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Qirina for Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research and Link Building

Qirina is a new service which allows you to enter either a domain name or a keyword and will return site stats, keywords and a set of domains that are in relation to each other based on what you’ve entered. Anyone doing keyword research and competitive analysis should be able to see the benefit here.

The first site I entered is a major resort hotel/casino in Washington and surprisingly, Qirina came back saying it wasn’t able to identify the site because it seems to be in non-english. I think it’s probably because the home page is mainly in Flash and there’s really no text to scan or read. So I tried another one, my own site, AlexJuel.com.

There we go!

It diagnosed my Title tag, the niche it believes I’m in, niche keywords (I like this), and a summary of the page.

It also includes a list of main keywords, key phrases, domain name keywords and the density of each.

On the right hand side of the screen, there’s also a list of my “neighbors.” I’m not sure how these other sites are discovered, but it looks pretty accurate and relevant. When I checked one of my other sites, I noticed that the list of neighbors that came back were perfect sites for building relationships, which are highly likely to turn into guest blogging opportunities or at the very least willing to add my site to their blog rolls.

Qirina is actually building an index, so if you check smaller, more unknown sites, it probably won’t have any information for you, but you can submit your site to their index and in about 60 seconds, the tool comes back with all the information you need.

Qirini is still in it’s early stages but it’s fast and sends back great info. It’s definitely going in my competitive analysis process.

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Quick and Useful Site Reviews From Shoemoney

Shoemoney just released a new SEO site review service called Free SEO Report and just like anything that comes from the uber-cool super-affiliate, I was sure it was going to be great. I signed up for an account and tested it out on one of my own recently created sites to see how it holds up.

On a side note, I’ve been doing site reviews ever since I became a professional SEO in 2005. I’m an agency SEO so I’ve reviewed hundreds of sites and last year I even helped create a massive SEO review package for the company I work for called an seOverview, and when complete it comes up to around 45+ pages of information. I know how to do a thorough site review.

So anyway, back to the Free SEO Report. It’s really easy to set up. All you have to do is submit your website, your best keyword, what search engine you want the service to gather info from and the country you’re located.

When the report is done, you’ll get an email letting you know. The first thing you’ll find on the report is a report overview, which shows the pages of your site that have been analyzed, how many links you have, the Alexa rank and domain age. (I blocked out the URL’s because I don’t need anyone competing against me.)

There’s also a small section that compares your site against the averages of the competitors for your keyword. This is really useful for affiliate marketers who are contemplating jumping into a new niche.

Another helpful section is the analysis of the document title on your site and competitors sites. You can see how well your site title is optimized for the chosen keyword. As you can see from the image below, my site isn’t optimized well for the keyword I entered. It does rank number 1 for that keyword though 😉

There are also some other great sections such as analysis of:

  • headings (H1, H2, H3)
  • body text
  • URL structure
  • robots.txt
  • meta descriptions
  • internal linking
  • page load times
  • image optimization

In addition to all of that analysis, each section also includes helpful suggestions and recommendations on what you should do to better optimize your site.

One of the things that our company likes to do is to participate in local business and marketing events where we do free SEO reports for anyone who comes up to our booth. We can’t sit there all night looking at one site, so we have to limit how much time we give each person and I think using the Free SEO Report from Shoemoney would make a huge difference in the amount of useful information we can provide at those events. I also do a little bit of affiliate marketing on the side, so this would make an awesome competitive analysis tool to use before jumping into a new niche.

Another really cool feature is that you’re able to customize the reports so that it’s branded with your company info. You can change the header image, the custom text and the footer information, that way your customers aren’t confused about where the report comes from. 😉

When you sign up for the first time, you get one free report. If you want any more than that you can sign up for $19.95 per month, which gives you unlimited reports. If you don’t want to sign up for a monthly membership, you also have the option to run a report and then buy it for a one-off charge of $10.

