Compare your blog/site with the top 10 sites for a given keyword

You've been working real hard, on your blog/site, for the past few months. You have been optimizing your blog for a particular keyword. Now you want to see some results. You want to know where you stand with respect to the competing sites. Well you are in luck because such a tool is available. Its free and its online (nothing to download and install).

Its called "Keyword Competition Check Tool". Here's the link to the tool page. Here's what the developer says about the tool;
"This tool will search Google using the keyword that you enter and give you useful statistics on the top 1 to 10 results. You can also include a site of your choice, which will also be included into the statistics. The statistics for each site are cached for one week.

Please note: the information you provide may be used by Just Search Ltd, to contact you to discuss the products & services available.

Sometimes you may find that the tool may time out and give you no results. This will be an issue with Google SOAP API not working and has nothing to do with the tool."

Here is the step by step guide to using the tool;

• Enter the keyword that you want to check (if you want to check the tool for multiple keywords use the tool again, just check one keyword at a time.
• Enter your blog's URL in the text box labeled as site. (It says that this information is optional, but you want to compare your stats with the top 10, so you should as well use it).
• If you do not want to go into complex details then just click the go button.
• But if you want to configure the tool more finely then click th blue colored buttoned named "Advanced" (the button will now display the text "Simple", so basically its a toggle).
• A menu will open.
  

• In the "Restrict to Country" drop down box you'll have three choices. If you want worldwide results set the option to "--", to restrict to UK results only set this to "UK".

• Next is the "Safe Search" drop down box. It only presents two choices. Safe search is a boolean value which enables filtering of adult content in the search results.

• Next one is the "Filter" drop down box. Like the previous menu, it has only two yes or no choices. Filtering activates or deactivates automatic results filtering, which hides very similar results and results that all come from the same Web host. (I would recommend that you select yes, otherwise it will return cached results from Google).
• Last one is the "Number of Results" drop down menu. Here you select the number of sites compared (plus your site). The higher you set the number of results to be returned the longer the script will take to run, the maximum limit (set by Google) is 10.

• Click "Go" button.
• After a little processing the results will be shown.

• Results will be shown in the form of a table. The table is divided into following columns, serial number, Google page PR, Google site PR, Google back links, Google site back links, Google site saturation, Yahoo back links, Yahoo site back links, Alexa back links, Alexa rank, directory 1 and directory 2 (Directory 2 is the Yahoo directory, directory 1 might be DMOZ, but I am not sure about that). Also there is a row at the bottom of the table which shows the averages of columns. (If any of the rows are colored green then this is taken from a cache of the last results for this site. If the cache is longer than a week old then it is cleared and new data is retrieved.)
• Below the table is the "Comparison Radar Graph" (but I must say that its a bit difficult to read).
  

• Below the graph you'll see the options you had selected.

• And below that is the same tool again, ready for your next search .

So go on and check your blog out. Share your results with me. Till then bye! Have a nice day!

List of free directories

WebNetClick Directory

Free forum, message board and chat room for your site

Wouldn't it be nice to provide some interactivity to your sites visitors? To have a place where your sites visitors can interact with you and with each other. Where they can chat or discuss topics that interest them. Well there is a way to add this type of interactivity to your site for free. Its completely free and you don't have to host the services on your server either (great news for those bloggers who are using free blogging platforms like Blogger or Wordpress etc. There's nothing to buy, nothing to download, nothing to install. Your forums reside on the World Crossing server, so there's no need to install software at your own site. In return for providing the free services the hosting company does show ads on the freely hosted forums (if you can pay, you can upgrade to a premium account and get some extra perks).

Features include;

1. Instant setup
2. Public or private forums
3. Chat rooms
4. Personal e-mail
5. Newsreader access
6. Customization
7. Administrator's control panel
8. Threaded messages or linear conversations
9. Unlimited participants
10. Unlimited messages

And so many other. You can view the detailed feture list along with their explanation here. You can see some demo forums, admistrator's panel and view some public forms from this page.



Here's the link to the service provider. After the page has loaded in your browser, press enter. Click "create a forum" from the side bar.


You'll land on a page which looks like this;


Click on the link "register as a member of World Crossing" (suggestion number 2). Enter your name, password and email address. You ca read terms of service and privacy policy too on the same page. Click "I accept" (there is also a radio button which says "I do not accept", but what's the point). Click "register" button.
 

