SMF SEO - Optimizing Simple Machines Forum

I have been dabbling with SMF (Simple Machines Forum). SMF is a good, free forum. However, SMF is not SEO ready. It requires some tweaking for search engines. Here are a few good sites with SMF SEO advice:

SMF is a good free forum. vBulletin is by far the best forum, but it must be purchased.

Essential Drupal Modules

This will be a growing list of Drupal modules that I use or like:

  • Alinks changes any word or phrase, specified by the owner, into a link. It might also work for inserting code, but I’m not sure.
  • Drupal Advanced Forum is the forum that Drupal should have had.
  • Pathauto makes the URL for a page based on the title of the page. Wordpress and most CMS do this without a module, so it’s surprising this has not yet been integrated into the Drupal core.

Read what others have to say are best Drupal modules: highest rated, most downloaded, top 10, and essential.

Good Web Marketing Tools

This is a list of web marketing tools that SEO friends have recommended. I haven’t tried most of them yet, but wanted to store the list here so I can check them out when the need arises.

SEO Tools

Arelis IBP (Internet Business Promoter) - A great tool for competitor back link and on-page analysis. It automates the tracking of keyword rankings in search engines.

Web Position - I use this for tracking all my website keyword positions. You can track numerous websites - I was tracking 50+ at one point - and you can set up the SERP reports on a scheduler. It shows SERP position change over time … I was tracking years of SERP positions for individual keywords. I’d buy this for the reporting only …. the SEO advice/tips it gives is pretty useless…

PPC Tools

Efficient PPC - I prefer this tool over Speed PPC and own both. This software helps with the rapid deployment of pay per click campaigns and landing page creation. EfficientPPC allows you to use more tokens during your ppc campaign creation. It’s definitely worth every penny 10x…

Speed PPC - The original quick ppc campaign creation tool. You can’t go wrong although I prefer Efficient PPC because it’s easier to use and allows for more tokens.

PPC Rockstar’s tools. Here are more PPC tools.

Video Upload Tools

If you want to upload your video to YouTube and many other video sites, use one of these options:

  • Tube Mogul - Free and works great - TubeMogul is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed.
  • Traffic Geyser - Most popular, works great, but not free
  • HeySpread - Fee seems to be 10 cents per video
  • Download software like videouploadpro and uploadvideopro

Article Submission Services

Submit Comfort offers web directory and article submission services for a fee. The submissions are done manually by people in India. I hear the services are good quality and value.

Article Marketer does not have the same quality as Submit Comfort, and I think their submissions are automated. Still, the fees are reasonable and can help quickly get your site listed.

Blog Reviews and Advertising Links

You can buy links to your site on blogs. These come in a variety of formats, but are often reviews

If you just want a link to your site, you might consider Text Link Ads. All of these services are the subject of scrutiny by Google, because they often involve links that pass pagerank to the advertiser. Thus, they can be viewed as services that sell pagerank.

Adsense Tool

If you have adsense or other advertising on your website, you can benefit from the valuable analytics and control offered by a tool like Open X, which used to be called PHP Ads New.

Free De-duplication Tool

When you are dealing with text files or Excel spreadsheets, you sometimes have a long list of words that you want de-duplicated. Here is a free online de-duplication tool that quickly does the trick.

Autoblogging: RSS to Blog Post

There may be times where you want a blog to create new posts from an RSS feed. This could be done directly from one RSS feed, or done by compiling multiple RSS feeds using a tool like Yahoo Pipes.

Keep copyright laws in mind to ensure you have permission to repost an RSS feed on your website. If you are the victim of copyright infringement, consider your rights under copyright laws or the DMCA (how to use the DMCA).

There are a number of Wordpress pluggins that can convert an RSS feed into posts. Some of the top rated pluggins include

Others that are less known, but may be good, include

Inside Google’s Duplicate Content Detection

Google’s duplicate content penalty has received much attention from webmasters and those concerned about SEO. Most SEO advisers understand the basics of the duplicate content penalty. But how does the duplicate content algorithm really work? And what exactly constitutes duplicate content?

