So you know I had to be interested when I got an email about trackur, a new reputation monitoring tool from Andy Beal.

Here is what I like about trackur:

Trackur goes beyond just Google content. It tracks images, videos, Digg, del.icio.us, Twitter, as well as the usual news and blog stuff. Users can view their results using a cool AJAX enabled interface and get updates via email or RSS. You can save multiple searches, add filter keywords, save discovered items, and sort the results the way you want.

Ok, that’s quite a bit. I especially like the part about getting your info via RSS. That’s pretty cool.

So I gave it a test run on a search for my name and my company name. “Stoney deGeyter” only produced 22 search results using trackur dating all the way back to March of 2007. A Google search for my name produces about 35,000 results. Similarly, a trackur search for “Pole Position Marketing” produced 26 results going all the way back to December of 2006 while a Google search gives me over 21,000.

Doing some more comparisons, for “Pole Position Marketing” Google produces 230 image results and 17 blog results. My own name produced over 1,200 blog results, a few video results (thanks Sage!) and another 300 images.

Ultimately, trackur didn’t give me anything I didn’t already know about. Reading the FAQ page they believe trackur will discover 99% of the information out there. Google does a pretty good job of finding stuff too.

But unlike Google, trackur comes with a price tag that is, well, pretty steep.

To monitor a single search you’re going to pay $88 per month. That’s about what I might expect to pay for a full year subscription, and the option of tracking at least five keywords. trackur has two other pricing options, $188 per month for five searches and $388 for 15 searches.

If trackur will be able to find more information than I can get from Google Alerts and substantially quicker then I can see the value in the service for larger corporations. But on the individual/small business level I just don’t see the value or return in paying the rather substantial monthly fee. I’m open to be convinced, but I wasn’t during the 14-day trial.

As always, please submit any bug reports or upgrade requests to help us continue to make this tool better.

What Does CodeMonitor do?

For those of you who don’t know what the CodeMonitor tool is or does… well it’s pretty cool, if you ask me.

Simply put, it notifies you when any web page that you are monitoring changes. Now this isn’t a substitute for an RSS feed, this is something entirely different. CodeMonitor allows you to monitor select pages of a website and will email you whenever that page changes. Once you get that email you can login to see the new changes highlighted against to the previously “saved” version of the page.

Here, let me show you…

Let’s say that I wanted to keep tabs on what a competitor is doing whenever they make changes to their pages for SEO purposes (or any other reason). After creating my CodeMonitor account (yes, an account is needed so we can store your monitored pages for a daily comparison) I then set up all my monitored pages. Each time I login now I get a screen that looks like this:

Now let’s say that several of my monitored pages change. The next morning I find an email that tells me what pages changed and prompts me to login:

I quickly see which pages have changed and I can click on the little compare icon which will let me see the old version side by side with the new version of the page:

This view shows me the on-page text (with Title and Metas) of the last “saved” version on the right and the most recent version on the left. The green highlights show me exactly what has changed between the two versions. I’m able to scroll each side independently so I can see the differences all the way down the document. Once I’ve done my analysis of the changes I can then hit the save icon and the new version becomes the master version from which all daily comparisons are made.

I also have the option of switching to two other views, one allows me to compare the HTML code of the page and the other is to compare the page as it looks in a browser. Here is a shot of the same page above in code compare view:

The browser view still has bugs and isn’t comparing properly so I won’t show you a screenshot, but you get the gist.

How else can I use it?

Not only does CodeMonitor let me keep up on what my competitors are doing but I can also use it to monitor pages that are not set up for RSS. I currently use it for wikipedia pages, Google webmaster pages, etc.

But I also have one more use for it for which it is extremely helpful, and that is to monitor client pages that we have optimized. Yeah, that’s right, we monitor our client’s too.

