If you are not yet ready, for whatever reason, to invest in a complicated SEO program and want to find a simpler way to record your link building efforts, here is one easy way to do it online.

Delicious Bookmarks

Want to keep track of all of your link building online so it is accessible where ever you go, with the simple click of a button? Why not simply bookmark them? Delicious is my choice of bookmarking for personal reference for several reasons.

1) The Bookmarklet

No matter what browser you are in, and without installing an extention that may slow your browser down, you can simply install the Delicious bookmarklet by dragging it to your bookmarks bar on your browser of choice. Whenever you’re logged into your Delicious account, you can simply click on this bookmarklet on a page that you have gotten or requested a link on to save it in your bookmarks.

2) The Tags

Want to tag your bookmarks for a specific website or by topic, or maybe even note if it is pending or active? Just tag it!

Also, after you have started tagging items, it will auto suggest favorite tags in the field, or you can select them from the Recommended, Popular, or All My Tags section below the Submit button.

Tags are separated by spaces on Delicious, so you will need to combine phrases as one word or hyphenate them.

3) Privacy Options

If, for whatever reason, you do not want to share your link building history with the public, you can check the “Mark as Private” option to keep the bookmarks to yourself. This might come in handy if you are labeling your bookmarks with client or website names (I would not suggest doing that though – you can always use an abbreviation instead to make it less obvious).

4) Notes

You can add notes to your bookmarks which are visible when you browse them. Might be a great place to add the date when you requested a link or other notes for future reference if you want to ask the same website for another link.

Of course, if you are going to add any information that you or a site’s webmaster may not want seen publicly, don’t forget the privacy option.

5) Search Features

Delicious has one of the best search features in terms of finding your bookmarks. You can use either the right-hand sidebar which shows a popular and all tags in a list view:

or in a cloud view.

You can also use the search box to search your own bookmarks.

This will search your bookmarks’ names, tags, and notes for the phrase you specify.

The great part of the search results is that you not only get results from your bookmarks, but you also get other people’s results as well, which might help you find other sites to contact.

6) Export

If you’re like me, you’re a huge fan of backups, because you never know what could happen to a website – anything from a database wipeout or the website going out of service could mean the loss of all of your bookmarks!

Delicious let’s you export your bookmarks to an HTML file, including notes and tags, just in case something should happen, or if you want to create a new Delicious account and import your old account’s bookmarks into it. You can also keep yo

The Bonus of Bookmarking Backlinks

One of the best benefits of bookmarking your backlinks (if you can have them public) is you are actually doing something to help strengthen the page that your link is on. Bookmarking the page on a site like Delicious may also help it get re-visited by search bots faster, caching your link sooner than later.

Your Thoughts on Online Link Recording

Have you ever needed a free way to record your link building efforts? What other online tools would you suggest for easy and free link recording?

This new WP plugin is a total solution for optimizing each of your posts, displaying relevant related posts on your site, as well as recommends other posts who are within your social community.

Blog Post Management

Once you have installed the plugin,  Arkayne will scan your site to give you a list of all of your blog posts, that you can then put through the SEO analyzer tool (keep reading to see how the SEO Analyzer works).  You can also manage all of your posts by seeing what inner-links and cross-links there are for each post.  You can also disable the plugin on a per post basis, to hide the links that Arkayne would normally show on that post.

Build Your Community Presence

Arkayne has built a community that allows you to find and recommend users and content that you would like to promote on your blog.  Once you have “Recommended” someone, their content will start showing up under “StayOnSearch Recommends” at the bottom of your posts.  Arkayne also has a proprietary algorithm that they use to deliver the most relevant “Recommended” links within your network to your blog readers.  This will improve the user experience, because you are offering relevant external links to blogs that you manually approve.

Where the real power of this tool lies is growing your network so that your posts are being recommended on other industry blogs.  For each person that recommends you, your posts will have the opportunity to now show up as “Recommended Links” on their blog.  This can help to increase referral traffic and drive a potentially new readership to your blog.

Here is what a Arkayne badge looks like for promoting on your blog.

