Caydel’s SEO Blog

For the last year or so, I have been regularily been using the Search Status and SEO for Firefox Firefox browser extensions as part of my daily routine for researching competition, SERPS, and sites.

On the recommendation of David Ogletree, I recently install the SeoQuake, just to test it out, and to see if it fit with my workflow better than the two plugins I am currently using. So far I am reasonably impressed, apart from a few small issues; namely that a number of the link checks performed by the tool are broken.

As you can see in the image above, a few of the functions are broken. In both the site-specific bar and the SERP checking functionality of SeoQuake, the Yahoo Link and Link Domain queries always return 0 queries. This is of course an error, since a quick check of the sources indicates that there are a few thousand backlinks returned by both. Addtionally, the MSN link check always returns an error.

This results in the broken SeoQuake being severely handicapped until these bugs are fixed; hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for the next release.

On the positive side, once these bugs are fixed, I will likely include SeoQuake in my regular toolset. Although the SERP information returned by SeoQuake is not quite comprehensive as that returned by SEO for Firefox, it loads quicker, and has a useful per-site caching system, so that if the same site is seen multiple times within different SERPS, it only fetches its information / statistics once. This leads to quicker results when researching similar SERPS within the same niche.

Overall, SeoQuake is quite a cool tool, and I think it will totally rock once they get those bugs out of the works.

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Do you ever hear of a new marketing idea and think to yourself, ‘Man - wish I had thought of that!’?

William Cross, who many of you may know from SeoFox, sent me a press release concerning the launch of his new company, Gadget Spark. Gadget Spark is the first company out the door to market custom Gadgets for the Windows Vista Sidebar.

According to Microsoft,

Gadgets are mini applications with a variety of possible uses. They can connect to web services to deliver business data, weather information, news updates, traffic maps, Internet radio streams, and even slide shows of online photo albums. Gadgets can also integrate with other programs to provide streamlined interaction. For example, a gadget can give you an at-a-glance view of all your online instant messaging contacts, the day view from your calendar, or an easy way to control your media player. Gadgets can also have any number of dedicated purposes. They can be calculators, games, sticky notes, and more.

In the first year alone, Microsoft intends to sell 80-120 MILLION copies of Windows Vista, each with the Vista Sidebar enabled by default. With this sidebar being constantly on the desktop of every Vista user, it is quickly apparent that this will become hot property for marketers.

According to the press release, Gadget Spark envisions three main marketing utilizations of the Sidebar Gadgets (extracted directly from press release):

• Blogging and social networks - People can add gadgets to their own space on a social network such as MySpace and FaceBook. It only requires one person to add it to their space for your personal space to become virally popular.
• Branding - Companies can have their brand or logo displayed on literally millions of computer desktops over the next couple of few years. One click in their Windows Vista side bar takes them to your Websites products or services.
• Affiliate Marketers - can create a mini-application such as a specialized clock, custom calculator, search tool, or anything else that has relevance to the sponsor the marketer is promoting. Gadget Spark can make a gadget that does it and at the same time use affiliate codes to make sure the marketer gets credit for any sales made from the gadget.

Gadget Spark is launching with 15 example gadgets available to the public free of charge, and will develop custom gadgets to fit your needs or marketing purposes for $599.

Care to Give an Example?

William gave a good example of the power of Gadget. Recently he created SEM Tutor, which gives daily marketing tips and tricks. Along with this site, he created a ‘Marketing Tutor‘ gadget which grabs the RSS feed from SEM Tutor, and displays the latest item, in effect presenting a new marketing tip every day via the gadget bar.

Despite having done no promotion of the site so far, William has managed to acquire 500 RSS feed subscribers as reported by Feedburner through the release of the Marketing Tutor gadget. For marketers, this is like acquiring an instant 500 person mailing list - one doesn’t have to think far to see the value in that.

What Makes the Idea So Good?

Now that you have a good idea of Gadget Spark’s business model, and have seen an example of a successful Gadet, I want to do some number crunching for a second to put the final touches on what I think may be the Best Marketing Idea of the Year:

Despite the fact that Vista is only relativly newly launched, by visiting the Microsoft Gadgets website and Windows Live Gallery, you can see that some of the top gadgets have already recieved over a quarter million downloads.

