I'd like to get a bit geeky on everyone - not the chicken biting geeky, but the other kind - and talk about architecting SEO tools for successful deployment. I'm going to skip by discussions of PC/Mac UI, Ajax/Ruby, vi/EMACS, etc, etc. I want to talk about basic system architecture.

Service with a Smile

The most commonly deployed form of system architecture for SEO tools is server-centric.

In this model you use a browser to make requests of some mysterious backoffice system that queries around the internet (in this example, Yahoo) and brings you back some results pretty on your screen.

Yawn.

As the service gets more popular it does what? Slows down.

But, here's the problem: as the service gets more popular, or does more stuff that gives you a competitive advantage, guess what happens? Exactly.

Server There is a Fly in my Soup

Happens all the time. So people do crazy stuff like anonymizing their server, hopping IP's, etc, etc.

But all that stuff is a bandaid. Once you're server centric, popular, and whacking the smack out of some other guys site, well, banning is going to occur. Or they'll help you experience "serial temporary outages" - anything to get you to go away.

There is an Easier Way

You just have to do a little work and have the actual grunt work happen on the user's side.

In this instance what we're showing is a lightweight AJAX app running in the browser. The actual mysterious query happens on the client side, XML is sent back to the server, which grinds the data up, and then it sends it back for display.

What a Load of Trouble!

Not really. Let's say Yahoo dislikes Cartoon Man's use of this service and blocks him.

Our intrepid cartoon man just gets a new IP. And goes on his merry way.

But that is even less likely to happen because instead of one server hitting Yahoo a zillion times a day (think the last guy working there will notice?) you have a few thousand users hitting Yahoo a few times a day each.

The other thing uses will notice is that it is much faster for almost any service - after all the client PC is really sitting around not doing much, most of the time, ain't it?

Conclusion

There is fair amount of work required up-front to get an advanced SEO friendly architecture like this working but it pays benefits because it is simply more robust in the wild.

Have you ever installed a theme or a component without reading and thoroughly understanding the source code of what you've just installed?

SEOmoz had a great article on Choosing the Right CMS Platform for Your Website and Dawud Miracle ran The Ultimate Resource For Free WordPress Themes . Both are great articles worth reading.

Everybody Loves Free Themes

What do these two seemingly unrelated articles have in common? They both implicitly guide readers towards using systems that are heavily dependent upon external themes. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that and I heartily support leveraging open source software where it makes sense. This blog runs on Joomla with several components and a commercial template from an outside vendor.

Themes and CMS

What is a theme within the framework of a content management system? A theme is just a mechanism for a content management system to separate the graphical user interface from the underlying code. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, the CMS developers have put hooks into the system that allows third parties to control what the user interface looks like without having to dive into the innards of the underlying system. It all works very well, and there are literally thousands of themes to choose from for just Word Press.

The Birds and Bees for Themes

So what's the catch? It's quite minor, but it could be disasterous if you don't know what you're doing. A theme is really just a collection of php files and the associate graphics and css files that allows the rendering of the page for the user. For instance, if you look at the directory structure of the default Wordpress theme you see something like:

404.php comments.php header.php page.php search.php archive.php comments-popup.php images rtl.css sidebar.php archives.php footer.php index.php screenshot.png single.php attachment.php functions.php links.php searchform.php style.css

All harmless enough. The different files implement "methods" for dealing with the different rendering events, so when it's time for the system to draw the footer of the page it just calls footer.php. Here's what the code looks like:

What?

That is the default theme from Wordpress - you get to give them a free link back to their site. Yes, it's linkware which is really a paid link and Google still counts it, but that's a different rant.

Leaving the Door Unlocked

But what else could a malicious person do? See the PHP statements? That tells the web server that it's no longer running HTML code and should now invoke the PHP processor to interpret this code. That php code can do all sorts of wonderful things. For a theme, it generally transfers something to the output stream that will end up on your web page. But there are literally thousands of functions available in PHP, and any code could be contained within a template. If someone had evil and very black hat intentions, they could:

Do These 10 Bad Things

1> Cloak your pages so that it looks normal to everyone except the search engine bots. They get shown a page of spammy links.

2> Implement an Ajax based function that sends any form data entered (for example, login and passwords from the comments) to an external web site.

