SEO Fox needed a solution to manage and organize our projects and tasks in order for us to efficiently fulfill our client obligations. After previous experience with BasecampHQ, Zoho, and Central Desktop (and even demoing a few more), we found a free (donations welcome) hosted project management tool called ClockingIT to help us fulfill our client and sanity needs!

I have found setting up a project in ClockingIT is easy. The interface is intuitive and every user’s dashboard is customizable so users can rename titles and add or subtract widgets to make the dashboard information relevant to the specific user. Admins (configurable) are able to assign projects to clients and task to users and schedule the time allotted to both while seeing a live “timeline” feed of task completions (there is also a GANNT chart display for the PM nerds in a few of us).

A couple tools I really find helpful are the task timer and the very versatile report feature. The timer allows you to easily clock the time it took to do a task (and it can also be a pop-out window) and document any notes you might want other teammates to be aware of. Using the timer tied with the different reports you can run truly makes calculating project metrics upon project completion easy.

Having a hosted solution (one less thing to worry about) was one of our requirements in a project management solution, but ClockingIT also has a local version for organizations that have a strong network administrator who knows a bit about Ruby. For more information on getting the source code or joining the ClockingIT development community, visit their source wiki and join their github project.

As SEOs, getting quality incoming links for clients is a time-consuming routine of content creation, web browsing, info submission, and link requests. The question is how to build link popularity efficiently without wasting time.

There are a number of ways to get incoming links, but two that show the most results are creating quality content (linkbait) and requesting links directly from relevant sites. We all know how to create quality content (or buy it). The question is really how to find relevant sites to approach for a link. Advanced keywords searches are a great way to get started. One of the most efficient ways to target potential linkbacks is still competitor backlink analysis.

Competitor backlink analysis is no stranger to SEO; our site owner David Ogletree has made several worthwhile posts about backlink research recently. There are a number of free and modestly priced tools on the market that streamline the link analysis of any website. But a new tool has entered the backlink analysis market that truly aids in streamlining your backlink management.

Link Hound is a great backlink research tool for discovering and managing any backlink endeavor. The process of adding a website campaign and relevant keywords to that campaign is simple. The tool actually suggests numerous websites to analyze based on any keyword phrase entered and determines the links with the most potential to backlink to your site based on the information you give. Link Hound also offers a contact management system within its results page which makes it easy to keep track of links and contacts within the tool instead of exporting that info to Excel. But if you are old-school, you can still export the data to CSV and have fun.

After spending an afternoon using the new tool, it definitely provided relevant potential. Even if you are already using link building software, Link Hound can serve to bolster your reservoir of potential link targets.

Bottom line: Link Hound will help you find relevant backlinks to pursue and help you manage them too.

There are 2 ways to get into Stumbleupon. One is if people who have the toolbar decide they like your site. The other is paid. You can pay $0.05 per visit. You just charge your account with money and Stumbleupon will use whatever you tell them to.

An expert SEO friend of mine William Cross told me that Stumbleupon was a good way to get some traffic and that a lot of Stumbleupon users have the Alexa toolbar installed. So I sent them $100 and told them to only send 100 visits a day and added my site to the web development category. Sure enough every day I got 100 visitors. Previous to this I had never had any Stumbleupon traffic.

My Alexa rating went up over this time. I forgot to write down what it was before but if you look at the Alexa chart you can see it going up over that period. From my referrer stats I can see that at least twice I got some free traffic from Stumbleupon. My number of community members at www.mybloglog.com has gone up a little every day or so since then as well. I have posted some stats of all www.Stumbleupon.com traffic.

Overall I think it was worth it. It is a good way to grow a website community and get new readers. You have to have a quality site that matches the category you submit to. You have to provide stuff people want to read.

spam karma + blog’s + name (required) + Website + comments + search engine optimization

That kind of scared me. So what I did was take that spam karma footer off then I replaced all those other terms with pictures. I used the same technique I use to make my email a picture. I realized that those terms are on every wordpress blog. (by the way that is a nice way to find blogs to comment on). You could also just change the wording on the wordpress default text like: pages, archives, categories, search, blogroll, sites, meta to something else. A lot of spammers use these to search in Google and other places to find blogs to spam on.

