Peter Vatistas

Being that I am an SEO I need to see live stats and information all the time; fortunately for me Firefox has a lot of great tools for free and extremely easy to use.

SEO tools for Firefox:

1. Search Status: This toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar. I use everything this tool has to offer but my favorite feature is the display of site’s Google PR, Alexa, and Compete at the base of my browser.

2. SEO for Firefox: Aaron Wall from SEOBook had this neat little tool developed and I love it. Tons of stats show for every listing in Google’s SERP whenever you search anything. This tool has to be one of the best SEO tools out there and without it a lot of my time would be wasted.

3. Social Media for Firefox: I already posted about this but this tool is worth the time to write about again. You can see my original post here but for those of you SEO/SEM Social Network guys like myself this tool just rocks and is definitely a major time saver.

Here is a list of other extensions I use including a few other SEO/SEM plug ins:

- SEOpen: This tool packs a ton of SEO tools, most I use daily.

- SEOLinks: Neat little tool that shows link stats with mouse over.

- Link Checker: Don’t get caught with broken links again.

- ShowIP: Love this tool for when I swing DNS records.

- ServerSpy: Great extension to show what type of server & version the site is hosted on (i.e. Apache 2, IIS 7.0, etc).

If your stuck trying to think of new ways to generate more traffic (especially recurring traffic) to your website you may want to look into some form of point or reward system. People by nature are competitive and have a drive to win, adding this environment to your site may prove beneficial.

Already there are hundreds of sites on the net that utilize this and many base the majority of their revenues off of it. I am not interested in the systems out their that actually payout to their member base, like a revshare affiliate program, I like the programs that allow you to turn in your points for custom features, better exposure, stickers & t-shirts, and more.

There are several ways to accomplish this, the following is my favorite and the only one I am going to talk about :

- Using an internal affiliate program to provide your members with a unique URL. The more people that click on a members unique URL, the more points they earn. When those clicked unique URL’s turn into conversions, even more points are earned. Look at this very popular gaming site called Outwar, they follow this model almost to a “T” and make hundreds of thousands of dollars doing so.

This method, if not monitored closely and built around a solid TOS, can hurt you as it may be considered SPAM by sites (forums, blogs, etc) receiving these posted URLs. Just be smart about it. That being said, this method can grow your traffic like crazy; let’s say for example that you have 10 members - everyday each member can recruit 10 more people from their unique URL’s and everyday half of them sign up and continue to recruit more members. I’ll let you do the math here but after 30 days your member base is considerably larger and growing! Obviously this is a picture perfect scenario but I hope you see what I am trying to get at here.

If you have a monthly membership fee, and award can be a free month membership or even a more exclusive membership only earned by playing the game. The list goes on and on with things you can provide your members that play along.

Now for you, the webmaster or marketing guy, this will really build your traffic and exposure for your ad campaigns. Hopefully there is something to your site aside from this point system that keeps the members around and is complimented by the point & reward system.

I am currently developing a system like this using an open source ad management application and an open source affiliate program. I will also be using an open source shopping cart for the points to be cashed in at. The reason why I am tying the ad management application into the mix is to provide members with the ability to earn revshare off of ad zones placed on their personal pages (i.e. forum posts, blogs, articles, etc).

The more you give to your members/readers/surfers, the more they will want to give to you - just play fair. Don’t ask form 1,000 sign ups for a t-shirt - you’ll be stuck with 1,000 t-shirts!

Social Media for Firefox has to be one of the best add-ons in my Firefox arsenal. The tool is placed at the bottom of my Firefox browser and gives me immediate access to my favorite social media accounts like Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Reddit.

For the people who know me - they know that I am a Firefox extension whore and I try everything out there and I keep only what I HAVE TO have. This is on my favorite list of extensions, get it.

Download Social Media for Firefox here and please pass it on - its a tool worthy of exposure (like my blog, LOL!)

Over the last few months Aaron Wall from SEOBook has been making many anti-Google comments regarding SEO. Matt Cutts, Google’s leading Spam Engineer, has been faced with such topics like “SEO equals spam” and “How to buy organic ranks in Google”. I think it is important to get people involved in this discussion and try to make some sense of this. I of coarse have my own opinions regarding many of these discussions and arguments between the two but I would love to hear what you think.

