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All bloggers have a number of websites that they visit every single day. Aside from the obvious ones (like email and Twitter), your favorites might be anything from your blog’s publishing calendar, to your online to-do list, to all your favorite social media button generators.

Wouldn’t it be great if all of those helpful resources were just a click away?

That’s exactly what bookmarks are for. In your web browser, bookmarks are links to specific websites that show up as buttons at the top of your web browser — making it easy to visit your favorite websites.

How to bookmark websites will depend on the browser you’re using. But trust me, it’s easy. Here are links to instructions for how to add a bookmark for four popular web browsers:

Chrome
Safari
Firefox
Internet Explorer

Now, let’s get bookmarking. What are some of the best websites that all bloggers should add to their bookmark bar? Check out 30 of the HubSpot blogging team’s favorites below. (And be sure to share your own favorites in the comment section.)

30 Websites Every Blogger Should Bookmark
For Keeping Organized
1) Publishing Calendar

Figuring out when you should publish which blog posts is time-consuming enough, right? Bookmark your publishing calendar so it’s only a click away at any given time. You can use it to keep your topics and authors organized, track keyword and call-to-action usage, and make sure all your blog posts are written on time.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can bookmark your HubSpot Calendar App.
If you’re not a HubSpot customer, then you can create a publishing calendar using Google Calendar and bookmark that.

(Are you also responsible for running your company’s social media accounts? Then you might want to bookmark social media publishing calendar tools as well.)

2) Trello

Trello is a really simple collaboration platform you can use to brainstorm and organize your blog post and project ideas. Bookmark it so you can easily add new blog post ideas as you think of them, manage your own post-writing to-do list, and see what the rest of your team is working on. You can also use it to build an editorial and social media publishing calendar, prioritize different tasks, and organize notes.

3) Evernote

While you can install Evernote as an app on your computer and any device, you may also want to make the website a bookmark on your web browser. Even more specifically, you can make notes within your Evernote into separate bookmarks: one for your to-do list, one where you store useful snippets of HTML, one where you store inspiring articles or ebooks, and so on.

4) Waterfall Graphs

We use waterfall graphs to keep track of daily progress on our traffic and leads goals on the blog. If you’re a HubSpot customer, your marketing software has a built-in waterfall chart template that will generate these graphs for you — so you might want to bookmark that page in HubSpot. If you’re not a HubSpot customer, you can create a waterfall graph yourself in Google Spreadsheets and bookmark that.

For Data Analysis
5) Percent Change Calculator

I can’t even begin to tell you how useful this little calculator is when looking for and analyzing data. Ever want to know the percentage change of two values without having to remember the formula? Simply enter the two values into this calculator, and it’ll spit out the percentage change.

6) Atlas (by Quartz)

Atlas is Quartz’s slickly-designed command center for all its charts. There are all kinds of cool, useful data in there — everything from Prada’s share price over time to the highest CEO-to-worker pay ratios in the U.S. You can download, embed, or grab the data. It’s open source so you can create your own versions, too. One of the best ways to build credibility on your blog is to back up your claims with data and evidence, so bookmark resources like Atlas so you can easily search for and grab the data and charts you’re looking for.

7) Comprehensive List of Marketing Statistics

Whether you’re a blogger who writes about about marketing, or you just need statistics to back up your strategy in a team presentation, it’s tricky to find the original source of data within the rabbit hole of the internet. We’ve put together a massive list of marketing statistics that are up-to-date and categorized for easy reference.

For Blog Ideation
8) Quora

Quora’s question-and-answer platform features questions from real people in your audience — and what better way to appeal to your readers than by answering their questions? Quora also offers an upvoting feature that lets you see how many other users are interested in the answer to a question, which can help you prioritize your response blog posts.

9) Portent’s Content Idea Generator

When you drop a topic into this neat little tool’s search bar, it proposes eye-catching, humorous title and topic ideas for you to test out. It also provides reasoning for the proposed titles, and you can make it spit out a new title idea if you’re unsatisfied. It might not produce the perfect title for your blog post, but it will get your creative juices flowing if you’re wondering what format or style in which to write.

10) HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator

Our handy free tool produces a week’s worth of blog post title ideas when you submit three nouns or keywords you’re trying to write about. The tool is particularly helpful because you can generate ideas about specific angles by entering several search terms at once. I submitted “blogging,” “tools,” and “marketing,” and I got back these five interesting title proposals:

For Writing
11) Style Guide

When you’re blogging, posting on social media, and creating other types of marketing content regularly, it’s important to have a written style guide to ensure your writing style is consistent across different marketing channels. But it can take a long time to learn all the nuances of your brand’s style guide, so have it bookmarked for easy reference while you’re writing and editing. (And if you don’t have a style guide yet, learn how to create one here.)

12) Keyword Tools

Keyword research comes in handy when you’re brainstorming, writing, editing, and creating headlines for your blog posts. That said, keep your favorite keyword tool bookmarked. Here are a few of our favorites:

HubSpot’s Keyword Tool (30-day trial)
Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner
Google Trends

Want to learn more about how to do keyword research for SEO? Check out this blog post.

13) WordCounter

Although there’s no “right answer” for how long a blog post should be, sometimes word count can come in handy. Bookmark WordCounter so you can quickly paste in your content to see how many words you’ve written.

14) Dictation.io

Let’s face it — if you’re a full-time blogger, you might get exhausted by writing sometimes. Don’t worry though, it happens to us too. When you need to take a break, try Dictation.io, a dictation tool that translates talk to text. This is a great way to keep the tone of your blog post conversational and to switch things up if you’re getting writer’s block.

For Editing
15) Pre-Publish Checklist

It can be pretty hard to remember every little thing you should check on a blog post before hitting “Publish.” That’s why we bookmarked this pre-publish checklist, which is a complete list of everything you should do when editing and proofreading your blog content. It covers everything from ensuring all your sources are properly attributed to double checking all your links work.

16) Hemingway App

Have you ever been in the middle of writing a blog post and realized your writing felt a little … convoluted? Bookmark the free Hemingway App for moments like these. All you have to do is paste your content into it, and it’ll assess your writing and identify opportunities to make it simpler. For example, it’ll point out instances of passive voice and hard-to-read sentences.

17) Tone Analyzer

In the same vein as analyzing readability, what about analyzing tone? Sometimes, you might be reading over a blog post and feel like it comes off as a little too negative or a little too excited. Tone Analyzer is a free tool that uses linguistic analysis to detect the tone of a piece — and then offers helpful tips on how to improve and strengthen the tone.

18) HTML Elements

If you edit a lot of blog posts, chances are you’ll be working with HTML on a regular basis. I like to keep this list of HTML elements handy so I can easily make changes to HTML when needed. From there, I can use CTRL + F to jump right to the HTML element I’m looking for.

19) HTML Score

Speaking of HTML, here’s another great HTML resource to bookmark. It’s a long list of special characters that HTML 4.0 processors should support, like the copyright symbol ©, currency symbols € ¥ ¢, and so on.

Image Credit: HTML Score

20) HTML Cleaner

Source codes can sometimes seem to take on a personality of their own and pull in crazy HTML snippets — especially if you’re copying and pasting from an external file, like Google Docs. If you find yourself having that problem regularly, bookmark a tool like HTML Cleaner so you can quickly remove any superfluous code from your content.

21) & 22) Grammarly & Correctica

Before you can officially say you’re done editing a blog post, you should run it through an editing tool like Grammarly or Correctica to triple-check there are no grammatical errors. (Bonus: Grammarly even checks for plagiarism.)

23) Headline Analyzer

You’ve written and edited your blog post. At this point, the only thing standing between your cursor and the “Publish” button is an eye-catching headline. Once you have a few ideas in mind, head to your bookmark bar and open up the Headline Analyzer, a free tool that scores your headline quality and rates its ability to drive social shares, traffic, and SEO value. It also shows you how it will appear in search results.

