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The First Cornerstone for the Middle Class

President Obama traveled to Chattanooga, Tennessee yesterday to talk about the first cornerstone of middle class security: a good job in a durable, growing industry. He outlined his vision for an economy where everyone who works hard can get ahead, and his plan to make that vision a reality.

Click here to see what the President had to say.

The 100 Best Free SEO Tools & Resources for Every Challenge

Posted: 30 Jul 2013 07:17 PM PDT

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

At Moz, we love using premium SEO Tools (especially our own). Paid tools are essential when you need advanced features, increased limits, historical features, or online support.

For other tasks, a free tool does the trick.

Below you'll find an interactive list of 100 best completely free tools, tools with both free and paid options, and free trials. Simply select the area you're working in, and view all the tools listed in that category.

Free Tools

Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool

http://www.removeem.com/ratios.php

Link Research, Technical SEO

Worried about Google's Penguin algorithm hitting you for over-optimized anchor text? Simply type in your URL for a full report of which links might raise flags.

Bing Webmaster Tools

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Tools Suite, Diagnostic

Similar in function to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing offers a suite of interesting research tools and resources for webmasters.

Bitly

https://bitly.com/

Social, Analytics

Most people use Bitly for URL shortening, but the real power of this platform comes from its analytics.

Boomerang

http://www.boomeranggmail.com/

Email, Productivity

Boomerang lets you follow up on emails, even when you forget. Great for link building or any time you send a lot of emails.

Buffer

https://bufferapp.com/

Social

Optimize your online social media sharing. Buffer allows you to share with your audience at the optimal times for greater visibility.

BuiltWith

http://builtwith.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Use BuiltWith to discover what technology nearly any website was, well, built with. Great for competitive intelligence as well.

Buzzstream Tools Suite

http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building

Link Building, Tools Suite, Email

Most people know Buzzstream as an outreach platform, but they also offer a number of free link-building tools. This company gets it.

Caption Tube

http://captiontube.appspot.com/

Video

Free and easy resource used to create captions for YouTube. Helps with usability and offers viewers a readable transcript.

CircleCount

http://www.circlecount.com/

Social, Analytics

Google+ analytics ramped up. Free resource to track your followers and analyze your shares. See how many followers you've gained over time.

Content Strategy Generator Tool

http://seogadget.com/content-strategy-generator-tool-v2-update/

Content

This tool from SEOgadget helps you plan your content strategy intelligently, using keyword research and estimating your audience size.

Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML

http://word2cleanhtml.com/

Content, Productivity

Despite the rise of Google Docs, Word still dominates much of the world. Copying and pasting has always been a hurdle, but this tool makes it easy.

Copyscape

http://www.copyscape.com/

Content

Copyscape serves both as a plagiarism checker and a duplicate-content checker. Great to use if your content has been distributed across the web.

Domain Hunter Plus

http://domainhunterplus.com/

Link Building

This magic extension for Chrome not only helps you find important broken links, but also tells you if the links point to an available domain.

Easel.ly

http://www.easel.ly/

Infographics

Free tools for creating and sharing inforgraphics. The templates allow anyone to create a professional-looking graphic.

Email Format

http://email-format.com/

Email, Productivity

Email Format helps you find the proper structure for thousands of companies and organizations across the web.

FindPeopleonPlus

http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/

Social

The ultimate Google+ directory that's great for research, outreach, and link building. Sort by keywords, profession, country, and more.

Frobee Robots.txt Checker

http://www.frobee.com/robots-txt-check

Robots.txt, Technical SEO

Many robots.txt files contain hidden errors not easily visible to humans. Run your file through this tool and you never know what you'll discover.

GetListed

https://getlisted.org/

Local, Moz

This awesome local SEO tool scores your local SEO visibility and gives you actionable next steps to raise your score.

Google Keyword Planner

http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner

Keyword Research

The tool to replace Google's popular keyword tool has been derided by some, but still offers data not available anywhere else.

Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Analytics

The most popular of all the analytics tools available, Google Analytics continually innovates and sets the standard.

Google Analytics API

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008004?hl=en&ref_topic=1008008

API, Analytics

The Google Analytics API is great for building custom reports and tools, and also for pulling data straight into Excel or Google Docs.

