Version tested: 2.2.15.31

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.
• Google search results are obtained from over 50+ international data centers.
• Note that there may be slight differences between your own manual search results and the ones obtained by this program. This is normal and may is caused by several factors (it is possible for you to do 2 consecutive searches on Google within minutes of each other and find slight differences in the displayed results).
• Results can be exported to CSV.
• Nag screen. Unfortunately, there is one. I like the simplicity and added value of this program enough to live with it, though.

If you are interested in SEO and in monitoring your site’s rankings on Google you will find that this little gem of a program is simple and extremely useful. .

Differences between free and paid version: The paid version of this is a much more powerful program that can also search Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. It will collect paid-search as well as natural search information. It also includes a keyword suggestion tool. (There are a few other, less important differences).

Compatibility: Windows 98, 2000, XP (no info on Vista).

Go to the program page to get the latest version (approx 1.27 megs).

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]

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. Another thing they seemed to have done a decent job on is the introduction of a UI builder to design and edit your blog templates. You no longer have to hack your way through convoluted HTML to introduce simple UI elements like a linked list. In general the UI builder seems to work, and not crash. But it does have its problems, the biggest being the confused state it winds up in if you do edit the HTML; unfortunately, this is innevitible if you upgraded your old blog as opposed to creating a new one from scratch. I still recommend rebuilding your UI template from scratch using the UI builder; of course, make sure to keep a back up of your original.

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. Another thing they seemed to have done a decent job on is the introduction of a UI builder to design and edit your blog templates. You no longer have to hack your way through convoluted HTML to introduce simple UI elements like a linked list. In general the UI builder seems to work, and not crash. But it does have its problems, the biggest being the confused state it winds up in if you do edit the HTML; unfortunately, this is innevitible if you upgraded your old blog as opposed to creating a new one from scratch. I still recommend rebuilding your UI template from scratch using the UI builder; of course, make sure to keep a back up of your original.There are also some nice widgets in the UI builder. One of my favorites is the RSS summary display; it allows you to put in an RSS feed, and then drag the element onto the blog display. The result is all the titles of the RSS feed show up so your users can click off onto this other blog. You can see an example on the new site I created at http://deep-art.blogspot.com – if you scroll down a bit, you’ll see an RSS feed called Chalo Bolo. Chalo Bolo is my main blog, so this element allows me to pull users interested in more general topics I write about. In general, the new Blogger is a big step up from the old, and better than other server side blogging all inclusive tools I’ve used. Nonetheless, I have a few items on my wish list for the next release:

* More customization ability on the RSS viewer. For example, I would like an option to include a couple lines of text from each article in addition to just the title. I would also like to be able to customize the number of articles displayed.

* Clean separation of content from blogs. Currently I have about 4 different blogs on Blogger. It is a real pain to post articles to different blogs, especially when I need to cross post. I would far prefer it if I could simply choose, for a given blog, which tags to automatically show in that blog. For example, my general blog Chalo Bolo, would show any articles regardless of tag, where as my art blog, would only show articles with the tag “art.”

* Future dated posts. I often write a number of blog posts at once. I would like to have these posts automatically posted over the next few days. It would be great if I could simply select a date in the future for a given post, and then have the post go live automatically on that date.

* Frequent Commenter Widget. Many people who post comments on the web, do so out of a self interest to drive traffic back to their site through an active link on their name. I would like to encourage this (minus the spammers of course), since it increases interest and traffic in my own site. It would be nice if I could have a widget that ranks in inverse order the most frequent commenter. Another idea is to enable users to vote on comments, so there could be a featured comment of the day.

* Ability to buy a domain name. Many of us are too addicted to leave Blogger, but would prefer to have our own domain name, and would prefer to do without the generic tool bar at the top of each blog. I would like to be able to pay a small amount, and have the DNS registration, migration, etc. all handled for me.

That’s it for now. I give the new Blogger 4stars out of 5. Unless you want to go the next level and highly customize your blog locally using client side software, I recommend going w/ Blogger.

Version tested:  1.2.25

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.

This app has some pretty nifty reporting capabilities as well. It can create a bar chart in a little window (see second screenshot) for a number of metrics (impressions, clicks, ecpm, ctr, and earnings), for different Adsense products and ad channels, across different date ranges. You cannot do cross charting of multiple metrics, but as far as I am concered SysSense is already going well above and beyond the call of duty for such a small program.

If you’re an Adsense addict (you know who you are) this is the program you’ve been looking for.

Go to the program page for the latest version.

“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.

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  2.0

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.

What you might not know, though, is that Yahoo (or Overture as it used to be called) actually makes available search volume statistics that can be really useful guides for optimizing your site and putting together your SEM campaign. Good Keywords is a small free program that will pull down these keyword search stats through the Yahoo/Overture API. It will also allow you to do some nifty stuff with the results.

The main functionality is, of course, looking up keyword permutations; e.g. a search for ‘freeware’ at the time of this writing will show that that term is searched on 63977 times/month, followed by ‘freeware game’ and ‘freeware downloads’ (at 10439 and 7516 searches/month respectively), etc. (see screenshot above). Note that the result set will conform to Yahoo’s peculiar translation of a search term. “Freeware” and “website”, for example, reformulated as “free ware” and “web site”; plurals will be reverted back into singulars, and some words will be filtered out altogether (”how do I download freeware” will be turned into “download free ware”, with the first three words taken out).

Good Keywords will also look up misspellings of keywords for you. This is often very useful as these might be searched on a lot and significantly less expensive than the correctly spelled counterparts. It will also allow you to create your own groups of keywords from any number of keyterm search results. Further, there are a couple of really good functionalities that add a lot of value; the ‘Webpage Explorer’ function will scan a webpage and output the various one-word and two-word terms found within it as well as the frequency of these. There is also a ‘Keyword Phrase Builder’ that can help construct keyword lists by cross-joining up to 3 lists of terms (check out the following screenshot for a small example of this). Finally, Good Keywords will allow you to enter multiple websites and check for the Alexa popularity ranking for these.

All in all this is a very useful tool. It doesn’t do anything spectacular but what it does do it does well. The only real drawback in my opinion is simply that Yahoo’s data is often not the best buidling blocks you could use when you’re building something for Google, and the different permutations of the same term, as well as search frequency, are often very different for the two search engines. This issue, however, is obviously not something that the makers of Good Keywords can do anything about (Google, in contrast to Yahoo, does not transparently make search volume data available in the same way Yahoo does).

At first I was going to give this software 4 stars not 5, just because there are other more powerful resources out there for SEM/SEO, and after installing this a while back I find I really don’t use it as often as often as I thought I would. However, given that the resources I am referring to are not cheap and this software is totally free I think 5 stars are definitely in order.

Go to download page for latest version. The Program home page.