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You’d like to improve the link popularity of your site. Or maybe to keep track on the latest web buzz. It would be nice to inform your readers about it the minute the news occured. Or maybe you just want to monitor the activities of your users and be able to find the best topics they might be interested in – quickly and efficiently. In these cases tracking tools can be extremely useful and improve your search enormously.

We’ve taken a look around and listed the best buzz-monitoring, observing and tracking tools a web-developer might be willing to use analyzing and monitoring his/her recent web-projects. Links checked: May/09 2008

Buzz-Monitoring

• Social networks often reveal extremely useful information about the public opinion of your web-site.The more popular a network, the more informative are the resuls – an overview of the most popular social bookmarks managers can be found here and here.
• Google Alert and Yahoo Alert inform regularly about the new incoming links and the appearance of a given term online.
• Monitor This: with MonitorThis you can subscribe to 22 different search engine feeds at the same time. A script generates an OPML-file, which can be imported in a favourite RSS-Feeder (i.e. Sage or Wizz RSS News Reader).
• Nielsen Buzzmetrics’ BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs and presents detailed live-data about the current development in the blogosphere. BlogPulse Trends delivers the information about latest trends and can be useful for finding interesting subjects for your next blog posts, which will generate buzz around the web. And with Conversation Tracker you can observe, who when and what wrote something about a subject or a web-page.
• Google Rankings lets you check the position of your web-site in Google and monitor your ranking free of charge. In a long run, if you store the information over few months, you can determine some tendencies and developments which are typical for your blog. The script uses the Google Web API to find domain names within the list Google.com shows for a given search. Therefore you’ll need a Google API Key to use the service.
• Opinmind is a search engine of opinions in Web. If you’d like to find different perspectives on a given subjects – i.e. a new product, issue or web-page – you’ll find it here. Positive and negative feedback are shown separately. Find opinions on topics that interest you, tracking 50M+ opinions from 5.5M+ bloggers.
• Sitening SERP Tracker is a free tool, with which you can measure and analyze the popularity of a page over a long period of time. You can also subscribe to daily results via RSS.
• Technorati is the biggest blog search engine, which indexes over 60 millions blogs. Daily. If someone sometimes somewhere mentions your web-site, it will be tracked by Technorati. Watchlists enables you to receive the relevant information via RSS in case someone mentions you in the Blogosphere.
• Further blog search engines such as Seekport, Icerocket, PubSub, Sphere or Talkdigger implemented further extended functionality in their search, however, the results are usually quite similar to Technorati results.

Buzz-Observing – Measure, observe and analyse the Link Popularity

In order to analyze the popularity of a page regularly, you have to have some statistical data and values, you can measure your success at. The following services rate web-pages and inform you about the potential problems you have or might have in the future.

• EgoSurf calculates the popularity value of your web-site, based on the quality and quantity of results provided by Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Delicious and Technorati. Using EgoWatch you can track the changes of your ego in the Web.
• Linkvendor Domain Popularity Check provides a detailed analysis of the site popularity. Among other functions you’ll find out that Pagerank of Backlinks and the so-called Link Strength.
• SEO MOZ Page Strength rates a web-page, based on its Link popularity in the Web. The Relative Importance/Visibility of a Webpage, the Potential Strength/Ability of a Page to Rank in the Search Engines and Data on Popularity, Links & Mentions of the Page Across the Web is provided.
• PageRank Checker is a SEO targeted tool allows you to check the Google PageRank values of multiple URLs at once. A time-saver for keeping tabs on you and your competitors’ PR values.
• Silktide Sitescore is a free tool which rates how well designed, popular and accessible your website is. Scores are broken down into 5 categories: Marketing, Design, Accessibility, Experience, User.
• Socialmeter calculates the site popularity in social networks.
• URL Trends allows webmasters to view their linking trends for eight different search engines (Google, Alexa, Yahoo!, MSN, AllTheWeb, Alta Vista, Teoma and IceRocket), as well as the PageRank and Alexa Rank. A recent addition also allows our users to view the number of end-users of a website that bookmarked the website using Furl or Del.icio.us.
• SEO Analyzer analyzes web-pages, rates them and informs you how you can change the page to avoid accessibility and usability problems.

Never miss a comment!

• Commentful aggregates information from Digg, Flickr, Blogger, Wordpress and further blog-services, searches through blogs, collects comments, trackbacks and follow-ups and presents them in a brief overview. With “Commentful Blinker” Firefox Extension you’ll be notified automatically if new comments have appeared.
• CoComment and co.mments.com allow you to subscribe to an RSS-feed which will provide you with new comments on your favourite pages or hot topics in the Blogosphere.

Improve Link Popularity

If you haven’t succeeded to get linked on the front page of Digg, Slashdot or Del.icio.us, maybe it’s a good time to consider a passive strategy. If you’ve found a popular article on the topic which is similar to the main topic of your page, just leave a comment to a relevant article on your page. However, this requires you to be able to keep track on the developments and buzz in the Web. Let’s find out how.

• Keo Tag: the latest trends are presented in a brief overview on a single page. Just enter a term you’re interested in and both services will return the most popular articles and blog posts, which are tagged with the term and generate Web-Buzz.
• Google Trends helps to find the current trends and developments and keep track on them.
• Popurls is an established aggregator of popular articles in the Web.

More Links? Here you go!

• Even a demanding blogger will be overwhelmed with this round-up of resources related to Blogging, Buzz-Monitoring, Observing and Tracking.
• Another overview of important tools and services which monitor the current trends in the Web.
• In his article 10 Things You Should Be Monitoring Cameron Olthuis describes 10 things that you absolutely need to be monitoring and explains how you find an optimal way to improve the link popularity of your web-site.