Before I got into search marketing, I developed web software for a few different companies here in San Diego (I still do a bit for the time being).  Along the way, I’ve found several different tools to be invaluable when it comes to helping me complete my tasks and making my work life easier - I seriously don’t know how I used to develop before some of these tools were around.  There are other tools not mentioned here that I’m sure are helpful, so if you know of something significant that I’m missing feel free to leave a comment.

Command Line Interface (CLI)

The command line interface or shell, depending on the operating system (OS), is a text input program allowing you to enter text-based commands that control the OS.  The CLI is great for web developers because it allows us to, among other things, quickly search or modify a large number of files, run and administer programs, perform automatic updates and patches, etc. all at the control of our fingertips (no point and click necessary).  Here is what a typical command line looks like:

So all you really do is type in text commands and receive text output, seems pretty simple right?  Don’t let it’s simple interface fool you as this tool could be considered the most powerful tool of them all.

I really can’t stress enough how important the command line is - most all computer geeks worth the glasses on their heads know and love this tool.  You can even build shell “scripts” (files containing multiple shell commands) to perform complex, automated tasks - making your life very easy.  There are even whole books written on the command line interface, so unfortunately I won’t be able to do it much justice right now.

SSH (Secure Shell)

If you’re any web developer worth a hoot, you’ll know what ssh is - a network protocol which allows data to be exchanged between two points in a secure fashion.  You’ll need this to remotely and securely login via a shell and administer your web server or web apps.  SSH is a nice upgrade from the old, insecure telnet days.

A really nice and easy SSH tool I use all the time is Putty for windows, just download it, run it, enter your target host and away you go!  If you’re on a Mac or Linux box, you can just open up your pre-existing shell program and use the “ssh” command to start logging in to a remote host.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

FTP is pretty standard stuff in web development but is worth mentioning for new or aspiring web developers.  FTP is the protocol used to transfer files over the internet, period.  So when you transfer a new site or app you just built from your stagging server to your production, FTP is often used to do this.  A nice FTP client I use is firefox’s FireFTP pluggin, runs right in the web browser.

Subversion (SVN)

I’ve recently discover this wonderful, open source, code versioning control program.  I don’t know why but I really like the name too: Subversion allows you to track what changes where made to which files over time.  This can be a great way to develop on a test machine and then automatically migrate changes to a live, production machine so that customers experience instant updates (rather than seeing buggy web pages or error messages as you hack away).  You can also track which of your employees made which changes to which files, kind of nice when you want to know who screwed up and where.

Most linux installations have a form of subversion installed and is a pretty standard way to manage code/file changes.  The nice thing about subversion is that it’s not limited to tracking just programming code changes, you can manage any type of changes to any type of file.  I’ve also used perforce at my last employer before starting my business, although perforce is not open source and requires a license to run.

FireFox’s Web Developer Tool Bar extension

FireFox is a popular, open source web browser that is gaining market share - it’s a really good browser, mostly because of the many extensions that are available for the product.  One of these great extensions is the Web Developer Toolbar.

If you’re dealing with CSS then you will really want to have this tool.

The pluggin allows you to view CSS styles of a web page in real time, so you know which piece of code is causing which styling to appear on the page.  You can even edit CSS code to have changes appear to your page in real time.

IE 7’s CSS Tool Bar Plugin

To be honest, I really don’t like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser all that much, but since the majority of internet users are on it, we as web developers need to take it into consideration.  The browser is notorious for not following web standards and trying to re-invent the wheel when it comes to interpreting web page code - that means code that displays a certain way on all other browsers might not display the same way on IE, making things difficult for web developers.

Go ahead and download the IE CSS extension, it’ll shed light on those pesky IE CSS bugs.  Another tip that has helped me a lot is to utilize CSS conditional comments in your web page code to import IE specific style sheets whenever an IE browser accesses your web page.

Photoshop

I’ve been using Adobe’s Photoshop since the late 1990’s, around 10 years now (has it been that long?), and must say that I can’t live without this one.  Photoshop is available on windows or mac, while linux has it’s own open source version call Gimp.

One of the single most useful tasks I can do with Photoshop is check to see how many pixels wide something is on a web page.  So if I’m modifying a banner ad or looking to fit a new image onto a page and make everything look exactly right and in place, I can take a screen shot (print screen) of the current web page, import the image into Photoshop, highlight the area of interest and check to see how many pixels I have.

