Archive for the ‘Cool Web Tools’ Category

Review: Six Small Business CMS and Web Marketing Systems

Monday, August 29th, 2011

What’s the best web content management system (CMS) for your small business? Should you look at something beyond a CMS—a web marketing system (WMS), that provides additional functions like customer relationship management (CRM) and email? There’s no shortage of options, and the decision is an important one: you’ll be “married” to the platform you choose for as long as your current site is up.

Content management systems are valuable tools for small businesses that 1) don’t want to make a big investment in IT infrastructure, 2) don’t have web development (HTML, CSS etc.) expertise on staff, and 3) want to be able to maintain their own web content (adding new pages, text and images) over time, without needing to learn web coding skills.

“Free” CMS options such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal have an obvious appeal (price) to small businesses, but none are cost-free. All require some level of technical expertise, and Joomla and Drupal particularly have steep learning curves. Low-cost, fee-based tools are generally more user-friendly, provide more features, and most importantly come bundled with support. For businesses looking beyond “free” tools, here are six CMS and WMS options that can help you get more sales and marketing productivity out of your website, while being easy on your web content contributors.

Keep in mind that all of these tools impose some design limitations; if you need a truly custom look and feel like these sites, your only option is to hire a professional web design and development firm. But if you can live within a template (and most of these tools do offer a respectable array of options), you can save thousands of dollars on design and coding costs.

CMS Only

These platforms offer website building and content management tools with hosting, but no “extras.” If you are just looking to get a site up on the web and already have systems in place for CRM and marketing automation, these tools are worthy of consideration.

Squarespace

Pricing: $150-$600 per year ($12-$50 per month)

Squarespace LogoSquarespace is a generally well-regarded tool with reasonable design functionality for building natively search-optimized websites and blogs. It offers a solid set of features including site search, multiple permission levels for different types of contributors, a form-builder, and  built-in analytics. The learning curve is far less daunting than most free CMS alternatives, and a strength of the tool is its mobile support. For anyone looking for an inexpensive, easy-to-use, basic website building and management tool, Squarespace is definitely worth consideration.

UPDATE: After closer examination, SquareSpace is not worthy of consideration, due to weaknesses in search engine optimization, specifically:

  • • Custom meta title tags for high-level pages are limited to 50 characters (even the most conservative SEOs recommend 65 characters for the title tag).
  • • Meta title tags inside a section (e.g., “blog”) will always begin with the section name. You can customize the section name, but you can’t override the fact the all-important first few characters of every page title in that section will contain it.
  • • You can’t create custom meta description tags (!) which are essential in “selling the click.”
  • • The people behind SquareSpace seem to lack understanding of how SEO works. True, manipulative tactics don’t work, but solid, white hat SEO is essential to getting a website ranked highly. Their information is both inaccurate and offensive to legitimate SEO professionals.

LightCMS

$240-$1200/year ($20-$100 per month)

LightCMS LogoLike the other tools listed here, LightCMS is low-cost, easy to use, search-optimized and provides tools like a forms builder. What sets it apart is better design flexibility than most of the alternatives, calendar tools and built-in ecommerce functionality. For developers and agencies, LightCMS also offers one of the most attractive partner programs. Considering all of its features, LightCMS is another shortlist-worthy tool for basic website creation, particularly for smaller B2C companies who want an easy-to-manage online store.

Solution Toolbox

$300 per year ($25 per month)

Solution Toolbox LogoAnother website building option that includes extras like ecommerce functionality with credit card processing, and nightly backups. The site is a bit cheesy, but the functionality of the tool is solid. Solution Toolbox provides their own comparison of their system to Squarespace and LightCMS, but take it with a grain of salt; it’s biased in their favor of course and some of the specifics are out of date (for example, Squarespace now includes a forms-builder). Still, for smaller consumer marketers who want to run an online store in addition to their basic website, this is worth a look.

