Software for SEO - standard tools for standard usage

This is a list of less specialized tools I use when working on SEO - here I show the standard tools for management of site seo, that can also be used for many other aspects of site maintenance, content development, digital strategy.

A big part of my job is  management of seo processes, from the writing of business cases, participating in building a BRD or I have to come up with requirements, define and establish processes, convince stakeholders to fund or to update content or to join projects.

Spending more hours in meetings and preparing them than in any other part of my role, this shows in the list of tools I use. Analytics are another joyful part of my role - mainly combining data from various sources, and social media engagement.

Absolut top are Microsoft powerpoint, outlook and excel. Take anything but these and I'll do ok. 

I tried to sort this by importance, but that varies from project to project, time to time, that it can only be a rough estimate:

• Onenote
• Lync
• Sharepoint
• Chatter 
• Freemind
• Notepad ++
• Photoshop elements (Adobe)
• MS Project 
• Cutepdf
• Gnu-utils (cygwin)
• Rssowl

This list does not include specific seo tools. Especially for the linkbuilding and technical aspects, nor does it cover online only  / mainly tools or social media tools (working on these lists).

Anything I miss or should take a close look at? Which other tool could increase my productivity?

Alexa Top 20 internet websites and Google Plus public ripples

Alexa publishes a list (under the ad on the right rail) for download with the top 1 million websites based on estimated traffic. Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, are just a few of the well known brands in the top of this list.

I wanted to check how this list compares to the ripples (A ripple is a public share of a page via Google Plus.) companies get on their homepages, and used my little script to do exactly that  for the top 1000 companies' homepages (only homepage!):

Top 20 homepages sorted by traffic according to Alexa.com. I then pulled the script to check for ripples of url from a textfile, and got this list. Then I added the numbers for rank by traffic and rank by number of ripples, and compared these. All of the top 1000 urls have the same rank by traffic and by ripples.

rank traffic	url homepage	ripples	rank by ripples	rank unmatch
1	facebook.com	5793	1	TRUE
2	google.com	5560	2	TRUE
3	apple.com	5109	3	TRUE
4	twitter.com	4826	4	TRUE
5	youtube.com	4629	5	TRUE
6	delicious.com	2507	6	TRUE
7	twoo.com	2362	7	TRUE
8	blogger.com	2289	8	TRUE
9	reddit.com	2066	9	TRUE
10	flickr.com	2058	10	TRUE
11	amazon.com	1895	11	TRUE
12	archive.org	1713	12	TRUE
13	google.com.hk	1622	13	TRUE
14	500px.com	1582	14	TRUE
15	mashable.com	1514	15	TRUE
16	stackoverflow.com	1440	16	TRUE
17	w3schools.com	1396	17	TRUE
18	9gag.com	1392	18	TRUE
19	scribd.com	1338	19	TRUE
20	goo.gl	1330	20	TRUE

Several were a surprise, I would have expected more retailers on this list and wikipedia - I was wrong. Twoo was a big surprise, but there's a lot of bad rep I got when searching for them.

The biggest surprise of all for me is that people share homepages of all these on G+, though, except for the shortener goo.gl.

You can download the list of all top 1000 homepage ripples numbers here.