internet
10 Free and useful webmaster tools
Lee Dodd has written a post titled “10 Ways to Become a More Efficient Webmaster” where he shares 10 free tools to help you “work smarter and not harder”.
My favourite tools in his list are:
- The “Keyword Typo Generator” which is great for your PPC campaigns
- The “SEO Firefox Plugin“, which I’ve been using for a while now, and I think is probably the 4th most used FireFox extension I have.
- The “Search Engine Rankings Tracker“.
To add my own list of favourite free webmaster tools:
This let’s you edit CSS and HTML on the fly, which is a MAJOR help when trying to test and debug your blogging (or other) template. Here are some of the features:
- Inspect and edit HTML
- Tweak CSS to perfection on the fly, without having to save and reload a webpage
- Visualize CSS metrics and see how much screen real estate something is taking
- Monitor network activity and see what files are causing your page to load slowly
- Debug and profile JavaScript allowing you to break code and inspect values
- Explore the DOM
- Logging for JavaScript
A DEFINITE must.
Similar to the EarnersForum Keyword Tracker above, but it’s the one I’ve been using for about a year, so I know it, and use it OFTEN.
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Found via ProBlogger’s “10 Tools for More Efficient Webmastering“
Read MoreWho to target for online Advertising
If SEO is baking a cake, my head has been making cookies for a couple of months now.
A few months ago a colleague of mine said he was sitting with his mother while she was using Google and realised that when Google returned the search results, instead of clicking on one of the results, she would click on an Ad on the right. She did this time after time. It turns out that she didn’t know the difference between advertising and search results.
That was something good to know if you’re into the whole AdSense thing… The cookie had been put in the oven.
2 weeks ago, Google added cream to my cookie. They started ranking me really well on my one sites for 2 different terms. The first term tended to bring a lot of users who appeared to be non-internet users, whereas the other visitors were people who seemed to be searching for something more specific, and seemed to know what they were looking for. I would say that 30% of the non-internet users were leaving my site via an AdSense ad, whereas only 5% of the other visitors used an Ad as an exit point.
For me this was a type of confirmation on the whole “who to target” idea, and helps me know what type of topics to talk about if I want more AdSense exiters.
Rand’s article “Online Advertising Needs to Evolve” put the cherry on the top of my cookie. He says it best in his article:
- The more you use the web, the more immune you are to advertising
- AdSense (and YPN) prey on the naivete of users – savvy visitors don’t click these
My final thoughts: I’m starting to realise that South African traffic is ideal for AdSense as most visitors have not grown Ad-Blind yet, and I don’t have as much competition JUST yet, especially in my niche which is targeting moms and dads who still need help programming VCRs. Well, Tivo’s and PVRs at least. 
HitTail – a useful statistics service
HitTail is a cool statistics service with a slight difference. They don’t track visitors once they arrive on your site, they only track the source of visitors that have arrived via a search engine, and then monitor what keywords the visitor searched for… Why is this beneficial? Well, this all relates to the Long Tail theory, where (in THIS instance) the least popular keywords actually make up most of your referrers.
Here’s an explanation I gave my wife on the Long Tail. Amazon.com, as we all know, sells a LOT of books. Obviously, there are the books like Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” which sell in the 1000′s. Lets say that in any given day they sell 100 copies. And, let’s say there are a few other books by popular authors like John Grisham and Frederick Forsyth (can you tell what books I read?).
Amazon also “stocks” books that are not so popular and only sell 1 copy a day.
The Long Tail theory roughly says that, even though these big seller books sell 1000′s a day, the sum of all those “1 copy a day” books totals a lot more than the popular books. And, I’ve seen a lot of mentions of there being an 80/20 rule, where the Long Tail consists of 80% of the total.
