Week 3 HW #5 - Martha's COIN 72

Book 2 - Search Engine Optimization
Chapter 1 Option A

INSTRUCTIONS SeoQuake Live HTTP Headers Xenu's Link Sleuth Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer OTHER TOOLS Other Web Sites

OPTION A on Chapter 1: This exercise was particularly difficult, exhilarating, and exhausting. The tools specified by our textbook each have so many dimensions to them such that I actually ended up only examining one website - my own (http://narfe65.org/), and only a few of the SEO tools. Here is what I found:

SeoQuake

SeoQuake was the first tool I tested, and the least satisfactory. It proved difficult for me to put to use, requiring too many quirky things, like locating the tool under View / Toolbars / SEOquake Toolbar (not under "Tools"), activating the icon on the lower right, and ignoring the icon on the upper right (when pressed, it offered options to customize toolbar layouts). Furthermore, the results were overwhelming - the print was too small, the icons non-intuitive, and the information unending. After many aborted attempts, I finally did produce some useful information. I particularly liked the results from the first tab, titled simply Info (see pageInfo-narfe65.pdf, pageInfo-csfcnarfe.pdf, and pageInfo-narfeNational.pdf). Listed under keyword density was a selection of one, two, three, or four-word phrases that characterized the page. The leading contenders in these categories for my website are: narfe, chapter 65, narfe chapter 65, and active and retired federal. Well, that is as it should be! Other information here needs more study - narfe is repeated 15 times - is that good or bad? It has a density of 2.53 (what does that mean?). The only other keywords with a density over 2 are "active and retired federal" and "and retired federal employees" - these two phrases had a density of 2.02. Again, is this good, or bad? As it stands, this tool has only opened my eyes to the information available - it has not increased my ability to recognize and understand what it means! I may need to re-read the chapter...

A few other interesting aspects from the SeoQuake Info tab - it lists the IP address (74.91.171.129), and the "age" (June 30, 2008). Humm - where do those numbers come from? I suspect the age was when first submitted to Google for indexing - if so, it's perfect evidence of the adage to "take everything with a grain of salt". The information revealed by these SEO tools are dependent on the search engines, and how they operate. These tools produce reports that are "relative", rather than "absolute". That is, the reports are primarily useful for comparisons - over time, and between Web sites - and not necessarily evidence of "fixed facts".

Trying the other options on the SeoQuake toolbar was a lot less satisfying. However, it did have some surprising results. I discovered that my humble efforts producing a Web site resulted in one that is indexed around the world! The information from the Russian (narfe65-RussianSE.pdf) and Chinese (narfe65-ChineseSE.pdf) search engines was a little scary. It's one thing to know that the Web is "world-wide". It's another to actually SEE it - to realize how someone ANY where in the world can access every little bit of information that we post on this (or any other) website. It's astounding how vulnerable this makes us. But - it's also empowering. This is what is driving the world economy these days - for better or for worse. And it means that the Web sites that understand this power, and that use it effectively, will benefit in ways we can only imagine.top

Live HTTP Headers

The "Live HTTP Headers" tool, in contrast, was much more satisfying. It shows up as I expected, in the Firefox browser, under the category "Tools". The instruction in the textbook (p. 162) to ignore everything except the first line, where it says "200 - OK", was helpful. And, lo and behold, I got what I expected when I used the tool - the index page (narfe65.org/index.html) showed "200 OK" (albeit on line 38 in this .txt file), and the non-existent page that I tested (narfe65.org/abcdefg) showed "404 Not Found" (a .gif image). On the other hand, I'm not overly impressed with this tool - it doesn't seem to reveal anything to me that I can't discover in other ways. I'm sure it may have a purpose under certain situations, and I'm glad I know that it's available, but I won't pursue it any further, at least for now.top

Xenu's Link Sleuth

Now HERE is a tool worth discovering! Searching for it online, I was led to the main website, which had a good article on how to use it, and what it's for: "Find broken links on web sites" (see http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html). Also, the tool was fairly easy to use - just enter a Web URL, and "let 'er rip". The results were rewarding. Saved as a .pdf, a word .doc, or an .html Web page (see my results at: Xenu Report for narfe65.org), it gave me a list of

Broken links, ordered by link
Broken links, ordered by page
List of redirected URLs
List of valid URLs you can submit to a search engine
Site Map of HTML pages with a Title
Broken page-local links
Orphan files
Statistics for managers

Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer

The Yellowpipe Lynx viewer, it turns out, will not work with Firefox 9.0.1, the version I had, so I was unable to try it. Perhaps with a different browser I will be able to explore this tool further.top

OTHER TOOLS TESTED

I will simply list and briefly describe the other tools I considered or tested, and hopefully I'll return to them at a later date.

Bing - this is a tool I definitely found interesting. I printed and saved articles that explain How Bing is Different (pdf), and What You Get from Bing Webmaster Tools, but I decided not to even travel this avenue for now.
Google Toolbar (see PublishersGuideToToolbar.pdf)- I have recently grown weary of the over-reaching, monopolistic presence of Google. My Yahoo! and Flickr photos are now hosted by Google, my Blogspot blogs are not only "sponsored" by Google, but they surreptitiously showed up on my Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard (with the offer to analyze them if I wanted - even though I had set them NOT to be indexed), and my FeedBurner feeds are now Googlized. If I'm not mistaken, my YouTube videos are also Googled. ENOUGH!!
Google Webmaster Tools - I set up an account in 2007, and found these tools very interesting. However, I have not kept up, and apparently neither has Google. They seem to have only indexed it the one time I asked them (June 2008, the "age", or beginning, of the Web site). I printed over a dozen pages of relevant information, but alas, have no time now to explore it.
Yahoo! Site Explorer - Lo and behold, this no longer exists. It has been subsumed into Bing. Microsoft is trying to catch up with Google. On the SeoQuake site, the Yahoo! Links have turned into SEMRush, an unknown, and therefore suspicious addition. However, I did check it out, and found the top 19 domains using the keyword "narfe", which may prove useful later on (see narfe-keyword.pdf).
LiveSearch Webmaster Tools - I didn't even look for this. If Yahoo is now Bing (a Microsoft product), then probably so is LiveSearch, says the cynic within.
QuantCast - I found that the NARFE web site is ranked 25, 633, and the Maryland NARFE page is 947,094 (see NARFE-AudienceMeasurement.pdf), and found that the demographics of its audience is twice as likely to be male, predominently over age 55, and 1/3 Afro-American (see NARFE-TrafficDemographics.pdf). To help understand these reports, check out ReadingOurReports.pdf.

Comparable/Competitive Web Sites Explored (with SeoQuake)

NARFE.org - the National Web site - the keywords do not even include the name of the organization (NARFE)!
CSFCNARFE.org - the California State Federation of NARFE Chapters - there ARE no keywords!!

top