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Following the best four series, this time I have chosen 4 sites to find wonderful and useful Photoshop plugins and filters. Though there are thousands of sites offering free Photoshop plugins and filters, searching through the sites and choosing the ones required could be a tedious affair. Am sure this list would prove to be a quick reckoner for all your Photoshop plugins and filters needs, because I have chosen them after trying them out myself. All these sites offer free downloads of filters and plugins, with a huge variety of options to choose from. 

Filter Factory 

This site has a huge accumulation of filters and plugins as well, that impart varying levels of effects in photographs and images. With more than 350 filters and plugins available, this site definitely contains a vast and excellent collection to its credit. With detailed explanation of what plugins and filters are and how to download them are clearly explained in the site as well.

http://www.photoshop-filters.com/html/filter_factory.htm 

VanDerLee plugins and filters 

A site with both free and paid versions, VanDerLee has an impressive collection of Photoshop filters and plugins. Along with latest news in the field of website designing and releases of various new versions of plugins and filters, the site also has a dedicated Support section that assists with useful FAQs and a list of Compatible applications that work with the site’s plugins.  

http://www.vanderlee.com/plugins.html  

Richard Rosenman filters and plugins 

This site has separate windows for both freeware and commercial collection that can be downloaded at a specified cost. Wonderful, amazing and varied collections of plugins and filters are available in the freeware section as well. A must checkout site for all Photoshop plugins and filters seeking fans!  

http://www.richardrosenman.com/software/downloads 

Mehdi Plugins 

A great site for Photoshop plugins, this site has a colorful and eye pleasing layout in itself! Not only does the site has a large collection of plugins, but it also has clear explanations as to how to use the particular plugin and also how to customize them in order to make it the way you need it. I have used this site for many of my plugin needs as well. Excellent site indeed! 

http://www.mehdiplugins.com

Apart from these four, I also happened to see a site called Virtual Photographer. A very useful site for creating special effects on photos, downloads are available in zip format as well. A site worth checking out for the photographer in you http://www.optikvervelabs.com/default.asp

Wordpress is a simple and handy platform that is highly used in creating blogs and is also one of my favorite blog platforms, Wordpress plugins that are used along with it can create excellence to sites. Out of many Wordpress plugins that are available, I have chosen 4 that are my darlings, from the Multimedia point of view. These plugins are highly useful with regards to creating Multimedia-rich websites and blogs, and I also am of the impression that they are simple to use, without any complications or hassles.

(1) Kaltura Video recording and management - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/kaltura-interactive-video 

This plugin is quite apt to make the videos in your blog more interactive. With facilities like uploading, importing and recording of videos into your blog posts,  modify videos with the help of an online video editor; this plugin is definitely a hit! What I like the best in this is that it this plugin also supports a huge variety of codecs and audio/video file formats along with video sharing options. In short, complete management and administration of videos is possible with this wizard! 

(2) MTR Audio and Podcast Recorder - http://www.podcastingnews.com/2008/09/15/free-podcast-recorder-plugin-for-wordpress
 

I would say a “must-download plugin” for the Podcast freaks; this plugin is called the MTR Podcast recorder that allows all the recordings to be saved in MP3 format. It is saved in the same server as that of Wordpress. The best part that I like in this plugin is that it allows handling the records and musical selection lists from the Wordpress administration itself. This helps in easy playlists management and overall blog site administration. 

(3) NextGEN Photo Gallery - http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery

One of my most favorites, this photo gallery plugin is very useful, especially for those interested in creating and sorting their own image collections. This plugin has a tinge of Web 2.0 and jQuery JavaScript library, all packed in one. The users can also upload images that have watermarked text or images. The best thing is that various JavaScript effects like Thickbox, Lightbox and the likes can be used. 

(4) Kimili Embedded Flash - http://kimili.com/plugins/kml_flashembed
 

So you want to embed flash based movies into your blog, then Kimili is the best choice! A very flexible plugin with many features attached to it, the Kimili  also complies with the standards. It is very useful for search engine optimization of blogs, as the plugin itself is search engine friendly. What’s more, this plugin also gels on well with other plugins in its 1.2 version, and hence is definitely the best pick for WordPress.

I have found these plugins to be remarkable and of great use to me. There are many more great plugins from WordPress, and if you feel anyone or more of them have stirred your web designing senses, then do not forget to suggest about them in my comments section.

Online competition tracking is not as easy as we all think and we don’t know when competitors make different alterations to their websites and fine-tune their keywords to gain top results. The most crucial phase and factor of SEO is competitor analysis, as staying ahead of the competitors is not an easy task. For that, we have various free competitor tools, which can help you track your competitor levels and also help you understand the competitiveness of your industry for success.

