It’s nearly 80 degress and sunny outside today in good’ol Brooklyn. It’s unfortunate that we have to be inside on a great day like this but to make things a little better, I’ve decided to give away free stumbles today for the entirety of the workday (for me until about 7:30-8:00 EST). All you have to do is post your to be stumbled link in the comments section and I’ll give it a thumbs up or submit it if it hasn’t been already. The only condition is it has to pertain to seo, sem, social media, wed design, essentially anything pertaining to this site’s industry or niche. So let’er rip and have a good weekend!

I decided to have a little fun today and created a page publishing tweet scan feeds based on search terms like linkbait, link building, and social bookmarking. Potentially, I can now find out about new sites and strategies pertaining to these topics all on one page instantly. Leave a comment below if there’s anything else you’d like me to add.

This is just a theory but I think it’s pretty sound. I was setting up Feedburner for a client earlier this morning and I was in the feed flare section where you can add additional services to your flare. I noticed there was a link to a catalogue of services. Clicking on this link brought me to a large list of sites that one could potentially add to their blog feed. Since Feedburner is now a Google operation, I’m guessing that these sites are trusted in Google’s eyes. Good to know when spreading the word.

Add This - Mass bookmarking blog widget
Add To Any - Mass bookmarking blog widget
Authorati - Socially rates your blog posts
Blinklist - Social bookmarking
Connotea - Online reference management for researchers
Crossfeednews - Religious News
del.icio.us - Social bookmarking
Digg - Social News
DotNetKicks - .NET and ASP programming social news
Facebook - Social network
Fark - Comedy/odd social news
Furl - Social bookmarking
Google Bookmarks - Social bookmarking
Kontrib - Multilingual socialbookmarking
Memeame - Spanish Social News
Mister Wong - Social bookmarking
Netvouz - Social bookmarking
Newsvine - Social news
Onlywire - Mass bookmarking service
Outside.in - Geolocational news tracking
Propeller - Social news
Reddit - Social news
Simpy - Social bookmarking
Slashdot - Social news
Sphere - Relevant content matching blog widget
Stumbleupon - Social bookmarking
TechBuzz - Tech social news
Technorati - Blog aggregator
Twitter - Mirco blogging/life streaming
Windows Live Favorites - Social bookmarking
Windows Live Spaces - Social Weblog
Yahoo! Bookmarks - Social bookmarking
Yahoo! 360 - Social Weblog
Yigg - German version of Digg

Paul Bragiel, former co-founder of Meetro ( an instant messaging service with geolocational functionality) is now introducing a new take on something tried and true. The Forum. Bragiel’s team of designers and programmers have created Lafora. Think standard forum plus, blog and news integration, embedded photos and video fuctionality, automatic newsletter generation for forum admins, WYSIWYG editors for publishing, threaded comments, member profiles generated from the by the topics participated in, a hottest topics section, forum search (search for content within all Lefora forums), unread message tracking, and lastly but certainly not leastly, everything has been SEO’ed! Sounds pretty cool right? Visit Lefora and be one of the first to take advantage of Lefora’s free forum hosting!

Screen Shots:

So over the weekend I attended a social dinner event here in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area of Brooklyn. It was a great party with some really interesting people. As the night progressed, there were about four or five folks who asked me “do you Tumbl”? What an odd question I thought. Do I Tumbl?! I asked the first two people to explain themselves and they slightly recoiled in embarrassment or dismissed my inquiry as if I wouldn’t understand any explanation they could deliver. When the third person asked me this I was determined to know what they hell they were talking about. Now, I consider myself to be 110% in the know about anything pertaining to social media. I’m usually aware of new initiatives, programs, apps, site changes, whatever. Yet I had never heard of Tumblr. Oddly enough the explanations I received from people weren’t accurate. They had me convinced that Tumblr was A) like twitter and, B)a way to sync your blog with a community timeline. A) is kind of true but B) was not. Tumblr is probably the easiest way to start a blog. It’s incredibly simple (the website claims you can start blogging in about 10 minutes) and it is very similar to Twitter but more robust. You can add text, photos, chat, audio, and video. It also has to ability to be completely social. Much like Twitter you can follow people but you can also join or start groups. I can see this having a lot of potential for many different types of projects.

I found that there were about eight people at the dinner event that had planned a meetup. They all Tumbled and they all followed each other’s Tumblr blogs. They were all very much into cooking as this is what the event was mostly about. It was interesting to see a previously unknown online app bring people together like this. I was sure to know about an app with that kind of social power but before that night I never heard of Tumblr. I’m glad I now know about it and I’m seriously considering using it in the near future.