Google Map Maker

http://www.google.com/mapmaker

Local

Among other things, Google Map Maker allows you to contribute to public map information, which may be shared and incorporated into Google Maps.

Google PageSpeed Insights

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Speed

Tools, data, and insights to improve your page speed. Page speed is correlated with better rankings and user engagement, so this matters.

Google Public Data

http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory

Content

Drawing on vast public databases, Google public data offers a great starting point for content research, infographics, and more.

Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html

Technical SEO, CRO

That SEO Mofo! Use this tool to see how your snippet may appear in Google's search results. Add structured data, review stars, and more.

Google Structured Data Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Structured Data, Technical SEO

If you use Schema.org microformats or any other type of structured data, this tool will verify your markup.

Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/

Keyword Research

See what's trending in Google search results and view keyword search popularity over time. A must for trends.

Google Webmaster

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Tools Suite, Diagnostic

The interface recently received an overhaul, and Google Webmaster remains a must-have resource of diagnostic and health tools for site owners.

IFTTT

https://ifttt.com/

Productivity

IFTTT stands for IF This, Then That. The tool allows you to create automatic triggers between various apps, like Gmail and Twitter.

Infogr.am

http://infogr.am/

Infographics

A great free Infographics resource that allows you to easily create graphics and data visualizations.

Internet Marketing Ninjas SEO Tools

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/tools/

Tools Suite

The Ninjas are some of the best SEOs and online marketers out there, and they've put some of their best tools online for free.

Linkstant

http://www.linkstant.com/

Link Building

This nifty analytics tool alerts you anytime someone links to your website. Great for outreach and intelligence gathering.

Linksy.me Email Guesser

http://linksy.me/find-email

Email, Link Building

Need to send an email, but you don't have the recipient's address? Type in what you know and this nifty tool will help you figure it out.

MailTester.com

http://mailtester.com/

Email

Need to send an email to an untested address, but you don't want to spam them? Check it first with this mail tester to verify.

MozCast

http://mozcast.com/

SERP Tracking, Moz

Want to know if Google is testing its algorithm this week? MozCast gives you a daily weather report to track changes in the SERPs.

MyBlogGuest

http://myblogguest.com/

Link Building, Content

Guest blogging is still alive and thriving. MyBlogGuest helps you find the good opportunities out there.

Panguin Tool

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Analytics

This awesome tool connects with your Google Analytics account to help you see if and when you've been hit by Google Algorithm updates.

Pingdom

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Speed

Pingdom offers an entire suite of speed tools to help analyze page load, DNS issues, and connectivity.

Piwik

http://piwik.org/

Analytics

Piwik is a lightweight web analytics solution, and a great alternative to Google Analytics.

Rank Checker for Firefox

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

Rank Tracking

This light and easy desktop tool checks rankings with the click of a button. Quick, easy and free.

Rapportive

http://rapportive.com/

Email, Link Building, Productivity

Rapportive works with your Gmail inbox to give you near-instant rich contact information for almost everyone you want to reach. A must-have for marketers.

Remove Duplicate Items

http://ontolo.com/tools-remove-duplicates

Productivity

Ontolo offers a suite of link building software and a few helpful productivity tools for link builders. The remove duplicates tool solves a common problem.

Robots.txt Checker

http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml

Robots.txt, Technical SEO

Use robots best practices and discover hidden errors in your robots.txt files that may cause search engine crawling problems.

Schema Creator

http://schema-creator.org/

Structured Data, Technical SEO

Everyone loves using Schema.org, but the microformats are difficult to write by hand. This generator from the folks at Raven simplifies the task.

Scraper for Chrome

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/

Productivity

If you've never scraped a webpage, you're missing out. Scraper for Chrome puts the power of simple web scraping in your hands without the need for code.

Seer Toolbox

http://www.seerinteractive.com/seo-toolbox/

Tools Suite, Analytics, Link Research

SEER opened up its internal toolbox for everyone in the world to use. These are the same tools used in-house at SEER, and they rock.

SEO Toolbar

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

Tools Suite, Toolbar, Technical SEO

On of the most popular tools available, The SEO Toolbar puts a ton of information at your fingertips including backlinks and competitive research.

