Topsy will use user influence and content popularity to rank its results. Topsy digs up posts, comments, links, and profiles. It is quite powerful as it lets you know who the influential users are and which types of content are trending. The search engine is not perfect by any means but is off to a good start.

The tool is pretty simple to use. It tracks your Facebook likes, shares, and comments. It also totals the number of tweets and +1′s have received. Shared Count also covers LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and Google Buzz stats. Of course, this is not exactly a fancy tool with a ton of eye candy options. But it does save you time tracking your total shares.

Of course, this new update has affected just a small number of sites. But those who pay attention to their statistics have probably realized whether they have been hit by this already. Now some claim this is not a Panda update and just an algorithm tweak. This is just technicality at this point. The fact is Google is changing its algorithm and people are starting to suffer, at least those who did not anticipate these changes.

If your website has been hit by Google, you are not completely out of luck. There are things you can do to avoid dropping further in the rankings. First of all, you should work on adding high quality content to your website on a consistent basis. These days you can’t afford to take short cuts. You should also use your Google Analytics reports to figure out which pages have been affected and go from there. Just use the period comparison report to figure out how far your site has fallen:

Let’s face it. Google and other search engines will continue changing their algorithms in the near future. If you are not focusing on your audience and multiple channels to reach out to them, you are are going to end up broken.

Pingdom is a cool service that lets you keep track of your website and its performance at all times. Instead of having to check your sites by hand, you can just set up a tracker through Pingdom and let it alert you when your site goes down. Pingdom is a freemium service. You can always get a free account to do basic checks on your site. If you have multiple websites or run a business, you are better off getting a paid plan.

There are many web hosts that offer 99% or 99.99% up-time guarantee. If you are not checking the performance of your web host, you won’t know for sure whether it is delivering on its promise. Pingdom can keep track of that and alert you when your host is down. It also offers you a detailed performance report. You get alerted by SMS or E-mail when your site is down, especially useful for e-commerce and other mission critical websites.

Let’s face it. Even the best SEO plan won’t save you if your site is down. You don’t want people coming to your website only to see a black or error page. Thanks to Pingdom, you can keep your web host honest and address downtime issues before they turn into something major.

Which service do you use to check your site’s up time?

Link building does not have to be rocket science. While there are plenty of creative ways one can go about generating links for a blog, here are 5 quick ways to do so for those who are completely new to the link building process:

• take advantage of witter trends: there is a reason topics start trending on Twitter. Could it be that people are actually talking about those topics? Talking about relevant topics that happen to trend on Twitter can get you some links without you having to do anything. You can always create lists of Twitter users, topics, and lists to get people involved with those to link to you.
• focus on social media & networking: providing your visitors with social bookmarking and networking tools can encourage them to submit your website to those sites and get your content to go viral. StumbleUpon and Delicious can keep driving traffic to your website if you start getting some saves in those communities.
• try online directories: many SEOs talk about how online directories are not that relevant these days and how their links do not count for much. They do. Links from these sites may not get you to #1 position on Google, but they are especially helpful for new websites that want to gain some traction in the social media.
• be Involved in your blogging community: you don’t have to be a blogger to be involved on blogs that cover your niche. Provide useful comments and participate in discussions, and you may get people from those communities to come check your content out.
• try linkbaits: linkbaits can be anything that can get you more links. If you want to take the easy way out, you can always give away a couple of cool gadgets in exchange for people linking to you. Is this link buying? Perhaps. Some of the links you get this way will be gone as soon as your competition is over. Trying cheatsheets, infographics, and controversial stories would be a better idea.

As you can tell, one does not have to be a genius to start generating links to a site. The above steps should get you on your way. But it never hurts to be creative when trying to get quality links.

Keyword Winner: a convenient tool that helps you choose the best keywords for your articles. It uses Google tools such as Google Insights to provide you with keyword trends and other information to help you choose the best keywords possible.

