Blogging is one of the most popular activities people do on the Internet today. According to Technorati, there currently are seventy-five thousand (75,000) new blogs everyday and about 1.2 million new blog updates everyday. As the activity of blogging gets more popular, there will be more and more tools that will be created to specifically address the needs of the blogging population of the Internet users. This article will attempt to catalog some of the best ever blogging tools created for users. To help users find the tools that they need, these blog tools are classified here into four main categories – blog publishing, blog reading, blog searching and the blog toolbox – a collection of tools important to the serious blogger.

Blog publishing

Blog publishing tools can be further categorized into three sub-categories: Online blogging services, do-it-yourself blog publishing platforms, and accessory blog-publishing tools. Blogging services provide the blog engine that you need to get yourself started in blogging as well as the hosting. Though most of the services offer this for free, some of them require that you become paying members in order to fully enjoy all the benefits.

Blogger – Google’s Blogger is one of the earliest blogging services and it helped popularize blogging. It is one of the easiest ways to get started blogging because of the focus on usability and easy blog creation. The Blog this feature, which is integrated in many Google tools, makes posting to Blogger possible in many different situations. It is also integrated with Google’s Adsense advertising program that makes monetization of your blog quick and easy.

TypePad – Typepad is the largest paid-blogging service around. As mentioned, a paid subscription is required to create a blog using the service. It uses the Movable Type blogging technology but it caters more to the non-technical users.

Wordpress.com – one of the newcomers in the online blogging services, Wordpress gets its credibility from the success and popularity of the blogging engine that it uses -Wordpress.

Xanga – Xanga is one of the largest blog-networks, boasting a user base of 27 million users worldwide. It edges over its competitors by offering excellent community features such as blog rings, metros, and a social networking profile system.

MSN Spaces – Although it is relatively a newcomer in the blogging services space, MSN Spaces boasts of a huge user base, because of the ease at which existing MSN services users were able to start blogging. The integration with the rest of MSN’s services (hotmail, messenger) makes Spaces a very good blogging option for the existing users.

Do-it-yourself blogging platforms on the other hand, only provide the blogging engine. Although you have to find your own hosting service, DIY blogging platforms give you more control in configuring your blog. Below are some of the best DIY Blogging platforms.

Movable Type – Movable Type powers TypePad and it adds the usual advantages of a server-side blogging platform: flexibility, more advanced configuration, and total control over your blog.

Wordpress – Wordpress is an increasingly popular open-source blogging platform that is written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database.

Radio Userland – Radio Userland, one of the earliest content management systems used by the pioneering bloggers, is still a good blogging platform choice. It has solid RSS features that include a built-in aggregator. Configuration is done in a desktop web server then it is upstreamed or sync to the web server. This gives the blogger a cached copy of the whole blog.

Blog posting tools are third-party applications that are used to compose and publish blog posts. These tools usually support multiple blogging services and are ideal for those without a persistent Internet connection.

W. Bloggar and BlogJet – these are two of the best blog-posting tools in the market, and both are available for free. They support almost all of the blogging platforms. They do what most web-based posting apps does, including rich text editing, with the added feature of being able to save your drafts offline.

Performancing for Firefox – a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows you to immediately compose a blog post while using the Firefox browser. It is Ideal for active bloggers who use Firefox as their web browser. It automatically saves your unpublished posts.

Blog Reading

RSS/Atom aggregators and other RSS tools belong to this category.

My Yahoo – My Yahoo tried to bring the concept of RSS subscription to the Internet masses. Though it lacks the more advanced features, it serves well as a good aggregator.

Google Reader – Google’s web-based RSS aggregator that features an AJAX-driven user interface. It has a good support for tags or labels, and features a very nice reading interface. One of its best features is its labels-sharing feature that allows you to put aggregated content to your blog.

Bloglines – Bloglines is one of the most widely-used web-based RSS Reader. It uses the traditional two-frame reading interface, and subscriptions are grouped into folders. It has a good blog-suggest feature, that uses linking analysis to suggest which blogs might be of interest to you based on your existing subscription set. You can also share your subscriptions using Bloglines.

Blog Search

Tools used to search information and blogs, and to watch the blogosphere for topics or issues being actively discussed.

Technorati – Technorati is one of the best blog search engine, feature wise, and is indexing over 49.4 million web blogs. It serves as a one-stop shop for those who want to know the current happenings in the blogosphere, including features such as blog ranking based on linking, personal aggregator (for those who login) and many other nifty tools.

Sphere – one of the newcomers in blog search that came even after many other engines have folded down already. It promised to deliver more relevant blog search results, and it rightfully did so, as attested by its early beta testers. It features a “sphere it” feature that allows you automatically query http://sphere.com to see topics that might be related to what you’re currently reading.

