Organic search always fascinates web marketers and online entrepreneurs. Although large chunk of web traffic comes from Google search, we cannot ignore search patterns of another major search engine Yahoo!. Recently, Yahoo has started an interesting service Yahoo! Clues, that gives you very helpful insights about search trends of US traffic.
Yahoo! Clues provides you helpful charts to get fair idea about search data for a particular keyword. You can freely use long tail keywords as well as highly competitive keywords. The different graphs included are search graph over time, graph showing demographic data, search pattern among different income groups and last but not the least - search locations across north American continent.
You can also compare two related keywords simultaneously through this awesome tool.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Yahoo Clues - Great Tool To Find Yahoo Search Trends
Friday, April 15, 2011
15 Best Social Media Applications For Android Smartphones
If you are a social media enthusiast using android smartphone, this list is made for you. I've compiled some of the best social media apps used by millions of android users across the world. All of them are free and does not contain any type of malware. Make sure your android device runs ver 1.5 & above to get the best out of these applications. I'm sure you already run some of these applications, but rest are worth giving a try.
Facebook for Android - Almost every netizen is on facebook, right? Stay in touch with your facebook friends, upload photos, check-in places, leave comments and follow your news feed through a clean light interface.
Twitter - If you're active on twitter, this app is a must for you. Packed with attractive interface, update your timeline with all core twitter functions to grow your network with ease.
LinkedIn - This is one of my favorite applications. If you're an active job-seeker, freelancer or runs an hiring agency, install this excellent application to connect with the largest professionals network.
Seesmic (Facebook, Twitter) - It's one of the popular social media dashboards used by large number of people. Seesmic for android is know for its clean interface. You can connect with facebook and twitter through this awesome app.
Foursquare - If you actively like to keep updated your whereabouts, install this popular check-in application. Foursquare is known to for its large user-base and useful check-in and tip leaving options.
TweetDeck (Twitter, Facebook) - Who doesn't know Tweetdeck, the most popular social media dashboard used by millions of users. I'm impressed by the clean interface this application provides to its users. Tweetdeck integrates all the advanced options for facebook and twitter and is highly recommended for professional users.
Tumblr - If you're active on Tumblr, this android app lets you manage your blog effectively with minimum fuss. Post new blogs, edit old posts, upload photos and manage comments. You can also edit drafts and schedule your posts through this application.
HootSuite - Yet another popular social media application that provides gorgeous interface to its users. Hootsuite is well-known for its powerful social analytics integration and support for multiple social networks. I highly recommend installing this application, if your're active on facebook and twitter.
Picasa Tool Pro - My friend use this application regularly and finds it very handy to manage his Google Picasa Web Album. Apart from usual account management, you can run keyword based photo search, download your favorite albums and can share selective albums or pics with your friends.
WordPress - It's an official android app for the world's most popular blogging platform. You can manage comments, write/edit posts and can view stats with this handy application. Perfect app for hobbyists as well as for professionals.
Blogger - I started blogging on blogger platform and so do millions of newbies. Blogger app lets you manage your blogger blog with ease. It has a familiar color scheme matching web interface and support all day-to-day basic operations to run a typical blogger blog.
Orkut - If you live in Brazil or India, you must be familiar with this popular social networking service. Orkut app lets you stay in touch with your friends, share comments and upload pics in your albums with a click. Interface is clean, fast and attractive.
Google Buzz widget - I would recommend this application too. Post buzz updates, share your photos publicly or privately and follow buzz steams of your choice. You can also update your location through this excellent application.
URLy - the URL sharer - It's the best multi-purpose url shortener supporting large number of social media services. This handy app supports large number of url shortening services and lets you post to popular social media services with ease. I highly recommend installing this application.
Posterous - Now you can easily manage your posterous blog through this application. Post combination of photos, videos and text. Share your content privately with ease through this app. All multimedia content uploaded through this app is automatically optimized for mobiles.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
How To Manage Your Cloud Storage Through Your Desktop
Since cloud computing has gained pace, cloud storage has taken a prominent place in online storage market. Today dozens of online storage services are using cloud storage technology, with some of them even providing API to access their cloud. Although you can access these services through regular web interface, there are other convenient methods that seamlessly integrate your cloud storage with your desktop file system.
