SEO Buzz Box » Tools

Want help setting up a blog?

Aaron — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 17:09:53 +0000

I am sure there are many of you out there who want to set up a blog but do not know where to start.

I believe there is only one choice in free blog software to use for this task and it is Wordpress.

I can install a database, setup wordpress, install a theme and SEO the code in under 15 minutes.

All you need is to register a domain and get a hosting package.

If you do not have a host I got a website called Want2Learn.org with an example blog on Off The Grid Living to show you what yours might look like. For me to set you up on this free domain your content must be clear of spam. Do you have something others might “want to learn”? You could blog about an ant farm and believe me you will find lots of friends in a short time! :)

Got something to barter as payment for having your own blog? I set up blogs for people for free, if you choose to link to me thanks but what’s in your wallet? I suck at graphics and am always looking for help in certain areas using the barter system.

Here are a couple good folks I helped this week.

Lee Roberts who contributed an article to SEO Buzz Box on internet plagiarism registered a domain called The Cross Walker to discuss his religious convictions. (Highly addictive stuff, will have to pull myself away from religion debate…hehe)

Adam Senour just needed me to hold his hand in the setup of his new blog called Walk On My Path. Adam has been a long time poster on this blog and is taking search engine compliant webmastering to a new level.

There is no reason why you should not be blogging and I am sure you have much knowledge to offer!

Related:
SEO on a shoestring

Remove yourself from the Wayback Machine

Aaron — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:05:14 +0000

I am going to disallow the Wayback Machine from archiving my content for this blog. If you are not aware of what the Wayback Machine a.k.a Internet Archive is, plug the url of your domain in here to see your websites history. I use this tool for checking domain history when offering advice to people in SEO forums. It is amusing when someone screams, “Google is punishing my “white hat” website and I don’t know why?” You then check the Wayback Machine and find that their domain was used to spam search engines not long ago. As I mention below, I also believe that these people should not be judged on past content if they have cleaned up their act.

The Wayback Machine offers a simple way to remove yourself from their archive and disallow all future archiving via robots.txt.

The Internet Archive is not interested in offering access to Web sites or other Internet documents whose authors do not want their materials in the collection. To remove your site from the Wayback Machine, place a robots.txt file at the top level of your site (e.g. www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and then submit your site below.

The robots.txt file will do two things:

1. It will remove all documents from your domain from the Wayback Machine.
2. It will tell us not to crawl your site in the future.

To exclude the Internet Archive’s crawler (and remove documents from the Wayback Machine) while allowing all other robots to crawl your site, your robots.txt file should say:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

Read: Removing Documents From the Wayback Machine

Here is an example of my robots.txt

Why am I going to stop the Wayback Machine from archiving content?

This SEO blog is about learning and growing, I do not want to have my childhood in SEO logged for all the world to see. It is also a natural human trait to judge others on their past, ever go to a high school reunion and meet classmates who believe you are the same person they remember? That’s right, you are not and for those of us who often learn by trial and error in life it can be a little strange at times.

Now, it’s Google’s turn to allow removal of indexed history via Webmaster Tools. Should search engines judge you by who you were in the past or should they also allow for a fresh start?

ID your content

Aaron — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:32:16 +0000

You can ID your content in several ways to notify search engines that you are the originator. When I first started to blog I was extremely annoyed when I found that feeder sites were scraping my content and taking full credit for it in search engines. I thought, “How is it possible that someone could pull something off a new site and rank for it in search engines?” I later discovered that it was the feed that was notifying scrapers I had new content AND Google that it was mine at the same time, so in reality, I was in good shape.

Here are a couple things that help notify search engines (and humans *see rss feeds*) that you have new content:

Google Sitemaps – Ping Google to notify that you have new content for their bots to crawl. Here are some third party tools for sitemap creation if you do not have a blog.

Google Webmaster Central – Join, login and observe what is going on in the console as Google does the same, if something is not right you will see errors, visit Google Groups for help.

RSS Feeds – Google loves feeds as a way to ID content, so much that they just wrote up: Tips on using feeds

Update Services – Blogs ping update services that you have new content automatically. An example of an update service is Google Blog Search @ http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

Blogs – Blogs by default come with RSS feeds, Atom, Sitemaps and Update Services built in so they are perfect for pinging search engines AND humans via RSS feed readers.

It is smart to use multiple tools to ID content. With incoming links and pagerank increases, scrapers and feeders will no longer rank #1 for your content. Search engines like Google did not forget about you afterall.

This writing was inspired from a question asked in Google Groups:
What to do when sites steal your content – The answer should be simple, start blogging.

SearchStatus: Viewing the internet with pink goggles

Aaron — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:21:00 +0000

Want to learn about ways that others are using Google’s nofollow tag? I use a Firefox plugin called SearchStatus that makes all nofollow tags appear in your browser in pink. As you see below a blogspot blog called Good Karma SEO might be suffering from the blogspot nofollow bug that people reported, fixed and offered information to correct on SEO Buzz Box just yesterday. I wouldn’t have found that the entire site was nofollowed if I wasn’t viewing the internet with SearchStatus.

