Caydel’s SEO Blog

It has long been a question asked tongue in cheek - Sex, or Chocolate?

For a definitive response, I turned to Google Trends. Sex is in blue, Chocolate is in red.

As you can see, sex is by far more important to Google users than chocolate. Looking a bit more into it, I decided to see how money stacked up. Once again Sex is in blue, Money is in red:

Once again, we can see that sex is even more important than money. So, now I guess we really know what drives society!

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Today, for my employer, I am creating a list of top SEO resources for him top refer to after I leave here permanently tomorrow. Here is what I have so far, if anyone has any recommendations or comments on the list, I would really appreciate them! I want to keep the list somewhat compact though - If I hand him a list of 20,000 different links, I can guarantee none would be read…

SEO / Keyword Analysis Links

Overture Tools -Overture is a search engine which used to power yahoo for a while. Generally gets 20% or less of the traffic that Google would get, so vary your stats accordingly.

1. http://inventory.overture.com/ - The Overture Inventory gives the search volume in the last month for the keywords you specified, along with the search volume of related keywords.

2. http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/ - The Overture Bidtool shows the highest bids currently placed upon a certain term within the Overture Search Marketing system, which is very similar in style to Google Adwords. Generally the prices reflected here are 60%-70% of what equivelent keywords would be bid on through the Google Adwords system.

WordTracker – Wordtracker is a paid service to analyze keywords, and links, to find the keywords and phrases that would be the most efficient to target through the use of their ‘Keyword Efficiency Index’.

3. http://wordtracker.com/

DigitalPoint Tools – There are more in the right-hand Nav bar under ‘Webmaster Tools’

4. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ - This tool will check against the Wordtracker and Overture engines to find search volume for given keywords, in addition to suggesting other terms

5. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/ - This tool will track rankings and backlinks for a given website or page… Register and check it out – it is very useful.

Other Tools

5. http://chkdom.com/ - As the title states, ‘A Quick Tool to Check a Domain’. This will check indexed pages, backlinks and saturation on the big three engines.

6. – The Yahoo SiteExplorer shows the indexed pages and backlinks in the Yahoo Engine. Yahoo shows *all* their backlink data, sorted by link weight. IE, your best backlinks are at the top.

7. http://www.seomoz.org/tools/kwtool.php – The SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool allows you to run tests and reports on keywords, to determine the difficulty of ranking for certain keywords. While you are at SEOmoz, make sure to read the articles at: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php and http://www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php

SEO Websites – These websites show the latest in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing news…

1. Search Engine Roundtable: http://www.seroundtable.com/ - Search Engine Roundtable reports on the most active threads in the SEO/SEM forums.

2. Search Engine Watch Blog - http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/ - More Cutting Edge Search Engin News

3. Threadwatch - http://www.threadwatch.org/ - Important - this is a daily read….

4. SEOmoz Blog - http://www.seomoz.org/blog.php – SEOmoz is great SEO company from the states. Their blog alsways has interesting SEO tips and tidbits…

5. SEOBook Blog - http://www.seobook.com/blog.php – This blog is written by one of the top minds in the SEO industry. Although I’ve never read it, his book is considered to be one of the best in the industry.

Recommended Webmaster Forums – In addition to the below, watch for forums referenced in the Search Engine Roudtable pages – they will generally be very good sources for information.

1. DigitalPoint Forums - http://forums.digitalpoint.com – All webmaster talk, all the time. Lots to learn about here

2. eWealth Forums - http://www.ewealth.com – More affiliate marketing related, great if you want to monetize website traffic

Misc. Resources - Public outcry has prompted me to add these as well:

1. 
   
   
2. Webmaster Radio - http://www.webmasterradio.fm - the source for constant webmaster/SEO broadcast shows, with an awesome chat room….

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I was just perusing the latest Cartoon Barry post by Barry Schwartz regarding an error in the title of a recent post at Search Engine watch.

To quote,

I was wondering why I didn’t get a hundred emails from people who noticed this typo. I mean, it was like that for well over an hour. So I asked the IRC WebmasterRadio.FM chat room and one person said…

that is actually pretty funny…. I saw that in my RSS reader and, while it confused the hell outta me, I just accepted it that you guys knew more than me, and it was some type of weird investemnt-related terminology

Wow, dangerous.
Yes, that is me in the chatroom. In my own defence, I know I know nothing about investments and related matters. I just assumed that greater minds than mind knew what they were talking about…

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A recent post by Stundbl today got me pointed towards CrazyEgg.com. CrazyEgg.com provides a service by which you can track how many visitors, and clicks you get to your site, as well as the location of the clicks and more - a really cool service. If you want a better idea of what they do, or to see that stats they can and will produce, check out their demo.

