing a blog post) – it soon became clear that this wasn’t going to be the best way of presenting the information.

After a bit of searching and brainstorming I decide to take what I had and start to put it into a timeline. You will see below the fruits of my labour!

In no way do I claim that this is comprehensive (I still have around a thousand links to blog posts that I haven’t used) but it serves as an introductory timeline to the history of Google, algorithm changes and key products. I will endeavour to keep it updated and add other pertinent events – but make no promises

So what have I included in the timeline?

• Key points in Google’s history as a business
• Major changes to the algorithm (thanks to Dr Pete for curating this information)
• Interesting news stories related to the search engine
• Product releases
• Discontinued products

A Brief History of Google

Susan’s favourite posts

25 Non-Financial Benefits of Business Blogging by Mark Schaefer. I am sure that you don’t need convincing why you should have a blog, or indeed why you should keep it updated. For the unconvinced there is this excellent list.

116 Best Tips from SES London 2012! by Kevin Gibbons. The SES London conference ran from the 20th Feb through to the 24th. If you weren’t there this is definitely one of the best tips round ups that came about from the event – time to check out what you missed.

Wayne’s favourite posts

Kudos to Jon Cooper for building two of the most comprehensive sources for link building information that I have seen in some time – and both in the same month. They are both self explanatory so go and check them out: Link Building Strategies – The Complete List and Link Building Resources – A Curated List (and his newsletter is worth subscribing to as well!)

 What I Learned From Reviewing 45+ Websites (Are You Making The Same Mistakes?) by Peep Laja. Technically speaking this belongs on the January list but I didn’t read it until recently and it is pretty awesome. Peep guides you through some fundamental mistakes that are stopping your website from being as successful as it could be.

Helen’s favourite posts

Ultimate Guide to Inheriting PPC Accounts by Bethany Bey. A great guide (predominantly for search professionals) on how to work with an existing PPC account – it’s tougher than you think!

6 Google+ Tips for Businesses by Marc Pitman. Whilst the Google+ debate continues (should you, shouldn’t you?) there is no denying that the stats are fairly impressive, that Google is marketing the product aggressively and it impacts search. With that in mind you should at least be investigating and setting up an page for your business – and here are 6 great tips for when you are getting started.

David’s favourite posts

Non-Google Link Strategy: An Example of Stealth Link Marketing by Eric Ward. Eric has always stood by the fact that you should link for people not for search engines and this post demonstrates this perfectly. Not as complicated as you may think, there is a real actionable sort-of-case-study that may help your business.

10 Awesome Tips to Become a Better Blogger by Obaidul Haque. 10 quick tips on organising and planning how to best utilise your blog.

Sarah’s favourite posts

92 Ways to Get (and Maximize) Press Coverage by Chris Winfield. A huge list and one that every business owner should take 15 minutes (it is quite long) to read and digest. If you get the time the comments are well worth reading as well.

Why Are Retailers Shutting Their Facebook Stores? by Lauren Indvik. An informative post on why F-Commerce (selling on Facebook) has not worked out as well as some big retailers may have hoped. If you have entered (or are looking at entering) the world of F-Commerce it is always to take a look at those that have shut up shop as well as the success stories

5 Facebook Posts That Spark Massive Engagement by Amy Porterfield .Struggling to get people to interact with your business on Facebook? It is a common problem and here are 5 quick tips that can help you get the ball rolling.

Hallam’s Most Popular Internet Marketing Posts of January

DuckDuckGo Review: An Alternative to Google by Wayne Barker

What does Google know about you? by Susan Hallam

Facebook Advertising – Advantages & Disadvantages by Helen Laird

Hallam’s “funniest post of the month from someone who wondered why he wasn’t included last month” section

The Secret Diary Of An Inbound Marketer – by Sean. This post went viral this month and could be spotted on every Twitter feed that I follow. After talking to Sean he pointed out that it had sent him upwards of 7 new visitors, half a new link, 1 new subscriber to his RSS feed and a bottle of wine. I suggest you read it and share it.

Extra Time: Two posts about tools and one about Googles major changes this month

Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February

17 Little Known Social Media Tools You Should Be Using (and Why)

45 SEO and Social Media Tools #SESLondon

Google+

This is another blog post in our series of Team Hallam Top Tips.

After numerous failures in the past Google finally has a social network that is worth paying attention to. With users allegedly reaching around 100 million now (although a lot of those are currently inactive) and more and more people signing up each and every day it is time for businesses to start paying attention.