If we look at the numbers for the Gadgets already created by Gadget Spark and posted to the Live Gallery, we can see that even though most have only been online for 4-5 days, many have been downloaded and installed 1500-2000 times.

Assuming Microsoft only sells 80 million copies of Vista in the first year, that will still be many, many times the number of copies that are currently in circulation. If Gadgets maintain the popularity that they currently appear to have, they have the potential be downloaded by hundreds of millions of people. Due to Microsoft’s slow release cycle, any gadgets you create are likely to keep working for you for many years to come.

Roll this all together, and it is quickly apparent what a hot property Gadgets are. By being the first to offer development services in this niche, Gadget Spark should more or less be able to grab the lion’s share of the market. That’s why I think this is will be a strong contender for the Best Marketing Idea of the Year!

P.S. You can to read about the conception of Gadget Spark in William’s own words at SeoFox’s SEM News blog!

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So, today begins my ‘official’ job hunt.

I will be graduating in a few months with my B.Sc. in Computer Science, with a Minor in Mathematics, with a good chunk of Physics in there. I am hoping to get a job either as an SEO, or as a programmer utilizing my talents in Java (SE or EE) or Ruby on Rails. I think I have a lot to offer employers, so we will see how it goes.

So far, I have a Monster.ca account created with my resume on it, and I have applied to a few jobs through it. I’ve even fired off a request to the Canadian Forces to see if they have anything suited to my education. There don’t seem to be tons of openings so far for entry-level jobs though - most listings I am finding on job sites require a minimum of 3-5+ years of experience.

The main problem I am trying to overcome is a lack of professional related job experience - since I am fresh out of school, I only have a coop and a consulting gig to place on my resume. While I have held a number of other jobs over the summers while I was in school, none of them are related. Should I put them on my resume?

Most of my resume information is available on my as well. If anyone knows of any openings that could use a bright, talented, and flexible CS grad with a good knowledge of a bunch of different disciplines (SEO, Programming, Web Design, heck… beekeeping, treeplanting, cabinet making, construction and more!), or can suggest any other places to look for jobs, feel free to pass on the information to me, either by commenting or emailing me at . (remove random underscores :p).

Since this is my first serious job hunt, I really appreciate any and all help and tips! I would really appreciate hearing from any recruiters about any suggestions they could make!

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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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It appears that Microsoft is starting to get protective over their digital property rights. Recently, they have begun a new set of lawsuits against companies, and individuals who have registered large numbers of domains that may possibly infringe on Microsoft-owned Trademarks, such as WindowsLiveTutorial.com and HaloChamps.com.

Once again, a company getting retarded over digital rights. Don’t get me wrong - if someone had a website corresponding to a product name of mine, then I would push to get it back. In Microsoft’s case, I could understand if the were pushing for XBox.com, Windows.com, MSN.com or similar names. But bu targetting sites such as HaloChamps.com, they are shooting themselves in the foot.

While the vast majority of the sites which are being targetted in the lawsuits are merely parked domains which contain Microsoft trademarks, think about what Microsoft is accomplishing with this - in essence, they are killing of their communities.

How many community websites do you see which contain game or product names in the domain or title of the website? I can think of hundreds! By scaring people from using their trademarks, Microsoft is going to stink community support of their products. Who wants to open a website, if they have to be afraid of using certain names and titles in their site lest the Microsoft monkey jumps on their back?

Now, if someone was pretending a direct association with Microsoft ont their site, that would be another story alltogether. And I don’t think they are going after existing, growing community sites. Rather, they are targetting cybersquatters. Nevertheless, I think much of what I have said above with respect to community acceptance holds true.

I am tempted to purchase a Microsoft trademark-infringing domain, and see what type of a response I get - it could be fun to get a C & D notice. As it is, I wonder what will happen to IE7.com… In one of my favourite ironies of the year, some smartass registered it and placed an oversized Firefox banner on it, pointing to the Firefox website….

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From a Digg post:

“SEO Black Hats have found a major loophole in the comment preview of the Moveable Type blogging platform. This exploit let’s them insert active links into any post, avoiding the “nofollow” penalty usually associated. This allows them to artificially inflate the importance of spam websites, leading to less accurate search engine results!”

This is really too bad, seeing as their are hundreds, if not thousands, of high-ranking blogs out there based on the Moveable Type platform…

read more | digg story

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