24) StockSnap.io

Once you’ve written your blog post, a great header image captures reader attention on social media. There are numerous stock photo websites featuring free photo downloads that you’re free to distribute, and we like StockSnap.io’s trending feature that shows you popular photo downloads — so you can steer clear of them to make your blog posts more unique than other web content.

25) Compressor.io

A photo compressor can help speed up the time it takes to load your web page and make your photos smaller for easy social media sharing. Drop your stock photo of choice into Compressor.io, and it will generate a new, compressed image for you to download and use in your blog post.

For Social Media
26) ClickToTweet

Creating a tweetable link is a lot easier than learning custom code. Bookmark ClickToTweet so you can create basic tweetable links to accompany cool quotes in your blog posts at a moment’s notice. (Learn how it works here.)

27) Pinterest’s “Pin It” Button Generator

Ever seen those “Pin it” buttons that let you pin an image to your Pinterest board? We use Pinterest’s “Pin it” button widget builder all the time to create those buttons for images we post on our blog. Bookmark that page so you can create and place these buttons next to images, infographics, and other visual content on your blog. (And scroll to the bottom of this blog post for instructions on how to build your own.)

28) Social Media Button Cheat Sheet

While we recommend bookmarking some of your favorite social media button widget builders (like the “Pin it” button builder above), you may want to go ahead and bookmark this cheat sheet as a handy reference. It has links to all the widget builders for share and follow buttons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. It also includes step-by-step instructions for how to create them and implement them on your website and blog.

29) BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo shares analytics about how many social media shares a URL has received, so when you’re getting ready to publish blog posts on social media, drop links into BuzzSumo to see which types of content perform the best. You can also glean insights about posts from your competitors or previous posts from your blog to see which are most shareable and clickable. Here’s an analysis of one of our blog posts about Facebook ads:

30) Embed Code Generator

Do you create original pieces of visual content (like infographics) and post them on your blog or website? Then you’ll want to provide embed codes alongside them so it’s easy for your readers to share them on their own blogs. (Plus, it’ll help you generate some inbound links because the embedded image will automatically link back to your website.) Bookmark the embed code generator so you can easily create these HTML snippets. (And read this post for instructions on how to use it.)

Here’s an example of what an embed code looks like (taken from this blog post):

Share This Image on Your Site <p><strong>Please include attribution to Blog.HubSpot.com with this graphic.</strong><br /><br /><a href=’http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/productivity-diet’><img src=’http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/hubfs/00-Blog-Related_Images/The_Productivity_Diet-_What_to_Eat_to_Get_More_Done_in_the_Day_FINAL.jpg?t=1434740339844&width=669′ alt=’the productivity diet’ width=’540px’ border=’0′ /></a></p>

What are your favorite websites to bookmark that help you be a more efficient blogger? Share them with us in the comments.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in September 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

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Google has released its annual year in review of the top trending searches and stories of 2016.

The post Here Are Google’s Top Searches of 2016 by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

The post SearchCap: AMP images, Google Maps promoted places & machine learning appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Bing is rapidly expanding the use of expanded text ads with an update to the Bing Ads mobile app.

The post Bing Expanded Text Ads Can Now Be Edited on Mobile by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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Just as it does in the real world, physical location makes a huge difference on Google. Because people have their phone in hand at all times, they expect Google to serve them information based on where they are or where they’re headed. This means Google’s influence is not just broad, it is also deep. From […]

The post How Google has changed a consumer’s path to making a physical purchase appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Editor’s Note: This post was originally publish in April 2012 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Because SEO results are always changing, it’s easy to make mistakes along the way without even realizing what you’re doing wrong. Seeing results from your SEO strategy is a long process, and there may very well come a time when you aren’t seeing the results you want. That’s why it’s so important to perform an SEO audit every few months to make sure you’re on the right track.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, an SEO audit is something you perform to analyze your current strategy and the results coming as a direct result. If you are missing opportunities or making mistakes, an SEO audit will look at your past efforts and determine where the problem lies.

