[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE

Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The 100 Best Free SEO Tools &
Resources for Every Challenge - Interactive'


Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

At Moz, we love using premium SEO Tools (especially our own). Paid tools are
essential when you need advanced features, increased limits, historical
features, or online support.


For other tasks, a free tool does the trick.


Below you'll find an interactive list of 100 best completely free tools, tools
with both free and paid options, and free trials. Simply select the checkbox for
the area you're working in, and view the tools forr that category.




Select All/NoneA/B TestingAnalyticsAPIsCompetitive
IntelContentCRODiagnosticEmailInfographicsKeyword ResearchLink BuildingLink
ResearchLocalProductivityRank TrackingRobots.txtSERP
TrackingSitemapsSocialSpeedStructured DataTechnical SEOToolbarTools SuiteVideo






Free Tools


Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool

http://www.removeem.com/ratios.php


Link Research, Technical SEO


Worried about Google's Penguin algorithm hitting you for over-optimized
anchor text? Simply type in your URL for a full report of which links might
raise flags.



Bing Webmaster Tools

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster


Tools Suite, Diagnostic


Similar in function to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing offers a suite of
interesting research tools and resources for webmasters.



Bitly

https://bitly.com/


Social, Analytics


Most people use Bitly for URL shortening, but the real power of this
platform comes from its analytics.



Boomerang

http://www.boomeranggmail.com/


Email, Productivity


Boomerang lets you follow up on emails, even when you forget. Great for link
building or any time you send a lot of emails.



Buffer

https://bufferapp.com/


Social


Optimize your online social media sharing. Buffer allows you to share with
your audience at the optimal times for greater visibility.



BuiltWith

http://builtwith.com/


Competitive Intelligence


Use BuiltWith to discover what technology nearly any website was, well,
built with. Great for competitive intelligence as well.



Buzzstream Tools Suite

http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building


Link Building, Tools Suite, Email


Most people know Buzzstream as an outreach platform, but they also offer a
number of free link-building tools. This company gets it.



Caption Tube

http://captiontube.appspot.com/


Video


Free and easy resource used to create captions for YouTube. Helps with
usability and offers viewers a readable transcript.



CircleCount

http://www.circlecount.com/


Social, Analytics


Google+ analytics ramped up. Free resource to track your followers and
analyze your shares. See how many followers you've gained over time.



Content Strategy Generator Tool

http://seogadget.com/content-strategy-generator-tool-v2-update/


Content


This tool from SEOgadget helps you plan your content strategy intelligently,
using keyword research and estimating your audience size.



Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML

http://word2cleanhtml.com/


Content, Productivity


Despite the rise of Google Docs, Word still dominates much of the world.
Copying and pasting has always been a hurdle, but this tool makes it easy.



Copyscape

http://www.copyscape.com/


Content


Copyscape serves both as a plagiarism checker and a duplicate-content
checker. Great to use if your content has been distributed across the web.



Domain Hunter Plus

http://domainhunterplus.com/


Link Building


This magic extension for Chrome not only helps you find important broken
links, but also tells you if the links point to an available domain.



Easel.ly

http://www.easel.ly/


Infographics


Free tools for creating and sharing inforgraphics. The templates allow
anyone to create a professional-looking graphic.



Email Format

http://email-format.com/


Email, Productivity


Email Format helps you find the proper structure for thousands of companies
and organizations across the web.



FindPeopleonPlus

http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/


Social


The ultimate Google+ directory that's great for research, outreach, and link
building. Sort by keywords, profession, country, and more.



Frobee Robots.txt Checker

http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check


Robots.txt, Technical SEO


Many robots.txt files contain hidden errors not easily visible to humans.
Run your file through this tool and you never know what you'll discover.



GetListed

https://getlisted.org/


Local, Moz


This awesome local SEO tool scores your local SEO visibility and gives you
actionable next steps to raise your score.



Google Keyword Planner

http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner


Keyword Research


The tool to replace Google's popular keyword tool has been derided by some,
but still offers data not available anywhere else.



Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/


Analytics


The most popular of all the analytics tools available, Google Analytics
continually innovates and sets the standard.



Google Analytics API

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008004?hl=en&ref_topic=1008008


API, Analytics


The Google Analytics API is great for building custom reports and tools, and
also for pulling data straight into Excel or Google Docs.



Google Map Maker

http://www.google.com/mapmaker


Local


Among other things, Google Map Maker allows you to contribute to public map
information, which may be shared and incorporated into Google Maps.



Google PageSpeed Insights

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights


Speed


Tools, data, and insights to improve your page speed. Page speed is
correlated with better rankings and user engagement, so this matters.



Google Public Data

http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory


Content


Drawing on vast public databases, Google public data offers a great starting
point for content research, infographics, and more.



Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html


Technical SEO, CRO


That SEO Mofo! Use this tool to see how your snippet may appear in Google's
search results. Add structured data, review stars, and more.



Google Structured Data Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets


Structured Data, Technical SEO


If you use Schema.org microformats or any other type of structured data,
this tool will verify your markup.



Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/


Keyword Research


See what's trending in Google search results and view keyword search
popularity over time. A must for trends.



Google Webmaster

http://www.google.com/webmasters/


Tools Suite, Diagnostic


The interface recently received an overhaul, and Google Webmaster remains a
must-have resource of diagnostic and health tools for site owners.



IFTTT

https://ifttt.com/


Productivity


IFTTT stands for IF This, Then That. The tool allows you to create automatic
triggers between various apps, like Gmail and Twitter.



Infogr.am

http://infogr.am/


Infographics


A great free Infographics resource that allows you to easily create graphics
and data visualizations.



Internet Marketing Ninjas SEO Tools

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/tools/


Tools Suite


The Ninjas are some of the best SEOs and online marketers out there, and
they've put some of their best tools online for free.



Linkstant

http://www.linkstant.com/


Link Building


This nifty analytics tool alerts you anytime someone links to your website.
Great for outreach and intelligence gathering.



Linksy.me Email Guesser

http://linksy.me/find-email


Email, Link Building


Need to send an email, but you don't have the recipient's address? Type in
what you know and this nifty tool will help you figure it out.



MailTester.com

http://mailtester.com/


Email


Need to send an email to an untested address, but you don't want to spam
them? Check it first with this mail tester to verify.



MozCast

http://mozcast.com/


SERP Tracking, Moz


Want to know if Google is testing its algorithm this week? MozCast gives you
a daily weather report to track changes in the SERPs.



MyBlogGuest

http://myblogguest.com/


Link Building, Content


Guest blogging is still alive and thriving. MyBlogGuest helps you find the
good opportunities out there.



Panguin Tool

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/


Analytics


This awesome tool connects with your Google Analytics account to help you
see if and when you've been hit by Google Algorithm updates.



Pingdom

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/


Speed


Pingdom offers an entire suite of speed tools to help analyze page load, DNS
issues, and connectivity.



Piwik

http://piwik.org/


Analytics


Piwik is a lightweight web analytics solution, and a great alternative to
Google Analytics.



Rank Checker for Firefox

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/


Rank Tracking


This light and easy desktop tool checks rankings with the click of a button.
Quick, easy and free.



Rapportive

http://rapportive.com/


Email, Link Building, Productivity


Rapportive works with your Gmail inbox to give you near-instant rich contact
information for almost everyone you want to reach. A must-have for marketers.



Remove Duplicate Items

http://ontolo.com/tools-remove-duplicates


Productivity


Ontolo offers a suite of link building software and a few helpful
productivity tools for link builders. The remove duplicates tool solves a common
problem.