3> Cloak your pages so that they look fine to you, but it someone enters the page on a search engine they get a different page with the evil template developer's adsense

4> Watch the IP addresses that view the pages (phone home) and make a good guess as to which addresses are probably the owner. Cloak the pages so that the site owner sees their own content, but everyone else see's the template developer's content.

5> Collect the email addresses of anyone who enters a comment and phone them home. In fact, in certain systems they could access the MySQL database and just query for all users and emails.

6> Change the ID's for ads and affiliate programs so that revenue flows to the theme producer and not the site owner.

7> Open a command window for pages served to certain IP addresses that allows the template developer to enter any PHP command (and thus any operating system command since PHP can shell out to the OS).

8> Send home the configuration data for the CMS, such as the administrator's user id and the "salt" for the password. If you don't know what the "salt" is, your takeaway should be that it's a lot easier to use brute force methods to decrypt someone's password if you know it.

9> Modify the robots.txt file so that search engines don't see any pages. Or do see the wrong pages. Or block the google-bot IP's and let ask.com through. Can you imagine the head-scratching to figure that out?

10> Ping the, er, ping services 1,000 times on each publish and comment so that you get banned.

Evil You

I was trying to come up with 10 because that's what you're supposed to do, and I thought it would be hard - it wasn't.

Don't think that I'm letting some super secret ideas out to the blackhat community. If they're good enough to do those things and evil enough to think of it, they've already figured it out.

Don't Panic!

Don't go screaming off into the night with fear that any Wordpress Theme you download is going to bite you. I personally have never seen a theme that did any of those things (with the exception of changing the Amazon Id -- I saw a plug-in that did that, but they were upfront about it in their documentation).

But I do read through the source code of any third party open source tool I'm going to install.

Do You?

The guys at Novsoft have a supercar price on their Tag Automater - it's $297 and $67/month for maintenance. Wow. Actually, no, I mean it: wow. I believe this is the most expensive tool I've found in the SEO world.

Tag Automater claims to support just 10 sites , which makes the price and the promise of "an Avalanche of Traffic" pretty dubious.

However, the software does support some handy functions:

• Automated user/password creation
• Timed submission of entries
• Pr oxy support
• Demo "Lite" version
  

Missing, unfortunately, are:

• Error reporting
• Workflow
• Activity reporting
• Support for RSS feeds
• Documentation
• Evidence of active maintenance or support
  

Un-Cheesy Videos

Kudos to the Tag and Ping guys for providing almost 10 minutes of video showing how the system works and how to "add new scuttle sites." (I do have to note that the musical accompaniment was straight out of, er, an adult film. It was incongruous to say the least.)

Passenger Pigeons

At one point during the video the author shows how to "find scuttle sites for automated posting" and the google (circa 2006) query showed 2,520 sites. I re-ran the query today and found 279.

I don't believe the others are hiding - I believe they have been taken down because of people hosing identical URL's into them with tools like this.

Is this Evil?

I've written before that tools are just that, tools, and that the evil is in the intent. I think it is unfortunate that the video example shows how to take a single , rotate the tags, and shove it through a scuttle API every few seconds.

Demo Version Unworkable

The company offers a Demo version that works with one social networking site (Furl) and is otherwise full featured. Which is a refreshing change.

I was completely unable to make the demo version work. This may be because it is V0.1. Yes, zero point one. Yikes.

By "not work" I do not mean it didn't run, but that it just didn't run with the features and functionality as described in the marketing literature or as shown in the video examples.

Support

Unlike its competitors, Tag and Ping does have a support site. So I went spelunking around to see if I could find out why the demo version did not work. Of course, I didn't find any answers, but I did notice this:

Sales?

Given that this software has been for sale for almost three years, it is not much of an install base. But most importantly I was dismayed at the "last updated" date of 2006 for the production and demo versions. (Remember, the Demo Version is V0.1!)

I hope that this is not accurate, or if it is, that somehow these people are still shelling our $67/month and getting updates. Because 14 months is a lifetime on the internet.

RSS Support

Probably because the software is quite old there is no support for RSS, so the user has to enter every article to "tag" one at a time. If you can imagine doing this for five blogs with two posts/day.....

