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Top 5 Free SEO iPad Apps

For many of us, the iPad has become our portable business tool of choice. It isn’t uncommon to see multiple people pull out their iPad for notetaking or to a review a website during a meeting.

With that in mind, here are five free essential apps that every SEOshould have on their iPad.

Quick SEO Site Review App

SiteAnalyserSiteAnalyser

Price: Free
iTunes Link:http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/website-seo-analyser/id384402373?mt=8

Multitudes of Firefox and Chrome plug-ins can show you PageRank, inlinks, and more. But sometimes you just need to pull the essential high-level stats from a website. The easier the better.

SiteAnalyser, a free SEO iPhone app, fits the bill. It gives you quick access to PR, links, page size, load time, meta data, header tags, age — basically all the top-level info you might need on the fly in a meeting.

Google Analytics for iPad

Google Analytics iPad

Price: Free (for Lite Version)
iTunes Link:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/analytics-for-ipad/id373676475?mt=8

This app brings a nice touch interface to the reports that we’re all familiar with from Analytics. The app is pretty powerful. Apart from anything advanced you might be undertaking, this suits the bill pretty well for quickly running a report or showing a client their top keywords or visitors with all the familiar segmenting of metrics that you probably do.

As a nice bonus, double-tapping on any report will bring it up full screen so it’s easier for others to see. The free version only shows you 10 rows of data, and won’t let you export which should be fine for most light reporting on the go. If you need some more advanced features, they unlock for $6.99

RavenTools

RavenTools iPad

Price: Free (RavenTools plans billed seperately)
iTunes Link:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/raven-tools/id378570397?mt=8

If you have a RavenTools account, then you should definitely keep the companion Raven app on your iPad. It can nicely supplement the Google Analytics app, while giving you some familiar features and tools while you’re on the go.

You can quickly build out a dashboard with modules for review and drilling into any of the modules takes you to the actual report in app. From there you can e-mail, have access to your familiar tools, and do some research.

This might not be as helpful in a meeting, but it’s handy to have while your laptop takes a nap back at the hotel room. Another cool time-saving feature: once you log in, you have access to all the websites in your account.

WordPress for iPad

WordPress iPad

Price: Free
iTunes Link:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wordpress/id335703880?mt=8

One thing I constantly find myself doing is writing, editing, and optimizing blogs through the magic of WordPress. Now I never expected to get really down and dirty with my optimization efforts through an iPad, but I did expect to be able to do basic maintenance, approve comments, and create blog posts.

Safari on the iPad had different plans, however, so I found myself searching for an app. Lo and behold: WordPress for iPad! It covers your fundamentals (and multiple blogs) quite nicely and has become quite essential while traveling.

VNC

VNC iPad

Price: Free
iTunes Link:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mocha-vnc-lite/id284984448?mt=8

If there’s one thing you’re bound to do from time to time, it’s forget something at the office. Usually, this happens at the least opportune moment possible and creates an instant headache.

Unless you have everything in the cloud, you might find yourself with lingering ties to the desktop. When these moments happen, I have a free VNC server running in the background on my Windows machine.

For an iPad client, I’ve been quite happy with using Mocha VNC Lite. It does everything I would want it to do and gives instant access to my desktop from hundreds of miles away. Additionally, should you ever have a need to view a Flash website from your iPad and you find yourself cursing Steve Jobs under your breath, you can use VNC as a workaround.

 

Reference from:http://searchenginewatch.com/3641862

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Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required – businesses can utilize a free usage tier and after that enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer fees.

Building large-scale email solutions to send marketing and transactional messages is often a complex and costly challenge for businesses. To optimize the percentage of emails that are successfully delivered, businesses must deal with hassles such as email server management, network configuration, and meeting rigorous Internet Service Provider (ISP) standards for email content. Additionally, many third-party email solutions require contract and price negotiations, as well as significant up-front costs.

Amazon SES eliminates these challenges and enables businesses to benefit from the years of experience and sophisticated email infrastructure Amazon.com has built to serve its own large-scale customer base. Through a simple API call, businesses can now access a high-quality, scalable email infrastructure to efficiently and inexpensively communicate to their customers. For high email deliverability, Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to scan a business’s outgoing email messages to help ensure that the content meets ISP standards. The email message is then either queued for sending or routed back to the sender for corrective action. To help businesses further improve the quality of email communications with their customers, Amazon SES provides a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.

Reference from: http://aws.amazon.com/ses/

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Ads on Google Images

Guide to Image Search Ads on Google Images

Creating an Image Search Ad for Google Images is a great way to reach your audience while they search for images. This ad format combines an image with text, offering richer, more relevant advertising on Google Images search results pages. In this guide, we’ll describe how to create an Image Search Ad and offer best practices for optimizing your ad performance.

Overview

Image Search Ads include the following:

  • Audience: These ads will appear only on Google Images through keyword targeting.
  • Performance: You can review specific performance metrics for your ads on Google Images.
  • Cost: Image Search Ads are priced as a standard AdWords ad with cost-per-click (CPC) pricing.
  • Ad Management: You can create Image Search Ads using the Display Ad Builder. Use a template to pair relevant ad text with a targeted, engaging image.

Create an Image Search Ad

For the best performance, we recommend that you build a new ad group specifically for your Image Search Ads.