Robots.txt Checker

http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml


Robots.txt, Technical SEO


Use robots best practices and discover hidden errors in your robots.txt
files that may cause search engine crawling problems.



Schema Creator

http://schema-creator.org/


Structured Data, Technical SEO


Everyone loves using Schema.org, but the microformats are difficult to write
by hand. This generator from the folks at Raven simplifies the task.



Scraper for Chrome

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/


Productivity


If you've never scraped a webpage, you're missing out. Scraper for Chrome
puts the power of simple web scraping in your hands without the need for code.



Seer Toolbox

http://www.seerinteractive.com/seo-toolbox/


Tools Suite, Analytics, Link Research


SEER opened up its internal toolbox for everyone in the world to use. These
are the same tools used in-house at SEER, and they rock.



SEO Toolbar

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/


Tools Suite, Toolbar, Technical SEO


On of the most popular tools available, The SEO Toolbar puts a ton of
information at your fingertips including backlinks and competitive research.



SEO Tools for Excel

http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/


Tools Suite, Analytics, Social


You don't need to be an Excel ninja to use Niels Bosma's SEO Tools for
Excel. This plugin does so many things many SEOs won't work without it.



SEOgadget Links API

http://seogadget.com/api/


API, Link Research


The SEOgadget Links API lets you easily gather not only backlink data but
contact information as well. A huge time saver.



SEOgadget Tools

http://seogadget.com/tools/


Tools Suite


This suite of tools from the Gadget lab includes several Excel plugins, a
content strategy generator, and more.



SEOQuake

http://www.seoquake.com/


Toolbar, Tools Suite, Technical SEO


More raw data than any other SEO toolbar out there.



SharedCount

http://www.sharedcount.com/


Social, Analytics


Want to know how any piece of content was shared socially across the major
services? This is the tool to use.



SharedCount API

http://www.sharedcount.com/documentation.php


API, Social


Harnessing the combined statistics of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and more,
the SharedCount API puts a ton of social data at your fingertips.



Similar Page Checker

http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php


Content, Technical SEO


Use this tool to check for duplicate content issues. The Similar Page
Checker will give you a score of how closely the HTML of two pages resemble each
other.



Sitemap Generators

http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators


Sitemaps


Google offers a slew of free, top-notch sitemap generators. Most of these
live on your server and generate new sitemaps automatically.



Social Authority API

https://followerwonk.com/social-authority


API, Social


How much reach and social authority do your followers have? How about the
people you're trying to connect with? The free Social Authority API will tell
you.



Social Crawlytics

https://socialcrawlytics.com/


Social, Analytics


Social Crawlytics allows you to conduct competitive research by showing you
your competitors' most-shared content. Lots of other features as well.



Social Mention

http://www.socialmention.com/


Social


Social mention offers real-time social media search and analysis. Enter a
search term and see who's sharing what, right now.



Text Cleaner

http://www.textcleanr.com/


Content


Some of the best tools solve the simplest problems. Text cleaner cleans up
all kinds of text formatting when copying and pasting between aplications.



Ubersuggest

http://ubersuggest.org/


Keyword Research


Every SEO loves Ubersuggest for its ease of use and wealth of keyword
research ideas. Utilizing the power of Google Suggest, it returns hundreds of
potential results.



URI Valet

http://urivalet.com/


Technical SEO


A great tool for digging into server headers, canonical information,
analyzing redirect problems and more.



Virante SEO Tools

http://www.virante.org/seo-tools


Tools Suite


Virant offers a number of high quality SEO tools to the public. These are
often the same tools developed for the Virant team, opened up for public use.



Wayback Machine

http://archive.org/web/web.php


Competitive Intelligence


Want to see the history of your website or your competitor's site? The
Wayback Machine allows you to step back in time and track important changes.



WebPagetest

http://www.webpagetest.org/


Speed


Quick and easy website speed tool. Offers suggestions for improving
performance.



Wordle

http://www.wordle.net/


Content


Create beautiful word clouds. Great for visualizations, graphics, and
research.



Wordstream Free Keyword Tools

http://www.wordstream.com/free-keyword-tools


Keyword Research, Tools Suite


In addition to its paid offerings, Wordstream offers a suite of free keyword
tools offering access to thousands of keyword suggestions.



Xenu's Link Sleuth

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html


Diagnostic, Technical SEO


Winner of the ugliest-SEO-tool-on-the-planet award, Xenu is also one of the
most useful. Crawl entire sites, find broken links, create sitemaps, and more.



XML-Sitemaps.com

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/


Sitemaps


XML-Sitemaps offers probably the easiest sitemap creation solution anywhere.
Great for smaller sites when you need a sitemap in minutes.



Yahoo Pipes

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/


Content, Productivity


A great mashup tool that combines different feeds into content and other
magical creations. Used for link building and whatever you can dream of.



Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/


Technical SEO


If you could only choose one WordPress plugin for you site, the first would
be from Yoast, and so would the second. This one sets the standard.



YouTube Analytics

https://www.youtube.com/analytics


Video, Analytics


Offers video-specific analytics for YouTube videos. A must-have for YouTube
video publishers.


Free and Paid


Ahrefs

https://ahrefs.com/


Link Research, Link Building


One of the more popular link research tools, Ahrefs offers a large index and
nice anchor text distribution charts. Mostly a paid tool, but they offer some
free data.



Banana Tag

http://bananatag.com/


Email


Banana Tag allows you to track your emails after you send them. For example,
check your email open rates from Gmail.



CloudFlare

https://www.cloudflare.com/


Speed


How do they make CloudFlare free? It works both as a CDN and a security
service to provide your website with speed and safety.



Followerwonk

https://followerwonk.com/


Social, Analytics, Moz


Perhaps the coolest thing about Followerwonk is the ability to track your
followers. Smart SEOs also use it for outreach and research.



Keyword Eye

http://www.keywordeye.com/


Keyword Research


Keyword eye adds a twist to keyword research by adding rich visualizations
â essential when you want to move beyond keywords to valuable concepts.



KnowEm

http://knowem.com/


Social


KnowEm allows you to check 100's of social profiles at once to check
availability. Looking for the perfect brand name? Check KnowEm first.



Majestic SEO

http://www.majesticseo.com/


Link Research, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building


You've probably seen Majestic SEO link charts all over the Internet. Great
crawling technology combined with several free options make for great link
research.



Majestic SEO API

http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/majestic-seo-api-now-explained/


API, Link Research


Majestic makes much of its backlink data available for free via its API.



MozBar

http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar


Tools Suite, Toolbar, Moz


The standard SEO toolbar for legions of marketers, the MozBar allows you to
perform over 50 key tasks right from your browser. Highly recommended.



Mozscape API

http://moz.com/products/api


API, Link Research, Moz


Companies everywhere incorporate the Mozscape API into their own products,
but it's also available to individuals, and much of the data is free.



nTopic

http://www.ntopic.org/


Content


nTopic is one of the few proven methods for giving your content a relevancy
score and offering keyword suggestions to improve it.



Open Site Explorer

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/


Link Research, Moz, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building


When Google and Yahoo started removing backlink data from the public, Moz
built Open Site Explorer to fill a huge need. See backlinks, anchor text,
popularity metrics and more.



Piktochart

http://piktochart.com/


Infographics


A cute and easy infographic generator. No experience required.



RowFeeder

https://rowfeeder.com/


Social, Analytics


RowFeeder allows you to track social usernames, hashtags and keywords and
load that information into Excel for easy social media monitoring.