Blogger’s Toolbox

A collection of other tools essential to the serious blogger

Mint / Measure Map /Google Analytics – these are three different tools used to analyze your blog statistics. Mint specializes in giving you a big-picture snapshot of your traffic, somewhat lacking in the providing specific details, something that Google Analytics is good at. Analytics can provide detailed information on what’s happening on your blog, which contents are popular, what keywords used in searches that bring you readers, and many others. It features a calendar to specify the time range of the analysis that you want to see. Measure Map, like Analytics is a fresh acquisition of Google, but still in early stages. It somewhat sits in the middle of Mint and Google Map in terms of what information is provided.

Akismet – Akismet is a highly-acclaimed anti-comment spam plugin for Wordpress blogs. It is free for personal use.

Feedburner – Feedburner is a tool that “burns” your RSS feeds in order to add tracking and analysis features. This way you can see statistics regarding your RSS subscribers.

The tools listed above are just a few of the many others that can help users; from those who are just starting to blog to those who want to become even better bloggers. It also includes some tools for searching and aggregating blogs, because a good blogger must learn to watch the blogosphere closely if it wants to be able to make more effective blog contents.

Useful Web tools from Google: – there are many free tools provided by google for users such as

Webpage Creator: very useful if any one to start small website and want to publish his content for public.

Online Note Book : clip and collect information while surfing the net

Google Docs: anyone can create online document and access anywhere from the world.

All the tool in above list are very useful but apart form this list some are very useful that are Analytics and Webmaster. Both are very useful tool if anyone has its own website or Blog and want to manage them.

Google Analytics: It is very useful for site owner to track and manage site. It gives the full detail about the site from where it is generating the revenue. Which content is most viewed and which keyword is used by the search engine to find the site. It is also integrated with the Adword which help to buy new new keyword for the website. Some of the main features of Analytics are given below

a. Keyword and Campaign Comparison: it tracks all the record that how the website is getting the traffic from internet whether the traffic is direct, through search engine or through referrals sites.

b. Geo Targeting: it gives the details about the source of traffic geologically. It is overview about the source of location. Which is very useful to find that site is attracting which type of people and what content liked by them. It also gives nation wise chart.

c. Traffic Source overview: it provide details about source of traffic from where users are coming to website. It also contain keyword search which keyword used by search engine for the website and how many visits for that keyword. It is very to useful to find which keyword attracting most traffic and help to manage content according to that

d. Visitor Overview: – it provides how many visitors are coming to the website and also gives how many new visitors. Including with page views along with time on site.

e. Content Overview: How many times a particular page is viewed along with unique views on the website. It also has navigation analysis how visitors found the website. Entrance path how the visitors found the website.

f. Goal Overview: – it help to set the goal for the website. It is used to measure how the website fulfills the business objective. After setting the goal one can check the conversion rate and the monetary value of the traffic received by the website.

By the help of these entire feature a webmaster can achieve good result and able to increase its revenue from the website. One of the good things about this is that it free of cost. Webmaster should know how to utilize this tool completely.

Google has become the most dominant search engine that almost every webmaster or web owners devote all their attention to with the ultimate aim to get their website to rank on the #1 page in an organic search. Seems a tough task but did you know Google offers help along the way?

Yes, help in sense of their FREE marketing tools available at your disposal but more often than not is looked over or ignored by many since it’s been offered free! These useful marketing tools can make your website or blog promotions easier and more profitable. Lets snap up this marketing tools now as I run through the top 5 most valuable marketing tools Google has to offer.

1. Google Analytics

Perhaps the premier marketing tool offered, Google Analytics gives you a daily snapshot of your website. Google Analytics analyzes your traffic, where it comes from and how it interacts with your site. This vital information allows you to create targeted ROI driven marketing campaigns which in-turn can increase your site’s conversion rate.

2. Google Sitemaps

A Sitemap is a list of pages on your website. Google Sitemaps lets you furnish Google additional information of your web pages and URL’s that might not be discovered by Google’s normal crawling process. Information such as how often pages on your site changes, last modified date of each pages and relative importance of each pages on your site are very useful information to Google that can help them crawl your site better.

3. Google Alerts

Get email notifications on topics or stories that you are monitoring with Google Alerts. It also helps you in keeping current on a competitor or industry.

4. Google Groups

As social networking fast becoming an important aspect of website or blog promotion, Google Groups offers these platform. You can manage your contact lists efficiently to make your marketing activity easy and precise!

5. Google Docs

Google Docs is a full featured online writing editor which allows you to create and share your work online. Your files are stored securely online so you can edit your work anytime and from anywhere. It also lets your publish your content directly to your blog.

All the best in exploring these very useful tools and be sure to use it to your advantage!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be complicated when you don’t know the right way to use this feature for directing traffic to your website. There are many tools available, yet considering Google is the search engine used more frequently, the information will be regarding the aspects of the tools used within Google.