To create an Image Search Ad, follow these steps:

  1. Sign in to your account at https://adwords.google.com
  2. Select the campaign or ad group where you want to create your ad.
  3. Click the Ads tab.
  4. Select Display ad builder from the “New ad” drop-down menu above the statistics table.
  5. Select Templates for search from the list of categories.
  6. Choose the Image Search Ad template.
  7. Complete the form for the template and upload your image. You’ll be able to preview your ad before saving and submitting.
  8. Click Save Ad.
  9. Ensure that the “Networks and devices” setting on your campaign’s Settings tab are opted in to the Search Network (i.e., that both “Google search” and “Search partners” are selected). Learn how
  10. Optional: Read our Google Images Best Practices Guide: Image Search Ads and Product Extensions

Reference from: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=184331

 

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Change Google Compaign Precedence

Goolge Analytics attributes conversion to the most recent campaign.

To attribute conversions to the first campaign, tag all campaign links with utm_nooverride=1

Google Analytics attributes conversions to the campaign that most recently referred the visitor.
For example, let’s say that someone discovers your site by clicking one of your AdWords ads.
Then, they come back to your site by clicking a banner ad that you’ve tagged with campaign variables. This time, they convert to one of your goals.By default, the banner ad will get the credit for the conversion, not the AdWords ad that originally referred them.To change this behavior, you can tag all of your campaign links with utm_nooverride=1.
If you do this consistently with all of your campaigns, Google Analytics will attribute conversions to the first referring campaign, instead of the most recent one.
Note that the utm_nooverride setting can be used in conjunction with autotagging.

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Top 10 Local Search Insights for the Moment

By Frank Watson | Nov 5, 2010

Without a doubt, local search is the topic getting the most coverage within our industry at the moment. Changes to the algorithm, moveable maps, the importance of adding physical addresses, and review site influences have all been written about. So I figured I’d give a little overview of recent actions and reactions to bring any sidetracked by work or other outside influences up to speed.

1. Google Improves Location-Based Results Seems Google is working toward really improving their location based results. Yellow pages — even the online ones — have taken a hit, and the scramble for improving search results for local businesses has begun. “Local search is growing in popularity as consumers shift from traditional phone book directories to finding products and services online. According to Google, 20 percent of all search queries are local in nature,” Jon Schepke wrote a few days ago. The article also offers several good tips. This a huge market. Google has dispatched one of their senior players, Marissa Mayer, into this arena, which should signal what a huge deal local searches are on Google.

2. Google Places: An Essential Tool for Local Marketing Basically, Google gives local placement in return for having businesses fill in the information and building their yellow page killer for them. Everyone who fills in their Google Place information helps — themselves, as well as Google’s efforts. And the spammers are being picked off, along with legitimate brick-and-mortar sites, as discussions at Google Groups have noted. The need to stay informed on what is impacting listings in Google Places is essential to every local business or the companies that handle their marketing. What can you do? Have addresses in the footers of your site that link to in your Places listing, add bold and H tags to location phrases, and make sure you’re mentioned in the review sites, to name a few (feel free to add more suggestions in the comments section below).

3. Mobile is a Big Player in the Location Game Searches on smartphones allow us to find locations while we’re on the go — whether it’s a local restaurant, business, or anything else we’re looking to physically find in the real world. Optimizing a businesses location so that it is found in mobile searches has become a hybrid part of local marketing. Google knows that the percentage of local searches is higher when done through smartphones. Adopting best practices for this platform is another area online marketers must add to their arsenal. “More than 100 million people a month use Google Maps from mobile phones to find directions and information,” according to another Search Engine Watch article on local-mobile-social convergence. The ones that find your website should be able to look at it in its most optimized format — using version redirects according to browser platforms is a good start.

4. Twitter: A Powerful Local Tool People listen to one another. The immediacy of suggestions from Twitter followers is amazing. Businesses with local followers can drive traffic to their locations. The Korean BBQ food truck in Los Angeles that uses Twitter to inform people of their impending service locations is a great example of its use.

5. Yelp, Foursqaure, Other Location Review Sites The importance of these sites and their impact on local marketing can’t be stressed enough. Google uses the reviews to populate information on the sites in Google Places — the number and quality of the reviews seems to have an impact on rankings.

6. Internal Pages Given New Importance Recent changes to Google’s algorithm have been showing internal pages in the SERPs where home page listings once held the spots. Thanks to Josh McCoy for his detailed report on this.

7. Don’t Forget Yahoo and Microsoft Even though Google has the larger share of all search, the Bing/Yahoo alliance gives them a significant share of the market and shouldn’t be taken for granted — your smarter competitors won’t. There is Yahoo Local and Bing Local Business Center. Also, don’t forget places like GetListed.org or Best of the Web Local.

8. Local Has Its Own Ranking Methods David Mihm has a great article about how to track local ranking factors — a must read for all marketers.

9. Don’t Forget the Basics Regardless of all the additional aspects of local online marketing, you should never drop the ball on the basic SEO methods. Obviously, attention to location keywords is important, but using regular methods remains a must.

10. Track Everything and Use What Works All of the steps above should be tried — but make sure you’re tracking what is working. Some businesses will gain more from a few of these than they do from others. Concentrate on the areas that best help each specific business. I haven’t seen a lot of recommendations for gynecologists on Twitter, but I’m sure women are doing location searches at the engines. It’s a new game and the importance of local marketing has created a growing niche that will be important for online marketers and small local businesses

Reference from: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641528