How the SEO Analyzer Tool Works

The Arkayne SEO Analyzer allows you to easily check every article you write for SEO compliance before and after your publish.

Key Features:

• Do it Yourself SEO
• Integrates directly into your WordPress Admin Panel
• Simple to use, doesn’t require technical expertise

Arkayne Tracking

Arkayne comes equipped with a number of tracking features to monitor the effectiveness of your blog links.  You can see how many total hits and your click through rates you are receiving.  You can also look within your Google Analytics account, under “Referring Sites” to see your typical GA data like time on site and bounce rate.

Other data you can gather includes:

• Click Ins (traffic coming from other blogs)
• Click Outs (traffic going out to other blogs)
• Top Users (which users are bringing in or sending out traffic)

Social Distribution

Arkayne is also adding Twitter and Facebook distribution, as well as additional ways you can provide links back to your blog.  Watch the video to see how this feature works.

Going Pro

Arkayne offers a number of pricing options including a free solution that lets you try it out before you decide to go Pro. Once you install the plugin, you will immediately want to bump up to at least the Pro edition once you see all of the additional features that are available.

If you are an agency, Arkayne has a whitelabel solution that will remove the Arkayne logo from the bottom of the Socialize links.

Basically Squeeze Theme is a suite of premium WordPress themes that are designed to “squeeze” or drive a user to complete an action on your site.  Those actions, depending on your goals and theme you use, will improve the chance of gaining that users contact information or convert that lead into a sale.  The ideal user of the Squeeze Themes would be product marketers, affiliate marketers, bloggers, and internet marketing who are either looking to generate an in-house marketing list or convert users to purchase a product (their own or as an affiliate).

There are three different themes that Squeeze Theme currently offers, depending on the type of marketing you are doing.  Lets go through each of the three different themes, to see how you can generate leads and sales.

Before we start: I should mention that one of the great things about all of the themes is that you do not need to have any programming or design experience.  Each of these themes with create the necessary code based on the easy drag and drop widgets that you can place on the page.  This is also a theme for WordPress, so you must install WordPress before you can use any of these themes.

Buy Now: Get 20% off Squeeze Theme (coupon code: 3A02F00FE5)

Squeeze Theme

The Squeeze Theme was designed to drive website visitors to perform a key action on your site like “Download an E-book” or “Sign-Up Now”.  The people at Squeeze Theme have done extensive testing to find out which design/content elements will yield better results, making it extremely simple for you to create high-converting landing pages.

Key Features:

• E-mail Form Integration and Automatic Styling
• Drag and Drop Widgetize Layout
• Easier Add/Manage Content within WordPress
• Built in Color-Picker
• No Coding Required

What I love about this theme is the simplicity of not only the back-end, but for front-end as well.  I love how the header is very small, so there is more real estate for the important content and calls to actions.  I also like the option of being able to remove the navigation on a certain page.  This is extremely useful if you want a user to convert on that page and eliminate the option of being able to go elsewhere on your site.

Overall if you are trying to build an e-mail marketing list and you have useful content that people who want to give their information to you in return for that content, it is a great lead generation tool.

Watch the Squeeze Theme in Action:

Buy Now: Get 20% off Squeeze Theme (coupon code: 3A02F00FE5)

Sales Theme

The Sales Theme has a little bit of a different goal in mind than the Squeeze Theme. The Sales Theme was created to allow you to create a high-converting landing page for selling products, as opposed to generating a marketing list.  This theme comes with a number of great drag and drop widgets that will help sell the features and benefits of your product and drive people to buying your product.

Key Features:

• Testimonial Widget (a template for adding a persons picture and quote about the product)
• Five Reasons Widget (a number list of the features and benefits of your product)
• Pricing Widget (a pricing box that will give you Was/Now pricing)
• Five Steps Widget (shows the steps of using the product)
• Money Back Guarantee Widget (a money back guarantee graphic, along with customized text)
• Product Feature Widget (showing product screenshots and description of how to use the product)

Personally this is probably my favorite theme because of all of the awesome features that are included in it.  You can create an awesome landing page with great design elements extremely fast!  If you are someone who is looking to sell their own products, this is the best theme for selling the user and giving them the information they need to buy your product.  I am actually in the process of using this theme to create the link builders toolkit sales page, which we will also be adding industry/niche specific toolkits in the near future.