(i) TouchGraph.com You can try it right away! Enter a URL or a set of keywords and then click on the button ‘Graph it!’ However, the following have to be kept in mind: · It is always advisable to have the latest version of java, minimum Java 1.5. Also popup blockers should be disabled to allow launching websites. · After typing out the URL or the search keywords, hit “Graph It!” Press the “Run” button when the question prompts as, “Do you want to trust the signed applet?” http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

(ii) Myriadsearch.com This is an excellent tool to view competition rankings across numerous search engines that are available nowadays. http://www.myriadsearch.com/

(iii) Seotoolset.com - competition research tool To show the present ranking of the top competitors across the prominent search engines, use this competition research tool. It gives the topmost 25 rankings across the board and sorts the results as well. The site that has the highest ranking is listed in the beginning. http://www.seotoolset.com/tools/free_tools.html

(iv) Spyfu.com SpyFu allows you to look at the keywords that are purchased by your competitors. It also shows the keywords that they optimize their site for. Once the competition is understood, you can become masters in their own game and at the same time can also tap on their weaknesses as well! http://www.spyfu.com Hope the above quoted sites have helped you with your search for top competitor tools

Search Engine Results Page, which is abbreviated as SERP, is a tool in which, once a keyword is typed in, it shows the results of various web pages where those keywords appear. This is taken from the results of various search engines, thus giving an idea of that particular keyword’s position in the web. This may refer to either a collection of all the links, or to even a page of links that the search engine offered.

There are many such tools available nowadays and with its demand increasing every day, it only makes it more important to have more SERP trackers. While most of them are free services offered by these sites, few of them are also paid services. Below is a detailed description of top four SERP tracker tools.

SEOCase.net

This is a simple and easy to use SERP tracker tool. As usual, the keyword and the URL of the site are given, and this tool fetches results from 6 popular search engines! The results obtained are also accurate. One drawback, however, with this tool is that the search results obtained are only from the first 10 pages of each search engine. So only the top positioned rankings would be obtained from this site. But whatever data is obtained is reliable and accurate as well.

Mike’s Marketing Tools

Another cool site with SERP tools! It provides the rankings of various websites obtained from top search engines and web directories as well. Immediate reports of these rankings are provided in an effective manner. As I have mentioned before, this site is a free one and requires no registration as well. The URL of the main site along with a single keyword or collection of keywords is to be given in the slot provided, and Lo! The details of the search run are in front of you!

SERP Rank

This site is an exciting and reliable site. It asks for the URL and the keyword to be checked for. Checks are done across 5 popular search engines. What more, this site also has facilities to check local sites of Google like Google.de, Google.ca, Google.gr etc! Once the listings come, they can also be checked in with the help of the links provided. Now isn’t that simply superb?! A simple and reliable site!

Digitalpoint.com

This is a cool site and quite a famous one as well. One thing to be noted here is that it the user has to register in this site, before using it. This registration is free of cost. Once you have logged in, you can go ahead with using the SERP tool. Good tool to be used.

With the importance of SEO and its related tools increasing to a greater extent each day, it is only important to have such SERP tools that offer trustworthy and accurate results to find the position of various keywords in a particular URL.

Also feel free to download our Practical SEO Techniques EBook 

Link popularity is one of the methods to increase the traffic in your site. This is an excellent way by which your online website can be recognized to a greater extent. It refers to the procedure in which many links or hyperlinks from various other sites are linked to your site, thus increasing the chances of others discovering your site’s existence! The more the links attached the better. This ultimately brings good traffic flow to your site.

It is not enough if your site has many links, it is important to find out what is the quality of these links and who is linking to your site. Links that are positioned in a better manner are definite to achieve continuous traffic. I have given about 4 link popularity tools below. They are free to be used and are also accurate.

Mike’s Marketing Tools

Famous for quite a long time in the SEO tools industry, this site has a tool for link popularity checking as well. It gives immediate reports on the link popularity of a site. The results offered are from 3 major search engines Yahoo, Google and MSN. Here, the URL has to be given in the slot and it results in the number of backlinks available to that site, as per the search engines.

MarketLeap

This is another cool site that is an accuratse checker. It asks for the URL for which the popularity is to be checked. The checker also gives options to compare with 3 other URLs as well. One of the useful features in this site is that it also provides the specific industry that the search has to be performed upon, depending upon the site’s home industry. If there is no necessity to confine the search to a particular industry, then the category “General” can be chosen as well. Once the details are given, it gives the search results under two headings – Google/AOL/HotBot and Yahoo/FAST/AltaVista. Definitely recommended!

SEO Centro

This site is a simple yet effective tool for checking the number of links to your site. It gives search results from 5 popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live, AllTheWeb and AltaVista. The total number of links obtained from all the search engines is also given here. This is split up into various bands starting from 0-250 references, 251-1000 references etc. Each band is given a specific color as well, for easy identification. The site also has the links of the searches for you to check out. A cool site indeed!

SEO Book Tools

This is a simple to use, at the same time an efficient site. The URL of the site to be checked is entered, along with URLs of up to three other sites that you want to compare your site with. The result page gives the numbers of the searches in various search engines along with that of the comparison sites as well.

These link popularity check tools are useful in terms of knowing the status of the backlinks linked to your site. Ultimately all this is done for a single fact - the more the site’s traffic and its popularity, the better its rankings in various search engines