Screaming Frog

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/


Diagnostic, Technical SEO


A powerful website crawling tool with a ton of features and customizations.
A must-have for most serious SEOs.



Searchmetrics Visibility Charts

http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research


SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence


Track the search visibility of any website, in addition to tracking winners
and losers in Google's search results.



SEMrush

http://www.semrush.com/


Tools Suite, Keyword Research, Competitive Intelligence


The paid and organic keyword data offered by SEMrush is often scary good and
comprehensive. Also great for researching competitors' ads.



SERPmetrics

http://serpmetrics.com/flux/


SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence


SERPmetrics flux charts track the flux for US search results across Yahoo,
Bing and Google over a 30-day period. A paid API is also available.



SimilarWeb

http://www.similarweb.com/


Competitive Intelligence


Impressive competitive intelligence across a number of online industries.
Competitor website stats are hard to come by, but Similar Web does a good job.



StatCounter

http://statcounter.com/


Analytics


Free, quick, and lightweight analytics solution. Often used by those who
want to avoid using Google Analytics for privacy reasons.



Trello

https://trello.com/


Productivity


Project management and tracking made simple. Used and endorsed by Moz.



Whitespark Local Citation Finder

https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/


Local


Finding local citations is key to local SEO. Whitespark offers a number of
free and paid solutions to find the local citations to rise above the
competition.



Whois Lookup

http://whois.domaintools.com/


Competitive Intelligence


Find registration, contact, and administrative information for any domain.



Wistia

http://wistia.com/


Video


The king of online video, Wistia offers SEO-friendly solutions for video
hosting. Both free and low-cost options available.


Free Trials


Moz Analytics

http://moz.com/products


Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Moz, Rank Tracking, Social


The flagship of the Moz software suite, Moz Analytics offers a dashboard of
all your important marketing data in one place with actionable analytics for
better marketing.



Optimizely

https://www.optimizely.com/


A/B Testing, CRO


Easy A/B testing and analytics to help you move toward success in your CRO
efforts.



Raven

http://raventools.com/


Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Content, Social


Raven offers a classic suite of SEO, content, and research tools popular
with many marketers.



Visual Website Optimizer

https://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/


A/B Testing, CRO


Visual Website Optimizer allows you to run A/B tests with a simple online
editor that lets you test content without knowing code.



Wordtracker

http://www.wordtracker.com/


Keyword Research


A powerful keyword research suite used by many top marketers, Wordtracker
offers a generous free trial option.




What's your favorite free tool?

Narrowing a list down to the 100 best SEO tools and resources is not an easy
challenge. Although I visited hundreds of webpages to compile this list, these
four resources offered particular value:


Annie Cushing's Must-Have Tools for Marketers
The Tools page at Inbound.org

Dr. Pete's APIs for Data-Driven Marketers

Free SEO Tools - A Curated List


The format for this ultimate interactive post was inspired by Jon Cooper's
complete list of link building strategies. You should check it out â it's
a great post.


Despite researching hundreds of tools, a few great ones didn't make the list.
What's your favorite free SEO tool? Let us know in the comments below.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!






You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/O2JZ3jFIQ5g/100-free-seo-tools

You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE

Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The 100 Best Free SEO Tools &
Resources for Every Challenge'


Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

At Moz, we love using premium SEO Tools (especially our own). Paid tools are
essential when you need advanced features, increased limits, historical
features, or online support.


For other tasks, a free tool does the trick.


Below you'll find an interactive list of 100 best completely free tools, tools
with both free and paid options, and free trials. Simply select the area you're
working in, and view all the tools listed in that category.




Select All/NoneA/B TestingAnalyticsAPIsCompetitive
IntelContentCRODiagnosticEmailInfographicsKeyword ResearchLink BuildingLink
ResearchLocalProductivityRank TrackingRobots.txtSERP
TrackingSitemapsSocialSpeedStructured DataTechnical SEOToolbarTools SuiteVideo






Free Tools


Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool

http://www.removeem.com/ratios.php


Link Research, Technical SEO


Worried about Google's Penguin algorithm hitting you for over-optimized
anchor text? Simply type in your URL for a full report of which links might
raise flags.



Bing Webmaster Tools

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster


Tools Suite, Diagnostic


Similar in function to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing offers a suite of
interesting research tools and resources for webmasters.



Bitly

https://bitly.com/


Social, Analytics


Most people use Bitly for URL shortening, but the real power of this
platform comes from its analytics.



Boomerang

http://www.boomeranggmail.com/


Email, Productivity


Boomerang lets you follow up on emails, even when you forget. Great for link
building or any time you send a lot of emails.



Buffer

https://bufferapp.com/


Social


Optimize your online social media sharing. Buffer allows you to share with
your audience at the optimal times for greater visibility.



BuiltWith

http://builtwith.com/


Competitive Intelligence


Use BuiltWith to discover what technology nearly any website was, well,
built with. Great for competitive intelligence as well.



Buzzstream Tools Suite

http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building


Link Building, Tools Suite, Email


Most people know Buzzstream as an outreach platform, but they also offer a
number of free link-building tools. This company gets it.



Caption Tube

http://captiontube.appspot.com/


Video


Free and easy resource used to create captions for YouTube. Helps with
usability and offers viewers a readable transcript.



CircleCount

http://www.circlecount.com/


Social, Analytics


Google+ analytics ramped up. Free resource to track your followers and
analyze your shares. See how many followers you've gained over time.



Content Strategy Generator Tool

http://seogadget.com/content-strategy-generator-tool-v2-update/


Content


This tool from SEOgadget helps you plan your content strategy intelligently,
using keyword research and estimating your audience size.



Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML

http://word2cleanhtml.com/


Content, Productivity


Despite the rise of Google Docs, Word still dominates much of the world.
Copying and pasting has always been a hurdle, but this tool makes it easy.



Copyscape

http://www.copyscape.com/


Content


Copyscape serves both as a plagiarism checker and a duplicate-content
checker. Great to use if your content has been distributed across the web.



Domain Hunter Plus

http://domainhunterplus.com/


Link Building


This magic extension for Chrome not only helps you find important broken
links, but also tells you if the links point to an available domain.



Easel.ly

http://www.easel.ly/


Infographics


Free tools for creating and sharing inforgraphics. The templates allow
anyone to create a professional-looking graphic.



Email Format

http://email-format.com/


Email, Productivity


Email Format helps you find the proper structure for thousands of companies
and organizations across the web.



FindPeopleonPlus

http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/


Social


The ultimate Google+ directory that's great for research, outreach, and link
building. Sort by keywords, profession, country, and more.



Frobee Robots.txt Checker

http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check


Robots.txt, Technical SEO


Many robots.txt files contain hidden errors not easily visible to humans.
Run your file through this tool and you never know what you'll discover.



GetListed

https://getlisted.org/


Local, Moz


This awesome local SEO tool scores your local SEO visibility and gives you
actionable next steps to raise your score.



Google Keyword Planner

http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner


Keyword Research


The tool to replace Google's popular keyword tool has been derided by some,
but still offers data not available anywhere else.



Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/


Analytics


The most popular of all the analytics tools available, Google Analytics
continually innovates and sets the standard.



Google Analytics API

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008004?hl=en&ref_topic=1008008


API, Analytics


The Google Analytics API is great for building custom reports and tools, and
also for pulling data straight into Excel or Google Docs.



Google Map Maker

http://www.google.com/mapmaker


Local


Among other things, Google Map Maker allows you to contribute to public map
information, which may be shared and incorporated into Google Maps.



