Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.2.15.31

Description: Free Monitor for Google is a small app that checks the natural search rankings of a URL (or multiple URLs) in Google for a list of user-defined keywords. For each keyword it can show a reference list of the top Google site results.

Here’s what you need to know about this program:

• This program will try to find your URL in the top result rankings for each of your keywords. The number of results it will search and display is user defined (i.e. you can tell it to look in the top 10, 20, 30 results etc).
• It will allow you to work with an unlimited number of keywords.
• For each of your keywords, Free Monitor for Google will remember the best ranking attained. It will also display a little up arrow, down arrow, or neutral arrow to show movement in ranking from the last time the search was conducted.
  Read more »

Rating: 4 

Version tested:  Beta

[Note: this review was written by my friend Navdeep Dhillon; see his personal blog here; also see Infact, the free ebook site he built with his team - The Freewaregenius]

Description: Blogger is a free service owned by Google that allows you to publish your own blog and host in on Blogger’s own servers as a subdomain of blogspot.com or on a server of your choosing. Blogger beta introduces a dynamic blogging platform and other improvements such as tagging and drag and drop template modifications.

I recently started using Google’s new Blogger beta. Its definitely a big step up from the previous version of Blogger.One no brainer new feature is the introduction of tags. Perhaps a couple years late, but a welcomed new feature nonetheless. I was getting quite tired of loading my entries with keywords, and then relying on the search capability to “kind of” get tags to work. Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  1.2.25

Description: SysSense is a system-tray based app that will retrieve data periodically from Google Adsense accounts and display real time notifications of your latest account information.

If you have a website (or websites) where you use Google Adsense you might want to check this one out. SysSense is resides in your system-tray and updates you on various account metrics. You can use it for multiple accounts (it allows for an unlimited number of accounts).

SysSense will periodically flash your information in a notification balloon (see screenshot) or can be told to refresh at will and display the latest adsense numbers - no need to log into your account(s) in a browser. Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  2.0

“In this changed world the keyword reigns supreme”.

I just felt like saying that. It sounds like a potentially meaningful and fashionable thing to say. It seems like you can really put your finger on the pulse of what’s going on if you knew what words/terms are being searched on a lot.

You also need to have an idea as to what keywords are being searched for if you’re interested in optimizing your site for the search engines. This information is also crucial if you are going to put together an effective paid search SEM campaign (which, in fact, is what I do for a living). There are a few free resources that can turn to for this; try Google Trends for a 3 year comparison of search terms complete with flags for significant events that might have affected them. You could also look at the media-oriented Yahoo Buzz Index for some entertaining trends. Read more »