Copyright © 2010 Tino Triste 2010-03-22T11:58:26+0000 2010-03-22T11:58:26+0000 http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. http://www.i-com.net/blog/ http://i-com.net/images/icom-net.gif http://www.i-com.net/blog/ Leading Manchester SEO, SEM and web design agency blog. I-COM International blogmaster at i-com dot net Tino Triste Tino Triste en SEO, SEM, Web Design, Web Development 1440 http://www.i-com.net/blog/seo-toolbar-by-seo-book-146/ There are so many toolbars, greasemonkey plugins, and Firefox add-ons for analysing websites that I dont even get excited when a new one comes along. In all honesty think that too many toolbars can actually slow down my workflow. Just because you can, doesnt mean that you need to! [Having said that, Ive got 62 extensions installed in my Firefox :-) ] Most SEO extensions currently available are good in some aspects but lack one feature or another. For the past few days I have been testing Aaron Walls new SEO Toolbar, and I have to admit that Im very impressed with its features. Finally Im a step closer to getting rid of my extensive list of extensions - the SEO Toolbar offers almost all research data/metrics that I need to analyse a website effectively. Some of the features introduced in the toolbar were already available on the SEOBook Tools website, but its good to have them handy in a toolbar. Whats in it? There is a host of information covering website visibility, competitive analysis and web development in this toolbar including: From left to right: Site info which includes all data described below plus other relevant metrics, such as google cached date, indexed pages, Yahoo! .gov and .edu links, plus the number of Del.icio.us bookmarks, Digg submissions and popular stories, StumbleUpon and Twitter. Google PageRank Number of Yahoo! backlinks to the current domain Number of Yahoo! backlinks to the current page Number of listings in DMOZ directory Number of listings in Yahoo! directory Number of listings in BOTW directory Archive.org site age Next up is the competition section: Sites visitors demographic and traffic information from Compete.com, Quantcas.com, Alexa.com, Googles Trends and Search-based Keyword Tool, SEMRush Whois lookup from domaintools Display current websites IP address IP search using MSN which displays other websites using the same IP address. HTTP Server Headers tool Ability to change the User Agent The next set of tools includes: SE Rank Checker A much improved version of SEO XRay (previously available in the SEO for Firefox extension), the new version is more pleasant to look at and has visual indicators which highlight heading tags, internal and outgoing links. And displays other useful on-page information such as the web page Title tag, Meta description and Meta keywords with word and character count. The keyword suggestion section has 12 different keyword tools built in, all good free keyword tools are included in it. It is possible to make multiple selection and the toolbar opens each keyword tool in a separate tab. Further theres also a KW density tool, KW cleaner, KW list and KW typo generator. A button to highlight links with the nofollow attribute on-the-fly. The last button in the toolbar enables you to compare up to 5 different websites/web pages against the same metrics from the site info tool. In my opinion this is a long-awaited toolbar and should be enough to analyse any website. My only complaint is regarding the built-in RSS feed section. Its possible to manage the feeds completely (like adding/removing, importing/exporting feeds). I havent used his feature of the toolbar very much, but I have noticed that greatly affects Firefoxs speed when in use (and even crashed it a couple of times). This is maybe an issue to be addressed in future versions. Search Engine Optimisation 2009-01-21 08:26:45 http://www.i-com.net/blog/seo-toolbar-by-seo-book-146/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/online-reputation-management-tool-features-requests-103/ As youre reading this article, almost certainly someone is discussing or talking about you or your brand somewhere on the internet. Hence, it is very important to monitor search engine result pages, blogs, reviews/ratings, social networking and news websites for keywords related to your company. This practice is called Online Reputation Management (ORM). Im not going to describe the benefits of ORM as there are some good articles on this subject and a free guide too. We understand that online reputaion management can be extremely time consuming, and unless you know which sites to include in your searches you may not cover everything. For this reason we are developing a new free tool to make this process easier. Some of the features include: Ability to choose search terms to track Comprehensive search of a wide variety of internet resources such as search engines, social networking, news, press releases, and ratings/reviews websites. Creation of custom alerts through RSS feeds We need your help! :-) The online reputation management tool is currently in development phase, we will release a beta