Why? Well you know how it is, you spend a lot of time editing page content, title tags, etc. and then a week later the client goes and makes changes from an old version of the page. Poof, all your SEO is gone. But most times we wouldn’t know it until we got back in to analyze the site, but with CodeMonitor we know the very next day. This then allows us to go in and see what changes the client made. Sometimes they are not significant but sometimes they are. Either way, we know.

And here is where we get to a couple of other cool features of CodeMonitor. If you have editing access to a page you are monitoring (such as a client page) you can control which pieces of code get monitored and which don’t. This is especially handy when changes are made to global headers or footers or when there are revolving elements on a page. You can simply insert some snippets of code to tell CodeMonitor to ignore those portions of the code. When changes are made to the code marked for ignore you won’t bother with it or have to go in and save a dozen site pages because of it.

Other Features

Another couple of handy features is that you can tell CodeMonitor to ignore comment tag changes or to notify you only when changes are to the text are made. The latter ignores all coding changes and only focuses on textual elements and the title and metas.

So there you have it. Check out CodeMonitor and start monitoring and spying today!

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is the greatest open-source browser available. Firefox offers users complete control over the browser featuring tabs, pop-up blocking, useful toolbars, and many themes. Firefox is W3C compliant which means developers will not have to slave to make sure CSS is rendering correctly like IE. In addition, the browser has thousands of extensions that will aid developers and SEOs alike.

Google Docs

Google Docs has made document creation and sharing simple through an easy-to-use web document interface. Google Docs offers users an alternative to Microsoft Office with tools for word processing, spreadsheets, and more recently presentations. Google Docs allows users to share documents with other users ensuring easy collaboration. For more info, check out the Google Docs Blog and WebWare’s Five Google Docs Hints.

Adium

Adium is a Mac-based application that allows users to connect to multiple instant messenger accounts at the same time while using a single application. It works with AOL, MSN, Google Talk and more. Looking for a close PC cousin? Try Pidgin.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar makes keeping track of important dates easy. The web-based software easily integrates with Gmail and all other Google products. Check out Lifehacker’s guide to using GCal and all the tricks that are possible.

Programmers Notepad

Programmer’s Notepad is a very easy to use HTML editor similar to Notepad. Unlike Notepad, however, PN is a text editor with several extra features such as syntax highlighting, quick search, docking tools, and code outlining. The program is very easy to use and a straightforward solution for SEO’s and developers alike.

Handbrake

Open source program Handbrake is an easy to use DVD to MPEG 4 ripper. This tool allows users to make backup copies of DVDs as well as import movies into iTunes or iPods. This isn’t exactly an “seo tool” but everyone needs to have some time to relax, right?

7-Zip

7-Zip is an easy to use file archiver to pack / unpack all types of files such as zip, tar, gzip, etc. 7-Zip is a much faster alternative to the zip programs installed on Windows XP and Vista.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer isn’t just another Microsoft program. Although I’ve already bashed the company twice in this post alone, I can’t say that there wasn’t any decent program to come out of the MS developer warehouse. Live Writer is a tool aimed at making blogging easier. It allows users to publish directly to most blogs like Blogger, Typepad, etc., in a very easy to use interface. The program allows users to preview their posts and compose entries while offline.

Gmail

What need I say about Gmail, quite possibly the greatest email program in the world. For starters, Gmail offers users up to nearly 6GB of storage, tagging, email conversations, and more recently IMAP. Gmail easily integrates into programs like Mail and Thunderbird, as well as iPhones and other mobile devices. Plus Gmail continually strives to make improvements aimed at bettering the user’s experience. Web-based mail is here to stay.

Google Analytics

At this point it’s safe to assume Google is taking over the world since three of my ten faves all come from the search engine monster. But in any event, Google has gotten analytics right. Google Analytics is a free web-based program designed to improving your site’s marketing and results. The program features a very easy interface and provides web owners a variety of features ranging from search trends, site trends, geography reach, and much more. Every SEO ought to at least try out this program to see what it can do for you and your site. Check out the Official Analytics Blog for more info.

