Understanding your competitors — their strategy, their tactics, their level of success, etc. — is crucial to the success of your SEO initiatives. I’m not just talking about your traditional competitors, I’m referring to the other sites occupying spots in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for keywords that you are targeting.
Many free competitive analysis tools are out there, but you have to know where to look for them. One of my favorite SEO blogs (Stuntdubl) offers a veritable Home Depot of such tools, at Mr. Ploppy’s Monday Tool List.
It’s a bit like walking into a DIY store and being faced with an overwhelming array of options. What is the right tool for the job?
Here’s a sampling of some of the SEO tools that I use for competitive analysis and what I specifically use them for:
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Matt Griffin, Alan Rimm-Kaufman, and Joe Dysart discuss, in this article, new concepts for companies to attract customers and keep them “involved” through the checkout proccess. It may be a series of tactics or success may fall on just one tactic.
This article explains, in some detail, new concepts and new twists on old concepts. One of these successful marketing concept is blogging. “Blogging should be part of any online retailer’s SEO arsenal,” says Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts.
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Tim Parry author for Multichannel Merchant discusses the dark-side of the Blogosphere. Links, community, and sharing are all great aspects of Blogging. However, slander and company wrong-doing, when posted on blogs, can have severe consequences.
Parry turns to Found and President of Netconcepts, Stephan Spencer for best practice advice on the blogosphere. Spencer contributes 5 Tips for Beginning Bloggers. These tips include…
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It is easier to build a relationship with your reader and engage with them if your blog is sticky. A sticky web site compels visitors to come back again and again, and to stay longer too. My blog is reasonably sticky because the author is so good and has such insightful things to say. 
But in all seriousness though, there are things you can do to engage your readers more effectively. For instance, you can form a community where they all talk to each other. Most blogs, unfortunately, are abysmal at that. Even my blog really doesn’t do a very good job of bringing readers together and involving them in a group discussion. It’s entirely too easy to be up on one’s soapbox, to start a conversation and also finish it.
Here are some practical suggestions for making your blog sticky, courtesy of Performancing:
- Design for repeat visits
- Keep advertising minimal for repeats
- Provide a recent posts list
- Answer your comments
- Use the right language
- Post frequently
- Have a private message system
- Allow member posts
- Include members in decisions
- Don’t neglect the distributed community
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Stickiness is a primary goal for most websites. A site that is sticky gets people coming back again and again, and staying longer too.
It is easier to build a relationship and engage your reader if your site is sticky. My blog’s reasonably sticky because the author is so good and has such insightful things to say.
But seriously though, there are things you can do to engage your readers in some of the dialog. For instance, you can form a community where they are all talking to each other — most blogs are really abysmal at that. Even my blog really doesn’t do a very good job of bringing readers together and getting them to talk to each other.
So how do you get off your soapbox as a blogger and start conversations without finishing them, and let your readers take over?
Performancing has a nice list of practical things you can do to build online community of your blog:
- Design for repeat visits
- Keep advertising minimal for repeats
- Provide a recent posts list
- Answer your comments
- Use the right language
- Post frequently
- Have a private message system
- Allow member posts
- Include members in decisions
- Don’t neglect the distributed community
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Since my list of WordPress plugins was so well-received, I’ve got another list to share. This time it’s my favorite Firefox extensions…
- Tab Mix Plus - saves your tabs and windows and will restore them if you quit out of your browser or it crashes, allows you to undo the closing of a tab, and lots more
- Performancing for Firefox - a blog editor for your WordPress, Movable Type, or Blogger blog that features integration with del.icio.us and Technorati, spellchecking, etc.
- All-in-One Gestures - execute commands by making certain movements with your mouse without having to use the keyboard, menus or toolbars — like going back a page, closing a tab, etc.
- User Agent Switcher - masquerade as Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, or msnbot etc. to see if a site is doing bot detection
- Web Developer - tool for doing CSS coding, building web forms, etc.
- Google Toolbar for Firefox - Get query suggestions as you type into the search box, view PageRank scores, etc. Check out my screencast on installing, configuring and using the Google Toolbar.
- SEO-Links - hover over a link and it displays link popularity and rankings for the anchor text from Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. I’ve got a screencast on using SEO-Links too.
- Copy Plain Text - copy-and-paste from a web page into Microsoft Word so that the formatting isn’t carried over
- ChatZilla - IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client
- Sage - RSS feed reader
- ViewSourceWith - view the page’s HTML source using an external editor (WordPad, BBEdit, etc.)
- ShowIP - displays the IP address of the web server in the bottom right corner
- StumbleUpon - get recommendations of related pages to check out from friends and like–minded individuals
- Search engines for the Search Bar - add your own favorite search engines to the search box in the top right, such as: MSN Search, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Technorati, Creative Commons, etc.
Here’s a tip that isn’t quite an extension, but over time it’s a huge time-saver. And it works in IE too.
- When you want to type in a URL into the address bar, you can leave off the the www. in front and the .com at the end, because, by hitting Ctrl Enter, the browser will automatically add the www. and the .com to the address for you!
