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Sarah Worsham

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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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CrowdVine
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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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B2B Competive Analysis – Compete

We’ve been discussing tools to use to find out how your competitors are doing on their websites and how your customers and competitors seem to know so much about your website. Last week we covered one tool for getting information about other websites – Alexa. This week, we’ll take a look at another similar tool – Compete.

Compete is very similar to Alexa in that it uses a toolbar installed in the web browser to generate estimates and statistics about various websites. Similarities really end there, as Compete is a paid service, and provides much more information that just estimates about a site’s traffic. A trial account starts with 5 free credits and various reports cost different amounts of credits (the ones I tried seemed to either be 1 credit or 4 credit).

Site Analytics – This service is similar to Alexa (estimates using a toolbar) and allows you to compare up to 5 websites at once in terms of Visitors (People Counts – Monthly, Rank – Monthly, Visits – Monthly), Engagement (Attention – Daily, Attention – Monthly, Average Stay – Monthly, Pages/Visit – Monthly), and Growth (Velocity – Daily). Unfortunately, unless your website (or that of your competitor) has quite a bit of traffic, these are very rough estimates.

Search Analytics – This is the more useful of Compete’s services – Site Referrals, Keyword Destination, and Compare Sites.

  1. Site Referrals – lets you see what keywords are sending traffic to a website, as well as the site share, keyword engagement and keyword effectiveness for each. The top 50 keywords will cost 1 credit, and the rest of the report will cost more (mine was 4 credits for 243 keywords). This can be very useful both for optimizing your website and for adwords. Use this on your competitors websites to find keywords to use on your own site, or ones that are not in use for Google AdWords campaigns. If you run this report again other on the day you originally ran it, it will cost you additional credits.
  2. Keyword Destination – gives you the top sites that get a click from a particular keyword as well as information about the keyword share, site share, and average monthly search referrals. Use this tool to find who your competitors are on particular keywords, especially if you advertise using Google AdWords.
  3. Compare Sites – compare two websites in terms of keywords which are ranked with keyword volume advantage and engagement advantage. This tool would be useful after you’ve optimized your website to see how well your efforts stack up against your competitors (at least in terms of keyword searches).

Cost – You start with 5 free credits which you’ll use fairly quickly (just one or two reports). Reports seem to range from 1 credit for partial reports to 4 credits for full results. To purchase additional credits (bonuses included at higher amounts): $25 for 10, $45 for 45, $100 for 110, $500 for 560.

Summary – Compete is a good tool to use if you are heavily using Google AdWords to drive traffic to your site and if keyword optimization is very important to you. If you do decide to use a Search Engine Optimization firm, spend a few bucks to use this tool before and after to see how well they did (remember you may need to wait a few months afterwards for the keyword traffic to actually increase). Best of all, you can play with some of the basics for free and pay going forward for when you actually need their keyword services.

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Compete
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