Marketer’s are always losing battles to time. Time is all you need to get everything done and to be most effective marketer possible. Marketing operations are more complex than ever before and the demands on our resources are constantly increasing. We need to identify solutions that help us get the most bang for the buck; because we aren’t about to get 25 hour days any time soon.

Marketer’s who were lazy and had poor corporate metabolisms were the ones most heavily impacted by Google’s Panda update because their SEO efforts were based on short cuts but not on the fundamentals of producing high quality, unique content. So much content gets created on a lowest-bid basis that is looks like a race to the bottom of the quality pile.

So like many businesses who found themselves in a hole and losing as much as 40% or more of their revenue when the Google Panda algorithm update hit, they scrambled to figure out what to do next. However, retailers like eBeanstalk.com got fed up and decided to put their heads down and go to work.

Ahead of them were thousands of product descriptions that needed to be rewritten and hundreds of product related videos were going to be produced.

Not that their product descriptions were the worse offenders I’ve seen but it certainly didn’t provide the visitor with much value. Here is an example of a before description:

This colorful all-cloth doll makes a great “first friend.” She has a cheerful painted face framed with a fleece cap and a soft scarf. 13 inches tall. Ages birth and up. Closed gift box. NOTE: If you have never purchased a Corolle doll, you are in for something special. We guarantee the recipient of this doll will have a new fast, favorite friend.

Why our Child-Experts Love It

We love almost every doll we′ve seen from Corolle (hey, nobody′s perfect). This pink doll (that your child will name) is adorable and super soft for a baby′s delicate hands to hold and play with! She is the perfect first doll for a baby (or a toddler)!

versus the new after description:

EVERYTHING IS BETTER IN PINK!

Great Core Training (and super fun) for the little ones! The Rody Horse is soft and easy to ride. It is made of super-strong, latex-free vinyl, and inflates according to the size and weight of the child with a hand or foot pump. And it is a very cute toy.

Why our Child-Experts Love It

Our physical therapist, Deanie, loves the Rody because it′s great at strengthening the core (stomach), helping with balance and getting kids to be more aware of their surroundings as they bounce around.

Overall, we tested lots of bouncing toys & rocking horses and Rody is the best…because it′s an attractive, well-made blow-up horse that is totally unique and great for a child′s physical development.

Use it with the base, and it′s a new spin on the rocking horse! Without the base it is a super fun bouncing toy great for balancing and outdoor play. Parents love Rody too because hey, he′s not too bad to look at when not in use!

eBeanstalk.com, knew it needed a more time efficient way to rewrite several thousand product descriptions if they were going to be ok for the critical holiday season. On my advice they agreed to participate in a business impact research study that I conducted along with Jay Baer and Pelin Thorogood. During the time of the study, they boosted search engine traffic by 27 percent, and conversion to sale by 17 percent on product pages that were optimized with search data leveraging a new tool called InboundWriter. InboundWriter brought the search and social research of the valuable customer words into the writing workflow and saved them time from doing the keyword research for each product before they began to write. Bottom line, it produced great SEO results with the minimum time commitment they needed. Anything that can product results and really save you time is critical.

Their effort also impacted their PPC as well.  Paid search impressions, meanwhile, rose 45 percent without any confirmed additional increases in spend, which the study authors attributed to a higher Google Adwords Quality Score because of Google’s increased factoring of landing page quality.

Have you had enough time to test and improve all your landing pages?

Why don’t people test? Some don’t believe in it but I think the majority do even if they don’t follow through. However,  I think it is the same reason many of us know what we should do to be healthy but still eat fast food and don’t find the time to exercise. It’s all about convenience.

Sure the tools are out there to test (many free and low cost ones) but we are resistant because of how long it takes to create and setup the test then to wait until the test runs and produces a statistically significant result. So I’ll often ask people – are you doing at least some PPC ad testing? Unfortunately many are not even doing that.

Shane Quigley, CEO at Epiphany Solutions said this past week:

“Advert testing is critical to the continuous improvement of an Adwords campaign. It’s a reasonable bet that many of your competitors are testing new adverts, and hence improving their click through rates and conversion volumes over time.

Where do you think those clicks and sales are coming from?

If your competitors are steadily increasing their click through rate, and you aren’t, your own CTRs are likely to drop steadily over time, even if your adverts remain the same.

And with that is likely to come a gradually reducing Quality Score, leading to higher cost per clicks or lower positions. It’s like standing on a down-escalator: the only way to stay in the same place is to keep trying to move up.”

So find tools like Omniture’s Search Center, Acquisio or for small businesses WordWatch and automate as much as you can of your PPC management efforts. Then get some help from a crowdsourcing company like BoostCTR, that uses it’s network to write and test ads against your existing ads (and you only pay if their new ads beat yours). Because no one has enough time to continuously rewrite and test their ads.

Then go and work on those landing pages to get the most return on your time spent. Or are your pages starting to show some rot and spoilage?

Disclosure: I am advisor for both InboundWriter and BoostCTR.

