Masterclass: The Essential SEO Toolkit for better search rankings

Many SEO consultants say they never use tools for their work. This is not true. They have to use at least one authoritative tool:  Google Search and possibly Yahoo Search. Yes, the search engines are the primary tool for competitive research, reverse-engineering of the algorithms, and to make ranking checks.

In this series we have already covered the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and the Google Webmaster Tools. They are among the most important tools you will use. Many websites offer online and desktop tools to make your SEO work easier. It is easy to get into “tool overload” where you waste time on a new tool that does the same task as another. Here are some tools that I use.

Web-based tools -

SEOmoz:

Rand Fishkin and his team run SEOmoz.org, a great resource with many free features and a few paid options. I subscribe to the daily SEO blog post, as it is one of the best ways to learn from experts. The site provides several useful tools, including:

    * Linkscape - a professional grade backlink tool that uses patented metrics to give you a measure of your backlinks. These are mozRank, mozTrust and Domain Juice. Since we can’t get Google’s measurements, SEOmoz has come up with its own benchmarks based on analysing millions of pages. This tells me, for example, that a link from a certain blog passes more link juice than one from another site. For those of you who buy links, this could be a great way to assess the value of a link. The detailed report requires a paid subscription and this tool alone may justify the cost. It is also available as a Firefox plugin.
    * Trifecta Tool Set gives you the number of sites/pages that link to you; the number of times your brand is mentioned on the web; and how much traffic your site receives.
    * Term Target tells you how well a given page is optimised for a keyphrase.
    * Rank Tracker enables you to check, track, and monitor your rankings at all the major search engines.
    * Juicy Link Finder helps you to find links that have authority, such as old domains with a high PageRank that rank well for your keyphrase.
    * Backlink Analysis tells you the anchor text used by the linking sites.

SEObook:

Aaron Wall operates seobook.com, which is focused on his ebook, but also has some useful tools:

    * Keyword Suggestion Tool. Although US-centric, this tool produces a wealth of related keyphrases and their search statistics from several sources.
    * SEO for Firefox. This tool will display details about every result in a Google or Yahoo search, such as PageRank, Age, types of backlinks, Delicious.com bookmarks, and a lot more.


HitTail:

HitTail shows you real-time visitor and keywords information. Even a free account is quite useful. Such analysis could show if your site is coming up for unintended search terms. If they are inappropriate (they chew up bandwidth), you can reword your pages.

Source: Apcmag.com

Nokia N8 Plug and Touch concept turns your TV into a touchscreen

Nokia N8 Deals

Nokia is developing camera software which could turn any old TV into a touchscreen, and may eventually lead to Iron Man-style air-touch technology for everyone -- not just troubled billionaire geniuses.

Plug and Touch is deceptively simple: point the N8 smart phone's camera at a HDTV, and connect to the same TV using an HDMI cable. The TV then becomes an extension of the phone -- a giant touchscreen. Marshall Chang, from Nokia Research in Beijing, showed off the tech at last week's Nokia World in a video on the Nokia blog.

When Chang made gestures close in front of the TV (you don't have to touch, but it helps) the N8 picked it up and responded to the action. It only needed the download of a 34K application and to be fixed in a clamp, although eventually it might just need to face the screen. Currently the technology only recognises the click and vertical scrolling controls and suffers some lag.

"I assume you've seen Iron Man," Chang said. "You know in his lab we've seen 3D things and he's interacting in the air? One day I'd love to see it, where we have a device that pops up a user interface in the air that we can interact with.

"In order to do that we have to figure out how to interact with that, how this device can track the gestures that we are doing. This is our first step to getting to that point."

Last week we saw Nokia's work on a Star Trek communicator phone, further demonstrating that the Finnish company is still beavering away behind the scenes on research, despite its much publicised problems in the high-end smart phone market.

With the release of the N8, C6-O1, C7 and E7, Nokia is making a comeback of sorts, but what the company really needs is a game changer. With the N9 due before Christmas and possibly running the new mobile OS MeeGo, could it have one?

Source: Crave.cnet.co.uk

PS3 Jailbreak now available on Nokia N900

Nokia N900 Mobile

Since we first looked at the pirate-friendly PSJailbreak dongle for the PS3, things haven’t been going too well for the developers behind it. First, it has been ironically pirated itself and at least one importer has had a shipment seized by Australian customs officials. Now, someone has made an open source version of the hack that you can perform with the help of the Nokia N900.

PSFreedom is an open source version of the PSJailbreak program which normally requires a specialised USB dongle. The hack has now been reworked to run on a Nokia N900 (N810 and Palm Pre versions also exist, apparently). Some level of tech expertise is required and you need to fiddle around with the eject button while you boot – but this still looks pretty simple to do and will no doubt be giving someone at Sony a headache.