The benefit of using Google Webmaster Tools helps website owners the in the ability to generate larger amounts of traffic to their website. Google Webmaster Tools is a free service for internet users. There is an extremely large amount of information available to you after you have verified your website with Google.

Here are some of the features of Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools will show you all the errors on your site, which this process includes showing any broken links on the website and all the links driving the internet traffic to the website where there might not be a valid page. The tools also include telling the site owner of possible restrictions they may have placed on the site that will limit access to the site visitors.

There is the ability to set the geographic target of the site such as if you want the www. to appear on the listing of the site. You can select if you want to show images within Google when the search has been performed by internet users. This process is called Google Image Labeler.

Google Webmaster Tools will provide a list of URLs that have duplicate title tags or meta description. The information will let you know if the pages are too short or too long. This helps to correct any problems with the website and lowers the traffic flow.

Top search queries are shown with the Google Webmaster Tools. It provides information regarding what the webs searches are and how the internet users are seeking information on the internet. This information helps to increase the flow of traffic to the website. The provided information breaks down the results by web, image and country.

Managing the site links for your website is very important. Most people desire to have additional information listed in the search results with their website. Google Webmaster Tools provide the option of setting the information you want listed under your website in the search results. You can only let Google know if you don’t want a site link listed, and you are not able to tell them what pages to add.

Google will provide a bit of JavaScript about your site on a 404 error page that will offer your site as an option for the internet user seeking certain information. This is a great way to direct traffic to your site.

Using Google Webmaster Tools helps to promote higher traffic flow to your website. It is a free service you cannot afford to pass up when wanting to generate higher hits on your website.

Rigid, unchanging procedures threaten any business activity. With Internet-enabled and -related enterprises, keeping up with technological progress is absolutely essential to survival. As opposed to static (unchanging) websites that are not looking to strengthen or increase their industry share, any dynamic (changing) website will have new copy, even new strategies, on an ongoing basis. Regular, extensive, ongoing keyword research is not a luxury, but a basic survival tactic.

Understanding how people actually use words, and the relationships these words have in the context of an Internet search, is key to threading these words and phrases through the fabric of your site. Because the Internet is so very dynamic, with word relationships changing seemingly by the minute, this is a huge and growing challenge for more and more people and companies. After all, the Internet is growing into the major commercial and communication hub of the world. Accurate and useful keyword suggestion tools – and their intelligent implantation into business and marketing strategy, are a major part of the solution.

There are a plethora of keyword suggestion tools available, from free to cost-based, including NicheBot, Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, SEOBook, and the various Google keyword tools. In this two-part article, we will consider these tools and the differences among them. Part one will cover the first three on the list, while part two will cover the Google tools and SEOBook’s Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Most importantly, perhaps, these tools help you estimate the relative (rather than absolute) size of the search referral “market” produced by particular words and phrases. You will develop a better understanding of what terms appear how often in search queries, and what other terms are correlated with them, and how many times they are searched compared to those other terms. The analytics you develop with the tools will also give you a good idea of how their suggestions will fare, and provide a means of understanding “competition levels” for specific words and phrases.

Naturally, there are differences both large and small among these keyword analysis/suggestion tools. Google, of course, compiles its tool data from its own search network of sites and offers tremendous functionality at low or no cost. The subscription-based services, such as Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery, take advantage of databases of multiple sites and data that can be assembled, broken down, repurposed and presented in myriad ways.

Specific tool functionality
Wordtracker aggregates its keyword data from the leading meta search engines, primarily Dogpile but with input from MetaCrawler and others. In Wordtracker’s attempts to mine keyword gold, it will discover how many times a certain term or phrase shows up in its database of over 316 million words. This is quite a trick in itself, as English (according to linguists) has between 600,000 and two million words, depending upon how we define a “word.” It is clear that Wordtracker leaves no permutation or word-form uncounted, which is a distinct benefit.

Wordtracker’s brain trust asserts that metacrawlers process the queries of the leading search engines with some precision, and that the software robots that continuously check site rankings and such do not interfere with the count. In a different approach, KeywordDiscovery relies on its global “premium database” of some 4.5 billion searches based solely on user data, thus diminishing the distortions inherent in some other strategies.

If you are considering which tool to use, you can still get free trials of most tools, except that you usually need to provide contact information, with phone numbers and e-mail addresses required. There are few ways to use and compare the tools anonymously, so the next best approach is “meta-analysis,” in which we look at various published third-party reports on the actual use of these tools.

In a study published last year, one technology writer performed keyword forecasts for “dog food” with KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker and several other programs. Despite using different original data sets, all of these tools try to supply reliable estimates of the available search referral traffic without “data inflation.” There are numerous ways to analyze and present the results.