I am in the process of putting together a buyer’s guide for a/b testing tools and service providers. I am looking to get additional feedback beyond my experience with the tools and the experiences of my close friends and clients. Would you please take 2 minutes to complete the following survey?

My iOS5 update is complete. Reminders could become my favorite app. I bet I’m not alone. Who doesn’t need a location aware reminder?

So what’s up Apple? As far as I can tell I can only see the reminders in iCal, while I’m on my Mac, but I can’t create or edit reminders.

Bryan and I are avid students of the Apple’s UX magic. We know Apple thinks that often customers can’t tell you what they want until they see it. Nevertheless, did Apple really think I would be abandoning the desktop completely when engaging with a To Do list? I’m sure someone will find a way to make a To Do list work with all my devices, until then I’ll have to stick with Google Tasks; which is a weak To Do list but at least it works the same on all my devices).

Am I the only Apple fanboy who thinks that Apple didn’t really think through all the use cases for a To Do list ?

As many of my readers know, I have been a tool junkie for a long time. Every year for the past several years I have shared my favorite free and low cost tools to improve your website and online marketing efforts. Last year I published a list of 99 tools and this year I was aiming to publish a list with over 120 tools. Well, I got carried away and decided that it would be easier for you and me if I categorized all the tools and put it up as a separate website: http://www.websitetestingtools.com.

So please feel free to share the website, rate the tools, comment on tools, ask questions etc. because I have launched 150+ Online Marketing Tools for website development, website optimization, & marketing campaign improvements. Enjoy!

Let’s get right to that list….

1. Online Marketing budgets aren’t allocated to enable you do to the job right.
2. Because of #1, I am sure you could list 98+ more reasons!

Too often the C-Suite has not figured out that your digital marketing (I include web, email, mobile & social here) activity is the glue that binds their brand together. They miss that online is that initial first impression before most people even decide to step into your physical store. So it demands that online live by the metrics but rarely gets the benefit of those squishy soft “brand” dollars. It’s 2011 and digital marketing and digital experiences are still way too often treated like the red-headed step child of traditional marketers. These digital marketers are expected to perform at incredible efficiencies which are never expected nor demanded from their traditional marketing counterparts.

As I stated in my last column, Conversions: Who’s Job is it Anyway; in the offline world there is a VP of Marketing and their counterpart the VP of Sales, but no such thing exists online. That column elicited a comment from a reader stating that you can’t “really offer an employee 8 hours per day 5 days per week and a good paycheck just for conversion optimization (CRO).” He went on to babble about how he would rather see a PPC manager or an SEO manager do CRO as part of their job.

Let me start by sharing the ugly truth! Most PPC accounts are a mess. We’ve audited many of them looking for conversion optimization. At best they need tons of work just to get them to a satisfactory level . Nevertheless, at least they seem to hit most of the core metrics at least in part because the media has still been wildly misattributed. Most of the PPC managers don’t have the additional bandwidth to simply maintain their account efficiently but yet you want them to have the time and learn the vast range of multi-disciplinary skills needed to do conversion optimization? Huh? Digital marketing is pretty complex work.

Most SEO managers are in the same boat. Just ask any consultant or Search Marketing platform vendor who has worked across enough accounts and they’ll tell you how 95%+ of all accounts are a mess. Oh yeah! The same is true of web analytics analysts as well.

These aren’t simply my opinions – go talk to them.

Now ask anyone who has ever been in the online optimization business and you’ll learn the same thing for each one. The budget to launch new websites or new campaigns tend to be healthy but what might be left over to improving the campaign or website after launch is worse than anemic.

To wring out significant returns on your investment, optimization must be an ongoing part of your daily marketing activities. It has to be a habit. So if you’re aiming to come to a point where you’re “finished” with optimization, you’re missing the point. Optimization is not a project, it is something you do daily to maximize the revenue of your marketing efforts.

Over the last few years the job of the conversion optimizer has been aided by the explosion of applications and services to help you improve your website or marketing efforts. Many of these services are low cost or even free! I often recommend that companies should get good at free first, then pay for a more robust solution once you have adoption.

A big excuse for the lack of optimization was the lack of access and resources to the tools. Web analytics, A/B & MVT testing tools, personalization tools and even usability studies were expensive, that is no longer a valid excuse.

For years I have blogged a yearly list of these tools. Three years ago I published my first blog post listing 33 free tools to improve your website, the following year it grew to 69 tools, last year it mushroomed to 99 free & low cost tools to improve websites and marketing efforts. This year I wanted to publish over 120 tools when Jeffrey asked me if I was out of my mind! That was my clue that it was time to launch a website dedicated to online marketing tools. You can check out the website at http://www.WebsiteTestingTools.com.

These tools allow a CRO specialist to spend his day gathering insights about your customers and your campaigns, identifying opportunities for creating new landing pages, developing new hypothesis for tests, figuring out how to segment and target your customers effectively and how to improve each and every one of your marketing campaigns. If you only have a handful of campaigns you may not need a full time employee but any business doing more than a couple of million dollars in online revenue probably does and the larger the company the more resources that will be needed.