And, of course, there is no workflow and there are no reports, so the lack of RSS is a real deal-killer.

Capability Grid

While the product is extremely actionable (it does one thing to 10 sites) and, in the video from 2006 at least, seemed to do it well it ends up in the dreaded first grid spot. The ROI from only 10 sites will be very low, given the cost, driving the product to the left, and the support and breadth issues drive it down the axis toward the origin.

Summary Grade: D-

The lack of site support, the apparent age of the product, the lack of workflow and absence of reporting all would have put this product, if reasonably priced, at a C in my book. But if you multiply all that by the astounding price, the grade goes down dramatically.

Running in the middle of the price pack, at $297, RSS Bookmarker has several distinguishing features:

• Clear and present Privacy Policy and TOS
• Clear return policy (30 Day MBG)
• Promise of lifetime support
• Reporting

Site Support

RSS Bookmarker claims to support 34 sites, which is near the bottom range compared to the direct-post URL products reviewed earlier. I should note that the video example shows only 5 sites in the dropdown.

All sites supported are bookmarking sites (delicio, etc) and not Digg (or Pligg) style sites.

Server Side ... Follies?

RSS Bookmarker PHP that runs on the server side. Obviously this leaves out 99% of potential users, a gutsy move for a $300 package competing against free offerings.

If the key feature you're looking for is server-side, cron-job drive, self extendable software, then this is the only package for you out of all the semi-automated tools under review.

Reporting

Thank you, thank you, thank you. As best I could tell from the video the error/success reporting is not exportable, but because the product is written in PHP, I am sure that there is a file out there with everything you need to manipulate it into shape.

Key Features Claimed

In order to make the automation "seem more natural" the dashboard allows you to schedule or randomize posts and keywords to the 34 claimed sites or to Super/Scuttle sites that you can find and add on your own.

Please note that any account that are create must be done outside the tool, manually, and the username/password entered.

The concept of a feed creating bookmarkable items is clearly laid out, in the video. This is a powerful automation tool concept, partially because it forces the user to organize and plan over a longer haul.

Capability Grid

The product looks to have around a dozen feature points, but they are all dead on target. And because of the ongoing automation feature, it is actionability overwhelms the simplicity, making it rank well into the upper right hand grid, well above the free competition.

Summary Grade - B

If you are looking for the following features:

• Bookmark only, no Digg-style sites
• Backend powered
• Super/Scuttle focused
  

Then this is probably the beast for you. Special kudos for the best short video explanation of how something like this works.

If you are willing to spend up to several hundred dollars you can (theoretically) get a fully featured product to help you take your content and place it on a number of social networking and bookmarking sites.

The tools that are under discussion are:

• Mass Automateion RSS Bookmarker
• Tag Automator
• Web2Submitter
• Tag to Rank

Invisible Men

Before I start discussing the functionality I should note that I sent several emails to each site's contact information asking some specific questions for this review. I did not get a single answer. I think that is a very very bad sign.

These products, in contrast with the lighter weight productivity enhancers reviewed earlier (Post Toaster, SocialPoster, etc ) promise to:

• Automate logins
• Maintain historical activity tracking
• Free support
• Free updates
• Privacy Policies and and T&C
  
• Money back guarantees

Chicken, Who Me?

Even though all these products promise money back, I was, frankly, too chicken to buy and try to return them. Perhaps the ritualistic trips back to the mall after Christmass are still too vivid.

So let's take a high level view of the product claims and how realistic they seem. First out of the barrelis RSS Bookmarker .

I have looked at more than 50 SEO tools in the last two days, trying to get my arms around the capability cloud that is available. And I have been deadly confused.

Not because I'm stupid (my children aren't teenagers, yet, so I am still smart at home) but because this stuff is all over the place and I can't place stuff in some simple categories.

Sophistication Requirement

No, really, it ranges from stuff you can understand in 30 seconds (ex: SEOmeter) to things that have me scratching my rapidly balding head after two days (ex: Google Landing Page Optimizer).

And while I am not an SEO guru, I've done a fair bit of this stuff and understand how all the pieces work. So if it is baffling me, what the heck is the guy running a $500K/year Yahoo!Store going to do with it?

Variable Actionability

Even better, some of the information you get is easily actionable (ex: Hubspot's Free SEO Report) and others are more purely theoretical or fall under the general rubric of strategy (ex: SEOMoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool).

