Per Google’s Help Center, “Search Funnels are a set of new reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion.” Search Funnels are currently in beta and may not be available for your account (note: you need to have AdWords conversion tracking installed or Analytics linked to your account for Search Funnels to work). If they are enabled, you can find them by hovering over the Reporting tab and clicking on Conversions. On the left side, you should see a link to Search Funnels!

Now, what makes Search Funnels so special?? To this point, all of Google’s conversions were attributed to the last click before the conversion. However, there is a LOT that goes into any sales funnel; why would Google be any different? I’d be willing to bet a good percentage of your conversions don’t occur on the first click. Just like any other sales funnel, there is likely a discovery phase, research/evaluation phase and more before a searcher finally converts. With all buzzwords out of the way, let’s take a deeper dive into the reports that Google so kindly built for us.

I: Path Length report –

The Path Length report is a birds-eye view of the overall length of your Search Funnel in terms of impressions and clicks. Did you expect your customers to find what they want on the first search? The Path Length report will let you how many searches a customer conducts before completing a conversion.

II: Time Lag report -

Similar to the Path Length report, the Time Lag report shows how long it took your customers to convert. Do you have an expensive product that could affect an entire organization? Expect a long lag-time as a searcher is likely evaluating a number of different options. You could shorten up the lag time by offering a softer call to action (for example, a whitepaper download) instead of asking the customer to give away too much information at the outset. Do you offer a low-priced commodity product? Expect the conversion funnel to shorten up as a customer is likely just looking for convenience and a bargain.

The time lag report can be viewed from first impression (time since their first query) first click and last click.

III: Assisted Conversions report –

With the first two reports we’ve established there’s more to a conversion than meets the eye. The Assist Conversion report dives a bit deeper into the conversion funnel and provides us with the extremely important assist metric, helping us find the Steve Nash and Jason Kidd of the conversion funnel. Whenever a keyword is part of a conversion funnel but is not the last click before conversion, it is given an assist conversion (either click or impression based). Let’s say you have a site that sells baseball gear and a customer wants to buy a new bat. The customer proceeds through the following path:

Baseball bats (your ad shows, but they do not click)

Baseball bats (again, your ad shows and no click occurs)

Good baseball bats (click!)

Good baseball bats (another click!)

Louisville bats (your ad shows, but they do not click)

Louisville Slugger (click, purchase, $$$ for you)

The above path would give a click-assisted conversion to “Good Baseball Bats,” impression-assisted conversions to “Baseball Bats” and “Louisville Bats” and finally a last-click conversion to “Louisville Slugger.”

Last click conversions should match what you have in the AdWords interface and represents all conversions that came through your campaign, while assisted conversions will show you who everyone who helped out!. Google also provided us with a calculated field to show us which keywords helped out the most. In the example above, you may want to re-think deleting “baseball bats” because of a low ROI – odds are it has a very high assist-conversion ratio.

IV: Assist Clicks & Impressions report –

The Assist Clicks & Impressions report dives a bit deeper into our newly-beloved assist metric and shows us exactly how many clicks and impression it takes on each keyword to get the job done. It is important to note that in this report, the “assist” metric is not exclusive in this case meaning. In the previous baseball example, there were two clicks on “Good Baseball Bats” and two searches for “Baseball bats” in the conversion funnel – in this report they would receive two Assist Clicks and two Impression Clicks respectively.

V: First Click Analysis report –

This report is a fairly simple high-level view of conversions sorted by the first clicked campaign/ad group/keyword in a conversion funnel. Each time you click on a given element the report navigates to the next level on the hierarchy. If you click on a campaign, Google displays all the ad groups in that campaign. Same goes for a transition from ad groups to keywords. If you click on a specific keyword and get super granular, you’ll be taken to a report that shows a dashboard of all reports available for that particular keyword.

VI: Last Click Analysis –

See section V; replace all instances of “first” with “last.”

