How juicy is your blog?

Just came across the interesting Blog Juice Calculator. It's a free tool from Text-Link-Ads which gives your blog the once-over and indicates how popular it is. It uses a combination of rankings, inbound links and subscriber numbers from bloglines, technorati, alexa and others.

I'll be monitoring the juiciness of my blog with interest ;o)

Usability & holistic SEO

SEO should never be seen as an activity separable from the build of a website. It should be totally integral to that build - taken into account when defining

- the site architecture (how do I structure the site in a way that search engines will like?)

- the design (should I use graphical headers and if so, how can I make these search-engine friendly?)

- and the copywriting (what keywords should I be including in my copy?).

The guys over at cre8pc.com have some interesting view on web usability and SEO. Including “No matter how hard you try, there is always something wrong with your website“…there are always improvements that can be made to usability that affect conversion, referral and traffic.

Here’ their list of top 10 things that drive visitors crazy - that we should all take note of when designing our sites.

Like, do I need another one?

How many social networking sites does the world need. I just stumbledupon consumating.com which, I'm sad so say, I wasn't aware of until now. But now what? Do I join?

Do I heck.

I can't even find the time to keep up with my buddies on linkedin, myspace, facebook, minti, twitter and cafepress...and balance it with a real life outside the internet.

Sorry consumating.com, I'm outta there.

Nice way of looking at keyword research

Rob Taylor runs an internet marketing video blog and has recently posted an interesting alternative to traditional keyword research tools.

He suggests using Amazon.com (not .co.uk) and their ’search inside’ feature. This, for any given book, provides you with a list of ‘Statistically Improbably Phrases‘ (SIP) - these are phrases which Amazon considers significant. It works by looking for phrase matches across all books (that have the ‘Search Inside’ feature) - and where a phrase appears in a large number of books, it is marked as a SIP.

Gathering keyword phrases like this and using them in optimised content could really pick up long-tail searches around particular topics.

View the whole video where he talks about it here.

Twittervision

Do you tweet? I'm not sure I'm into Twitter yet, but I think it might grab me soon. Like I've got time to keep that up too? As well as the four kids, the day job, this blog and the other side-lines...oh yeah, and have a life too? Hmmm...

But I love twittervision.com - nice mashup of Google maps and Twitter

openphoto.net

Wow. Just came across this great photo library resource with some fantastic images on it. Most of them (like the one above) are available for reproduction and sharing under the creative commons licence.

Coochi

We have a new baby in our house. Well, she's nearly one now...but it seems just five minutes ago that the tears were welling up in my eyes as I saw her for the first time as she was delivered screaming into this world.

She's our 4th daughter (and, yes, our last!) so we're pretty au-fait with babies. We thought we had all the baby gumph that we'd ever need, but recently came across this really cool baby bathing apron from Coochi. It's a wearable towelling apron that you put on before you bath the baby, and when you get them out of the bath, it un-poppers so you can immediately wrap it around them in one smooth move without fear of them slipping through your fingers. If only we'd had one for our other 3 girls!

OK, so I'm a tech-geek

My online addiction might, I suppose, have something to do with my career. I spend my life online, thanks in the main, to my 'real' job as technology geek for a marketing agency. So once in a while this blog will contain tech stuff. Like now.

I found this awesome site the other day - miniajax.com has some brilliant examples of how the web can be - giving users an interactive experience that's as good as using a client, non-web, application.

My personal favourites have to be:

• ClickHeat website heatmaps
• Instant image reflections with Javascript
• Really easy field validation
  
• Edit-in-place AJAX editing

Some fantastic stuff there for all you AJAX lovers.

Earning a crust

Some time ago I stumbled across CafePress and loved what they do. It’s a great business. They print stuff on all sorts of products from T-shirts to mugs, mousepads to CDs. They sign up shopkeepers who earn money by selling their own designs on CafePress’s products using an e-commerce system provided by CafePress. You can get started for free with a basic store or pay $6.95 per month for a fully customizable store. CafePress handle everything from ordering, printing, stock control, customer service, returns - the lot! So all you have to worry about is the creativity of your designs…and the marketing of your store.

So I signed up, uploaded a few designs and now I get a regular (3 figure) income every month. It’s not going to pay the mortgage, but it’s something. It’s a start. They also have an affiliate programme that is managed by Commission Junction, so you can earn 15% on sales that you refer - this also brings in a small amount every month for me.

If you’re a budding artist…or even if you can string something funny together to go on a T-shirt or two, I’d urge you to sign up. And it’s fun to know people out there are wearing your designs!

Nice API - Yahoo! term extraction

Tag clouds abound these days - and are, I think, a nice way for users to discover deeply embedded content within a site. Useful tag clouds are built on the idea of extracting useful keywords from content. So how do you go about doing that without extracting all the noise - after all, the word ‘the’ probably appears frequently in your content, but you sure don’t want to display that in your tag cloud.

One nice way might be to use the Yahoo! term extraction API. In short, bung it some content and it’ll return you a list of relevant / related tags. It uses the Yahoo! search technology and will filter out all the chaff for you. So you could, for example, display a post on a forum and use this API to provide the user with a list of significant and related keywords to search (eg) blogs, technorati or wherever.

Further reading can be found here and here with the official documentation in the Yahoo! developer network.