Like many of you, I use a social bookmarking site to keep my blogs nice and neat and clean for me. I go to one site and am able to read all 18 blogs without having to go the actual blog site unless necessary. Pretty convenient, right?

Well, I thought so too, until I realized just how many social bookmarking sites there are. And it seems to me that, like the blogs I read, these social bookmarking sites seem to double in a week’s time.

Here are some non-niche-specific bookmarking sites (and I’m not even including some of the major players):

del.icio.us: A social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too.

Digg: A place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, …

reddit: reddit is a source for what’s new and popular online. reddit learns what you like as you vote on existing links or
submit your own! …

StumbleUpon: The best way to discover great websites, videos, photos, blogs and more. Channel surf the internet and get personalized recommendations …

Technorati: The recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now.

Twitter: Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.

While many of the above are rather general, many of the below are specifically targeting those in marketing and/or marketing-related fields:

Marketing Lens: Love internet marketing? Each day, Marketing Lens identifies the top 15 online marketing stories and blogs of the day.

Small Business Brief: Serving those in small business by providing resources, informative articles, current news, software directory and small business ideas forum.

Sphinn: The place for web, online, search, interactive and internet marketers to share news stories, talk within subject-specific discussion forums.

I can’t tell you how many times I get emails asking to “sphinn” this or “fetch” that, to “digg” this or “reddit” that. It’s almost too much to handle sometimes. Then again, I do understand the want of gaining a level of notoriety through this relatively new media frenzy of social bookmarking. Who doesn’t want to be popular?

It’s a lot like high school, where you have the different cliques. Except in regard to social bookmarking and networking, rather than having the cheerleaders and the band geeks and the rebels, you have the tech geeks, the media companies, and the marketers.

This is a popularity contest.

The more friends/fans/followers you have, the more likely you are to get on the front page and be the next hot topic.

The first session of the last day was site clinic, hosted by Shari Thurow and Matt Bailey. In this session, audience members’ web sites were reviewed from a usability and SEO standpoint. The site clinic brought about many good tips and ideas:

• Always have call to actions above the fold
• Keep higher ranking word links above the fold
• Stay away from blue text unless using it for links
• Give users a sense of place on every page by using breadcrumbs
• Use benefit-oriented copy to show users what your products would do for them
• Utilize a context rewrite module for long URL’s
• Check your site using Yahoo! Site Explorer to discover link structure

Meet The Crawlers

This session was moderated by Danny Sullivan and featured representatives from four major search engines to answer attendee questions. I think we were all hoping that each engine would give away their secret algorithm, but that didn’t happen. Instead, the representatives answered questions from the audience similar to that of a politician at a debate. They wouldn’t give straight answers to questions ranging from link baiting and paid links to site structure. I found this session more of a headache than anything else.

Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price Of One

This session was the last session of the conference. It was hosted by Shari Thurow and Matt Bailey. In this session, the two speakers presented ways to not only build a search engine friendly site, but how to fix site usability. There’s no point of having a number one ranking in Google if your site doesn’t get any conversions. The session discussed the importance of having proper information architecture, using clear, visible links, and keeping important information above the fold.

Overall, the conference has given me a greater understanding of the SEM world. I also met some neat people along the way. I would recommend SES to any search marketer wanting to learn more about their field.

And, really, it wasn’t how she looked that she was trying to figure out anyway. Any mirror can tell you that. She wanted to know what people thought of her- beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all.

So what do people think about you? What do they think about your business? Do you know? Do you know how to track it? There’s a few tricks to monitoring these things via the web, and thats what I’d like to show you today…

How Do You Figure Out What The Internet Thinks About You?

We all would like to find out other’s opinions of us- as scary as it might turn out, we like to keep an eye on our public image. And when you take that concept to the internet, it can be a really scary prospect. It’s a huge place- if you’re going to stare into that abyss searching for an answer you better have a plan.

