Need A Tool?
I’m looking for some ideas for useful (or semi-useful) free online tools I could write as a way to garner some link love for this blog. Actually, I have several ideas in mind but who knows if anyone else would find them useful. So I thought I’d just ask my readers what they’d like to see and do a bit of market research that way…
Here’s the deal. Leave a comment telling me about an online tool you’d like to see developed. Could be anything, but it has to be something I can offer for free (or at least a free version). It can be a tool I place on one of my sites, a script I give away, a WordPress plugin, etc. The incentive? If I build the tool, I’ll give you a link back to a site of your choosing as your reward.
I have no idea if anyone will participate in this, but I hope a few (or many!) of you do…
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19 Responses to “Need A Tool?”
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Eric, I was there was a free tool that would tell you a keyword count that was updated by the hour in any search engine(popular) that is ie.. MSN Yahoo etc etc..
Kim, what do you mean by keyword count?
Enter in the keyword you are looking for, and see how many times it is gathered for a certain time period, ie.. 1 hour
I run some sites aimed at an American audience that have AdSense ads on them. Since I don’t live in the US, when I look at my sites I don’t see the ads that US readers would see.
I know that there’s an add-on for Internet Explorer that “sort of” shows the ads that my visitors see, but it’s very rough & ready.
I’d like a tool that would let me load the actual page as if I were seeing it in the US … much as AdWordsAnywhere lets me see the location specific ads for Google SERPs.
Thanks, I always enjoy reading your blog.
Eric, I can think of tools that I could use, but they would be either hard to create or take a long time to create (for me anyway). But here are some ideas and you can decide if they are doable and worth your time.
1. A tool to help me see who visits my individual blog pages (not crawlers but actual human impressions and clicks). Same for web sites.
2. A tool to somehow gauge an article to see if it will be read. For example, I write an article and I want to know the likelihood it will get read on ezinearticles, based on keywords, strength of title, etc.
3. Along the same lines, what keywords in ezinearticles are searched most often (or for other article sites too). In general, I want tools to help me get my articles read and resource boxes clicked
These tools would sure help me, free or not. I’ll try to think of some more, thanks for bringing up this topic.
Tuppy, you can already do what you want using proxy servers. I’ll write up a post showing you how.
Kim, I’m still unclear as to what you want: do you want to know how many times a keyword is searched for in an hour? There’s no way I’d be able to do that, no one releases that data….
Rich:
1. Does your web host support Awstats? It actually separates human visitors from bots.
2. Interesting idea. I don’t know how easy it would be to program, though, given that so many things are subjective. For example, how do you calculate the “strength” of a title? Sure you can do metrics like does it include the keyword, how many words it has, etc., but it’d be hard to measure how “attention-getting” the title is. I could come up with something, though.
3. Knowing what keywords are searched for on a given site means needing access to stats for said site, or else installing a plugin/toolbar on a large number of browsers (think Alexa) and gathering stats that way. Don’t think I can do anything here, unfortunately…
BTW, I’m also open to creating WordPress plugins and/or themes.
Eric
Eric thanks for the reply
1. Yeah I have Awstats but it’s a little confusing with all the stuff it shows. I just want to know who clicks what blog page. But thanks for reminding me about it.
2. I know there is a website somewhere that shows the strength of a headline in a percentage. I forget the URL it’s at home, so perhaps tomorrow I can share it. Also I recall somewhere articles about how certain words are stronger than others; I don’t know how accurate that stuff is.
3. I wished ezinearticles had a report showing which articles and categories and search terms are most popular. I could write a great article but if nobody reads it, it does me no good. I’d rather write a lousy article everyone reads.
Whoooweee… for me, I’m always on the look out for an automated promotional tool, perhaps one that gives the look and feel of a human promoting manually!
For example, social bookmarking, submitting to multiple sites, but varying your link text, and appear to submit from a different ip address each time! Hey, this is a wish list right? That would be GREAT!
Perhaps a tool, that can submit automatically, but with a delay (so many days, in between posts etc.) - A set it and forget it type of thing…
Hmmmmmm some Idea’s anyway!