The only excuse for not optimizing vigorously now is just being too lazy, ignorant or worse to prioritize the optimization of your efforts. I know that this column might hit a nerve. So if you’re a CEO or a senior executive who has been sent this then I have one question – when will you take optimization seriously?

Big news today in the social analytics & CRM space as Salesforce.com has acquired social media monitoring company Radian6 for approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock. This will definitely blur the line between social and CRM. I wonder who will be next to be acquired.

As I was reading the acquisition news, and seeing this article about how companies don’t understand why consumers use social media, it reminded me of an article I published in July of 2001.

Have you been bombarded, like I have been, with the latest buzz suggesting we should spend our time, resources, and money on online customer relationship management (CRM) software {and Social Media monitoring and measuring tools}? Talk about putting the cart before the horse! Oh, the idea is pointed in the right direction, all right — but don’t you think first you need a satisfied customer base to manage?

Your goal, of course, is lots of satisfied customers — happy ones who become loyal, repeat buyers as well as active referrers. But just because they bought from you once doesn’t mean you have a relationship with them — yet. In fact, for all you know, they’re not coming back, and maybe for a very good reason.

First, you have to create an online shopping experience that plants the seeds of a real relationship. Then, you have to nurture those seeds with outstanding fulfillment and customer service. Building a relationship takes time. Shoving some tech-heavy CRM application at your customers is more likely to push them away than draw them in. If you want to get it right, you need to follow not CRM, but MRC: Manage your e-business correctly so that you can establish a relationship based on which you can develop a delighted and loyal customer. Only then can all the other stuff you do have the impact you want.

Lots of e-businesses have the software to facilitate CRM, and lots of software vendors would love to sell you some if you don’t have it yet. Nevertheless, most businesses don’t have the in-depth customer knowledge they need to use the technology effectively. They wind up getting carried away with trying to manage what they don’t actually have.

According to smart and commonsense customer relations guy David Sims: Everybody who profits from CRM has their own definition of what it is, but they’re agreed as to what it is not: CRM isn’t about technology any more than hospitality is about throwing a welcome mat on your front porch.

Properly understood, CRM is “a philosophy that puts the customer at the design point, it’s getting intimate with the customer,” [in the words of Liz Shahnam, CRM analyst with the META Group]. Mike Littell, president of the CRM division of EDS, agrees: “We view CRM more as a strategy than a process. It’s designed to understand and anticipate the needs of the current and potential customer base a company has.” Once you nail that, Littell says, there’s “a plethora of technology out there that helps capture customer data and external sources, and consolidate it in a central warehouse to add intelligence to the overall CRM strategy.”

In short, first get the happy customer base, and then you’ve got something to manage. To put it more bluntly, poor customer service can lose you a customer and leave you with nothing to manage.

And every one of us here has had the following problem: You go to a site, run into a snag making a purchase, and decide to call customer service. But the lines at customer service are all busy. Do they put you on hold? No! They tell you to go to the Web site! Didn’t you just come from there?

So, before you go spending your money on CRM, spend a little time — no, a LOT of time — considering how effective you are at MRC. That’s where it all starts, and if you get it wrong, that’s also where it all ends.

Do you know any companies that have put the cart before the horse? They invest in social media campaigns, tools, etc but not on their core service. Be remarkable first and your social media & CRM strategy will stem from their.

Often times, marketers approach me to tell me they think something is wrong with their page but they aren’t sure how to convince their designer or management that their are any issues.

In this four-minute video, I share a simple technique and how to use attention mapping software like Feng-GUI.com to prove to your designer that they are costing you money.

Attention mapping software uses software algorithms to create heat maps based on how people would engage with your Web page or ad within the first five seconds of interaction. Of course these tools aren’t perfect as they can’t predict what is driving a person’s motivation but from a pure design perspective you can see if you are in the right direction or not.

Watch this video to see a specific example of a page – before and after – and notice the difference in heat maps and page effectiveness.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is just a snippet of what I will cover on my MarketMotive webinar on January 18th, EyeTracking, Heat Maps and Visual Clarity, Oh My! You can register for free. As a bonus, I’ll be joined by the CEO of Feng-GUI, Rafael Mizrahi. He and I will take volunteer websites or landing pages, run a heat map analysis on them and provide feedback at the end of the webinar. Register now to get your page analyzed.

P.S. This video column was created for the celebration of the 10th year anniversary writing my column for ClickZ.

1. MobiReady
More and more visitors are arriving to websites using mobile devices today. Is your website ready for it? Evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards.

2. Treepodia
Other than mobile, video has been the other big demand from customers. Treepodia alows you to submit your XML product catalog feed to them and they will then turn that feed into automated video (with music or voice overs), submit those videos to sites like YouTube, FaceBook, & MetaCafe and them generate a video sitemap. These videos often show up pretty high in the search engine results page and are pretty effective at engaging your visitors and converting more of them into buyers.

