When I first started out in the SEO field the only task I was given was to build links. Link building is very time consuming and sometimes very difficult in nature. Over the years there have been programs that claim to find places to get backlinks from if supplied with a keyword or two. The problem with most of those programs was the fact that many of the places that they cultivate links from is of poor pagerank or are spammy in nature. So it has always been a real task to find quality relevant backlinks in a short period of time. There is a new link building program that claims to be the next generation.

This new link building product is called Ontolo. What makes this product different from the past attempts is that they claim to spider 15,000+ websites on a monthly basis. The collection of these spidered sites are then stored in a searchable database.  The user of Ontolo will be able to access this database of possible links by entering relevant keywords that pertain to the theme of your website. What is also great about this tool is that it allows for searching for .gov and .edu backlinks. Either way a backlink tool such as this will help to speed up time when you are looking to build up the backlinks of a website. A word to the wise, this tool is designed to be used by intermediate to advanced SEO professional just because there is still some analysis that goes into building links.

So if you are looking for new way to build backlinks to your website, then I would check out Ontolo.

The popularity of social media has created a need for real-time search engines in order to aggregate and search for information. New platforms are coming up in answer to these needs.

In this article we will be covering 3 real-time search engines that might be useful in helping you to stay up to date with what’s happening in social media relevant to your marketing strategies.

OneRiot

OneRiot is currently the largest real-time search engine for Social Media. It aggregates popular topics from Twitter and other social media sites. Articles are consolidated into one headline that when clicked on brings up a variety articles within the topic. OneRiot indexes its search results according to their current relevance and popularity.

OneRiot will save you lots of time by not having to search through all the news sites to find the information you are looking for. Just search by a particular topic and OneRiot will return all the search results for that topic across the web in real-time.

As an example, if you sell watches, linking to OneRiot results page with the most current information on the types of watches you sell will instantly give your customers a resource to help them make their decision.

Collecta

Collecta monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, and Flickr, so it will show you results as they happen.

If you like to keep up with important news stories as they are happening, then Collecta is for you because it will aggregate news stories by topic and then suggest three sources to give you the breadth of angles on a particular news story.

48ers

48ers is a social search engine that scans Facebook, Twitter and Digg for conversations. The site is great if you are searching for keywords and want to see what people are discussing about within a certain topic.

Some ways 48ers could be useful:

• You can track what people are saying about your company or brand across major social sites from one interface.

• You can engage your audience by using the sharing functionality directly from within the 48ers’ interface.

• You can build an audience by tracking what is being said about them in real time and respond accordingly.

These are a few of the real-time social media search engines that we have come across. Let us know if you use them too and how it’s benefited you. If you’re using a different social media search engine, let us know what it is and how it has helped you to manage all the information that is out there in the social media world.

Greplin is a personal search engine for all the data you keep in the cloud. It works a lot like the desktop search Spotlight where you search for a word or phrase and Spotlight will go through your entire hard drive looking for matching files and documents.

Greplin does the same thing but for your online data that you store on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Voice, Dropbox, Gmail and a bunch of other services. You can run a query and find public and private data on those sites. Tweets including DMs are shown as well as digging into the transcripts of your Google Voice voicemail.

Greplin uses OAuth and other APIs for authorization, so they never see your third party credentials. Since Greplin’s searches work on a variety of online sites it is invaluable to the small business owner who does business online by saving them a lot of time locating the exact information they need when they need it.

Greplin.com is in closed beta right now. Most of what Greplin offers will be free. A fee is charged for more features like searching within attachments. Below is a video illustrating how Greplin works. To register for Greplin go to http://www.greplin.com and pick the first index you’d like to use.

Let us know how you envision you could use Greplin in your personal life and business.

Greplin Demo from greplin on Vimeo.

Flipboard is a free iPad app that you can quickly download from iTunes and then request access to the service via email.

It downloads your latest incoming updates from your Facebook and Twitter accounts and turns it into a colorful digital magazine. Flipboard will turn the links you receive from your Facebook friends that might include photos and displays it on your iPad along with the first few paragraphs. If you touch the photo or image it will expand to fill the entire iPad. If you touch a link it will bring up the page on Flipboard’s built-in web browser. You even have a comment section to discuss the story with your Facebook friends.

You can use Flipboard to read your Twitter incoming messages. It displays a few paragraphs of the web page along with any links or images so you are not limited to the 140 character cryptic messages your followers send you!

Flipboard also acts as a Twitter feed reader so you can put your favorite feeds into Flipboard and it will turn into an instant news magazine that updates itself. You can link to lots of Twitter news sources such as Fortune, Economist and Wired to name a few.

You can also use Flipboard to aggregate data feeds from major news sources. It sorts the stories into useful categories — news, business, sports — allowing you to riffle through a great variety in just a few minutes.

Flipboard is still in it’s infancy with lots of bugs that need tweaked. For instance, it doesn’t store downloaded data for when you’re not connected to the Internet and there’s no reload button to refresh content. At the moment you have to shut down the app and restart it to refresh content. Sometimes there is a lag of 30 minutes updating Facebook content. You also can’t bookmark a webpage within Flipboard to your iPad’s Safari web browser. Future releases of Flipboard should iron out some of these bugs though. For now there’s still plenty to like about Flipboard.

One example of how you could incorporate Flipboard into your social media marketing and sales efforts is to create a dummy Twitter account that you will not use to promote your business or proactively seek followers. What you would use it for is to tweet to this account any customer reviews about your product you find online or any videos you post to YouTube of customer testimonials. This Twitter account is essentially your social bookmarks that you link to the Flipboard app on your iPad. This will enable you to create a social media magazine that is portable and attractive which you can show your potential clients to assist in the sales process.

Are you using Flipboard as part of your marketing/sales process? If so, share with us how Flipboard has been able to help you and your business.

To help hotels and resorts stay on top of mentions, chats or general dialogue that might be happening about their properties,  Screen Pilot, a bleeding edge digital marketing firm, have compiled a Top 5 list of free tools that can be used right now to keep tabs on the social media-verse.

-Social Mention (socialmention.com) is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the social universe into a single stream of information. Social Mention monitors more than a hundred social media properties.

-WhosTalkin (WhosTalkin.com) is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics cared about most such as property brand name. Search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways.

-Samepoint (samepoint.com) crawlers encompass every conceivable type of social media service. Categorization breaks out results by type of social media.

-Surchur (surchur.com) is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter etc.

-Trendrr (trendrr.com) allows you to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. Compare trends to one another, monitoring and evaluating across a variety of sources.

No matter what tool you use, interpretation of the data is a different ball game.  Screen Pilot’s social media services can help you translate what all these results mean. Not only does Screen Pilot position hospitality brands in the social media space, but we help track the impact and revenues generated as a result of social media and other hotel internet marketing efforts. For results, best-practice advice and incremental revenues visit screenpilot.com