Buy Now: Get 20% off Squeeze Theme (coupon code: 3A02F00FE5)

Affiliate Theme

The affiliate theme was designed for (obviously) affiliate marketers who are looking to market and promote other websites products. This theme will save you tons of time and effort for creating effective affiliate marketing websites.  Take a specific niche, gather affiliate marketing graphics, content and links and start to create your website with ease.

Key Features:

• 1, 2, 3, or 4 Column Layout
• Right or Left Sidebar
• Easily Change Navigation and Footer Elements
• Header and Background Options

I have not played around with the Affiliate template as much as the other two, however I could imagine that it will save you a lot of time in creating quick affiliate sites, compared to manually having to design and layout a site.

Watch the Affiliate Theme in Action:

Buy Now: Get 20% off Squeeze Theme (coupon code: 3A02F00FE5)

Squeeze Camp

As an added bonus, Squeeze Theme offers something they call “Squeeze Camp”, which is a 12-week training course that will take you through all the steps of building an affiliate website and targeted email list.  There are some excellent video tutorials which will really give you some detailed instructions on how to maximize your effectiveness with using these Squeeze Themes.

Purchase Squeeze Theme with 20% Off Coupon Code

The guys at SqueezeTheme were nice enough to provide everyone with a 20% off coupon code.  Go to the Squeeze Theme page and enter in the coupon code 3A02F00FE5 to get 20% off your order!

Trackur: Free Online Reputation Monitoring

Rank Checker: Free Rank Checking Tool

Website Grader: Free Website SEO Tool

Facebook Grader: Free Facebook Analysis Tool

Backlink Watch:  Free Backlink Analysis Tool

AuditMyPC:  Free XML Sitemap Generation Tool

Hootsuite: Free Professional Twitter Client

TubeMogul: Free Video Syndication Tool

vFlyer: Free Listing Syndication Tool

Get Listed: Free Local Business Listing Tool

GT Metrix: Free Website Speed & Performance Tool

GeoMaker: Free Micro-format Creator

Five Second Test: Free Design Feedback

SlickPlan: Free Flowchart/Sitemap Creator

Mockingbird: Free Wireframing Software

Preceden: Free Timeline Creator

KnowEm:  Free Username Checking Tool

Free Marketing Outlets

Groupon: Free Location-Based Marketing

Living Social: Free Location-Based Marketing

Craigslist: Free Classified Ad Marketing

OnlyWire: Almost Free Social Bookmarking Syndication Tool

Free Traffic System: Free Backlink System

Ping-O-Matic:  Free Ping Tool

EventBrite: Free Event Promotion

Broadtexter: Free Text Messaging Marketing

What’s Included in the Link Builders Tookit:

• Over 160 Blog Directories (Download this tab for FREE!)
• Over 30 Classified Sites
• Over 100 Content Sharing Sites
• Over 80 Coupon/Deal Sites
• Over 400 Directories
• Over 40 eBook Sites
• Over 25 Event Sites
• Over 30 Forum Sites
• Over 50 Local Sites
• Over 40 Photo Sharing Sites
• Over 35 Podcast Sites
• Over 300 PR/Article Submission Sites
• Over 35 Q&A Communities
• Over 65 Review Sites
• Over 60 RSS Submission Sites
• Over 50 Social Bookmarking Sites
• Over 50 Social Community Sites
• Over 45 Shopping Sites
• Over 35 Twitter Sites
• Over 35 Video Sharing Sites
• Over 60 Free Website Creation Sites
• Over 15 Wiki Sites

Other Great Resources That Are Included:

• List of Ping Sites to Syndicate Your Content
• Complete List of Search Queries for Finding Link Partners

You can buy the Link Builders Toolkit or download the Blog Directories tab for free.  For a limited time, you will get a 30% discount on the toolkit, so make sure you pick up your copy.