Google PageSpeed Insights

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights


Speed


Tools, data, and insights to improve your page speed. Page speed is
correlated with better rankings and user engagement, so this matters.



Google Public Data

http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory


Content


Drawing on vast public databases, Google public data offers a great starting
point for content research, infographics, and more.



Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html


Technical SEO, CRO


That SEO Mofo! Use this tool to see how your snippet may appear in Google's
search results. Add structured data, review stars, and more.



Google Structured Data Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets


Structured Data, Technical SEO


If you use Schema.org microformats or any other type of structured data,
this tool will verify your markup.



Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/


Keyword Research


See what's trending in Google search results and view keyword search
popularity over time. A must for trends.



Google Webmaster

http://www.google.com/webmasters/


Tools Suite, Diagnostic


The interface recently received an overhaul, and Google Webmaster remains a
must-have resource of diagnostic and health tools for site owners.



IFTTT

https://ifttt.com/


Productivity


IFTTT stands for IF This, Then That. The tool allows you to create automatic
triggers between various apps, like Gmail and Twitter.



Infogr.am

http://infogr.am/


Infographics


A great free Infographics resource that allows you to easily create graphics
and data visualizations.



Internet Marketing Ninjas SEO Tools

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/tools/


Tools Suite


The Ninjas are some of the best SEOs and online marketers out there, and
they've put some of their best tools online for free.



Linkstant

http://www.linkstant.com/


Link Building


This nifty analytics tool alerts you anytime someone links to your website.
Great for outreach and intelligence gathering.



Linksy.me Email Guesser

http://linksy.me/find-email


Email, Link Building


Need to send an email, but you don't have the recipient's address? Type in
what you know and this nifty tool will help you figure it out.



MailTester.com

http://mailtester.com/


Email


Need to send an email to an untested address, but you don't want to spam
them? Check it first with this mail tester to verify.



MozCast

http://mozcast.com/


SERP Tracking, Moz


Want to know if Google is testing its algorithm this week? MozCast gives you
a daily weather report to track changes in the SERPs.



MyBlogGuest

http://myblogguest.com/


Link Building, Content


Guest blogging is still alive and thriving. MyBlogGuest helps you find the
good opportunities out there.



Panguin Tool

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/


Analytics


This awesome tool connects with your Google Analytics account to help you
see if and when you've been hit by Google Algorithm updates.



Pingdom

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/


Speed


Pingdom offers an entire suite of speed tools to help analyze page load, DNS
issues, and connectivity.



Piwik

http://piwik.org/


Analytics


Piwik is a lightweight web analytics solution, and a great alternative to
Google Analytics.



Rank Checker for Firefox

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/


Rank Tracking


This light and easy desktop tool checks rankings with the click of a button.
Quick, easy and free.



Rapportive

http://rapportive.com/


Email, Link Building, Productivity


Rapportive works with your Gmail inbox to give you near-instant rich contact
information for almost everyone you want to reach. A must-have for marketers.



Remove Duplicate Items

http://ontolo.com/tools-remove-duplicates


Productivity


Ontolo offers a suite of link building software and a few helpful
productivity tools for link builders. The remove duplicates tool solves a common
problem.



Robots.txt Checker

http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml


Robots.txt, Technical SEO


Use robots best practices and discover hidden errors in your robots.txt
files that may cause search engine crawling problems.



Schema Creator

http://schema-creator.org/


Structured Data, Technical SEO


Everyone loves using Schema.org, but the microformats are difficult to write
by hand. This generator from the folks at Raven simplifies the task.



Scraper for Chrome

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/


Productivity


If you've never scraped a webpage, you're missing out. Scraper for Chrome
puts the power of simple web scraping in your hands without the need for code.



Seer Toolbox

http://www.seerinteractive.com/seo-toolbox/


Tools Suite, Analytics, Link Research


SEER opened up its internal toolbox for everyone in the world to use. These
are the same tools used in-house at SEER, and they rock.



SEO Toolbar

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/


Tools Suite, Toolbar, Technical SEO


On of the most popular tools available, The SEO Toolbar puts a ton of
information at your fingertips including backlinks and competitive research.



SEO Tools for Excel

http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/


Tools Suite, Analytics, Social


You don't need to be an Excel ninja to use Niels Bosma's SEO Tools for
Excel. This plugin does so many things many SEOs won't work without it.



SEOgadget Links API

http://seogadget.com/api/


API, Link Research


The SEOgadget Links API lets you easily gather not only backlink data but
contact information as well. A huge time saver.



SEOgadget Tools

http://seogadget.com/tools/


Tools Suite


This suite of tools from the Gadget lab includes several Excel plugins, a
content strategy generator, and more.



SEOQuake

http://www.seoquake.com/


Toolbar, Tools Suite, Technical SEO


More raw data than any other SEO toolbar out there.



SharedCount

http://www.sharedcount.com/


Social, Analytics


Want to know how any piece of content was shared socially across the major
services? This is the tool to use.



SharedCount API

http://www.sharedcount.com/documentation.php


API, Social


Harnessing the combined statistics of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and more,
the SharedCount API puts a ton of social data at your fingertips.



Similar Page Checker

http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php


Content, Technical SEO


Use this tool to check for duplicate content issues. The Similar Page
Checker will give you a score of how closely the HTML of two pages resemble each
other.



Sitemap Generators

http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators


Sitemaps


Google offers a slew of free, top-notch sitemap generators. Most of these
live on your server and generate new sitemaps automatically.



Social Authority API

https://followerwonk.com/social-authority


API, Social


How much reach and social authority do your followers have? How about the
people you're trying to connect with? The free Social Authority API will tell
you.



Social Crawlytics

https://socialcrawlytics.com/


Social, Analytics


Social Crawlytics allows you to conduct competitive research by showing you
your competitors' most-shared content. Lots of other features as well.



Social Mention

http://www.socialmention.com/


Social


Social mention offers real-time social media search and analysis. Enter a
search term and see who's sharing what, right now.



Text Cleaner

http://www.textcleanr.com/


Content


Some of the best tools solve the simplest problems. Text cleaner cleans up
all kinds of text formatting when copying and pasting between aplications.



Ubersuggest

http://ubersuggest.org/


Keyword Research


Every SEO loves Ubersuggest for its ease of use and wealth of keyword
research ideas. Utilizing the power of Google Suggest, it returns hundreds of
potential results.



URI Valet

http://urivalet.com/


Technical SEO


A great tool for digging into server headers, canonical information,
analyzing redirect problems and more.



Virante SEO Tools

http://www.virante.org/seo-tools


Tools Suite


Virant offers a number of high quality SEO tools to the public. These are
often the same tools developed for the Virant team, opened up for public use.



Wayback Machine

http://archive.org/web/web.php


Competitive Intelligence


Want to see the history of your website or your competitor's site? The
Wayback Machine allows you to step back in time and track important changes.



WebPagetest

http://www.webpagetest.org/


Speed


Quick and easy website speed tool. Offers suggestions for improving
performance.



Wordle

http://www.wordle.net/


Content


Create beautiful word clouds. Great for visualizations, graphics, and
research.



Wordstream Free Keyword Tools

http://www.wordstream.com/free-keyword-tools


Keyword Research, Tools Suite


In addition to its paid offerings, Wordstream offers a suite of free keyword
tools offering access to thousands of keyword suggestions.