Important: Do not forget to check “highlight nofollow links” in SearchStatus as seen below. Notice all the other useful features for search engine optimization?

Search Status is a tool that I use every day during my internet travels.

Download: SearchStatus Version 1.18

Find domains on the same IP

Aaron — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:50:20 +0000

As a competitive search engine optimizer you might want to do a quick check on what other sites your competition might have on the same IP address.

Link Vendor offers a free Domains from IP Tool that completes this task.

Type in: seobuzzbox.com (and the ID) and you will find my two other sites, then look around at the domains of your friends and competition.

Note: Shared IP addresses can have hundreds of sites so don’t think that all those listed are ones owned by the same company or individual you are checking.

Free Keyword Discovery Tool

Aaron — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 03:26:55 +0000

Hilton Rutgers says:

Here is the Free Keyword Discovery Tool.

Gives the top 100 results per search from a 35 Billion keyword database.

Cheers
Hilton

Thanks for letting us know about the Free Keyword Discovery Tool Hilton!

Free Wordtracker Keywords

Aaron — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 20:09:36 +0000

Want to generate up to 100 related keywords and an estimate of their daily search volume?

Wordtracker keywords is a cool SEO tool.

Here is how they estimate daily search volume.

Thank you Free Wordtracker Keywords!

What happened to my pagerank?

Aaron — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 02:34:16 +0000

A common question often asked in SEO forums and Google Groups is what happened to my pagerank? When the seasoned SEO looks to determine what is going on he/she often finds that the website does in fact have PR but the individual is not seeing it because the Google data center they are viewing results from is currently updating or being serviced.

The quickest way to show the novice webmaster or website owner that they do have PR is by using this future pagerank tool.

Notice the missing PR (green bars) in the image of the Google data centers?

If Google is under a PageRank update queries will show your future PageRank increase or decrease. Several data centers not yet updated will not show PR.

This information may be obvious to the SEO expert but you would be surprised how few are aware.

SEO Analyzer

Aaron — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 14:35:10 +0000

SEO Analyzer is a web standards and SEO tool that goes beyond search engine ranking. SEO Analyzer focuses on semantic structure and other design elements. The only thing that might be considered “SEO” is it’s top keywords query because it is all about:

web standards-based web design

semantic structure

obsolete and deprecated HTML

improper use of table elements

inline styles

download size and time

outgoing links

top keywords

SEO Analyzer was developed by a team of veteren IT professionals who believe in a holistic, reductionist approach:

The Sitening approach encompasses both holism and reductionism: just as we believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, we also recognize the importance of attention to detail. We can provide a complete solution from the ground up or plug a hole in the hierarchy of technological management of information.

Does this tool represent a new breed of internet marketer who is smart, fresh and compliant?

Give SEO Analyzer a try! (I got a 100% on aaronpratt.com for it’s bloggy freshness).

Instant Domain Search

Aaron — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 04:24:53 +0000

Lightning fast domain search, nice!

W.Bloggar

Aaron — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 21:01:08 +0000

W.Bloggar is Back

I tried a great interface called W.bloggar to post to my blog a few months back. In fact, I used many and W.bloggar was the only one that impressed me because it is set up like a word processor. Unlike other blog interfaces it does not try to sell you anything (spyware, popups, metrics, certificates to join blog nation, well you get the picture). What saddened me was that W.bloggar stopped functioning and it’s creator seemed to be out of town. I tried emailing him but never got a response. I ended up deleting W.bloggar out of frustration and the post I once made in my blog about W.bloggar as well.

Today Marcelo Cabral emailed me to say that his W.bloggar has been updated and all the bugs have been worked out. This made me extremely happy to see this useful blogging interface come back to life and I appreciate Marcelo emailing folks to let them know.

Instead of me doing a review I will direct your attention to one on Softpedia. In the mean time I will try to get Marcelo in for an chat. Thanks Marcelo, welcome back and BTW this post was done from W.bloggar, how cool is that?

Dagon Wordpress Sitemaps

Aaron — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:19:46 +0000

For those who are using Wordpress 2.0 the Dagon Design sitemap generator plug-in is great. It has a configurable admin panel, supports multi-level categories and even multiple pages for those who have large blogs.

SEOlinks

Aaron — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 13:28:03 +0000

SEOlinks – Firefox Plugin

SEOlinks has to be one of the best educational tools around in that it helps build an awareness of the value of links. When you rub your cursor over a hyperlink it shows you link popularity and ranking data for the URL in Google, Yahoo and MSN. This great Firefox plug-in appears to have been written by a Spanish speaking gentleman Davilac and you can download it from Webmasterbrain