I’ve also designed countless logo concepts and modified countless more images to fit my perceptions.

I’m only scratching the surface of Adobe’s wonderful program, read more about it when you get chance.

Dreamweaver

Even though I’ currently looking for a replacement program, I use Adobe’s Dreamweaver almost every day to modify web page code.  It’s a pretty easy way to open up files via the FTP protocol and just do some straight code edits, or download a complete file set, perform local edits and then upload changes to a remote host.

A lot of experience web developers will cringe at the sound of “Dreamweaver” because sometimes the program can create extra, hidden, unwanted code in your files (which I am still unsure of why).  Not to mention Dreamweaver’s FTP saving featuring is painfully slow….wait….wait…….wait…FTP error occurred…. try again…. wait….wait……success.  Seriously, an FTP file transfer doesn’t take much overhead to run and Dreamweaver has some obvious problems to solve before we see an excellent product - but for now it will have to do.

I’m actually on a trend right now to avoid Dreamweaver and jump into more command line editing or CMS editing if I can as those would be cleaner ways to modify code.

Drupal

The Drupal framework is a very powerful and customizable open source content management system.  In laymen’s terms that means it’s like an instant website in a box that you can customize to your liking.  Drupal has many different software modules with the purpose of extending it’s functionality. - so you could bolt on a newsletter module, or an image upload module, or an e-commerce module to sell products, etc.  You can even create your own custom modules.  There are other CMS frameworks out there for web development purposes but none so far that I’ve seen which have such an easy hook system for custom module programming.

Google has a tool called “Google Trends” in their arsenal of gadgets that allows you to view relative search volumes and seasonal trends between two or more keyword phrases. Why is this useful? Because we can use trends to help guide our paid and organic search marketing campaigns.

Last week, Tech Crunch posed the question wondering if Google could predict the 2008 Presidential election. Not a bad idea, I thought, and dug a little deeper on the subject. Google Trends will let you pull up search volume data for broad keyword terms - so that means the tool will return results for broad keywords that are one, two or possibly three words long that have a certain amount of search volume. This is great because we can compare two or more keyword phrases side by side to find trends that we otherwise would have to wait and dig up from our analytics data over time.

Predicting Political Elections

Take the 2008 Democratic Presidential Nomination in which Obama won over Clinton:

By looking at the above line chart, it’s pretty clear that Google captured more search traffic for “Obama” than it did for “Clinton” since the start of this year (2008) - and we know Obama eventually won out. When you think about it, Google captures a portion of the world’s search traffic (Google Trends also allows you to drill down to United States only search traffic) and their sample size is a good bet at being fairly accurate, seeing that they own around 66% of the U.S. market share. So Google Trends to me sounds like it is able to make predictions with a certain degree of accuracy. The wheels are turning now. Could we start to see Google predict other things as well?

Now let’s look at Obama vs Mccain:

From this data, it seems the race between Obama and Mccain is not as close as the Obama, Clinton match-up. For kicks you may want to watch these numbers until the election in November and I’ll probably do a follow up post to review my personal prediction based on Google’s numbers. Based on this data, Obama appears the winner.

Find Seasonal Trends and Steady Traffic Patterns

A lot of the time you can determine which keywords you will want to utilize for your PPC campaigns and which keyword you will want to market your site with organically by looking at seasonal search vs steady search traffic volumes.

For example, on Google trends you can search for yearly events like “xmas gifts” that you think might yield seasonal trends:

As you might expect, people search for xmas gifts around christmas time. But notice how each year the search volume of people looking for xmas gifts keeps growing. Ever thought about turning on a few Adsense ads during that time?

Digging a little deeper on the gift subject I’ve decided to compare search trends for “xmas gifts”, “wedding gifts”, “personalized gifts” and “romantic gifts” to see if we can see any seasonal vs steady traffic trends:

“Xmas gifts” pales in comparison to the relative spike in “personalized gifts” so you may want to think about including the latter search term into your PPC campaign. Looking at the xmas trend, you could begin your PPC campaign early on while the curve is still relatively flat to test the market and snap up customers before advertiser volume and click price becomes too much. And since “personalized gifts” has a pretty large search volume throughout the year, a steady organic campaign might not be a bad investment.

We can also see, and I laughed at this, people tend to get married during the middle of the year or at least they are searching for “wedding gifts” at that time - again now you can see during what times of the year you’re going to want to invest into paid search when it comes to wedding gifts.

