Managing projects for multiple clients often requires dependent tasks and strict deadlines. To keep track of the “who does what by when” details, it is helpful to have a project management tool to insure you are achieving milestones while not getting stressed out!
SEO Fox needed a solution to manage and organize our projects and tasks in order for us to efficiently fulfill our client obligations. After previous experience with BasecampHQ, Zoho, and Central Desktop (and even demoing a few more), we found a free (donations welcome) hosted project management tool called ClockingIT to help us fulfill our client and sanity needs!
I have found setting up a project in ClockingIT is easy. The interface is intuitive and every user’s dashboard is customizable so users can rename titles and add or subtract widgets to make the dashboard information relevant to the specific user. Admins (configurable) are able to assign projects to clients and task to users and schedule the time allotted to both while seeing a live “timeline” feed of task completions (there is also a GANNT chart display for the PM nerds in a few of us).
A couple tools I really find helpful are the task timer and the very versatile report feature. The timer allows you to easily clock the time it took to do a task (and it can also be a pop-out window) and document any notes you might want other teammates to be aware of. Using the timer tied with the different reports you can run truly makes calculating project metrics upon project completion easy.
Having a hosted solution (one less thing to worry about) was one of our requirements in a project management solution, but ClockingIT also has a local version for organizations that have a strong network administrator who knows a bit about Ruby. For more information on getting the source code or joining the ClockingIT development community, visit their source wiki and join their github project.
Quality inbound links are key to achieving great results with organic search.
As SEOs, getting quality incoming links for clients is a time-consuming routine of content creation, web browsing, info submission, and link requests. The question is how to build link popularity efficiently without wasting time.
There are a number of ways to get incoming links, but two that show the most results are creating quality content (linkbait) and requesting links directly from relevant sites. We all know how to create quality content (or buy it). The question is really how to find relevant sites to approach for a link. Advanced keywords searches are a great way to get started. One of the most efficient ways to target potential linkbacks is still competitor backlink analysis.
Competitor backlink analysis is no stranger to SEO; our site owner David Ogletree has made several worthwhile posts about backlink research recently. There are a number of free and modestly priced tools on the market that streamline the link analysis of any website. But a new tool has entered the backlink analysis market that truly aids in streamlining your backlink management.
Link Hound is a great backlink research tool for discovering and managing any backlink endeavor. The process of adding a website campaign and relevant keywords to that campaign is simple. The tool actually suggests numerous websites to analyze based on any keyword phrase entered and determines the links with the most potential to backlink to your site based on the information you give. Link Hound also offers a contact management system within its results page which makes it easy to keep track of links and contacts within the tool instead of exporting that info to Excel. But if you are old-school, you can still export the data to CSV and have fun.
After spending an afternoon using the new tool, it definitely provided relevant potential. Even if you are already using link building software, Link Hound can serve to bolster your reservoir of potential link targets.
Bottom line: Link Hound will help you find relevant backlinks to pursue and help you manage them too.
