Online Marketing Blog

Yahoo has updated their Site Explorer tool to offer some very Google Sitemap-like tools including the ability to track more than one site, display the last crawl date, easier feed submission and an update notification service. These services require a Yahoo account to login.

PRWeb announced today that they are now offering a service that will allow their press release distribution clients the ability to map the company domain name to the RSS feed of the release hosted by PRWeb.

When you submit a press release through PRWeb and associate that press release with a RSS Group in the PRWeb control panel, the release is then published as part of an RSS feed. This feed url can be pinged to the RSS search engines and also used in an auto discovery tag for RSS feeds in the company web site. That way RSS enabled browsers and feed readers can automatically detect the company press release RSS feed and subscribe to it, even if they do not have a blog.

Rand and company over at SEOmoz have come up with a slick tool called “Page Strength SEO Tool” for determining the importance and visibility of a web page. Factors considered range from age of domain to link quantity, sources and Page Rank. Basically, it serves as an alternative to Page Rank. More importantly, it serves as a form of linkbait for SEOMoz. But that’s been true about SEO tools for quite a long time. Tools that help webmasters and marketers promote their sites offer excellent linking opportunities.

While it’s not the same thing, Aaron’s SEO for Firefox tool also offers a way to get various pieces of information on a web page.

Aaron Wall announced in his “Above the Fold” newsletter yesterday the launch of a new SEO tool for Firefox. He also posted about SEO for Firefox on his SEOBook blog, generating a TON of feedback.

Says Aaron, “This tool was designed to add more data to Google and Yahoo! to make it easier to evaluate the value and competitive nature of a market.”

The tool allows you to perform various SEO research functions as you search Google or Yahoo – which is very different than the toolbar and right click options offered by tools like SEOpen. With SEO for Firefox, after each search result you’ll see a variety of information for each URL ranging from age of domain name to .edu & .gov links to del.ico.us and dmoz info. The SEO for Firefox tool can be toggled on or off universally, plus there are settings for each data point.

PRWeb has announced today the launch of their SEO Wizard toolset to help users create and distribute optimized press releases.

“The SEO Wizard will guide members in structuring their press releases in a way that will give them optimal results within news and search engines. The idea of search engine optimization, or increasing a company’s value in search engines by using specific keywords, has gained popularity in recent years. PRWeb’s SEO Wizard quantifies keyword traffic, so users can focus on the keywords that are popular search terms and valuable to their PR and marketing campaigns.”

This is a tool that PRWeb staff have been using and now is being made available to all PRWeb users. Here are a few screen shots:

Customers of Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery service received an announcement today:

1. Increased Keyword Database from 26 Billion to 32 Billion
2. New Keyword Importer and Keyword Filter
3. New Thesaurus Search
4. Dutch Keyword Database Release

Additional features that will be included in version 2 beta of Keyword Discovery include:

- New user interface – easier navigation
- KeywordDiscovery v2 Beta (Faster, Bigger and Better)
- Increased speed and search response times
- Advanced import features
- Advanced competitor analysis
- New projects interface

My SEO consulting firm changed all of our keyword research and analysis over to Keyword Discovery recently. David Warmuz and his team have done an exceptional job at listening to their client base and enhancing product features accordingly.

This week we’ve released the first version of two WordPress plugins. One for the Feed Subscription Button Maker and one for the Social Bookmark Tool.

If you have WordPress, these two plugins work quite well and are easy to integrate. I’m still working on figuring out how to get an options page in the WordPress admin area itself, however that’s not stopping me from releasing the first versions.

Both have been tested in WordPress 2.x and work great. The Social Bookmark Tool plugin works in WordPress 1.5 also but the Feed Subscription Button Maker (aka Chicklet Creator) plugin does not at this time. If there is an interest in 1.5 support, let me know.

All suggestions and comments are welcome.

Thanks
Thomas

I leave in an hour with the clan to California for a nice long weekend. Being a glutton for work, I will have my laptop with me so my post title is probably not entirely true. Travelling with a group of 5 can be interesting especially if 3 of them are 7 or under. Unless Thomas breaks from the massive mountain of work in front of him, posting will be rather light for a few days.
A couple of quick items:

In case you don’t know about it already, check out SEO Blog RSS feed aggregator site, SearchBrains.com. This site is an awesome way to track what’s happening with most of the top SEO blogs all in one place.

Thomas here and I just wanted to let you all know that I’ve released a Firefox extension called yExplore to quickly access the Yahoo Site Explorer.

Back in September Yahoo released their site explorer and it’s quite a handy little tool. However, I wanted quicker access to the tool so I created the yExplore Firefox extension. It simply allows you to right click on any web page, select yExplore and it’ll open Yahoo Site Explorer in a background tab with the URL already submitted.

A few more details are available at my yExplore Extension page or you can get yExplore from the Mozilla site.

There’s all sorts of buzz about blogs lately and yet so many companies are still wondering what to do about it. In fact, there are a tremendous number of business blogs that are not realizing much of their potential visibilty on the web. Why? Because they’re not optimized.

This is very much the same scenario that occurred with web sites in the late nineties. Back then I worked with a company that sold web sites – lots of them. But after getting the site up and running, the traffic didn’t come by itself. So we figured out optimizing for search engines and that was the start of my SEO career. Blogs can generate traffic without search engines, but WITH search engines it can be even better.

Thanks to Phillip Lenssen, I have a Writely account to play with. Seems pretty cool actually. I can see how useful it will be for collaborating on the many group writing projects we have in our PR and SEO firm. We do use jot.com as a Wiki, but that’s more for spreadsheet collaboration.

The list of features for Writely is amazingly long. Whatever you might use a text editor for is applicable for Writely including creating blog posts, MS Word docs, PDFs, web pages, and even Open Office docs. There are tagging features and some cool right click options too.

Do you want a Writely invite? You can either leave a comment here (I only have 5 left) or you can visit the Chat room at Google Blogscoped.