From 2005 to 2008 I successfully ran a “one man shop” web development company with only knowing the basics in web design and development. However, what I didn’t know in design and programming I made up by thoroughly knowing outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and project management. If you look at my gallery page you will see just a few of the projects I did during that time.

I am often asked to teach these business methods to others, and over the years I have developed a series of lessons to help facilitate these requests. I have been meaning to publish these lessons as an ebook, but with all that is currently going on in my life I don’t see it happening any time soon. So, instead of waiting for that someday to come I have decided to publish the lesson that is most requested—crowdsourcing.

The other day my friend Leland asked if I knew any great SEO SERP tools that were free (serp is an acronymn for search engine ranking position). Personally, I am hooked on the paid tools SEOmoz offers, but I understand that when you start out in SEO you often don’t have the luxury of paying for the all the new shiny tools out there.

Leland’s biggest frustration was that when he did a search in Google all the tools he tried didn’t work. A lot of these websites can’t sustain their tools since they are free. It actually takes real resources to crawl the engines and return results. If a SERP tool pings the engines too often their IP is banned for a day. Get banned too many times and you can count on being permanently locked out.

So, you can see why finding a decent free SERP tool can be difficult. I love the challenge of finding free resources to help people in their SEO quest and hopefully my research from these efforts can help others. Therefore, below are the different tools I found that actually worked. I haven’t used most of them more than once or twice so my feedback is limited. Yet, the one thing I can guarantee is that they will show you your SERPS and that they are free (at least at the time of writing this).

A few days ago I wrote about how you can redirect bad backlinks pointing to your website. Of course, this tactic is only helpful if you know what links are pointing to your website. Below is a list of websites that assist in displaying your backlink landscape. There are quite a few to choose from, but ultimately it just comes down to finding the one that best suits you.

One thing to consider when using these backlink tools is that most of them (with the exception of seomoz) use Yahoo’s search results. This is important, since Yahoo only shows your website’s first thousand backlinks. Usually, this isn’t a big deal, because many websites don’t have that many backlinks. However, as your site grows you will hopefully go over the thousand limit. If you want to take your backlink strategy more seriously I recommend looking at the paid backlink tools in helping you stay on top of your backlink game!

In the meantime, the below tools will help you get started on your seo backlinking efforts. If you know other backlink checking websites/tools let me know and I will add them to the list. ~Paul W.

So, for the last few years I have been using a free piece of software, called Stick, that has been really quite useful. Stick allows you to add a virtual “push pin” to any widow pane or software interface. Once you add the push pin that window will always be viewed as the top window pane. This is extremely helpful when I am going from one program to another and have lots of windows open. Before this great piece of software I had to add an additional step of clicking on the window in the task bar. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but when you have to do it several hundreds of times it gets old and fast.

I have no idea where I downloaded it.  I looked into the software properties and there is no attribute to the creator. Thus, I can’t give a hardy thank you to the designer of Stick. Really, I use this software multiple times a day, and frankly I am surprised that Microsoft hasn’t added this feature into Windows (but let’s be honest when does Microsoft really build for the user in mind, IE is a perfect of example of this corporate blindness).

Anyway, Stick is free, and as far as I can tell it’s under creative commons. I will be using another computer for the next few weeks, and this software is something I can’t live without. So, I decided to upload it to mymarketer in order for me to download it when I start using the new machine.