The interface is clean, customizable, and includes a wealth of information about your twitter account.  Let’s take a detailed look into how Hootsuite can be used to manage your daily engagements for both personal and business use.

Daily Engagement

I use Twitter primarily for business, however some personal use.  I like to be able to see the people I am following are tweeting about, find industry related news, read/reply to people connecting with me, and send updates to people following me.

Monitor Followers Tweets: Watch in real-time as your Twitter followers add new tweets to their account.  See what people are doing, content they are promoting, and people they are talking about.

Send Updates to Users Following: Keep your account active, by updating your status, promoting content and interacting with your friends and followers.

Scheduling Tweets: Probably the most important feature I love about Hootsuite, is the ability to schedule when you want your tweets to go out.  Sometimes you will want to promote a piece of content during peak hours, so you can schedule it during that time.  You may also want to spread your tweets throughout the day so your profile seems to be active during the whole day, not just for 10 minutes a day.

Keyword Monitoring: Keep track of industry specific keywords that you want to monitor.  This can help you find users to follow, reach out to, send special offers/promotions, and follow industry news.

View User Info: Click on the users Twitter handle to see their profile including followers/following statistics, location, brief bio, and latest updates sent by the user.

User Management

For businesses that would like multiple users to contribute to managing their Twitter account, Hootsuite allows you to add users to the account.  This will help manage multiple users across multiple accounts.

Update Syndication & Automation

Here is the real power of Hootsuite.  Using the social network syndication tool, you can send out mass updates to ALL of your social media profiles.  Using the Ping.FM integration, you can send an update to Ping.FM and then from there it will update all of your profiles.  You can also update multiple twitter accounts with the same update status.

Feed to RSS: Hootsuite allows you to add RSS feed to your account, so that whenever a new blog post is added, it will send an update through your Twitter account. Especially if your organization contents a lot of content, it can really help cut down on not having to manually submit new content to your twitter account.

Tracking

Hootsuite adds tracking urls to each tweet you send out, so you are able to track data on your links.  Find overall statistics like seeing how many daily clicks you received from all of the tweets you sent out during the day.

See where in the world your clicks and followers came from.  See your top referrals by clicks.

Break down each tweet to see which tweets received more clicks and exposure.  This can help you gain some insights into what type of content your followers like to share.

On The Go

Hootsuite recently developed an iPhone Application that you can use to keep up-to-date with the Twitter community while you are away from your home computer.  Take advantage of all of the rich features the browser application contains from your Apple iPhone.

If you would like to see a demo of the Hootsuite application and its features, watch the video.

Keyword Research

Google Keyword Tool:  There are probably around 5 different keyword tools I use, however I will always start at the Google Keyword Tool.  It is a great starting point for building your initial keyword list, finding PPC estimates, and competition data.  Typically I will gather a long list of potential keywords, then export and sort the list based on keyword segmentation.

Others I Use:

• YouTube Keyword Tool
• WordTracker
• MSN: Detecting Commercial Intent
• Wordstream

Competitive Analysis

SEO Book Toolbar: Usually when I first go to analyze competitors I will start by looking at the data provided by the SEO Book Toolbar. All of the core data you would look at is provided by the toolbar.  I look at the pages indexed, inbound links, PR, domain age, which main directories they are in, and social bookmarking data. Of course an in-depth competitor analysis is much more than just looking at the toolbar data, however this is a great place to start to get some basic information about the site.

Others I Use:

• IBP
• Web CEO
• Compete
• SEO for Firefox
  

Website Audit

Xenu:  I will use the Xenu tool to help identify broken links, site depth (directories), title/meta tags, 404 error pages, internal linking, possible loading issues.

IBP or Webste Grader:  Both of these tools perform similar tasks, however I have used both to help analyze a website.  These tools will help gather meta data information, inbound links, pages indexed, blog information, social media data and other SEO factors.

Others I Use:

• Check out: 10 Website & SEO Analysis Tools

Analytics and Rankings

Google Analytics:  Like 95% of other sites, I use Google Analytics to look at site and visitor engagement.  I will usually check my stats first thing in the morning and then once again in the afternoon to see if a post went viral during the day.