The Redirector: a fast, clean plugin that lets you create your very own URL redirection service on your domain. It makes sure there are no URL slug conflicts, which is very handy.

Scribe SEO: Scribe SEO is not a cheap service by any means, but it is the ultimate tool for anyone hoping to fully optimize their content for the search engines. It helps you choose the right keywords, optimize your content, and improve your site’s link structure.

A/B Theme Testing Plugin: a pretty cool way to test multiple themes to see which one converts better on your website. Upload 2 themes to your website and use this plugin to rotate between them as visitors come to your website.

SEO Booster Pro: a search engine tracker that shows you what keywords your visitors are using to get to your website from the search engines. It can also optimize your content for the search engines (though you want to be careful with this feature).

What’s your favorite paid SEO plugin for WordPress?

In order to get started with Scribe for WordPress, you are going to need a subscription plan. This is a premium service but is worth the money considering the service you receive for your money. Scribe analyzes your content, keywords, and other important on-page factors. It even suggests other keywords that you can take advantage of in your content to give your website a better chance of ranking well on Google.

Once you install Scribe and analyze your content, you are going to be provided with a content score. This plugin will let you know how ready your content is for search engine domination. It also displays how many evaluations you have left for the rest of your month (more expensive plans offer you a whole lot more evaluations).

Scribe for SEO is more than just a simple content analyzer plugin. It can show you how well you have integrated your top keywords into your content (information such as keyword prominence and density are very helpful). While it does not do things you can’t do by yourself, Scribe can save you a lot of time, especially if you write a lot. It can keep track of your keywords and provide you with the suggestions to maximize your SEO opportunity with your content. It may not be a cheap plugin by any means. The good news is you can try it for free to see if it’s right for your blog. It’s available for Joomla and Drupal too. What more can you ask? Maybe a one-time fee plan?

There are plenty of lazy SEOs that complain about having to come up with fresh content all the time. Let’s face it. In a perfect world, you’d do what you want to do and Google will find your content and rank it high in the SERPs. In reality, you will have to come up with new ways to expand your target keyword list and produce content relevant to your new keywords. Thanks to PostRank, you’ll never be out of ideas.

There are multiple ways you can go about finding new ideas for your articles with PostRank. For starters, you can just keep track of the hot content in those popular categories. Let’s say you are interested in topic x. All you have to do to track it is by using the following URL:

postrank.com/topic/x

That will give you a list of top websites about your topic of choosing. You can also see which sites have moved and down in the rankings recently. Best of all, you can analyze top posts per site to find out what is working for your competitors.

The temptation is always there for SEOs to use the same old content formula to optimize their sites for the search engines. That could still work but the times are changing. Articles and posts that actually provide a unique value to your readers will be winners in the long run.

If you are planning a new SEO project or just want to come up with new ideas for your existing campaigns, Primal can give you some ideas. Under “Think” page, you can enter a group of keywords and let the tool dig up related keywords for you.

The “Search” page does not need any explanation. It displays a set of pages relevant to your specific keyword. The tag cloud at the top of it can help you figure out what areas you need to focus on. Once you are done with your keyword research, you can just download your lists for further clean up.

Primal is not the only tool you’ll need to do some decent keyword research, but it’s a pretty fun tool to use and can provide some value to you if you are stuck. It’s just a tool though. What you get out of it is up to you.

This plugin is pretty easy to deploy. Just add it to your WordPress site, define what you want it to display as your headline, and you are all set. It keeps track of pages that people have visited and links to them from their referring locations. This is significant for two reasons. It not only automates the internal link building process for you, but it also help your visitors find out what other stories they may need to visit on your WordPress website.

You can do a lot of cool things with this plugin. You can choose to display thumbnails next to each post (those can be generated automatically too!  The number of stories displayed per each page can be modified too. You can always give you top stories a better of being linked to by using this plugin with one of those popular posts plugins for WordPress. If you are creative enough, you can get Where did they go from here? plugin to the right pages on your website without you having to do much. It’s worth trying, especially on larger websites.