20 MORE Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools

Not satisfied with just 20 Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools? Never fear, I compiled a list of 20 MORE Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools over at SiteProNews this week.

Enjoy!

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Q and A: Will you review our new SEO tool?

Dear Kalena...

I'm rather hoping this is up your street. After reading your SiteProNews article and looking at your web site I think it is. My name's Chris and I'm a partner in the company TrainStorm Interactive. We've developed a fresh new web-based mutual SEO tool at seorce.com that we think is a novel idea. The tool is free at the moment, and will be cheap to use when it comes out of beta testing compared to other SEO tools/software and hopefully as effective if not more so. Its straightforward operation is fully explained on the site. We're inviting all comers to use the tool and it'd be great if you could come back with some comments or possibly a full review.

Regards,
Chris

Kalena's Answer:

Hello Chris

Thanks for thinking of me to review your SEO tool. I've had a look around the site I'm going to pass thanks. If I did write a review, I'm afraid it wouldn't be favorable because your concept doesn't offer any *real* value, but merely builds fake link popularity, which goes against practically everything in Google's webmaster guidelines. Because it's basically a membership site designed to generate traffic via a voting and points system from visitors in the same network, it's very open to manipulation and is, in my opinion, operating on flawed logic.

This "mutual optimization" idea has been tried before. It doesn't work because it only attracts the most aggressive clickers and the whole thing turns into a competition between 2 or 3 lazy webmasters who think traffic at any cost/quality is the way to run an online business. It's not. Unqualified traffic that's unlikely to convert to sales or sign-ups is only wasting your valuable bandwidth and hosting resources. Visitors that disappear from your site a few seconds after they arrive skew your site metrics and send a message to search engines that your site is not worth visiting. You want traffic from qualified leads, loyal repeat visitors and new visitors via highly targeted search queries.


Need more than advice? Take a Search Engine Marketing course online

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Two business tools I use every day

Ever take for granted the software or online services that you use every day? It's sometimes easy to overlook the impact such tools can have on your business. There are a couple of software tools that consistently impress me, every time I use them, despite the fact that I use them every single day.

The first of these is ProposalKit, which takes the chore out of creating and tailoring client proposals. With over 200 pre-designed self-guiding templates ready to fill in the blanks with your company, project/product/service and client information ProposalKit will get you on your way to writing your proposal immediately. ProposalKit provide the structure, layout, design, instructions and examples to get you well on your way before you even get started. What I like best about ProposalKit is the range of ProposalPack templates you can buy as add-ons to suit certain industries, such as Real Estate, Web Design, Consulting, SEO, Hosting etc. I just love this product.

The second one is Freshbooks. This little gem is an online invoicing, project management and time tracking service that saves you bundles of time and gives your business a professional image, no matter how small. We use it to invoice all our clients online and it can even be set up to automatically invoice recurring clients every month. It also has built in timesheets and project management tools so that all your staff can use the stop-watch to time the various tasks they do for certain clients and then bill those clients automatically at the end of the month based on the hours logged in the timesheet. I've raved about this product so much that they put my testimonial on their home page!

Anyway, just thought I'd share these with you and acknowledge the developers of these tools again to say thank you for making my life easier!

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Product Review: Submit Suite - Article Submitter

Here at Search Engine College we generate and receive a high volume of quality articles each month. So you can imagine we were interested to take up Cristina Mailat's request to review Fastlink2's latest product Submit Suite – Article Submitter.

Below is a list of features the product offers:

• Can submit an article to 647 article directories in a matter of hours.
• Author information/profile page, records all submission requirements for every article directory in the database.
• A directory can be selected or deselected from the list manually.
• Google page rank of each directory listed.
• Interface neat and easy to use.

Main benefits:

• Submission of article to multiple directories saves a large amount of time.
• Automatic article format to individual directory submission requirements – another huge time saver.
• Record keeping minimized as Article Submitter records which article has been posted, where and when.
• Research time minimized as database updated with new directories regularly.

Possible limitations:

• No multiple author/profile tool – limited to submitting articles by one author only. (Although Fastlink2 indicated later editions of this product will have multiple author capacity).
• Can not scheduele submissions for future posting.
• Can not submit multiple articles at same time.
• Can only submit to the directories contained in the database (Although it is possible to suggest a new article directory be included).
• Still some record keeping required by author as the software doesn’t store actual article content.

The Article Submitter is reasonably priced at USD $47.00 and would quickly pay for itself in regards to its time-saving capacity. Benefits are greatest for those who need it only for submitting their own articles. If you need to submit articles by several authors, then keep an eye out for future versions.




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Review: The Search Engine Marketing Glossary

[The following is a paid review for ReviewMe].

I've been asked to review Aaron Wall's Search Engine Marketing Glossary, for which I am happy to oblige.

I am constantly referring Search Engine College students to various search engine glossaries online but I'm yet to find a single one I'm impressed with. So I approach this review with my fingers crossed that this glossary will be a good one.

Here is my list of likes and dislikes about it:

Likes

• The layout is neat and the color scheme easy on the eyes.
  
  
• The definitions are located on the same page, saving the user additional clicks.
  
  
• The "Feedback" section of the site includes alternative sources of information including other glossaries - Aaron is clearly not precious about his site and has put usability first. I like that.
  
  
• Aaron welcomes feedback on the definitions and any problems with the site (e.g. broken links).
  
  
• Where a definition includes other definitions, links are included to those as well.
  
  
• Aaron admits personal bias in his definitions and explains some of those.
  
  
• Most definitions are very detailed and include several references to more information.
  
  
• There are some great definitions in there that I've not seen defined anywhere else e.g. "dayparting", "everflux" and "catch all listing".
  

Dislikes:

• There is no bookmarked list of terms being defined. You have to know the term you are looking for and scroll down until you find it.
  
  
• A few of the definitions aren't directly search engine related at all e.g. "server" and "cgi".
  
  
• There is no record of the number of definitions included. I would like to see a running total updated as it grows so I can compare it to other glossaries.
  
  

The verdict? Thumbs up for the Search Engine Marketing Glossary! Clearly the number of things I liked about it outweighed the number of things I didn't like. I will definitely be adding the site to our recommended student resources at Search Engine College.

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Proposal Kit launches 2006 upgrades

Ian from Proposal Kit has been in touch to let me know they have launched their 2006 upgrades this week, including new business proposal templates and design styles.

Major additions include:

* Proposal Kit Pro 10.0 has added 250 pages of new content
* More contracts, proposals and sample proposals
* Proposal Packs expanded for writing grant proposals
* Proposal Packs expanded for writing business plans
* Proposal Packs expanded for writing book proposals
* 18 new Proposal Pack graphic themes found here

Proposal Pack Wizard has also been upgraded to version 2.7. This is a free maintenance release with a lot of new features for anyone already using a previous version of Proposal Pack Wizard.

Click here for the complete list of additions and changes. If you are also a Proposal Kit or Proposal Pack user the upgrade details (how to upgrade, grace period for recent orders, upgrade costs, etc.). can be found via the same link.

Make sure you enter coupon code WEBRANK in the refer/upgrade field to receive 10% discount on your purchase.