3. UserTesting.com
UserTesting.com has built a large panel of users who will record their on-screen actions and voice as they use your website. For each user’s test session, you get a video and their written summary. It costs $29 and is typically ready in one hour. The users are pre-screened to ensure they can follow instructions, stay on task and verbalize their thoughts. UserTesting is fast, easy and inexpensive. Users are prescreened and rated by previous clients so the quality of feedback is pretty good. It can also be quite valuable to see how your site runs on various users’ computers. The control panel is limited, however, so you can only specify age, income, gender, and computer/Web experience. If your target audience is very specific, you might want to run tests with your own customers. UserTesting.com allows you to do this but it’s a bit more work.

They just launched A Quick & Cheap Way To Fix Blind Spots in Your PPC Efforts.
You can get 3 independent people (the testers) to search for your main key phrase (with product ads or not) for just $75.

Each tester will do a search for your phrase and;

• evaluate which 4 ads they would be most likely to click on and;
• evaluate each landing page for 5 seconds to see if the ad met their expectations and;
• also provide their first impressions of the page.
• After all that, each tester will dig deeper into each of those sites to see if they would be comfortable buying from you or one of your competitors.

4. BoostCTR
BoostCTR is a tool for advertisers to outsource ad writing and testing. Sit back, and let their writers compete to improve your ads. You choose how many ad groups you would like to improve. BoostCTR guarantees that their expert writers will continue to write for these ad groups until they beat the performance of your best existing ads.

5. WordStream Keyword Grouper
Keyword reports from Web analytics and Search Query Reports from Google AdWords often contain tens of thousands of search queries – this valuable information is very difficult to understand in such a raw format. Generally, making sense of huge lists of keywords requires importing keyword data into Microsoft Excel and trying to organize the data into columns or different worksheets.

The process of manually organizing huge lists of website keywords to find a valuable grouping can take hours, even days, using typical keyword tools or spreadsheets. WordStream’s Free Keyword Grouper automates that process – just paste in up to 10,000 keywords and the tool finds the most profitable keyword groups for you to target in just seconds. The keyword groupings that you discover are incredibly valuable for informing and optimizing both SEO and PPC marketing.

6. KISS Insights
Ask a question (or two) and your customers will see it slide up from the bottom right-hand corner of your site. You can read a review of how to use KISS Insights from one of my MarketMotive conversion certification graduates.

7. WordCounter
Ranks the most frequently used words in any given body of text. Use this to see what words you overuse (is everything a “solution” for you?) or maybe just to find some keywords from a document.

8. Clue
A fun and easy way to test what people remember on your website by answering some question after viewing your website for 5 seconds.

9. Bounce
A fun and easy way to share ideas on a website. Upload a screenshot, add notes by clicking and dragging. Collaborate with friends & colleagues.

10. Graybit
GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page’s perceived contrast.

11. Silverback
Silverback is an application for Mac computers that also records a user’s screen and voice as they browse a website. The interface is extremely simple and meant specifically for moderated usability testing. The program carries a one-time fee of $49.95. If you have easy access to people with whom you can test your site, and a Mac laptop, this is a great solution. You simply arrange to meet somewhere with Internet access and run the test. You end up with a recording that you can easily edit and post on the Web. The software even enables webcam use to embed the user’s facial expressions in the corner of the final recording.

12, 13. Ethnio + Morae
Ethnio enables companies to recruit their own customers for testing. Add the Ethnio JavaScript to a Web page and it automatically launches a periodic pop-up offering a reward for participating in a usability study. When a user chooses to participate, a notification is sent to the person who will moderate the session. The moderator can then telephone the participant and use a screen sharing service like Morae to record the session. Ethnio costs $400 for 200 recruits and a UserVue subscription is $149 per month.

This is an ideal combination because you get real users and you can ask questions during the session to better understand user behavior. The drawback is that this solution is more expensive and quite time consuming. Don’t forget, you’ll need to offer some sort of compensation to the users.

14. 5 Second Test
5 Second Test allows website owners to upload images that will be reviewed by random Internet users. Users view the image for just five seconds then click on the screen to indicate areas of the images that caught their attention. Using text fields provided on the screen, they describe what they saw on the places they clicked. This is a free service. 5 Second Test is useful for understanding users’ first impressions of your site. You’ll need to review others’ sites in exchange for your review.

15, 16.FeedbackArmy & Mechanical Turk
Quickly and inexpensively get workers at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to provide written answers to questions about what they think about your site. It costs $10 for 10 reviews.

You could go to Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) directly and save a little money but FeedbackArmy is easier and still very inexpensive. The quality of responses varies dramatically, so you won’t necessarily get 10 helpful reviews for your $10. The advantage here is that you can get a higher quantity of responses — look for repetitive feedback. This is a bit more quantitative approach than watching a video of each user where you might find problems that even the user doesn’t realize they are uncovering. FeedbackArmy has two similar competitors, EasyUsability.com and 3rdPartyFeedback.com.

17. GazeHawk
Study participants view your page and track their gaze with GazeHawk’s software. You get heatmaps which show how the users interacted with your site.