On average, KeywordDiscovery predicted there would be some 1,088 searches for “dog food” daily, while Wordtracker calculated the probable search referral market for “dog food” to be about double that. KeywordDiscovery does have a unique and quite useful algorithm that considers “seasonality” in its results, letting you review the seasonality of terms historically, as monthly estimates or even as a component of annual trends. Search engine market share is developed, as well.

KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker results can both be repurposed to estimate just Google referral traffic or that of any other major engine. In the tech columnist’s example, the Wordtracker daily estimate for Google’s “dog food” search was 1,043, or almost half of all the “Daily Prediction” information. KeywordDiscovery had Google accounting for 67 percent of its “Average Daily” results, thus suggesting that 738 “dog food” searches would be made in Google every day.

Perhaps this does not seem to be much of an absolute difference, but when considered over a 30-day period, the difference scaled up considerably in this particular test. KeywordDiscovery estimated some 22,000+ “dog food” searches that month, but Wordtracker projected over 31,000 “dog food” searches for that same period.

A ‘niche’ player
Nichebot came on the scene with some degree of fanfare. It is a complex program, with a tightly specified methodology that lacks flexibility in some important ways. On the other hand, it gathers data from more sources than Wordtracker  – leveraging the results from KeywordDiscovery and Google – and provides a great selection of explanatory videos, instructive screenshots and excellent “Help” functions.

However, Nichebot recommends a five-step system, which can be time-consuming and confusing, even for veterans. There are, of course, some free “quick-dig” tools, including, oddly enough, Wordtracker and its thesaurus. While it is free to search Wordtracker via Nichebot, you get only basic counts, and must pay for a premium search if you wish to see competition data and the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI).

You can dig a bit “deeper” without additional cost by clicking on a term or phrase in the results, which provides a list of associated phrases. One savvy forum poster declared that the primary purpose for using Nichebot is “to find as many keywords from multiple sources to cover as much territory for the maximum traffic for your website.” In practice, he explained, one can start “from a broad search and just keep refining, merging, narrowing in.”

The proliferation of “niche” tools and functions would seem to be a sensible development given Nichebot’s name, but the added functionality comes at a price. For instance, you can get the addresses of the sites that have the greatest number of backlinks for a particular term, but the learning curve involved with this program makes the more arcane data difficult to develop.

Generally speaking, Nichebot results are excellent, and it allows better organization of projects and searches via its folder hierarchy. Further, the program checks your site for keyword density “red flags” that Google may note (and disapprove of). As premium search charges kick in a bit early compared to others, the question for users has to be, Do the premium charges return enough value to offset the time and money spent to obtain it?

Time and tide
While meta-analysis of user comments at a random selection of forums discloses that they don’t find Nichebot particularly intuitive, it is considered an impressive software achievement.

Even its appearance gives Nichebot the impression that using it takes time and discipline.  While KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker can be used in a stream-of-consciousness manner at times, Nichebot does not lend itself to brainstorming or “fluid” search styles. This is a direct result, of course, of its having the power it does. Despite that power, it does have a number of anomalies that are commonly reported. For one thing, it applies its vaunted “Jackpot” rating to keywords for which it finds no competition, even if that is the case because of error or anomaly.

Finally, a number of users report that advanced searches can get stuck in a “holding pattern” (in a queue) and take from 15-20 minutes to generate results. With the tide of the Internet forever washing new waves onto the shore, time is of the essence.  Even though advanced keyword research searches can return valuable data, it is no stretch to say that many marketers might consider 20 minutes per keyword tool inquiry to be a barrier to frequent or consistent use.

Rating the tools
Wordtracker is easier to use for most people, but the possibilities are certainly expanded with Nichebot. Doing random or unassociated searches “by the seat of your pants” is among Wordtracker’s great strengths, but Nichebot works well to focus your work and helps you take a step-by-step, measured approach. It can be said that Nichebot can not only return search terms and numbers, but can actually sub as your defacto keyword research process.  As one user commented at a KEI forum, Nichebot “takes a lot of the guesswork out [but] getting there is somewhat painful.”

KeywordDiscovery’s “9-in-1 tool” approach (check their site, it’s even divided up this way) is popular with many users. It goes some 10,000 keywords deep and the more you pay the deeper you can go. Nichebot does provide more information, but it has that steep learning curve and much harder to learn than the more “friendly” Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery.

What works best for you will most likely be a product of trial and error – and for many will be a combination of the tools. Because you have to give up more and more personal data to get the “free trials,” however, you may want to let other people’s fingers “do the walking” and continue to do meta-analyses of others’ results. Thee is a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from multiple opinions, yet there is nothing like running your own research your own way.  Trust the judgment of tech columnists and meta-analysts, or acquiesce to giving up some personal information to see for yourself.

