Insane Twitter Apps
Twitter was undoubtedly one of last years biggest talking points and is used by millions of people around the world. The explosion in popularity of Twitter has lead to some weird and wonderful apps being developed and i thought i would share a few with you.
Foamee
This one is pure genius. It lets you track who owes you a drink. When you owe someone a beer, send a message to Foamee in the format “@ioubeer @twitterscreenname “reason beer is owed”. Your IOU will then show up on the Foamee homepage for all to see. Novel idea but im personally not particularly fussed about asking for drinks back.
No SEO campaign would be complete without extensive testing and the guys over at ABtests.com have been highlighting some great examples of split testing. I wanted to use this post to highlight some of the things they have been doing and show how essential testing has become.
It is easy in life and especially SEO to make assumptions. Assumptions can be costly in SEO as tactics that have worked in one place won’t necessarily work in another. This is because target audiences in different markets expect very different things and have completely different mind sets. A good SEO will understand these mind sets and test different alternatives on a site.
I find this one of the most interesting aspects of SEO because you often find things that you wouldn’t expect. A simple change in the positioning of text or an image can dramatically improve conversions for example. There was also a great example on abtests.com recently for a site called 5ftShelf.
This is a new initiative from the Google Analytics team and see’s experts Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski answer questions posted on Google message boards. Most of the questions are based on Analytics however they do answer some questions on other Google tools.
It’s great that Google is starting to provide new ways to support its users and i believe this could be a good way to get answers to those more advanced questions. The video format also enables Google to provide demonstrations to help answer questions. This is ideal as it sometimes difficult to follow long sets of instructions in forums.
Link building is a big part of SEO and having the right link building tools can help improve both the effectiveness and speed of the process. There are many tools out there which provide different functionality and serve different purposes. I find there isn’t one tool out there that does everything and it is therefore important to use a selection of tools. The best tools are often paid but well worth the investment.
Of course the list of tools could be endless for this post however i am going to list the ones i use regularly and find most useful.
SEO SpyGlass
SEO SpyGlass is a desktop tool that lets you analyse the backlinks of your competitors. I tend to use this tool at the beginning of a project and look for patterns between top ranking competitors. The great thing about this tool is that you can get it to list a range of key attributes next to each link. For example what type of link it is, what page rank it has and the exact anchor text used.
Once i have run SEO Spyglass i like to add the key links from the research into a spreadsheet. I don’t think its worth getting all the links the competition has as you need to differentiate yourself in some way but helps you identify and target the authority links. SEO SpyGlass is a paid tool and it might be worth purchasing their entire suite. The rank tracking software in the suite is very good.
Note: This is not a paid review but I thought it was something that might interest other mac fans.
Of course many companies make macbook sleeves, most noticeably incase who seem to dominate the market pretty well, however there are some great alternatives. I for example wanted a new case to protect my new macbook pro but fancied something different from the standard neoprene incase sleeve. So after a bit of searching i came across Tilly Moss.
You probably won’t have come across Tilly Moss as they are a fairly small company and are not stocked by many major retailers. Despite the small size the company creates a range of standard and custom made sleeves for laptops. The sleeves are all hand made and can be fitted to the exact specification of your laptop. I went for the custom made option as you can see above.
Most of the cases cost around £24 which seemed pretty reasonable to me and the quality of the sleeve is outstanding. The sleeve certainly protects your mac from scratches although it wont provide much protection against dropping it. The cases also come in an ever changing range of designs and i believe the patterns are just about to be updated.
So every year i like to set myself a new set of goals and what better time to do it than on new years eve. This year i am going to be a little bit more ambitious and use a special tool to track my resolutions, which i will share with you shortly. Firstly i wanted to look back at last years resolutions.
As you can see i had 7 resolutions or goals in 2009. In all i think i managed to achieve around 4 of them which is not great going.
1. Passed Adcenter Exam
2. Made It to America
3. Pushed this blog a bit more
4. Improved SEO results in some key places
Looking back at them has made me think that i should set my sites a little higher and put more energy in to all aspects of life. Life outside work is just as important as in it.
About Mark Mayne
Manchester based SEO consultant who specialises in online marketing and PPC. Mark currently works for PushON ltd, one of the north west's top online marketing companies and has helped numerous companies boost their online profiles.