18. Seevolution
See a detailed, real-time traffic breakdown of your website’s visitors compiled and displayed immediately in a movable, transparent heatmap overlay on your website.

19. Feng-GUI.com
Feng-GUI uses software to analyze uploaded images and provide image owners with heat maps, symmetry analysis, and focal center/attention information. Their software does not track mouse movement or clicks (instead relying on a predictive algorithm), and the free version does not offer face or text detection. Price ranges from free for a standard heat map on an uploaded image, to $1,000 for 700 images. By paying for the product, you receive premium analysis, including customization options for the reports.

20. 3M Visual Attention Service
VAS accurately indicates what design elemnts people are most likely to notice in the first 3 to 5 seconds.

21. Olark
Chat with visitors on your website from your desktop, your laptop, your iPhone, or your Blackberry. They work with standard chat (IM) clients (like iChat, Pidgin, and Meebo) and services (Google Talk and Jabber) which means YOU get to decide what software to use. Can be used with multiple operators too.

22,23,24,25.  ClickTale, UserFly, ClickHeat, Clixpy
Both ClickTale and UserFly offer silent movies of your users’ interactions with your website. You place JavaScript on your Web pages that causes users’ mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes to be recorded. The result looks like a screen cast of the user’s screen. ClickTale also provides a written report with detailed information including heat maps, link analytics and form conversion rates. ClickTale is free for up to 400 page views and then pricing gradually increases to $790 per month for 240,000 page views. There Form Analytics will help you optimize all those forms that people abandon on your landing pages and websites. UserFly ranges from free for up to 10 page views per month and gradually increases to $200 for 10,000 page views. ClickHeat is an OpenSource software, released under GPL licence, and free of charge.

26. BT Buckets
Engage your users with a free segmentation and behavioral targeting tool.

27. 4Q from IPerceptions
When evaluating how you website is doing obviously it helps to get your customers’ opinions. This free tool helps you answer four important questions:

* How satisfied are my visitors?
* What are my visitors at my website to do?
* Are they completing what they set out to do?
* If not, why not?
* If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?

28. What’s the Buzz?
a keyword research tool with one simple aim: to find out who’s talking about a certain keyword. To do that, it does five things:

* It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days
* It displays the Google Trends chart for the keyword
* It finds blog posts tagged with the keyword
* It finds blog posts containing the keyword (a straight-forward search)
* It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords

29. Bad Neighborhood Link Checker
scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.

30. Sency
To use Sency, simply enter in whatever you want into the search box and click search, and you’ll get real time results powered by real people. The first tab allows you to search what people are talking about right now. The second tab, to the right, allows you to search today’s most shared links on the real time web. Also, on the Sency home page, they have highlighted topics which may be of interest to you. You can look at what’s going on right now, which shows you the hot topics of this instant. You can also see the most popular topics over the past day via the what’s going on lately box. In addition, below the what’s going on boxes, they show you today’s top links which give you prominent link topics that are being shared today by real people on the real time web.

31. Webbed-O-Meter 2.0
can help track how effective you are at inspiring consumer generated content online, call it buzz marketing, social media marketing or viral marketing.

32. Website Grader
provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

33. Spider Simulator
help you find out for yourself how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your visibility.

34. Spider Test
Shows the source code of a page, all outbound links, and common words and phrases. used on a page.

35. Google Talk Chatback
Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don’t need to download anything. It opens in a new window so they can keep chatting with you even if they browse to other pages.

36. Google Analytics
web analytics with “enterprise features” and a ton of plugins and hacks.

37. Yahoo! Analytics
still in beta, but incredibly powerful. It is currently available with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store plans.

38. Google Website Optimizer
Free A/B and Multivariate Testing. I’ve written the book on it, Always Be Testing.

39. Optimizely
Create an experiment in minutes with our easy-to-use visual interface with absolutely no coding or engineering required.

40. HiConversion
adaptive multivariate testing solution requires dramatically less visitors than any other solution. This enables you to run a fairly large multivariate test with relatively small number of visitors. As a result, you will be able to explore the largest number of new ideas within shortest period of time.

41. Piwik
This is an open source web analytics solution.

42. Linkscape
allows access to link information on more than 30+ billion web pages across 200+ million domains.

43. BacklinkAnalysis
Get a look at what keywords websites are linking to you with.

44. Trifecta
Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain.

45. Google Webmaster Tools
see which phrases you’re ranking well for, what pages are causing problems for Google when crawling your site, which pages are getting the most links, rss subscribers, etc.

46. Morgue File
offers free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

47. OpenAds
for sites that want to serve and track advertising.

48. Sitescore
analyzes the quality of incoming and outgoing links, keyword density, page titles, plagiarism, popularity rank, the usage of popups and the effectiveness of site’s structure. Sitescore also grades the printability, readability, spiderability and usability of the page as well as spelling and W3C compliance. This is no longer available for free, sorry.

49. mon.itor.us
use this to monitor uptime, website performance and other hosting abnormalities.

50. Orangoo Spell Check
spell check your website.

51. The Scrutinizer
offers 283 tools to test your website in one place.

52. Product Indexation Check
use this handy tool to check how many of your category or product pages are included in the major search engines.