You'll be sent an email with your member code. Press ok button (or preferences button, both take you to same page). You can select the special offers from the sponsors and click submit button or click the "No thanks, continue" link. (Whichever option you choose you'll land on the same page).

On the next page you can change your password or preferences, view most active forums or the newest forums.

Click "Change your password or preferences" link. Here you can add information about yourself and configure some other options as well.

Chat with your blog visitors

That would be so nice, wouldn't it? To talk with your blog visitors in real time. Your blog visitors talking with each other, leaving messages for you to see when you go online. That's a sure way to make a few of them stay a little longer (and keep coming back regularly).

One gadget that can help in this respect is a chatbox for your site/blog. This post is about one such shoutbox called ShoutMix shoutbox. You can easily obtain a free shoutbox for your site from ShoutMix. Here's the link to the website that provides the shoutbox.

This is how the shoutbox looks like.

Using the shoutbox is a three step process;

1. You create a login account.
2. Choose the type of shoutbox style you like, and
3. Place the code in your your page/template.

Create an account by supplying your user name, password and email address.

After clicking the continue button, you'll be taken to a page where you can choose from amongst 4 compact and two wide shoutbox styles. Fill in the verification code and click continue. You'll be instructed to log into your control; panel to use the shoutbox. Click "go to my control panel now". Enter your password to continue. Click login button.


At the top you'll see the menu bar. From "Quick Start" menu choose "Get Codes".


Choose "Place shoutbox on webpage".


Enter width and height for your shoutbox, select whether you want frame border around the shoutbox.


Click inside the code box and select whole text by using Ctrl + A keyboard combination. That's all the work you need to do at the developers site.

Hop along to your site and place the shoutbox in a side bar. You can view my shoutbox here.

New clothes for your blog

Do you agree that the quality of clothes you wear has direct relation to the degree of impression that you create in someone's mind. Its a kind of ratings effect. Likewise when someone lands on one of your blogs pages, the first thing that his mind will register are the images and colors that your site present to him. If you have a great post but your blog theme has registered a negative impact on the visitors mind he is not likely to remember your blog. He may not bookmark it. Your blog fades from his memory and you have lost a potential long time client. So what should I do about it, you ask? To put it simply, get some new clothes for your blog. A great mind in shabby clothes will not create a lasting impression. Get some great looking template for your blog. Dress it up and watch as you begin to retain those drifters from the WWW.

While surfing through the net, I stumbled upon a great looking template for blogs. It has impressive colors, great color contrast which emphasizes your posts and best of all its free. Here's how it looks like;


Doesn't it look nice and impressive. By the way you can see it installed here as a demo.

Its been named Blogy Puerto by the developer and here is your link to the developers page about this template. There is one problem though. The page is in Spanish. So for those poor folks who cannot read Spanish, here's another link. Yes that's our great friend Google to our rescue. This link will translate the original page into English for us (although the translation is not perfect as its based on word for word translation, maybe the algorithm will evolve in future).

Its a three column theme, so you can put lots of stuff above the fold on each page (otherwise some stuff we would like our visitors eyes to catch never achieves what is expected as the visitor might leave without scrolling down). Its for those blogs which are hosted by blogger.com at blogspot.com (i.e. for folks like me and my other neighbors). It also has tabs, which allows for better organization (something lacking from Blogger templates). The only thing that I don't like about the template is that, it does not show the blogger navigation bar. As you know, that the blogger navigation bar allows some useful features such as, searching your site, moving onto some other blogger blog (now this is a source of good traffic, and blogger's with nav bar turned off do not qualify for this free traffic), blog customization link and link for creating a new blog post.



Anyway, here the link to download the template. Its only 7KB, zipped file. You'll find the template in the xml format inside the archive. There are some helpful links on the developers page regarding template installation in general; a video (Oh God, its in Spanish again (and this time even Google can't help us, just get your clues from the visuals)), FAQ and installation guides. Read them carefully before tampering with your existing blog (or if you are thinking about starting a new blog, don't waste your precious brain ATP's (energy) (Blogger only has a few templates to choose from).

So hop along, dress up your blog and start dating those fleeting visitors (and convert them into permanent relations). Happy blogging!