Web Marketing Platforms

These suites combine CMS functionality with additional web marketing applications to provide more than just a website, but a complete online marketing software system.

Business Catalyst

$480 per year ($40 per month)

Business Catalyst LogoBusiness Catalyst combines the features of the products above—a CMS, forms builder, and ecommerce tools—with email marketing functionality and a basic CRM system. It provides respectable design flexibility and support for mobile devices. Though the product had issues in its original incarnation, Adobe has fixed many of these issues since acquiring it in late 2009 and continues to invest in product development. The catch? Business Catalyst isn’t sold directly to users, only through web developers and agencies (though there are ways around this).

Genoo

$2,400/year ($200 per month)

Genoo LogoGenoo is a solid, easy to use tool, very strong on email marketing / marketing automation. It offers some of the best built-in SEO tools of any of these packages. Genoo doesn’t provide native CRM functionality, but does have a pre-built integration to Salesforce.com. This is ideal for midsized companies with at least moderately sophisticated internal marketing resources who are already using a separate CRM system and are ready to graduate from hosted email marketing services. Genoo’s offering includes training on how to use its lead-nurturing capabilities.

ePROneur

$1,800/year ($150 per month)

ePROneur LogoThis is a complete web marketing package for smaller, non-ecommerce businesses. It provides a robust CMS for a website and blog along with native CRM, email marketing, and forms-building tools, as well as comprehensive strategy guidance for making all of the pieces work together. The ePROneur package uniquely combines hosting, software, services and strategy to help companies with limited resources effectively generate leads and revenue online. The web marketing resources section of the company’s website also offers a wealth of free strategic and tactical web marketing information.

Any of the alternatives above can help small to midsize companies cost-effectively build and manage their web presence with no IT infrastructure and limited technical expertise. The key from there is to choose a platform whose strengths match up with your business type and needs. And also to investigate multiple options to determine which tool, and company, you are most comfortable working with.

FTC Disclosure: Webbiquity has no affiliate relationships with any of the vendors in this review.

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New Tool Helps SEO, SEM Consultants Pinpoint Local Clients

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

The SeoQuake team, the group behind the SEMRush tools for SEO and keyword research, recently released a new tool to help SEM consultants and agencies find local clients. SEMRush Geo displays Google AdWords advertisers on a Google Maps background, enabling users to identify the businesses within any geographic area who are running AdWords campaigns.

SEMRush Geo Tool - Mapping AdWords Users

Clicking on any businesses opens a small pop-out with additional information (which is also displayed in the left sidebar). Clicking the SEMRush icon within the pop-out or sidebar opens a new window displaying the keywords bid on by that company, and for each keyword the average cost per click, destination URL, percentage of AdWords traffic driven, percentage of AdWords costs and more. The free link displays only partial data; a Pro subscription to SEMRush (at $50 per month) is required to view all of the AdWords data, plus organic keywords, history and export capabilities.

SEMRush AdWords Detail Information by Company

For companies using AdWords, it may seem almost a bit creepy that there is this level of detail about their SEM activities available publicly. But it’s a good reminder for all of us that what we online is, usually,  there for the world to see if one knows where to look. For SEM agencies and consultants, the SEMRush Geo tool is a prospecting goldmine. Used properly, the tool can help agencies generate new business and advertisers improve the effectiveness of their AdWords campaigns. For consultants and agencies that provide SEM services, this is definitely worth checking out.

FTC Disclosure: SEMRush provided access to their tools to assist in conducting this evaluation but did not provide any direct compensation for writing this post.

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31+ of the Coolest Social Media, Search and Web Tools of 2010

Monday, January 24th, 2011

Looking for an easy way to create a cool graphical email signature with trackable interactive buttons? Supplement your email list with your contacts’ social network info? Find out if the username or vanity URL you want is still available across dozens of social sites? Display a feed of brand-related comments from a variety of social networks on your website? Create video emails? Convert PowerPoint presentations to Flash, or into YouTube videos? Search for a brand name or keyword across all of the most popular social networks at once? Monitor social media discussions of your company or product in real time? Create animations? Promote events through social media? Gather competitive intelligence?