53. Kamplye
allows your visitors to give feedback on your site, via a little button that sits at the edge of each webpage. Also offers Google Analytics integration.

54. Google’s Free Custom Search Engine
create your own custom search engine, indexing your website or add additonal websites as well.

55. Microsoft AdCenter Search Funnels
Customers often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences. This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers’ search sequences.

56. Crazy Egg
track what visitors are doing on particular page and shows you what links they clicked via heatmaps and various overlays.

57. Loop11
run online, unmoderated user testing. It is designed to essentially replicate the process of lab-based user testing, albeit online and unmoderated.  The primary purpose of Loop11 is to facilitate the collection of quantitative usability data, something that is otherwise considered too expensive to gather.

58. Scrutinizer browser
a web browser, based upon the Adobe AIR toolkit and the WebKit browser, that offers a simulation of the human visual system. Using this simulation, you can get a better idea of how users interact with your site design.

59. Firebug
this plugin for Firefox provides a number of development tools. For the purposes of analysis, Firebug will allow you to monitor and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within your browser.

60. Web Page Analyzer
Spiders your page to determine page load time and offers detailed recommendations.

61. Yahoo! YSlow for Firebug
Using Firebug plugin, it shows you the impact of objects that slow your website down.

62. Page Speed by Google
Similar tool to YSlow plus lots of additional resources to speed up your site, including how to optimize your code.

63. Site-Perf
get an accurate, realistic, and helpful estimation of your site’s loading speed. The script fully emulates natural browser behavior downloading your page with all the images, CSS, JS and other files – just like a regular user. A unique feature is that site-perf.com allows to measure packet loss ratio with reasonable precision.

64. Smush.it
Online image optimizer if you want to learn how to speed up your website and optimize images you can read about it in one of my previous posts.

65. Dynamic Drive
Shrink the size of your images.

66. Web-Resizer
another online image optimizer.

67. SEO Blogger
Optimize Your Posts As You Write with this FireFox plugin from WordTracker

68. WordStream’s Free keyword research tool
Nice interface to do keyword research

69. LotusJump
SEO tool that provides you an ongoing task list of what you need to do to improve your Search Engine Rankings.  It breaks down the tasks by:

• Social Profile Tasks
• Q&A Tasks
• Social Bookmarking Tasks
• Buzz tasks
• Content Generation tasks
• Competitive Backlink tasks
• Directory submission tasks

70. SiteYogi
examines how well optimized your site is for search engines as well as the number of backlinks you have, various social media rankings, whether your code is valid, and how well ranked your site is.

71. Notify.me
It eliminates the need for you to constantly check on classified listings, blogs or social networking sites. Notifications are delivered to your destinations of choice such as instant messenger, mobile phone, email, desktop or web application.

72. Crowd Science
An online measurement service that builds detailed reports on the demographics of your website audience.
Using site-centric research techniques and some cleverly constructed technology, Crowd Science helps website owners and marketers drive ad sales, direct content creation, and reduce the time and money spent on research.

73. Google Ad Planner
a tool that gives fantastic insights into understanding behavior of visitors to your website in context of the broader ecosystem. My friend Avinash, wrote a great primer on how to use it for competitive intelligence.

74 + 75. Google Trends for Websites & Google Insights for Search
compare volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

76. GobbledyGook Grader
evaluates your written content (press release, brochure copy, etc.) and checks for use of gobbledygook, jargon, cliches and over-used, hype-filled words. You’ll receive a grade together with a full report.

77. AdQuants
is a tool that offers competitive research related to any keyword or URL you provide. Similar to Spyfu.

78. Camtasia and now Camtasia for Mac
Make screencasts of your products, demos, etc. The power of videos to persuade should not be underestimated.

79. Concept Feedback
Receive quick, actionable feedback from a professional community by uploading a concept (a website, logo, advertisement or other.

80. Chalkmark
Quickly run a test on your UI prototypes to answer any nagging questions about usability.

81. IfByPhone
Ifbyphone’s Call Tracking solutions helps marketers measure, manage, and automate phone calls in order to track phone call conversions to the keyword-level, manage the way phone call leads are distributed to your sales team, and automate immediate follow-up to web form leads

82. Mongoose Metrics
provides phone call analytics for both online and offline marketers. Customers use our service to better understand which of their campaigns drives phone calls and to see phone call reports directly within their web analytics package of choice.

83. ClickPath
tracks all conversions generated from your online advertising, including phone calls, and ties them back to the exact keyword or ad source.

84. PaymentCentral
Offers an automated service that allows customers to complete their online transactions by telephone. I blogged about someone who does something like this, in Sorry, I don’t give my credit card online.

85. GoingUp!
With an AJAX-rich interface, GoingUp! combines powerful web analytics with top notch SEO tools… are you GoingUp?

