Thanks Mozzers!

I just wanted to take a quick moment to thank everyone at SEOmoz who contributed very valuable feedback which helped bring the SEO Bookmarklet to where it is today.

I shared the SEO Bookmarklet with everyone at SEOmoz through a YOUmoz blog post because it is a great community filled with a ton of knowledgeable SEO practitioners, and I thought this could help them in their day-to-day work as much as it has helped me. The post generated so much discussion and interest that it was promoted to the main SEOmoz blog where even more great feedback was generated.

Thank You!

So thank you Mozzers! I’m glad you love the bookmarklet and thank you for all of your input.

It doesn’t have to stop there, though. If you have any input into features for the SEO Bookmarklet let me know!

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Gary Vaynerchuk Keynote

This isn’t the first post I’ve written about Gary Vaynerchuk. He has a way of distilling the “complicated” subjects and questions down into the gritty basics. He talks about Social Media and Internet Marketing, but he is really stressing the point that it’s all about relationships and one-to-one

Here is a video I came across on Google+ (connect with me there) and he had me laughing and thinking. Fair warning: he drops a lot of expletives.

Gary’s Site

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Facebook Buys Gowalla

It’s not confirmed by Facebook and it’s not clear whether or not Gowalla will continue to exist as it is now. Apparently the Gowalla team will be working on Facebook’s Timeline.

Facebook buys Gowalla From CNN Money

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The Market for iPhone Apps is Dead…

I once read a book where there was a group of guys who ran a publishing house. This publishing house was not in business to market books to the public but to market publishing to those who wanted to be published. They edited and printed manuscripts sent to them by authors who wanted to be published and 100% of the books published were purchased by the authors.

I once submitted a poem to a publisher of poems who only accepted “the best works”. Those works were incorporated into an anthology and the anthology was offered to those who were published “at a special price”. In addition to the anthology the creators of the poems were offered special deals on custom plaques, bookmarks, and a bunch of other items featuring their poems. I was about 12 years old and my mother was proud that I was published, so she purchased both the anthology and a plaque featuring my poem.

…Or, How to Make Money Building Apps

There is a business model for this. Not marketing to the public, but marketing to those who want to be marketing to the public. If you want to make money building apps, market yourself as builder of iPhone apps for those who want an iPhone app.

I think this is about the only opportunity people have these days to create apps for iPhone (specifically, but possibly mobile apps in particular). I’m not sure that a business model based on creating and selling apps is sustainable 99.9% of the time. I think most people have the mentality that an app is an app; it’s a minor part of their lives. In the best case it’s an entertaining gadget that distracts them for a bit. For a lot of people that doesn’t seem to even be worth 99 cents.

The Other Option is to Build a Valuable Service, With App Access

So I had a look at the most popular and best-selling apps in the App Store (excluding games, they are a whole other beast), and a pattern revealed itself to me. The apps that people download (and sometimes pay for) the most are simply access points to a service that provides them with some value. The app itself provides value by giving them mobile access to a service that provides value. In most cases the mobile access is not a source of revenue for the service and the app is free.

Look at Facebook’s business model. A large part of it is selling advertising. On the desktop version of their website users see ads in just about every page they are on. On the iPhone app they see none. To get the iPhone app users don’t pay anything.

Look at Evernote. It is a freemium service model (free basic service, paid premium service). The app is free, but advanced features are unlocked in the app if you have a premium subscription.

I Hear You, Market

Personally, I believe that most of the apps that I create provide some value. Whether that value is a mobile budgeting tool, an iPhone Bible tool, or a basic navigation tool themed to match a game that I (and millions of others) enjoy, these apps all provide some value. I feel that the value is a meager $0.99 for each. For some I feel it is a little higher.

But the market doesn’t agree. They would rather have free mobile access to a valuable service they are happy to pay for. Fair enough. The upside is that it is much easier to effectively market a valuable online service than it is to effectively market a product that nets $0.70 in profit for each purchase. It can be very difficult to market an app in a profitable way with only $0.70 available to try to acquire a customer.

My advice? Don’t focus on creating a remarkable app if the market believes that generally apps are throw-away distractions. Focus instead on creating a remarkable service that people find valuable. Then give them mobile access.