I had never been to the monthly Web 2.0 Meetups before and figured it would be a good networking opportunity. These Meetups are a creation of Brett Petersel from NextWeb. From what I can gather off of the website, NextWeb is composed of four dudes, Chris Boucher (Sales), Brett Petersel (Founder), Oz Sultan (Technology), and Johnathan Dingman.

The Meetup was held at Webster hall which is mostly used as a 18+ club. The place was a dark and stale cave but you get that anyway with many of NYC’s old buildings. For a rainy Monday evening the turnout was quite impressive. I don’t know what the headcount was but there are 186 confirmed attending on Facebook and 90 maybes. From the looks of it, I’d guess there were around 200 people in attendance.

First up was Jack Bury of EyeBees.com. Jack buddy, you’ve got to work on your power point and presentation skills man. That was rough going in the beginning but once the Q&A started things got a little interesting. EyeBees is a snippet of code that one can place on their site so when people visit, this little floating box pops up illustrating others who are on the site at the same time. You can then click on their little dots inside the box and chat with them. During the presentation about 12 different users logged on to the same website that was up on the presentation screen. We could see all the little dots present in the EyeBees box. I think the general audience response was that of being mildly impressed and personally I don’t see an application of this nature being practical for all websites but for some I think it could be really beneficial. Websites that are based around common health issues or illnesses, hobbies, or niche interest sites.

Next was Ben Kaufman of Kluster. This guy was a loud ball of energy and was quite a refreshing contrast. Kluster is really unlike anything I’ve ever heard of. I thought at first it was a Basecamp like app but then Ben got into the details. Kluster uses group decision making and participation to see a project from beginning to end. They use their own monetary system called “Watts” to reward those who participate. The more Watts you have the more influential you are within the system. Kluster can be used for any type of project music production, logo design, toy design. If someone needs a logo created and is willing to pay $500 for this logo, 33% of that $500 will go to Kluster and the remaining money will be the cash prize for the best/chosen logo by the Kluster network. Really interesting idea. Ben says they have about 10,000 members and have only been live for a few weeks. Looks like this company could be catching on. Oh, and thanks for the free drinks guys. Cheers!

Next was Eric Litman of WashingtonVC. WashingtonVC is a brand new VC firm out of yes you guessed it, Washington DC. Eric was the most articulate of the bunch and gave a quick speech about what he does. He then introduced Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV. If you haven’t heard of Gary then you’ve probably been living in a cave (Webster Hall?). Gary took an extremely unusual approach to the promotion of his family’s wine business. He started a website doing wine reviews. Gary admittedly talks about the New York Jets a good portion of the time but that’s what he loves. If I could summarize what Gary said during his speech it would be ‘do what you love and the money will follow’. Although I enjoy a nice glass wine here and there I’m not too into listening to Gary scream about wine or the Jets. However I absolutely applaud his creative approach and ambition. Gary’s speech was the most interesting and inspiring of the evening. He also poured out 60 bottles of wine for the audience. Schlepping those cases down to Webster Hall probably wasn’t a walk in the park. Thanks for that Gary.

Overall the Meetup was pretty good. There was a good turnout and some interesting speakers. The most negative takeaway would be the location of the event. The most positive thing I would have to say was Gary’s speech.

Thanks for putting that together Brett. Maybe I’ll see you again next month.

Undoubtedly it’s a tight race so I wanted to see how Google (the largest gatekeeper of online information) was treating the Democratic front runners. Let’s take a look at Hillary’s rankings first. After all, she is the candidate who gets asked all the questions first

1. Some up-to-date news worthy information from mlive.com, Michigan Election News
   This ranking seems totally fine and makes sense
2. Hillary’s campaign website.
   Displaying a really nice array of site links. Very impressive.
3. Hillary’s splash page.
   Also being indexed. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to be indexed twice AND have site links but hey, she’s taking up some nice real estate here.
4. Hillary’s Wikipedia entry under en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton
   Good, fine, makes sense.
5. Hillary’s second Wikipedia entry under en.wikipedia.orf/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_Clinton
   Ok guys is this really necessary? Don’t get me wrong it’s great for Hillary but rather redundant.

Now for Barack

1. Barack’s Books
   Of course. This is keeping in line with typical Google protocol. Nice.
2. Some up-to-date news worthy information from NPR
   Good, fine, makes sense
3. Barack’s Campaign website
   Good, fine, makes sense
4. Barack’s Wikipedia Entry
   Good, fine, makes sense
5. Barack’s Illinois Website
   Good, fine, makes sense

Barack’s rankings seem to be more appropriate and less redundant than Hillary’s however Hillary is taking a nice chunk of Google real estate with the site links and the dual Wikipedia entries. Why doesn’t Barack have site links? I mean BarackObama.com has 537,000 pages indexed in Google and Hillary has only 53,200! If anyone should have site links it should be Barack!

