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Top Tools from Pubcon 2011

We’ve decided to share some of the tools that were frequently mentioned in both presentations and tweets at the 2011 Pubcon Las Vegas conference.

Link Building

Link Research Tools
Link Research Tools (LRT) combines link data from 22 sources and includes 53 different metrics to measure link value and find high quality sources of links. You can look at anchor text distribution, social link value and distribution of link sources (blogs, social, site pages).

Social Media

Followerwonk
Followerwonk is the ultimate tool for finding and mining information about Twitter followers. Quickly find Twitter users who fit the demographics of your product or service and follow them within the app. You can also look at shared followers and analyze your own followers with demographic and usage data.
Campalyst
If there is one question that annoys marketing managers the most it’s “What is the ROI for social media?” Campalyst aims to provide the answer once and for all with a platform that manages multiple social media presences and tracks sales and conversions as a direct result of social.
Voot
(Still in private beta as of this writing) Voot is an analytics tool for video sharing that takes your video stats, engagement and rankings and organizes them through a single reporting interface.

Blogging

Zemanta
Zemanta is a tool that jazzes up blog posts with a built in image library, auto-tagging / linking and a related articles.
WordPress GASP Plugin
Akismet is generally seen as the answer to blog spam but this plugin blocks automated spam bots by creating a client side check box that is easier to fill out than a captcha and supposedly reduces blog spam by up to 99 percent.

Keyword Research

Soovle
This tool let’s you see autosuggest data for your keywords or phrases for Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, Answers.com and Amazon. This tool is helpful for keyword research especially for finding the most popular topics and search variations according to these other sites.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest scrapes auto suggest data for keywords by taking a base term like “kittens” and then typing “kittens a …” “kittens b …” etc … then pulling the list of autosuggestion terms

Site Data

Pingdom Tools
Pingdom is a set of tools that looks at page load speed, dns health and does ping and traceroute tests. The most valuable of the three is the page load tool as it provides aggregate data (time, total page size) while breaking down the same metrics for individual page elements. The individual element section allowed us to see that the Cufon font replacement used on this blog takes up more than 1 MB and we might switch it out to increase load times.
Schema Creator
Schema data is going to be play a pivotal role in SEO and social and the Schema Creator allows you to easily create the necessary data for people, products, organizations and media. Simply enter data into the generator and then insert the code into the correct page.
Yahoo Clues!
In 2011 Yahoo shutdown their popular SiteExplorer service but I can’t be mad at them especially with their Yahoo Clues! service. It functions like Google Insights but they provide top trends and then a social analysis of those trends. You can look at what’s popular among men and women in specific age ranges and locations and this data is valuable to any webmaster running a pop culture, sports or general news site.