If you need tactical stuff you can execute on, then it's a waste of your time to run reports that are going to give you answers that are purely strategic. The reverse is also true.

So, of the two examples above, the Hubspot report is very useful to a 'got up' situation where you are tweaking and improving an ongoing site. The SEOmoz tool is probably more useful when deciding what kind of site to put up.

I'd hasten to say that neither is either 'bad' or 'good' - they're just useful to different people at different points in the business cycle.

ROI Estimation

I'm not talking about ROI as in: run the tool and become John Chow, but I have been having trouble looking at these tools and figuring out if we took action on the results of the tool, would we get a return from our actions?

For example, the Hubsport report told us we had missing image tags and our domain was expiring rather closer than google liked. So we had someone fix the tags and got the cheapest-CFO-on-earth to buy us a four year extension on this domain. So our Hubspot grade went up.

Did we come up in the SERP's somewhere? Is our ad-supported side of the business going to get better ads? How would I tell? In other words, we spent an hour fixing image tags and buying domain stuff, so figure I spent $200 on the results of this report. Am I somehow gonna get $201 or more back?

Results

In the end I fell back on what I know: scotch. No, really, I did grab a drink and start drawing stuff all over my post-it flip charts. (My CFO hates those things - they cost a dollar a page and I use 'em up like Altoids!) And I decided that I needed to put my high-ticket consultant tag on and come up with a capability grid.

I am proposing to put "SEO ROI" and "Sophistication/Actionability" on the X/Y axis respectively.

I'll pull together some of the better known tools and start placing them on the grid over the next few days - let's see how this goes.

I spent part of this morning writing a wikipedia article and it was way way too hard. Really it was:

1. Another Markup Language.

Yeah, baby, I want to learn something that combines the worst obscurity of Tex, HTML, and C++. Yah know, Jimbo , you could spend less time on the "I am important" circuit and get someone to write you a WYSWIG editor.

Oh, the irony of a nofollow link to you AND the fact that you have a reference to an editor you can't implement.

2. Style Guide From Hades

This is a family blog, so I can't say what I think about your style guide.

3. Writing Workflow Pain

Have you ever watched someone write an article from scratch? Bejebus, man, have pity. I write a new article once or twice a year and it is hard. It's not that I don't contribute to the wiki - mostly I correct silly mistakes in American History articles, which is easy enough.

I reckon new article creation on the wiki takes me 4x as much time as on this blog.

4. Save as Draft

Wordstar had this in 1987.

5. Terrible Examples

Your annotated example is 90% text about a freaking auto-train and maybe 10% annotation about formatting. Isn't that backwards?

6. Overlove of Thyself

Ok, it's keen and everything that you have that graphics dumping ground you call the commons, but forcing graphics into the wiki model, well, it doesn't work. Go look at Flickr. There is a site that works.

7. You're Walking Dead

I'm actually starting to mourn you before you're even dead. Yes, I know you still show up in the top two positions in Google SERPS for, well, everything great and small.

But you have to know that with Google's launch of Knols (and isn't that another ironic link?) you're like the 1900's Bud horse drover looking at a model A for the first time. Sure, we'll enjoy looking at you once in a while, but you'll be gone from the streets before too long.

[I was writing an article on Social Networking Automation Tools. Please feel free to contribute. While the Wiki is still around.]

We practically run our company on bugzilla , and not because we are drowning in bugs, but because we misue it the same way so many people over extend Excel. We'd probably feel less sheepish if it was named "Listzilla" or something.

Here's what we use it for:

• Bugs (natch)
• Feature requests
• System error reporting
• Editorial calendar development
  
• Collecting and grouping ideas for future products/projects
• Workflow task collection
• Customer Management
  

And probably a few more things that are just not coming to mind right now.

If someone asked me to name the top three or four pieces of open source software, bugzilla would certainly be right up there.

And, unlike switching from Windows to Linux, switching from an email based bug tracking systems (you email Wilma, she enters it into a spreadsheet) to bugzilla takes about five minutes. Installation is a breeze and it is lightweight enough to run on a teeny old laptop off in a corner somewhere.

