Dashboard

It’s a relatively simple, free online tool that allows collaboration and analysis. First you create a project, then specify your company/website, your competitors, and add team members as you go along. The basic dashboard looks like this:

Clippings

The clippings are news items that either mention your brand or your rivals. You can rate each clipping anywhere between Very Positive to Very Negative, depending on the sentiment of the article. Any team member can add to this, and you can subscribe to these clippings via RSS feed. A bookmarklet is also available to make things easier.

Comparison Matrix

To compare your site or product’s features vs the competition, it’s also possible to create a comparison matrix, which is essentially an AJAX-based table of items that you can put checkmarks on or not. Its simple and intuitive, and gives a bird’s eye view of how you square up against others.

Traffic Graph

Using Alexa traffic data, Competitous plots your sites daily traffic rank trend against your competitors, in the same graph, using different colored lines. It’s not the most detailed or accurate comparison out there, but it has its uses.

People

You can invite other people to collaborate with you on a certain project by inviting them thru email. Whoever creates the project is assumed to be the project manager, and therefore has sole authority to remove existing users from the project. However, all members can invite new users or cancel their own invites.

All these features are rudimentary, but very useful if you’d like to organize your competitive analysis in one place, and share it with others. If you’d like a more advanced tool, the same company behind Competitous has launched RivalMap, and I’m sure I’ll also be looking at that in the near future.

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So what does it have that Google Analytics don’t?

Developer API - Advanced users will rejoice because the Clicky API allows them to extract traffic data into several common formats. That way, it’s easy to integrate, analyze, or store data within your own application.

White Label - Brand the service as your own and put up a reseller account. Use your own domain name, logo and CSS. They also have a separate White Label API, so that you can automate the user and site registration process from within your own application.

Dedicated iPhone Version - Do you worship Steve Jobs? If so, Clicky is a match made in heaven for you because it has an optimized iPhone version, enabling you to view your stats on the go. For the rest of us, Clicky was also kind enough to make a generic version for other mobile phones.

Others - Also notable features include visitor geotagging on Google maps, the ability to track outbound links and downloads, widgets, the option to get stats via RSS, an official WordPress plugin to integrate code, and many more.

Now that we know the pros, what are the cons?

If you’re doing Internet marketing or other advertising campaigns, you will miss Google Analytics’ Goals and Conversions, as well as Campaign Tracking features. Clicky says it will have these features on its roster soon, but there are no dates available on which to expect them, so don’t hold your breath.

As for pricing, Clicky has a free and paid offerings. Of course, the free account has several limitations, including tracking support for only 3 websites and up to 1,000 hits per day. This makes it suitable for only the small, startup blogs. If you’d like full functionality, support for up to 20 sites, and hits from 10,000 - 50,000 a day, you’ll need the premium plans that range from $3.99 to $16.99 per month. You can get 6 months off if you pay for a year’s worth of service upfront. For people who have a large blogging network that gets plenty of traffic, you may also consider a custom plan that supports up to 200 sites and 300,000 total daily page views.

Is it worth it? It all depends on your needs.

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1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

If you don’t have the time to test each and every plugin to see what’s best, then YARPP is your safest bet. It’s easy to install with no editing of your WordPress template required. However, it’s in flexibility where this plugin really shines, with plenty of options to suit your every need. As for result relevance, YARPP delivers. Additionally, you can tweak thresholds and how things are computed, if you wish.In the works for future versions are the inclusion of post dates, RSS feed support, and sentence-aware excerpts. Due to its tagging support, the latest version’s compatibility is limited to WordPress 2.5 and up.

2. WASABI

WASABI’s installation can be a little more involved than YARPP, but a guide is handy on its dedicated web page. A few people have extended its functionality, which now includes the ability to allow manual correlation of entries using keywords, for those posts with witty titles whose relation to the contents are not readily apparent. There is a version which permits the use of WordPress’ built-in excerpt field, and another with the very useful feature of generating suggested links if the user encounters 404 errors. All of these are available on the WASABI PB Wiki page.

3. Aizattos Related Posts

Aizattos is a simple related posts plugin that works right off the bat, which makes it ideal for people who don’t care much for figuring out the technical details. It is said to have evolved from the WASABI plugin, but the two have taken on different paths since. Aizattos can generate related links without requiring you to add any special tags to the posts, and it’s this no-fuss characteristic that makes this plugin a favorite among many bloggers. However, for some reason the developer has taken it down from the original download site, but a fan has made it available again for others to use.

Try to install any of these three and see how it affects your blog’s page views and ad earnings.

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Reminder Fox

Beating a deadline? Reminder Fox can be configured to set an alarm at a specific time of the day, or periodically like every hour, just to remind you not to goof off. You can customize the alarm sound to any .WAV file like the ones here on The Free Site, or go record your own using Window’s built-in Sound Recorder to make it more fun.