Best Cool Social Media, Search and Web Tools of 2010Economic conditions may have been tough in 2010, but there was no shortage of online innovation. Discover how to accomplish all of the tasks above and more using some of the coolest free and modestly priced social media and web tools released in the past year or so.

Cool Social Media Tools

eSig

A slick tool with free and fee-based options for creating graphical email signatures, adding interactive buttons and even tracking click-throughs from the different elements of your email signature.

Flowtown

A handy way to supplement your email contact list with information about those prospects from the most popular social networks.

namechk

Check dozens of popular social networking and social bookmarking websites to see if the username or vanity url you want to use is still available.

JustUnfollow

Don’t want to follow Twitterers who aren’t following you? This tool makes unfollowing non-followers easy.

Klout Score for TomPickKlout

A free tool for finding the relative influence of any Twitter user. For those accustomed to getting stratospheric scores on standardized tests, Klout can seem a bit harsh. If you need more of an ego boost, try TwitterGrader.

paper.li

Create your own online newspaper from Twitter and Facebook updates based on any topic or group of contributors. Your custom paper is updated daily and easy to share.

DialogFeed

***** 5 Stars

Display a feed of brand-related comments from a variety of social networks on your website. Highlight the best comments, selectively hide comments (e.g. that are irrelevant or profane), and enable site visitors to share comments back to their social networks without leaving your website.

twebevent

A free service for setting up, promoting and hosting Twitter chats.

Social and Alternative Search Engines

48ers

A realtime social search engine that pulls current and recent results for any term from Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg and Delicious. Searches can also be filtered by platform.

Qwiki Search for Gwyneth PaltrowQwiki

A different kind of search engine, Qwiki (currently in alpha) delivers a combination of audio, images and text in response to searches on an expanding variety of topics. In the site’s words, “Think of asking your favorite teacher about Leonardo Da Vinci, or your most well-traveled friend about Buenos Aires: this is the experience Qwiki will eventually deliver, on demand, wherever you are in the world… on whatever device you’re using.”

MyLife

A powerful people search tool. Find long-lost acquaintances, extended family members, or a future love interest. Discover what information is available about a potential future boss or employee. Interesting, though the “Who’s searching for you” feature appears to be more a spammy sales tool than a functional offer.

Blekko’s Tools Give Search Marketers Google Alternative by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Granted, the web is littered with “Google killer” alternative search engines, but Blekko, created by Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson, is really cool. It enables users to perform slashtag searches, so for example, rather than just searching for “social media marketing” and getting a zillion results of all types, you can search for “social media marketing /blogs” to see only results from blogs. Or use /forums too see only results from discussion forums, /date to sort results by recency, or even create your own slashtags.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Lithium

A feature-rich, realtime social media monitoring and engagement tool. In addition to customizable search and sentiment monitoring, the Buzz Tracking feature provides realtime “metrics around how much buzz is out there, how much of it is yours, how much of it is your competitors’, and what’s buzzing industry-wide.” Lithium also includes response assignment and reporting tools. A free trial is available.

BackType - Social Media Monitoring and Analytics ToolBackType

A slick, easy to use social media monitoring and alerts tool. Create an account or try it out by setting up a free alert in just seconds.

Actionly

A social media monitoring tool that tracks your brand and keyword searches across Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Google Buzz, Blogs, and News, and reports results hourly. Actionly also includes Twitter account management and analytics tools.

Sysomos

A realtime social media monitoring tool featuring sentiment analysis, key influencer tracking, and the ability to sort/view results by geography and demographics. Sysomos has an impressive blue chip customer list and the company’s recent acquisition by Marketwire gives it solid brand and investment backing.