One of the things about wordpress or wordpress themes is the way it handles page titles. I have seen some plugins that handle this but I was not happy with any of them so I just went in and hacked it myself. I went to the header.php file for my template and found:

and replaced it with:

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == "/"){
bloginfo('name');
}else{
wp_title('');
}
?>

There are a bunch of ways to do this. The main thing to know here is that putting the quotes in wp_title removes that weird >> thing. There are also som build in conditional statements for wordpress. is_home() returns true when you are on the home page or is_single() which returns true when any single Post page is being displayed. There are a lot more is_ conditional tags listed here if you want to read up on it.

Of course there is always the list of plugins I use:

Adsense-Deluxe – that lets me add Adsense to specific pages with specific code. I don’t put adsense on all my posts and this lets me be very specific. Sometimes you will find yourself ranking for some unexpected terms. This is a good way to monitize it without putting Adsense all over your stie.

Anti Spam Image – This plugin inserts a security image for the WP comment page, requiring the poster to enter the right characters in the image. The link is to the plugin on my site. The site that I got it from seems to be down.

Bsuite – Stats program. It shows you how many visitors you have for the day, referrers, comments left, and search engine traffic. It also gives a nice traffic graph on the bottom. It is very simple and I’m sure there is much better but I have gotten used to it. The download for this one seems to be broken as well so I just uploaded the one I have.

Digg This – Adds Digg story link on detection on digg referrer. On the rare occasion I get dugg.

Feedburner Feed Replacement – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from. I’m sure everybody already has this one.

Feed List – This lets me have the 2 pages I have that show stuff I dig and stuff I commented on at www.digg.com. Digg provides rss feeds with that data for me.

Google Sitemaps – This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. It also keeps it up to date when you create new posts

Objection! Redirection – Gives you the ability to redirect incoming traffic based on pattern matching. I use this because I moved my blog from another format a while back.

Spam Karma 2 – Spam killer. It works very nice. I turned off the built in CAPTCHA FOR it because it went to a blank page after you typed in your code and I already had something that used CAPTCHA. This has stopped most spam. The only spam I get is stuff that really looks like a comment and I have to make a judgement call on. It is rare somebody is working hard to hand enter spam that is hard to detect so is not a big deal.

WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

WP-Cron – I only use this with WordPress Database Backup. I have it set up to send me an email with my db backed up in it.

WP-phpMyAdmin – This is a new one that I just added. It is real cool. It adds a tab in my admin panel that gives me full phpmyadmin access to my database. It is so simple to install compared to installing phpmyadmin the normal way plus you have one log in.

Subscribe To Comments – This plugin will allow your readers to get email notifications when comments are left on a post after their own.

Dofollow – The dofollow plugin for WordPress lets you remove the evil nofollow attribute from your comments.

Domain Details – This adds a little menu when you right click on a web page. It has two options. The first is just a plain whois. You have to enter a CAPTCHA for this one. The second gives a report about your site. Stuff like Backlinks, Alexa info, where the server is, type of webserver, pagerank, and info from your registrar. The second does not require a CAPTCHA. They both open up in an unfocused new tab.
Web Developer – I may be the last person on the planet to install this. I have heard a lot about it but never understood how it would help me. I have seen some sites that were cloaking and redirecting with javascript and the toolbar allows me to turn off javascript. It lets you turn on and off many things. There are way too many items for me to list here. Just check it out.

What it does is give you a WYSIWYG view just like WordPress does. The difference is that it is much faster. It has a better way to switch to “view source” and “preview”. The only thing that it does not have is a button to add the < more > tag. It also has a way to add it to a catagory. I like it.