VII: Top Paths report –

Think your brand conversions are responsible for all your conversions? The Top Paths report will likely prove otherwise, showing every click or impression along the conversion funnel. Thanks to the other reports, we know all the keywords that had an influence on the report, but we haven’t yet had a chance to see what order they work in.

Our Google reps let us know a few things that may give you a bit of a ‘scare’ this report, so I may as well call them out now…

1: There will only be a few clear cut leading paths, followed by an extremely long tail.

2: There will be a ton of instances of (filtered path data) showing up in the impression-based reports. Just like the ever-frustrating “x other unique queries” label in Search Query reports, the (filtered path data) metric shows when Google simply doesn’t have enough information to populate the report.

As you can see from this novella-length post, there is a TON available in Google Search Funnels. I hope this brief introduction gave you a good starting point to explore! Oh, and sorry for all the sports references…

How do YOU plan on using search funnels to help your campaigns? Share your ideas in the comments section below.

To see Google Real Time Search results, go to http://www.google.com/trends and select one of the Hot Topics. The image below is for the search “winter storm.”

The second result on the page incorporates blog posts, news bulletins, and Twitter updates. All are shown based on relevancy to the search term. Interestingly, it looks like the full URL is displayed in the search results for Twitter posts, rather than the shortened URL. The real time results can be paused.

The link at the top of the live search results points to this page. From here, you can swap out the search term to see what the real time search results would be for nearly any term. Try seo:

One question we’ve already heard today is, “How can I make sure I show up in these search results?” So far, it seems to be a combination of relevancy and authority. There’s still so much to learn about these new developments. For the time being, if you put up a blog post or tweet about a topic, why not make sure you include good keywords?

The second tool to be examined in this process is MajesticSEO.

MajesticSEO – The Good

• Crawled 127 Billion pages
• Over a Trillion URLs
• Anchor Text Indexed
• Link Tags Indexed (Redirect / Alt Text / NoFollow etc.)
• Data Export via CSV and API

Majestic SEO has crawled over 127 billion pages and over a trillion unique URLs. This makes MajesticSEO only the second company in the world to publicly announce that they have discovered this many URLs. The big question though, is how does all of this data help SEO campaigns? Well before we can discuss how the data impacts an SEO campaign we must discuss all of the data and features Majestic provides us with. Once you register a domain with Majestic, you gain access to several reports. I will discuss what I think are the most useful below.

The Anchors report shows you the most popular anchor texts to your domain, along with how many external links and referring domains use that anchor text. Additionally the report shows an ACRank spread, which is Majestic’s way of ranking the importance of a website. This report is useful to get a sense of what people on the web are using as anchor text to link to your site. What makes this report even more useful is the ability to drill down into a specific anchor text.

Once you drill down into a specific anchor text from the Anchors report, you are shown information about all of the links that point to your domain. This information includes, the source, its ACRank, the date the link was found, the target URL, the target URL’s ACRank, along with several source flags. The tags indicate what kind of link is pointing to your site including; redirect, frame, nofollow, images, deleted, mention, and alt text. This is where the real power of Majestic comes into play.

Imagine if you were able to find every link to your domain on the web along with these tags. Optimizing your links is now a simple matter of filtering the criteria you want, and emailing a webmaster and requesting they make a small change to an already existing link. Trying to target a specific keyword? Email webmasters requesting your anchor text to be changed to that keyword. Having access to all of these tags allows you to address these existing links in whatever way best fits your linking strategy.

Perhaps one of the most useful tags is the mentions tag. The mentions tag indicates that your domain has been referenced in plain text, however no link is provided. Creating a list of all the pages that mention the name of your site but do not link to it is an easy way to generate links.

Other reports allow you to break down this information in different ways. Some of these reports include referring domains, specific URLs within your domain, IP Addresses, Subnets, and even countries. How you use these reports will depend on the SEO strategy you are using, but these reports give you several more ways to analyze your data. I also should mention one of my favorite reports, the daily update report. I will get into why the daily report is one of my favorites later in this post.