86. MockingBird
Create, link together, preview, and share wireframe mockups of your website or application.

87. MockFlow
Design, collaborate (in real-time) user interface mockups for your software and websites.

88. Tynt
Each time a user copies content from your website and pastes into an email, blog or website, Tynt automatically add a URL link back to your site’s original content. When someone clicks that URL, they are directed back to your site and see the original content.

89. Yahoo! Clues
Lets you visually explore how people are using Yahoo! Search. When you enter a word or phrase in the “Search Term” field and click Discover, you’ll see information about that search term’s popularity over time, across demographic groups, and in different locations.
You can also enter a second search term in the “Compare With” field. This will show you information on both search terms, side by side.

90. Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer
This tools help you determine the backlinks of your website and link text used by your backlinks to Link to your wesbite.

91. Attracta
Crawls your website finding all of its pages, including pages that can’t be found by search engines’ crawlers, to create an XML Sitemap and SEO dashboard report. They submit your XML Sitemap directly to the XML interface of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask— plus help you find and fix SEO errors.

92. Google AdWords Modified Broad Match Keyword Tool
This simple modified broad match keyword generator will add a + sign in front of each “word” which comprise your keywords, or in front of those specific keywords you indicate.

94. RSS Grafiti (FaceBook Application)
RSS Graffiti periodically checks the RSS/Atom feeds that you specify and posts any new entries it finds to the Facebook Walls that you specify.

You can get any feed written on any wall. In fact, multiple feeds to multiple walls. You choose the combination.

95. EverNote (use this on all your devices)
A. Capture Everything – Chances are, if you can see it or think of it, Evernote can help you remember it. Type a text note. Clip a web page. Snap a photo. Grab a screenshot. Evernote will keep it all safe.
B. Organize It – Everything you capture is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable. If you like, you can add tags or organize notes into different notebooks.
C. Find It – Search for notes by keywords, titles, and tags. Evernote magically makes printed and handwritten text inside your images searchable, too.

96. iMockup (iPad App)
Mockup your app ideas in seconds and iterate on them faster than ever.

97. Analytics App (iPad, iPhone App)
The Analytics App interface makes it easier than even using your computer’s browser to check and analyze your site stats! You’ll find yourself checking your stats with Analytics App not only on the go, but at your desk as well!

98. iCardSort (iPad App)
Visually organize ideas quickly and easily. iCardSort allows you to group, order, and explore your possibilities. Then, when you are ready, share it with everyone involved.

99. MarketMotive
Tools are great, but you need to know what to do with them. Learn internet marketing from the basics to the bleeding edge, through online video, weekly webinars, conference calls and anytime-Q&A with the top minds in Internet marketing, including, Greg Jarboe on online publicity, Avinash Kaushik & John Marshall on web analytics, Todd Malicoat on SEO, Matt Bailey, Jennifer Laycock on social media, site usability & architecture and myself on conversion optimization.

What are some of your favorite free or low cost tools to make websites better?

Last week, I had the pleasure to present a webinar sponsored by Compete titled “How to Legally Spy on Your Competition.” Many people on that webinar requested a list of the tools that I mentioned on the call. I thought I’d share them here as well. For specific examples on how to use each of these tools, please check out the recording of the webinar.

1. How are your competitors doing now?

One of the most common questions heard across boardrooms, this question is much easier to answer today than ever before. This is a list of tools to provide you with an overall benchmark to do market research and provide validation of your marketing efforts:

Google Trends: With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s or segment of the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. This is a great way to compare your website, category, brand, or product lines and your competitors’.

ComScore: ComScore provides syndicated and custom solutions in online audience measurement, e-commerce, advertising, search, video, and mobile and offers dedicated analysts with digital marketing and vertical-specific industry expertise. This is great when you want a custom report benchmarking your transaction rates last quarter to several of your competitors’ and want to understand what factors influenced them.

Compete: Compete has a diverse sample of 2,000,000-plus U.S. Internet users that have opted in to have their online click stream behavior monitored. Compete normalizes this click stream data and is then able to determine the behavior of all U.S. Internet users. Compete.com is the only online competitive intelligence service that combines site and search analytics in one site. Compete will allow you to benchmark your site to your competitors’ by a number of standard metrics such as: unique visitors, visits, page views, Compete rank, average stay, visits/person, pages/visit, attention, daily reach, and daily attention. It offers a free trial and customized reports as well.

UserTesting: Sometimes you see the quantitative numbers in these other reports but you can’t understand whyyour competitors are getting the results they are. This is where I find UserTesting.com very helpful. UserTesting lets you “look over the shoulder” of people in your target audience while they use your website. You get a video of their session on a website as they talk out loud about their experience as they try to accomplish the task you set out for them. I often use this for PPC (define) campaigns. I’ll specify a term and have three users look at several ads (including my clients) and the landing page and ask them to evaluate the experience on each.

If you’re interested in running user tests for yourself and your competitors just send me a note and I’ll send you the task sheet I use for these tests.

2. Find out what is on your competitor’s roadmap.

Would it help to know what your competitors are planning so you can maneuver appropriately? These tools can give you some good indications.

