For example, entering the phrase ‘search engine’ into the tool would yield:

1. search engine
2. search egnine
3. search enigne
4. search engnie
5. search engien
6. saerch engine
7. saerch egnine
8. saerch enigne etc

Notice that in 2. the ‘g’ and the ‘n’ are swapped. In 3. the ‘g’ and the ‘i’ are swapped and in 4. the ‘n’ and the ‘i.’ These chnages cascade through the word to the end.

The tool tries to mimic people accidentally transposing letters when typing words.

Another problem that keyboard users sometimes have is to accidentally hit a key to the right or left of the key being targeted. The new tool, key word switcher, goes through every keyword and replaces each letter, in turn, with those to the right or left of it. So for example, if you typed ‘blue cat’ into the tool, you would get the following key word combinations:

1. blue cat
2. blue cst
3. blue car
4. blue cay
5. bkue cat
6. bkue cst
7. bkue car

etc

Notice that in 2., the ‘a’ in ‘cat’ has been replaced by the letter to the right of ‘a,’ i.e. ‘s.’ In 3. the ‘t’ has been replaced by the letter to the left of ‘t’ on the Qwerty keyboard, i.e. ‘r’ and in 5. it is replaced with the letter to the right of ‘t’ on the Qwerty keyboard, i.e. ‘y.’

If these new keyword combinations are surrounded by square brackets they could be used in Google Adwords, for example, to target unusual keywords that may be available for a lesser cost per click than their correctly spelled equivalents.

It is crisply written, doesn’t include a lot of unnecessary ‘filler’ and as a result is a fast read. It includes the basic information that every site owner should know about.

According to Social Target’s press release, the report includes information on social media monitoring and analysis tools from the following companies:

Andiamo Systems, Attensity, Attentio, Beyond Analysis, Biz360, Brandintel, Brandwatch, BurrellesLuce, Buzzcapture, BuzzLogic, CIC, Collective Intellect, ComMetric, Converseon, CustomScoop, CyberAlert, Digital Influence Group, Digital PR, Distilled, Dow Jones & Company, eCairn, EmPower Research, Ethority, evolve24, FirstRain, InfoNgen, Integrasco, Intelligence Technologies, J.D. Power and Associates, Jodange, Kaava, KDPaine & Partners, Lexalytics, Linkfluence, Market Sentinel, MediaMiser, MetaTale, Metrica, Millward Brown Precis, MotiveQuest, Netemic, NetEquity, New Media Strategies, Nielsen Online, Onalytica, Quirk eMarketing, Radian6, Relevant Mind, Report International, RepuMetrix, Reputation Institute, ReputationHQ, Scanblog, SentimentMetrics, Socialware, Synthesio, Techrigy, TNS Cymfony, VICO Research & Consulting, Visible Technologies, Waggener Edstrom, Whitevector, WiseWindow (All trademarks are the property of their respective owners).

I started going through all the different tools by visiting each company’s Web site, in turn. There is a lot of useful information ou there, but it set me thinking that this approach is likely to lead to analysis paralysis.

Surely a better approach is to brainstorm the information that you need, make a list and then set about finding a tool or tools that provide that information.

In addition, many of the tools above assume that you are a well known brand or company getting thousands of social media references daily. For smaller entities the sort of output that these tools produce may be either non-existent or less valuable.

The new feature appears to return accurate results and gives the option of showing ALL backlinks, or excluding/including links from specific top-level-domain (e.g. .co.uk, .edu, .gov etc) domains, subdomains or domain folders. For example, you can use this filter to find all the backlinks coming from .co.uk or .gov sites.

The Live Search Webmaster Center blog posting goes on to elucidate some of the advantages of backlinks, including:

• Links show who has taken an interest in your product or service and may represent ways of gaining product feedback. They may also be potential sources of promotion.
• You can find out how what discussions are occurring about you in the world of social media by using the filter feature to target specific social media sites.
• Determining the quality of the links.

Since the number of backlinks can be very large, the tool also gives you the opportunity to download the backlinks into a CSV file for further analysis.

HitTail works by creating a small snippet of Javascript that its users add to their sites (on every page). Using this Javavscript snippet HitTail is able to track the searches that eple made to find a particular site. The searches can be viewed in real time bu logging into your HitTail account.

The core of the HitTail idea is to provide information on the ‘long tail’ of searches that people make to find a site. A significant percentage of visitors find a site based on a few keywords BUT the vast majority of visitors find the site by using keywords that are in the ‘long tail.’ HitTails’ crown jewels is a suggestion list.