For example, will the duplicate content penalty be triggered if the text on a page is rearranged but the word count for each word remains the same?

While the actual Google duplicate content algorithm remains a secret, SEO practitioners can assume Google is using advanced methods for duplicate content filtering. What are these advanced duplicate content detection methods—this article explains duplicate content filtering detection methods with great complexity.

Free Logo Tools

Want to make a logo, sign, button, or background using a free online tool? Check out this list of 25 free logo and image maker tools.

Magento Supports Wordpress

The Magento Commerce shopping cart now works with Wordpress blogs: Magento: Wordpress Integration Extension Available.

Alternatives to OnlyWire for Mass Social Bookmarking

For a while, OnlyWire was the best way to bookmark pages to multiple social bookmark sites. Unfortunately, OnlyWire seems to have been neglected lately, and a number of the social bookmark services listed in OnlyWire have become obsolete.

A number of new services provide the same service as OnlyWire. That is, you can save a web page to a social bookmarking service without having to bookmark each one at a time. These new OnlyWire alternatives include

If you have experience with these new alternatives to OnlyWire, please leave a comment and tell me what you think.

Magento Themes

Magento Commerce is a terrific new open source shopping cart. Of course, everyone wants to customize their cart with a new theme/template. Magento themes aren’t easy to find yet. At some point, the Magento developers are going to launch a repository for Magento themes at Magento Connect.

I will be listing the Magento Commerce shopping cart themes that I find online here. So far, I’ve only found these:

Great Backlink Checker Tool

There are many SEO tools online. There are many backlink checker tools online. But this backlink checker tool works better than any I have seen: Backlink Watch.

What is a backlink checker tool you ask? It’s a website where you can enter the URL for any website and the page will list all the websites that link to that URL. You can use thisbacklink checker tool to see who is linking to your own site or see who is linking to your competitor.

Lucrative Adsense Keywords Tool

If you are thinking about making a website that will be monetized by Adsense, here are a few steps to find lucrative niches using some free tools:

  1. Identify the most lucrative terms related to your subject by using Read more »

Magento Shopping Cart Review - Is it right for you?

Is Magento Commerce the right shopping cart for you? This post presents what I’ve found and asks others to add to this knowledge to provide a helpful resource for those who are considering using the Magento shopping cart.

What is Magento Commerce Shopping Cart?

Magento is the newest shopping cart in the “open source shopping cart” category. This category had been dominated by OS Commerce and Zen Cart (and Virtumart for existing Joomla sites). Magento’s release has created quite a buzz, and I understand that many developers are creating plugins for this new platform.

The “buzz” before Magento was released in May of 2008 was that Magento would provide a high-end, professional shopping cart to the masses for free. So far, people continue to be amazed by Magento.

Magento Shopping Cart Example

You can see an example of a Magento shopping cart at Mobile Edge. I found this by the link from a post by Simple Helix here. The Magento screencasts also show many of the Magento shopping cart features.

Magento Problems: Slow Performance

Magento is rich with features only found in the best shopping cart scripts. But these features appear to come at a cost to performance. The main criticism of Magento are focused on Magento’s slow performance when stores offer thousands of products on a shared hosting plan. That is, Magento appears to requires a lot of server resources to run, which in turn, adds additional expense to using Magento.

Example. For example, they tag cloud feature has been reported to take over a minute to load, since it is pulling keywords from all the products. Similarly, the searches have taken over a minute for large catalogs of products. I presume this will be fixed soon as Magento improves its indexing. Waiting over a minute for visitors to search will cause most vistors to cancel the search and move on. That is not tolerable for any etailer.

Small Merchants. Performance issues shouldn’t be a problem for very small online merchants, since these etailers aren’t offering many products.