The tracking is really easy to set up; merely place a single line of javascript onto the page you wish to track. The only complaint I have is that their free version is somewhat limited; of course, that *is* the nature of business. As it is, the free version still hold a lot of promise for helping you to optimize your content based on information concerning user behaviour on your site.
According to the latest post on the CrazyEgg blog, the initial problems they were experiencing after the launch have somewhat cleared up, and they are stabilizing. I would recommend signing up, and seeing what they can do for your site!

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Now, before I go any further, let me make a few things clear:

• Spiceworks is an ad-supported program. By removing the ads, you are depriving the development team of their funding. In essence you are stealing the software from them.
• Spiceworks is not open source software. This means that you are not allowed to modify the code for your own uses.
• Removing the ads is probably illegal.

So, why am I posting this? Well, for a few reasons:

• I was having issues with the ads loading - they were timing out, making each page take 30+ seconds to load, and making the software somewhat unuseable.
• Many tech people have adblocker software that is blocking the ads already.
• This is to illustrate a point that I plan to make in an upcoming post.

That said - here is a quick way to remove the ads in Spiceworks. What tools do you need? Nothing. You need notepad, and the Windows Explorer.

An immediate observation I made when first looking at Spiceworks is that it is written in Ruby on Rails. All other things inside, that immediately indicated that somewhere, there was an .rhtml file which contained the layout code to include the ad block.

So, immediately, I performed a serach of the program directory, and found all the .rhtml files.

The two which you need to edit are:

• C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\spiceworks-0.8.3616\app\views\layouts\common\_ads.rhtml
• C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\spiceworks-0.8.3616\app\views\layouts\common\_sidebar.rhtml

To remove the ads, simply open both the above files in notepad. Remove all the contents from _ads.rhtml, leaving it completely empty. Remove everything within the “adbox” div tag.

If you would rather place your own ads in the sidebar, or the other content of your choice, perhaps links, or other content, you can also edit

C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\spiceworks-0.8.3616\app\views\ads\adiframe.rhtml

replacing the contents within the tage with whatever you want to appear there. You could even place your own ads into the spiceworks install if you wanted.

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Now the point of this post is not to rant and rave about how good Spiceworks is like some cheap PR release, or paid post. Rather, in implementing Spiceworks, and seeing their architecture, and the unique way that they market themselves, it got me thinking about a few issues in Software development and marketing that I will flesh out a bit in my next few posts. But, I figured an introduction to the rpogram, and what it does is probably good background material…

At the beginning of the summer, my employer was thinking about setting up a type of network/system monitoring solution to keep track of the 50+ systems we ahve in our office and shop. We looked into a couple of options at the time, and started to set up IRM. IRM (Information Resource Manager) was a great program for what we needed, or so it looked. Of course, the setup was monstrous, with hours spent handbombing in information and data, copying CD-keys, tons and tons of work. We stuck with it for a few days, and finally put that project on hold due to other deadlines coming up etc. etc. etc.

Fast forward to yesterday. A friend of mine on an IRC channel a frequent sent me a link to Spiceworks.com. I looked at Spiceworks, and it is really slick - just need to download it and install it, and it automatically scans your network, picks up systems, determines which OS and software is installed, which services are running, etc. It alerts you to any problems in your network, monitors drives for space, or out-of-date antivirus information and more. Best of all, it’s free!

Actually, not true - the best thing is the Spiceworks is written in Ruby on Rails…

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So over the last few days, I had noticed that my blog’s popularity has gone through the roof - today, there are neraly 10x the number of subscribers that there were a week ago. This came as a surprise to me, as I was in the midst of a dry spell, with non new articles in a bit that would trigger this type of subscription rush…

Well, it has all been made (somewhat) clear.

It appears that many of the new subscribers came by way of Damien Tanner of the IAmRice blog, when he released a list of his personal fovourite Ruby on Rails feeds. Lucky for me, I happened to be included on this list.

At any rate, to all the new readers I have picked up via Damien’s link, thanks for reading - I hope you will find my mindless drivel somewhat entertaining, and at times, enlightening. If you came from somewhere else, drop me a line in the comments, and let me know - I am always curious how visitors find my blog.

By the way, Technorati has not caught any of the updates of the past eight days to this blog… Does anyone have any idea why that would be? I have tried manually pinging them, replacing the embed code, etc. etc. etc. with no luck… Let me know if anyone can figure out what it takes to get them back on track…

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