MickMel SEO

How have I not seen this before? A friend showed me Jing a few days ago, and I’m in love with it. It’s a software program for Windows or Mac that makes it very easy to capture screenshots or video clips and share them.

I had seen Skitch a few weeks ago, and thought it looked awesome. The problem with it is that it’s Mac-only. A Windows version is “coming soon”, but not here yet. In addition, Skitch only does image capture, while Jing does both images and videos.

To explain how easy Jing is, I’m going to do the following:

• Pull up ESPN
• Grab a screenshot
• Add some arrows pointing to interesting items
• Annotate it a bit
• Post a link to the final, uploaded image
• Time the whole process.

Here we go…

Done! 32 seconds.

http://www.mickmel.com/jing/2008-05-20_2230.png

It’s great! For another brief example, here’s a quick video I just made so you can see how those look:

http://www.mickmel.com/jing/2008-05-20_2246.swf

You’ll probably find quite a few uses for this. I even grabbed the Jing logo at the top of this post by grabbing it from their site using their own software. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Animoto, the very cool video mixing service, has announced that you can now export a video directly to YouTube!

Animoto, for those that don’t know, allows you to create a killer video in about five minutes. You upload a batch of your pictures, choose a song (or upload your own), and tell it to go. It analyzes your song and pictures and creates a video with them. The pictures move in time to the music, and it’s got some cool effects.

If you haven’t tried it before, give it a shot. If you already use them, go dig out your old videos and put them on YouTube! Here is one that we did for our church a while back:

If you’ve not used it before, the Term Extractor at SEOmoz is an eye-opening tool.  You give it the URL of your page, and it tells you what search terms it thinks you’re trying to target.

As SEONoobs put it — “that way if you’re trying to target “garden tools” and the term extractor tells you that it thinks “sea monkey poop” is more SE targeted, that you have some work to do, keyword density wise!“.

I run this on all of my sites from time to time, just to make sure I’m not missing anything major, and I usually find a handful of small things to correct.  I consider it one of the best free tools out there.

I was looking for a way to make a good-looking chart for one of my sites.  I made one in Excel, but it was pretty bland.  Then I discovered the NCES Create A Graph website.  It’s actually a kid’s site, but has some slick tools to make some good-looking charts and graphs.

Combined with the WordPress FancyZoom plug-in I showed a few days ago, this can make for a great way to show charts on your website.  Here is the page I used it on, showing the diminishing level of a lake near Atlanta.