SEO | Internet Marketing | ToolsBelow I have listed a number of tools and resources that I have found a great help my marketing my blogs and web sites. I hope that you find the following tools useful for the marketing of your own blog or website:
1. Ten Things Known To Be True About Google
2. Overwhelmed by Social Media
3. Effective Keyword Research
4. Pop-up Squeeze Page
5. Blogging Software
6. Tools To Reduce Image Size
7. WordPress Plug-ins
8. Internet Marketing Forums
9. FREE FTP Software
10. Keyword Density Checker Tools
1. Ten Things Known To Be True About Google
There are many myths across the web about Google. So rather than speculate about Google’s philosophy to how they organise the world’s information why not surf across to Google’s site and find out the ten things known to be true about Google
2. Overwhelmed by Social Media
If your social media has become more of chore than a useful marketing channel then consider reading my post where I provide 3 simple strategies for those overwhelmed by social media. This post will provide some simple solutions that will help you to gain back control and start to see positive results from your social media marketing channels.
3. Effective Keyword Research
Knowing what keywords to use is half the battle when putting a blog together. There are some people who believe that a blog should be completely organic and little reference is made to keywords whereas others believe that keywords are key to attract visitors. I believe that a bit of both is vital – produce great copy but make sure people can find you! So check out my post on effective keyword research for helpful hints of how to get noticed in the search engines.
4. Pop-up Domination
Some people hate email subscriber opty-in pop-up forms, but in truth this product really does work. I have set it to pop-up only once a day so it should not be too intrusive for my readers. The claim is that it will increase sign-ups by up to 400%. This type of increase is achievable for those who do not already have an effective email subscriber pop up system in place. The majority of my email optins come from my popup domination optin form.
The idea is that the pop-up screen will give visitors a nudge in the right direction and will help you grow your contact list. I personally think its a really cool tool and I rarely recommend premium products.
5. Blogging Software
Ok I’m a little biased, but I can strongly recommend the use of WordPress as probably the best content management system online. I have tried a few different systems and feel that on balance WordPress provides the best overall feel and offeres such versitility for both the beginner and the more advanced user. To get your free copy of WordPress go to WordPress.org. There are thousands if not millions of pages of tips and help. I have always been able to quickly and effortlessly resolve any WordPress based issues.
6. Tools To Reduce Image Size
It is critical to load speed of your site or blog to have image that load quickly. One way to do achive this is reduce the size of your images. You can use either Gimp or Tinypics v3.16b to reduce image size on a website – both are free software packages. TCoIM prefer Tinypics as it is very simple to use. You add your drag your image to the software application and it will automatically reduce image size.
7. WordPress Plug-ins
There are hundreds of WordPress plug-ins out there, but the ones that I think are the best are ones that help you to grow the exposure of your blog across the internet. Rather than name all of the plug-ins that I use I have listed my top three below:
1. Sexybookmarks – This plug-in adds a set of sexy bookmarks to the end of your post. It looks cool and helps to increase exposure especially if your post is great!
2. WP Super Cache – Probably one of the most essential plug-ins as it helps to speed up your WordPress blog. Anything that can help with the load speed of your pages and posts has to be a good thing!
3. Subscription Options - This provides another avenue for your visitors to subscribe to your blog feed, twitter account or facebook account.
4. Broken Link Checker – This is a really handy tool that lets you know how many broken links that you have on your blog. It detects both broken links internally and externally broken links. Too many broken links can impact on search engine rankings.
5. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin keeps an up-to-date version of your sitemap in your blog root directory. This plugin will help search engine spiders/crawlers to find your posts and pages – which is essential in ensuring that your pages rank well in the search engines
8. Internet Marketing Forums
Internet markeing forums can be great resources to find out the latest news on marketing techniques. I can recommended frequently keeping yourself updated on the information shared on the following quality internet marketing forums:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/
9. FREE FTP Software
Maintaining your own blog or webste can be a daunting thing. But if you use a stable FTP application such as FileZilla it can take much of the headache out of the maintenance of your site. In a few clicks you can have the whole of your site backed up on your PCs hard drive – the alternative is to use the FTP software within your hosts cPanel, but this can sometimes takes hours to complete the download. I can strongly recommend using FileZilla – I’ve used it for over 5 years now and have never had an issue with it. It’s as easy as using a windows based file exploring tool.
10. Keyword Density Checker Tools
When you are producing your website or CMS content it important to know what about the keyword density of your content. There are a number of great tool online to help you achieve this. I have listed below a number of tools that are incredibly useful:
SEOBook Keyword Density Checker – this is great tool to use if you already have online content and you want to evaluate the keyword density of the content.
SEO Keyword Density Checker WP Plu-in – this a great tool for WP that provides you with data about the keyword density of content before you publish a WP post or page.
SEO Quake Browser Tool – this is an excellent SEO browser tool for Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera that amongst its many features has a great tool to check keyword density of web pages.
keyworddensitytool.com – this is a great tool to use if you want to evaluate the keyword density of word processed content that has not yet been published online. Just copy and paste the content into this online tool.
For more information about keyword density checker tools please see my comprehensive post on this topic – how to check keyword density.
Hope that you find these all of my suggested tools and resources above useful and that they help you get your message out there across the web. I encourage you to periodically come back to this page to check in on additions to this page.
To your success!
Howard Clemence
Follow TCoIM!