The second day of SMX started with a panelist discussion on social shares, and top tips on how marketers are truly going to be influential.

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Links are a big part of the success of your Search Engine Optimization efforts and the overall traffic from organic search to your site. However, there are several issues related to links to your site, including anchor text that you need to pay attention to. One of them that you may not know about is the text that surrounds your links. This is just as important as your internal links with anchor text.

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It’s clear that titles matter to search. You’re less likely to rank well in search engines for key phrases if those phrases are not in the title of your content. It’s also clear that search engines are putting a great deal of emphasis on social signals when ranking content. Interestingly enough, titles also have a direct impact on just how much your content will be shared socially.

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Google has launched a new ‘Account Activity’ dashboard that allows people to ‘step back and review’ their online activity. This tool requires users to sign up for it and keeps a log of user activity performed on all Google’s products. In a blog post Google explained that this tool will provide users with a password-protected monthly report of their activity.

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Past two days have seen webmasters heading on to various forums and complaining about heavy drops in traffic/sales/rankings. A WebmasterWorld thread has various webmasters sharing their concerns over changing SERPs of their primary keywords.

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Every business owner wants to be number one, but how much is a first page Google ranking worth to your business?

Calculating the value of a number one ranking is a worthwhile exercise as it allows you to look at the return on investment (ROI) from any SEO campaign you might be considering.

Here are the steps to calculate the value of a number one ranking for your business.

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I really lucked out after moderating the morning session at SES London on Social Media Tools by joining the SEO Tools of the Trade session that followed. Both sessions had great speakers and I’ve decided to combine my notes for both into one post about social media automation tools and SEO tools.

The sources for the SEO tool recommendations include: Richard Baxter of SEOGadget, Dave Naylor from Bronco, and Neil Walker from Just Search. The social media tool recommendations came from Andrew Girdwood from bigmouthmedia, Paul Madden from Automica and Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics.

Before I get into the list of tools, I feel compelled to share a quote that I’ve often used to give people context for tool use, since it’s so important to use them for scale, efficiency and to gain a competitive advantage:

“Tools are only as effective as the expertise of the person using them.”

I think that’s an important perspective, because some online marketers use a small handful of tools but their expertise is very deep. Therefore, they get a tremendous amount of productivity from them. Others use many, many tools without deep expertise in anyone area and as a result, effectiveness may be lacking. Once you find a handful of tools that work for you, get really, really good at using them. At the same time, always be open to trying new tools as they come along.

Ok, let’s start off with SEO Tools:

1. RedFly GoogleGlobal Firefox & Chrome Extension – See SERPs in other countries
2. Netcraft – Hosting, DNS, site uptime and many other features
3. MajesticSEO – Link tracking, research and analysis. Export links by country code (TopRank uses MajesticSEO
4. Copyscape – Find copies of your content elsewhere on the web to avoid duplicate content issues
5. Google Webmaster Tools – How does Googlebot interact with your website. Check for crawl errors that could affect inclusion and ranking of your content
6. Firebug – Firefox extension for reviewing code, look for hidden text issues that could affect search engine penalties
7. Google Page Speed - Check the load time of your web pages. Slow loading pages are not your friend and certainly nothing Google will reward you for
8. Pingdom – Monitor uptime of your website. If your website is down neither customers or search engines can get to it.
9. Xenu Linksleuth or Screaming Frog to spider your website
10. Open Site Explorer – Download data and segment anchor text for identifying good/bad inbound links
11. KISSinsights – Find sales objections and test them with a super short survey
12. Fivesecondtest – Show an image and see what people think of it. Analyzes most prominent areas of your design
13. Google Website Optimizer – A/B test your page designs
14. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Official keyword research tool from Google
15. Spyfu – Perform competitive PPC and SEO keyword research
16. Alexa – Wide range of traffic and keyword information about websites
17. SEMRush – Get competitive SEO and PPC keyword information on websites found on Google.com and many other country domains
18. KeywordSpy – Keyword research tool
19. Wordtracker - Keyword research tool
20. Wordstream – Keyword research tool
21. Keyword Discovery – Keyword research tool
22. Socialmention – Social search tool allows you to download to csv file of social keywords and influences that you can pivot to see what what kinds of mentions are you getting, on what kinds of social media sites and how it compares to the competition.
23. Analytics SEO – page load time, pages indexed, ranking overview, reveal potential keywords, next opportunity keywords, reporting.
24. Sistrix toolbox – Tracks PageRank over time, ranking, position, search volume, traffic index
25. Searchmetrics Essentials – Suite of SEO and social media tracking tools
26. GTmetrix – Compare multiple sites for their page download speed
27. Link Research Tools – Link research and profiling tools
28. Keyword Density – DaveN tool providing a wide variety of data points about a website according to a specific keyword phrases
29. maxmind – Geographic ip detection down to the city level
30. wipmania – Geographic ip location tool

Social Media Automation Tools (Some are a bit Grayhat SEO)

1. Evri – Social content aggregator
2. Trapit – Topical news aggregator that leans your preferences with AI
3. Strawberryjam – Shows the links your social network shares the most
4. ifttt – Rules based automation of actions through social channels/media sites
5. Paper.li – Crawls links contained within RSS feeds, Twitter lists you supply and creates an online newspaper that auto-tweets the most popular twitter handles that share
6. Pearltrees.com – Tool for aggregating content and sharing content with a rich visual interface
7. Tweetguru Multi – DM up to 12 people on Twitter at the same time
8. RSS Graffiti – Pull in RSS data feeds into a Facebook page automatically
9. Tweetadder – Auto follows people on Twitter (um, kinda spammy no?)
10. Socialoomph – Schedule social content and status updates (Twitter and Facebook)
11. dlvr.it - Takes a RSS feed, filters content based on rules and publishes to Twitter, Facebook and other social channels
12. Odesk – Not a tool but a resource to outsource redundant tasks. Use for research, writing small content, etc.
13. Socialenhancer – In beta: Auto reply to tweets by keyword. Export followers for analysis
14. Tweetdeck – Twitter management tool
15. Hootsuite – Twitter, Facebook and other social channels management tool

Richard Baxter, Dave Naylor, Neil Walker

There you go. I hope you find these tools useful. Some are quite old and some are new. Some are a bit iffy in terms of being more mechanical than meaningful for social engagement. Take care when checking them out. Tools can be a bit of a time suck so think about what your goals are, what tasks do you want to achieve. Look at these sites if you have time or ask other SEO and Social SEO professionals about them to decide what you want to try or test out.

What are some of your favorite SEO tools? What tools do you use to improve efficiency and automate redundant tasks when it comes to Social SEO actions? Would you like to see us do more reviews of tools?

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