This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of useful Firefox extensions. Check out the new FirefoxFacts ebook for a bigger list of recommended extensions and tips for Firefox. And if there’s an extension you feel should be added to the above list of favorites, please leave me a comment!
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I’ve posted onto BusinessBlogConsulting.com a list of my favorite WordPress plugins and what they do and why I like them. If you’re blogging under the WordPress platform, you might want to trick out your blog with some of these great plugins.
The list includes: PodPress, Popularity Contest, Google Sitemaps Generator, Akismet, Adhesive, Ultimate Tag Warrior, EmailShroud, Transpose Email, WP-EMail, WP-Print, Subscribe2, In-Series, Permalink Redirect, Gravatars, Subscribe to Comments. WP-Notable, A Different Monthly Archive, Related Posts, Related Posts for your 404.
That’s not quite 20, so I’ll add one more to that list — a suggestion from commenter Neville Hobson (thanks, Neville!) — FeedBurner Feed Replacement, which makes it easy to “migrate” your pre-existing RSS subscribers over to Feedburner once you sign up for the service (which is excellent, btw).
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What follows below are some of my favorite WordPress plugins and why. Many of them I have in common with Cavemonkey’s excellent Top Ten WordPress Plugins list. Here’s my list, in no particular order:
- PodPress - makes it super-simple to post podcasts; includes an inline media player
- Popularity Contest - offer a leaderboard of your Most Popular posts based on views and ratings
- Google Sitemaps Generator - creates a Google Sitemaps XML file. What’s killer about this is that it uses Popularity Contest’s ratings for the priority scoring that Google uses to determine how frequently to spider your pages
- Akismet - you’d be a fool to run a blog with comments turned on and not use this plugin to stop the flood of comment spam. ’nuff said!
- Adhesive - gives you the ability to flag certain posts as “Sticky” so they float to the top of the category page regardless of whether it’s the most recent
- Ultimate Tag Warrior - creates tag pages and a tag cloud. Great for SEO as I’ve said before.
- EmailShroud - an email address obfuscator to thwart those evil email harvesters. Scans for email addresses in posts, but won’t work on email addresses hard-coded into your theme.
- Transpose Email - another email address obfuscator. Doesn’t automatically scan for email addresses, but can be used from within your theme files.
- WP-EMail - “Email this post to a friend” functionality
- WP-Print - Printer-friendly version of posts
- Subscribe2 - let your readers subscribe to your blog updates via email
- In-Series - link posts together into a series, regardless of dates posted or categories selected
- Permalink Redirect - fixes the canonicalization problem where the same page loads whether the slash is there or not. Important for SEO.
- Gravatars - puts the commenter’s “Gravatar” image next to their comment
- Subscribe to Comments - a commenter can check a box on the comment form so that they get notified of further comments to that post
- WP-Notable - places a row of buttons alongside your posts so the reader can easily add your post to their favorite social bookmarks service (del.icio.us, digg, etc.)
- A Different Monthly Archive - a pretty way to display links to archives by month
- Related Posts - link to related posts automatically based on the content of the post
- Related Posts for your 404 - your File Not Found error page can now suggest related posts to the misguided user. Cool!
What are your favorites? Did I miss any important ones?
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A report conducted by the recruitment firm OfficeTeam, the Office of the Future: 2020, looks ahead to the future of office work and the kinds of jobs that will be invented in the coming years, which they purport will include such things as Virtual Meetings Organizer, Human Resource Coordinator, and Information Integrator/Abstractor.
It was the Information Integrator/Abstractor role that intrigued me the most. According to the report, the job will include the collecting, compiling, and indexing of text, data and images in order that this content can be searched in a variety of ways.
It occurred to me that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the information integrator/abstractor of the future. After all, what does a business blogger do but the following:
- identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
- take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
- ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
- cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
- republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world
This could be the job description for a Corporate Blogger in 2006 as much as it could be one for an Information Integrator/Abstractor in 2020!
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You’ve probably heard it before, that the vast majority of the jobs that our children will hold when they grow up haven’t been invented yet. But what you may not have heard yet are some example future job functions being postulated.
According to the Office of the Future: 2020 report, these new roles will include:
- Virtual Meetings Organizer
who will help employees schedule conferences and set up the required cameras, projection systems, electronic whiteboards, meeting software, audio equipment and related tools
- Contract Resource Coordinator
who will bring together the right contract workers for a given project, like a movie producer assembling a cast, camera crew and production team
- Information Integrator/Abstractor
who will collect, compile, and index text, data and images so this content can be searched in a variety of ways
It was this last role that most intrigued me, since I am a search geek after all! I just imagine a scene from The Minority Report where the Information Integrator waves his/her hands in the air purposefully and talks to a computer while within a virtual world of information projected onto the back of his/her retinas. In this world he/she categorizes schemas for datasets, slices and dices incoming datastreams into more manageable segments, gives directions to an AI to do further categorization on its own, and so on.
As a business blogger, I also got to thinking that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the “Information Integrator/Abstractor” of the future.
Think about this, what does a business blogger do but the following:
- identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
- take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
- ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
- cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
- republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world
Sounds like a plausible job description for an Information Integrator/Abstractor of the Year 2020!
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