Xenu's Link Sleuth

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html


Diagnostic, Technical SEO


Winner of the ugliest-SEO-tool-on-the-planet award, Xenu is also one of the
most useful. Crawl entire sites, find broken links, create sitemaps, and more.



XML-Sitemaps.com

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/


Sitemaps


XML-Sitemaps offers probably the easiest sitemap creation solution anywhere.
Great for smaller sites when you need a sitemap in minutes.



Yahoo Pipes

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/


Content, Productivity


A great mashup tool that combines different feeds into content and other
magical creations. Used for link building and whatever you can dream of.



Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/


Technical SEO


If you could only choose one WordPress plugin for you site, the first would
be from Yoast, and so would the second. This one sets the standard.



YouTube Analytics

https://www.youtube.com/analytics


Video, Analytics


Offers video-specific analytics for YouTube videos. A must-have for YouTube
video publishers.


Free and Paid


Ahrefs

https://ahrefs.com/


Link Research, Link Building


One of the more popular link research tools, Ahrefs offers a large index and
nice anchor text distribution charts. Mostly a paid tool, but they offer some
free data.



Banana Tag

http://bananatag.com/


Email


Banana Tag allows you to track your emails after you send them. For example,
check your email open rates from Gmail.



CloudFlare

https://www.cloudflare.com/


Speed


How do they make CloudFlare free? It works both as a CDN and a security
service to provide your website with speed and safety.



Followerwonk

https://followerwonk.com/


Social, Analytics, Moz


Perhaps the coolest thing about Followerwonk is the ability to track your
followers. Smart SEOs also use it for outreach and research.



Keyword Eye

http://www.keywordeye.com/


Keyword Research


Keyword eye adds a twist to keyword research by adding rich visualizations
â essential when you want to move beyond keywords to valuable concepts.



KnowEm

http://knowem.com/


Social


KnowEm allows you to check 100's of social profiles at once to check
availability. Looking for the perfect brand name? Check KnowEm first.



Majestic SEO

http://www.majesticseo.com/


Link Research, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building


You've probably seen Majestic SEO link charts all over the Internet. Great
crawling technology combined with several free options make for great link
research.



Majestic SEO API

http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/majestic-seo-api-now-explained/


API, Link Research


Majestic makes much of its backlink data available for free via its API.



MozBar

http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar


Tools Suite, Toolbar, Moz


The standard SEO toolbar for legions of marketers, the MozBar allows you to
perform over 50 key tasks right from your browser. Highly recommended.



Mozscape API

http://moz.com/products/api


API, Link Research, Moz


Companies everywhere incorporate the Mozscape API into their own products,
but it's also available to individuals, and much of the data is free.



nTopic

http://www.ntopic.org/


Content


nTopic is one of the few proven methods for giving your content a relevancy
score and offering keyword suggestions to improve it.



Open Site Explorer

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/


Link Research, Moz, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building


When Google and Yahoo started removing backlink data from the public, Moz
built Open Site Explorer to fill a huge need. See backlinks, anchor text,
popularity metrics and more.



Piktochart

http://piktochart.com/


Infographics


A cute and easy infographic generator. No experience required.



RowFeeder

https://rowfeeder.com/


Social, Analytics


RowFeeder allows you to track social usernames, hashtags and keywords and
load that information into Excel for easy social media monitoring.



Screaming Frog

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/


Diagnostic, Technical SEO


A powerful website crawling tool with a ton of features and customizations.
A must-have for most serious SEOs.



Searchmetrics Visibility Charts

http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research


SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence


Track the search visibility of any website, in addition to tracking winners
and losers in Google's search results.



SEMrush

http://www.semrush.com/


Tools Suite, Keyword Research, Competitive Intelligence


The paid and organic keyword data offered by SEMrush is often scary good and
comprehensive. Also great for researching competitors' ads.



SERPmetrics

http://serpmetrics.com/flux/


SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence


SERPmetrics flux charts track the flux for US search results across Yahoo,
Bing and Google over a 30-day period. A paid API is also available.



SimilarWeb

http://www.similarweb.com/


Competitive Intelligence


Impressive competitive intelligence across a number of online industries.
Competitor website stats are hard to come by, but Similar Web does a good job.



StatCounter

http://statcounter.com/


Analytics


Free, quick, and lightweight analytics solution. Often used by those who
want to avoid using Google Analytics for privacy reasons.



Trello

https://trello.com/


Productivity


Project management and tracking made simple. Used and endorsed by Moz.



Whitespark Local Citation Finder

https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/


Local


Finding local citations is key to local SEO. Whitespark offers a number of
free and paid solutions to find the local citations to rise above the
competition.



Whois Lookup

http://whois.domaintools.com/


Competitive Intelligence


Find registration, contact, and administrative information for any domain.



Wistia

http://wistia.com/


Video


The king of online video, Wistia offers SEO-friendly solutions for video
hosting. Both free and low-cost options available.


Free Trials


Moz Analytics

http://moz.com/products


Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Moz, Rank Tracking, Social


The flagship of the Moz software suite, Moz Analytics offers a dashboard of
all your important marketing data in one place with actionable analytics for
better marketing.



Optimizely

https://www.optimizely.com/


A/B Testing, CRO


Easy A/B testing and analytics to help you move toward success in your CRO
efforts.



Raven

http://raventools.com/


Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Content, Social


Raven offers a classic suite of SEO, content, and research tools popular
with many marketers.



Visual Website Optimizer

https://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/


A/B Testing, CRO


Visual Website Optimizer allows you to run A/B tests with a simple online
editor that lets you test content without knowing code.



Wordtracker

http://www.wordtracker.com/


Keyword Research


A powerful keyword research suite used by many top marketers, Wordtracker
offers a generous free trial option.




What's your favorite free tool?

Narrowing a list down to the 100 best SEO tools and resources is not an easy
challenge. Although I visited hundreds of webpages to compile this list, these
four resources offered particular value:


Annie Cushing's Must-Have Tools for Marketers
The Tools page at Inbound.org

Dr. Pete's APIs for Data-Driven Marketers

Free SEO Tools - A Curated List


The format for this ultimate interactive post was inspired by Jon Cooper's
complete list of link building strategies. You should check it out â it's
a great post.


Despite researching hundreds of tools, a few great ones didn't make the list.
What's your favorite free SEO tool? Let us know in the comments below.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!






You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/O2JZ3jFIQ5g/100-free-seo-tools

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posted.
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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE

Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'SEO Finds in Your Server Logs,
Part 2: Optimizing for Googlebot'


Posted by timresnik

This is a follow-up to a post I wrote a few months ago that goes over some of
the basics of why server log files are a critical part of your technical SEO
toolkit. In this post, I provide more detail around formatting the data in Excel
in order to find and analyze Googlebot crawl optimization opportunities.


Before digging into the logs, itâs important to understand the basics of
how Googlebot crawls your site. There are three basic factors that Googlebot
considers. First is which pages should be crawled. This is determined by factors
such as the number of backlinks that point to a page, the internal link
structure of the site, the number and strength of the internal links that point
to that page, and other internal signals like sitemaps.


Next, Googlebot determines how many pages to crawl. This is commonly referred
to as the "crawl budget." Factors that are most likely considered when
allocating crawl budget are domain authority and trust, performance, load time,
and clean crawl paths (Googlebot getting stuck in your endless faceted search
loop costs them money). For much more detail on crawl budget, check out Ian
Lurieâs post on the subject.


Finally, the rate of the crawl â how frequently Googlebot comes back
â is determined by how often the site is updated, the domain authority,
and the freshness of citations, social mentions, and links.


