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I’m a certified geek, even a technology evangelist. From my first core dump on a coal-fired Unix system up until my latest hack to access ssh through Bluetooth on my home router (try it), tech has been in my blood. But marketing through technology has been the passion.

So I was excited to get invited to SMX Israel, an honor which fell into my lap through the grace of being the developer of our SEO Comparison tool. Thus, the finger landed on me to cover the lecture on “SEO Tools”. Now, I know SMX is a big SEO, SEM, SMM (insert every other three-letter acronym here) in the industry, so I’ll try not to try your patience too much. Keep your phasers on ‘stun’.

First, Olivier Amar from Point Up Media moderated an outstanding lecture. The first speaker was Miriam Schwab (illuminea), who flew in through the window in her superhero costume to take her place at the podium and dish us the scoop on Raven Tools. Raven is an all-in-one marketing tool for SEO and social media that lets you seamlessly integrate and harness online data sources like Google Analytics, Facebook, MajesticSEO, SemRush, and SEOmoz into one big picture. That should cut a whole swath from your bookmarks folder right there!

For those of you with an “SEO buzzword bingo” card, mark off the “integrate” spot.

Anyway, Raven Tools can show you where you, your projects, and your clients all stand on the Internet arena. But wait, there’s more! Act now and you can also export amazing reports with just a few clicks, saving us all the headache of printing several rain forests’ worth of printouts that we have to pull out manually.

The only minor nit is that it doesn’t yet support any RTL languages, so using it on the local market (Hebrew and Arabic) will currently be challenging. However, I just took the liberty of tweeting Raven Tools about this and they assured me that they are working on UTF-8 support and all the languages that would allow. So it’s on the horizon. And now you know what a well-connected big shot I am.

Next speaker was the one-and-only Eli Feldblum from RankAbove, who talked about DRIVE. DRIVE’s mission in life (cue Mission Impossible theme), is to take the SaaS SEO platform to the next level. Check “to the next level” off your card – anybody have bingo yet? Anyway, for 30 minutes Feldblum took us on a pith-helmet safari through enough number-crunching data to analyze Russia’s Gross Domestic Product, all in the name of showing how they developed their system to choose the best data sources out there for their tool. This is what geeks come for, is a look under the hood with less marketing polish.

Long story short, DRIVE uses data from Google, WordStream, and Majestic to help you research, create, and monitor your campaigns. They do the engineering and bookkeeping so you don’t have to. It’s an essential function for any big-shot PR and SEO/SEM company.

Now, the third speaker came out, and I instantly liked the guy, because he was a renegade. It’s always the rogues hanging out in the shadows that blindside us with ways of thinking about things that never would have occurred to us in our modern Web 2.0 marketing bubble. Mark Ginsberg came out swinging and dismissed the use of fancy tools in favor of going back to the roots. Like spreadsheets. Excel spreadsheets. You could smell the fear in the two front rows.

But Ginsburg made a lot of sense, talking about free (FREEEEEE!) tools to harvest, index, and sort data. Doubtless, this way lies hand-hacked shell scripts and text file filters, but remember it’s the mad scientists in their basement laboratories that harness the raw power of computing and pass all of us by while we dodder about setting the shiny buttons and icons on our apps to the “seabreeze” theme.

Now, some of these tools are so easy to use that it’s a matter of typing in a URl and receiving a torrent of SEO reports. To see this magic firsthand, there’s a slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/markginsberg/mark-ginsberg-seo-tools-smx-2012 . Peruse at your leisure.

The last speaker was Dixon Jones, the legendary MajesticSEO marketing director, whose name alone qualifies him as a detective in a James M. Cain novel. Time was running out, so he barely had the chance to give us a quick roundup of algorithms around MajesticSEO’s neck of the woods, and then shower us with convention swag (keychain-bottle-operers, which have magic powers I shall not disclose here) and offers for a month-long free trial of MajesticSEO to anyone who could flip him a business card.

Since Majestic is a household name in the SEO marketing niche and we all use them either directly or indirectly (Probably a lot more since Yahoo! site explorer went down) through their API, I needn’t belabor the point of how integral they were to the whole show. And by the way, if you haven’t taken advantage of their free personal domain analysis yet, run, don’t stroll, to do so now, because it will be like getting to drive your first car and date your first fashion model on the same night. You’ll come for that, and stay for the link research, backlink tracking, and other advanced tools for a frugal price.

It was a fun, happening symposium all together. Minions of the web market traveled far and wide to crowd the seats and pack the halls and doubtless hang by their fingernails from the window ledges outside to avail themselves of the wisdom of these oracles of the market electric. If you missed out (and are now doubtless crying yourself to sleep in the fetal position next to a jug of Thunderbird because of it), there’s always next year when SMX 2013 will come around. Do mark your calendars for it, because whether you’re an Excel ninja prowling the shady gutters of the web or a polished Apple-hipster thumbing through your piles of apps with the solid-diamond icons, there’s something for everyone.