Rabs To Riches

SEO Tools

I have been thinking about buying the pricey SEO Elite for some time now since I had read only positive reviews. Just recently got around to doing my own research, and found some useful free alternatives mentioned on seobook.com:

BacklinkWatch is a web-based tool that shows the page rank and anchor text of inbound links for free.

This is another web-based tool that compares your site’s link profile with the sites that rank in the top 10.

Tattler and Backlink Analyzer are both downloadable tools that provide backlink information for free.  This is primarily the reason I was interested in SEO Elite, and since all of the tools mentioned above are free, I  think I’ll try them out first.

Firefox is Amazing

I joined the Firefox boat kind of late - I really resisted joining.  I was very happy with Internet Explorer until the new version started crashing on me all the time in the middle of my work.  I finally decided to try Firefox and I am truly amazed at the capability of this browser.

First of all, I think it is a must have if you have kids.  Countless times I have stepped away and my 1 yr old has come and shut down my computer.  Thankfully, if a firefox browser is not closed properly, it asks you to restore the session.  It remembers all the browser windows that were open which is such a total lifesaver!

Plus the totally amazing plugins.  With the 30 Day Challenge, we were asked to install some handy plugins and here they are:

Google Notebook

SEO For Firefox

Firebug - useful to debug web page errors

Del.icio.us

Fleck

Scribe Fire

Search Status

Session Mgr

Stumble Upon

I’ll write more about each as I start to use it extensively.

Progress

Part of my recovery process has been to go through all of my online receipts and come up with a general idea of what I had on my computer. Some things were free and I’ve lost them forever. I’ve also lost the plethora of notepad files that I jotted notes down on. But thank god for the internet - because I have almost all my receipts online. I guess the lesson to be learned is:

1. Make backups of your hard drives regularly.

2. Keep a hard copy list of inventory.

3. Keep items in your email or saved at some central location whenever possible.

In a way, I almost feel refreshed. I am starting out from a clean state with a nicer computer and a cleaner desktop. Let’s hope it stays that way!

Laptop Theft and a New Beginning

When I last left this blog, I was in the middle of typing an SEO tools entry and had to take a break. Went out to eat and my car got broken into with the laptop stolen. I didn’t and don’t care about the physical laptop, but my hard drive must be my most prized possession! I’m a bit more over it now and I do for the most part have receipt for the all the software and ebooks ($5500 worth mind you) that I have bought. It’s just going to take time.

So now I’m really one of those people (well not really, but close enough) that are asked - hey so, what if you had to start from scratch - what would you do? Well I’m going to document my recovery process one by one, including what I’m doing differently and how I’m recovering all the stuff I had before. I’m also going to work out a back up plan to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Anyway, for now, how I’m going to start is — the Thirty Day Challenge. I had already completed most of the preseason items that were for prep, so it should not take me too long to repeat them again.

So let’s begin!

Squidoo Slap

Squidoo is a subject which people have published complete eBooks on - it was an Internet Marketer’s dream. Webpages on Squidoo (which Squidoo calls lenses) were showing up on the first page of Google and getting quickly indexed as well. I was a bit lazy in creating my lenses full force and was just about to get around to doing that when this past week along comes the Squidoo Slap. Google, it appears, has generally disfavored Squidoo lenses and either delisted them or they have been de-ranked from the 1st page to the 20th page! This is obviously because of the spammers who exploited the system and this was Google’s slap on the wrist to Squidoo creator and owner Seth Godin to clean up house. Initially I thought that this would be it for Squidoo, but after following some veteran internet marketers and seeing what they have to say, it seems that if Squidoo cleans up a bit, which they have already started doing, it shouldn’t be long before they climb up the ranks again - apparently a similar thing happened to Ezinearticles a while back. Originally, apparently anyone could put anything and anything in their article, and it would get published. However, after the slap, ezinearticles started the editorial review process and came back to where they are today - an article published in ezinearticles shows up very highly in the search engine rankings. Now, Squidoo will also be adding an editorial review step for new lenses.

All in all, it might not be such a bad thing. This will force people to create more quality lenses and will eliminate a lot of the useless competition from people looking for shortcuts. In the mean time, spread your time investment into more baskets - hubpages.com appears to be favored by Google and I will be giving that a shot as well.

Lack of Consistency - A Human Weakness

I have come to the realization that the most successful are not the smartest people, and they are not necessarily the hardest workers, although that is usually a big plus, but they are the most consistent workers. Whatever, they do, they do consistently, and that will make them more successful in the long term than the crash n burn guy.

This is my biggest weakness as well. And one that I hope to overcome. It’s better to do a little over a longer period of time than a lot for a shorter time period.