Now, let's take a look at how Googlebot is crawling Moz.com (NOTE: the data I
am analyzing is from SEOmoz.org prior to our site migration to Moz.com. Several
of the potential issues that I point out below are now solved. Wahoo!). The
first step is getting the log data into a workable format. I explained in detail
how to do this in my last server log post. However, this time make sure to
include the parameters with the URLs so we can analyze funky crawl paths. Just
make sure the box below is unchecked when importing your log file.




The first thing that we want to look at is where on the site Googlebot is
spending its time and dedicating the most resources. Now that you have exported
your log file to a .csv file, youâll need to do a bit of formatting and
cleaning of the data.


1. Save the file with an Excel extension, for example .xlsx


2. Remove all the columns except for Page/File, Response Code and User Agent,
it should look something like this (formatted as a table which can be done by
selecting your data and ^L):




3. Isolate Googlebot from other spiders by creating a new column and writing a
formula that searches for âGooglebotâ in the cells in the 3rd
column.




4. Scrub the Page/File column for the top-level directory so we can later run
a pivot table and see which sections Google is crawling the most




5. Since we left the parameter on the URL in order to check crawl paths,
weâll want to remove it here so that data is included in the top level
directory analysis that we do in the pivot table. The URL parameter always
starts with "?," so that is what we want to search for in Excel. This is a
little tricky because Excel uses the question mark character as a wildcard. In
order to indicate to Excel that the question mark is literal, use a preceding
tilde, like this: "~?"




6. The data can now be analyzed in a pivot table (data > pivot table). The
number associated with the directory is the total number of times Googlebot
requested a file in the timeframe of the log, in this case a day.




Is Google allocating crawl budget properly? We can dive deeper into several
different pieces of data here:


Over 70% of Google's crawl budget focuses on three sections, while over 50% goes
towards /qa/ and /users/. Moz should look at search referral data from Google
Analytics to see how much organic search value these sections provide. If it is
disproportionately low, crawl management tactics or on-page optimization
improvements should be considered.
Another potential insight from this data is that /page-strength/, a URL used
for posting data for a Moz tool, is being crawled nearly 1,000 times. These
crawls are most likely triggered from external links pointing to the results of
the Moz tool. The recommendation would be to exclude this directory using
robots.txt.
On the other end of the spectrum, it is important to understand the directories
that are rarely being crawled. Are there sections being under-crawled?
Letâs look at a few of Mozâs:




In this example, the directory /webinars pops out as not getting enough Google
attention. In fact, only the top directory is being crawled, while the actual
Webinar content pages are being skipped.


These are just a few examples of crawl resource issues that can be found in
server logs. A few additional issues to look for include:


Are spiders crawling pages that are excluded by robots.txt?
Are spider crawling pages that should be excluded by robots.txt?
Are certain sections consuming too much bandwidth? What is the ratio of the
number of pages crawled in a section to the amount of bandwidth required?


As a bonus, I have done a screencast of the above process for formatting and
analyzing the Googlebot crawl.






In my next post on analyzing log files, I will explain in more detail how to
identify duplicate content and look for trends over time. Feel free to share
your thoughts and questions in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!






You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/noIYBEP9OCw/seo-log-file-analysis-part-2

You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE

Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Announcing Moz Academy!'


Posted by Nick_Sayers

Weâre stoked to announce Moz Academy!


Have you ever wanted a resource to learn inbound marketing or a place your
team can reference marketing best practices? Well, we hope you do a backflip
over Moz Academy. If you have a Moz Subscription, check it out now!




Subscription-based content

At Moz we produce a wealth of free content in the blog, our guides, Q&A, and
pretty much everywhere on the site. We want to do something special for Moz
subscribers by transforming our free content and reinventing it for Moz Academy.
You could probably scour the Moz Blog and other websites to obtain the
information in Moz Academy, but we think having it easily digestible and all in
one place is a huge win for Moz subscribers. Moz is excited to add the
simplicity and power of Moz Academy to the list of Moz subscription benefits.

Why create an inbound marketing school?

Moz is extremely passionate about educating our community. In fact, our entire
business started as a blog where people could learn about SEO. Moz Academy gives
subscribers the power to be better marketers, which will enable them to use our
products in more depth and with greater confidence. We want to provide a hub of
marketing knowledge that will create a stronger community where people can teach
each other while using the Academy as a frame of reference. One could say that
Moz Academy is the Mr. Miyagi of inbound marketing. The key to this project is
empowering you to kick even more butt than you already do!




We hope Moz Academy turns into the one-stop-shop for inbound knowledge for Moz
subscribers. Everyone on the team is committed to continually refreshing content
and adding new lessons. Again, we really want this to be the easiest and most
comprehensive place to learn internet marketing on the web.


Furthermore, weâve designed each lesson with empathy in mind; they will
be easily digestible and considerate of your time. That means you can drop in
whenever you like and have comfortable breakpoints if youâre brain is
exploding with inbound marketing knowledge.

Wait, how do I use Moz Academy?

Moz Academy is easy to use! Check out these six simple steps:


Step 1: Log into your Moz account.




Step 2: Go to moz.com/academy.




Step 3: Look through the lessons.




Step 4: Click a lesson you find interesting.




Step 5: Enjoy a video and/or read the lesson below it!




Step 6: Crane kick.



What lessons do you have right now?

We're starting with the following lessons:


Inbound Marketing
SEO
Link Building
Social Media
Content Marketing


We plan to add a lot more! Look for lessons on local SEO, community
management, video marketing, email marketing and web analytics. Yup, it's going
to be pretty sweet!

Well, Moz, what's next for Moz Academy?

The future of Moz Academy really depends on how everyone uses it. In the next
few months, we want to create a good foundation for beginners and subsequently
build up to intermediate-level content. Eventually, we'd like to have sections
for beginners lessons, intermediate lessons, and advanced lessons. Keep your
eyes peeled, because weâll be releasing a lot of new stuff! Some of our
longer-term goals for Moz Academy are to have interactive quizzes and some sort
of gamification. Yes, we know you'd like to track your progress and unlock
achievements. That way you can show off how awesome you are at Moz Academy!




Eventually, we want Moz Academy to look more like Treehouse and Code
Schoolâs online learning platforms. We have a long way to go, but are
excited about the journey to get there. With your help and feedback, we can make
Moz Academy something awesome. Thanks in advance, and enjoy!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!






You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/31UQxhXgh_8/moz-academy-announcement

You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE

Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'An Introduction to Integrated
Marketing and SEO: How It Works and Why It Matters'

Posted by StephanieChang
To say that the SEO industry has changed would be considered a massive
understatement. In previous years, for a site to excel in the SERPs (search
engine results page), it needed a few key important ingredients:


A...

You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/PdJmrdG7-us/integrated-marketing-and-seo

You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE

Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Key to Empowering your
Marketing Team - Whiteboard Friday'


Posted by randfish

What holds marketing teams back from accomplishing great things? In today's
Whiteboard Friday, Rand tackles the big challenges many internal marketing teams
face, and outlines a way to bring structure and empowerment back to your
marketers.


Have something to add? Leave your thoughts and questions in the comments
below!






The Key to Empowering your Marketing Team - Whiteboard Friday





For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard.



Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I'm going to be talking to you a little bit about what holds marketing teams
back from being able to accomplish great things inside of companies, and for
external marketing teams that are on an agency or consulting basis, but really
oftentimes internally.
So this, I've got here my six little friends. This one, this guy is kind of
awkward. His back is a little out of whack. But that's okay. He's just a stick
figure. He's probably feeling just fine.


