Monday, November 9, 2009

Google is Testing a New AdSense Interface

Google is currently beta testing a better and sleeker interface of its AdSense account management. The new interface answers the top three suggestions provided by AdSense account holders  that will make the task of managing AdSense accounts easier and less daunting.
performancegraphs
From the sample screenshot given by Google, the new interface is indeed better looking than the current interface. It is also less cluttered and links to the information that you would like to know when checking your AdSense account are given outright.
The new AdSense interface gives you more detailed performance reports that enables you to view daily statistics in a nice graphical format. Additional metrics that matters are also provided including earnings you earned from various ad implementation, ad targeting and ad bids.
The Ad Review Center will also be enhanced to give more options for managing ads and a cleaner interface that will facilitate easier reviewing of  ads in the Ad Review Center.
The new AdSense interface is now more streamlined and simplifies common tasks that you normally do on your individual accounts. The interface now also includes more relevant help, message inbox containing tips and alerts on every page of your AdSense account.
Google is currently rolling out the beta version of the new AdSense interface to some users in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Japanese AdSense users.

The Advanced SEO Toolkit

Search and Social team is happy to announce the launch of advanced SEO toolkit allowing you to do multiple SEO tasks from one handy dashboard!
SEJ tools offer plenty of options allowing to build and promote multiple projects. It covers various tasks from content creation to link building and keyword position monitoring so that you didn’t ever need to leave anywhere.
Most of the tools are currently powered by Raven SEO tools but we are adding new resources and tools which are exclusive for SEJ readers. Please share your thoughts and feature requests in the comments!

Research Any URL or Domain Page Rankings

Just go to “Research” tab, provide your domain, URL or a keyword and see the following data:
  • The keyword;
  • The domain Google position for this term;
  • Cost of the term;
  • Overall number of results for this term;
  • CPC for this term;
  • Average monthly search volume.
SEJ tools: research keywords
Further actions:
You can add each word to manager to further work with it or to SERP tracker to monitor its positions.
Below you can also see the paid search words the domain is ranked for as well as the list of top competitors in organic search.

Analyze Domain Basic Stats

For any domain you enter you will be able to see the following data:
  • The number of indexed pages in Google and Yahoo;
  • The number of link to the domain (via Google and Yahoo);
  • .EDU and .GOV links to the domain (via Yahoo);
  • Domain age and expiration;
  • Google PageRank;
  • Alexa traffic;
  • Dmoz listing.
SEJ tools: analyze

Analyze On-Page Data

Provide the URL and see the following analysis (along with recommendations):
  • Semantic structure (the use of headers);
  • Page Lynx view;
  • Page content size;
  • Page download time;
  • Outgoing links; etc.
SEJ tools: design analyzer

Manage and Monitor Your Link Building Campaign

The software provides solid ways to store, organize and manage your link building campaign: categorize links by tags, types of linking sites and types of the backlink itself (paid, organic, etc); monitor the link status change; estimate your backlink anchor text variety and activity.
First, add all the links you want to keep an eye on:
  1. Specify the link status (if it is queued, active, declined, etc);
  2. Provide the link details (anchor text, URL, type);
  3. Link placement (where it is located, the type of the linking site, etc);
  4. (Optionally) Assign tasks and add comments. If you’re a task administrator, you can assign a link record task to another user on your account.
SEJ tools: Manage and monitor link building campaign
Further actions:
  • After you create the list of all (potential, active or deleted) links you want to manage, select the ones you want to keep track of and add them to monitoring;
  • Generate and export reports on your link building based on the time frames.

Add and Manage Content

The software allows to add content to your blog – it may turn really useful when you need to post to numerous blogs, so you don’t need login to various dashboards.
Just go to “Blog manager” behind the CONTENT tab, click “Add blog”, provide your blog details (including admin login info) and you are done! You can also make the data public to let all the managers access the blog, save and publish content.
SEJ tools: blog content

Monitor Your Reputation Across Numerous Sources

“Media Monitor” hiding behind SOCIAL tab tracks and alerts your brand mentions across numerous social media platforms. Moreover, it creates a handy chart representing your name popularity within the set period of time.
You can also perform the sentiment analysis of your brand mentions. Next to each listing you will be able to click an icon representing an emotion (positive, negative or neutral):
SEJ tools: media monitor

Monitor Your Brand Across Forums

You can also monitor your brand mentions (or any keyword) across forums and discussion boards (the feature is powered by Omgil):
Just enter your search term and see the results: the discussion date, title and the excerpt:
SEJ tools: forums search

Check Where Your Brand Name Should Be Reserved

There are plenty of social media sites you may want to join (if not to participate, then at least to claim your brand name to protect your reputation). You can do that with SEJ tools by going to “KnowEm” link behind SOCIAL tab (the feature is powered by KnowEm) and providing your brand name (or the moniker you tend to use). After that you’ll see:
  • Websites where your name has been already claimed;
  • Websites where this name is still available (for you to claim it):
SEJ tools: KnowEm

Monitor Your Keyword Positions

The software allows to monitor key words and phrases in various search engines. Just provide your search terms (or upload the CSV file if you need to submit a number of them).
Reports can be downloaded as a PDF or a CSV file. The trend (gained or lost positions) will be represented with green and red arrows:
SEJ tools: SERP tracker
Additional options:
  • Set the search engines you want to track (You can set to track Google, Yahoo, Bing as well as numerous local versions of Google and Yahoo). The option hides behind “Search Engines” link in SERPS tab;
  • Add competitors and compare your rankings. The option hides behind “Competitors” link in SERPS tab.

Analyze Your Traffic Stats

To analyze your traffic stats, you’ll need first to activate Google Analytics by authorizing a specific Google Analytics account so the system can access the data. The software will fetch and display the following data:
  • Top referrals;
  • Top keywords;
  • Top search engines.
SEJ tools: Google Analytics

Manage Reports and Users

The software allows to generate and schedule reports as well as create report templates. It also saves the report history.
You can also allow your whole team to work with the tool by creating new users and assigning various roles.
  • Create roles in “Role manger” (Unrestricted or Read-only roles);
  • Add and manage users in “User manager”

New Digg Feature: Trending Topics

Digg.com has always been known as “Reddit.com’s news from yesterday”. It appears now they’re trying to combat this issue…at least on a micro level.
A recent post from Digg explains:
…we’re launching a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends which will surface certain highly active stories as they’re trending to Digg’s homepage so people can vote on whether or not they feel the story actually belongs there.

trending_story

How Does it Work?

Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not.
In addition, they have a new Twitter account in which they tweet the trends as they occur (@Digg_Trends).
Some breaking news and trending topics include:
  • The Real Men Who Stare at Goats” is trending
  • Shooting reported at Orlando high-rise – CNN.com
  • New Twitter Retweets Take A Little Peek Around
  • Verizon Droid Eris: Officially launching on Friday for $99
Some NOT SO breaking news topics include:
  • Disney Will Make Over Mickey — Why? To Make Us Like Him.
  • Piggy Trouble (INFOGRAPHIC)
In short, it appears that Digg is just focused on high-activity levels over focusing on strictly “breaking news”. Opens up a new portal for manipulation? We’ll see… The question I have is whether or not they’re taking into account share data on Twitter and Facebook. My guess is…”yes.”