I do think that Aaron Wall and his new wife are trying to stir the pot a little and get some linkbait. Aaron has a lot of knowledge in SEO and I don’t think he will just throw things out there with no thought. I also don’t think Aaron would do anything to piss Matt Cutts off considering Matt helped Aaron when Aaron was getting sued from a business/client of his…

Matt Cutts

Aaron Wall - SEOBook

Interested to know what your online competition is spending their money on and how they rank in the SERPs? Well now you can (for the most part) with a great tool that I use religiously called SpyFu. SpyFu is a free online tool to track and manage what your competitors are doing and what they average on a daily basis for keywords and what-not.

SpyFu also offers a paid version which allows you to see and track more stats on the fly. I know this is a great tool and it is worth your time to check it out - I wonder how many of your competitors are tracking your moves online right now?

Just got back from Blogworld 2007 in Las Vegas and I am beat. First impression of Blogworld was good, as time went on it wasn’t so good. The keynote went okay for a few minutes and then when down the drain with almost everything else at Blogworld. The award show was held at the Hard Rock Casino and I though the food was great and the music was cool too. The big problem with the award show was no one cared and the guy on stage giving out the awards was almost completely drained out by the noise, I couldn’t hear a word he said and I was sitting 15 feet away!!

Some sessions were good, one was great but in almost all of them people were talking about how great they are and how everyone should advertise on their sites… Lame. I am at Blogworld to learn and to network, I acheived one of those (I met a lot of cool people). I walked out of 2 sessions and just banged my head against the wall, I learned more that way when I met a few smart guys with some great products doing the same.

Walking the floor with all the vendor booths was cool too, I made a few vital connections for my companies socal network that is in development and found a few neat solutions that I am going to dig deeper and learn more about. I got a massage, won an iPod shuffle, an iPod Nano, and made $20 in chips (by wearing Hackersafe’s tag beneath my nametag).

All in all I plan to attend next year’s Blogworld convention with hope that they will learn from the many mistakes they made from this years event. I loved being in Vegas too!!

 Currently there are quite a few solutions on the Internet that allow you to create an online community. I have made a list of all the community applications I implemented and tested before choosing the one I did. The first application I tested was Community Server 2007 which depending on the scope of your needs can be very expensive (upwards of $20,000). Community Server is used by major companies all over the world for it’s forums, blogs, media gallery, CMS, and back-end administration. I was blown away by how robust and scalable CS2007 could be and the ease of use setting up all the pieces of an online community and adding content. The part that made me look at other out of the box online communities obviously was the price tag but also how difficult it would be to customize a theme and get CS2007 to look and operate exactly how I wanted it to, .Net2.0 with master pages is still new to me but not a road block.

The next application I stumbled on was DotNetNuke which came with a huge online following and loads of plug-ins and support. DotNetNuke was a lot less to look at on the front and back end but seemed to be a bit easier to skin and customize. I wasn’t entirely impressed but I did install it and played around with it for a few days before looking at my next option, which was Joomla.

Joomla knocked my socks off when it came to how many plug-ins the community had to offer and again the online following. Like DotNetNuke there was a lot less to look at on the administration side but from a customization standpoint seemed a little easier. At this point I just kept going with my options and moved on to my last two options, Handshake and Boonex Dolphin.

Handshake sold me right off the bat, a small price tag of $400 or $500 bucks and how easy they made it look I was pretty impressed. The part that kind of threw me off was how they didn’t have a full online demo or much of an online following but even still it looked pretty slick. I purchased, downloaded, installed and right off the bat it didn’t work 100% so I contacted support. A week later they said they weren’t sure why I was having that problem and were not sure what they could do for me at that point. Right at that very moment I decided that whatever CMS/online community I buy they will have to have a support phone number, LOL.

The last of the online communities and probably the most impressive out of the box was Boonex’s Dolphin/Orca/Ray solution. Right out of the box it had everything I needed, it installs without a hitch, back-end administration is very strong, and it is very easy to skin/customize. From what I noticed there wasn’t a strong online following and there were only a handful of plug-ins but it still had EVERYTHING I was looking for, so I continued to configure and test.

After about a week of full blown implementation and further customization (still in test mode) I started thinking about Community Server and how scalable it is and how so many large companies like Microsoft, Intel, and other use it. Then I realized something, there are not very many sites using Dolphin and the ones that do are very small. Then the big problem comes when I contact their support (which I had no need for up until I was deeper into customization) but when I did it was just horrible.