version of the tool very soon. Have you got any suggestions or can you think of any features that a reputation management tool should have? If the answer is yes, feel free to contact us or leave a comment below. Internet Marketing 2008-10-06 14:51:39 http://www.i-com.net/blog/online-reputation-management-tool-features-requests-103/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/is-google-chrome-really-the-fastest-browser-88/ Let's (for a moment) put aside Google Chrome's privacy concerns and find out whether Chrome is really 10 times faster than any other browser as Google claimed. As pointed out by Adrian yesterday, Chrome's performance loading the Google Analytics pages were second to none, and seemed to load very quickly other process demanding pages like Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, NetVibes, etc... I have used 3 javascript performance testing tools which in effect push the browser's capabilities to their limits: SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark - Measured in miliseconds (The lower the better) Dromaeo - Measured in miliseconds (The lower the better) V8 Benchmark Suite - This is Google's own tool and was tailored for Chrome. The higher the score the better Internet Explorer 7 I'm affraid that I have to use IE 7 for this test because I dare not upgrade to a beta version of IE 8. If anyone else can test IE 8's performance, let me know. SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark - completed in 39614.4msLink to test results - http://tinyurl.com/66eqjn Dromaeo - Unfortunately IE couldn't cope with Dromaeo testing. It simply crashed the entire browser 3 times. Oh dear! V8 Benchmark Suite - score: 26 Opera 9.5 SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark - completed in 8122.8msLink to test results - http://tinyurl.com/59fxu3 Dromaeo - completed in 3491.00msLink to test results - http://dromaeo.com/?id=34639 V8 Benchmark Suite - score: 231 Safari 3.1.2 SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark - completed in 5603.0msLink to test results - http://tinyurl.com/648aek Dromaeo - completed in 2358.00msLink to test results - http://dromaeo.com/?id=34592 V8 Benchmark Suite - score: 89 Firefox 3.0.1 SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark - completed in 4659.8msLink to test results - http://tinyurl.com/64qthc Dromaeo - completed in 1765.20msLink to test results - http://dromaeo.com/?id=34637 V8 Benchmark Suite - score: 130 Google Chrome 0.2 SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark - completed in 3078.8msLink to test results - http://tinyurl.com/653xe2 Dromaeo - completed in 462.00msLink to test results - http://dromaeo.com/?id=34587 V8 Benchmark Suite - score: 869 Google Chrome really seems to be the fastest browser for processing JavaScript. Firefox came behind in second place, followed by Safari in third and Opera in fourth, and unsurprisingly IE in the last place. Surely the other browsers will study Chrome's technology and adopt changes in their products. The race is on! Technology 2008-09-04 16:04:19 http://www.i-com.net/blog/is-google-chrome-really-the-fastest-browser-88/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/top-25-marketing-research-and-analysis-tools-77/ Marketing research and analysis is one of the most important aspects of any business. Yet, it's normally overlooked by most small and medium size companies. We understand that back in the old days marketing research would cost a small fortune which most SMEs couldnt afford. However the internet brought us a host of resources and databases where you can get precious information for FREE. This article covers a variety of tools that we use on a daily basis when dissecting existing markets for our clients, discovering new ones, or keeping a close eye on the latest trends. 43 Things - 43Things.com it's a website where people can share their dreams and goals or find out what others want to do. The Zeitgeist section lists popular goals achieved by the community. About.com: Sites A to Z is the index of all about.com sites. It's good for brainstorming and exploring new concepts. Amazon's Hot New Releases lists bestselling new and future products on Amazon.com, it is possible to drill down your searches by product categories, bestselling, most wished and much more. Amazon's Most Popular Tags displays up to 1,000 tags used by Amazon customers to classify products. More frequently used tags are larger and more recently used tags will appear darker. AOL Hot Searches is a daily updated log of popular searches in the AOL search engines. eBay Pulse is a daily snapshot of the latest trends and hot products. eBay What's Hot is a mix of data from trade magazines, predictions from industry experts, and eBay sales data to determine whats in demand. eHow is a user generated content website providing information about "how to do just about everything". eHow is useful for finding topics in demand. Google Trends reveals how often a given search term is searched, relative to the total number of searches in Google. Google Trends also allows the comparison between two or