Remember, because of the many search engines and the multitudes of sources the keyword tools get their numbers from, all of the results are relative. For starters, check out the most important, relevant and highly “trafficked” keywords and terms already associated with your site’s content. As we move to Part Two and consider the Google tools and SEOBook’s program, don’t forget that ongoing study, research and testing are the most fruitful ways to stay abreast of an ever-changing universe of words – and all their relatives, too.

The 800-Pound Gorilla and the New Kid on the Block: Google and SEOBook

In our last article covering the similarities, differences, and uses of the most commonly used keyword suggestion tools  we focused on comparing the usage, operation models, and results of Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, and NicheBot.  For Part Two we will be covering the tools Google brings to the table and SEOBook’s Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Google rising
With the way the company has exploded in the last decade, especially over the last five years or so, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Google was taking over the world, not just the Internet. The fact is, they are growing, changing, expanding and refining all of their diverse operations with such velocity that some bloggers and “industry analysts” make a full-time out of tracking Google.

They track Google while Google tracks everything net-related, so you can avail yourself of some of Google’s powerful tools. Some are free, some used to be free – like its Adwords API (Application Programming Interface) – and others cost you in various ways, from money to time to learning curves. But there is no way to do your work, if you work in web marketing, without the Google tools.

The basic Google tools
Google Suggest is good place to start accumulating your list of words and phrases to be researched. It is a fast (some would say “quick and dirty”) way of identifying common word combinations and how many pages are relevant to them.  When you start typing your search into Google’s search box, a dropdown box opens listing terms that start with those letters and the number of pages that would come up in a search for each term.  What this basically gives you is a very quick way to get a snapshot of related terms and their relative competitive landscape.

If you were to type in “fly,” Google Suggest would potentially give you such extrapolations as “fly fishing” or “fly larvae,” taking you off on your chosen tangent. Typing in parts of words, like “prob,” might show extrapolations such as “probation,” “probability,” “problem child,” or “probono.” This tool is particularly helpful in building out your first keyword lists, letting you then focus on terms you deem most worthy of further research.

Google Trends lets you assess the popularity of particular terms and phrases against one other, and even supplies a history of the “most searched” terms from 2004 through the present. The particular search terms’ popularity is expressed as a proportion of the total search volume, which is calculated for different regions of the world, even in a variety of languages.

You can also compare the volume of searches among multiple terms, and can display news associated with search terms on charts displaying the effect of the news on term popularity and presence. This can help you make snap decisions about whether to concentrate on one set of keywords or some other. If you want to get a handle on how searches are affected by regional anomalies and external factors, this is a good tool for that.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Until late 2006 the features in the AdWords tool kit were free. Then Google began to charge for the API portion of the tool, with a 25-per-thousand fee that sounded low until big users started adding it up. The controversy has abated greatly, but it did leave a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.

Google responded with a free External Tool outside of AdWords for those that desired keyword help but did not have an AdWords account.  It was truly a tool that suggested keywords only, returning a great number of keywords related to the term you entered but offering no search quantity numbers to show how often people actually searched for each term daily or monthly.

More recently Google added the search metrics that a lot of marketers and business owners have been craving.  Their External Tool now shows how many times the keywords you are researching were searched last month on Google related properties, as well as a twelve-month average for the terms.  It also features a measurement that shows you the advertiser competition for each.

For AdWords accounts holders the AdWords Keyword Tool is tightly “Google integrated” of course, and not only helps you estimate your AdWords campaign cost but provides information on the competition levels among your chosen, targeted keywords and terms.

The AdWords Traffic Estimator is another tool that can provide data on total potential clicks for each ad, each day, for each keyword, but they are merely approximates.  It also estimates potential cost so you have an idea what your daily spend would be for those terms.  For natural search research it is helpful in compiling an initial list for further, detailed research, which is the point at which you would bring other keyword analytics tools into the process.

As with all of the free and fee-based tools, they are best seen as an “information buffet,” a range of tools and tests from which you can assemble the best toolkit for your particular project. Your needs may change from one task to the next, from one product to the next, so you need the greatest amount of flexibility you can get. Some people are now saying that SEOBook’s Keyword Suggestion Tool is the best “anchor program” on which to hang other specialized tools.

The up-and-comer
SEO industry stalwart Aaron Wall developed the Keyword Suggestion Tool for SEOBook, and it is popular for not reinventing the wheel, essentially. That is, it aggregates the most successful and effective suggestion tools on the Internet –Google tools, the “visual tool” Quintura (with its “word clouds”), Wordtracker and even Yahoo metrics, back when there were some.

Its proponents say that SEOBook’s tool is the right one for anyone, any time, because of its components. By combining results, it does save time, but some professional traffic mongers prefer to set the tools against each other for comparison, rather than aggregation, purposes.

Still, features of the tool are legion. It can estimate certain keyword traffic in Google, Yahoo and MSN independently, or add it together for average total daily traffic. It links up to the Google Trends data for the targeted keyword(s) and employs the Google Traffic Estimator to determine the daily cost for advertising the subject terms.

