Thursday, November 14, 2013

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?

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

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.
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