more terms. Trends is useful to identify seasonality and geographical distribution. Google Checkout Trends aggregates sales data of Google Checkout merchants. With Google Checkout Trends it is possible to compare two or more products and discover which is selling more. Google Hot Trends displays the top 100 hot searches of the past hour. It is also possible to search the archives past dates. Google Insights for Search is a beefed up version of Google Trends. We have already explained how to use Google Insights for keyword research or market research. However there many other useful things that you can do with this tool. Google Press Center: Zeitgeist provides a snapshot of Google user search behaviour based on queries from around the world. The information is organised by country and displays "Popular Queries" and "Top Gaining Queries". HowStuffWorks.com teaches people how stuff works. The website will tell you how hard drive works or how a tsunami forms. It is divided in 13 main categories that cover virtually any subject. HowStuffWorks.com also features the most popular articles which is helpful for identifying trends and getting ideas for website content. Lycos 50 is a weekly chart of the top search terms in Lycos. It is focused mainly on the showbiz, celebrities and entertainment markets. adCenter Labs: Demographic Prediction determine user's age, gender, and other demographic information, based on their online behaviour. adCenter Labs: Online Commercial Intention detects customer commercial intent based on keyword or URL. The probabilities are distributed in 3 categories: non commercial, commercial-informational, commercial-transactional. adCenter Labs: Entity Association Graph provides a graphic view of associations between search queries or search sessions. adCenter Labs: Keyword Forecast is similar to Google Trends but also predicts demographic distributions of keywords by age and gender. adCenter Labs: Search Funnels helps with the analysis of users' search sequences. Enabling you to visualise how customers perform their search journey. SEOmoz Popular Searches aggregates popular search queries gathered from various sources across the web. Including Technorati, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Google, Amazon and many more. Yahoo! Answers is probably the biggest social Q&A website with over 70 million users. It is estimated that has a collection of in excess of 250 million answers written in English. To take advantage of the second most popular reference website after Wikipedia, just sit down, listen and learn what problems people currently have and offer solutions for those problems. trendwatching.com is a leading trend firms. trendwatching.com has 8,000+ trend spotters across the world constantly analysing and identifying the most promising consumer trends. Their findings are aggregated in a free, monthly Trend Briefing and an annual report. Shopping.com Consumer Demand Index makes it easy for you to put your finger on the pulse of consumer demand. With millions of shopping searches conducted each week, the CDI reveals emerging trends and hidden gems while highlighting the hottest products. With so many resources for gathering demographics data and customer behaviour information there's no excuse not to know your market and stay ahead your competition. Internet Marketing 2008-08-21 14:25:29 http://www.i-com.net/blog/top-25-marketing-research-and-analysis-tools-77/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/using-google-insights-for-market-research-72/ Google Insights for Search provides additional features aimed to help advertisers and marketers understand search patterns and visitors' behaviour. Google Insights for Search allows you, for example, to determine the seasonality of any market, or establish the geographical distribution of a given search term. The ability to obtain this type of data is precious and surely gives you an edge over your competition, whether you need to fine-tune your pay per click ads, evaluate the market potential of your next business venture, or find popular keyphrases for your SEO campaigns. Below are some examples of how Google Insights for Search can be used for market research. Let's say this fictitious company - Gardening Outlet Ltd is enjoying great success in the UK and want to expand their business to the United States. In Google Insights, I've selected the "Locations" option under "Compare by"; the relevant geographical locations under "Locations", and in "Filter" I've used a popular keyword for the gardening industry. The graphical heat map pictured below indicates that there is a greater demand for "gardening supplies" in Wisconsin, Colorado, Oregon and Massachusetts than anywhere else in the US. Hence these states would be the ideal places for Gardening Outlet Ltd to begin their US campaign. Google Insights for Search also reveals search terms related to "gardening supplies" in the form of top all time searches and rising searches, the latter being useful to identify new trends. Gardening Outlet Ltd can also establish the seasonality of the demand for certain