Ok, so now you’ve read my attempt at explaining the Long Tail theory, here’s how HitTail fits into all this. If you have a site that is “optimised” for a few major keywords, you might be getting a decent amount of traffic from them, but you probably also get visitors for terms or phrases you may mention somewhere on your site. You might be lucky to get this visitor because they’ve gone past the first 20 or 30 results on Google and thought your site seemed the most likely result they needed. HitTail has the ability to point out what those search terms are, so that you can then focus on writing an article or 2 about each of those terms. This might cause you to rank higher in Google for those terms, and therefore bring you more traffic.
I’ve just started using HitTail on one of my blogs, and here are some of the really interesting terms I’ve found that I’m receiving visitors for and HitTail is suggesting I write articles for:
“girl party ideas”
“stylish kitchen”
“velvet paint”
“home deco”
“bright pink bedroom ideas”
Believe it or not, it’s not a sex site. So, using these terms, I can try and gain more traffic. It might not be much, but if I double the number of visitors for these terms, I’m adding to the overall number of visitors to my site.
Very useful. So, I recommend that you go check them out at www.hittail.com. I also recommend that you read this blog post by the HitTail creator entitled “HitTail Vs. Digg – Which Works Better to Drive Traffic?“. It might be useful if you have a site that is just starting out and are keen to try HitTail.
By the way, I’d love it if you could post a few comments below on some of the strangest search terms that people have used to land on your site. I’m always up for a laugh. 
Cool Desktop Wallpaper from NetBeans
If you’re looking for some abstract wallpaper for your desktop, go take a look at the NetBeans Evangelism Collateral page.
Personally, these are perfect wallpapers as they don’t depict anything in particular, so I don’t really notice that it’s the same thing, day after day after day. It’s the same thing with all the funky new ringtones with songs. They might be really cool songs, but if you hear them on the radio more than 3 times a day for a month, you’d DEFINITELY get sick of them. So why would you want to listen to the same 15 seconds of the same song, 10 times a day!
Of course, if you’d like to make your own ringtones from your MP3s, here’s a little tutorial I wrote:
The only software you’ll need is “Windows Movie Maker“, which you probably have installed on your pc already if you’re running Windows XP.
Anyway, enough plugging for today. Go download some cool wallpapers…
Bloggers Internet Resolutions are killing me
Most lucky people don’t work over the Christmas and New Year season. This year, I was one of those lucky people. So I caught up on a lot of Feed Reading using my faithful Google Reader. And, thanks to those luvverly new stats that Google supplies, I can see who updates what and by how much.
Well, being a new year, people also tend to make New Years Resolutions. And MAN does it seem like most bloggers’ resolutions were to blog more. Ok, fine, I did subscribe to Lee Odden’s “Must Read Search Marketing Blogs“, so I now have an extra 250 feeds to get through, but I am filtering out the “non-performers”.
But over the last 30 days I’ve gone through over 2000 items. It may not seem like a lot to some of the serious readers out there, but I’m no skipper. I tend to read everything in case I miss something.
Here are some of the culprits (whether they’re starting to write more often now or just continuing a great trend, I thank thee for the good read):
- WordPress Planet – If you’re using WordPress, then you’ll need to subscribe
- Google Blogoscoped – Info ANY ‘net user would find useful
- Google’s Official blogs – (Take a look at the column on the right for the list). They really seem to be updating often now. Thanks to Matt Cutts? perhaps
- Scobleizer – Robert Scoble is about 30% of my news source, and even then he can be hard to keep up with…
- ProBlogger – I don’t know WHERE Darren Rowse finds the inspiration, but boy can he write!
So, any blog YOU recommend?
UPDATE: So it’s not just me who’s noticed this?!
Read MoreGatineau – Microsoft Analytics?
How do people get such great “exclusives”?! I guess I’m just too new to this to have the contacts.
Either way, I really hope that this peak at a possible free competitor to Google Analytics from none other than Microsoft is more than just a rumour. I am definitely a web-stats fan as you can see here, so I’d like to see what Microsoft has to offer.
You’ll have to check out the pics here: “The Google Cache – Code Name Gatineau: Microsoft’s New Free Analytics“.
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