Resources

A collection of tools, resources and products I use and recommend.

SEO Resources

  • SEO Book – My favourite SEO blog and resource, by Aaron Wall. I’m a member of Aaron’s SEO Book training program. At $300 a month to be a member it may seem expensive, but I consider it excellent value. It’s where I’ve learnt the majority of my SEO and internet marketing skills. Includes a private forum with 100% noise free, cutting edge content. Even if you don’t join his program, make sure you read his blog and use his excellent range of free tools.
  • SEOmoz – My second favourite resource, written by Rand Fishkin and the gang. I don’t always agree with some of the blog posts, but they are certainly stimulating and I’ve learnt a lot. I’m a member of the SEOmoz Pro membership. This article on ranking factors is a must read.
  • Search Engine Land – A daily must-read. Suffers from a tiny bit of noise (or less than awesome blog posts) but for the most part is highly informative. Founded and largely driven by the SEO industry’s grand-master Danny Sullivan.

SEO Tools

SEM

Ecommerce

  • Interspire Shopping Cart – The shopping cart I have settled on for our big sites after trying numerous hosted and self-hosted offerings.
  • WP-Ecommerce – a handy plugin for WordPress that provides medium level shopping cart functionality. I’ve used it on some smaller sites, but wouldn’t recommend it for large stores. Has a free and a paid version, so a good start if you want something cheap (Update: new site at GetShopped). 
    (Other WordPress ecommerce options include ShopperPress and  Shopp.)

Community Building

  • vBulletin – the premier Bulletin board (forum) software on the market.
  • vBSEO – provides SEO friendly URLs in your vBulletin forum. Becoming redundant after the recent upgrade of vBulletin to V4, but still worth considering for some of its extra features.
  • aMember Pro – software for building membership sites. I put off buying this product for over a year because it looked so clunky and ugly, but having implemented it on our main site and it powering a significant part of our business, I haven’t looked back
  • Wishlist Member – another membership site product, this one a plugin for WordPress. Very useful, and growing in popularity. But not quite as powerful as aMember.

Internet Marketing

  • Interspire Email Marketer – the software I use to do all our email marketing, auto-responders and list management.
  • iDevAffiliate – the affiliate management product I use for managing our partners on our business sites.
  • Teaching Sells – excellent membership program, covering all facets of building a membership site

Hosting

  • DreamHost – I now use a Virtual Private Server for most of our business sites. I still have a few little sites lying around on other hosts.
  • Pingdom -  how I monitor uptime and site response times for my sites.

WordPress

  • WordPress – I use WordPress on all of my sites now, including this blog. I self-host using a Virtual Private Server on Dreamhost.

Themes:

  • Elegant Themes – One of my favourite Premium Themes site. Way too cheap at only $19.95 per year.
  • Thesis Theme – the Theme I use on this blog. Very simple, clean and easy to use. Perhaps a little pricey at $87, but one I haven’t regretted paying the slightest.
  • Woo Themes – great themes for business sites. For example, I use their Optimize theme on the XEN SEO site.

Plugins:

  • All In One SEO – very simple way to manage the title tags and meta data on pages and posts
  • Platinum SEO – I’ve been playing with this on a few sites – it has a great feature that automatically redirects old URLs to new ones if you change your permalink structure
  • Google XML Sitemaps – automatically generates an XML sitemap that you can submit to Google and Bing Webmaster tools
  • WP-Super Cache and W3 Total Cache – I use WP Super Cache on most sites, but it interferes with redirect software on one of the sites, so instead I use W3 Total Cache on that. Both are excellent, but WP Super Cache has been around longer.
  • Google Analytics for WordPress – makes adding your analytics code simple, but with the added advantage of easily adding tracking of downloads and external link outs.
  • WP Security Scan – great for highlighting security weaknesses on your site
  • Backup WordPress – I use this to back up each of my WordPress sites every day, and automatically email the backup to a separate GMail account I maintain specifically for the backups.
  • DrainHole – the best download manager plugin I have come across
  • Redirection – simple way to implement 301 redirects within WordPress
  • Topsy – ability to show Twitter mentions as trackbacks on your blog posts (I untick all the retweet stuff, and only enable the ‘Enable trackback comments’ option at the bottom of the Topsy settings.
  • (See also Wishlist Member and WP E-commerce mentioned above)

Resources:

General Resources

General Tools

Firefox plugins

  • Firebug – excellent tool for analysing mark-up and CSS
  • FireFTP – an awesome FTP client right in your browser
  • SEO for Firefox – returns tons of SEO related information about the current site/page
  • SEO Toolbar – more goodness from Aaron Wall
  • Tab Kit – gives nice tab grouping on the right hand side of the browser (ie no more tabs on top)