products using Google Insights. I've selected the "Time ranges" option under "Compare by"; the relevant years or time ranges under " Time Ranges ", and in "Filter" I've used "lawnmower". The "interest over time" graph pictured below clearly indicates that April and May have much greater demand for lawnmowers. To make things easier you can export your findings as a CSV file to your favourite spreadsheet editing software. It would be impossible to describe everything Google Insights does in this article. I will certainly continue experimenting with it for analysing potential markets for our clients' advantage. Anyway, feel free to leave comments below, highlighting how you're using Google Insights for Search or Google Trends. Advanced Search Marketing 2008-08-14 08:46:50 http://www.i-com.net/blog/using-google-insights-for-market-research-72/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/googlebotrsquos-hot-date-59/ Google has published an article on the Google Webmaster Central Blog explaining the relationship between the Googlebots and crawled websites. I have to say that it's somewhat cheesy the way it has been addressed by emulating a conversion in a hot date between the website and the Googlebot. However, it's worth reading as it explains how Googlebot interacts with websites and how it navigates through them. For example, if Googlebot is crawling for web search it ignores .JPG or .MP3 files, or if it's crawling for Google Scholar it prioritises .DOC or .PDF files. The article also addresses other subjects which are continuously discussed in the search engine optimisation world such as file extensions, gzip compression and the robots.txt file. Search Engine Optimisation 2008-07-23 10:28:37 http://www.i-com.net/blog/googlebotrsquos-hot-date-59/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/canonical-urls-seo-and-htaccess-54/ It is very common for web sites to have multiple urls pointing to the same page. This happens especially to a website's home page and  where content management systems generate dynamic urls. It wouldn't be wrong to say that the following urls are all the same: http://helloworld.com http://helloworld.com/index.html http://www.helloworld.com http://www.helloworld.com/index.html   In actual fact they are, and typically all the above web addresses would display the same web page. From a SEO perspective that's where the problem lies. Search engines are aware of this issue and know that a web server could display distinct pages for all the urls above. Thus they would try to pick the best urls in this group, causing you to lose control of how your site is displayed in the SERPs. The Google engineer, Matt Cutts, explains canonical urls in more detail in his blog. The key to prevent duplicate urls is to be consistent. It is important that you use "/" instead of "index.html" when you link to the home page from other pages within your site. Further, pick the url you prefer (with or without www's) and stick to it for both incoming and internal links. If your web site is hosted on an Apache server you can use a file called .htaccess to instruct the web server to 301 redirect the canonical urls. There are two ways of doing this: Options +FollowSymlinksRewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^helloworld.com [NC]RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www. helloworld.com/$1 [L,R=301] The above rule tells the server if "helloworld.com" is requested to permanently redirect to "http://www.helloworld.com". Options +FollowSymlinksRewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. helloworld \.com$RewriteRule (.*) http://www. helloworld.com/$1 [R=301,L] This rule tells the server if "www.helloworld.com" was NOT requested to redirect to "http://www.helloworld.com". I personally prefer the second one because it's more flexible and addresses all possible scenarios. Search Engine Optimisation 2008-07-17 08:58:06 http://www.i-com.net/blog/canonical-urls-seo-and-htaccess-54/ http://www.i-com.net/blog/google-friends-connect-preview-release-34/ Google Friend Connect is a new service which is set out to grow the number of visitors by making your web site more social. Google Friend Connect makes it easy to enhance your web site's social and viral features, such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing. All without programming!To add Google Friend Connect to your web site you just need to add a few lines of code in your web pages where you want the gadgets to appear.  Your visitors will be able to login to your site using their Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account.  And connect with their friends from Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and other OpenSocial enabled applications. Sharing is also easy as it is also possible to invite friends (and friends-of-friends) from their contacts without leaving your site. Google Friends Connect hasnt been public released since it is in development phase, but you can sign up for a preview release. Social Media Marketing 2008-06-19 08:41:37 http://www.i-com.net/blog/google-friends-connect-preview-release-34/