Google search and News Timeline: There are several searches you can do to see if any of your competitors’ future plans have leaked online. They include searching for :

• site:competitor.com “roadmap” or “plans”
• Plan filetype:pdf site:competitor.com (there are many file types you can search for)
• Key employees
• Product lines and rumor

I also like looking at my competitors’ press releases for a year or two years at a time to see if I can spot trends in what and when they make certain releases.

LinkedIn: It has recently added a feature that allows you to follow companies, but you should be following key employees (especially HR) and spend time monitoring the groups they are in for clues to what they may be looking for in talent (just like when Apple was recently looking for several antenna engineers). You should also be looking for any job postings there and on other job boards.

SlideShare: This is another great place to find competitor roadmaps and plans.

Twitter Search: It doesn’t matter if you search from the website or have custom searches set up in tools such as TweetDeck, Twitter provides some incredible competitive intelligence opportunities. Search for tweets such as:

• hashtags of products, category, competitors, etc.
• Key influencers
• Competitors’ employees
• Conferences
• Industry associations

Facebook: Follow fan pages for interesting discussions with your competitors’ key advocates and early-to-market announcements.

Next time we will look at how to identify who your competitors are and your brand influencers. We’ll also explore how to find top media contacts and how to find out what untapped search marketing opportunities exist.

Have you ever wished you knew everything your competitors where up to? Well online it isn’t that hard.

1. SpyFu – Want to know what keywords your competitors are targeting in the search engines? Use this tool to download the list of keywords and adwords they are using. Don’t forget to visit their SpyFu Universty.

2. The Search Monitor – They have several tools including another great search engine competitive intelligence tool. The Search Monitor Track market share, page rank, ad copy, landing pages, budgets, day parts, and uncover new competitors on Paid & Organic Search. You can catch trademark abuse on paid search, track brand buzz web wide, as well Monitor your affiliates for TOU compliance, watch paid search activities, monitor ad copy and landing page copy, recruit your competitors’ affiliates.

3. Yahoo! Site Explorer - Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site including your competitors, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

4. Compete Search Analytics – Enter a site or a category; get a list of keywords referring traffic to it or enter a keyword; get a list of sites it refers traffic to.

5. Copernic Tracker – automatically looks for new content on Web pages, as often as you like. When a change is detected, our Web site tracking software can notify you by sending an email, including a copy of the Web page with the changes highlighted, or by displaying a desktop alert.

6. Statbrain – Using several sources, Statbrain’s algorithm computes the number of visitors to a website based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any hit-counter information. Use this as a rough relative benchmark of your traffic to theirs. First run your website and compare the results given by StatBrain to your actual results to get a sense of its accuracy in your category. Figure out what the multiplier is and then try it on a competitor.

7. FeedCompare – If you use Feedburner to track your rss subscribers you can compare the size of your feed to others. Just like in #1 above, figure out your own multiplier and then compare it to the competition.

8. AideRSS now Postrank– Find out which of your competitors’ blog posts and topics are engaging people. This should provide you with a list of topics you should be covering. Engagement doesn’t necessarily mean your competitor’s opinion is right or even agreed with — but it does mean the engaged people are interested in the topic and therefore why not your opinion on the topic.

9. Xinu Returns – Xinu Runs a report from multiple sites to tell you how well a site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking sites and other technical details. How well are you stacking up against your 5 biggest competitors?

10. Google Trends For Websites – Enter up to five topics and see how often those topics been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. You can learn more on how to use this from our friend, Avinash Kaushik.

11. Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Again, Avinash explains how to use this well.

12. Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast tool – This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.

13. Microsoft’s Search Funnels – Customers often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences. This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers’ search sequences. Search Engine guru Mike Grehan explains the value of these query chains.

14. WayBackMachine – Go back in web history to see how your competitors’ site has changed through the years. Look for the things that have stayed consistent, because those might have been the most successful. In the same vein, what have you changed on your own site during that time? It’s easy to lose track, particularly of your own work, and to think of your current site as “how it’s always been”.

15. Web Page Readability – By comparing the readability score of web pages you can optimize your writing and make sure that you aren’t creating overly complex sentences and paragraphs for your audience.

16. Attention Meter – Attentionmeter gives you a quick snapshot comparing any websites you want (traffic) using Alexa, Compete, and Quancast.

17. Websitegrader – Website Grader is a free tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. Also worth checking out Twittergrader to check on your competitors’ twitter accounts.

18. Google Alerts – set up searches for your competitors, key employees, and keywords to monitor their activity.

19. BoardTracker – searches across 37,000 forums representing more than 63 million threads. Set up your own custom alerts using RSS and the site’s search function to see what other people are saying about your competitors.

20. Twitter Search- track important keywords, competitors’ Twitter user names, and product names.  You can save these as RSS feeds or you can just save these searches in a tool like TweetDeck.

21. SocialMention – Enter in a search term and SocialMention will track down what people are saying about that term across different blogs and social outlets.  It will tell you how many times a keyword was talked about, the time frame, and let you subscribe to an RSS feed for that term or export the information as a CSV.

Care to share your spying secrets? What tools or techniques do you use?