Feedburner:  To keep track of my RSS subscribers I will use Feedburner.  There are some other nice customization features that you can add in your Feedburner account.

Rank Checker:  If I need to check some keyword rankings really quickly, I will use this firefox addon.

Rank Tracker: If I am working with a client, I will have Rank Tracker automatically pull rankings usually once a week.  This saves me time from having to manually pull updated rankings for all clients.

Other I Use:

• Woopra
• Get Clicky

FTP Files/HTML Editing

Filezilla:  If I need to pull files from the server, Filezilla is the easiest way to do it.

Notepad ++:  A great notepad editor that has a number of cool features (for a text editor)

Dreamweaver CS4:  Any HTML edits that need to be made for a clients site, I will use Dreamweaver.

Firefox Addons

I try not to install too many firefox plugins because it really slows down the performance of the web browser, however there are some that are essential.  Here is a list of addon I use (besides SEO Toolbar and SEO for Firefox, which I already mentioned).

• Web Developer Toolbar: Diasble/Enable elements,
• Firebug: Inspect page elements, HTML and CSS, and other development aspects.
• YSlow:  Test page load time and makes recommendations on improving load time.
• WASP: Easily Identify what Analytics program a website is using.
• OnlyWire Bookmarklet:  Social Bookmark content across mulitple social bookmarking sites.
• LastPass: Stores passwords so you never have to worry about logins again.
  

Blogging

WordPress:  My blog uses WordPress, so normally I will just use WordPress for writing/editing blog posts.  I have tried a number of blogging software tools however I just prefer to write within the backend of WordPress.  Depending on if I am writing a guest post for another blog, I will use whatever blog platform they are using.

Project Management

Basecamp:  There are a number of project management tools out there, I felt that Basecamp was the most user-friendly and can be customized enough to manage my projects. I am able to setup task lists, see when projects are due, monitor communication with clients, and add project notes.

What are some of the main tools you use on a daily basis?

Feel free to click on my bracket…
Read more

1. Listio
2. MakeUseOf
3. FeedMyApp
   

   My NCAA Tournament Bracket

4. Mashable
5. Go2Web20
6. Web 2.0 Expo
7. All Things Web 2.0
8. Zippa
9. NetWebApp
10. eXplash
11. RateItAll
12. WebMashup
13. TechCrunch
14. OnTheApp
15. ReadWriteWeb
16. Web2List
17. Web 2.0 Search Engine
18. Digital Trends
19. Web 2.0 That Works
20. Chris Pirillo
21. Yahoo! News – Technology
22. ZDNet
23. Social Computing Journal
24. The Web 2.0 Weblog
25. Web 2.0 Blog
26. Crenk
27. CenterNetworks
28. DownloadSquad
29. Profy
30. Smashing Apps
31. Social Times
32. TheNextWeb
33. The Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog
34. Web 2.0 Blog
35. Killer Startups
36. AppUseful
37. W2Point
38. NeoBinaries
39. Web 2.0 Summit
40. Web 2.0 Journal
41. Digital Beat
42. Gadget Tell
43. O”Reilly
44. The Last Podcast
45. Wired
46. Media Post
47. TechNewsWorld
48. GHacks
49. TechWeb
50. Slashdot
51. PC World
52. PC Magazine
53. Engadget
54. eWeek
55. InfoWorld
56. TechSpot
57. Computer World
58. Gizmodo
59. AllTop
60. Profy
61. Social Media Watch
62. Sphinn
63. Programmable Web
64. Daily Tech Log

]]> I thought I would share some new tools and applications that I have recently stumbled across during the last month.  For the most part they are random tools ranging from iPhone applications to SEO research tools, however I thought I would share some of them with you.  Hopefully you will do the same

Buzzie

The very 1st Google Buzz app for the iPhone, so you can Buzz updates from the convenience of your smart phone.  For $2.99 you can have this app with all of the cool features it includes.