The SEOBook tool also allows you to get an idea of your competitors’ numbers by interfacing with Google, Wordtracker and the UK’s Overture. It also makes use of the GoRank SEO Tools and Ontology Finder, and checks the top 1000 Google results for your terms by running queries on related words. It would be a good idea to look at GoRank’s new link popularity analyzer, which is just now being made ready for beta testing (as of September 20). It’s completely free and supports up to 30 backlinks. Once beta testing is complete, it will have the capability to analyze up to 1000 backlinks.

At the bottom of the SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool page is a list of potential searches you can perform on a “vertical database” – for news, blogs, directories, tags, thesauruses, dictionaries, encyclopedias, classified ad listings, audio, video, competitive, groups and other tangents.

Who, what, how and why
There are still differences among keyword analysis tools and keyword suggestion tool, but as they continue to aggregate each others’ functions and link to various other third-party programs, there is bound to be some “convergence.” There is a great deal of “shakeout” still to come in this sector, and following Yahoo’s almost-ignominious retreat from this arena the winnowing process would appear to be gaining some momentum.

Using any or all of the available suggestion tools can be a very nerve-wracking experience. There is always the chance that you will start taking the results and suggestions as gospel, and making sweeping changes based on data that changes by the nanosecond. It takes patience to make these tools perform their best, and there is no substitute for the human brain. It is the ultimate analytical tool.

Whatever tools you use, in whatever manner, it is wise to maintain a healthy skepticism about the results. Various industry analysts have run tests that show a wide discrepancy between what some of the tools report, and what they actually do. This is not to say there is misrepresentation (sometimes called “lying”) going on. It is more a function of the transient nature of knowledge and the rapid turnover of data sets in Internet-related enterprises. Use the tools, certainly, but use your head, primarily.

If you have a website, there are a number of free tools available for webmasters through Google that are absolutely indispensable in helping you increase your website’s visibility and traffic. The Google search engine is one of the most popularly used search tools on the Internet. Ranking high in the results for keyword phrases that relate to your products or service is going to increase your traffic and increase your sales. Google provides a number of free tools that help you see exactly how well your website is doing and show you what you need to improve, what pages are not ranking and what is working for you.

Though Google offers a number of different tools for a small fee, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on Google Webmaster Tools. This free service let’s you know a number of pieces of valuable information about your website. First, you have to verify that you own the site by adding a specified meta tag to the header of your home page or upload an HTML file. Once you do this, you will be better equipped to optimize your site.

Google Webmaster Tools: Diagnostics

Googlebot is the web crawler that searches the Internet to find relevant pages that match up with the search terms people enter on Google’s search engine. The diagnostics section focuses on what Googlebot comes up with when it crawls your site as well as your site’s mechanics.

• Web Crawl—This shows you if there are any errors or problems that Googlebot encounters when it crawls your site.
• Content Analysis—Problems with your site’s meta tags, meta titles and descriptive information will show up here.
• Mobile Crawl—Problems and errors on pages designed for mobile phone viewing are found here.

Google Webmaster Tools: Statistics

This set of tools focuses on the traffic that is coming to your site and how it is getting there.

• Top Search Queries – Find out which keyword terms people are using that generate your site in the results list, the percentage of clicks you got when pages from your site were shown, and what number on the list pages of your site appear in the Google search engine.
• Crawl Stats—This shows you a bar graph of how your pages are faring in PageRank as rated when crawled by Google’s Googlebot. They are shown as ranking high, medium, low or not yet assigned.
• Subscriber Stats—If you have subscriber feeds like RSS or Atom available on your site, this will show you how many subscribers you have to those feeds.
• What Googlebot Sees—This shows you what phrases and content are used in external links to your site. It helps if these phrases are related to the content, products and services on your site to help generate the appropriate traffic.
• Index Stats—This tool lets you see what pages have links to your site and how your pages are indexed by Google.

Google Webmaster Tools: Links

• Pages with External Links—Here you will see which pages on your website have inbound links coming from other websites.
• Pages with Internal Links—Here you can find out which of your pages have links pointing to them from other pages on your site.
• Sitelinks—This shows you which of your links may appear directly in Google’s search results.

Google Webmaster Tools: Tools

There are a number of other tools that you can utilize free of charge as well. For example, you can submit a site map with all the pages on your site to expedite the process of including every page in your site on Google’s search engine. You can also:

• Analyze robots.txt
• Generate robots.txt
• Set Geographic Target
• Enhanced Image Search
• Manage Site Verification
• Set Crawl Rate
• Set Preferred Domain
• Remove URLs

Before you invest in any pricey ranking tools or analytic software, check out what Google has to offer for free!

Hello everyone !