There are people and companies you can hire to perform an SEO audit for you, but there are also plenty of tools you can utilize to do it yourself. Below is a list of some of the most popular and well-rated tools to help you perform an SEO audit on your own.

Top 5 SEO Audit Tools

1.Open Site Explorer – SEO Moz seems to do it all from great blog posts to great SEO services, and one of their newest software is Open Site Explorer. This software will give you up to 10,000 links to help you tell whether or not your link building is working. It will give you information about your competitors’ internal and external links, give you on-page optimization suggestions, and will sync with Google Analytics to help you get analysis on your traffic.

2. Woorank – Woorank is an awesome resource that’s always keeping tabs on the latest and greatest of SEO news and tools. Their auditing tool allows you to run an instant website review that will reveal how your website is performing across 70+ different metrics. Over 75,000 different sites are reviewed each month on this tool, making it a trusted resource for webmasters looking to improve their site performance.

3. Ahrefs – Crawl reports, position trackers, and content exploration-oh my! This tool is a popular favorite for everything from keyword exploration to on page optimization. Ahrefs is incredibly detailed, giving users a full picture of not just how there site is performing, but where there’s room for improvement. The thoroughness of this auditing tool makes it a top choice.

4. Screaming Frog– Like Ahrefs, Screaming Frog is another one of my favorite, go-to tools. There are a handful of different versions to choose from, but in short, Screaming Frog’s SEO spider tool will crawl your site pages and analyze SEO performance. Check out the video below to learn more.

5. DeepCrawl – This SEO audit tool is no joke, and true to the name, it digs deep into the functions of your website. The in-depth reports crawl millions of pages and reveal key insights regarding load time, links, title, URL length, and more. Most impressively, DeepCrawl has a scheduling feature that allows you to keep a recorded history of all the changes you make, task employees with specific corrections, and continue running regular audits.

 

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Google has decided to experiment with user ratings for movies and TV shows. Is this a new permanent feature?

There seems to be an initial attempt from Google to introduce user ratings in its search results for movies and TV shows.

A selected sample of testers noticed a thumbs up and thumbs down sign on the special box that offers more details about a movie. This is a quick way for Google to build user ratings depending on its own audience.

Image: Techcrunch

According to the first images, the search results display a new percentage of user ratings, right next to IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. The only difference from the other two sites is the system of rating, with Google relying on like and dislike and not an actual rating as a sign of preference.

For the time being this seems to be available only in the desktop version and it isn’t clear whether there is a plan to turn this into a permanent feature.

Even if Google hasn’t revealed its plans yet, it could be an interesting addition to its database which may even lead to further plans on building users’ reviews and gather more features on its own site.

Image: androidpolice

For example, the dedicated section for each movie could rely on users’ ratings to personalise the experience for each user, or even find a great way to connect user ratings with its own Google Play.

For the time being, we are waiting to hear from Google on its thoughts for the particular testing and whether we expect to see it globally anytime soon. Should we vote on that, too?

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We’re excited to introduce the new Google Wallet web experience (wallet.google.com) just in time for the holidays. Available across all browsers, the updated Wallet website has a brand new look and added features, which will make planning that New Year’s trip with friends a breeze.

You can send what you owe to your friend’s email address or phone number, and they can quickly transfer the money to their bank account – all without installing an app.

You can also request money on the web and your friends can pay you back without leaving their browser. Once you receive their money, you won’t even need to cash out. You can just set a default payment method and any money that’s sent to you through Wallet will be automatically transferred to that account.

Sign in to wallet.google.com now and be sure to bookmark it for the next time you need to pay someone back.

Send Money | Request Money

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Why do you blog? You want your content to be discovered and read by as many people as possible, right?

But often your reach is limited. You’re limited by the size of your existing audience.