Another major plus of MajesticSEO is the ability to export the data via a CSV or via an API.

MajesticSEO – The Bad

• No Keywords
• ACRank = Bad Metric

One of the unfortunate drawbacks of MajesticSEO, as they themselves are quick to point out, there is no ability to sort by keywords. The reason for this makes perfect sense when you consider the 127 billion pages that they have crawled. Storing all of the links from these pages alone requires a huge amount of processing power and data storage. In order to allow for keyword searching, MajesticSEO would have to index the entirety of all 127 billion pages, and then provide a search feature to sort through all of the data. Needless to say that is a tall order, especially considering MajesticSEO is primarily focused on finding links, not the keywords on the pages.

Another small drawback, which again MajesticSEO points out themselves, is that currently the ACRank of a site is only based on how many pages link to the website the link is on. Here is MajesticSEO’s summary of the issue:

“It should be said that in it’s current design it suffers from a serious drawback: actual ACRank weight of backlink is not taken into account, so a page with one backlink of ACRank 1 will have the same ACRank value of 1 just like the other page that has got backlink with ACRank of 10 (or 15), clearly the latter page should have gotten higher ACRank as being linked to from the more important pages intuitively makes the page they linked too also more important.” Full Definitions: MajesticSEO Glossary

While MajesticSEO plans to correct this problem, in the meantime they have implemented the ACRank spread. The ACRank spread shows the ACRank backlinks broken down by their ACRank. However after doing some spot checking on some of the websites that have high ACRanks I am very weary using ACRank as a metric for evaluating a page until this problem is fixed. Here is an example:

One Webpage http://cfsxiba.1freewebspace.com (I’m not linking because I don’t want to give this page anymore links!) has an ACRank of 10, which according to MajesticSEO should have at least 1,024 links pointing to it. I assumed it would be a somewhat reputable site, fair assumption right? Wrong. When the site loads it takes you to a black screen with the words “Loading…” displayed in white. After a few seconds I scrolled down and saw a list of URLs and what appeared to be some porn spam. I don’t know about you, but I DO NOT want a link to my site from there. Now the page was indexed on April 30th 2009, so it may have been changed or hacked, but not a risk I’d like to take.

Since the size of the database rivals that of Google, another thing to consider is what if Google, or any other search engine, hasn’t indexed a page yet? Getting a link from that page won’t be very helpful, and it’s probably not a very valuable site! Furthermore if no one else has found it, it becomes very difficult to determine if it is a quality page without manually analyzing it.

MajesticSEO – The Ugly

• OLD DATA

Old data and the problems that result from it is the major problem with MajesticSEO.

While the vast amount of linking information is by far the draw of MajesticSEO, as with most large databases, it also causes some issues. Due to the fact that pages are constantly changing it is difficult to trust information that was gathered over a year ago. Depending on the type of domain you are optimizing for a large number of the pages MajesticSEO finds may not exist anymore, or may have been altered. While Majestic will tag links as deleted when it can no longer find them, this requires MajesticSEO to check the page again, which normally won’t happen for a significant period of time.

As with most large databases focusing on the internet, this inaccuracy of data is to be expected. When crawling billions of pages it becomes very difficult to make sure the entire database is kept up to date. This means however that before the information can be used in an SEO campaign it must be cleaned up and verified to ensure the accuracy of the information. This inaccuracy of information is why I believe that the Daily Updates report is incredibly useful. Since the links were found within the past day, the information provided by the Daily Update is far more accurate than the data collected years ago.

Takeaways

• Tracks a HUGE amount of links
• Links may be old, pages may not exist, or the link may have been taken down
• ACRank is not a good metric to determine priority
• Some sort of script to evaluate sites is necessary
• If you can implement a system to evaluate links found my MajesticSEO, it can be VERY powerful

MajesticSEO allows you access to more linking information than any other tool I’ve seen. However as with other tools of this size the accuracy of old data becomes a problem. Combine this problem with the fact that the ranking metric MajesticSEO uses (ACRank) is a poor judge of the quality of a site sorting through existing links becomes a huge problem. So what is the best way to make use of the data we do have?