Performance Fixes. The Magento community has been discussing Magento performance issues. Magento is working on its performance issues and has made improvements with Magento’s recent release. Magento’s website says that performance is a key focus for future releases.

If you host your own server, there are a number of tips to get Magento to run faster.

Magento Installation

To install Magento, you may find this Magento installation tutorial useful.

Other Magento Commerce Reviews

I will be posting Magento Commerce reviews that I find here:

Your Review or Opinion of Magento

What do you think of Magento Commerce shopping cart? If you have experience with it, please add your impressions, feedback, or advice in a comment here.

How to Get Backlinks

Today I ran across a great list of ways to obtain backlinks to your website.  Backlinks are sometimes called “inbound links.”  Backlinks give your website credibility with search enginges. To read the list, go here: The Best known ways to build links, and traffic 2008.

Gmail Custom Time is Google April Fools Hoax

On April 1, 2008, Google launched its 2008 April Fools joke by offering a link to Gmail Custom Time to users logged into Gmail. Initially, the link appeared to be a broken link, because it led users to a 404 error page. But at midnight CST, as April Fools Day began, users saw this page:

The first tip that the “new Gmail feature” was a hoax was this text: “How does it work? Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox).”

Second, Google’s language on the page was piqued with humor. For example, Google wrote, “Our researchers have concluded that allowing each person more than ten pre-dated emails per year would cause people to lose faith in the accuracy of time, thus rendering the feature useless.”

Finally, Google itself confirmed that Gmail Custom Time was an April Fools Joke by its “Privacy Policy” and “Program Policies” links.

Gmail Custom Time is the latest in a long list of Google April Fools stunts.

New Tools for PPC and Analytics

To manage your PPC campaings, Google announced a new tool: Google Ad Manager, which will compete with OpenX.  The folks at OpenX responded. One site criticized Google Ad Manager.

On a different note, Going up appears to be a great, free analytics service to compete with Google Analytics.

Online CSV to MySQL Import Tool

I found this handy tool that converts a CSV file to a MySQL format so you can import the table using PHP MySQL. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks good.

Unfortunately, the free version of ImpSQL is limited to 50 entries. I’m surprised the author is trying to make money off this, because the tool is handy, but this type of tool seems simple to create. Either way, it may come in useful.

Try it here: MySQL Data Import tool

The Best 15 Free SEO Tools Online

SEOposition.com used, reviewed, and analyzed many of the free seo tools online and put together a short list of the top 15 free seo tools online. The Best 15 Free SEO Tools Online

Drupal 5.6 and 1and1 Hosting

After installing Drupal 5.6 on 1&1 and loading my new Drupal website in my browser, I received this error:

Incompatible environment

The following error must be resolved before you can continue the installation process:

register_globals is enabled. Drupal requires this configuration directive to be disabled. Your site may not be secure when register_globals is enabled. The PHP manual has instructions for how to change configuration settings. (Currently using PHP 4.4.7)

I overcame the problem by adding the line, AddType x-mapp-php5 .php, to the .htaccess file in Drupal’s root directory. This trick applies to all sub-directories.

This information is extracted from a conversation here: CubeCart > Register Globals = on
and Register_Globals Off. Read these links for more info on why this works.

How to Make Money with Your Blog

Someone recently asked me how he could make money with his blog. In addition to advice from great sites like Pro Blogger, use affiliate and advertising programs like there:

- Azoogleads (link: http://www.azoogleads.com/)
- Neverblueads (link: http://www.neverblueads.com)
- Clickbank (link: www.clickbank.com)
- Copeac (link: http://affiliates.copeac.com/)
- Adsense (link: http://adsense.google.com)
- Yahoo Publisher Network (link: http://publisher.yahoo.com)
- Direct.Rightmedia (link: http://direct.rightmedia.com)
- Adversal (link: http://www.adversal.com)
- Text-link-ads (link: http://www.text-link-ads.com/)
- Other Misc Affiliates that are not in the formentioned affiliate networks.
- Joint Ventures

