This tool should be used by every Online Marketer and SEO specialist. It helped me in SEO and my online work even more than Triberr helped me in my adventure with social networks.

Why?

Because with Market Samurai you can:

1)      Find Keywords for Your Blog or Website

2)      Analyze Keywords

3)      Find Perfect Domain Name for Your Site

4)      Analyze Your Competition

5)      Monitor Positions of Your keywords

6)      Estimate Cost of Your AdWords Campaign

7)      Find Affiliate Programs for Your Niche

Let’s find out some more details about each feature.

1. Find Keywords for Your Blog or Website

First of all – you should create a new project. It’s very simple – type your main keyword, title of your project, file name and language, click “Create” and it’s done.

Now you should go to “Keyword research” area. For best results you should connect Market Samurai with your Google AdWords account. Specify needed length of phrases, type some keywords into “Add Keywords” area, click “Add keywords” button and Generate Keywords.

In the example below MS generated 737 keywords for me.

Now go to the next step:

2. Analyze Keywords

After generating keywords you should analyze them. It’s also very simple

In keyword research area you should mark (tick) interesting fields (organic, adwords, competition, commerciality), change match type and period, and click analyze Keywords.

I choose “exact” match type and period “monthly”. I also mark all of the fields…

Of course you can choose other setting – it depends on you.

Keyword analysis will take some time (2-10 minutes), so you can prepare a coffee…

Most important data for me are:

• amount of searches for the keyword
• SEOC (SEO competition) – total number of pages that mention a specific keyword term
• SEOTC (SEO Title competition) – total number of pages that mention a specific keyword term in title
• SEOUC (SEO URL competition) – total number of pages that mention a specific keyword term in URL

And of course you can order your keywords as you want.

If you are interested in this topic you can also read:

How to Find Keywords for Your Blog or Website

3. Find Perfect Domain Name for Your Site

Now it’s time to find proper domain name for your site. In “Domains” tab you should type some of your keywords.

Now you should choose needed TLDs (for this moment you can choose from: .com, .org, .net , .ca , .co.uk , .de , .eu , .in, .us, .org.uk , .me , .mobi , .tv , .info , .cc , .nu , .ws , .com.au, .co.nz, .me.uk, .biz)

You should also set prefixes and/or suffixes (it’s very important!)

I find a lot of my domains (org, net, biz and com) with that tool. For example this blog (NoPassiveIncome.com) and ProjectManagementBay.com (it’s not ready yet ).

At this moment you can search only for new domain names.

4. Analyze Your Competition

Now you can check how strong your competition is. For chosen keyword (in SEO Competition button area) you can find top 10 pages (you can add your own URL too – chose “Add custom URL”).

For “Top Ten” results you can see:

• Page url
• Domain age
• Page Rank
• Index Count (how many pages is indexed from the whole domain)
• Amount of unique domains referring to the page
• Amount of unique domains referring to the whole domain
• Amount of backlinks referring to the whole domain
• Amount of backlinks referring to the page
• Amount of backlinks from .edu/.gov domains
• Some onpage details (for example if keyword is in title, in url, in description, in header Tag)

Green color is good for you, red is not…

If you want to see some more details about specific page, you should click on the arrow near the URL. Here you can check for example:

• Alexa details
• Google trends
• Whois information
• ACRank Analysis (ACRank is similar to Page Rank)
• Anchor Text Analysis

The last 2 options are the most important here (because they show backlinks in details) and are from Majestic SEO (you don’t need to pay for it additionally!).

5. Monitor Positions of Your Keywords

With Market Samurai you can monitor for free 10 of your keywords (White belt plan). If you want to monitor more keywords, you must pay for it additionally.  I started to monitor with this tool some of my phrases recently, and it seems that it works properly.

6. Estimate Cost of Your AdWords Campaign

In “Keyword Research” area you can find estimation, how much you will pay (as an Adwords advertiser) if your keyword will be on the #1 of SERPs. I don’t focus on it, but for some marketers it can be an additional feature.