Start with what we know for sure: At some point every link in MajesticSEO’s database pointed towards your site with the given tags. What makes this awesome is this is all you need to know!

Here at SEER we have built a tool that checks several data points to determine what we believe to be the quality of a website. Now all we need to do is sort these links by the quality of the website and bingo, we have a list of sites linking to us in order of importance!

This is a great first step but it leaves us with a few problems, does this site still exist / link to us / are the anchors the same? Well it should be pretty clear from whatever site ranking tool you use if the site still exists. As for if the site still links to us and if the anchors are the same? The last thing you’d want to have to do is manually check this for each link. Good thing is this is easy to find out! Building a web crawler to explore a web page for this information is a relatively simple task.

The power of Majestic SEO comes from the fact that it is able to find so many links. However at the current time Majestic doesn’t seem to do a fantastic job of ranking the links or keeping the information up date. If you have a system in place that can automate this part of the process MajesticSEO has the potential to be an incredibly powerful tool.

Follow me on twitter for more tool reviews!

The first tool to be examined in this process is SemRush.

SemRush – The Good

The best part about SemRush is the amount of data that is stored in the database. SemRush is “Currently indexing top 20 results on 30 million keywords across more than 13 million domains.” That is a TON of data. SemRush also boasts several tools including:

• Google Keywords – Shows keywords that rank for the current domain.
• Adwords Keywords – Shows any Adwords ads that land on the current domain.
• Competitors in Google – Shows the domains that share keywords with the current domain.
• Competitors in Adwords – Shows the domains that have Adwords ads running for the same keywords on the current domain.
• Adwords Ads Texts – Shows a summary of all Adwords ads found landing on the current domain.
• Potential Ad Buyers – Shows you can sites that buy AdWords on your keywords.
• Potential Ad Sellers – Shows you sites with visitors that are the same with visitors from your AdWords campaign.

Full descriptions of these tools can be found at: SemRush

So what makes all of these tools and this data useful for SEO and SEM campaigns? I will highlight some of the better uses of the first four of these tools.

The Google Keywords reports allow you to find a significant portion of the keywords that you rank in the top 20 for (this portion will vary depending on how mainstream the site is) along with several metrics describing the keyword. Perhaps the simplest use of this tool is to look at the combination of position and search volume. If there is a keyword with a high search volume ranked just off of the first page, in position 11 or 12 perhaps, if you specifically target that keyword you may be able to push it to the first page with minimal effort. Competitors in Google is best used for keyword discovery and to keep an eye on how much traffic your competitors are getting on shared keywords.

The Adwords Keywords report is most useful when examining a competitor. If you are managing Adwords for a domain, you will have access to that accounts Adwords information. Therefore the best use of this tool is to enter a competitor’s domain to examine their Adwords strategy. By entering a competitor’s domain you will be able to see a majority of keywords they are bidding on along with several metrics, including estimating volume and cpc. Using this information it should be possible to find quality keywords to add to your campaign.

Competitors in Adwords is best used to find sites that share a significant number of keywords with your domains and give you a brief overview of how they are doing compared to your campaigns. If you discover competitors using this tool, and then use the Adwords Keywords report you have a very powerful combination.

The most powerful aspect of this tool is the ability to export data, specifically via the API. Considering the amount of data stored in SemRush’s database, examining the data manually is far too time consuming. By allowing data to be exported, you may apply rules or filters to the data, and only examine the results that meet the criteria you are looking for.

SemRush – The Bad

The best part about SemRush is the amount of data that can be searched; however the size of the database is also its Achilles heel. Data displayed in reports can be incorrect or outdated. This may include Ads being displayed in results that don’t exist, or incorrect rankings in keyword reports etc. Let’s take a minute to look at why the size of SemRush’s database is the cause of this problem.