System Error Reporting

One of the neat things you can do with bugzilla is to use one of the many plugins and have your other systems email/ping your bugzilla with a task when something goes awry.

For example, write a cron job that greps the "error" string out of your Apache logs and email it to bugzilla and assign it to your sysop.

Feature Request

It take two minutes to train someone to use bugzilla. When you're having a meeting have someone capture every "wouldn't it be neat it" idea and assign it to a project. You can discard stuff later, but this way you don't lose killer ideas.

Future Project Ideas

Sames as with features - why not collect all those things that come up in meetings and save them as future projects that can accumulate features until they're hatchable.

Editorial Calendar Development

Once again, you can catch the ideas as they flow.  Best of all, you can assign dates to each "bug" and assign them to specific users.   You can attach files to the items.   You can give external contractors logins and they can only see their assignments.

Customer Management

 If you do projects with customers then they will report bugs.  If you can train them to enter the bug, groovy.  If not, you can give them an email address to email their bugs into bugzilla.  When the bug is fixed you can setup bugzilla to email the customer that their stuff has been fixed.   You can also generate simple lists of open and closed issues so that you can more easily manage your weekly status calls.  (You do do that don't you?)

Best of All 

This is all free.   And easy to use.  How much stuff out there makes you look good,  is easy to use, and is free.  Hooah, Bugzilla!

Post Toaster is the "site count leader" over Ekstreme Socializer (28) , OnlyWire (22), SocialPoster (61) and SocialMarker (28). However, as an automation tool it suffers from the same ills and an unusual UI choice actually drops it back in the pack.

First, let's see what Santa left in our stocking:

• Good UI
• Categorization of postable sites
• Clear monetization
• Ability to shuffle post characteristics

 But there is a lot of coal to be found:

• Inappropriate sites for posting
• Lack of full-site support
• No TOS or privacy policy
  
• Most problematic workflow support

Good UI

Once again, a good designer manages to get a LOT onto one page. Without making it seem crowded. Nice job!

Categorization of Postable Sites

The site adds a nice twist to pligg vs. bookmark split by indicating which ones support no/follow. Which is good because it gets content posters thinking about traffic vs. links.

It may not be clear to people that a lot of the "dofollow" links happen deep into the site so you'd have to find some way to point google/yahoo/etc into that page. Or pay attention to your tag so that the robots can spider into your page that way.

As you might imagine, the author had to include some tier-2 posting sites to make the list so large, so good on 'em! With the included categorization you can ignore them if you like - though you shouldn't!

Inappropriate Sites Setup for Posting

Perhaps in the sites-you-can-post-to arms race the temptation gets too great, but once again, we see sites like Facebook and Twitter listed as posting options. I have trouble seeing where one would want to post the same information to delicio and twitter. It may not be a violation of the TOS, but it's certainly going to get negative reactions almost 100% of the time - so why support it? Especially since he has a....

Clear Monetization Policy

SquareOak owns Post Toaster and they sell SEO/SEM/Webbie services. Finally, an obvious monetization scheme for one of these services. And, as a consumer, I can be sure that there is some impetus for maintenance.

Phew.

So it's even more puzzling to me that the SquareOak guys would include sites (twitter, Facebook) where using a tool like this will always cause agitation.

No TOS or Privacy Policy

This is really surprising as SquareOak are a real business with real clients. I'm not going to go back into what lack of TOS means, it's kind of obvious that this is a real barrier to continual use.

Shuffle of Characteristics

Post Toaster has a wonderful feature where you can shuffle four titles and four post summaries as you post from place to place. Cool.

One thing you might consider: if you are rotating four titles and four summaries around a constant URL then it won't take anyone looking very long to figure out what you're doing. And the best way to look sneaky is to get caught doing something that looks sneaky.

Lack of Full Site Support

It may be that SocialMarker and others have raised the bar a bit with iFrames and buttons, but I found myself getting aggravated by small problems (lack of tag support for delicio, etc) during the posting process. I think this area needs some good attention if they expect good uptake in a crowded market.

In all fairness, the problem with trying to direct-URL post without being logged in is sometimes in the social site, not Post Toaster. But, as a consumer, it doesn't really matter why my diggo post went awry and took four minutes instead of 30 seconds, it only matters that it happened.