And this brings us to this week’s installment of Info Addict: 3 Easy Steps to Managing Your Online Reputation.

Step 1: Get Access to a Feedreader

If you don’t have a feedreader- online or offline- go get one. You have 2 choices for the bulk of this: (1) spend a half hour every day searching the web for information about yourself or (2) let the web do it for you via a feedreader. If you need any help, visit my last Info Addict post.

Step 2: Try out a few Vanity Searches

What you’re going to do is perform a “Vanity Search,” and then you’re going to subscribe to this search in your feed reader. Vanity searches are just searches for your name or the name of your business. It can be helpful to experiment with alternate spellings, abbreviations and misspellings so that you capture everything being said about your or your brand on the internet.

Step 3: Add feeds of your searches to your feedreader

“What’s that,” you ask, “you can subscribe to more than just blogs and news?” Yes. many sites will allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds of searches, and many search engines are adding this feature as well. Now this step can vary from engine to engine, so I’ll explain how to do it with 2 of my favorite sources, Bloglines and Google.

How to subscribe to a bloglines search:
Once you know have a list of the different variations of your name you want to monitor on the net, you can go to bloglines.com and subscribe to them. Once you hit bloglines, in the top right of the page you’ll see the search feature. There’s lots of options listed but for now ignore them- just do the default search for “posts.” Once you’ve completed the search, you’ll see just below it a couple links to subscribe to the search. Add it to your feedreader and off you go. Rinse and repeat for all your searches.

How to subscribe to a Google search:
The catch with Google is that not every search is available for subscription yet. As of now, it’s available for Blogs and Video- so we’ll highlight the blog search. Just do the same thing- perform a search for each of your variations and you’ll find the option to subscribe on the left hand side, below a few other options.

Bonus Step 4: Do Your Best to Go To Sleep Tonight, Instead of Endlessly Refreshing Your Feedreader

As a company, as well as an individual, it’s more important than ever to monitor your online reputation. There’s so much value there- from learning unexpected lessons about how your customers feel about or use your product, to protecting your brand from slander or misrepresentation.

Now that you’ve mastered the Vanity Search, you’ll probably want to subcribe to a few other searches like the names of your competition, your suppliers, your favorite sports team, your 5th grade crush…

“…represent the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization”

which:

“… is a resource of incredible value”

and futhermore:

“…that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google’s algorithm is contained…”

I am both embarrassed and encouraged:

Embarrassed that the “industry leaders”, have made so little progress towards a practical understanding of modern search engine mechanics, thereby giving a degree of merit to detractors of search optimization who openly voice their skepticism.

Encouraged by the idea that here in Reno, Nevada we are doing things in our little corner of the SEO world that are light years beyond what the “SEO Elite” are doing (I’ll go ahead and pat myself on the back and extend the same to Stoney as soon as I see him.)

I’d like to point out what I feel are the most noteworthy points of interest and expert comments within the “Ranking Factors V2″. The following points are noteworthy because of the nonsensical nature, wildly contradictory “expert opinion” or outright comedic value which they offer.

Most Entertaining Expert Comments on the Ranking Factors V2:

According to one expert almost everything: “May hurt your rankings if it is too well aligned with the page title and anchor text. “

So if your: (insert ranking factor of choice:

• Primary on-page descriptor, the H1 Tag
• Keyword Use in H2, H3, H(x) Tags
• Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag
• etc., etc.)

and your Title element and your anchor text all accurately describe the topic of your page; it may hurt your rankings?
Huh, maybe an anti-relevancy sorting algorithm is in use?

“Being a fairly new SEO’er, I’d say that from all the stories I’ve heard compared to my actual experimentations, I’d say this has little value if you try to do white-hat, but could be more effective with massive link campaign / spamming (while getting you flagged!)”

How does a “fairly new SEO’er” armed with “stories” qualify as a “leader in the world of organic search engine optimization”?

Concerning the use of keywords in your body text: Once again, better to than not to, but hardly any value.