Internet marketers and webmasters have always had a love/ hate relationship with Google. Whatever you think of them they do provide website owners with some great market research tools.

No matter what market you are in or plan to be in, you will find these free tools provided by Google very useful when researching your market. You should be researching your market constantly, NOT just when setting up your site. The internet is ever changing and, if you’re not keeping up with those changes, you will be left behind.

Market Research Tool 1 – Related Searches And Wonder Wheel

When you start typing in the main Google search box you should see a drop down box appear giving you some alternative search terms related to the word you typed. Note these phrases down in a notepad file or write them on a piece of paper. They will be useful as part of your keyword list used in the next tool. You will also see more related search phrases after you click search. Scroll to the bottom of the results page and you will see “searches related to:” Note down any new phrases shown there.
Recently Google has released Wonder Wheel which is also a related keywords tool but is shown in a mind map format. You can also click on the related phrases to find more useful search terms. To access wonder wheel: enter your keyword in the standard search screen, then at the top of the results on the left you should see a show options link. Select that and it will reveal a menu. Near the bottom of the menu you should see wonder wheel.

Market Research Tool 2 – Adwords Keyword Tool

We all know how important keywords and search phrases are. Let’s face it, it’s what drives the internet. Google has provided us with a tool that tells you what keywords and phrases people are using to find what they are looking for. You are able to search an individual country, more than one if you hold down the ctrl key on your keyboard as you select, or all countries.

The adwords tool is now more valuable due to the fact it shows actual search numbers. Previously you only had a green bar to indicate how much traffic the search term receíved. You can also see how competitive each keyword is amongst adword advertisers, showing us which keywords are commercially viable.

Market Research Tool 3 – Google Trends

Now that you have an idea what keywords your market is using you can use the trends tool to check the history of that keyword / phrase. Google Trends supplies data for the last 5 years, giving you an idea if the search term is consistent. You can also see if the search term is popular at certain times of the year, also known as a seasonal keywords.

Another important function of Trends is the section that tells you the popularity of a keyword by country, city and language – very useful if you are targeting particular countries or even cities.

Market Research Tool 4 – Google Alerts

Alerts is underused by webmasters. If you want to stay in touch with what’s hot in your market, you can by using Google Alerts. All you have to do is enter the most popular phrases in your market. Google will then send you links via email depending on what type you select.The types are news, web, blogs, video and groups. If you would like a mix of all, you can select comprehensive. You can decide how often you want to be updated by selecting either: as it happens, once a day or once a week. I hope you can see how powerful this is if you want to be seen as an authority in your market.

Market Research Tool 5 – Google Web Search

Finally, we have Google’s standard web search which is not standard in my eyes. It provides a lot of information if you know what to look for. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important part of running a website. By performing a search of your market keywords, Google will tell you what type of content it sees as important.

If you see videos, blogs or images this gives you another way to reach the top 10 of Google. If you see Web 2.0 style sites such as Digg, that could be another avenue. If there are adword ads on the right side of the screen, that tells you the market is commercially viable and more importantly that the keyword you entered is good enough to pay for, especially if there are 10 ads or more.

As you can see, even if you don’t have money to buy the latest tools, I have shown you there is a way to get some very important information using free tools from Google. Are you starting to love them now?

Googlo!Google.Things sure change fast.Once an abscure mathematical concept,the new age respelled and capitalized avatar is the search engine that has come from nowhere to become the search engine of choice,and even an accepted english verb!Heck i have a confession to make and now’s as good a time as any – i love google!

Why you may ask?whay am i wasting precious newsprint proclaiming a much-repeated cliche?Let me explain.Its not about the pleasing lack of banner advertising in its search results or for that matter that the management vehemently promotes its fundamental guideline:Don’t Be Evil.” its probably the intuitive accuracy with which Google ferrets out the information people are actually looking for.Or maybe it’s just that i can’t even remember how we managed when the entire world wasn’t indexed and instantly available.

Truth be told,Googleis what a lot of us really want the internet to represent-information that is fast and free.As a business,this is precisely where other players have messed up and are playing catch up now.Strange as it may sound in the industry in which it operates,Google built on what one could call a second mover advantage.

Getting there is one thing and as yahoo must’ve learnt the hard way,staying there is quite another.It’s not surprising then that as a general practice,Google also requires that its engineers spend 20 percent of their time working on personal technology projects.Give a bunch of really smart guys that kind of freedom,agreed even Google suggests that the ideas in this technology playground aren’t ready for primetime but given their track record of products staying perennially in beta (Gmail) some of this stuff is too compelling to ignore.

Google Suggest

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

If you love autoComplete,you’re going to dig this!Take a regular Google search and throw in an algorithm to predict the user queries based on overall popularity from the database that it maintains to track ’search trends’.As you type,the suggestion appears in a drop down menu.Type in ‘Chip’ and Google suggest refines the from down list to suggest anything from chips to chippendales along with the number of results against each alternative.What really rocks is that displaying this list is obviously a computationally intensive task,and it’s achieved in near real time!