Let’s look at some stats yeah?

HillaryClinton.com
G: Indexation – 52,300 pages
G: Backlinks – 9,460
Domain Age: 2001
PR6
Alexa: 14,392
Compete: 1,746

BarackObama.com
G: Indexation – 537,000
G: Backlinks – 15,500
Domain Age: 2004
PR6
Alexa: 4,060
Compete: 877

Barack is definitely kicking Hillary to the curb with indexation, backlinks, Alexa, and Compete stats but Hillary has the 7 year old domain and the Google SERP real estate. With Candidates however, they are both authority names and so Google SERP real estate doesn’t really matter a whole lot since we’re searching for their names specifically and not something like, 2008 president of America…I wonder what those results are?

Oftentimes we’re contacted by a potential client who’s really jazzed about starting a new campaign. In fact they are so pumped they’ve read all they can about search optimization and marketing, social media, viral content, digg, etc and they really want to get the ball rolling. Awesome! You get them signed up and everyone’s ready to roll. The site audit begins and their site is put through the checklist. Done! You report back with what you’ve found and their response is…”so what does this mean exactly?” Or, “we like what you’ve found but we LIKE the way our text looks as images”, or “what do you mean we can’t copy the text from all of our newspaper mentions and place them on our blog?”

Sigh…

This post is being written to help explain search engine optimization services, search engine marketing services, and the implemented tactics and strategies that go with them so we can hopefully put some of these reactions to bed. I want to help educate and make everyone’s lives a little easier. So here are a list of non-Wikipedia sites that have great glossaries on terms pertaining to search engine optimization, marketing, tactics, and general jargon. I did consider writing out these definitions here but why rehash what so many others have done so well. My favorite finds were:

SEOBook
Aaron continues to successfully build his mini-empire and I was not surprised to find this amazingly thorough glossary attached to his domain. He just about covers everything here. Quite a task and accomplishment.

SEMPO
SEMPO has a great glossary in their learning center. This one is a little more concise in terms of tech talk.

SEOmoz
Who doesn’t love these guys right? They have a page from their YOUmoz section that has a nice write-up of SEO jargon provided by David LaFerney

Webmaster World
Here is a nice user contributed list of various terms. The date range on the posts here is from July 2007 – August 2007 so it may be a little outdated. As you could imagine the total definition list isn’t really organized/alphabetized so you may have to browser search your sought phrase.

Besides Wikipedia these were the four best resources I could find. If you know of any others please submit them in the comments below.

Now let’s have a little fun. Let’s see how each glossary defines a certain term. How about social media?

SEOBook
Define: Social Media

“Websites which allow users to create the valuable content. A few examples of social media sites are social bookmarking sites and social news sites.”

SEMPO
Define: Social Media

“Sites where users actively participate to determine what is popular.”

SEOmoz
Define: Social Media

“Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.”

Webmaster World
Social Media not defined

I think I like David LaFerney’s from YOUmoz the best.

I received an email from a Gabriel Jonsson this morning about a some new service called Yooba. I get these emails all the time, “visit us and check it out, sign up for our newsletter, join our facebook group”, etc. It was a well written email which grabbed my attention so I clicked-on over to their domain to see what they’re all about. I was greeted with a really, really cool animation video that could give Pixar a run for their money. I don’t know how much it costs to build something like that but I’m thinking it’s no easy task. So of course the video got me, that’s the point. So I poked around a bit more, they asked me to sign up for their beta testing and join their Facebook group which I willingly did.

Apparently this service is supposed to be an all-in-one for internet marketers It will allow you to “create, publish, and evaluate”. I still don’t fully understand this and went to the Facebook group to find more. Here’s a post published not 24 hours ago by Gabriel about the Yooba service.

Ok guys. I think it’s time to add a little clarity to the description of this service. Mark’s final question was: What will your tools allow marketers to do? A lot of people who visit the website ask the same question. And now I want to give some inside information to our facebook group members.

As you probably already have seen we define the service by three words: Create - Publish - Evaluate. Let’s explain the concepts behind these words.

Yooba lets you create different kinds of online content for marketing purposes. It can be anything from a simple ad to a full scale interactive campaign. Yooba provides a browser based flash/flex application that possesses everything you need to design and create your content. You don’t need any programming or artistic skills. If you just have a creative idea, you can have it published in no time.

The publishing is a simple procedure. You can put your creation anywhere you want. Yooba takes care of the hosting. Since Yooba is a completely web based service, you can work from any computer you want, and you can create and save projects and publish them later.