Wildfire Social Media Monitor

Measure your social media marketing performance with tracking tools for the major social media networks, keep tabs on competitors and compare your results to theirs, and get alerts about trends and social media activity. Wildfire is designed to enable organizations to easily create branded interactive campaigns (e.g. sweepstakes, contests and surveys) and publish them to multiple social networks and their own website. Pricing ranges from $30 to $150 per month.

Other Cool Web Tools

Proclaim Messenger

Proclaim Messenger enables you to easily combine pre-recorded or live video with PowerPoint presentations to produce video email campaigns (with full analytics), one-off video sales emails, or hold live one-to-one or small group video chats. Pricing ranges from $30 to $100 per month depending on features.

Runaware

Runaware’s TestDrive® suite of services provides software developers with marketing tools and a hosted interactive online demo environment that allows customers to evaluate real software in their web browser, complete with tutorials and detailed usage reporting. Runaware’s Cloud Platform offerings enable clients to experiment and evaluate SaaS and PaaS using their own application without requiring any modifications.

Wondershare

An inexpensive tool for converting PowerPoint to Flash web files, ideal for creating online presentations, Flash banners, photo albums, e-cards and more. You can import other Flash files and audio as well as record narration. The output can be saved as a Flash file for the web, converted to a self-running executable, used to create an auto-run CD or sent as an email attachment.

Qirina

Billing itself as a “keyword analysis and comparison engine,” Qirina is a simple but useful SEO evaluation tool that helps users understand a site’s position in the keyspace, assess the quality of the site’s on-site SEO, and identify competitors in search.

Reviews of More Cool Web Tools

Another Cool Tool To Optimize Your Site Loading Speed by Daily Blog Tips

Now that Google is taking site loading time into consideration as a ranking factor, webmasters are feeling the need for speed as never before. Here’s a quick review of WebPageTest, a handy tool for checking any site’s pre- and post-cache load times.

6 slick news aggregators you should try by iMedia Connection

Josh Rose reviews six “news aggregators (including Popurls, Netvibes and Alltop) that…are moving beyond the simple RSS reader. These are customizable tools that can be shaped into exactly the right resource for the most important information you need to know.”

PowerPoints That Turn Into YouTube Videos Create Instant Marketing Tool by MediaPost Search Blog

Laurie Sullivan provides an update on Brainshark, “a tool that turns PowerPoint decks into YouTube videos. The platform turns a presentation into a video slideshow (with voiceover/audio) formatted to upload onto YouTube with one click.”

Dvolver Moviemaker6 Free Sites for Creating Your Own Animations by Mashable

Sarah Kessler reviews a half-dozen free and (mostly) easy to use tools for creating online animations, including GoAnimate, Devolver, Xtranormal and Voki.

6 Newfangled Social Media Tools Worth Discovering by Convince & Convert

Jay Baer shares his thoughts on a small collection of tools worth checking out, including Curate.Us, which is sort of a social media-friendly version of ClipMarks; Formulists, a slick tool for automatically creating lists of your Twitter followers based on criteria you select such as having a similar follower count or having retweeted you in the past month; and Wibiya, which lets you create a custom footer bar for your blog or website that enable users to easily translate a page, share it via their social networks, link to your YouTube channel or perform other actions.

12 Social Media Tools for B2B Pre-Event Marketing by Social Media B2B

***** 5 Stars

Adam Holden-Bache presents a dozen tools that can “help event organizers extend an event’s visibility, attendance and pre-event conversations,” from LinkedIn Events and Facebook Events to build attendance, to location-based services for event check-in, to Slideshare for leveraging presentation content after the event.

MentionMap for TomPick on Twitter11 Twitter & Social Media Tools To Try In 2011 by COMMS Corner

***** 5 Stars

The brilliant Adam Vincenzini reviews a collection of highly useful social media tools including Twoolr for Twitter statistics, MentionMap for analyzing “what a particular person is talking about on Twitter and who they are talking to,” TouchGraph for visualizing where your site is being mentioned, and Citrify, a simple yet effective web-based photo editing tool.