Every day, people are bombarded with more content than they will ever have time to read. Most people are both incredibly busy and have the attention span of a goldfish (guilty on both counts!).

So how do you make your content go further and make sure lots of people read your stuff?

Image via Reid Hoffman

LinkedIn Pulse can help you do just that.

What Is LinkedIn Pulse?

LinkedIn Pulse is LinkedIn’s version of a personalized newsfeed. It is also available as a standalone app. Pulse allows users to see the biggest headlines and read top industry news of the day.

According to recent figures, LinkedIn has more than 1 million publishers; more than 150,000 posts are published every week; and the average post reaches LinkedIn members in 21 industries and nine countries.

You’ll see a mix of curated content on LinkedIn Pulse:

Stories that people in your network and/or people in your industry have shared.
Trending stories from your extended network.
Posts from LinkedIn’s publishing platform – including “Editor’s Picks,” content written by influencers, publishers, and individuals.

We’ll focus on the third type of content for the remainder of this post.

Why You Should Use LinkedIn Pulse

You should publish posts on LinkedIn for the same reason you publish content on your own site as well as third-party publications and blogs like Medium.

Exposure.

If you’re going to invest time and money in creating content, you want it to be consumed.

By publishing content on LinkedIn, you’re increasing the odds that more people will discover and read your content.

However, finding success on LinkedIn Pulse, like any other channel, requires a strategy.

You’ll also have to put in the needed time and effort to make your investment worthwhile.

Depending on how many connections you have, the posts you publish on LinkedIn can easily get anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousands views, on average.

But sometimes LinkedIn articles become unicorns – they can get 50,000, 100,000, or even millions of views.

Wish you could get that many views? You can!

Here are 11 hacks to help your content blast off like a rocket on LinkedIn Pulse.

1. Keep Your Titles Short

If your headline is too long, LinkedIn might truncate your title. That means people who are scrolling through the app or their newsfeeds will see only part of your headline.

Make your headline as concise as possible without neglecting important headline elements that increase clicks – such as using the right keywords, an emotional hook, and a promise (i.e., telling readers what they’ll get out of reading your post).

2. Use an Eye-Catching Image

If your headline fails to do the trick, the second most important element that can persuade readers to click is your article image.

Definitely avoid using boring images in your content, such as:

Generic headshots.
Company logos.
Anything that will make a reader squint.
Anything that screams “I’m a stock photo!” We’ve seen them all a thousand times before – the highway signs (Opportunity Ahead; Innovation, Next Exit), the happy and diverse business team working around the computer, and the business handshake of trust, to name just a few.

Here’s a great example of an eye-catching image:

Now that’s an image that stands out from the rest and makes we want to click!

3. Grow Your LinkedIn Connections

Every time you publish a post on LinkedIn, your connections will see an alert in their notifications.

But to really make ripples, you need a large audience of first-level connections.

For any of the stuff we’re talking about throughout this post to really work, you’ll need to make as many connections as you possibly can.

This means improving your LinkedIn profile (to sell yourself to potential connections) and expanding your LinkedIn network (this includes connecting to people you know as well as people you don’t yet know).

Here’s how to write the perfect LinkedIn connection request.

4. Publish Frequently

LinkedIn is a bit of a numbers game. You can’t just publish a post once every six months. That won’t help you.

I publish at least twice a week, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You should probably only publish on weekdays during work hours – LinkedIn is a professional network, so not much happens after hours or on the weekends.

My whole LinkedIn Pulse strategy is powered 100 percent by republished and syndicated content. I’ve never once originated a single piece just for LinkedIn.

Don’t worry about duplicate content issues or the potential impact on organic search rankings if you pursue a content repurposing strategy. As long as you make it clear the article has been published before with a note that links to the original article, Google is good at figuring out which is the original source and which is the copy.

5. Get Featured on Channels

LinkedIn Pulse has more than 100 individual channels. Some of the most popular channels are for Leadership & Management, Big Ideas & Innovation, Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Social Media.