7. Find Affiliate Programs for Your Niche

Honestly I’m not using it. But if you want, you can find products in ClickBank, Amazon, Commision Junction and PayDotCom affiliate programs.

Example for “make money” keyword for Amazon.com

If you still don’t know, how to use this tool, below this link you can find more Market Samurai tutorials.

Has This Tool Only Advantages?

No. Market Samurai has one disadvantage – it’s not very fast tool. For me it works very well even with that speed. But if you want very fast tool – please try to find something else for you.

How Much Market Samurai Costs?

It’s not cheap tool. Normally it costs 149$. But using this link, you can download your free trial version and test it for 12 days since registration. There is no difference between free trial and paid version – so you can try each function.

Can I Get This Tool Cheaper?

Yes, you can. You should only download your free version of Market Samurai. After registration you will get an email with registration details. In this email there will be your unique link to download your free version, registration key and link to great offer – you can get Market Samurai for only 97$. But remember – since registration you have only 7 days for getting your Market Samurai for this promotional price of 97$ (instead of 149$ – it’s 35% discount).

Bonus

When I started using it at the end of 2010, I was able to install it on 2 computers at the same time. Yesterday I contacted with Market Samurai support – now you can install it (with one license!) on 5 computers which is enough even for a small business!

And what about you? What tool are you using for your online marketing? Do you use Market Samurai?

If not, you can try it for free here (my affiliate link). If yes, please share your experience with us in comments below.

You are a Blogger (or site owner, marketing specialist or SEO specialist) and you need traffic on your site. But how you can do it? Are there any tips and tricks? Can you use enterprise SEO services to boost your organic rankings and improve your business? Or maybe you should use tools, SEO tools, for getting tons of traffic?

Below I’ll describe you five SEO tools, which I use. Some of them are totally free, and some of them are really expensive. You must choose, what is best for you.

1. Alexa

Alexa is an online tool for basic website analytics. It’s based on huge database with relevant information and statistics about webpages.

Thanks to Alexa, you can very fast find out general traffic stats, what is an audience of the website (male/female, age, education, etc.), major sites, which are linking to your site.

The interesting thing is here a short overview, on top queries from search engines.

For example for Bloggers.com, most important three keywords are:

• Bloggers
• Top technology blogs in Nigeria
• Bloggers.com

Beside this, Alexa will show you Top 500 sites (worldwide, grouped by country or grouped by category).

Last interesting feature from Alexa is Alexa Toolbar, which can help you learn some statistics, related links and other things about browsed pages. It’s a plugin for your browser.

2. Google Keyword Tool

Google Keyword Tool is a totally free tool for finding keywords prepared by Google.

You can find keywords based on one or more words (or phrases). Important thing is to mark tick on Exact match, to find only specific keyword. Google Keyword tool doesn’t have a lot of options, but is simple – so I like it

Here you can read my article How to find best keywords for your blog or website  using Google Keyword Tool or Market Samurai (the next tool, I’ll describe for you)

3. Market Samurai

Market Samurai is another tool, for finding best keywords for your site and analyze your competition

It let you:

• Find best keywords for your sites
• Analyze your competition on specific keywords (it analyzes most important factors for pages, which are in top #10 in SERPs, of course for your keyword(s))
• Find proper domain name for you
• Find content among Wikipedia, Ezine Articles, Google News, etc
• Help you find affiliates programs for you (Amazon, ClickBank, Commision Junction)

There is a lot more functions of this great tool, but personally I use it mainly for analyzing my competition, research keywords for me, and find appropriate domains (for example I find my domain nopassiveincome.com thanks to Market Samurai ).

Market Samurai isn’t free tool. Paid version cost normally 149$ (it’s not cheap), but it is worth each cent I spent on it.

Here you can download free trial (12 days trial with some limitation). If you buy it during five days since downloading, you will get your Market Samurai only for 97$

4. SEMRush

SEMRush is a tool for analyzing organic keywords, competitors in organic search, AdWords keywords and a lot more. You can check it for ten Google databases (for instance for US, UK, DE, IT) and for Bing

For example, using free report for the website bloggers.com, we can get following results:

You can read (from the first table and first line), that most important keyword for organic search is bloggers. Bloggers.com is on 2nd position in SEPRs and this keyword generate 14,36% of organic traffic.