SEO Tools for Excel

http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/

Tools Suite, Analytics, Social

You don't need to be an Excel ninja to use Niels Bosma's SEO Tools for Excel. This plugin does so many things many SEOs won't work without it.

SEOgadget Links API

http://seogadget.com/api/

API, Link Research

The SEOgadget Links API lets you easily gather not only backlink data but contact information as well. A huge time saver.

SEOgadget Tools

http://seogadget.com/tools/

Tools Suite

This suite of tools from the Gadget lab includes several Excel plugins, a content strategy generator, and more.

SEOQuake

http://www.seoquake.com/

Toolbar, Tools Suite, Technical SEO

More raw data than any other SEO toolbar out there.

SharedCount

http://www.sharedcount.com/

Social, Analytics

Want to know how any piece of content was shared socially across the major services? This is the tool to use.

SharedCount API

http://www.sharedcount.com/documentation.php

API, Social

Harnessing the combined statistics of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and more, the SharedCount API puts a ton of social data at your fingertips.

Similar Page Checker

http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

Content, Technical SEO

Use this tool to check for duplicate content issues. The Similar Page Checker will give you a score of how closely the HTML of two pages resemble each other.

Sitemap Generators

http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

Sitemaps

Google offers a slew of free, top-notch sitemap generators. Most of these live on your server and generate new sitemaps automatically.

Social Authority API

https://followerwonk.com/social-authority

API, Social

How much reach and social authority do your followers have? How about the people you're trying to connect with? The free Social Authority API will tell you.

Social Crawlytics

https://socialcrawlytics.com/

Social, Analytics

Social Crawlytics allows you to conduct competitive research by showing you your competitors' most-shared content. Lots of other features as well.

Social Mention

http://www.socialmention.com/

Social

Social mention offers real-time social media search and analysis. Enter a search term and see who's sharing what, right now.

Text Cleaner

http://www.textcleanr.com/

Content

Some of the best tools solve the simplest problems. Text cleaner cleans up all kinds of text formatting when copying and pasting between aplications.

Ubersuggest

http://ubersuggest.org/

Keyword Research

Every SEO loves Ubersuggest for its ease of use and wealth of keyword research ideas. Utilizing the power of Google Suggest, it returns hundreds of potential results.

URI Valet

http://urivalet.com/

Technical SEO

A great tool for digging into server headers, canonical information, analyzing redirect problems and more.

Virante SEO Tools

http://www.virante.org/seo-tools

Tools Suite

Virant offers a number of high quality SEO tools to the public. These are often the same tools developed for the Virant team, opened up for public use.

Wayback Machine

http://archive.org/web/web.php

Competitive Intelligence

Want to see the history of your website or your competitor's site? The Wayback Machine allows you to step back in time and track important changes.

WebPagetest

http://www.webpagetest.org/

Speed

Quick and easy website speed tool. Offers suggestions for improving performance.

Wordle

http://www.wordle.net/

Content

Create beautiful word clouds. Great for visualizations, graphics, and research.

Wordstream Free Keyword Tools

http://www.wordstream.com/free-keyword-tools

Keyword Research, Tools Suite

In addition to its paid offerings, Wordstream offers a suite of free keyword tools offering access to thousands of keyword suggestions.

Xenu's Link Sleuth

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Diagnostic, Technical SEO

Winner of the ugliest-SEO-tool-on-the-planet award, Xenu is also one of the most useful. Crawl entire sites, find broken links, create sitemaps, and more.

XML-Sitemaps.com

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Sitemaps

XML-Sitemaps offers probably the easiest sitemap creation solution anywhere. Great for smaller sites when you need a sitemap in minutes.

Yahoo Pipes

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Content, Productivity

A great mashup tool that combines different feeds into content and other magical creations. Used for link building and whatever you can dream of.

Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Technical SEO

If you could only choose one WordPress plugin for you site, the first would be from Yoast, and so would the second. This one sets the standard.

YouTube Analytics

https://www.youtube.com/analytics

Video, Analytics

Offers video-specific analytics for YouTube videos. A must-have for YouTube video publishers.

Free and Paid

Ahrefs

https://ahrefs.com/

Link Research, Link Building

One of the more popular link research tools, Ahrefs offers a large index and nice anchor text distribution charts. Mostly a paid tool, but they offer some free data.