Key Features

• See what’s happening around you, even if you don’t have a Buzz account
• Receive messages from the people you follow
• Comment on messages and mark them as liked
• Browse all links and images attached to messages
• Manage your followers
• Browse the people following you
• Find new people to follow
• Check the places around you and buzz about them
• Buzz from your phone, publicly or privately
• Support for push notifications

Xobni

Have you ever wanted more information about your contacts within Outlook, well look no further. Xobni is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that makes it easier to search past emails, contact info and attachments.  It will also search the web for social media profiles like Facebook and Linkedin and pull in any information it finds into their contact profile.

Key Features

• Search emails, contacts and attachments
• Organize contact info, profile pictures, company info and job titles
• Pull in social media profile information
• Threaded Comments
• E-mail Analytics and Data
  

Radian6 Engagement Console

Radian6 gave us a sneak peak into their new social media desktop console, the solution to help scale social media engagement inside a company. Easily monitor conversations, assign follow-up tasks and manage client social media strategies all through the new engagement console.

Key Features

• Is a complete real-time social web client (yep, more than Twitter)
• Helps you coordinate team social media engagement across the enterprise
• Shows Radian6 topic profiles right alongside your personal or corporate Twitter and Facebook streams
• Lets you set one-click workflow for frequently use post routing, assignment, and classification
• Feeds data to your Radian6 dashboard for reporting and analysis

Check out the Introduction Video from Radian6

Foursquare Grader

The newest grader tool brought to you by Hubspot is SquareGrader, a tool for measuring your effectiveness on Foursquare. SquareGrader gives you a score out of 100, that looks are various engagement factors within your Foursquare account.

Key Features

• Badge Summary
• Suggested Next Badge
• Mayorship Summary
• List of Friends along with their Grade
  

Scribe

Scribe is a wordpress plugin that helps to make SEO copywriting easy and seamless when writing within wordpress.  While you are writing your post, Scribe will give you recommendations for title tags, meta description tags, and content optimization.  It will perform a contextual analysis that will look at keyword density, rank, and keyword performance.  Overall, Scribe will help add SEO best practices to your blogging.

Key Features

• Reduce Optimization Time
• Retain Maximum Readability
• Remove SEO Guesswork
• Analyzes what you’ve already written, preserving your natural flow
• Tells you what search engines will think you’re writing about
• Helps you tweak remaining content elements based on SEO best practices
• Tells you what changes to make to better reflect the language searchers are using

Trendistic

Trendistic will check trends for specific keywords within the Twitter community.  It will also perform real-time searches to see what people are currently saying about a keyword or phrase. For anyone conducting industry research, this is a great tool for measuring social media mentioning.

SocialURL

It seems like everyday I am signing up for another social media account.  Well SocialURL is a way you can show off all of your social media profiles with one url.  SocialURL will aggregate all of your profiles into one easy to use web page.

Key Features

• Give out one URL that links to all of your web profiles
• Perfect for e-mail and forum signatures
• Keep your fans updated on new profiles you create
  

WhoLinksToMe

WhoLinksToMe is a backlink and reputation management tool that allows you to gain valuable insights into your website.  Even though there are dozens of tools that are similar, WhoLinksToMe has a clean interface with some robust reporting.

Key Features

• Backlink Analysis
• Keyword Rankings
• General Website Information
  

Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop

For anyone who is managing pay-per-click campaigns through Yahoo, should download the Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop tool that will allow you to easily manage your account.  Google has a similar desktop tool called the Adwords Editor that allows you to make changes to your PPC account.

Key Features

• Make Quick Edits
• Add New Campaigns and Ad Groups
• Add New Keywords
• Paste From a Spreadsheet into Your Account
• Work Offline
• Browse the Latest PPC Account Data
  

Google Wave Extensions

Google just released extensions for their new communication tool, Google Wave.  Find extensions that will help with video chat, telephone conferencing, embed Google Maps, and add important data and information to your waves.

Have a new Web 2.0 app or tool that you want to share?  Tell me about it.

	Give out a single URL that links to all your web profiles.
	Perfect for email and forum signatures.
	Your fans get notified when you create new web profiles.