Open Site Explorer is Pretty Slick

From a marketing and a public relations standpoint this tool is brilliant. Rand just put up a full in-depth review here.

In the past I have not been a fan of certain outing policies, but of late I have seen that practice has went away…and if it stays that way how could I not recommend the above tool?

Sometimes it is hard to appreciate how spoiled we are as SEOs with cheap to free keyword data, cheap to free great link data, and lots of useful tools to help us organize and make sense of it all. And even lots of charts

One area where some of our tools could be better is on the usability front…we tend to presume some level of knowledge and/or the willingness to work through things to figure them out, but the presentation on OSE is very easy to grasp & understand at first glance. Part of this challenge comes from limited resources…and the most limiting one being time. It is so hard to make money servicing the SEO market (because there are so many great free options). As the market continues to open up more with more tools and options, at the same time the SEO *process* keeps getting more complex, with more competitors jumping into the SEO market.

It certainly feels like it will keep getting easier to make money as a publisher rather than a person servicing the SEO market.

But not all forms of publishing will get easier & more profitable. Companies like Demand Media and Aol sharing their results publicly will saturate some segments, but there are many areas where bullshit content won’t be enough to compete. And some thin operations will see margin contraction as the investment needed to stay competitive increases.

But we are quite literally drowning in opportunity. If a person can’t make money as a publisher with SEO knowledge, it is simply because they are not willing to put in the effort (or they are part of an old bureaucratic publishing company which moves slowly, is debt laden, and has a high cost structure).

I have always avoided scaling as a company, but there is so much opportunity that I might have a resolution for 2010

Firefox 3.5 Currently Most Popular Browser in the World

According to data from StatCounter, Mozilla’s web browser Firefox 3.5 is now the world’s most popular browser. It has just surpassed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7, which has been steadily declining.

For December 20, StatCounter has IE 7 at 21.2% market share, and Firefox 3.5 at 21.93%. Microsoft’s IE 8 is closing in though. Its share has been steadily increasing, presumably making up for most of the lost IE 7 share, and has approached 20.33%.

The top browsers are as follows:

1. Firefox 3.5
2. IE 7
3. IE 8
4. IE 6
5. Firefox 3.0
6. Other
7. Safari 4.0
8. Firefox 2.0
9. Opera 9.6

Last month Mozilla celebrated the fifth birthday of the Firefox browser. They said that in the first four days of launch, over a million people downloaded Firefox 1.0. Firefox is available in over 70 languages and offers over 7,000 add-ons.

Firefox 3.5 also had over a million downloads in its first day of launch, and Mozilla surpassed a billion downloads in late July. Firefox has come a long way in five years and has really given Microsoft a run for its money in the web browser space.

Related Articles:

> Mozilla Celebrates The Fifth Birthday Of Firefox

> 8 Firefox Add-Ons to Boost Productivity

> Firefox Nears 1 Billion Downloads

I Stopped Caring About Links (Well, Almost)

Recently on Twitter a couple people mentioned that we should create tools similar to our Firefox extensions for Google Chrome. Then on TechCrunch there was a comment “As soon as I see the SEO Book toolbar for Chrome, I’ll be glad to uninstall Firefox.” I read that and thought news to me.

First of all I think it is a bad idea because if Google owns the search engine and the browser then maybe that is not the best spot to have your SEO research stuff hooked up, but even beyond that I don’t think we would make $1 more by creating those tools. Why? Because the people who use Google Chrome for SEO research are not the type of people who want to pay for anything related to SEO (outside of buying links perhaps).

My buddy Patrick from BlogStorm mentioned ‘Imagine all the links you would get from people writing about the “Top 10 Chrome Extensions for SEO”‘ but when you think about it, what kinds of “customers” would those links bring? Entitled demanding and rude non-customers who pollute our sales funnel and waste our time. Eh…not really worth it.

Today a person running a COMMERCIAL SEO company told me “One of my employees loves the hubfinder and is now distraught that it’s not free anymore. What would it take to get access to that tool?” And I responded with “if they are distraught over $300 then frankly they are quite pathetic, IMHO.” He wants to CHARGE his clients, PAYS his employees, and then wants my time FOR FREE to ask how he could get FREE access to the fruits of our labor.

Distraught? Really? I couldn’t imagine having the audacity to send that message.

And the truth is…that is 99%+ of the SEO market…everything should be free except whatever they sell. But we have to PAY $1,000+ a month for a web host, PAY for our vBulletin license, PAY for our SupportSuite license, PAY to license data from other sources, PAY to create tools to collect data, PAY to create new tools, PAY to maintain tools, PAY to advertise, PAY for a design + redesign, PAY for additional servers working creatively on future projects, PAY for the risks associated with being a well known public SEO, PAY to fly out to speak at SEO conferences & share information, PAY for upgrades to the site, SPEND lots of time on creating content for the blog, PAY PAY PAY etc etc etc

We have subscriptions with services like Compete.com and WordTracker because to us they are worth it.Which is why we buy AdWords ads, certain links, access to other sites and services, desktop software like AdvancedWebranking, etc. I have easily spent $100,000’s on consulting, tools, and info-products. Was every purchase profitable? No. But in aggregate, there was plenty of profit to be had.