Better to use the words that define your topic when presenting your topic, than not to. Ummmmm…Sounds like good advice.
And while your at it make sure to call people by their own names and not other people’s names. And just in case you better use a phillips screwdriver on that phillips screw and use your car key to drive your car.

“The link populairty of the linking page and site is probably the most important factor when deciding on a link.”

If you have time to do only one SEO action on your site, take the time to create good titiles.

If you only have time to create good titles, you’re not an SEO.

Concerning the Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site: If it doesn’t I’ve wasted 14 years of my life.

I don’t think Google takes that into account, but I hear personalization is coming.

Most Entertaining “Ranking Factors”

Relevance of Site’s Primary Subject Matter to Query
I was unaware that whole websites are now being furnished as search results.

Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)
So if the text is about a certain topic that may help it rank for that topic. Awesome! Good Find Guys!

Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag
Is click-through important?

PageRank (as measured by the GG Toolbar) of Linking Page
The Google Toolbar shows PageRank?

HTML Validation of Document (to W3C Standards)
Validate Google’s HTML

My conclusion

If todays top SEO’s really are doing well for their clients, they don’t have a clue why. That is a professional liability.

As a quick aside, and along these lines, over at search engine guide I made an argument for website validation as an important part of the optimization process. I don’t believe 100% validation makes a difference for rankings, but I outlined there why it is worth taking the time to do. At the very least it helps you identify search engine unfriendly problems.

For this series I figured we’d start at the top: the domain name. Many argue about the value of using keywords in the domain name and whether that will make any difference at all in the ranking algorithms. My opinion is if it does make a difference, it’s not much. But I also believe that the full process of optimization is largely about doing a whole lot of “not much”.

The smartest thing to do is make sure your business name uses your keywords. And no, I don’t mean you should name your business No Doc Home Mortgage Loans Company. But if you sell mortgages it makes sense to use mortgages in your name, being sure you can secure the domain name as well.

Since there is really not a lot you can do to “optimize” your domain or even make it search engine friendly so I’ll leave you with links to series of articles I’ve written previously on Securing a Marketing Rich Domain Name. That’ll give you some food for thought.

Intro (see link above)
Build Your Brand
Secure a .com
Don’t Hyphenate
Spell Words Properly
Type-In Traffic
Mispellings
Hyphenated Versions
YourDomainSucks.com
Use Proper Redirects

I feel compelled to begin with a little disclaimer: in no way was today’s blogging activity here at PPM orchestrated to be a pick on Rand day. We openly praise and discuss much of Rand’s work here at the office and we are very much fans of SEOMoz.

With that said…

Today I was reading an interesting post over at SEOMoz in which Rand put forth the idea that perhaps submitting a Google sitemap could be detrimental as it may cause pages to be indexed which are unworthy of inclusion in the index (Google SpamMaps?) . The main point that I got from the post was that non-inclusion served as a pass/fail metric to indicate the strength of a given page.

I have a couple of problems with Rand’s position. Firstly I can state with a good deal of certainty that inclusion in a Google sitemap does not equal inclusion in Google’s index. I have experienced this first-hand and I’m quite certain that Google is still evaluating index worthiness of individual pages, even those crawled via sitemap.

Lastly (and most disappointingly), is the matter of relying on non-inclusion as a metric to determine a page’s index-worthiness. If SEO’s don’t have an independent grasp on determining whether or not a page should/will be indexed; then I think that is a big problem.

According to the post, non-inclusion is a good indicator of poor importance (“link juice”) and/or poor content. By submitting a sitemap one may cause these factors to be overlooked by the search engine. Again I can’t escape from the fact that if you need Google’s refusal of your work to let you know that it is no good, then perhaps it’s time to upgrade one’s skill-set.

The ability to simulate and analyze optimal link structures and site architecture is a fundamental SEO skill. A keen eye for sound, relevant content is at the top of the list as well, and these are just the basics.

