SeoAlchemist

Okay, so my title is fairly misleading. Google Wave HAD extensions… just maybe one or two. When Wave came out I was so excited that I totally exhausted the “poll” option. I sent out ridiculous polls to all my friends such as, “Can you make me blueberry muffins? Yes, No or Maybe?”…. to which I would always get a maybe. I guess nobody wanted to make my day. Anyway, I’m getting completely off track here.

Google Wave now has over 15 extensions present for our pleasure and enjoyment. Things such as “Wave Sudoko” (which I won’t play because Sudoko scares me) as  well as Phone Conference, to start up phone calls with friends or coworkers, and the “Likey Gadget”. If you’re familiar with Facebook then I’ m sure you’ve seen how you can “Like” stuff that people post up on their pages. The only issue with that is there isn’t a “Dislike” option. Trust me, Facebook users run rampant about this almost everyday- I guess Wave implementing the option to both agree and disagree is going to float many a person’s boat.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but waffles don’t have anything to do with setting dates for events. That’s why this one extension in particular strikes me as slightly odd. The new “Waffle” date-picker gadget adds a waffle to your wave and sends out an event notice for people to vote on. WHAT?! Maybe I’m missing the big picture here but I still don’t get what a waffle signifies other than a yummy breakfast food that you can douse with chocolate syrup.

Since I’ve been deemed the resident Google Wave expert, I suggest you go and play with these fun extensions. I only have a few Google Wave buddies to test these things out, and seeing as I ran the polling extension into the ground, I might play Sudoko. If anybody is willing to take the scariness away from Sudoko and explain it to me, perhaps I will start a Wave and play a round with you. I guess it’s not that it actually SCARES me, I just haven’t really looked into how to play it and there’s a lot of numbers in your face! Complete chaos.

You can find updated ones located in your extension wave.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

New Google Wave Extensions Debut!

Its TV Portal is one of Yahoo’s strongest verticals. I personally check it out to get my fix of entertainment news from time to time. So, it is but logical for Yahoo to try to maximize the potential of Yahoo TV to generate site traffic and engagement to its site. Enter the Yahoo TV Shortcuts right smack into your entertainment-related search results pages.

So when you search for an entertainment-related topic on Yahoo Search, the search results page will now display latest video clips, bonus videos or entire episodes, episodes lists, sho ratings, show times, photos – all coming from Yahoo TV.

On the left side of the search results page you’d also find suggested links to information about celebrities, movies or TV shows related to the search terms you just entered.

In addition, if you’re searching for a celebrity and that celebrity happens to have a Twitter account, Yahoo search  will also display his or her tweets – call it a direct result of the Yahoo-Twitter content sharing deal.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Yahoo Adds TV Shortcut on Search Results Page

A few weeks ago I shared four addons to show you some website stats at a glance. Earlier I had also compared the three most popular advanced SEO toolbars.

Today’s addon is one more multi-purpose SEO toolbar to add to your arsenal.

SEO Professional Toolbar offers a few useful SEO-related tools in one place (SEO stats as the page loads, stats tracking, on-page diagnostics help, etc).

FireFox Navbar Options

For the current page the tool displays the following stats in the navbar:

• PageRank,
• S-Rank (I guess it is something internal, you can just ignore it or disable it)
• Number of backlinks (per Yahoo SiteExplorer)

The navbar icon gives access to an array of more features you might appreciate:

• Highlight keywords and view their density
• Highlight internal, external, and nofollow links using the multi-functional sidebar
• View the number of indexed pages on Google
• Look up links to the current page in Yahoo! SiteExplorer
• Quickly access Google Analytics, Google Insights and Google Adwords Keyword tool:

View page info

• number of words (I wish they filtered out some ’stop’ words like articles and prepositions),
• the most frequently used words on a given page (I wish they also listed most frequent phrases – they are what really matters for the on-page analysis)
• the number of internal and external links
• the number of nofollow links

Monitor any site stats

To start recording the history of ranks and backlinks, click on record in the main menu which you may activate by right-clicking on the logo of the addon. The picture bellow shows how to perform this action.

After that you can access the site stats via the addon sidebar which can be activated with help of [CTRL + SHIFT + E] shortcut. I haven’t used the tool long enough to see the trend but here’s how it is going to look like:

(I actually really like their Yahoo! backlinks tracking feature, let’s hope it won’t be disabled by Yahoo! any time soon).

The tool options also allow to customize which stats you want to see and track (you may want to remove their S-Rank by the way):

The options can be accessed by right-clicking on the tool icon in the status bar:

My verdict?

I think it’s a solid free SEO tool. I’ve installed it and don’t see myself removing it so far. Let’s see what you think.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

SEO Professional FireFox Toolbar: Tracks Yahoo! Backlinks