The people who are selling stuff but who are afraid to spend any money themselves often sell trash. They are not convinced in the value of what they sell (often because it is lacking). Or as Seth puts it…

Money is more than a transfer of value. It’s a statement of belief. An ad agency that won’t buy ads, a consultant who won’t buy consulting, and a waiter who doesn’t tip big—it’s a sign, and not a good one.

You don’t create a real business by being the free infrastructure for someone else’s business while giving it away AND providing 1:1 support. That is why open source works so well…give away the software, but if they want 1:1 support from the source they pay for it. $$$

Yes we could use more links, but that is not a weakness in our business right now…we have something like a quarter million people using our stuff. If anything, I would love to donate some of this site’s links to a few of our affiliate websites.

Imagine having a quarter million+ non-customers. If you are at that scale your problem is not finding a way to get more people at the top of the funnel. At that scale the issue more becomes filtering out the bottom portion of the market without offending the people who might potentially become customers. Assume 5% of the 250,000 people are entitled ___holes. Assume another 5% of them are great people who just happened to have a minor issues in the conversion process (forgot their username, picked the wrong username, registered under the wrong email address, didn’t get the welcome email, etc.). Could you imagine handling 25,000+ personal emails a year? Add in paying customers & media inqueries and now your up above 30,000. And that doesn’t even include making close to 1,000 posts a month in our member forums and reading the nearly 100,000 posts that have been made there! I love the work I do (and love helping people), but I think this really expresses the sentiment nicely.

I had to add the following to our support feedback section to help make the pollution from non-customers more manageable

Free SEO Tool Issues?
A Polite Warning for Non-customers

We run the best SEO website with the deepest and richest customer engagement. But our resources are finite and our time is valuable.

We Give Away Lots of Value, But Our Company is Small

At the same time we have given away some of our free SEO tools to over 100,000 webmasters. We can not provide 1 to 1 support to an audience that large while still providing the amazing customer experience that our paying customers have grown to appreciate and expect. If you are not a PAYING member then we expect you to read the installation and usage documentation before filing a ticket.

Did You Read The Usage Instructions?

Please note that if you are not a PAYING customer AND your issue is with our free SEO tools then we will NOT respond to ANY requests where you have not read the installation and operating instructions from the associated download pages.
SEO Tool Usage + Configuration Instructions

For your convenience here are links to the official resource centers for SEO 4 Firefox, Rank Checker, the SEO Toolber, & the download page. (The download page requires you set up a free account and login to it).

Need to Uninstall a Tool?

If you would like to uninstall something here are 2 ways to do that.

In his book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky stated something along the lines of popularity being an imbalance between supply and demand of attention. Which is precisely why filtering is so important. If you don’t filter out the laggards and freetards you are only holding back your own potential while giving your paying customers an inferior service to what they deserve.

Eventually it gets to where filtering through that noise becomes nearly a full time job. (Lucky for me I work twice as long as just about anyone I know), but anything that makes the sign up process more complex creates more noise (which potentially eats your time + harms your brand while creating 0 income). Plus the above quoted piece from our support section might turn off some potential clients…but it is always a game of filtering…help as many people as you can and hopefully try not to offend many people.

What we are scarce on is time. And that is also what many people new to SEO are scarce on. And what people who are willing to pay for correct information with rich context are short on.

Working through all the hype and misinformation and scammy offers can be a bit overwhelming. To a person who is new to SEO, it is already confusing enough to decide…

• which tools offer real value
• if they should use any software
• if they should use free or paid tools
• what combination of software to use

And if we duplicate our tools for many different browsers then that ends up increasing the maintenance cost WHILE harming conversion rates (because people don’t know what they should chose, or why you have so many tools doing the same thing).

The capital and efforts spent creating (and maintaining) a second or third set of duplicative free SEO tools would be better spent creating more paid tool & content for our paying subscribers.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth – More Than Just A Broken Links Finder

Posted by Tom_C

There are literally a bazillion SEO tools on the internet (literally!), this post discusses just one such tool; Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Many people in the SEO industry are already aware of this tool but many people I’ve spoken to only treat the tool as a broken link finder. It’s so much more than that.

This post is aimed at those who haven’t heard of it before and those who do use it regularly – there are lots of nifty features that solve all kinds of SEO-problems and hopefully beginners and advanced alike will learn something from this post.

What is Xenu?

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a FREE download (everyone loves free) that runs on all versions of Windows (but not quite on Macs unfortunately). It’s a lightweight download and I’ve never had issues with it crashing or hanging. In a nutshell it’s a site crawler and once you point it at a URL it will crawl around the site and spit out a report at the end. It’s main focus and branding is all about finding broken links on your site (so where you link internally to a 404 error) but I’ve found that I use it to solve a whole host of different SEO-related issues which I will explain below.