Finally we come to the evaluation part. Maybe the most important one in a marketing manner. Yooba provides a backend system that gives you feedback on your published content in form of information and statistics.

Hopefully that cleared up a few questionmarks.

Ok…a little bit clearer but I’m still at a loss. Maybe it’s a new blog CMS on steroids? I guess I’ll just have to wait until spring to test it out.

This post is an ode to Matt McGee’s post How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes. I found myself using this as a quick reference from time to time when first published. It was a great write-up that was very useful to many people. I always wanted to expand on this a bit and have the search community add to it so here’s my new and updated checklist for your review. If there’s anything I missed please add it in the comments below.

Contents
SEO Checklist
A: Homepage
B: Site
C: External

SEO Checklist
A1: Homepage - www.domain.com
1. Check for redirects and canonicalization issues
2. Choose http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com
3. Redirect domain.com/(index|main).(html|htm|php|cfm|asp) to domain.com

Apache redirects and editing .htaccess files:
domain.com to www.domain.com
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.html [NC]
RewriteRule . / [R=301,L]

www.domain.com/index.php to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.php [NC]
RewriteRule . / [R=301,L]

A2: Homepage – Navigation
1. Check for image, drop downs, javascript, image maps vs text navigation. Text is the best option.

A3: Homepage – Content
1. How much text is present? The more the better.
2. Check for keyword density in homepage content
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
3. Check for use of H2 tags and bold fonts (light/appropriate use is good on keywords)
4. There should be a sitemap present
5. Do a select all (ctrl + A) to find potentially hidden text
6. Check to see how search engines will view your site with SEO Browser. Make sure everything is crawlable.

B1: Site – Meta Tags
1. Check Title tags. Are they using keywords and are formatted correctly?

Brand authority formatting:
Brand Name or Domain | Keyword, Keyword & Keyword

Non brand authority formatting
Keyword, Keyword & Keyword | Brand Name or Domain

2. Check Descriptions for keywords and composition. Make sure the description gets to the point and speaks to the purpose/content on its respective page in the first couple sentences.

3. Make sure the keyword tag contains around 5 – 10 keywords. No more or less is really necessary.

4. Make sure there are no duplicate meta tags anywhere, site wide.

B2: Site – URL Formatting
1. Check url formatting. Dynamic URLs are bad. URLs that are too long will be truncated in Google SERPs.
2. URLs should contain keywords separated by hyphens.
3. Hyphens are more preferable than underscores
4. Keywords in URLs should match the content contained within the page they are leading to.

B3: Analytics
1. Make sure you have some sort of analytics installed. It doesn’t have to be Google analytics but do remember that every page within the site should contain the analytic tracking code.

B4: Site – Links
1. Links should contain keywords
2. Links should contain titles utilizing keywords
3. Anchor text, link keywords, link title, and page being linked to should be relevant to one another.
4. Site linking structure should be cyclical. There should be no dangling pages.
5. Use Xenu Link Sleuth to check for broken links

B5: Site – nofollows (advanced)
1. nofollow TOS, Privacy Policy, or other pages that don’t contribute to your site’s ranking.
2. If you know how to link funnel correctly this should be done. I haven’t written anything on this yet but you can consult Slightly Shady SEO or Andy Beard

B6: Site – Robots.txt
1. Check for robots.txt file. Does one exist?
2. See what’s being blocked and what’s not.
3. Make sure it’s written correctly (consult Sebastian’s Pamphlets for best advice)

B7: Site – Duplicate Content
1. Make sure there is no duplicate content within your site
2. Make sure there is no duplicate content on other domains. You can use CopyScape to check for dupe content.

B8: Site – PDF files
1. Does this site contain PDF files? If so these can be optimized with new titles, keywords, and comments. Use Adobe Acrobat Professional to edit PDFs.

B9: Site – Images
1. Images can have ALT tags. Make sure to utilize these appropriately with keywords. When implemented, your site may gain traffic from image search engines like Google Image Search.

C1: External – Indexation
1. Perform a site:domain.com search on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Compare what’s being indexed and what isn’t.
*Install FireFox Extension Search Status by Craig Raw
You’ll be able to easily perform this operative plus many other functions with the Search Status plugin.

C2: External – Backlinks
1. Perform a backlink count with the Search Status plugin.
2. You may also want to install Joost de Valk’s backlink checker plugin for FireFox to check the anchor text of your Backlinks within Yahoo Site Explorer or Google’s Webmaster tools.

So that’s about all I can think of for the time being. If I forgot anything please submit your additions to this checklist in the comments below.