Problematic Workflow

While some sites do iFrames and others just run you over to the site, Post Toaster trys another method: a browser page full of links you can click to run through your posting routine. This solves the iFrame/TOS and referrer issues that other services have, so I was interested by this approach.

While I appreciate people taking a different look at a problem, it is harder on the users when the 'new' solution just doesn't work. And this really doesn't work for me. I actually had more trouble keeping track of where I was and what I did.

Maybe they can play with this and give you a page you could mail to a colleague for posting, or a CSV dump of the page for personal tracking, etc, etc. It's a neat idea and I'd like to see it worked on .

Overall Grade: B-

I liked the idea of categorizing sites as having no/follow and trying a new way of letting the user run the workflow. I also appreciated the clear monetization. I gave the usual ding for workflow, lack of TOS/Privacy Policy and inappropriate sites in the post list.

But this site gets the highest grade of its competitors for breaking some new ground around the actual work process. However, they'll have to catch up to the other free services offering rudimentary login/register features if they want to stay at the top of my mindmap.

A newly buffed up SocialPoster, with more features, more sites, and a tuned up user interface is still lacking in critical features as a social network posting automation tool.

In the "nice" column we have

• Second largest group supported - 61 working sites
• Categorizing the type of site supported
• Clean and clear design

Unfortunately the regular "naughties" are present

• No TOS or Privacy Policy
• No workflow or history
• Fragile direct-URL posting method
• No monetization
• Bad error reporting
• Inappropriate sites listed

Large Group of Sites Supported - With Categories

"Beaten" only by Post Toaster's 70 sites, SocialPoster supports a goodly list of social sites. It is really nice that the author has taken the time to categorize them as pligg, top, etc.

It is really important to consider posting your content at appropriate second and third tier sites, and this pre-selected list will help do just that as it contains lesser known sites such as RelevantLogs and FritterWare . (I know of dozens more, but it's still good to see someone heading in that direction - kudos to the author for that!)

Unfortunately....

Inappropriate Sites Are Listed

One of the sites listed is Teenwag, which really has no place on this list. I know you could argue that Facebook (another listing I would have left off) shouldn't be there either, but Teenwag is especially inappropriate. The average age is <15 and, frankly, nobody using this tool or reading this should probably be doing much posting in that arena, and certainly now without a lot of care. (Disclosure: I have a pre-teen and am sensitive about this.)

I know it sounds all holier-than-thou Googlish, but: Don't be evil.

(I am not even going to talk about openly displaying Google Page Rank!)

Good Design

Like SocialMarker, the design is really very nice, with good single page layout, options for framing your work, etc. But it really is a very small site: one section for posting (1 page), one section for webmasters (1 page), and a very low volume blog: 3 posts since 25/Sept/2007. Which makes me wonder about the...

Lack of Monetization

There is a single ad pointing at their "premium" product, Social Bookmarks Submitter. Since that product seems to support fewer sites than the free section, it is hard to imagine a lot of $150 conversions. So you have to worry about your time investment in the tool.

Lack of Workflow

Like all the others in this tier, SocialPoster doesn't help you keep track of anything you're doing, making a sustained complex effort much more difficult than necessary.

No TOS or Privacy Policy

None, nada, nuttin. So what *is* in that iFrame it's putting around your browsing? I looked: it's cool. But using software without a TOS is foolish, in my opinion.

Fragile Architecture

Like the others, SocialPoster uses direct-URL posting and pops you into sites based on hard-coded site URL's. Let's do some math:

(60 sites * 4 URL's per site)

- (60 webmasters who hate SEO's)

- (lack of monetary incentive to maintain)

= Eventual failure

Bad Error Reporting

And maybe the failure is happening now. The system let me "link" delicio without being logged in (hint: no link saved), and it did the same with Myjeeves.ask.com.

On the upside, it did walk me though the other 8 sites and either gave appropriate error messages or worked, depending on what I did. So 20% rot in my sample. Maybe that is good enough for free.

Grade: C+

I liked the UI, appreciated the attempt to codify and classify the sites, and thought that including good second tier sites in the list was useful. I dinged them, like the others, for having bad workflow, an opaque business model, and no TOS/Privacy Policy. I was especially disappointed to find inappropriate sites in the "can post" list.