In short, Rae uses Firefox’s Bookmarks in conjunction with custom URLs to turn your address bar into a souped up search machine! Here’s a quick example of how Rae works her magic.

Rae finds a service that uses dynamic URLs such as WhosTalkin.com She then runs a query through the service. As a result we get a URL that looks something like this:

http://www.whostalkin.com/search?q=sugarrae

Next Rae will replace the query in the URL with %s to act as a place holder. So the URL now looks like:

http://www.whostalkin.com/search?q=%s

In Firefox Rae will go to Bookmarks>Organize Bookmarks, then right click on Bookmarks Menu>New Bookmark

So now when Rae goes to her address bar and types “who sugarrae”, she will get a fresh set of results from WhosTalkin.com

Rae takes things a step further by using this hack to run analysis on pages and sites by using the URL in place of a query. For example if she wants to run a Whois check her setup might look like this:

Now when Rae types whois whostalkin.com into her search bar a Whois report from DomainTools.com appears.

Are you starting to see the magic here? If not here are a few of my favorite examples to get you started. Just copy and paste them into the method above.

Bookmarks with URLs:

Shorten URL’s
kl.am
http://kl.am/api/shorten/?url=%s&format=text
TinyURL
http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=%s

Social Bookmarking

StumbleUpon
http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=%s

del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/post?url=%s

FriendFeed
http://friendfeed.com/?url=%s

Digg
http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=%s

Sphinn
http://sphinn.com/submit.php?url=%s

View a Site as Text at SEO-Browser.com

http://www.seo-browser.com/index.php?user_agent=1&address=%s&action=Parse+URL

On Page Keyword Analysis

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis-tool.shtml?url=%s

Translate any web page into English:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=%s&sl=auto&tl=en&history_state0=

Bookmarks with Search Queries:

Google News Search

http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=%s&cf=all&scoring=n (sorted by date)

Google Blog Search

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%s&scoring=d (sorted by date)

Google Maps

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl

Get Yahoo results as a RSS feed:

http://search.yahooapis.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=%s


Update Twitter

http://twitter.com/home?status=%s

Have fun playing with these bookmarks and feel free to leave some of your favorites in the comments! Stay tuned for my next post where I kick things up a notch with this bookmark hack and JavaScript!

Here’s the secret: Give the charity of your choice a page on your web site. The vast majority of work that we do at jozsoft is web development for non-profits. From my experience there are LOTS of small non-profits and local charities that could greatly benefit from a web presence, however lack the funds required to make that presence a reality. If I could I would give away all my services for free to non-profits, but then I would be out of work and never finish with the TONS of them that need web help. Trust me they are out there, just start looking.

Did you say something about links??

Yes, I did. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t get something out of being such a great guy or girl, right? Here’s how the links work: when you add the charity’s page to your site you are effectively extending your web presence into their organization. This is extremely powerful because, every member, volunteer, staff person, constituent, and supporter will automatically become your domain advocate and hopefully link builder.

I have done this several times and have seen huge success with each. But there are a few things to keep in mind that work best.

One Page – Why just one? It’s allot easier to do just one page and it will be easier to focus link juice to other parts of your site if you have fewer pages. All their information on one page means all links pointing to one place, you get the idea. Many don’t care putting all there info on one page when its free.

http://www.yoursite.com/non-profit-name.html

Linkable Content – Encourage the organization to provide content for the page that people want to tell others about or link to. Examples are: monthly calendars, fund raising messages, information about upcoming events, resources for their members, or even embeddable content like videos or slideshows from different events.

Active Orgs. – Organizations that stay active are the ones that will build the most links, because they are the ones that have the most to talk about. Examples of active groups would be church youth groups, boy and girl scouts, School PTAs, and others.

The Right Org. – Its important to pick an organization that you don’t have any fundamental disagreements with, otherwise you might have a problem if you have to remove their page in the future.

PageRank Sculpting – Ok I don’t want to advise that everyone does this because it is more on the grayer/black side of SEO. However, if you really want to send the most link juice possible to the rest of your site then at the very least you should include one or two links to your home page on the non-profit’s page. This can be done by including a link at the bottom that says something like, “this page is sponsored by jozsoft”. Then, “nofollow” the rest of the links except the one to your home page. Only do this in moderation because all of the authenticity that you have just received by helping a charity will be gone if caught.

I hope this is helpful and encourages you to help out a local non-profit or charity this holiday season. Remember, the links are the added bonus, and the better your free service to the charity is, the more links you will receive, people like talking about good things!

Am I dreaming here??

Lets start things off by pointing out a post at Michael Gray’s blog where he talks about Guy Kawasaki writing reviews for products that he has been given. This prompted the debate over the link aqquistion only for us all later to find out that Guy doesn’t really know that much about links to begin with!

Maybe Guy should take a look at Dave Snyder’s most recent post.

A local police department in Wisconsin opens up a criminal investigation after a woman links to their web site. The police department ordered a cease and desist of the link. The woman responded with a law suit against the city at large! Moral of the story here is what ever you do, don’t send any link juice to the Sheboygan Police Department (Oops!) What makes this get even more interesting is this article that describes this whole insanity. Scroll down to the bottom of the article and tell me if you see anything funny at the bottom right.

Hitwise Most Visited Real Estate Web Site Rankings
1. realtor.com – 9.08 percent
2. HomeGain – 2.44 percent
3. Yahoo Real Estate – 2.25 percent
4. RE/MAX real estate – 2.21 percent
5. Rent.com – 2.19 percent
6. Zillow – 2.06 percent
7. Apartments.com – 2 percent
8. Move.com – 1.91 percent
9. ZipRealty – 1.86 percent
10. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development – 1.42 percent.

When I first saw that list I had this gut feeling that something was off. If any of you are familiar with my work in the past you know that I love crunching the numbers. So, lets take a look at what the numbers say:

zillow.com trulia.com remax.com century21.com

As I expected my analysis shows Zillow.com doing better than REMAX.com. And, even more interesting is Trulia.com doing better than remax.com as well! Trulia.com isn’t even listed on Hitwise’s report!

Confused? So am I. But, don’t worry, I will explain all of this and more in a future guest post at Wolf-Howl.com….stay tuned!

Despite that it might be a good idea to get a grasp on who in the group of national franchises are doing better than the others. Therefore I have done a bit of research and put together what I think is a good assessment of the top 5 national franchise real estate web sites. To conduct my analysis, I used four different traffic firms to make averages for each. The list and results for all are below:

Top 5 National Real Estate Franchise Web Sites:

1. remax.com
2. century21.com
3. coldwellbanker.com
4. prudential.com
5. kw.com

Google Trends for Web Sites

Quantcast.com

Alexa.com

Compete.com

What I am concerned about is all of the large corps reaping the SEO benefits of these branded URLs. Think about it: www.trucks.ford is going to rank allot higher than a small used car dealer that sells Ford Trucks, even with geographic search terms. It won’t matter how much money he puts into SEO he will never be able to market his product like the corporate competitors! Now of course if you own a local Ford franchise then I suppose that corporate could set up a site for you at smithautos.trucks.ford but that only means that you need corporate affiliation to compete in the same market place. I think this move is a win for large corporations that want to dominate SERPs. And if you think this will be the last of this type of behavior from those that regulate the internet, think again, this is just the beginning!