Another interesting point is the “romantic gifts” in green: people search for romantic gift ideas during the xmas period and Valentines day. I knew Valentines day was a big one but didn’t realize romantic gifts were that popular around the new year - and that’s what this tool is nice for, finding those otherwise hidden trends. Notice there is also a steady volume during the rest of the year, again probably not a bad organic search marketing investment.

Look at Recent, Hourly Data to Generate search Traffic

I was a bit surprised when I found Google trends now displaying the top 100 fastest growing or “hottest” search terms for the a given day. Google defines “hot” as keywords that “experience sudden surges in popularity… and displays those searches that deviate the most from their historic traffic pattern“. You can even see search traffic by hour!

You might be able to look at the hot trends and see what other people find exciting at the moment, then write a quick blog post that caters to the interest at hand to generate a bit of search traffic in your direction. I know that Google has a feature within their search engine that allows new website pages to rank very quickly if the indexed information is relevant and seems valuable to searchers - Google calls this feature Query Deserves Freshness.

What is Google Trends lacking?

I’d like to see the tool:

• Include a feature to drill down and see keyword broad, phrase and exact match
• Include results for terms that don’t have large traffic volumes
• Compare more than 5 keyword phrases
• Display a larger, optional data graph (for now you can download data in cvs format to build your own charts)
• Display search volume numbers (yea right)

What to be wary of

• Google trends appears to return results based on broad matching keywords. This means the search volume results contain data for your keyword phrase but also contain data for other searches that happen to contain the same keywords in different order. For example: if you were to compare “home” and “homes” on Google Trends you will get a larger search volume for “home” than you would for “homes”. But if you view Google’s Traffic estimator that breaks down “home” and “homes” by broad match, phrase match and exact match, you will see that the exact match for “home” gets almost no search traffic compared to the same term in a broad match. The Adwords website has more information on keyword matching types. Just remember, Google Trends returns broad matching keywords which will need further analysis to determine if it is a good choice for your campaign.
• Use Google’s Traffic Estimator to drill down, analyze and see a keyword phrase’s broad match, phrase match and exact match to eliminate poor keyword choices among words you find that have good potential on Google Trends.

What can you take away from all this?

If anything, know that Google Trends in combination with Google’s Traffic Estimator can be used to find out which keywords are better suited for PPC vs Organic search campaigns. Google uses time as a factor in addition to relative search volumes to give you seasonal/steady search traffic trends but also gives you a tool to drill down and see broad match, phrase match and exact matching keyword data. Your PPC campaign can take advantage of seasonal keyword trends while steady traffic would be at least be a good candidate for organic search marketing.

If you haven’t already tried it, check out seodigger, a nice free tool that generates keyword ranking lookups for domains. In other words, if you browse to seodigger and type in a site URL like “http://www.bestrank.com” then you’ll get a whole distribution of the top keyword positions on Google for that domain. The tool also allows you to pull in and compare Google Adwords advertiser volume, competition volume, Wordtracker search volume and Overture search volume for each keyword position. Nice!

Why this tool is good:

• Quick and easy way to eye ball the top keywords a website ranks for, yours or your competition’s. You can see what’s working and what’s not for both you and your competition.
• Good way to generate keyword ideas by looking at a distribution of related keywords.
• Keyword rank and search volume comparisons allow you to see which keywords you should be targeting more aggressively in the organic search, because higher search volumes can pay off with a higher keyword rank.
• Offers a nice API so that you can pull in keyword data for your own applications.

Why this tool isn’t good:

• Doesn’t have data on all web sites. SEOdigger only knows about domains that people request results for. So if you punch in any random domain you might not get anything back - until they get around to compiling results on that domain per your original request.
• Keyword ranking data can sometimes be a few months old. They take their time to update results
• Limits your number of search queries for the non-paid version… but allows you to sign up to receive more queries per day.

Despite it’s drawbacks, seodigger is still good because it gives you at least a snap shot from a certain point in the past on a domain’s organic keyword distribution - and that’s worth a look.

Today we’ve created a new simple tool you can use to see the number of links that point at your website (back links). All data is taken from Yahoo! site explorer. This tool is useful in determining the amount of work necessary to catch up to your competitors’ web sites, in terms of link popularity.  More work will be done in the future to improve the tool’s function, more to come later…