Put DOMtab on your Wordpress Blog

Smarter Wordpress Designing explains how to put DOMtab on your wordpress blog. The DOMtab script adds uses blog real estate well and adds a cool effect for visitors.

eMail List Services

The following are services you can use to manage an email list and send bulk emails. Aweber Prices: Up to 10.000 contacts: Paid Monthly: $19.95 (discounts available) Constant Contact (most people like this the most because of the easy templates):

Your Email List Size Your Low Monthly Fee
Email Marketing* Survey** Bundle**
0-500 $15 $15 $30 $22.50
2,501-5,000 $50 $50 $100 $75.00
10,001-25,000 $150 $150 $300 $225.00

iContact prices:

Contacts Monthly Annual 500 $9.95 $107.46 1,000 $14.00 $151.20 2,500 $29.00 $313.20
5,000 $47.00 $507.60
10,000 $74.00 $799.20
15,000 $109.00 $1,177.20
25,000 $149.00 $1,609.20
35,000 $239.00 $2,581.20
50,000 $379.00 $4,093.20
75,000 $529.00 $5,713.20
100,000 $699.00 $7,549.20

Basic plans include sending up to six times your subscriber limit.

Vertical Response: Pricing is based upon the number of emails that you send—there is no contract for a subscription. If you plan on mailing weekly or monthly, save by “buying in bulk.”

1 - 1,000 $.015 per email $15.00  per 1000

Lyris is another option, but their prices weren’t listed online when I checked.

Free Stat Counter Alternatives to Google Analytics

Besides Google Analytics, there are a number of free stat counters you can use to analyze your traffic.

  • Clicky is very similar to Google Analytics. The free version only works for under 1000 visitors per day. If you get more traffic than that, you will have to upgrade to a paid version.
  • StatCounter is great but the appearance is a bit “old school.” It doesn’t have the fancy ajax of Google Analytics.  The free version only works for under 1000 visitors per day. If you get more traffic than that, you will have to upgrade to a paid version.
  • 103 Bees is unique. It’s great for bloggers. It provides less info than some of the other stat counters here, but it provides information in a way that allows bloggers to come up with new ideas for blogging.
  • FeedBurner is great for RSS feeds.


Spin Articles for Unique Content

Tools that spin articles:

Tools that check the similarity of spun articles:

Affiliate Marketing Companies

I’ve done more research on the big three affiliate companies:

Commission Junction appears to be the most popular, but Linkshare is not far behind. Linkshare seems to have more major retailers than Commission Junction, but that could be because Commission Junction has so many retailers, small and large. Both Linkshare and Commission Junction feature companies offering a wide range of products.

Click Bank is different. Clickbank focuses on ebooks and other intellectual property products, not physical products. Still, ClickBank features many useful products. Affiliates like the products on Clickbank because the commission percentages are very high (often 50%).

Best SEO Blogs

Want to learn more about SEO? Here are some good blogs to read. They include “white hat,” “grey hat,” and “black hat” methods, so use your own judgment to decide which tactics to use yourself. Search engines disapprove of methods that are not “white hat,” and if possible, search engines will seek to thwart those efforts and potentially punish the websites of those using them. However, many times there is little search engines can do about non-whitehat methods.

http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/
http://www.seobook.com/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog
http://searchengineland.com/
http://www.wolf-howl.com/
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/
http://www.stuntdubl.com/
http://massa.techndu.com/
http://www.johnon.com/
http://seoblackhat.com/
http://tropicalseo.com/
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog
http://www.seobythesea.com/
http://www.irishwonder.syndk8.co.uk/
http://www.seoataglance.com/

How to Market Your Website on YouTube

 Great advice:

Great CSS Resources

Great CSS help and CSS layouts with help. See also:

How to Have a High Adwords Quality Score

How to Have a High Adwords Quality Score: How I Do Quality Score

iMacros for Firefox :: Firefox Add-ons

If you love the Firefox web browser, but are tired of repetitive tasks like visiting the same sites every days, filling out forms, and remembering passwords, then iMacros for Firefox is the solution you’ve been dreaming of! This isn’t just a Firefox form filler, it actually replays your actions, which can include actions over multiple sites. Get it here: iMacros for Firefox

Cool Affiliate Marketing Idea: Review & Comparison Pricing

Although the promise of this title rings of “get rich quick” schemes, the concept in this article seems very good even though it is still untested: Earn $100 a Day in 60 Days.