The Best Things In Life Are Free: 10 Tools For Digital Professionals That Don’t Cost A Dime by MediaPost Online Media Daily

A quick review of 10 free tools for online marketers, for tasks like keyword research, competitive intelligence gathering, social media monitoring, test marketing and presentations.

Most Popular Free Windows Downloads of 2010 by Lifehacker

***** 5 Stars

The most popular free Windows tools of 2010, including Soluto for speeding up slow PCs, Snow Transformation for those who want their Windows screen to look like a Mac, Freemake video converter and editor, and MultiBootOS– a true geek tool that lets you load multiple operating systems onto a USB drive and select between them at boot-up.

4 Social Media Predictions for 2011 by oneforty blog

Social media monitoring tools are predicted to get both more sophisticated and less expensive in 2011, and several interesting vendors are cited here including Argyle Social, viralheat, Beevolve and eCairn.

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20+ Cool Social Media and Web Tools

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20+ Cool Social Media and Web Tools

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Looking for a way to monitor social media activities and results on a tight budget? Want to show the world how social you are with a cool widget on your website or blog? How about a real-time search tool to see what’s being said about your company or any topic of interest right now?  Interested in an easy way to stay current on key Google Analytics traffic stats from your desktop? Need a way to edit video and photos without the expense and overhead of a pricey editing application?

You’ll find all of this and more in this collection of tools and reviews of some of the coolest free or low-cost social media monitoring and web tools so far this year.

Cool Web Tools

SocialMention Screenshot - TomPickSocial Mention
***** 5 stars
A powerful real-time social search engine that not only displays results for a specified term or phrase, but lets you filter results by source (e.g., blogs, microblogging sites, social bookmarking, images, video), and shows associated metrics like sentiment, top keywords, top users (who’s talking about this topic most actively) and sources. You can narrow search results to a specific timeframe and sort by date or source. Social Mention also lets you set up alerts (simiar to Google Alerts) and offers a widget that can be installed on a website or blog to display the real-time buzz about your specified topic.

uberVU

A social media monitoring tool that combines powerful features (e.g., historical and real-time data, sentiment analysis, platform filtering) and ease of use with a more attractive monthly price than many well-known competitors.

Social Website Analyzer

A quick and handy way to get a snapshot of the “social media rank” of any website. Metrics include traffic stats from Alexa, Compete and Quantcast; backlinks and results by search engine; backlinks and mentions on the major social news sites and more.

Outbrain

A cool, free blog widget that automatically displays links, along with thumbnail images, to related posts on your blog at the bottom of each blog post you publish. Visitors can rate posts and you also get click statistics. It takes a bit longer to install than they claim but isn’t terribly difficult.

monitter

A dead-simple to use Twitter monitoring dashboard; keep tabs on tweets for three phrases, hash tags or Twitter handles. Monitoring can be filtered by location as well.

Collecta

A real-time search engine that displays results from blog posts, articles, blog comments, microblogging sites (e.g., Twitter) and social content sharing sites.

Stupeflix

An online video editor than enables you to mix videos footage, images and soundtracks and add effects to create standard or high-definition online videos. Your first video is free. After that, their standard pricing model is designed for high-volume production but plans are available for less frequent use as well.

Polaris

***** 5 Stars
Want a quick snapshot of how your website—or any number of websites you track through Google Analytics—is performing? Now there’s no need to log in to GA just for a simple check. Polaris is a slick, free Adobe Air-based desktop tool that displays eight GA charts at a glance, including the dashboard, traffic sources, top content, keywords and goal values.