Disagree? Agree? Post your feedback in the comments.

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SEO Bookmarklet

Every day as an Internet Marketer I review web pages to see how their on-page optimizations stack up against best practices to find out where they might be improved. With all of the different factors that go into on-page optimizations, it can often be very cumbersome to search through the page source to find all the areas of optimization I regularly look for.

So I built a bookmarklet that highlights the areas I look for most often, as well as a bunch of external tools I use to check other aspects, such as the readability of the page or how old the domain name is.

How it works

The bookmarklet opens a window over the page you’re viewing to show you a bunch of different SEO factors and links to external sites. When you’re done just click the red “x” button at the top right and the window will close. You don’t have to leave the page or view the source.

There are two flavours, the stable version and a “Bleeding Edge” version that I might tweak from time to time (and may not work 100% all the time as I work on it). Drag the links below to your browser’s toolbar to install it, or copy the text in the textareas to create your bookmarks manually (useful for creating the bookmarklet on your iPad or tablet).

Install

Stable Version

Drag this to your bookmarks bar: SEO

or copy this code:
javascript:(function(){var d=document,z=d.createElement('scr'+'ipt'),b=d.body;try{if(!b)throw(0);z.setAttribute('src','http://twkm.ca/min/f=gadgets/resources/seo-bookmarklet/seo-0.1.js');z.setAttribute('id','twkmSEOScript');b.appendChild(z);}catch(e){alert('Please wait until the page has loaded.');}}());

Bleeding Edge

Drag this to your bookmarks bar: SEO (BE)

or copy this code:
javascript:(function(){var da = new Date(),d=document,z=d.createElement('scr'+'ipt'),b=d.body;try{if(!b)throw(0);z.setAttribute('src','http://twkm.ca/min/f=gadgets/resources/seo-bookmarklet/seo-latest.js?ts='+da.getTime());z.setAttribute('id','twkmSEOScript');b.appendChild(z);}catch(e){alert('Please wait until the page has loaded.');}}());

Install on iDevice

On an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch you will have to create the SEO bookmarklet manually. The process is a little involved, but well worth it to be able to check out SEO factors on the go.

1. Select and copy the code in the box (in the post above)
2. Tap the ‘action’ icon in Safari (the one that looks like a box with an arrow in it)
3. Choose ‘Add Bookmark’
4. Change the title to ‘SEO’ and choose the folder you want to save it in
5. Tap the ‘Save’ button
6. Now go to your bookmarks and find the bookmark you just titled ‘SEO’
7. Tap the ‘Edit’ button and tap the title of the bookmark
8. Select the URL, clear it, and paste the code you copied into the URL input
9. Tap the back button in the top left. Your changes should be saved.

Full List of Features

The bookmarklet is broken into four main sections, and each can be hidden or expanded by clicking the title:

• On-Page Factors
  • Title tag length and value
  • Meta description tag length and value
  • Count of <img> tags with the alt attribute set, and total number of tags on the page
  • Count of <a> tags with the title attribute set, and total number of tags on the page
  • Count of heading elements from h1 to h3 on the page
  • Whether or not sitemap.xml and robots.txt files are present in the root folder of the domain (i.e. “www.seomoz.org/sitemap.xml” or “www.seomoz.org/robots.txt”)
  • Whether or not rel=canonical or meta robots tags are present, and what their values are
  • The site cookie
  • The referral URL to the current page
  • A set of links that will perform various tasks on the page, such as the SEOmoz Term Extractor, the W3C Link Checker, and others
• Research and Intelligence Tools
  • Open Site Explorer links for the current page and current domain
  • An historic backlink graph for the site
  • Access to the Google AdWords keyword tool
  • and links to research and market intelligence resources
• External Tools
  • De-personalize Google results pages
  • Get Whois data from GoDaddy
  • View past versions of the page you’re viewing through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine
• Text Length Checker
  • Paste a chunk of text in the text box to find out how many characters are present

Compatibility

I have tested this on all modern browsers and on multiple sites and haven’t seen any issues. It also works fairly well on an iPad. If you find any issues or have any suggestions, let me know!

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