As with any social network you need to make sure that:

a) That your target market is actually active on there at the moment or are likely to be in the future

b) That you don’t jump in blind. You need to make sure that you know what the platform can offer and if you are going to use it that you have some sort of strategy.

 Background Reading

Beginner’s Guide to Google+ by Kristi Hines. If you are just getting started with Google+ this is just about the best primer that I have come across. It covers the basics and won’t leave you feeling exhausted.

If you are more of video person then Peter G McDermott has put together this quick (15 minutes) video for the learning the basics around Google+. He also has some more videos around using specific features of Google+ like this one on using Hangouts.

If you are already using Google+ and need to think more strategically for your business may I suggest this awesome post by AJ Kohn. The Google+ SEO Guide is rich in detail covering how it impacts search.

If you are unsure as to whether you should be looking at Google+ for your business have a wander over to this post/video by Rand Fishkin – Why Every Marketer Now Needs a Google+ Strategy

For an alternative idea on how to use Google+ for your business check out Jason Acidre’s post on PlusBlogging – How to Dominate your Market in Google+

Blogs

The Google+ Developers Blog – get the news straight form the guys themselves.

Google+ Blog – run by Scott Dunroe you will find a number of tips for using Google+ more successfully.

Tools

Google Plus Directory – the best of all the search/directory sites that have popped up since Google+ really took off. The great thing about this directory is the ability to filter out all of the noise to really find people that will be important to you. Whether you are looking to add people to add to your circles or looking for people within your niche to reach out to it delivers the goods.

Google+ Search – a simple no nonsense site for searching Google+.

Google+ Bookmarklet – drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and easily share content to your Google+ page.

 Manage Flitter – essentially a tool for helping organise your Twitter account but has the option to connect to your Google+ account and tweet out a link to the post. It takes a while to get the hang of how your tweet will appear but is incredibly useful.

Recommended Reading

Team Hallam Top Tips Social Media

Team Hallam Top Tips Twitter

Team Hallam Top Tips Facebook

Founded by Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo positions itself as a search engine that believes privacy is paramount and never stores IP addresses or logs user information. As the concerns of Google’s recent activity rises and they push advertising and their own products (stand up Google+) in users faces more and more people are looking for alternatives.

Recent statistics have shown that an increasing number of people are turning to DuckDuckGo for their search results – so maybe it is time you gave it a go!

So here is a quick review of DuckDuckGo to get you started

Head on over to the home page (http://duckduckgo.com/) and you will see a sparse, clutter free home page (similar to Google) and all you do is fire away with your query.

You will notice a couple of things:

1. You are not bombarded with a million Adwords Ads

2. At first glance the results are very relevant

3. You get more search suggestions

So far so good! In the age of information overload it is nice just to get a simple set of results – relevant results – that aren’t surrounded by 20 adverts, multiple sitelinks, maps, shopping results and the like. Often times I feel a little overwhelmed by Google and these kind of results are a refreshing change!

So what else about DuckDuckGo makes it different to Google and the other major search engines?

1. As mentioned earlier it is not personalised in any way – what you see is what everyone sees. If you search for ‘Hotel in London’ you aren’t going to see the hotels that your (non expert) friends have stayed in and mentioned on Google+ back in July (which they hated anyway). If you look at the screen grabs below (DuckDuckGo first followed by Google) which is easier to understand and extract information from quickly?

Google is comprehensive but do you ever get the feeling they may have gone a little far?

DuckDuckGo Results

Google Results

2. It doesn't have pages. Although Google have played around with this infinite scroll DuckDuckGo already has it in place. Not only does this give the sites that rank lower a better chance of getting clicked (if you don't physically have to press page 2, 3 etc.) but gives the user a better chance to scan for the information that they are actually trying to find. Have a scroll and see what you think...

3.  It has !bang commands. It has what? I'm a geek but this is probably my favourite feature of DuckDuckGo, essentially DuckDuckGo allows you to search loads of other sites quickly from right in their interface.

Looking for Ricky Martin videos (not that you would or should!) simply enter:

Looking for direction to our office simply enter:

Looking to buy a Pauly Shore DVD (PRO Tip: you don't really want to do this) simply enter:

I think you get the idea! There are hundreds of these !bangs available (here is the complete list) You may have to search around to find the ones that you want - but when you do you will find that is a refreshing, clutter free and productive way to search!

I really encourage you to give DuckDuckGo a try (remember you are completely anonymous on DuckDuckGo so you can search for what you want ;) and not have it stored). Let us know how you get on and what kind off experience you have in the comments below.

Recommended Reading

What is Wrong with Google Personalised Results

Google Search Personalisation