One such system is Gladinet Cloud Desktop that brings dozens of popular cloud storage services right to your desktop. There are two versions - free and pro. I've found free version has enough features for casual users and works very well on all popular windows operating systems.
Gladinet uses the API provided by popular cloud storage services and integrate your account as virtual network drive on your system. This way you can access your online storage like a normal local hard drive through regular windows explorer. Gladinet uses strong encryption to protect all your login credentials to prevent any abuse.
You can either start it manually or can set it to automatically start with boot. I prefer the latter, as it automatically connects and map all cloud services as virtual drives ready for use. Although it can integrate over a dozen cloud storage services, I use it for 3 popular services.
If you want incremental backups, file versioning and want to enable auto-synchronization, you must upgrade to pro version to activate all these premium features. But most of the normal users can do well with the free version. The interface is clean and user-friendly such that even technically challenged users can map their storage accounts with ease. So go ahead and grab this amazing free tool to bring your cloud storage right on your desktop.
Monday, April 11, 2011
10 Best Online Image Optimizers
Whether you're a hobby photographer, web designer or a casual web surfer, images form an integral part of browsing experience. There are billions of images hosted on internet with varying sizes and quality. Imagine if all of them are web optimized how much bandwidth will be saved per year. Generally, images are compressed with various standard algorithms to reduce their size.
Depending on the percentage of reduction in size, the quality of an image may deteriorate. All standard image editing software support some kind of image compression options.
Dynamic Drive Image Optimizer - I use it regularly to optimize images for blog posts. You can save target file in JPG, GIF and PNG format. The good thing is that it automatically generates from highest quality to lowest quality indicating the percentage of reduction in size.
Image Optimizer - This is yet another fairly popular image optimizer. Simply, upload the image, select the size and quality you want and press the button.
NetMechanic GIFBot - If you to receive surprises via email, this image optimizer will be your favorite. Upload the image with your email address and it will deliver the optimized image right in your inbox.
Web Resizer - It is one of my favorites. Web resizer provides ample options to tweak and adjust the settings before you generate the optimized version. Conversion is fast and accurate.
Yahoo! Smush.it - It's a fairly simple image optimizer that shows the summary of optimization work after compressing the image. You can either upload from your PC or can provide multiple urls at the same time.
Stanley Shilov – Online Image Compression - This image optimizer gives you a simple criterion for optimization (percentage of compression). The higher percentage you choose, the size will get small, but the image quality will deteriorate drastically.
iResize - This excellent image optimization tool gives you an option to rotate images, set width and height and lets you adjust pixel and file size before the optimization process starts. I highly recommend this image optimizer.
Pic Resize - If you're looking for a quick image-resizing tool, this is your best bet. It's fast and quick and gives you various options to crop, optimize and resize the target image.
Shrink Pictures - Now this is even better. Besides image resizing, you can also adjust various optimization settings to get what you're looking for. This excellent service also lets you apply various special effects to the compressed image.
PunyPNG - This image opitimization tool is used by famous websites like Wikipedia. The interface is clean and quickly compresses all popular image formats. There's a limit of max file size of 150 kb/image.
Monday, April 4, 2011
How To Archive Your Tweets Into An eBook
We use various twitter clients to update our tweet stream, retweet through various tweet buttons and display latest tweets on our blogs and websites through different widgets and plugins. There are several other tools that lets you leverage twitter lists and provide insightful twitter analytics. But, have you ever thought about preserving your tweets? There's a free tool called TweetBook that allows you to archive your tweets in an eBook format.
I've tested this excellent tool with an account with 6000 tweets, which were successfully converted into an ebook. I'm sure that must be a limitation on the number of tweets (due to twitter API limits) that can be archived. The tool itself gives a friendly message about restarting the process if the archiving process is not completed in 10 minutes. I'd love to see this application get tested with large number of tweets. If you have an account with over 20,000 tweets, please do share the results with us.