I am a dedicated SEOMoz reader and I have great respect for Rand who frequently demonstrates great SEO acumen and experience. I do however think that maybe he ran with this one a little too quickly.

Today I will be sharing 2 of my favorite search tools. These are either search engines which furnish search results in a new and innovative way or search services which enhance or refine the search results of traditional search engines.

Service: Grokker
Description: Grokker is a cool visual clustering search engine with a unique way of presenting search results.
Use: Identification of logical concept ontologies especially in regards to how sub-topics relate to parent topics and the general level of granularity at which various sub-topics exist.
Screen Shot:
[image no longer available]

Service: Quintura Search
Description: A query submitted to Quintura produces a visual map of concepts related to the query. Placement in relation to the query terms reveals conceptual similitude. Quintura then allows you to interact with your query in various ways to refine your search results in real time. For example you can promote, demote, append and expand upon individual search terms to refine the entire query.
Use: Identification of concept spaces and even specialized industry vocabularies.
Screen Shot:
[image no longer available]

• Building a Search Engine friendly website
• In depth keyword research
• Understanding a Search Engine
• On- and off-page search engine optimization (aka SEO)
• Google AdWords and Pay-Per-Click campaigns
• Link building strategies
• Tracking your traffic and understanding stats

The course will illustrate that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of many important ingredients that increase a web site’s exposure on the Internet. Students will learn how to incorporate an SEO campaign into a much broader e-marketing strategy that’ll transform an under-performing site into a high-performance marketing machine. The class is ideal for local business owners, students and entrepreneurs interested in learning how to maximize their online presence, starting from the ground up.

The cost is only $139 and uses Stoney deGeyter’s book “E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing and Marketing your Website Online” as its curriculum. Student price for the book is $30 through TMCC – or register for the course this week to receive a free electronic copy.

It’ll take place Thursdays starting February 22, through March 1, 8 & 15 from 6 pm – 9pm.

Class size is limited to the first 30 students, register online at wdce.tmcc.edu or by calling 775-829-9010.

As you can imagine there are all sorts of treasures hidden within this massive data pile. The trick is formulating effective queries that will deliver the goods. I call this Google-Mining and below you will find some of my best tools for striking gold.

A Word of Caution: As well-intentioned as Googlebot is, sometimes it indexes information that was not intended for public perusal. Please respect other’s privacy and digital property! Don’t save or even view any data that is obviously intended to be private. This includes media objects, personal files, business data, etc.

Finding Applications

Use the following search syntax to locate applications:

“parent directory ” /appz/ -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums

inurl:[manufacturer ie.Sun] filetype:iso

Finding MP3’s

Use the following search syntax to locate MP3’s:

“parent directory ” MP3 -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums

?intitle:index.of? mp3

Finding Games

Use the following search syntax to locate games:

“parent directory ” Gamez -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums

Finding Movies

Use the following search syntax to locate movies:

“parent directory “Xvid -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums

According to NASA, the integrated solution named iEarth, will be available for use by anyone in April.

Text Analysis Tools:

• Web Vocabulary Profiler: An awesome text disambiguation suite.
• Textalyser: An old favorite for quick and easy text stats.

Search Tweaked:

• Search Mash: Google’s experiment with search result integration.
• GMBMG: Give me back my Google furnishes “pure” or non spammy versions of Google search results..

Technical Reference:

• MathWorld: The definitive math resource online.
• Soople: Online calculators.

more to come…

[quote]In the past, the only way to prevent this association was to routinely clear the cookies from your browser. Lost in the Crowd takes a different approach: automatically and over time placing a number of random queries through the search engines you use from your actual tracking cookie. What searches did you care about versus those that were just made up? There’s no way for the search engine, or anyone else, to tell.[/quote]

Now, get lost!