The challenge for these guys is that they constantly need their work
reviewed. They're kind of in the weeds, in the trenches doing marketing
activities, building content, trying to get that content shared and linked to,
trying to earn rankings and traffic, trying to buy advertising, trying to
influence the website and the marketing materials, make the conversion rate
higher, do all these things to promote the marketing funnel improving. Yet
they're constantly changing course, sometimes daily, sometimes even hourly. Boss
comes in, it's sort of like, "No, no, no, don't do that anymore. Focus on this
thing. No, wait, I know I told you to do that, but we don't need that anymore.
We need this other thing."


They're not empowered to make decisions, not even about their own work. They
really have to get constantly reviewed. Someone comes and gives them feedback on
everything they do. I've been this marketer myself before. Especially as a
consultant, you're oftentimes in this position. You don't have that empowerment
to make great decisions.


But there's a way to fix this, and it's an architecture I want to share with
you that's been really powerful for me and for a number of other companies that
have adopted this and that have shared it too. So the idea is basically that
what we want to do is we want to take all the things that the company wants to
accomplish today, in the future, in the far, far flung future, and we want to
connect that all the way down to what the marketing team is actually working on
today, right now. But it takes a little bit of work, and it takes a lot of
transparency, and it takes some thinking. If you don't have this architecture
yet, you should give it a try. Let me show you what I'm talking about.


A big company vision is a great starting point. I know many small and medium
businesses don't even really have a great big company vision. But if you can
imagine one, if you can put one on there, "We want to be Cleveland, Ohio's best
marketing agency, and we define best as our clients are the happiest, we have
the most clients, and we have the highest revenues in the city." Okay, great,
now you've got a company vision. Moz's vision, for example, is to help people do
better marketing. Tesla's vision is to transform how the world is transported.
NASA has an organizational vision to explore space. So you can get a company
vision.


So let's say it is, "Help people do better marketing." From that flows things
that you're going to do over the next few years. It could be five years, it
could be just two or three years, but the mission that you have. I'm going to go
back to Tesla again because I love Tesla's five-year mission. Tesla's five-year
mission is to "Power the transformation from gas to electric vehicles and to
become the world's leading car company by doing that." So become the world's
leading company by powering the transformation from gas to electric.


Okay. Then, based on that mission, that thing that you want to accomplish
over the next few years, you have a BHAG. A BHAG is Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I
know it sounds a little funny, but this acronym is actually quite important, and
so are all the letters in there. Big because you want it to be hard to achieve.
My favorite thing that people say about a BHAG is,
"It's out of reach, but not out of sight." A goal that is out of reach, I
can't see us accomplishing it today. My God, it's almost hard to imagine that we
accomplished it, but not completely out of sight.


So perhaps Tesla would say that their BHAG is to be the world's number one
auto manufacturer in ten years or in five years. That means that they have to
build so many cars and sell so many cars that they are the world's leading car
company through number of cars on the road. For Moz, our BHAG is one million
people subscribing to our platform. For your Cleveland, Ohio consulting agency,
it might be successfully keeping and maintaining 100 paying customers at $5,000
a month or more for a full year, nonstop. Whatever it is, it has to be
definable, easily definable, easily measurable, and powerful, something that
people can get behind.


I'll go back to NASA again. That moon mission that they had, in the 1960s
NASA had the moon mission and the BHAG for the moon mission was, "Put a man on
the surface of the moon and return him safely to the earth." Super measurable,
super definable, incredibly powerful to get behind. If you're doing marketing
for that, you can see that big vision and that big goal very clearly. Then from
there, from these two, I'm going to take our mission and our BHAG, and I'm going
to define a list of strategic goals, things we need to accomplish in order to
get these things done. But they're going to be things that we do over the next 6
to 12 months, just 6 to 12 months, just the next little while. This is really
powerful because those strategic goals should flow down to everything else that
the company does.


So if, for example, I say, "Hey, in order to sell more cars, Tesla needs to
open Tesla dealerships in 500 cities over the next 12 months, and here's the
list of cities." Okay, that's a strategic goal. Now we've got to go get that
done. We need to figure out people who know how to open stores and people who
know about real estate, and we need to have a bunch of investment dollars that
we can put it in these things. We need to figure out how long it is before we
open a dealership before that actually turns into sales for us. We need to hire
all the salespeople. We need to build a process for that. Huge list of things
that come from those, but the strategic goal is very simple. "Open stores in 500
cities."


At Moz, one of our strategic goals is to increase the retention of our Pro
subscribers. Build stuff. Make stuff in the product that makes people want to
stick around and use Moz longer. Okay, these are strategic goals.


Then, from there, now we really start to get into the nitty-gritty with the
marketing goals being tied to these company goals, and this is such a powerful
architecture. It just removes all kinds of barriers, because now I can go and I
can build a process like this, right here. So I take a goal that the team is
trying to accomplish, and I translate that into what my actual marketing task is
around it. Then I have the process and the people that I need for that goal. So
actually, I'm going to use my checkboxes that I actually made.


I define my goal, I get the process and people I need, I figure out how we
define success, what the measurable elements are. Maybe it's, "Hey, we need to
broaden our brand's reach." We want to have more people exposed to the Moz
brand, and so therefore, we are going to define a goal as half a million people
following our Twitter account and 100,000 people following our Google + account,
and maybe a million people following us on Facebook and whatever those things
are.


Then you have those metrics-based targets. So those could be website visitor
statistics. They could be conversions. It could be an ROI number. It could be a
cost number. Many times a strategic goal will be to reduce cost to a certain
amount, and then you have these goals. "Hey, we need to reduce customer
acquisition costs. We need to find channels that don't cost as much."
Oftentimes, inbound channels don't cost as much, things like SEO and email
marketing, opt-in email marketing, community building, and content and those
kinds of things, that's a great way to reduce customer acquisition costs. It
could be a marketing goal, and you figure out who the process and people are
behind that. We may need a writer. We're going to need someone who is a
marketing analyst to do all the statistics work. We're going to figure out how
we measure success. That's going to be measured through number of people
acquired through these lower-cost channels. We're going to have metrics-based
targets. We're going to say we want to acquire 20% of our customers through
non-paid channels by the end of 2013.


Great. Now you have something so amazing. You have marketers that can see the
big picture. They can see all the way. They know everything that's connected
here, and that means that they know how their work matters. I can't tell you
what a change in attitude you get when you understand how your work matters
versus wondering why you're pushing buttons. It's just a remarkable change. Now,
those same people can navigate project complexity without needing someone over
their shoulder, looking all the time at their work, making sure that they're
doing the right thing, reviewing, because they can see that full connection.


You might have someone who reviews the work at the end of the cycle or is in
a project planning meeting with them, maybe a manager or a senior leader or
something like that, and that's fine and that's a good thing. But you don't need
to be in the weeds with your team anymore, and because they're empowered, they
can choose how they work best, figure out what makes them most effective, and
then they can execute on projects.


I urge you to give this a try. It won't take that long, especially if you've
got some of these bigger things already defined, and it can really move the
needle on how your marketing team works.


All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday.
We'll see you again next week. Take care.



Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE

Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Google's Multi-Week Algorithm
Update'


Posted by Dr-Pete

Back on June 21st, Matt Cutts replied to a tweet about payday loan spam with
an unusual bit of information (reported on Search Engine Roundtable):




The exact timeline was a bit unclear, but Matt seemed to suggest a prolonged
algorithm update covering as many as three weeks. Four days later, we tracked
our highest temperature ever on MozCast, followed by more record highs:




Seven days during the "multi-week" timeline showed temperature spikes near or
above 90, with six of those days exceeding the severity of the original Penguin
update.