Time Tracker

This is a simple tool to measure how long you’ve been using the Firefox browser, and takes very little space on your status bar. It’s useful for measuring how long you take to finish each article or any other task, which helps you keep focused. Like the saying goes, if you can measure it, you can improve it.

Read It Later

The surfing addict’s dream. This plugin allows you to click on any link on a webpage and instead of the browser taking you there, it saves the link on your “Reading List”. This way, if you encounter something interesting, you don’t have to get distracted from work. And no more multiple open tabs to clutter your workspace!

Undo Closed Tabs Button

Ever accidentally closed the wrong tab and cursed yourself for it? It happens to me a lot, so before I had to go through my cluttered browser history, which wasn’t very easy because I go through maybe over a hundred web pages a day doing research. With this tool, it’s like a one-click undo, and you can set it to remember up to the last 99 closed tabs, but the default is a more manageable 10. Now this should be a standard feature on all browsers.

AdSense Notifier

For those who keep constant vigil over their AdSense earnings, this is an indispensable tool. No longer will you have to login to the AdSense site every time or refresh your browser every few minutes - this plugin will do it for you. It can show your total page impressions, clicks, CTR, and eCPM, and earnings for the day, depending on how you configure it. AdSense Notifier can fetch new data in as frequent as every 15 minutes. A caveat, it stopped working with FF 3.01, so use this only if you have an older version of the browser.

Do you use other Firefox plugins to help you work faster? Please share them in the comments section below.

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How does Google’s date range search operator look like?

Here it is:

desired search term daterange:2007 january-2008 june

Of course, you must replace the phrases and dates by the ones you want to research. For instance, if you want to search for SEO tips published between Jan/2005 and Dec/2006, type the following on Google’s search box:

seo tips daterange:2005 january-2006 december

Now choose a topic and try it for yourself.

Why should I use Google’s date range search operator?

• Research is an obvious reason to use it. By using that search string you can limit the results displayed on Google to a specific period and compare them to current data to see how a given subject has evolved.
• Get inspiration for articles. Example: if you have a political blog, try searching for us elections daterange:2004 january-2004 october. Read the news published at that time. Are they still current in any way? Or have things changed significantly? Write a post on your conclusions.
• You may also compile a chronological resource list on your niche. For more effectiveness, you should perform several searches limited to shorter date ranges, instead of going for a single broader one.

Can’t I use Google Insights for Search instead?

It depends on your needs. If you want to track search term trends, yes, you can stick to Google Insights for Search. However, note that this tool won’t show you any search result pages. If you want to see those, the date range string is the way to go.

Google Insights for Search is great for researches on keyword and marketing trends. Google’s date range search operator, on the other hand, is a powerful aid for content creation.

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This week Google announced the release of a brand new tool. It’s called Google Insights for Search.

How is Google Insights for Search like?

I see it as a sort of Google Trends on steroids. This is due to the fact that with Google Insights for Search you can not only analyse regional trends — which are shown in maps for easier visualisation — but also view other data, such as related search terms and rising searches. Besides, this new keyword popularity tool lets you choose the desired comparison criteria: search terms (the traditional option on Google Trends), locations or time ranges.

In order to avoid confusion, you can select a category for the terms you want to research. Take a general term like “writing” and run it through different categories such as “Arts & Humanities,” “Internet,” “Computers & Electronics” and “Industries.” I guarantee you’ll see a great variation among results. And the tool will even tell you how often your chosen term fits each selected category.

Who is Google Insights for Search Intended For?

According to Inside AdWords (Google’s official AdWords blog):

Today, we’re launching Google Insights for Search, a new product designed with the advertiser in mind. It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.

I also highly recommend that you take a look at this page with tips on how to use this keyword popularity tool. Again, they talk about advertisers all the time. However, it doesn’t mean that you can’t use it to optimise your sites even when you don’t plan to use AdWords. After all, the data that you can gather with this toy can certainly help a lot in your SEO efforts. It can also guide you in your content creation strategy. So I’d say that the tool is perfect for anyone who wants to improve their web business.

Will Google Insights for Search kill other Google tools?

I don’t think so. Not at this moment.

If you want search volume numbers, AdWords Keyword Tool should still be your #1 choice. Google Insights for Search doesn’t display such info. Their data is based on relative numbers, not on absolute ones.

And if you tend to get a bit confused when you’re given too many research options, you’d better stick to Google Trends at a first moment. What I suggest is that you open both Google Trends and Google Insights for Search in different browser tabs (or windows, as you wish). Then type the same term on both tools and compare the result pages. Repeat this several times, until you get used to the differences and feel more comfortable when being exposed to several features at once.

You may also be interested in reading the comments posted here. They will give you some food for thought and remind you that there’s no such thing as a perfect keyword popularity tool.

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