In the world of online marketing, tracking changes to competitor, client and industry related websites can not only help you stay current on important issues, but can also help you gather additional competitive intelligence data simply and easily. RSS is great, but its not everywhere. For tracking what you can’t with RSS, we have developed the CodeMonitor Page Tracking tool.

While your reasons for wanting to track pages may vary, here are a few common reasons that don’t always lend themselves to RSS.

Competitor Tracking
Tracking even minor changes to your competitor websites. You want to know whenever a competitor adds a new product, reduces prices, or even makes changes that are designed to improve their search engine rankings. Changes in their title and meta description tags as well as on-page content can all provide you important business intelligence.

Industry Updates
When respected web developers make new tools available to the public, you want to know about it. Or you want to keep updated when informational sites add industry relevant articles or links to other important industry related information. Infrequent monitoring can often put you at a competitive disadvantage.

Client Changes
If you are a firm that provides online marketing services you need to keep an eye on all your clients. Even the smallest changes made, without your knowledge, can be devastating to both rankings and conversion performance.

If you are the client, you want to know whenever your search marketing firm makes changes to your own site, no matter how small. You know that their changes can effect your public image so you need to stay on top of what changes are actually being made to your website.

Without sounding too much like a commercial, if you want to track pages for any of the reasons above, you really ought to give CodeMonitor a try. Here is a quick rundown of the benefits:

• Tracks page changes. This included code changes such as title and description tags as well as on page content. SEO changes, pricing changes, product additions would all be included
• Provides multiple comparison views. You can see the changes in html code view, text only view, or visible (browser) view.
• No hunting for the changes. In each view changes between the old and the new versions are highlighted for you.
• Track any and as many pages as you want.
• 24-hour updates. If any change is made to any page you are tracking you’ll receive an email first thing in the morning notifying you.

If you have a need for competitive tracking, give CodeMonitor a try. It’s completely web based so there is no program to install. Check out CodeMonitor today.

Shows knowledge of this subject
average: 5.0

OK, so at least I know what I’m talking about. Though I have to admit that it’s not often hard to convey superior knowledge to a group of people who know little to nothing about a particular topic. It’s more important that they actually learn something!

Is well-prepared
average: 3.75

Good marks, but I know I could have been better prepared. I think I relied too heavily on the book when I should have just let myself talk, instead of thinking about what to say. I know the information and wrote the book, so it’s not like I need that to tell me what to talk about.

Uses time effectively
average: 4.0

We were pressed for time from the beginning and really didn’t even get through all the materials. Because of this I know some students felt that the workshops were not the best use of time, but I still think those we did were useful. Next time the class will be 4 hours longer, but even still I suspect that will be too short. I’ll be approaching the material in a different way as well and hope to hit everything that is important.

Is professional
average: 4.75

I’m actually surprised at this because I actually felt a bit stiff, at lest for the first two classes. For the second half I was more relaxed and felt less like an “instructor” as I did someone simply helping a group of people take hold of some new information.

Encourages participation
average: 4.75

The workshops were all about participation and a lot of times I really allowed the students to use their own business sites as examples. With more time in the next session I hope to be able to expand on this aspect as well.

Answers questions effectively
average: 4.75

When I knew them!

Instructor Average: 4.5

That first section was all about me and my teaching capabilities, the next section shows my true worth as a teacher, or at the very least our ability to accurately represent what the course material will cover.

Course materials were useful
average: 4.50

Glad to hear that the book was of value. This was the hardest part to know before hand because you never know who’s going to sign up for the class and what skill level they bring with them. It looks like we nailed this one!

Your knowledge in this subject increases
average: 3.50

Everybody learned something. Maybe not what they thought they would learn or what they hopes, but at the very least we provided the students a real education.

You are very satisfied with this course
average: 4.50

I know for some the course wasn’t what they had expected and because of that we are working out a new course title and description. We are hoping this will clarify any miscommunications.

You would recommend this course to others
average: 4.25

Ah, the true measure of a course’s value. If you would recommend it to someone else then you know you didn’t have a dog on your hands!