Banana Tag

http://bananatag.com/

Email

Banana Tag allows you to track your emails after you send them. For example, check your email open rates from Gmail.

CloudFlare

https://www.cloudflare.com/

Speed

How do they make CloudFlare free? It works both as a CDN and a security service to provide your website with speed and safety.

Followerwonk

https://followerwonk.com/

Social, Analytics, Moz

Perhaps the coolest thing about Followerwonk is the ability to track your followers. Smart SEOs also use it for outreach and research.

Keyword Eye

http://www.keywordeye.com/

Keyword Research

Keyword eye adds a twist to keyword research by adding rich visualizations â€" essential when you want to move beyond keywords to valuable concepts.

KnowEm

http://knowem.com/

Social

KnowEm allows you to check 100's of social profiles at once to check availability. Looking for the perfect brand name? Check KnowEm first.

Majestic SEO

http://www.majesticseo.com/

Link Research, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building

You've probably seen Majestic SEO link charts all over the Internet. Great crawling technology combined with several free options make for great link research.

Majestic SEO API

http://blog.majesticseo.com/general/majestic-seo-api-now-explained/

API, Link Research

Majestic makes much of its backlink data available for free via its API.

MozBar

http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

Tools Suite, Toolbar, Moz

The standard SEO toolbar for legions of marketers, the MozBar allows you to perform over 50 key tasks right from your browser. Highly recommended.

Mozscape API

http://moz.com/products/api

API, Link Research, Moz

Companies everywhere incorporate the Mozscape API into their own products, but it's also available to individuals, and much of the data is free.

nTopic

http://www.ntopic.org/

Content

nTopic is one of the few proven methods for giving your content a relevancy score and offering keyword suggestions to improve it.

Open Site Explorer

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Link Research, Moz, Competitive Intelligence, Link Building

When Google and Yahoo started removing backlink data from the public, Moz built Open Site Explorer to fill a huge need. See backlinks, anchor text, popularity metrics and more.

Piktochart

http://piktochart.com/

Infographics

A cute and easy infographic generator. No experience required.

RowFeeder

https://rowfeeder.com/

Social, Analytics

RowFeeder allows you to track social usernames, hashtags and keywords and load that information into Excel for easy social media monitoring.

Screaming Frog

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Diagnostic, Technical SEO

A powerful website crawling tool with a ton of features and customizations. A must-have for most serious SEOs.

Searchmetrics Visibility Charts

http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research

SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence

Track the search visibility of any website, in addition to tracking winners and losers in Google's search results.

SEMrush

http://www.semrush.com/

Tools Suite, Keyword Research, Competitive Intelligence

The paid and organic keyword data offered by SEMrush is often scary good and comprehensive. Also great for researching competitors' ads.

SERPmetrics

http://serpmetrics.com/flux/

SERP Tracking, Competitive Intelligence

SERPmetrics flux charts track the flux for US search results across Yahoo, Bing and Google over a 30-day period. A paid API is also available.

SimilarWeb

http://www.similarweb.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Impressive competitive intelligence across a number of online industries. Competitor website stats are hard to come by, but Similar Web does a good job.

StatCounter

http://statcounter.com/

Analytics

Free, quick, and lightweight analytics solution. Often used by those who want to avoid using Google Analytics for privacy reasons.

Trello

https://trello.com/

Productivity

Project management and tracking made simple. Used and endorsed by Moz.

Whitespark Local Citation Finder

https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/

Local

Finding local citations is key to local SEO. Whitespark offers a number of free and paid solutions to find the local citations to rise above the competition.

Whois Lookup

http://whois.domaintools.com/

Competitive Intelligence

Find registration, contact, and administrative information for any domain.

Wistia

http://wistia.com/

Video

The king of online video, Wistia offers SEO-friendly solutions for video hosting. Both free and low-cost options available.

Free Trials

Moz Analytics

http://moz.com/products

Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Moz, Rank Tracking, Social

The flagship of the Moz software suite, Moz Analytics offers a dashboard of all your important marketing data in one place with actionable analytics for better marketing.

Optimizely

https://www.optimizely.com/

A/B Testing, CRO

Easy A/B testing and analytics to help you move toward success in your CRO efforts.

