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Internet marketing is not difficult, but it is very time consuming. Use the right tools and you decrease the time between starting an online campaign and seeing your desired results.
Your challenge is finding the right tools. In our best practice research, we have uncovered several excellent tools, which help lessen the burden and can improve results. We summarize our findings below.
For more complete information, please take our Internet Marketing Tools Survey.
All survey participants will receive a summary the survey results. As a thank you for taking the survey, we will give you $300 worth of Internet marketing tools for free. We are using the results of this survey to identify the best-of-breed for Internet marketing tools.
Primary use: To uncover the keywords (or keyword phrases) your customers are searching for right now.
Basic Information: A keyword (or keyword phrase) is the search string that people use when searching on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Most searchers use at least 3 words. If the phrase is longer than the typical number of keywords, it is called a “long tail keyword”. These long tail keywords are very useful for search marketing because they are often face less competition.
Why Use: Internet marketing is a race to the top of the search engine results page. When your ideal customers need to solve a problem, they will search on the Internet for information, tips and even vendors. Searchers enter their query on a search engine (SE) and the SE displays a page with results matching that query.
You want to understand the language of your target searchers and how much competition you face on each potential keyword. The best tools will give you a list of keywords that individuals use in their searches. The top tools also provide details on each keyword’s competitive landscape. You should select keywords that are highly relevant to your message and less competitive.
Some of the top keyword research tools for Internet marketing include:
Google’s External Keyword Tool
Keyword Discovery by Trellian
Wordze
Primary use: Tools used to see the keywords your competitors target can help you determine the volume of traffic your competitors’ Web sites receive. Some of these tools can also identify the sites linking to your competitors’ sites.
Basic Information: Competitive Research tools gather a variety of information on Web sites. These tools will often use “inferred” information based on search patterns. For example, some competitive research tools aggregate data from a participating panel of thousands of Internet searchers. Others actually place JavaScript (with permission) on an individual web site and provide aggregate data from those web sites.
Why Use: If you want to rank well for a particular keyword, you will need to choose words with the least or the weakest competition. Also, if you find a competing site constantly outranks your site, these tools can help determine why. Many of the best tools will tell you the keywords for which a competing site ranks. Some to tools will also reveal the strength of a competitor's positioning.
Essentially, you want to study web sites that rank high for your target keywords in order to improve your own rankings. Competitive research is crucial during two phases of the SEO campaign. First, when you start the process, information about competitors and competitor’s strengths help you select the best keyword focus. Secondly, after you complete the first phase, you can use this information to increase (or maintain) your rankings.
Some of the top competitive research tools for Internet marketing include:
Compete
Trellian Competitive Intelligence
Yahoo Site Explorer
Primary use: To manage your online PPC advertising campaigns.
Basic Information: You should not just set up a PPC campaign and walk away from it. You need to regularly monitor your campaigns daily in many cases. For some high-priced keywords in new campaigns, some people monitor the campaign hourly.
Why Use: Managing multiple campaigns across multiple PPC ad systems (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc) is time consuming. If you are only running a PPC campaign on Google, you may not need an external management tool. Google offers good PPC management tools on its site and a desktop tool. If you are running complicated campaigns on 2 or 3 systems, you will find that third-party management tools make your tasks easier. The best tools can help you spot trends across accounts easily and will save you money over time.
Many third-party tools help combat click fraud. Click-fraud occurs when someone clicks on your PPC ad to drive up your costs or to increase their revenue. If you are concerned about click-fraud, you should consider a third-party tool.
These tools can be helpful because they are independent of the PPC advertising systems. Google, for example, assigns a quality score to each keyword in a campaign. If Google gives a keyword a low score, they will not explain exactly why. Some of the third-party tools may be more helpful in this situation.
Some of the best PPC Management tools include:
Atlas Search (formerly Atlas Onepoint)
KeywordMax
ClickSweeper
Primary use: To analyze the backlinks (in-bound links) coming to your site from other sites and to manage the process of acquiring backlinks.
Basic Information: If you want to drive more traffic to your Web site, backlinks are important for two reasons. First, backlinks can bring more visitors to the Web page to which they link. Secondly, Google and other search engines look at the quantity and quality of inbound links to a page to determine a page’s rank. You should have an ongoing effort to attract quality inbound links, especially from relevant, authoritative Web sites.
Why Use: Analyzing your competitor’s inbound links and acquiring inbound links for your Web site can be a time consuming process. The best link analysis and link building automate some of the more tedious tasks of link building.
Some
of the top link analysis and link building tools for Internet marketing include:
Yahoo! Site Explorer
Majestic SEO
SEMOZ
Primary use: To place articles online to acquire quality backlinks to your SEO-targeted pages.
Basic Information: Google and the search engines value quality incoming links to a Web site. These search engines discount (or ignore) reciprocal links and link pages. The search engines prefer one-way links in the body copy of a page. One great way to generate these types of links is writing articles with links to your targeted pages.
Why Use: The Internet includes hundreds of article directories that will allow you to publish articles (often for free). The challenge now is that most directories are so crowded, you must submit a lot of articles to really see results. With each article directory requiring a different protocol for submitting articles, you can easily spend a lot of time just on the submission process. These tools can make the article submission process easier.
Some of
the top article marketing tools for Internet marketing include:
Automatic Article Submitter
Unique Article Wizard
Magic Article Submitter
Primary use: Search analytics tools give you an idea of how well your Web site is performing. These tools enable you to set a baseline and measure performance toward reaching your goals
Basic Information: You will find two basic types of Web site analytics tools. The first type resides on your server. Many ISPs provide these packages as part of their hosting package. With the second type, you install code on the pages of your Web site. You can then access the information and reports from the off-site programs through your browser by entering your ID and passwords. With some search analytics programs you can capture information about your potential audience.
Why Use: As the old saying goes if you cannot measure it you cannot manage it. You really must know what is happening on your Web site in order to make good strategic decisions. Did that last article marketing campaign drive a lot of new traffic to your Web site? Has your search engine results improved since you added new SEO copy? Good analytics packages will give you the information you need to answers these questions and more. In addition to helping with analyze your Web site, you will find very valuable nuggets for market research.
Some
the best web site and search analytics tools for Internet marketing include:
Google Analytics
Awstats
Web Trends
If have you are an experienced Google Analytics user, we suggest:
Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton
If you are a beginning Google Analytics user, we suggest:
Google Analytics 3rd Edition by Jerri L Ledford
If you need help monitoring your keyword positions, please see our SEO services page.
Additional Internet Marketing Tools
You may also find the following tools useful.
Keyword analyzer. This tool checks for the number of times a word appears on a page
Robot.txt file creator. This tool helps you create the robot.txt file, which helps guide the search engines in indexing your Web site.
If you need assistance in researching your competitors’ online success, send an email to:
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