The other day, a troll hit me up on Quora, and I tweeted about it. It wasn’t long before Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever (@ccheever on Twitter) came to my rescue:

and a bit later:

With such excellent customer service as that, you better believe that Charlie Cheever earned himself a new Twitter follower. Monitoring brand mentions for instant, proactive CRM is an excellent use of Twitter. Many kudos to Charlie for that!

Recounting the incident later to friends, one of them told me, “Wow, look at you, you’re famous!” To which I blushed and insisted that no, I’m really not. I mean, take a look at my current Twitter stats:

501 followers is so not even close to famous, at least not on Twitter. And yet, my Klout score isn’t half bad for someone with so few followers:

Klout attempts to assign a score to a social media user to gauge their actual influence. How these numbers are calculated is not really important for this article. You can visit their site to read all about it if you like. What is interesting, however, is what happens when you compare my score with those of a handful of the better known players in the internet marketing industry.

@dr_pete: 56
@joehall: 58
@ccheever: 43
@randfish: 68
@tomcritchlow: 58
@justinrbriggs: 50

That’s a pretty random sample grabbed from whoever happened to be sitting in my Twitter feed just now. Every single one of them has more than twice the followers I do, and yet in most cases my score isn’t too far behind theirs. What’s more, I somehow beat the founder of one of the hottest web properties out there! What the heck is going on?

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I may be a total girl when it comes to actually using most of the tools in anyone’s garage, but I absolutely love them. I love the magic that happens when a painstaking task becomes effortless thanks to a brilliantly engineered device. Since I like to nerd-out about my favorite things while talking about SEO, let’s see if I can draw some parallels between my three favorite actual tools, and their theoretical SEO counterparts!

The “mini power tool” (shown in the photo) that was developed and used by NASA for the last repair of the Hubble Space Telescope combined with the fastener capture plate developed for many uses on the same mission is an awesomely specific and effective combination. The mini power tool was developed specifically to allow astronauts to remove tiny screws from one panel of the Hubble telescope. It had to be made smaller than previous power tools in order to gently remove the small screws, and a light was installed in the front of it so astronauts could clearly see them. The fastener capture plate allows for the screws to be removed cleanly, capturing all the screws as they are removed so they don’t drift off into space… or worse, inside the telescope.

This tool reminds me a lot of Yahoo! Site Explorer. It is an invaluable tool to SEOs for either evaluating your own backlinks or looking at the backlinks of a competitor. There’s really no better tool for the job. SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer is a close replacement, and certainly offers some nice metrics in addition to links, but we’ve found that it doesn’t give as complete or accurate a list as YSE. We are devastated with the thought that it might go away. Both of these tools are great examples of tools engineered to a very specific purpose. However, they also both share a ginourmous fault – being a one-trick pony. Yahoo! Site Explorer only shows us backlinks – why not also show local citations and reviews? Why not allow an option to see social media citations? Yahoo could also take a page out of SEOmoz’s book and show some trust rankings. My next favorite is a much, much more versatile tool…

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As the competition for first page listings, web traffic and business leads keeps getting tougher, optimizers are always looking for new ways to get inbound links and authority and credibility for their clients’ sites.

The fact that results from search queries now increasingly include real time search results , it’s becoming imperative for us to craft strategies above and beyond the traditional link-building methods.

While making sure that the fundamentals like custom Title tags, compelling descriptions, high quality content and user friendly interfaces remain the cornerstone of our work, we can successfully use some strategies to boost the presence of our sites.

• Publishing targeted blog posts, interacting with the viewers and syndicating blog via feeds.
• Making sure Google Maps and Bing Local listings are verified and updated with the latest media rich information about the site.
• Finding Local directories to add sites and create a presence within a smaller, more focussed geographic area.
• Using Twitter and Facebook to build a brand following for your site, thus proving the popularity of your site to the search engines.
• Using e-PRs , articles and press releases to target specific key phrases through latest updates.
• Using Video especially YouTube to build a strong presence for your site.

These strategies will bring definite advantages to our sites, helping us get an edge over competition in the search engine rankings and potentially bring in high quality web traffic and business leads for our clients.