Boonex has a support forum and an support email address but the thing that made me sick to my stomach was how they offered support. Every time I submitted a support post in their forum it would take upwards of a week for a response (sometimes longer). Most of the time it was one of their main developers (only a couple guys) that would have me contact him on his personal email account and try to get me to pay him for the work that should have been free. He would tell me how he needs the extra cash and that’s the only way I could get their support. I dropped Dolphin when I read that email and never looked back, kind of sucks because they really had something good going.

After looking in at all my options I chose to move forward with Community Server, mainly becuase of the massive level of support and the programming behind it. Now from my understanding, the person who started Telligent (Community Server) came from Microsoft and was the Project Manager of .Net 2.0, under Scott Guthrie.  That was a big selling point for me!

I ended up purchasing the enterprise license of Community Server and have it running on two servers, one for the CS application/IIS and one for the SQL base. Soon I will add a third server for their enterprise search feature but for now everything is running great. Because I don’t know enough of .Net 2.0 to make Community Server work the way I need it to I contacted Telligent to see what they recommend. Immediately I was put in contact with a very nice woman at Telligent who gave me two options, first being the use of their development staff. This would seem like them best choice but unfortunatley there was a 3 month waiting list and comes with a minimum price tag of $45,000. My next choice was to work with an external developer that they have experience with and highley recommend. At the time of my conversation with Telligent only one developer came highley recommended, Robert McLaws with Interscape USA.

The best part about their recommendation is that Robert McLaws lives in Scottsdale, AZ (where my office is) and within two days we were face to face, building the scope of my project and getting the ball rolling. The price tag for Robert’s time is very reasonable compared to Telligent and his complete understanding of my needs and timelines made it very easy for me to hire him on full time to this project and keep a long term development relationship for months to come.

I will write more about the further development with Community Server and my experiences a long the way so please check back soon. Below you will find a list of links for the applications I looked and the contacts I have made, like Robert.

Online Community Solutions 

Community Server

Dolphin/Orca/Ray

Joomla

DotNetNuke

Handshake

Community Server Developers

Robert McLaws, Interscape USA

I just registered for the Blog World Expo which is on November 7th - 9th and I am extremely excited for this conference!  I am especially excited for the SEO Best Practices session on the 7th with Aaron Wall, the author of SEO Book. Blog World is in Las Vegas this year so I will be making the most of my trip by staying an extra 3 or 4 days to reflect of what I learned and the new contacts thousands of dollars I have made.  ;)

If your attending be sure to leave a comment, email, or IM me and let me know; maybe we can grab drinks and shoot the shit. Although I have been heavily involved with SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing for a couple years, I am new to blogs and blogging; I think Blog World is perfect for me and I know I will make the most of it. Make sure to click the links below and check out Blog World’s schedule, speakers, and what they have to offer!

Blog World

Blog World Schedule

Blog World Speakers

Blog World Pricing

There were a couple good posts written a while ago about URL canonicalization and it’s importance for SEO. If someone wants to link to my blog for example, there are several ways they could do so:

http://peter-v.com

http://www.peter-v.com

http://peter-v.com/index.php

http://www.peter-v.com/index.php

https://peter-v.com/index.php

https://www.peter-v.com/index.php

The problem here is Google sees different links and weighs page rank on individual links, not on the domain (Google ranks pages, not sites). The solution to this issue is canonicalization using Mod-rewrite expressions in Apache or using a tool like ISAPI_Rewrite for IIS ($99).

Web servers running Apache, just open your .htaccess (I recommend just contacting your host) and add the following expression (remember to replace peter-v with your domain):

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond % ^peter-v\.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.peter-v.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

The Rewrite expressions above state that the URL http://peter-v.com permantly changes to http://www.peter-v.com.

Web servers running Windows IIS with ISAPI_Rewrite, edit the .ini file and follow the same expressions:

# IIS Mod-Rewrite configuration file

#Turn IIS Mod-Rewrite engine on

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond Host: ^peter-v\.com

RewriteRule (.*) http\://www.peter-v.com$1 [I,RP]

There you have it, now you can stop worrying about how people link to you and worry more about the anchor text they are linking to you with!! Here are a few real good posts and articles about canonicalization:

Matt Cutts

Chris Hooley

Also a good link that explains more about ISAPI_Rewrite expressions:

Scott Hanselman

Check out this neat tool to check and verify if your website is accesible in China. From what I hear RSS feeds seem to work fine but any feeds through FeedBurner seem to be blocked, can anyone verify this? I have no need to reach China surfers but I can see this being a problem for people who do.

Website Test behind the Great Firewall of China