SemRush tracks over 30 million keywords, and several statistics associated with them. For each keyword at least several queries must be made.

• The Google Search Engine
• The Adwords Traffic Estimator
• The Google Keyword Tool

This results in millions upon millions of queries that must be made to Google. All of the while SemRush must make these queries in such a way to not incur any penalties or be throttled. As a result gathering this data takes a significant amount of time. The three most recent US database updates have been on June 9th, August 3rd, and September 29th, which means the database is
currently being updated roughly every eight weeks.

While SEO campaigns often require several months to generate results SEM campaigns do not. Many SEM campaigns are seasonal; react quickly to changes in the marketplace; or are otherwise changing frequently. While it is beneficial to have access to competitor’s ads, you cannot run an Adwords campaign using just a snapshot of the marketplace every eight weeks.

Another major concern about SemRush is that it only tracks the first 20 results per keyword. There could be many instances where it would be useful to know keywords beyond simply the first 20 results. Also, SemRush only tracks the ranking for one search engine, Google. While Google is the most dominant search engine with approximately 65% of the market share all other major search engines are ignored. If there were ever a large shift in market shares, SemRush may not be a good indication of how terms are ranking.

SemRush – The Ugly

The dangerous part of SemRush however, is all of that information does not magically appear in the database upon the update! It has to be gathered over the eight weeks prior. The problem is you do not have any way of knowing at what time during the process the keyword you are examining was added to the database. Here is an example (this is an extreme example to illustrate what COULD happen not what is most likely):

On September 29th after the database was updated you checked a keyword, and it says you are ranked #1 for that keyword. You do a search for the keyword and to your surprise; you aren’t even on the first page! How did this happen? Unknown to you, the keyword you are checking was the very first of the 30 million keywords to be updated, and that query was run on August 4th. Since then your ranking tanked and you were no longer on the first page.

If you do not check your keywords and this happened it would take until the next update of the database for you to be alerted to this problem.

While this is an extreme example to illustrate the danger, it’s important to understand that when the database is updated, to some extent all of the data is old. It could be only a day old, or it could be significantly older than that, though no older than the last database update.

Takeaways

SemRush has a massive collection of data, and a number of very useful tools to go along with it. It is great when used to get an idea of the marketplace, find out information about competitors, and to find new keywords. However due to the size of the database, and therefore the infrequent updates and potentially inaccurate information displayed, it is not the best tool for tracking any of your domains. Additionally in order to make best use of the data, some methodology must be created to avoid manually sorting through the huge amounts of information.

***After contacting SemRush’s support team they indicated they try to update their database each month. According to their news feed I haven’t seen any updates in less than eight weeks, but if they do start to update the database once a month the impact of the negative issues discussed will be reduced.

***If you have any other favorite uses of SemRush, or disagree with any aspects of the post, please feel free to comment!

I should be sleeping right now, but I read something that I had to briefly write about. I was just in Vegas last week, presenting on how to future-proof your SEO strategy and I mentioned keeping an eye on Google / Yahoo etc using data on your site in helping them determine relevancy for SERPS.

At the time I didn’t have any examples of this happening for Google Analytics and I still don’t.

But The Google Blogoscoped post I linked to above & this one here from Marketingpilgrim discuss how now you can “choose” to share your Google Analytics content with Google so they can use the data for other products. I would think it is a no brainer for them to use this data to improve SERPS someday (i.e. spam sites aren’t sticky, so sites with low time on site could see a negative tick mark in rankings – Oh I can’t wait for the day when real data is one factor used in helping determine who ranks where.)
By choosing to share your data with Google (yes this is an opt-in program, read the FAQs) you will also get data from Google on how you compare in your industry to other sites (who are using Google analytics AND opt in). By the looks of things the data points you’ll be able to compare your site against others include:

• Visits
• Bounce rates
• Time on site
• Pageviews
• Pages per visit
• New visitor percentage

For those of you seeking competitive information back in November of 2006 Laura wrote about using some tools to spy on the competition. I have used the fireclick index in the past when clients ask about trends and benchmarks. It will be interesting to see how this compares, if you look really closely at the firclick data, you kind of say,
“OK so what am I going to actually do with this information?” Will this go the same way? I hope not, I hope the verticals are more finite, the fireclick verticals in my opinion are too broad.