Problem – How do I find broken links on my site?

This is the most basic use of Xenu in my opinion, but also the most common use. Simply point the program at the homepage of your site, check ’skip external’ to avoid it crawling the entire web, and set it going!

Click here to view a sample report provided by Xenu for the Distilled site (note that this is a sample report only, not run across the whole site).

You can see that there is a handy section which reports any broken links that it finds, though in this case I’ve chosen a rather poor example since there are no broken links on the homepage of Distilled

Problem – How do I get a crawl of my site into microsoft Excel?

The answer to this one, as you may have guessed is also Xenu! Simply choose the following menu option once the report is run:

Then, when you run the report and export to excel redirects will no longer get the status code 200 but will get the true status code, be it 301 or 302! Perfect.

Problem – How do I check the indexing of a test version of my site?

Xenu of course! If your test version lies at a public URL such as testsite.distilled.co.uk then you can just point Xenu at that URL. However, if that’s not an option then you can even run Xenu off a local HTML file which is pretty nifty:

Problem – How do I generate an XML sitemap for my site?

Although there are many many ways of generating an XML sitemap for your site, Xenu does this in a quite nice (if not particularly customisable) way. This is perfect for small site owners with limited technical knowledge I think:

Problem – How do I find images missing alt text?

If only Xenu would do such a thing…. Wait, it does! Simply filter your excel download to image files, then the “Title” column is the alt text of the image:

Well that’s just a few of the many many applications of the Xenu tool – hopefully it’s inspired you to go out and give it a try – I know I use it a lot for all kinds of things. I mean, once you get your data into Excel the world is literally your oyster. Mmmmmm data oysters.

But wait! That’s not all – I reached out to Rich Baxter as I know he’s a very knowledgeable and smart SEO and he uses Xenu a lot. I asked him if he had any killer tips and here’s his killer tip. Thanks a lot Rich for getting me this at short notice:

Crawling web directories, looking for errors (By Rich Baxter)

Xenu’s not just a great tool to look inside your own site, it’s also pretty powerful for crawling external resources like directories, particularly if you’re looking for a domain to buy.

Try crawling dmoz.org, being sure to restrict Xenu’s access to “editors.dmoz.org”, but allow the crawler to “check external links”.

Quite quickly you’ll start finding “not found” URL errors from directory entries that might have been forgotten, on domains that may not yet have expired. Just sort by “status” in the crawl results table in Xenu. Here’s one I found earlier. I’m pretty sure that with the right offer via SEDO, the owner of fridgemagnet.org.uk (with its 634 sub domain links) might be interested in selling before the domain expires.

I’ve always found the “Copy URL”, Google cache and Wayback Machine links invaluable on a right mouse click on the results you’re interested in:

As a side note: If you are crawling external resources, try to be a good citizen and crawl slowly. Set your maximum threads to a very low level, so as not to get your IP banned by your target host.

Thanks Rich! Great tips. Let’s get link sleuthing! If anyone has any other creative/useful uses for Xenu please share them in the comments.

In other news, there’s still time to get your FREE SES Chicago Pass by purchasing a year of PRO! (If Chicago’s not your thing, SES will let you exchange the pass for any SES Event in 2010). SES just raised their prices to $1995 for a pass, so $799 for an entire year of PRO and a full-access SES Pass is an awesome deal

You’ve also still got 7 days left to get super-low release pricing on the brand-new SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics six-disk DVD set! Until December 6th, you can get this killer new series for 20% off and Free Shipping anywhere in the world. Hundreds of people have already ordered and supplies are limited, so take advantage while the price is low, and this limited-edition set is still available.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Enrich Your Google Search Results Page with Kikin

I never grow tired of reviewing more and more tools that expand the possibilities of Google search. I already took a look at tools that allow to see Twitter search results within Google SERPs and a few addons that generate relevant results from other sources (like Wikipedia, Youtube and other).

And here’s one more tool that retrieves search results from more sites: Kikin is the FireFox addon that “enriches and personalizes your browsing and search experience by adding results from your preferred social media websites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, eBay, etc).

Install:

Just click “Download”, allow FireFox to show you the pop-up from this site and install the tool. Re-start the browser and you are done.

Customize:

Go to TOOLS FireFox menus and select “My kikin“. You’ll be taken to the the kikin website where you will be able to customize your settings. To always see results from sources, select the green button. To only see results when they are relevant to your search, select the yellow button. To never see results from a source, select the red button.

Note 1: you will need to allow access to Kikin Facebook application to get the results from Facebook.

Note 2: you will also be able to search your Twitter stream if you connect the tool to your Twitter account.

Use:

Just search for anything that you are interested in and notice a cute box above the Google search results. Click through the tabs to see relevant results from the sources you set up in the options:

Warning:

The tool won’t work for me when I am using Google toolbar to search. I am not sure why. So if this happens to you, try deleting extra URL parameters in the Google search string appended by the toolbar. Hopefully, this bug will be fixed or clarified.

The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Enrich Your Google Search Results Page with Kikin

Next Page »