Chaos Laboratory

There’s a brand new money earner for your blog up and about – BlogRolled. If you just made a wild guess regarding their modus operandi, you’re right! It’s a service that pays you for placing the advertisers’ links in your blogroll. At this point of time, the site doesn’t offer much information regarding the company.

The site itself contains a barebone outline of how their service is going to operate along with a sign-up section for both bloggers and advertisers. I came to know about it through this mail from ReviewMe, which stated that this service is brought to you by Shawn Nafziger, the president of Page1Promotion, LLC, an SEO consulting firm serving small business clients across the USA.

Now the first thought that pops in your mind when you hear of this service is – BLOGROLL !! That’s like prime real-estate. The average blogroll appears in the sidebar and nowadays it’s common practise to display the sidebar on all pages – whether on the blog index or along with individual posts. In effect, the links placed in your blogroll are highly visible to all Search Engine spiders, irrespective of the part of the site they are crawling. My point is, that each of the paid links must bring in a decent amount of cash in lieu of such high visibility (as opposed to text link ads placed on single posts). It’s pointless to give up such prime location to low paying advertisers.

I’ve signed-up with them and intend to have a deeper look at it. More on it later. Meanwhile, has anyone else out there started availing this service? If so, care to share your experience with us?

Jun 18th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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DNSRank is an all new juvenile entrant in a jungle full of raging tigers. What I mean to say is that, they’ve decided to join the whole SEO bandwagon with almost no originality on their part – which might make it very difficult for them to survive for long.

The site definitely has that Web 2.0 jazz & sparkle to it and is very well laid out. They describe themselves as a “Domain Evaluation Tool” – but I’m sorry to say that they fall way short of expectations in this quarter. Eye-candy isn’t all !! Lets face the reality. There are plenty of age old predators in this field, starting from web-based services like SEOMoz & Xinu to awesome Firefox extensions like SeoQuake, SEOpen & SearchStatus. Most of these tools give far more comprehensive information and Search Engine Optimization tips than the barebone skeletal outline offered by DNSRank. While utilising their service, I couldn’t find a single tool that could spike my interest… except maybe for the section that displays sites which share the same IP as yours. Then again, there are plenty of other services on the net that cater to just this, as a simple Google Search reveals.

DNSRank is still in it’s infancy. Running their own tool on their own domain reveals that even the domain registration is just 29 days old (on the date of writing this review). Judging by it’s age, we can certainly cut some lax. If they have market domination (or at least gaining a large percentage) in mind, they’ve already lost out of the beginning battle. They totally failed to cash in on the element of surprise (by introducing new tools & tricks) – which is so common to any Web 2.0 startup these days. If they’re really out to set a mark on the wall, they need to strive much much harder than this.

Jun 13th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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Lets say, you own a web-based business that isn’t working all that well. You don’t seem to get too many hits from the major search engines, despite trying out all the “proven” SEO techniques you dug up from the net. Your best bet under such circumstances is to turn to professional help – like Apogee Search – who can get your business into the limelight in no time.

The company has been around since 2001 and has evolved to become one of top 25 search engine marketing firms in the world. Apogee’s SEO can lead your site to be ranked at the top of today’s most popular natural search engines. The increased visibility leads to more sales which in turn enables your business’s market share to grow by leaps and bounds.

Apogee handles the bulk of San Antonio SEO. San Antonio is a booming market for small, local businesses. Applying their domain of expertise (paid search, natural search, affiliate marketing, pay-per-call etc.), Apogee has put many of these small businesses online and helped them gain a stronghold in an ever expanding market.

They’ve an active blog that covers the latest and hottest search engine marketing news and events. Even if you aren’t availing their services, their articles can provide you with many helpful pointers & insights. If you wish to sample their services, you can always order a free Search Marketing Analysis of your site anytime.

To sum it all, Apogee is a trusted partner who can help squeeze the most out of your marketing dollar and quickly raise your revenues to the next level.

Sep 20th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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Well, almost ! Xinu is this great new “Jack-of-all-trades” tool that analyses and returns a horde of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) related information regarding your site, neatly stacked in a single page. A real time-saver if you ask me.

All you go to do is enter your site’s URL and hit Go. The results are fetched using AJAX – so you don’t have to suffer long wait periods while all the factors are summed up and displayed. In fact, the interface comes up with pre-created tables and SEO factor titles, where the values are simply plugged-in later on.

Among the results provided are:

• Screen-shot of your site
• A mini site diagnosis involving your URL’s difficulty-to-remember score, site title score (based on the number of words), keywords & description, HTML file size, number of each types of tags etc. Surprisingly, this section reported that my site doesn’t have a favicon and I need to get one, whereas you can see mine (the blue flask) the moment you land-up at my site.
• A small domain panel that shows the IP your domain resolves to, the country where your host is located, the site author’s name and if possible the age of the domain.
• A site ranking panel that displays you Google PageRank, Technorati rank, Alexa Traffic rank as well as the number of DMOZ listings.
• Couple of lines of information on the type of syndication (feeds) offered by your site and the number of subscribers.
• Number of inbound links from various well-known Social Bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, Clipmarks as well as from lesser-known ones like Mister Wong, Meneame etc.
• Site markup validity information broken up into HTML, CSS and Feeds.
• Number of indexed pages on Google, Yahoo and Live.
• Lastly, the number of backlinks from all major search engines like Google, Yahoo, AllTheWeb, AskJeeves etc.

All in all a pretty good tool – although a bit buggy in places. Hopefully, they’ll fix these soon. What I like best about Xinu is that you can stop scampering around half of the internet just to check on all the important SEO aspects of your site.

Sep 19th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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If you’re a webmaster and run your own site, Website Grader can count as a brand new yet invaluable addition to your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) toolbox. The site takes your own site’s URL as an input and provides a Percentile SEO Score (on a scale of 100) along with a comprehensive report that tells you the SEO pros and cons of your site.

Additionally, you can enter your keywords/keyphrases along with your competitors URLs to get a relative feedback on your site’s marketing effectiveness.

My blog, Chaos Laboratory, got a score of 96/100. That means my site has a marketing effectiveness that is higher than 96% of all other sites submitted to this service.

A website grade of 96 for chaos-laboratory.com means that of the thousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 96% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over a dozen different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

By submission, they mean the first time a site’s URL is entered at Website Grader, following which the data is kept stored in their database and matched against all such similarly submitted sites. This also means that the SEO Score for this site isn’t constant – and may vary from time to time depending on the quality of other sites submitted sooner or later.

The only warning I received was regarding the high number of meta keywords I have in my site header.

We believe that though the search engines don’t weigh keywords as heavily as they used to, they’re still important to get right. By using a high number of keywords, it is possible that you are diluting the effect of your most important keywords. We would suggest keeping the keywords to 10 or less. Currently, this site has 21 keywords in the meta-data.

The site sports a simplistic Web 2.0 AJAX based interface and there’s a membership feature, which helps you keep track of your SEO Score as well as get detailed reports mailed to you.

Website Grader is a free service (as of now) and I don’t see any mentions of a paid high-end counterpart anywhere on the site. This can definitely act as a free but great alternative to the Sitescore and the SEOMoz Page Strength tools – which have retracted their free services (at least Sitescore did while SEOMoz has reserved the updated analysis feature for premium subscribers only).

Found via: Quick Online Tips, Our Website SEO Grade is 98/100

Sep 18th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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