Well anyway, If the data points above are any indication, where I think this data makes great strides over what is out there are in the following 3 areas:

1. You finally get real numbers, Quantcast, Compete, Alexa, etc are all questionable in the accuracy of the data. Quantcast data is much better when publishers use their quantified program.
2. “New visitor percentage” will allow you to tell the velocity by which your competitors are ramping up efforts to attract new visitors, right now Quantcast, Alexa, Compete, etc are not equipped to give you an idea on if your competitors site is just getting more visits from the same people or from a totally new set.
3. “Bounce Rates” will be huge, if you can see that you are on the bottom of your industry group for bounce rates, you could look at your top competitors, check their pages to see if they have Google Analytics page tags installed, and if they do, you could then review their sites to see what they are doing different / better.

The issues I can see already are:

1. Could I set up Google Analytics on an old domain, that is in my industry, but I don’t use anymore to get access to industry benchmark data, but not actually opt in my real site, allowing me to get access to data while not contributing to giving good data to the system.
2. The above issue immediately leads to another issue, garbage in, garbage out. If people try to use alternative domains to get access to the competitive data benchmarks then they are polluting the industry benchmark with poor data, thus decreasing the value for themselves and others. I hate people who do stuff like this, bit there is money to be made on the web and people will find opportunities to exploit a great opportunity like this, where in theory everyone that shares their data gets something out of sharing.

But the Google teams are known to be pretty sharp people, I’m looking forward to seeing this rolled out.

GO GOOGLE ANALYTICS – Even TECHCRUNCH’s Michael Arrington wants your data shared.

UPDATE: Googleblogoscoped has updated their post with screencaps.

Anyway, I referred a company whom we couldn’t take on for SEO to someone I knew for a long time, and had consistently performed and I TRUSTED to take great care of someone we referred. This person impressed the company and the company paid a small deposit to get started.

The referral has disappeared, but luckily this “person” twitters all the time, so in theory he’s been ignoring the client for some time, and holding on to their $$ while they’ve been listening to some great songs, wishing happy birthday, working out, etc all within the last 2-3 days. This client has not been able to get in touch with this person for 2-3 weeks, and neither have I.

My sentiment went from “I hope you are OK”, to “Obviously you are OK, but you are too busy working with your interior designer to give a damn about me or someone I referred you to whom you have taken money from.”

Just one less person I can send potential prospects to!!
Lesson: If you are ignoring people via e-mail and phone (we all HAVE to do this for a few hours at times to focus on something) stop Twittering Dummy, it makes us feel pretty crummy knowing every little thing you are up to that matters more than getting back to us, I’m on 3 days and counting. Thanks!

We listened to your requests and responded with fifteen short SEO video tutorials on YouTube. Each video is under ten minutes in length and deals with a different SEO topic: keyword research, competitive tools, link building for SEO, SEO best practices, and much more.

As BizReport suggested, this feature may contribute in battling the click-fraud that advertisers face but usually do not have much control over. Click-fraud can be identified when an ad is receiving an excessive amount of clicks from the same IP address on a continual basis.

2 Ways to effectively use the IP Exclusion Feature:

Blocking Competitor IP addresses
Blocking IP addresses from competitors could potentially aid in less click-fraud, which in turn may enhance the validity of reporting from Adwords by registering more of the quality clicks versus reports containing the fraud clicks and the quality clicks.

Fortune 1000 companies … Exclude yourselves
Blocking internal IP addresses could also aid in preventing the accidental clicks caused by employees and agencies constantly checking the status of their PPC ads. We saw this happening firsthand with a client of ours. They found that 75% of their clicks on their branded keywords were from their own employees! Another feature Adwords provides for checking Pay Per Click (PPC) ads for employees and agencies to carefully avoid the accidental clicking can be found here.