Thanks!
Don
How about a tool that sends a site to every one of your friends on Stumbleupon?
Folks, when I say “online tool” I mean a tool I can install on a web page… some good ideas here, but many of these work best as tools you run on your own computer.
Alex: I’m surprised something like that doesn’t already exist. To do it properly, though, would require you to validate your SU login. I wouldn’t want to let anyone send a message to all my friends. Or would I?
Don: I know of such services that exist already, but they work on a monthly membership model.
Eric
I would love to have a “terms ranking tool” that would let me find where a specific term shows up in a Google ranking without having to page through dozens/hundreds of pages of links to find it.
Michael, I assume you mean you want to see where a URL ranks for a given term?
Yup, that’s it. Thanks for the clarification. Have been looking for such a tool for a while now.
Eric,
as Tuppy Glossop said, I would like from another country all the ads AdSense in my web sites in US, and orher countries. I have websites in 4 languages and I can’t find proxy servers for each country.
Dou you have any online tool to see these web sites as a local can see them ?
I tried with the online tool that Digitalpoint.com had a few times ago but it do not works currently.
I will appreciate (and buy !) this online tool if ever it will exist.
regards
Bernard
Eric,
AWstats doesn’t do a good job of separating users and bots.
The reason is that it only looks for known bots.
The problem is bots that aren’t known.
I’ve found a way to determine this in my logs. Bots generally tend to take only one hit, and a human several.
The human requests a page (1 hit) and the CSS file (2 hits), and 5 images (up to 7 hits). The bot only requests the page and accounts for 1 hit.
And looking at that I notice that a couple of my sites are only visited by bots who rip off the content.
But of course that as an online tool wouldn’t be too profitable or reliable. Better as a server side log analyzer.
But MY suggestion for a tool is not really a tool, but a feature for a tool.
No matter what you offer, it would be nice to have a “spy” feature and see what everyone else is punching into it. You know, so I can usurp their niche
Hi,
I’m kind of new here. i dont know if you can write this. A RSS parser displayed using Javascript.
[…] I’m sure all the keyword scrapers are super busy recoding their programs. Hmm…. I was looking for some cool tool ideas… […]
Rich, you mentioned wanting data showing which articles are most popular on ezinearticles.com - that info is already on their site. Underneath every article is a list of the most popular articles in that category (or sub-category, as the case may be).
However, they don’t show which are the most popular categories though. Still, knowing which articles are most popular is a good start. Did you ever try contacting them to find out this info? You never know, they MIGHT help you out a bit…
Now, as for your question about tools Eric… I would like to see an online tool that shows me the competition for a list of keywords, but it allows me to specify which search engine the numbers are collected from AND country-specific options as well.
There are software tools that do this, but it seems to always be only for Google.com and US-centric. I’m in Australia and would love to get that data for google.com.au, for example.
I want to be able to paste in a whole list of keywords and let it go off and do its thing, then deliver me the results in csv format for download & massage. Helps heaps when doing a keyword analysis for a project, rather than having to manually search for each keyword & record the data.
Eran Malloch
Google AdWords Qualified Professional
Hi Eran
Thanks for your reply. You are right, that ezinearticles does show the most viewed and most published articles in a category. That information does indeed help, and could be good to see how others write successful articles. But it wasn’t quite what I had in mind.
What would be nice to have, is a tool where I would input an article, with the title and resource box, and the tool would tell me how likely it would be read in ezinearticles, and the resource box link clicked. I know there are tools that can gauge how “strong” certain words are, but I meant more like a tool that would check the popularity of keywords; that is, what are readers looking for when they search for articles (and perhaps where there is a scarcity of related articles).
The “most viewed articles” in a category does help, but it doesn’t say if 20 people have read the article in 90 days, or 20,000. Also it doesn’t tell me when they read the article, showing trends over time. But asking ezinearticles if they keep track of statistics like that and can make them public (or if someone else does), is a good idea that I will try. All they can say is no.
Thanks again for replying.