keywords

Create word clouds with Wordle

Wordle is a simple Web app that's useful for creating eye-popping "word clouds" just by inputting text.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but with Wordle, a thousand words is worth a word cloud. (Try saying that out loud a thousand times.)

Wordle lets you create custom word clouds like the ones found on blogs and other Internet content sites. A word cloud is a popular visualization of words typically associated with Internet keywords and text data. They are most commonly used to highlight popular or trending terms based on frequency of use and prominence.

In … Read more

How to use iPhoto keywords

There are a number of methods for organizing and cataloging your iPhoto '11 library. You can dump photos into albums, and you can set criteria for ever-evolving smart albums. You can use the Faces and Places features to sort by people or locations. You can flag photos. And you can use Events to sort photos taken during a certain time period.

The above methods are very effective for helping you locate photos in a sprawling iPhoto library, but for a more granular approach, I suggest you try keywords. Keywords act like tags, which help you quickly search for a particular photo.

Work faster with LaunchBar

LaunchBar is a popular and long-lived productivity-enhancing app that can literally change the way you use your Mac--and that change can come gradually, as you learn the app's many tricks and secrets, bit by bit. At its most basic, LaunchBar is a completely keyboard-based way to find and open anything on your Mac with a few quick keystrokes. But its functionality goes far beyond that, letting you use keystrokes to manipulate files, send e-mails, search Web sites, and control apps like iTunes.

LaunchBar has an almost invisible interface, and you invoke it with--of course--a keystroke, which by default is … Read more

Web hit magnet

Web sites incorporate keywords to get search engine hits and attract visitors. A1 Keyword Research from Micro-Sys makes it easy to find the right keywords and phrases to optimize your content and attract Web traffic. It builds a wide variety of keyword lists for nearly any Web site. It even checks all spelling and grammatical variations, displays ranking graphically, and handles multiple Web sites and search engines.

The developer's experience shows in a blistering fast installer and an attractive, efficient interface. The title bar tracks the trial period, an unobtrusive placement we'd like to see more often. Optional … Read more

Keyword creator

Back in the 1990s, the keywords meta element was an important part of Web design; putting the right keywords in this tag helped search engines properly index sites and, if done right, helped improve search rankings. Unfortunately, because it was so easy for unscrupulous site owners to add misleading keywords and create irrelevant search results, meta keywords have largely fallen out of favor with the major search engines. If you decide to use them anyway, Keywords Meta Tag Generator can help you analyze your content and select the best keywords for each particular page.

The program's interface is basic, … Read more

Graphic grabber

At first the purpose of this program puzzled us. Why would you want to download all of the images on a given Web site? We pondered this for a moment and then it dawned on; although we're sure there are other reasons, the first one that occurred to us starts with a P and ends with a -orn. Whatever your reasons, if you find yourself needing to grab a lot of images off the Web in a hurry, Web Image Collector is exactly what you need.

The program's interface is plain and intuitive, with graphical buttons that represent … Read more

Create keyword-based site-specific searches

Wouldn't it be great if you could set up a simple keyword to initiate a site-specific search that you need to perform regularly? It turns out you can, including for search engines such as Google and Bing.

In this How To we'll show you a simple hack for making search engines and site-specific searches alike do your bidding at a single keystroke.

Ad-zapping toolbar

So, another Internet Explorer add-on toolbar...but wait! Quero Toolbar is different: It's actually worth using. For starters, it's not like those spyware "toolbars" that continue to plague unprotected PCs and careless users. Quero Toolbar is actually designed to block pop-ups, flash animations, and other ad-related annoyances that can spoil your browsing. It also integrates a search-as-you-type function, easily selectable search engines and international profiles, a highlighter, easy zoom and resize, security options, and much more.

Quero Toolbar installs seamlessly with all versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and above. The Quero button on the navigation … Read more

Buggy search bar

tyBit Unified Search is a toolbar that lets users search multiple search engines at once for a variety of different things. Although we love the idea in theory, in execution, it leaves something to be desired.

We first ran into trouble when we found that the version of the toolbar that was available from Download.com was not compatible with the version of Firefox we were running, or with our version of Internet Explorer. This resulted in some error messages and other general annoyances before we got the program updated and running, at least in Firefox. There we were greeted … Read more

Web site analysis

Rank Tracker SEO Software analyzes the rankings of Web sites with search engines like Google and Yahoo. You select keywords relevant to your site, and Rank Tracker reports their search rankings.

Rank Tracker SEO Software installs easily. There's a Help file that explains how to use the program, but we were unable to tell if Rank Tracker has any other features. We analyzed two Web sites built by amateurs and one popular blog. Not surprisingly, the two amateur sites didn't make any search engine's top 100 list. The program ranked the blogger's first name in the … Read more