The downside of IP exclusion is that if you block an IP address that uses a proxy, you may have succeeded in blocking the 1 or 2 people suspected of click fraud, but you may also be blocking hundreds and thousands of legitimate, quality clicks at the same time.

The IP Exclusion Features allows an advertiser to block up to 20 IP addresses per campaign. The IP Exclusion Feature can definitely serve as a benefit to Adwords campaign, but before you decide to enable the feature, be sure you have done your homework on the IP addresses you are about to block and the feature doesn’t backfire on you!

I’d like to write about one tool that has changed how we produce work at SEER. SEO audience beware, this has less to do with search and more to do with common problems we all deal with when sharing files between people in an office setting.

If you have more than two authors on your word, excel, or PDF documents, you know how troublesome it can be to control efforts between people. Which is the newest version? Did I remember to email Jane my newest copy?

I almost cannot remember dealing with those problems after using subversion–also known as SVN–for the past few months.

SVN does a few things all on its own:

• It coordinates file use between multiple parties. All users get their own copy the file. When someone has made changes to their copy, they “commit” them to the server. Everyone else can perform an “update” at any time to get the newest copy of the file. This is the means for preventing work from being overwritten and it also facilitates a means for keeping everyone’s copy up to date.
• It adds extra management information to each file, independent of the file type. Some of these fields include last author, last modified time, and version number. Version number 100 is newer than version 99.
• It saves revision history. If someone wants to see a file any number of versions ago, they can download it at any time. SVN is not meant to serve as a backup solution; however, you can use it to peer into the past and watch file progression or go back to a time when your file was correct. For example, if you accidentally delete a paragraph and save, just revert back to the previous version from the repository. No harm is done. Even if you save and commit your changes, you still have the opportunity to revert to any previous copy.
• It offers detailed documentation. The version numbering is only one aspect of the usefulness of the history; the custom notes that can be added to each commit make it even easier to understand what each version number represents. Imagine searching through a document’s history seeking the version you sent to the client last month when you discover the comment stating, “final copy-sent to client.”

There are necessary ingredients for using SVN as I describe it in terms of solving an inter-office file-sharing problem. Fortunately, I believe just about anyone can use an SVN front end to manage files. Unfortunately, setting it up is definitely not for everyone.

• A server or some hosted facility to hold repositories for your files. These will probably be accessible over the Internet.
• A front end software package that makes using SVN as easy as using a Windows Explorer or Finder window. Try rapidsvn or smartsvn.
• An IT person to put it all together. It might be a good idea to have the IT help conduct training and be available for any problems that may arise.

For those who have used CVS (a more dated version control system):
You’re welcome to stop now. There are programs for converting CVS to SVN repositories. SVN has functionality for moving and renaming directories, where CVS doesn’t. CVS users know how troublesome directory management can be.

Talk about subversion with your IT staff or geeky cousin–I’m under the impression it’s a solution to many problems we all have experienced.

1. Firefox – This may seem like getting back to basics to some people but when I started at SEER Interactive, I didn’t know what Firefox was – which was a complete shock to the rest of the team. Now, I can’t understand how my husband can live with Internet Explorer 6 – yes, 6 (he hasn’t upgraded to IE7). That means he surfs the Internet with multiple windows – and without tabbed browsing and awesome user-friendly extensions – which I can no longer remember how to do.

2. Multiple Homepages – Now that I’ve got tabbed browsing down, it’s great to be able to set Firefox to open multiple homepages every time it runs. There are two ways to accomplish this: 1) open the pages you want set as your homepages in separate tabs, then go to “Tools,” “Options,” click on “General” and then click “Use Current Pages;” or 2) Under “Tools,” “Options,” “General” tab, type each of the URLs in the “Location(s)” box separated by a “|” (that’s SHIFT + \). Hit “OK” and that should save your settings for the next time you open Firefox!