Easy Online Favicon Tool

Here is an easy tool that makes a favicon from any photo: favikon

Annual Web Marketing Plan

Create an annual marketing plan with these twelve ideas to drive qualified leads to your Web site over the year: Your 2008 Web Marketing Plan

MaineToday.com | Internet Marketing 101

Here is great advice about how to promote an event or class on Internet Marketing 101:

# Published the event on the Web Marketing Seminars page on my Web site. This is a no-brainer and the first, essential step.# Added the event information (including a link to the online registration) on Facebook, both on my page and as part of the Portland, ME network so that other local people could find it.

# Sent out an email alert to the people who have signed up for my Web Marketing Alerts email newsletter. (You can sign up for this when you sign up for flyte log, our free, monthly email newsletter.)

# Added it as an event on MaineToday.com, the online presence for the Blethen newspapers.

# Added it as a class through Craig’s list.

# Added it at MaineBiz’s event calendar.

# Submitted to Maine Public Broadcasting Network’s event calendar.

# Posted it to my Internet Marketing 101 blog at MaineToday.com (at least twice.)

# Posted it to my flyte blog: web marketing for small business blog (again, at least twice.)

# Posted to Eventful.com, which sends to several other sites including Podbot, Google Calendar, del.icio.us/events, Ping-o-Matic, Technorati, and Upcoming. Several of these sites extend that reach even further through their own network. (Found through Joan Stewart, the Publicity Hound, through Denise Wakeman tip.

# I also learned about EventCrazy.com that way.

Best Free Emailing List Newsletter Software

I wanted online software for managing my newsletter. Paid options included ConstantContact and aWeber. Wordpress plugins offered a PHP option, but that option is susceptible to problems inherent to running PHP, such as timeouts.

Then I read about PHPlist and its Wordpress Plugin options at Email Mailing List Manager, which seemed to be the best option for me. Lorelle also reviewed some good mailing list and newsletter software.

I hear another good free option is Feedburner’s e-mail service, but this is very limited.

Chat by Video with Free Video Conferencing Online

Ustream.tv is a platform that provides free, live interactive video conferencing for everyone. Anyone with a camera and an Internet connection can use Ustream to broadcast to a global audience.

Xpenser - Mobile Expense Tracking and Reporting

If you dislike tracking your expense reports, check out Xpenser, which makes it painless. Use your PDA, email, or web browser to quickly jot a note for each expense. It’s easy and free.

Online free seo tool detecting search keywords – Seodigger.com

With online free seo tool Seodigger.com you can find out for which keywords your site ranks high enough to be in Google Top 20. You can analyze your own sites as well as sites of your competition. Check it out: Seodigger.com

Free Comics, Cartoons, Fonts, and Signs for Blogs & Websites

Add humor or a creative touch with these free online graphic and image making tools:

Custom Sign Generator Widgets - Thousands Of Web 2.0 Image Generators

How to Add a NoFollow Tag to Your WordPress Blogroll

Sometimes you link to a site and you want a NoFollow tag on that link. If you do, this page explains how to hack Wordpress so you have that option in your Blogroll: WordPress Blogroll SEO Nofollow Hack

Import a Comma Delimited File Into MySql with a PHP Script

This article will show you how to import a comma delimited (or delimited with another character like tab) text file into a MySql database using PHP: Reading a Delimited File using PHP.