Perfect for those times when you want to peep into the guts of Google and see how other users think and search.And of course as creator Kevin Gibbs puts it,it “makes it easier to type in your favorite searches.

Google Scholar

Http://scholar.google.com

If you’re the sort who thinks going to a library to pull up research papers is a real drag,Google scholar is for you.While it claims to index everything from peer-reviewed papers,theses,books,preprints,abstracts and technical reports in many areas of research,it offers only some of what you would expect from a library database.The convenience of the one-box-fits-all-interface is very compelling and what’s really promising is that for the first time,Google spiders have crawled into password-protected subscription-based content to provide abstracts of hitherto uncrawled academic material.

when spidering the content,Google spiders also identify authors of the papers as well as the formal titles of the papers and other documents that cite the material.The citation go as inputs to the special ranking algorithm to establish the popularity and connection between two otherwise link-disconnected articles.

Google may simply have hit the sweet spot for research students and faculty the world over – not by providing new material but by exposing material that was till now invisible to our day and age.No longer will Google be merely indexing the web;it will be adding vast amounts of content as well.

Google Print

http://print.google.com

Drawing inspiration from the scholar project,Google engineers collaborated to form Google Print.If the material you’re searching for deos not actually exist online,and enough papers reference it,Google provides a handy Library search that searches libraries for offline books.

And that’s not all.As we go to print,Google has begun a massive digitization project with five libraries:stanford,University of Michigan,Harvard,Newyork Public Library and Oxford – estimated to cost upwards of $150 million and over five years to digitize.Copyright material will of course only be available as bibliographic information and snippets of text but books in the public domain will be fully searchable and if you still prefer the smell of dead trees,printable.

Of course geek humor will still prevail at Google.Seen on the Google Print home page:”No library books were harmed during the making of these digital copies”.

Personalized Web Search

http://labs.google.com/personalized/

Nifty,very nifty stuff.Privacy issues asid,personalized search lets you create your own profile of interests (such as technology,open source).Now when you search on the personalized web search page you can drag a slider to show personalized results.

Take it out for a spin.I entered Open Source as an interest.then searched for nothing but ‘news’.Without personalization,i get BBC.com:with maximized personalization,i got to see technology blog Slashdot in the top spot.

Google stores personalized profiles by setting a cookie,oblitering the need for logging in time and again.

Google Alerts

http://www.google.com/alerts

Kevin Gibbs wasn’t kidding if you’re so lazy that you would rather get Google to tell you when your search results change in Google news or Web Search,so be it Google Alerts sends you e-mail anytime there are new Google results for your search terms.All you’ve got to do is visit the Alerts page,enter your search and the frequency of checking and your e-mail address.very neat if you’re tracking a breaking news story or want the latest dope on that girl you saw on TV the other day.

Google Desktop Search

http://desktop.google.com

yeah,yeah.Much have been said about the google destop search everywhere.Google Desktop search indexes and searches files on your windows PC so fast.

Reviews say Google’s isn’t the best,but it’s good enough and it will improve,as will competition.The state of desktop search woefully inadequate for so many now is going to get much,much better.

Google Compute

http://toolbar.google.com/dc/offerdc.html

SETI lovers unite!.if you search for extra terrestrial intelligence has yielded nothing but colorful patterns on your computer all these years,it’s time to devote your spare computing cycles to a nobler cause-through the process known as distributed computing,where a processor downloads a small piece of a large research project and performs calculations on it much like thousands of other client.

Folding@home,stanford funded project to understand the nature and structure of proteins to better diagnose and treat illnesses,is the first recipent of the Google Compute project and if this is what it takes to help humanity,E.T can wait.

Google Voice Search

http://labs1.google.com/gvs.html

Google on the telephone?Yup crazy as it may sound you dial the Voice Search phone number,speak your keywords and then click on the indicated link.It’s still experimental and doesn’t always work.

Cool Tools

http://www.google.com/htlp/features.html

If you thought Google was only about search think again!Here are some of the cool things the plain white page can do-all these have at some point of time or the other graduated from Google Labs.Not bad for employee projects,eh?

Cached Links: Useful,especially when the site has since disappeared from the World Wide Web,Google’s cached Links bring the page back to life.CPR for the web eh?

Shopping-froogle and Catalogs: Indexes products from online stores and more than 6,000 paper catalogs in a searchable index.

Then what else surf over to http://www.googleguide.com/searchengines/google/searchleader.html.

That said,Google lab projects may suddenly disappear at any time out of lack of user interest,or lack of stability or that they were so popular that Google servers went on strike.

If one could call a search engine ’sexy’,then Google would be the pinup power search glam boy of the world wide web.