Amplicate

Do you really love a particular topic, company, website or public figure? Or really hate one? Care what others think? This is the site for you. Amplicate is a user-driven site that shows you at a glance how many people love or hate any of thousands of different entities across dozens of categories. For example, (at last check) in the social networks category, three times as many (67 to 22) people loved ecademy as hated it, while more than twice as many (18,163 to 8,632) hated Facebook as loved it (not that Zuckerberg is terribly worried). Joe Biden gets 86% love, but Barack Obama only 48%. Okay, so it may not be scientific, but it is fascinating.

BackUpMyTweets

Twitter saves “only” your last 3,200 tweets. For those who feel they really need to hang on to more than that, BackUpMyTweets offers a free service to save all their snippets of 140-character brilliance. The site also offers tools for backing up web mail accounts, blogs and online photos.

Reviews of More Cool Tools

5 PowerPoint Search Engines To Seek Out Publicly Available Presentations by Carpe Diem

According to some estimates, there may be as many as 50 million PowerPoint presentations publicly available on the web. But searching for them can be a pain. Sure you can use a general search engine with PPT as a filetype query, but you can save yourself work and typing by utilizing one of these PowerPoint-specific search engines to do the digging.

The 39 Social Media Tools I’ll Use Today by Social Media Today

Jay Baer provides concise reviews of his favorite social media tools for Twitter management, comments, search, photo sharing, analytics, video creation, social media monitoring and more.

Trackur Launches Free Version Of Its Social Media Monitoring Tool by TechCrunch

Robin Wauters reviews Trackur, an online reputation management and social media monitoring tool created by Andy Beal and team. Trackur is sort of Google Alerts on steroids and competes with products like Radian6 and Attentio. This is a slick tool, and my one experience with their support team was impressively brief and helpful.

10 Must-Have Web Apps Every Internet User Would Love To Know by Smashing Apps

Mini-reviews of 10 helpful tools such as WobZIP, an online utility for unzipping files on admin-proteced computers; Mitto, an online password manager; and Web Page to PDF, which is kind of self-explanatory.

10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop by LifeClever

Chanpory Rith reviews 10 free online tools that offer many of the features of PhotoShop with the high cost or complexity, including Picnik (possibly the best free online photo editor), PhotoShop Express, Snipshot and flauntR.

5 Free B2B Marketing Tools by Modern B2B Marketing

Maria Pergolino of Marketo reviews five popular tools including CoTweet, a Twitter tool that enable users to track keyword or brand mentions and even assign responses to particular individuals (for example, by product line). These are familiar but essential tools for the b2b marketer’s toolbox.

List of Search Engines – Top Search Engines in 2010 by Secret Search Engine Labs

Google may be the 800-pound gorilla of search engines but as this post reminds us, it’s not alone in the jungle. Here you’ll find a alphabetical list of 30+ alternative search engines from Ask and Rich Skrenta’s Blekko to social search engine Stumpedia and “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha.

Interesting websites to check out by iMedia Connection (video)

Shelly Palmer discusses four tools worth checking out including BugMeNot (for creating website logins that won’t get you spammed) and Phonezoo, a site where you can find and create custom cell phone ringtones.

10 Simple Google Search Tricks by The New York Times

Simon Mackie of GigaOM explains 10 cool little tricks for Google searches including site search, using Google as a calculator, performing currency conversions and finding specific types of documents online.

12 alternatives to Basecamp by Popwuping

Clark MacLeod reviews a dozen alternatives to popular online project management / group collaboration tool Basecamp, such as Huddle, Kindling and Mindquarry.

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Best Cool Web Tools of 2009, Part 2

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Part 1 of the best cool web tools for 2009 presented tools for sharing presentations online, consolidating social networking accounts, generating word-of-mouth referrals and using social media for research. This post includes tools for social search, social media monitoring, Twitter management, competitive research, real-time chat, job hunting, video sharing, time management and more.

Social Media Tools

Best Cool Web Tools of 2009 - WebbiquityHowSociable?