Was It A MozCast Glitch?

Let me perfectly honest â Google rankings are a moving target, and
tracking day-to-day flux has proven difficult at best. Any given temperature on
any given day is prone to error. However, this was a sustained pattern of very
high numbers, and we have no evidence to suggest a glitch in the data.


There were some reports that other tools were not showing similar spikes, but
some of these reports were based on apples-to-oranges comparisons. For example,
if you look at SERPmetrics flux data and isolate just page 1 of Google (which is
what MozCast tracks), you'll see this:




Sorry, it's a bit hard to see the dates on the reduced image, but the two
spikes equate to roughly June 28th and July 4th, with a smaller bump on June
25th. While they're not an exact match, these two data sets are certainly
telling a similar story.




Was It A Large-scale Test?

This is a much harder question to answer. Our beta 10K data set showed similar
patterns across multiple C-blocks of IPs, so we have no reason to believe this
was specific to one or a very few data centers.


What if Google made a massive change one day, though, and then reverted it?
Theoretically, we would see two days of high MozCast temperatures, but if we
looked at the two-day flux (instead of two one-day numbers), the temperature
would be very low. While this multi-day flux is theoretically interesting, it
can be very hard to interpret in practice. Some rankings naturally change, and
Google can roll out multiple small updates in any given week.


If we look at the overall flux between the start and end of recorded spikes
(June 25 - July 4), we get a MozCast temperature of 120.3, not much higher than
the one-day temperature on June 27th. The average daily temperature for this
period was 92.5. Now, let's look at a similar time period (May 28 - June 6)
â the average temperature for that period was 66.8, and the multi-day
temperature across the entire period was 114.7.


Comparing the two time periods, the overall flux for the period of record
temperatures was roughly the same as the peak and about 30% higher than the
multi-day average, whereas the overall flux for the quieter period was 72%
higher than the average. This is an inexact science at best, and we don't have a
good historical sense of multi-day patterns, but my gut feeling is that some of
the multi-week update involved changes that Google tested and later rolled back.

What About PMDs & EMDs?

In my post on the June 25th temperature spike, I reported a noticeable
single-day drop in partial-match domain (PMD) influence. That post happened very
early in the multi-week update, so let's look at the PMD influence data across a
30-day time period that includes all of the high-temperature days:




While there was a lot of movement during this period, you can see that PMDs
recovered some of their initial losses around July 4th. The overall trend is
downward, but the June 25th drop doesn't appear to have been permanent.


It's interesting to note, even if not directly relevant to this analysis, that
the long-term trend for PMD influence in our data is still decidedly downward.
Here's a graph back to the beginning of 2013:




So, how have EMDs fared? They seem to show a similar pattern, but in a much
tighter range. Scaled to the same Y-axis as the PMD chart above, we get this:




The EMD data is fairly consistent with Dr. Matt Peters' early report on our
2013 Ranking Factors study. Keep in mind that we are measuring two different
things â the correlations show how well PMDs/EMDs ranked compared to other
domains, whereas MozCast tracks how many PMDs/EMDs ranked across the data set.
If the number of total PMDs drops, but they rank roughly as well, the
correlations will remain stable, but the "PMD Influence" metric will drop. In
other words, the correlations measure how well PMDs rank, whereas MozCast
measures how many PMDs rank.

Which PMDs Lost Long-term?

There's one more question we can ask about the drop and subsequent recovery in
PMD influence. Did the PMDs that fell out eventually come back, or were they
replaced by different PMDs? The metric itself doesn't tell us, but we can dig
deeper and see who lost out long-term.


On the initial drop (between June 25-26), 62 PMDs fell out of our public 1K
MozCast query set. New PMDs always enter the mix, so the net drop is smaller,
but 62 PMDs that were ranking on June 25th weren't ranking on June 26th. So,
let's compare that list of 62 to the data on July 5th â after the apparent
recovery. On July 5th, 37 of those PMDs (60%) had returned to our data set. This
certainly suggests some amount of legitimate recovery.


So, which losing PMDs failed to recover? Here's the complete list (query
keywords in parentheses):


californiacarshows.org (car shows)
digital-voice-recorder-review.toptenreviews.com (voice recorder)
fullyramblomatic-yahtzee.blogspot.com (yahtzee)
virginiamommymakeover.com (mommy makeover)
www.appliancepartscenter.us (appliance parts)
www.appliancepartssuppliers.com (appliance parts)
www.campagnolorestaurant.ca (campagnolo)
www.campagnolorestaurant.com (campagnolo)
www.capitalcarshows.com (car shows)
www.chicagoweddingcandybuffet.com (candy buffet)
www.dollardrivingschool.com (driving school)
www.elitedrivingschool.biz (driving school)
www.etanzanite.com (tanzanite)
www.firstchoicedrivingschool.net (driving school)
www.fitzgeraldsdrivingschool.com (driving school)
www.monogrammedgiftshop.com (monogrammed gifts)
www.moscatorestaurant.com (moscato)
www.newjerseyluxuryrealestate.com (luxury real estate)
www.ocsportscards.com (sports cards)
www.phoenixbassboats.com (bass boats)
www.rvsalesofbroward.com (rv sales)
www.sri-onlineauctions.com (online auctions)
www.stoltzfusrvs.com (rvs)
www.vibramdiscgolf.com (vibram)


It's not my goal to pass judgment on the quality of these domains, but simply
to provide data for further analysis if anyone is interested. You can see that
there are a few examples of multiple PMDs falling out of a single query,
suggesting some kind of targeted action.

How Did The Big 10 Do?

In MozCast, we track a metric called the "Big 10" (I did my grad work at U.
Iowa, so I should probably have thought twice about that name) â it's just
a count of the total percentage of top 10 ranking positions held by the 10 most
prominent sites on any given day. Those sites may change day-to-day, but tend to
be fairly stable. Looking back to the beginning of 2013, we see a clear upward
trend (this graph starts on January 8th, due to a counting issue we had with
YouTube results at the beginning of the year):






The "Big 10" gained almost 2-1/2 percentage points in the first half of the
year. Some of the gain across the year represents a shuffling of sites in the
mix (Twitter falls in and out of the "Big 10", for example, and the root eBay
domain struggled earlier this year), and some of this is a symptom of other
changes. As Google gets more aggressive about spam, the sites that already
dominate naturally tend to take more spots.


I thought it would be interesting to look at these numbers alongside the
year-to-date PMD and EMD numbers, but the "Big 10" doesn't seem to tell us much
about the multi-week update. As a group, they moved only a fairly small amount
between June 25th and July 5th (from 14.97% to 15.17%). Whatever Google tested
and rolled out over this period, it didn't dramatically advantage big brands in
our data set.

What Happened, Then?


Unfortunately, the patterns just aren't clear, and digging into individual
queries that showed the most movement during the multi-week update didn't reveal
any general insights. The volatility during this time period seems to have been
real, and my best guess is that while some changes stuck, others were made and
rolled back. Google may have been doing large-scale testing of algorithm tweaks
and refining as they went, but at this point the exact nature of those changes
is unclear. Between the multi-week update and Google's announcement of 10-day
Panda roll-outs, it appears that we're going to see more prolonged updates.
Whether this is to mitigate the impact of one-day updates or make the update
process more opaque is anyone's guess.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!






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