Raven

http://raventools.com/

Tools Suite, Diagnostic, Content, Social

Raven offers a classic suite of SEO, content, and research tools popular with many marketers.

Visual Website Optimizer

https://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/

A/B Testing, CRO

Visual Website Optimizer allows you to run A/B tests with a simple online editor that lets you test content without knowing code.

Wordtracker

http://www.wordtracker.com/

Keyword Research

A powerful keyword research suite used by many top marketers, Wordtracker offers a generous free trial option.

What's your favorite free tool?

Narrowing a list down to the 100 best SEO tools and resources is not an easy challenge. Although I visited hundreds of webpages to compile this list, these four resources offered particular value:

The format for this ultimate interactive post was inspired by Jon Cooper's complete list of link building strategies. You should check it out â€" it's a great post.

Despite researching hundreds of tools, a few great ones didn't make the list. What's your favorite free SEO tool? Let us know in the comments below.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Announcing Moz Academy!

Posted: 30 Jul 2013 02:16 AM PDT

Posted by Nick_Sayers

Weâ€™re stoked to announce Moz Academy!

Have you ever wanted a resource to learn inbound marketing or a place your team can reference marketing best practices? Well, we hope you do a backflip over Moz Academy. If you have a Moz Subscription, check it out now!

Subscription-based content

At Moz we produce a wealth of free content in the blog, our guides, Q&A, and pretty much everywhere on the site. We want to do something special for Moz subscribers by transforming our free content and reinventing it for Moz Academy. You could probably scour the Moz Blog and other websites to obtain the information in Moz Academy, but we think having it easily digestible and all in one place is a huge win for Moz subscribers. Moz is excited to add the simplicity and power of Moz Academy to the list of Moz subscription benefits.

Why create an inbound marketing school?

Moz is extremely passionate about educating our community. In fact, our entire business started as a blog where people could learn about SEO. Moz Academy gives subscribers the power to be better marketers, which will enable them to use our products in more depth and with greater confidence. We want to provide a hub of marketing knowledge that will create a stronger community where people can teach each other while using the Academy as a frame of reference. One could say that Moz Academy is the Mr. Miyagi of inbound marketing. The key to this project is empowering you to kick even more butt than you already do!

We hope Moz Academy turns into the one-stop-shop for inbound knowledge for Moz subscribers. Everyone on the team is committed to continually refreshing content and adding new lessons. Again, we really want this to be the easiest and most comprehensive place to learn internet marketing on the web.

Furthermore, weâ€™ve designed each lesson with empathy in mind; they will be easily digestible and considerate of your time. That means you can drop in whenever you like and have comfortable breakpoints if youâ€™re brain is exploding with inbound marketing knowledge.

Wait, how do I use Moz Academy?

Moz Academy is easy to use! Check out these six simple steps:

Step 1: Log into your Moz account.

Step 2: Go to moz.com/academy.

Step 3: Look through the lessons.

Step 4: Click a lesson you find interesting.

Step 5: Enjoy a video and/or read the lesson below it!

Step 6: Crane kick.

What lessons do you have right now?

We're starting with the following lessons:

Inbound Marketing
SEO
Link Building
Social Media
Content Marketing

We plan to add a lot more! Look for lessons on local SEO, community management, video marketing, email marketing and web analytics. Yup, it's going to be pretty sweet!

Well, Moz, what's next for Moz Academy?

The future of Moz Academy really depends on how everyone uses it. In the next few months, we want to create a good foundation for beginners and subsequently build up to intermediate-level content. Eventually, we'd like to have sections for beginners lessons, intermediate lessons, and advanced lessons. Keep your eyes peeled, because weâ€™ll be releasing a lot of new stuff! Some of our longer-term goals for Moz Academy are to have interactive quizzes and some sort of gamification. Yes, we know you'd like to track your progress and unlock achievements. That way you can show off how awesome you are at Moz Academy!

Eventually, we want Moz Academy to look more like Treehouse and Code Schoolâ€™s online learning platforms. We have a long way to go, but are excited about the journey to get there. With your help and feedback, we can make Moz Academy something awesome. Thanks in advance, and enjoy!

miercuri, 31 iulie 2013

The First Cornerstone for the Middle Class