Quite a few little applications can help search engine marketing efforts; this is a quick look at a few.
“Where does he get those wonderful toys?” Jack Nicholson wondered while wearing Joker makeup and watching Michael Keaton’s Batman escape an ambush in the first Tim Burton “Batman” movie.
Ask that of your typical Internet user, and the answer would be “online, of course.” At SES 2005, one session called My SEM Toolbox discussed some helpful online features. One of the speakers, trademarkSEO’s Paul Bruemmer, discussed some of them in a recent Pandia article.
Alexa gets a mention, and most in the world of SEM already know and use it to gather a wealth of data about a site. Another site that pulls in a lot of data resides at URLTrends. That one shows Google and Alexa ranks, and the number of reported incoming links.
Mr. Bruemmer lists Hoovers as an excellent source of business data. Quite a bit of information about companies can be obtained there for free, but much of the more useful information will require a fee. If your field is search engine marketing, a Hoovers subscription may be in order. Also, online subscribers to the Wall Street Journal have a lot of corporate financial data available there.
From another part of the Web comes a developer who has built a plug-in for the Firefox browser; the AdSense Notifier plug-in displays one’s AdSense earnings in the browser’s status bar. Please note that this plug-in is not endorsed by Google, so AdSense customers leery of providing their password to a third-party source may wish to investigate the product further before clicking Install.
Readers of this article should be sure to check out Mr. Bruemmer’s article, linked earlier, to read his excellent rundown of the toolbox session.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
