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Archives for March 2008

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Please Welcome…

Aaron Worsham, my husband, has agreed to explore the hardware, network, development side of B2B Internet vendors. He’ll be posting on Mondays and Wednesdays. He co-owns both Sazbean.com and Dynalink, LLC. with me.

Aaron is a Software Development Manager at a Mid to Large print publisher where his team writes all of the products and applications used online. Before software, he spent ten years as a Cisco Network Engineer in the telecomm and banking industry.

When not working, you can find him being a very good father and a slightly less terrific woodworker and furniture maker at a wood shop he owns with his father.

Aaron is going to start things off with Content Delivery Networks (CDN). We hope you enjoy his hardware, network, and development reviews.

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B2B Social Networks – CrowdVine

Do you need a quick and dirty social network right now? CrowdVine offers a free social network with basic features that takes just a couple of minutes to create. CrowdVine’s networks are centered on allowing network members to connect and communicate. Everything on the network exists to facilitate this communication – profiles, comments, blog posts, and profile questions, all of which are featured on the homepage.

Connecting with other users is primarily through keyword clouds or by seeing an interesting update on the homepage. CrowdVine’s networking assumes users are familiar with keyword clouds and know to click on the keywords to see users associated with them. The keyword clouds are generated entirely from answers to the profile questions, which places an extreme importance on both the questions and the answers in order to properly connect people. Browsing members is also possible, but you have to click into each member profile to get any real information, which can be tedious for a large network.

As stated previously, setting up a CrowdVine network is extremely easy: choose a url, a network name, some colors, and your questions and you’re done. Inviting members is through email, Facebook, or other CrowdVine networks. Obviously the latter two are only useful if you have a group of people who use either, which is probably fairly limited in the B2B world.

If you’re looking for a fast and easy social network with no cost and just basic features, CrowdVine may be worth taking a look at. Keep in mind that your members will need to be savvy with keyword clouds, your profile questions are extremely important, and you’ll need a very active community to get things going. CrowdVine also offers a social network for events that we’ll tackle in a future installment.

I created a sample CrowdVine network, feel free to take a look, join, comment, and get a feel for how it works.

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CrunchBase Information
CrowdVine
Information provided by CrunchBase

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B2B Competitive Analysis – SEOQuake

If you want to get a nice snapshot of what search engines really feel about your competitors, SEOQuake will probably give you more information than you can handle. SEOQuake is a free web browser extension for both FireFox and Internet Explorer. Once installed you can see information on any page you browse to either up in the toolbar or as an overlay at the top of the website in question.

For each web page you can get the following information from the default package:

  • Google PageRank – the rank Google assigns to the site (higher is better on a scale of 10)
  • Google index – how many pages Google has from the site in its index
  • Yahoo links – how many pages Yahoo has from the site in its index
  • Yahoo linkdomain – how many pages on Yahoo linking to the site (has been flaky lately)
  • MSN index – how many pages MSN has from the site in its index
  • MSN links – how many pages on MSN linking to the site
  • Alexa rank – the rank Alexa assigns to the site (lower is better) based on traffic estimations
  • Age – first archive date taken by the Internet Archive
  • Delicious links – how many times the page has been saved with Del.icio.us
  • Whois – information about who owns the domain name from DomainTools, including some SEO information (worth checking out)
  • Source – the html source of the page (also a viewable option in most web browsers)
  • Keywords density – a breakdown of the keywords on the page (very valuable for how the search engines see the page) by single words, 2-word phrases, 3-word phrases, 4-word phrases and a keywords cloud to show you the most repeated keywords
  • Internal links – links on the page which lead to another page on the site, includes SEO info for each link in a table format
  • External links – links on the page which lead to a page off the site. This seems to use the full url to determine if a page is on site or offsite, although it may also use the IP address. For example if the page we’re looking at is www.website.com then hiring.website.com is considered an external link

For the more technically inclined, SEOQuake also allows the ability to create custom parameters. They also offer a list instructions for some useful parameters. Plugins can also be customized, but they offer a plugin list of ones you can download and install.

The amount of information that you can obtain from a website for free using SEOQuake is amazing. If you had time and were inclined, you could get this information with various tools on the search engines and indexing services, but this puts all the information together in an easy-to-read format. You should be able to get a good idea of how the search engines view your competitors websites as well as your own. This tool is particularly useful to use before, during and after a redesign and before and after any types of Internet promotions.

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