An extremely cool tool. What Website Grader does for website SEO analysis, HowSociable? does for a brand’s presence in social media: it evaluates a variety of sites to produce a combined “social media presence” score. Even better, it allows you to drill into the social media mentions of a brand behind the metrics.

Filtrbox

A real-time social media monitoring platform for PR, marketing, and brand pros. Get real-time alerts, trending and analysis for news, blogs, twitter and more.

KnowEm

Protecting your brand online is critical. This tool lets you instantly search more than 350 social media sites for your brand as a user name, so you can reserve it and keep it out of the hands of competitors, name squatters or potential detractors.

TwiPing

An inexpensive utility that helps efficiently create Twitter lists, find relevant people to follow, identify inactive Twitter followers and more.

CloudProfile: Social Media Optimization for Small Business by Mashable

Mashable reviews CloudProfile, a social profile / SEO / social media monitoring tool for small businesses. Sounds interesting, but is it worth $50 per month?

The Internet more positive about PPC than SEO by Searchcowboys

A review of whatdoestheinternetthink, a social sentiment tool. Enter any term and this tool will show you percentages of positive, negative and “don’t care” social media sentiment regarding the topic or brand.

Own Your Domain Name & Aggregate All of Your Social Accounts with Chi.mp by How-To Geek

A review of Chi.mp, a free service that enables you to register a personal/unique domain name, domain name, then blog, create photo albums, and aggregate all of your social accounts in one place.

Real-Time Chat Tools

Meebo Me

A widget that lets you install real-time chat capabilities on any web page.

Olark Is A Dead Simple Chat Widget For Site Owners by TechCrunch

TechCrunch review of Olark, a live chat widget alternative to Meebo.

Enhanced Search Tools

5 Ways to Add a Search Sidebar to Google SERPs by Search Engine Journal

Ann Smarty reviews WebMynd, Unified Search and three other tools that extend the search capabilities of Google in various ways to produce more relevant and/or comprehensive results.

Search Engine LeapFish Merges Real-Time Data And Social Content by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Review of LeapFish, a meta-search engine that combines traditional and real-time results from social media and news sites.

Wowd

A real-time search tool for discovering current opinion and news coverage of hot topics.

Scoopler

Another real-time search tool.

Google Squared – A Simple Tutorial by SEM Nook

A quick tutorial on how to use Google Squared to get customized, focused search results.

SimilarWeb

A downloadable tool that helps instantly find sites similar to the one you are currently browsing.

MyLife

A powerful people search tool for finding online information about individuals.

Hunch

A human-powered recommendation engine that provides guidance on a wide range of topics and questions, from which computer you should buy to which vegetables are the most  nutritious.

Other Cool Web Tools

Clip2Net

A tool that allows you to capture and upload video, images, text, files, even an area of your desktop to the web.

Hey!Spread

An online video distribution and analytics service to promote video content, somewhat along the lines of TubeMogul.

9 new marketing tools you need by iMedia Connection

Doug Schumacher reviews nine cool apps and plugins for marketers, including Skitch (for web page markup), OmniGraffle (diagramming), ColorZilla (online color management for design) and Hootsuite (Twitter management dashboard).

Find Competitor’s Top Performing Keywords & Use Them To Your Advantage by PPC Hero

Tips on how to use Compete.com to find your competitors’ top keywords, site traffic patterns, unique visitors and other information.

Xtranormal

A tool that lets you create funky animated movies from a text file.

Favicon

A tool for creating website favicons, similar to the DeGraeve favicon tool or the Dynamic Drive FavIcon generator.

Krunchd

A URL shortener that enables you to combine multiple URLs into one shortened link for collaboration or sharing.

Indeed

Job hunting? Indeed instantly searches job sites, newspapers, associations and company career pages for jobs based on title/keywords and location.

100+ Resources for Getting Things Done by Readaloo

A fabulous list of time management apps for calendars, task lists, collaboration, organization, taking notes, bookmarking, mind-mapping and more.

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