From second table (ads keywords) we find out, that bloggers.com doesn’t pay for ads.

And the last table (on the screen) show us, that major competitors for Bloggers.com are (in  organic search):

Youtube.com (1718 common keywords)

Zimbio.com (1088 common keywords) and

Facebook.com (987 common keywords)

Of course SEMRush offers a lot of others helpful reports – information about potential ads/traffic buyers or sellers, estimated traffic to specified site or backlinks report.

Using free version, you can generate only five reports a day, what’s much to less, even for bloggers

Paid version of SEMRush cost monthly from 69.95$ (Pro recurring version) to 499$ (Enterprise version)

5. Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is a last tool, I want to describe today.

It’s a tool mainly for analyzing your (and your competitor) backlinks, top pages, etc.

With this tool, you can also check backlink history and neighbourhood of your domain.

Three days ago Majestic SEO launched two new metrics related with link profile – trust flow and citation flow. I plan to test it in the future, but now I couldn’t tell you anything more about these features.

For getting some details about your site, you must login in to the website (so firstly you must sign up to it.

It’s free of charge, if you don’t need in-depth analysis and you need it only for your site. For professionals there are three paid plans: Silver, Gold and Platinum (49.99$, 149,99$ and 399,99$)

And how about you – do you use some SEO tools for making your life easier? Or maybe there are some other tools, which are valuable for mention?

Disclosure – please note, that some of the links above are affiliate links and I earn a commission, when you buy something via them.

Each blogger use a lot of sources and tools. A lot of them  are available online.

Below  is a list of Top 100 websites, which every blogger should know and use. I spent a lot of hours preparing this list, but some websites may be out of date. If you find such links, please leave a comment about it below this article.

For better navigation, I order them in such groups of links

Search engines

WP themes

Plugins for WordPress

Free blog platforms

Statistics

Hosting for blogs and websites

Advertising and affiliate systems

Photos and pictures for bloggers

Tools for keyword analysis

SEO tools and analysis

Mailing lists and autoresponders

SEO blogs

Blogs with tips & tricks about blogging

Motivation and self-help websites for bloggers

Lists of most important blogs

Reviews for bloggers

Boost visits on your blog

Outsource your work (or find a job as a freelancer)

“Knowledge” websites

Social & networking sites

Websites with other multimedia

Free time for bloggers

Top 100 websites for bloggers

Search engines:

1.       Google.com – most famous search engine in the world

2.       Bing.com – 2^nd search engine for English language market

3.       Search.com – aggregate in one place search results from best engines

4.       Baidu.com – 1^st search engine for China language

5.       Yandex.ru – the largest search engine in Russia

Wp themes

Some free WordPress Themes:

6.       WPdaddy themes – a lot of free WP themes (but be careful – some of them are not free!)

7.       Free WordPress  Themes 4 U (if you need to remove sponsored ads, you need to pay 19.95$ to get the key)

8.       TopWPThemes  – another website with some themes for WP

And some paid WP themes:

9.       Theme Junkie – premium WordPress themes with one-time fee starting at 29.95$ (but for 39.95$ you will get allWP Junkie themes and life time support). This blog is based on one of WP Junkie themes – Smart Blog theme

10.   Thesis WP Themes – pricing starts at 87$ for one website

Plugins for WordPress:

11.   WordPress Plugins – official WordPress.org site with thousands plugins

12.   WordPress Plugins from yoast.com – some useful plugins made by Joost de Valk, most of them are free

13.   WPMU DEV – WordPress plugins by WPMUdev team

Free blog platforms:

14.   Blogger.com – Google’s platform for bloggers, integrated with Google Accounts

15.   WordPress.com – it’s free and open source platform for bloggers.

16.   Xanga.com – network of blogging and social networking communities

17.   Tumblr. – you can share here everything you want – text, photos, videos, links, etc.

18.   Moveble Type – another social publishing platform

Statistics:

19.   Google Analytics – free statistics with huge amount of reports and tracking tools.

20.   Piwik – open source web analytics tool. It is really good tool, but needs installation on own web server

21.   AWStats – free tool for advanced web statistics analysis

22.   StatCounter –Statistics tool for your website with real-time analysis of the visitors.  It’s free for 250k monthly pageload. Above it, it’s paid monthly

23.   Site meter – this counter and statistics tracker has, similarly to StatCounter, 2 options. SiteMeter Basic is for free, and Sitemeter Premium is starting at 6.95$

Hosting for blogs and websites:

24.   Hostgator – this blog is hosted by Hostgator – it’s not free hosting (prices started at about 4$ a month) but it’s stable and easy to use

25.   BlueHost– another hosting recommended by some bloggers

26.   OVH – hosting for sites in Europe

27.   IQ.pl – hosting not only for Polish sites

28.   GoDaddy.com – another hosting for your website

Advertising and affiliate systems:

29.   Google AdSense is most famous advertise program(based on contextual advertisements), both for small and for very big portals. Google equivalent for ads publishers is Google AdWords

30.   Zanox.com – this network offers publishers and advertisers a lot of affiliates program. It’s European market leader in this area.

31.   Clickbank – it’s online program for buying and selling digital or information products. It’s one of the biggest affiliate’s network system

32.   Tradedoubler – this is also European program for affiliate marketing, with a lot of websites and ads publishers

33.   Chitika –  it’s non-contextual  online-ads service, which may be used simultaneously with Google AdSense ads

Photos and pictures for bloggers:

34.   Fotolia.com – one of the best stock with royalty free photos, images, videos and vectors

35.   Istockphoto.com – another website with a lot of royalty free images and photos. You can also get discounts on istockphoto with a promo code.

36.   Photoxpress.com – some photos and images on this website are free of charge

37.   Flickr.com – photo sharing and image hosting website

38.   Shutterstock.com – another stock with royalty-free photos, illustrations and vectors

Tools for keyword analysis

39.   Google keyword tool – It’s very popular keyword tool, feeded with data by Google. It’s not perfect, but it’s free of charge!

40.   Market Samurai – this keyword analysis tool has a lot of useful  functions  – keyword research, seo competition, finding domains, etc. This tool is used by more than 200 000 users (including me). It’s paid tool (price is not low – it’s one time fee of 149$), but there is 12 day trial – you can download it for free here! If you buy it in 5 days since downloading, you will paid only 97$ for it

41.   Keyword Research Suite from WordStream – it’s free only in very limited area, paid plans starts at 329$ a year

42.   Traffic Travis – another tool for keyword research. It has both free (limited for 5 projects) and paid (only 97$) versions

43.   Keyword Elite – it’s keyword Research tool by Brad Callen. It also cost 97$

SEO tools and analysis:

44.   Majesticseo.com – site explorer for your backlinks, neighbourhood checker and more. It’s better than Yahoo Site Explorer was!

45.   Alexa.com – it provides a lot of information about websites, their audience, traffic and keywords. Completely free and without registration

46.   Whois.Net – tool which help you reveal who is behind each domain

47.   WayBack Machine – it’s “time machine” for websites. If you want to see, how did web page look like in the past, you must use this time machine

48.   CleverStat – on this site you can find a lot of useful SEO tools for bloggers and website owners. Some of them are free (for example PaRaMeter, which allows you to check Google PageRank), some aren’t…

Mailing lists and autoresponders:

49.   AWEBER – email marketing software (used also by me) with prices started at 19$ a month (you can try it for 1$ for first month)

50.   Constant Contact – email, event and social marketing solution for you with 60 days trial

51.   Get Response – email marketing platform with powerful autoresponder with few pricing plans

52.   iContact – another autoresponder with additional features

53.   MailChimp – free email marketing service. It’s totally free for 12k emails per month (or for 2000 subscribers)

SEO blogs:

54.   Matt Cuts blog – blog of Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web spam team

55.   SEOmoz blog– most famous blog (and not only blog) about SEO

56.   Search Engine Land – news, tips & tricks about Google, Bing, search engine marketing and search engine optimization

57.   Search Engine Watch – very helpful site about SEM, SEO, PPC and Paid Search advertising

58.   SEO Book Blog – another valuable blog about SEO

Blogs with tips & tricks about blogging:

59.   Smartpassiveincome.com – very smart blog about blogging and with very detailed income  reports, owned by Pat Flynn

60.   Johnchow.com – very interesting blog with one of the best free ebook: The Ultimate Blog Profit Model

61.   ProBlogger.Net – most famous blog about making money online directed by (maybe even more famous ) Darren Rowse

62.   Dailyblogtips.com – blog about tips & tricks for bloggers. By Daniel Scocco.

63.   Entrepreneurs-Journey.com – Yaro Starak gives here a lot of advises and tips for internet entrepreneurs

Motivation and self-help websites for bloggers:

It’s very hard to describe all the staff, which is on each of the site. But I strongly recommend to visit them at least one time, to see what’s inside

64.   PsychologyToday.com – a lot of articles, not only about motivation, but also about creativity, setting and achieving goals and lot more

65.   Brian Tracy blog – official blog of Brian Tracy, motivational and self-help specialist

66.   StephenCovey.com – website of Stephen Covey, author of bestseller: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Unfortunately his blog isn’t updated since some time, but despite this, there is a lot of motivational stuff  on this website

67.   FourHourWorkWeek.com – blog and site of famous author Tim Ferriss

68.   StevePavlina.com – website of Steve Pavlina, blogger about personal development. Another great website!

Lists of most important blogs:

69.   Technorati.com – list of top 100 blogs

70.   Bloggers.com – this website is dedicated for bloggers, categorizes blogs and bloggers

71.   List of top blogs by Wikipedia – no comments

72.   Top ten lists of blogs – top ten list of blogs by blogs.com

73.   Top blogging news with Alltop– news from most popular blogs and more…

Reviews for bloggers:

Unfortunately I didn’t use any of them, so there are only links to most popular reviews sites. If you have some experience with this type of sites, please share your knowledge and leave a comment

74.   Reviewme.com

75.   PayPerPost.com

76.   PostGenius.com

77.   SponsoredReviews.com

78.   SharedReviews.com

Boost visits on your blog:

79.   Digg.com – a social news site. Some time ago it was more popular than Facebook

80.   StumbleUpon.com – recommend your website to more than 20 millions of StumbleUpon users

81.   Reddit.com – social website, where you can submit your content and vote for another

82.   Delicious.com –(in the past – del.icio.us) – you can find here a lot of cool sites and shares your own links with others

83.   4chan – this site mostly concerns on sharing images

Outsource your work (or find a job as a freelancer):

84.   Elance.com – marketplace for freelancers and people (or company) which want outsource their work

85.   Guru.com – you can outsource your projects here or find freelancers for hire

86.   oDesk.com – another website, where you can find job as freelancer or hire somebody to your projects

“Knowledge” websites:

87.   Wikipedia – free online encyclopedia with more than 20 million articles

88.   Ask.com –most popular question-answering service

Social & networking sites:

89.   Facebook – most famous social site in the world. You must be in

90.   Twitter – share short messages with others. Follow friends, experts and celebrities

91.   LinkedIn – it’s world’s most popular professional  and business-related network.

92.   Google+ – another network, some people like it, some not

Websites with other multimedia:

93.   YouTube – free video sharing platform owned by Google

94.   Vimeo – another site, where you can find, view, download and upload  videos

95.   Live365.com – radio online with a lot of stations

Free time for bloggers:

96.   Dilbert – you don’t know, who Dilbert is?

97.   Demotivational Posters – you must see it!

98.   Break.com – website with funny videos and pictures

99.   Jokes.com – jokes for almost everyone

100.   Garfield – and everything is clear…

Disclosure – please note, that some of the links above are affiliate links and I earn a commission, when you buy something via them.