Getting your posts featured in one of these channels is essential to success. Pulse exposes your content to a massive audience.

At most, you can have 25,000 connections on LinkedIn (though most people don’t come anywhere close to this number). But these Pulse channels have millions of followers.

If you want a post you’re writing to get featured in Social Media (and potentially be read by those 14 million channel followers), then spend some time looking at what types of stories get featured. Figure out what types of article you need to publish if you want a shot at being featured.

6. Do Some Old-School SEO

Content optimization is one super simple way to help get your content featured on a Pulse Channel.

To categorize your content, LinkedIn Pulse does an analysis of the text of your article.

This is like SEO tactics of the dark ages, when all you had to do was include your keyword in the title and use the right words a few times throughout the post.

7. Ask a Pulse Editor to Feature Your Story

Want to get a story featured on LinkedIn Pulse? Then you’ll have to tweet at them.

Yes, seriously, you’ll need to head to Twitter to get something featured on LinkedIn.

All you have to do is send a friendly tweet to @LinkedInPulse. Like so:

8. Give Your Post a Paid Boost

Although getting your post featured on a Channel is awesome, it isn’t enough. You need to help your post go red hot.

After your content gets attached to the channel, you need to quickly drive lots of traffic to it. This will help push your post to top of channel, as opposed to being just listed on the channel in fifth position (or wherever it ends up being shown).

You have to get to the top spot. How?

Spend a few bucks (no more than $50) on Facebook and Twitter promoted posts. This will help quickly drive lots of traffic to your LinkedIn post.

The LinkedIn Pulse algorithm will reward your content if your post generates a bunch of traffic and engagement within a few minutes.

The best part? You don’t have to pay to drive traffic for long. The social media ads will simply act as a catalyst.

Once your social media ads have helped your article get to the top, the traffic will be self-sustaining for a while as LinkedIn’s users go to their favorite Channel to see what’s trending.

9. Promote Your LinkedIn Page

Although you’re limited to having 25,000 connections on LinkedIn, there is no limit on how many followers you can have.

What you should do is promote your LinkedIn page from other pieces of content.

For example, are you linking to your LinkedIn profile from your Twitter profile? That’s just one way you can help amplify your LinkedIn presence.

Think about it: you’re getting thousands of profile visits on Twitter every month. Even if only a small percentage of those click on the link to your LinkedIn profile, it increase the odds of further amplification on the network.

10. Repost Content

LinkedIn won’t penalize you for reusing the same content you’ve already published on their platform. There are no duplicate content filters.

If a post you published didn’t generate any engagement a few months ago, and you think it should have done much better, why not publish it again?

There are two things you should change, however: your title and image. Most likely, your old headline was too boring or your image wasn’t interesting. Now you know better!

11. Only Syndicate Your Unicorns

Not every piece of content you write belongs on LinkedIn. So don’t syndicate everything – especially if you’re publishing more than two articles per week around the web.

Focus on your best stuff. Only use content that performed remarkably well elsewhere, whether it generated a lot of traffic for your blog or engagement on another social network.

Your best content has already proven itself on one platform. That means it has a higher probability of doing well on LinkedIn as well.

TL;DR

If you aren’t yet using LinkedIn as part of your content strategy, you definitely should. Use these 11 hacks to use the LinkedIn Pulse algorithm to your advantage and send your content into outer space.

By the way, one other platform that will help your content go further is Medium. The strategy for getting your content to trend is kind of the same for both places. However, one thing I like a little more about Medium is that it’s more of meritocracy – there are no anointed Influencers.

Have you tried LinkedIn Pulse yet? If not, what are you waiting for?!

This article was orginally published on the Wordstream blog and it’s repeated with permission

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Messaging Apps are everywhere. We take a look at their history, where they’re headed and why they could be the next big bend in the road when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the big players like Google and Facebook.

The post The Complete Guide to Messaging Apps by @antonymesser appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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