Unique Website/Blog Evaluation Tools
Hope you enjoyed your Christmas!
I'm picking up where Mary of RSS Pieces left off with her 10 best SEO Web Tools . With the Google Page Ranking date coming up, I'm compiling a list of website/blog evaluation and SEO sites...
A business model question pops into mind... there are literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of free SEO sites offering applications of varying degrees of usefulness (here's a list of 156 of them), how do they all make money beyond attracting webmasters and bloggers for ad dollars?
Here are three apps I find most interesting:
IceRocket, a blog search engine backed by Mark Cuban of Dallas Mavericks fame, has a fascinating tool I haven't seen before. Blog Trends Tool tracks "blog post citations" for given search terms on a daily basis. For example, it can track blog "buzz" on citations about keywords Shaq and Kobe. If the search terms are blog urls, this tool basically tracks inbound links. Kevin at 3Oceans and I have observed that our readerships are fairly similar, and our content sometimes coincide. Check out our coinciding linkage comparison -
(pardon the poor graphic) note the blips on December 7 and 19 occurred when both of us covered the new Zillow offering and the Yankee Blog Swap, and a lot of pre-Swap publicity activity occurred on the days preceding December 19. This tool is effective for visually appreciating which articles had impact.
I found Blog Trend Tools while reading a very funny must-read post by Mark Cuban about how Donald Trump is completely clueless about blogging. He then presents the Blog Trend showing Rosie O'Donnell's blog (she gets it) whoopping on Trump's blog in terms of buzz.
(btw, I can't vouch for the accuracy of Icerocket's blog search engine, it seems to miss many of the results I usually get from Technorati)
MarketLeap has a link popularity check tool that analyzes linkage from seven major search engines and generates an industry benchmark report specific to real estate. Most SE link checkers I've seen don't benchmark by industry. Interesting to compare real estate blogs with IDX sites to demonstrate how much more effective blogs are in link popularity.
Quantcast was reviewed by Joel at FoREM and me in mid-November. Quantcast's secret sauce is its ability to project demographic data on, say, ethnicity or income, from the visitors of a site without actually surveying the visitors. Both Joel and I independently tested Quantcast out and I returned to the site again to see if either FoREM or Transparent would have enough history to project "who" our readers are. Well, I'm assuming both our traffic are too small to project demographics after a month of data gathering... neither of our sites had any demographic results. For comparison, look at Quantcast's rich Zillow profile (note how many Asians are proportionately attracted to Zillow).
Technorati Tags: blog search, icerocket, mark cuban, quantcast, marketleap, blog trends, seo, search engine, link popularity
Pat - I tested Quantcast twice on a site I have been tracking with Google analytics for a year. Also, I am very familiar with the demographic of the school the site represents. The results that Quantcast returned were similar to the Donald's deep groking of blogging - totally unrealistic.
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John, I appreciated hearing your Quantcast test and its faulty empirical results today... Quantcast's credibility really is on the line if they don't make their methodology more transparent.
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The WeBuildPages and MarketLeap tools are excellent. Use them all the time.
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Very cool, Pat. The trend tool on Icerocket is a great resource. I like Market Leap too. Soldi compilation of useful tools for tracking blog success.
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