Compare with your competitors Alexa Rank

So you want to spy on your competitors. You want to know how well they are doing. (Who are your competitors? Your competitors are web sites that rank high on search engines for the keywords that you are also targeting). Well Alexa is the service which ranks web sites based basically on traffic (smaller numbers mean higher ranking). So here is a tool which will help you judge your SEO campaign against your competitors.

• Visit this page
• This what the developer of the tool says about the Alexa rank comparison tool;

The Alexa Traffic History Graph allows you to create a traffic history graph for any site. Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users.

What is Traffic Rank?
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users. It is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago.

What is Reach?
Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. Alexa expresses reach as the number of users per million. The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current reach with its values from three month ago.

• 
• Some more configurations
  

• And some final actions

• Your graph is displayed above the input boxes. Below is the image with default graph type and time span settings for 4 websites.
  

• You can also display this tool on your own site.
  

• After pressing the button od clicking the link, you'll taken to the code page. To embed the Alexa Rank Comparison within your site, just cut and paste the HTML code snippet into your web page. Simply click in the text box . The code will highlight. Copy with Alt-C (Command-C for Macintosh). Then paste into your site's code. The table has a width of 345 pixels.
  

That's all there is to Alexa rank comparison. Bye! Have a nice day.

Eliminate useless keywords!

Want to find out which keywords are ranked higher in Google? Can't decide which of the two versions of the the given keyword would be more search engine friendly (so you think "car" and "cars" rank the same in Google? You couldn't be more wrong. Car has double the ranking potential as compared to cars. Was that an eye opener? Are you itching to find out how and from where I got the data from. Well hold your guns, that's what this post is about). So here are the steps that you need to follow to be more keyword savvy (choosing the right keyword is important for Google ranking and traffic);

• The service is called Google Battle
• Here is a description of the service from the developer himself (it will help you understand how the two keywords are compared). "Google Battle measures which of two terms has a higher Google rating by searching for term1 OR term2 and then counting the hits of either in the returned top 100.
  
  The current implementation only searches the snippets returned by Google; otherwise the whole thing would take a lot more time.
  
  There are a number of implementations out there that just show you the number of 'hits' each term has and declares the one with the most the winner. It think the OR approach makes more sense; by asking Google to provide us with a list that contains either keyword, Google with indirectly decide which keyword it thinks is more important. Therefore counting the number of occurances of the keywords in the resulting snippets makes sense. The number of hits of a term doesn't mean much; I can create a million pages with my name on it, but that doesn't make me as important as Paul McCartney (oh well, he has 2 million anyway)."
• 
  
• And the results look like this
  (amazing isn't it, men outdoing women by almost 50%). That's a fun tool too, compare different words to see which ranks better in Google (there are some interesting results from some previous searches on the page which you might find interesting (they will awaken the curious in you; even the human private parts have been compared).

Well that's all from me till the next post. Have a nice day and take care of yourself!

50 bookmarking sites 1 widget

getBookmarked.com will help you to Bookmark a site into several Social Bookmarking Services. Instead of using different links to each Social Bookmarking website, you have to keep only a single link to all of them! When you use this Free service in your Website or Blog, visitors will be able to bookmark it in 50 Popular Bookmarking Services. Actually there are two free widgets, one for your use from within your browser (its a bookmarklet) and the other is widget for your online site/blog. Follow the steps to get them both;

• Visit this page
• Near the top pf the page you'll find the link to the bookmarklet. It is a piece of javascript code. just drag and drop it onto your bookmarks toolbar (in Firefox).

• When you find some interesting web page (most of the time it'll be your own site/blog), just press the "getBookmarked" button. A page will open with links to 50 bookmarking sites. They are arranged in two categoeies;

1. Most Popular Bookmarks

1. Popular Bookmarks

• When you click on any hyperlink to a bookmarking site, a new tab opens in your browser with URL and the title of the page already filled in the submission form. Fill the description and tags yourself. That's all there is about the bookmarklet. Now we move on to the widget for your blog visitors.
• The first step to getting the widget for your blog is to enter the title of the blog and its URL. Press create button.
  

• Step 2 is to copy and paste any of the automatically generated HTML Code into your website. Here too you have 4 options. Choose the type of button you would like to display. Click in the corresponding text box, select the code, copy it into your clipboard and you are done. Visit your blog/site and insert the code into the appropriate area (usually the template).
  

