Google Alerts are updates that are emailed to you when Google finds a certain phrase, name, brand, or URL that you want to keep an eye on.

How does it work? Here is an example:

Say that you want to know if someone writes a review or simply mentions your your company, The Best Hotel in the World.  Simply go to Google.com/alerts and set up an alert for “The Best Hotel in the World” and Google will send you alerts as often as you choose with the links to where your phrase appeared.

Below is a screen shot of a few of my alerts including “Blizzard Internet Marketing” (set up to alert me when the phrase appears) and “Glenwood Springs Internet Marketing” (set up to send once a day with the newest results).

I also want to know when articles that I have written have been found by Google (and just out of curiosity, who else has my name) so I have set up an alert for myself.

Try it out, you will be surprised what you find and your friends will think that you are a master of the internet!

LinkDiagnosis is a free tool that gives you an in-depth analysis of links pointed at your website. It requires a quick Fire Fox plug-in but is worth the minute of extra work.

Type in your URL and it crawls then exports a Link Diagnosis Report including:

• Your incoming links
• The anchor text those links use
• What page the link is coming from
• Total back links
• Estimated strength of the length
• Page rank of the page that the link is coming from

Try it and find out who is linking to you and if the link is valuable.

Check out Blizzard’s other favorite tools in our toolbox.

Do you have questions about what to learn more about the power of links? Get Blizzard’s on-demand webinars including:
All About Google VI – Link Popularity
All About Google VII – Getting Good Links

The Microsoft Demographic Prediction Tool predicts the age and gender of your website or of a specific keyword phrase.  Its insights into your audience could help you target your website more effectively.  Just enter your website (and press URL button) and press Go.

Blizzardinternet.com is mostly male and in the 25-50  range.  No surprises:

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ClickTale is a totally unique web analytics program because it actually videos your website visitors as they interact with your website. Careful, these movies can be addictive and entertaining! ClickTale also produces usable visitor analytics data related to where people look on your webpages and what links they click on.

Use ClickTale to make post-click marketing decisions … which is when you study your user behavior and change your website to increase conversions. The “eye tracking” (or clicking and scrolling) research it provides in the form of heatmaps is very insightful.

ClickTale has a free version that will let you try it out.  We recommend the $99 per month version that should do everything you want, and more!

Blizzard is an affiliate of ClickTale, we signed up after seeing just how exciting a piece of software it is.  Try CrazyEgg too for nice click heatmapping.

Yahoo Site Explorer is an oldie but a goodie.  It is a tool that has been around for years.

Yahoo Site Explorer is the best free tool on the Internet for finding ALL (or at least as many as possible) backlinks that point to your website… or a competitor’s.  It includes the good, bad and the ugly!

Here is a quick 3 minute video to show you how to find all those websites that link to you:

If you are want to learn more about how to analyze a linking website to determine how good the link and listing really is, make sure you watch our All About Google VI: How Link Popularity Works webinar.

Crazyegg.com is a nifty and inexpensive heat mapping software package that tracks where people click on your web pages and produces stunning heat map reports that will help you visualize your user behavior.

A Click Heat Map is a visual representation that shows aggregated analytics data.  It is based upon where your website visitors click.   The heat map reports are quite handy for post-click usability improvement.  Post click analysis is when you analyze your website based strictly on what your past visitors did.  This helps test and improve the “assumptions” that every webmaster uses when building a website.

Here are two examples of heat maps produced by Crazy Egg.  This example shows colored dots where people click – each color represents a “referrer”… in this case, the orange would be Google:

This is a more proper example of a heat map, which shows “hotter” colors for the areas with the most clicks. (more…)

There are several niche keyword research tools of interest to the tourism marketing strategist. These keyword research tools focus on finding demographics like age, gender, location of searches.

At our recent Blizzard University: All About Google, there were several tourism attendees from Denver and Aspen.  One of the topics was focusing your design on your demographic.  A good tool to see what your demographics might be is the the MSN Adcenter Labs Keyword Forecast Tool. It shows age and gender demographic trends.

Enter your keywords:

See how they distribute by Age:

See how they distribute by Gender:

Another question revolved around determining international and Geographic based search terms.  Two tools to consider are:

Google Insights To Search lets you strain your data with several parameters:

• The Location of the Searcher
• The Keyword Phrase used
• The Timeframe
• By Category

Brian Lence from Vacationsinc.com, a Winter Park rental company, suggested  the Google Global Firefox Extension which lets you simulate searches in contry specific versions of Google.  This tool is worth exploring if you are targeting international visitors.

Other Keyword Research Posts:

Keyword Research: Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Keyword Research Tool: SEMRush

Keyword Research Tools: KeywordDiscovery by Trellian