On a similar note, here is a pre-made script that its author says will import a CSV file into MySql: PHP script to import csv data into mysql.

To learn more about PHP, there are great articles and resources at PHP.net.

Great Tools for Creating Longtail Keyword Lists

Here are some useful tools for generating longtail keywords for your SEM or Adsense campaign.

Combine Keywords
This tool allows you to enter three lists of words and the tool will combine the lists into every possible phrase using those words.

Local Keywords List
This tool is similar to Combine Keywords except it only allows you to enter one list, which it combines with a list of city or state names. One cool feature is how it allows you to select cities: Once you enter a zip code and a distance (number of miles) from that zip code, the tool will generate a list of cities within that geographic area (circumference).

AdWords Wrapper
The Google AdWords Wrapper is a FREE time saving tool that wraps keyword phrases in “quotation marks” (phrase match) and [square brackets] (exact match) for use in Google AdWords campaigns.

For tools that generate keywords that are related to a single topic, among other things, check out the keyword tools here and here.

Google Sitemaps FAQ

Here are some useful links for those wishing to learn about Sitemaps, which can be used in conjunction with Google Webmaster Tools to improve the speed that Google indexes your website pages:

Make Your Own Wordpress Blog Theme

This tool allows you to make your own blog theme, or template, for Wordpress or Moveable Type blog systems: Easy Blog Design Tool - CSSEZ

Free Sitemap Generator for 5,000 Pages!

This Free Sitemap Generator stands above the rest because it will generate a sitemap of up to 5,000 pages. That is much higher than most free sitemap generators. The only problem is the sitemap is queued so it may take a few hours to generate your sitemap.

Also, check out this free sitemap generator, which also has a 5,000 limit.

If you have more than 5,000 pages, here are a couple options.

First, you could use a PHP script that you run on your server. I have used phpSitemapNG and it works great. This script crawls your website to add dynamic and static pages to your sitemap.xml file. It also supports gzip.

Second, you could download an application to your PC. I used A1 Sitemap Generator (also available at download.com) and it worked great. It has a lot of features, so it was a little tricky to get working right away, but it worked well. This application allows you to save the sitemap.xml file, which you then must FTP to your website’s directory on its server.

Keyword Density Analyser

I like this keyword density analyzer because it will analyze text you paste into a text box or select the URL of a web page.

Also, I like this keyword density analyzer because you can choose to sort the results alphabetically or by the number of times a word appears in the text.

Try it here: Keyword density analyser

Website Plagiarism Search for Copyright Violations

Is someone copying the content on your website? Find out with this tool: Copyscape

Analyze the SEO of Your Site

This tool asks for the name of your site and creates a report explaining what is good and bad about your site from an SEO perspective. The tool also allows you to compare your site with a competitor’s site.

The reports are very interesting. Most importantly, the reports offer recommendations to strengthen your site based on its SEO weaknesses.

Try it now: Rate the SEO of Your Site

Online Font Comparison Tool

This tool was created to find the perfect font online. It’s amazing. It also lets you pick colors based on the color’s number. I love this! Font Tester - Online Font Comparison Tool

Free JavaScript tools

This is a great JavaScript resource:

Free JavaScripts, tutorials and tools - Onlinetools.org

It includes a great page on DomTab.

This site also looks great for Web 2.0 javascripts: Mini Ajax

Nice JavaScript Menus

This example shows how to create an relatively positioned vertical dropdown menu with YADM. Vertical relative DHTML dropdown menu with YADM

Get the code here: Simple Customizable JavaScipt Menus

Or check out this other simple menu script: Simple Drop Down Menu

eCommerce Channel Submission Services

The following is a list of popular eCommerce channel submission services.

  • http://marketworks.com (a Channel Advisor company)
  • http://channeladvisor.com
  • http://zoovy.com
  • http://vendio.com
  • http://andale.com (a Vendio company)
  • http://sellcenter.net
  • http://www.infopia.com
  • http://www.auctiva.com (eBay only)