• And a final word of caution.

So that's all that you have to do to meet your objective. Till next time bye! Have a nice day!

Get free Google Page Rank button for your blog

Wouldn't it be nice to display your Google page rank on your blog/site? Wouldn't it be great if we don't have to pay for it? Wouldn't it be great to get it from an independent source (to add authenticity to your claim)?

If your blog/site has been ranked by Google and you would like to display it for your visitors to see, here are the steps to follow to achieve that end;

• Your Google PR is shown in the form of web 2.0 medal graphic. Here's how it looks like;

• You can also select black as the background color.
• Developer claims that the widget is "Served from a fast and reliable server. This widget won't stall your page load."

• Visit this page

• 
• 

• As you can see in the above graphic, code for insertion in your blog/site has been automatically generated. All that is left is to choose the badge background color. Select code from the first text box if you want your rank to be displayed on a black background or select code from second text box if you would like your badge to have a white background. Click inside the desired box, press Ctrl+A to select the entire code. Your work on the developer site is done. Browse to your site and insert the code in your template/page(s). That's all there is to it.

Free submission to 15 search engines

Yes, you read that right! You can submit your blog/site to all the major search engines free of cost. No need to hire anybody to do it. Will not cost you a single dime. So, how do you do it? Just follow the steps given below and you are on your way to free organic traffic;

• Visit this page
• You'll find two text boxes there.
• Enter your URL into the first text box.
• Enter your email address in the second box (yes, you'll have to give your email address to use this service; its free after all).
• Click the submit button.
• Your blog/site will be submitted to the following 15 search engines;

1. Google
   
2. AOL Search
3. Yahoo! Web Search
4. iWON.com
5. Jayde
   
6. Exactseek
   
7. Whatuseek
   
8. ScrubTheWeb
   
9. SearchIt
   
10. Amfibi
    
11. Lycos / AllTheWeb
12. Altavista
13. HotBot
    
14. GigaBlast
    
15. WebSquash
    

• The submission results page will load in your browser. It will show you successful and failed submissions. Successful submissions will be shown in green color, while the failed submissions will be shown in red color. Reason why the submission failed can also be viewed. Direct links to the submission pages of the failed search engines will be shown (they have a leading * appended to their name). You can click them to submit your site/blog manually. These links will open in a separate tab/window. (Not all failed submissions can be submitted manually by visiting the search engines submission page, however).
  

Free! Show your blog stats on your blog

Would you like to show your blog's SEO related stats on your blog? Yes, but wouldn't it be just great if it was possible without having to pay for it. Well both these wishes are possible. Here's how to do it;

• First you'll have to visit this page.
• Enter your site URL in the site URL text box.
• After that you'll have to select the SEO related stats that you would like to display on your blog/site. There are two radio buttons next to each stat, first one for showing the stat and the second one for preventing it from showing (obviously you would not like to show stats that are not impressive). All stats are in abbreviated form. Following are some of the stats that you can select;

1. Google Page Rank
2. Google info, like total number of pages indexed by Google from your site and back links pointing to your site.
3. Yahoo info, like pages from your site indexed by Yahoo and the number of back links pointing to your site.
4. Msn info, pages in MSN index.
5. Alexa info, Alexa ranking and back links as counted by Alexa.
6. Today's Unique visitors.
7. Today's Page views.
8. Yesterday's Unique visitors.
9. Yesterday's Page views.
10. Total Unique visitors (you can also supply the initial value in the text box beneath this stat selector).
11. Total Page Views (you can also supply the initial value in the text box beneath this stat selector).
12. Number of users currently browsing your site.

As you configure the stats you would be able to watch a live preview on the right side. After every change the preview graphic will change.

• Next you configure the colors;

1. Background color.
2. Text color.
3. Border color.
4. Indicator color (The color of Google page rank indicator).

• Last step on the page is to enter the captcha code in the code text box.
• Click the submit button.
• You'll be taken to the next page where you'll be given a code to paste into your blog/site.
• This is how the stats look like;

Hope I've been of some help to you. If you've some tools or services you would like to share with me and the readers of this blog, please do not hesitate to leave a comment. I'll be grateful.