This review has been moved to Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus Review. Please add your own mini review of Office 2010 below that one.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Arguably the most comprehensive SEO tool on the market, Market Samurai is an affordable, must-have research and management aid for the affiliate marketing expert and novice alike.

Eugene Ware demonstrates Domain Samurai

Yesterday, more than 150 people were privileged to see a presentation of Market Samurai by Eugene Ware of Noble Samurai, the company behind the tool. Speaking at the Affiliate Marketing SIG of the Melbourne PC User Group, Eugene went through the basics of using this tool that is rapidly catching the interest of affiliate marketers everywhere.
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Popularity: 9% [?]

A discussion in the Webmasterworld Supporters forum (you need to be a paid Supporter to get there) entitled Rank checking for agencies led to a comment suggesting that using tools to make ranking checks is not a good idea for search agencies. Apparently, a manual check results in different results.

I had just made a check of some UK banks rankings while testing Axandra IBP.

Manual check of ranking tool results

Popularity: 2% [?]

Which real estate website will give you the most traffic to your listing? That depends on how good their SEO is. This report does not purport to tell you which company gives you a better service or value for money. There are thousands of localities not tested below – use a search engine and make up your own mind. All this report tries to convey is that some websites consistently rank in the top 10 and many more don’t.

The US real estate local search landscape is different from the Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) scene. Dedicated real estate classifieds sites such as Trulia and Zillow pop up in the search results, pushing down the static IYP entries from Yellowpages.com. They compete with affiliate marketer sites that are nipping at their heels.

I studied the performance of 26 nationwide real estate sites, including a small number of other sites that showed up in the SERPs. I was looking to find:

• Which cities are served well by the big real estate portals?
• Which search engine delivers high ranking real estate portals to a given city?
• Which portal delivers the highest ranks?
• Does the search term alter the ranks significantly?
• How much SEO appears to have been done?

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Popularity: 11% [?]

I saw a tweet from @Dixon_Jones:

New Link analysis app for the iphone! http://r3.ms/2o Very cool. has majesticseo moz and semrush data.

I bought it for $2.49 and checked it out. I entered my URL and pressed Done.

Waiting, waiting. Oh, there’s a Link Juice button up there. Does it take me to the beginning? Try it.

Success. The numbers in the top box are not clickable. OK, let’s try the links below. The first one I try is SEMRush.

Let’s try another one. SEOmoz Linking Domains:

Hmm. Let’s try MajesticSEO:

Hmm, I need More Details, and there’s a handy green button. Let’s see where it takes us:

Oh, it needs permission. OK:

Now I’m annoyed. This isn’t “more detail” about the link stats I was looking at but the app was closed and I am now in the browser looking at a non-mobile web page that has to be enlarged to be legible and it doesn’t even have my URL preloaded, waiting to be clicked.

The SEOmoz information is fairly detailed, but the MajesticSEO and SEMRush data is minimal – just three values from MajesticSEO:

• Indexed URLs
• External Backlinks
• Referring Domains

and three from SEMRush:

• SEMRush Rank
• SEMRush Traffic
• SEMRush Cost

I can’t say I recall hearing about SEMRush before and it hasn’t heard of my site, as it estimates my traffic to be 166 visitors per month.

Verdict

This is Version 1.0 and I am underwhelmed. I can imagine an SEO using this app while visitng a client but it isn’t something I’d be using in a coffee shop or in the crapper. It has the feel of a lead generator for SEMRush and MajesticSEO and not a good one at that, since we don’t get a mobile site in the browser.

Given the name of the app, Link Juice, I can’t see how the SEMRush data has anything to do with links. The SEOmoz data seems to come from Open Site Explorer, which is worth a visit in a desktop browser or a mobile browser if that’s all you’ve got. MajesticSEO is also well worth a visit with a desktop browser.

But the app has potential, i.e. provide more detail, or a connection with LinkDiagnosis.com.

Popularity: 4% [?]

The Inside AdWords blog reports that the Google AdWords Tool now shows “more relevant” traffic estimates. I don’t like it so far, more relevant or otherwise.

Google Keyword Tool

I was chucking keywords into the tried and tested keyword tool when I noticed the link to the new tool, so I took a look. The old information is still there, and some features from the Search Based Keyword Tool are incorporated.

So what didn’t I like? Actually just one thing — when I choose (Show results for) Ideas containing my search terms, I get zero results. Even if I enter “Google” I get zero results. What am I supposed to enter to see something for that option?

The option to enter a website URL apparently produces relevant keywords that you may not have considered. Good idea, but for my test site (an Australian migration consultancy), the suggested terms included inappropriate ones such as “embassy uae, canadian embassy, american visa” .  It also had fragments such as “visas for, visa and, etc” and other non-Australian keywords that would be worthless. Great for Google if your PPC agency uses this tool blindly.

This makes no sense. I liked the old interface, which first shows results based on my keywords, and then additional terms to consider. If you are not logged into your AdWords account, you only get a maximum of 100 results.

I suppose I’ll get used to it.

Added 1/5/10:

I took a closer look at the downloaded Excel CSV file. This is an improvement. Instead of getting an unformatted file as per the old tool where we had to convert Text-to-Columns each time, we now get a comprehensive data dump in a zipped file.

Exported Excel file from the new Google Keyword Tool

How useful is this dump? Most of it is not useful to me. For either SEO or PPC I am usually targeting a country or a smaller locality, so the Local Monthly Searches data is the most valuable. The global count is meaningless to me. When I try to sort the Local column from high to low, the hyphens are sorted above the largest number – zeroes would have been better.

I’d prefer to be able to choose which data I want to export, e.g. 12 months worth of Local searches would be more useful than the Global ones. Even so, monthly search volumes are rarely news to business owners, who know exactly when seasonal changes come into play. Over here, the period post-Christmas through mid-February is our summer break, when search volumes dip for most websites, particularly B2C sites.

Anyway, I know from my access to large traffic data sets that these numbers are wildly understated, so I don’t scrutinise the actual numbers. They are good for assessing relative popularity of the keyphrases.

It would also be useful to be able to select more than one country at a time, showing each country’s Local Monthly Searches results in a separate column. What do you think?

Popularity: 2% [?]