Just cobbled together a nice little SEO tool that checks the PageRank of a website’s backlinks and sorts them in order of the pages with most authority - LinkRanker.

The tool grabs backlink information from the top 50 inlink results at Yahoo’s SiteExplorer API, so should be a bit more accurate than tools which use Google’s linkage data.

It’s probably still not that accurate, but should give a good indication at least. Any feature requests?

If you’ve just eagerly updated to Firefox 3, only to find that you can’t use certain vital extensions like the Web Developer toolbar and User Agent Switcher, read this useful post and then restart Firefox to fix the “plugin does not provide secure updates” message.

Hurrah! After a seemingly immense period of beta and RC testing, Firefox 3 is finally here!

Only problem is that those of us in the UK have to wait until 6pm (or 10am San Francisco time) to download it

Since everyone else seems to be releasing free/not quite free Google SERP ranking trackers, in the spirit of “what the hell they’ll change the code tomorrow anyway”, here’s the (Perl) regular expression I’ve been using for my own Google SERP tracker: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the many incredibly useful modules over at the Perl module database CPAN, is the WWW::Google::PageRank module. It gives a quick and easy way of checking PageRank for a number of pages without delving into the particulars of the header exchanges over at toolbarqueries.google.com.

In order to use the script below, first create a file named ‘pages.txt’, and enter the full URLs of the pages you want to check, separated by newline characters, and save it in the same directory as the script:

Read the rest of this entry »

Further to my previous post about Search Engine Optimizer essentials, there are a couple of additional tweaks you can make to your Firefox installation to make it more useful for SEO purposes.

Custom Stylesheet

1. Find your /Profiles/{xyz}.default/chrome/ directory
2. Rename userContent-example.css to userContent.css and open it in your favourite text editor
3. Add in the following rules:

Read the rest of this entry »

The fundamentals:

1. A thorough understanding of (x)HTML - HTML is the language of the web. Without being able to understand a page’s source code you’ll have difficulty with everything else. It’s the only language that search engines really “understand”, so you need to be able to understand it too.

   If you’re learning from scratch get an O’Reilly book on it or preferably enrol in a course on it - it’s always faster to learn if you can ask questions.

2. Fair knowledge/understanding of Javascript and CSS. Javascript is a client-side (i.e. executed on a user’s browser) scripting language that can fundamentally affect how a web page is displayed, how it behaves, and how it is treated by a browser. Javascript is important because search engines by and large do not process it, so it makes a difference to how an average user and a search engine spider see a page. For this reason it can be used equally for optimization and abuse.Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) also affect a web page’s appearance, but only the style of certain HTML elements. It is not a scripting language - more of a description language. CSS is important because again, it changes how a user as opposed to a search engine sees a page.
3. Knowledge of a one or more server-side scripting languages. Core languages on the web include PHP, ASP, Perl, and Python. Understanding how a server-side language operates, how they interact with the server, and what they are capable of doing opens up a whole new world of possibilities for search marketers.Examples range from creating dynamic websites, offloading unnecessary on-page code (ASP’s ‘viewstate’ meta tag is a common offender), IP delivery, and much, much more. Learning a server-side language also offers a deeper understanding of how the web operates.

The tools:

4. Firefox browser with following extensions installed:

• Web Developer - most essential add-on by far; notable features for search marketers include:
  • disable javascript, meta redirects, css, images, cookies
  • display alt attributes
  • linearize page
  • display element information
  • outline frames, headings, links
• User Agent Switcher - combined with disable javascript, css & images from Web Developer, useful for emulating the Google/Yahoo/MSN bots
• CustomizeGoogle - anonymises search data sent to Google, numbers results, & gives dynamic links to other search engines on search results pages
• Flagfox (would be ShowIP but it keeps crashing my Firefox) - view the IP address & country location of the server where the website you’re visiting is located
• IETab - quickly switch between IE & Firefox without leaving the page you’re on
• LiveHTTPHeaders - view and save HTTP headers, with a nice ALT-L shortcut to put it on the sidebar as and when needed.
• My IP Viewer -view your own IP address
• RefControl - control over what referrer information is sent to the websites you visit
• SearchStatus - good for highlighting nofollow links on demand
• SEO for Firefox - Aaron Wall’s extension is sometimes useful for analysing SERPs - shows number of times URLs are bookmarked in del.icio.us, Pagerank, # of .edu links, etc
• Torbutton - use in conjunction with Vidalia bundle to surf through proxies on demand

5. Xenu link sleuth - good for quickly analysing on-site redirects 404 errors and orphan files.
6. FileZilla - the best open source FTP client available (possibly just the best FTP client period).
7. A decent IDE. I mostly use Activestate Komodo (open source version here) and Notepad ++. Automatic colour coding of HTML source code helps to find errors quickly and efficiently.
8. Lynx browser - a very simple, text-based browser that gives a quick impression of how a search engine may see a website.
9. Local server - if you’re using Windoze, WAMP server is a good LAMP alternative that easily sets up your Windows PC with an Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language.This enables you to test and develop SEO changes before implementing them on a live site.
10. Custom-built search tools. Using a combination of your HTML, Javascript and server-side scripting knowledge, you can create bespoke tools for repetitive tasks, you can build your own web spider to help you see your site from Google’s perspective, and quickly develop tools that solve a variety of problems that come up every day.
11. An ear to the ground - keeping track of changes in the search world is essential. Watch both white hat and black hat sites - black hat being the ‘dark side’ of SEO, it’s essential to understand how black hat SEO works, even if you disapprove of the techniques.
12. A constant eye on many useful websites - here are just a few:

• DNS Stuff
• Domain Tools
• Webmasterradio.fm
• SEOBook
• Matt Cutts
• Searchengineland
• Google Webmaster Central Blog

Oh, and decent copywriting skills are a bonus

Anything I’ve missed??

The Google Checkout API is a very powerful tool for integrating an ordering system into an e-commerce website. The advantages it offers sellers are:

• Great integration with AdWords - plus get a big Google Checkout icon next to your ad!
• Fast, secure online checkout with no setup fees.
• Free processing of transactions until 2008.
• Free protection from fraud.
• It’s not PayPal*.

* You may/may not think this is an advantage…

However, Google’s documentation doesn’t necessarily make it easy for someone with limited knowledge of PHP/ASP/Perl, etc to integrate the checkout using their “Level 2 integration” via their XML API, which allows you to integrate GCO with your own order processing system.

Part 1 will show you how to get a basic testing setup of Google Checkout running on your website using Perl.
Part 2 will show how to set up the Callback URL so that you receive notifications every time a new order is placed on your site.
Part 3 will explore in depth how to integrate these steps with your MySQL database.
Part 4 will pull it all together and show how to integrate this into a fully functioning website and create a basic back-end administration and order processing system.

This tutorial assumes that you have at least a basic knowledge of Perl, MySQL, and a server that is running Perl 5.8.8.

* Before continuing with this tutorial, I recommend that you print off and at least scan through the Google Checkout XML API documentation. It’s not the most user-friendly thing to read, but it is an essential reference point. For Perl development, you should also read the POD for the GCO modules. Read the rest of this entry »