After reviewing everything Shoemoney’s report offers, I still can’t say that it’s better than the seOverview that we sell where I work, because it’s just nowhere near as involved as our report. Our report is also not automated and has real input from our employees. I do think Shoemoney’s Free SEO Report is a great tool for other companies to resell and an awesome tool for any affiliate marketers arsenal. I would also love to have this tool available to me when going to small business meetups and other local marketing events.

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Marketing Is as Simple as Shuffling Cards

ChildsPlay Marketing has come up a fun and creative way of coming up with new marketing campaigns for your business and it doesn’t require hiring an expensive consultant. All it takes is a quick shuffle of a deck of cards. Well three decks of cards actually.

The ChildsPlay Marketing Cards are three different decks of cards that each have a different function.

The first deck will help you choose which audience you’ll be targeting for your next campaign, such as active clients, uncovered prospects and best clients.

The second deck of cards will help you choose a special offer to provide to the audience chosen. Here you’ll pull choices such as free samples, money back guarantees or even a simple “thank you” letter.

The last deck is where you’ll figure out which communication vehicle you’ll be using to pull off this campaign. You’ll find choices such as hold music on your phone system, mail-outs and web seminars.

All three decks come in a cool tin and cost $69. I don’ know how many cards come in each deck, but all three combined can provide more than 125,000 ways to market your business according to their website. Check out the cheesy video below to see them in action.

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Dragon Dictation on the iPhone is Awesome and Free

If you’ve ever heard of or used Dragon Naturally Speaking you’ll be excited to know that there’s a new speech recognition app for the iPhone from the same company called Dragon Dictation. The app is really simple and you can dictate from anywhere and send it through text message or even through an e-mail. As a matter of fact I’m writing this post on the app right now. I did go back to edit a little more on the computer before posting this though, but only a little, as you can probably tell.

Dragon Dictation Start Screen

And just like Dragon Naturally Speaking or Macspeech Dictate you can speak punctuation as well. If you want to put a period or an exclamation mark after any sentence, all you have to do is say it. If you pause for too long while you’re recording your message, the app will take you to the editing screen, but if you want to continue you just have to tap the recording button again and it’ll add more text to where you last stopped.

Dragon Dictation Recording Screen

Anytime you want to go back to edit what you’ve recorded, just hit the Done button to go back to the editing screen and hit the little keyboard icon so you can change anything that you need to fix. You can select words to delete if the app got the dictation wrong and in some cases it will provide a drop-down menu on some words if it feels your grammar wasn’t correct.

Dragon Dictation Editing Screen

I honestly can’t believe how good this app works. I’ve used both Dragon Naturally Speaking for the PC and MacSpeech Dictate on the Mac and both are awesome programs, but they require a little bit of training to work well at first. The Dragon Dictation app on the iPhone seems to work great right out of the box and requires no training at all.

This app is definitely a must-have for any writer and right now it’s free. Get it while it lasts, because I don’t think it will stay free for long.

Update: A friend of mine said that he tried it out and he thought it sucked. I think because I’m already familiar with using Macspeech Dictate, I speak into it properly instinctively. You have to speak almost like a news reporter; very proper and clearly.

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The Real “Porn Mode”

With all of the talk about Internet Explorer 8’s controversial “porn mode” I thought I’d help all you internet junkies out there take it a step further. The Invisible mode in IE8 has been dubbed “porn mode” and I don’t really see why. It hides all your cookies and browser history and stuff, but that isn’t a big deal. Any internet user can figure out how to get rid of this stuff.

If you really want porn mode, why don’t you check out a site called Vanishd. This is the real deal. All you have to do is go to their website, log in, and enter two different domains. One is the site you’re trying to hide, and the other site is what shows up on top of it. Now all you have to do is move the mouse around the page and a small area of the website beneath it will show up. If you hear someone coming, move the mouse off the screen or right-click and nothing from the underlying page will be visible. Happy “working!”