The suggestion list is created using patent pending technology and creates a list of terms that HitTail believes would be worthwhile for you to create conetent about. They particularly recommend creating content using a blog or CMS because of the ease of use.

According to HitTail, creating new content based on the suggestions creates a snowball effect and further suggestions. The end result should be significant new traffic.

Visit HitTail to view some informative demo videos about the HitTail service.

I quickly learned that during development it was vital to keep checking how a site rendered in multiple browsers (and on the same browsers running on different operating systems). Having said that, there are an awful lot of browser variants out there and several operating systems.

A great tool to help with this problem is browsershots.org. All you need to do is enter the URL of the page that you want to check and then make a selection of the browsers you want to check against.

Browser alternatives to check your Web page against

Currently the following, very comprehensive selction is supported:

Linux

Dillo 0.8, Epiphany 2.22, Firefox 1.0, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Flock 1.2, Flock 2.0, Galeon 1.3, Galeon 2.0, Iceape 1.1, Iceweasel 3.0, Kazehakase 0.2, Kazehakase 0.4, Kazehakase 0.5, Konqueror 3.5, Minefield 3.1, Mozilla 1.7, Navigator 9.0, Opera 9.25, Opera 9.50, Opera 9.51, SeaMonkey 1.1,SeaMonkey 2.0,

Windows

Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Flock 1.1, Flock 1.2, Flock 2.0, K-Meleon 1.1, Minefield 3.1, MSIE 4.0, MSIE 5.0, MSIE 5.5, MSIE 6.0, MSIE 7.0, MSIE 8.0, Navigator 9.0, Opera 9.23, Opera 9.24, Opera 9.25, Opera 9.26, Opera 9.27, Opera 9.50, Opera 9.51, Safari 3.0, Safari 3.1, SeaMonkey 1.1, SeaMonkey 2.0

Mac OS

Camino 1.6, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Safari 2.0, Safari 3.0, Safari 3.1, Safari 4.0

Once you enter your URL and made a browser selection the tool goes and creates screen shots of your page in each browser/OS combination.

BrowserShots processing your site against the selected browsers

This can take some time, but once complete the screenshots are displayed on the Web page.

Your Web pages renders differently in different browsers

By hovering over each image you will see a larger version. You can also double click on an image to see a larger version.

Browsershots is a great tool for doing an audit of your current sites, or for helping during the initial design phase.

One of my projects is to make a comprehensive list of SEO data needs and then go about creating a matrix to match those needs with available information tools.

Before the change the only way of getting this information was to take a guess by looking at a bar within the keyword tool that gave a rough approximation for comparison purposes between different keyword phrases.

Alternatively you could have subscribed to Wordtracker – but Wordtracker gets all ist dat from two sparsely used metacrawlers: Dogpile and Metacrawler. Its results were likely to be less accurate, especially for more esoteric and thinly searched subjects.

I ran one of my sites through the updated Google keyword tool, and for example, for the term ‘graphic design companies’ it returned 9,900 searches for June. Google says that the tool produces an approximate number, but I suspect that this is fairly accurate.

If you go to Wordtracker and use their free keywords tool to enter the same term, the results are markedly different.

One thing that struck me the other day was Avinash’s comments about internal search. Even though I often use the internal search box on many of the sites I visit, I hadn’t really thought about its potential as an information source for understanding what people are looking for when they got to my site.

it makes sense that as sites get bigger and bigger, no menu structure, or site map can truly capture the complexity of the information and provide an easy navigation to each and every item. Avinash cites Amazon as an example.

Capturing the data does not need to be complicated, at least not at first. You can start by capturing what the visitor did an internal search for and when he made the search.

If you decide to use Google Analytics, Google recently added a new feature called Site Search. To enable Site Search for your site you need to lo into Google Analytics and find profile settings. Once here you need to edit the Main Website Profile Information and change the Site Search setting to “Do Track Site Search.’ You will also need to enter Query Parameter(s). These enable Google to recognize that a search is taking place. When someone clicks the internal search box on you site, you will probably see something like:

http://billyfire.com/BillyFireSearch.php?search_term=test+entry

or

http://semplanning.com/wordpress/?s=test+search+in+wordpress

In the first case the query parameter is: “search_term”. In the second case, which results from submitting something into the standard WordPress search box, the query parameter is “s.”