3. Numbered Google & MSN Results – Thank you, Greasemonkey! I have always loved Yahoo! for numbering their search results – they make it so easy to know that your term is #6 instead of having to count results down the page. I never understood why Google or MSN couldn’t do the same thing. After discovering tool #1, I discovered Greasemonkey and then scripts that number Google and MSN results. Oh, so wonderful!!! I have to practice counting from one to ten some other way now!

4. Mouse Gestures – This might be an “oldie but goodie.” Mouse Gestures may have existed for a while, but I never knew about them. Since installing this extension, I don’t know when the last time I actually visited the back button was. I LOVE my right mouse button now! And I can’t stand it when I am working on a computer that doesn’t have Mouse Gestures. On any computer I sit down at, by default, I drag my right mouse button to the left to try to go back a page.

5. Google Alerts – On a regular basis, there are certain searches that I like to run to keep an eye on different things, beyond checking keyword rankings. These searches include looking for writings about our company, competitors, and stories that are of personal interest to me (Duke basketball, Dale Earnhardt Jr, and Tim McGraw perhaps – yes, I am a “country girl in the city”). Instead of repeating my queries multiple times and having to remember whether I have seen a particular result before or whether it is new, I can sign up for a Google Alert. I enter my search term, pick the type of alert I would like, how often I would like to be notified, and enter my email address. Google emails me with updates of new results. Thanks, Google, for once again making my life easier! Learn more about Google Alerts here.

6. Google Reader – I’ve written before about how I believe learning is an important part of being good at SEO. Part of learning is reading – doing a LOT of reading. To stay organized in my reading of blogs, I’ve found Google Reader to be the most helpful. I can check all my favorite blogs in one place and can easily tell if any of them have new content that I have not read.

7. Sharing with Google Reader – Everyone at SEER pretty much has their favorite blogs, and we’re all addicted to Google Reader (see #6). Moreover, we each find down-time to read blogs at different times during the day – some of us first thing in the morning, some at lunch, some of us at 3am! The good news is that when we find an item of interest, no matter what the time, we have an easy way to share it thanks to Google Reader. Right below each item in the reading pane is a “Share” link, and clicking on it lets you send out a notification to others to check out your shared items. And now, if you have a blog of your own, you can display your shared items for your readers as well.

8. InForm Enter – I fill out a lot of forms in the course of a week – whether it’s testing client websites, link submissions, or filling out contact forms. InForm Enter, a Firefox extension, is a lifesaver! I’ve created various “Profiles” depending on the different types of forms I might need to fill out (even client-specific profiles), and can easily change between them with a couple clicks in the corner of my browser window. No more repetitive typing of the same information (name, email, website address, etc.) over and over again! An added feature – InForm Enter will tell you how long your stored entries are, in case the field you are typing in has a maximum field length. This is definitely a time saver!

9. FoxyTunes – Ok, so this one doesn’t save a TON of time, but it saves me from having to go back and forth from application to application every now and then, and I like that. FoxyTunes allows me to control my iTunes without having to leave my Firefox browser window. It works with a ton of other players besides iTunes, too. It’s nice to be able to quickly and seamlessly skip that annoying song I downloaded 8 months ago but have never bothered to delete from my playlist.

(As an aside, if anyone knows any good “Rain” songs – songs about “Rain” or with “Rain” in the title and wants to contribute them to our “Rainy Day Playlist” send them over!)

10. Google Browser Sync – Trying to access a site from home that you normally access from your work computer, where the password is stored, and now you can’t remember it? I do that all the time. Do you have a lot of bookmarks at work that you wish you could easily transport home? Google to the rescue! Use Google Browser Sync, and you can have bookmarks, passwords, cookies, and your history synchronized between computers. Another helpful use for this we discovered this week – save everything to Google Browser Sync before you need to reformat your computer!

Those are my Top 10 helpful tools for working online. Do you have any to add? I’d love to hear about them – I’m always looking for ways to be more productive!