This course was described accurately in the guide and/or web
average: 4.50

This one I’m surprised about because I heard very specifically from some that felt that this course wasn’t quite what they expected. We’ll do better next time, I hope.

General Average: 3.90

A few other comments added by the students can be summarized as: add more visuals, more examples, more time. We are correcting the time issues which hopefully will allow for more visuals and examples.

Total Average: 4.22

Overall, I would have to say the class is a success. There are definitely areas for improvement and we’ll be hitting on those next time around. I enjoyed the class and I got the impression that the students did to. I’d like to thank them all for their participation!

“Their first issue will hold about 40 pages, and would be the first magazine devoted solely to search marketing. Publisher Boris Mordkovich commented that, ‘The goal of the magazine is to bring all of the information that’s floating out there to end-users that need it to improve their advertising campaigns in a simple yet effective way.’ “

If you want to receive 4 free issues (a year’s subscription) of this (hopefully) awesome magazine, just go to the homepage at Searchmarketingstandard.com and fill out the short form.

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• Improved HTML Code Comparison
  Previously CodeMonitor would highlight an entire line of code when a small edit in that line of code had been made. This made it difficult to pinpoint the change made in exceptionally long lines of code. The new version of CodeMonitor will now only highlight the actual code changed, rather than the full line of code, making spotting coding changes that much easier.
• New Comparison Views
  CodeMonitor now allows you to switch to two new comparison views, along with the standard “code” view.
1. Text Comparison
   Don’t want to sludge through all that code and only want to see changes made to textual content? Now you can switch to a text-only view which will display just the on-page text and highlight the changes made accordingly.
2. Web Page Comparison
   We have also added the ability to compare changes made through the eye of a browser. No code, and not just text, but view the page as you see it in your browser, with recent changes highlighted.

Have not yet tried CodeMonitor? You can read more about it or get a CodeMonitor account here.

“The SEO Links extension gives you tooltips specially enhanced for SEOs. When enabled, hovering any link in Firefox will show you Yahoo, MSN, and Google link popularity and ranking data for the URL and anchor text pair. For times you just want regular surfing and tooltips, the extension can be quickly toggled on and off in a single click.”

Check it out and see a screenshot of the tool in action.

This is something that should have happened a long time ago. Imagine if your Sprint cell phone could only call other sprint customers. Or that your T-Mobile cell phone would not allow you to call your friends that use Verizon. We’d be carrying multiple cell phones just to be able to take calls from all our friends and family.

This is the mess that instant messengers have been in. Some people have messenger accounts for MSN, Yahoo, AOL, GoogleTalk and ICQ. Trellian had been about the only way to combine all of these into one service, but the downside to that was you had to register for an IM account at EACH one.

Hopefully this Yahoo / MSN collaboration will result in more IM services working together to do the same. Let me use the IM service I like best, but don’t keep me from chatting with someone who doesn’t have my particular IM. This is a big step in the right direction!

“Click fraud is an elusive problem for advertisers, and even industry experts disagree on the extent of the problem. Studies estimate that click fraud accounts for anywhere from 10 percent to 30 percent of all clicks.”

They call it “Fraud Print” and it runs a series of tests on the user’s computer’s electronic “fingerprint” to try to determine if the click was legitimate or not.

“Some advertisers have noticed a greater return on investment than before Fraud Print was implemented, Thaler said. The technology also benefits Search for It, he said, by ‘creating a situation in which our advertisers look to continue to replenish their account balance.’ “

I think that’s a pretty neat tool, especially since people are seeing better ROI.

I think of it as walking into a library, asking for information on X and the librarian handing you a book and saying, here you go. Sure, the book may be just what you want, on the other hand, it might only provide you a fraction of what you need. Aren’t you better off being directed to the section of the library that contains dozens of book about your topic, rather than just one?

Recommendations are nice, but they should never be allowed to substitute the full spectrum of sources available.