Imagine if you could monitor every time someone copies and pastes something off your site. To make it even better, what if you can insert a backlink when you text is pasted somewhere else. It’s a great way for attribution, tracking what content is popular, and gaining some inbound links.

There is a service called Tynt Insight that allows you to do this. It’s a free service and there is even a slick reporting dashboard. You simply signup, generate your unique bit of JavaScript and insert it into your site.

Load time is barely impacted since the script is lightweight and Tynt’s servers have been super quick. There’s some customizable options offered by Tynt like changing the attribution link, being able to recognize the number of visits generated by these attribution links. You to see the total number of copies for text or images, see what pages on your site are getting copied the most, what words are getting copied the most and heat map overlays . Mike Wong at Tynt Insight is a great guy and Tynt’s product is jaw dropping.

I have Tynt Insight running on this site. Give it a try by copying and pasting a chunk of text from this site.

To get your own copy, visit http://www.tynt.com/

There are times when you may want to block search engines (or other robots) from including certain directories or files in search engine results. One way to do this is to create a text file called a robots file. You can use Notepad or any other text editor to create the file.

If you wanted to block robots (like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) from everything on your website you can use:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Is that it? Yes. Simply copy and past that into a blank text file and upload the file to your top-level directory. You can test it by accessing your robots.txt file @ www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt

When the bots visit your page they will read this file and get instruction.

Below, I’ve included some other examples of usage:

If you wanted to give all robots complete access you can use:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

What if you wanted to block all robots from a certain directory or from multiple directories? Use the following in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/
Disallow: /directory2/

What if you wanted to block a certain bot? Use the following as your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Bot
Disallow: /

Alternatively, you can allow only a certain bot by using the following:

User-agent: Google
Disallow:

What if you don’t know the “user-agent” name for the bot? I typically rely on a list like the one found at User-Agents.org

All though this method is definitely not foolproof, using the robots.txt file is a good way to communicate with bots. If there is an extremely sensitive directory you should make that directory password protected.

Google Analytics is hands down one of the most popular free analytics  platforms.  It is used by large sites as well as personal blogs.

There is a ton of information provided in the reports that Google Analytics generates and since the reports are customizable you can slice and dice the information any way you see fit.

Google Analytics helps you identify where visitors are coming from, how long they stay on your site, which products are selling, which keywords lead to the highest conversion rates, which pages are most popular, and so on. I will have plenty of posts in the future discussing Google Analytics (including some advanced tweaks), but in this post I’d like to discuss the  ”Traffic Sources” sources portion in Google Analytics. In particular, how to include information into your URLs to help you and Google Analytics identify a source of traffic.

A good example of why Google Analytics needs your help with identifying a source of traffic is when a newsletter has been sent out. Let’s assume that in your newsletter is a link back to your homepage.

When a reader clicks this link, Google Analytics usually will just count the visit as a referral and your visitor’s email service as the referrer.  This visit will be displayed in Google Analytics with something like this: webmail.aol.com / referral.

But what if you send out a number of newsletters a month? Shouldn’t you be able to tell the different between visits coming from one email vs another? Without this type of info, it would be hard to optimize your email campaigns.

This is where Google’s URL Builder tool comes into play. This tool will help you generate URLs that you can include in newsletters, press releases or anywhere you would like to pass more information regarding the visitor’s source.

The tool is pretty straightforward. You can find it here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578 or you can Google “url builder”.

If you wanted to send traffic from your newsletter, press release, etc to your homepage you would enter your website address into the field labeled “Website URL”. Next, enter a “campaign source” (newsletter, or bing, etc), “campaign medium” (email, or cpc, etc),  ”campaign name” (winter2009, etc) and click “Generate URL”. Now you can use your new custom URL in your campaigns and the info will be associated with the visit.

You will now be able to find visit information in Google Analytics under Traffic Sources –> Campaigns.

This is a great way to tag cpc campaigns for Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, and others.

Note: Assuming you have Adwords auto-tagging enabled and your Analytics account properly linked, data from Google Adwords is automatically included in your Analytics reports.

What is a web hosting service? How do I choose one?

Some people at Wikipedia have said:

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a serverthey own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center.

Basically, a host is a computer where your webpages, images, video, etc are located. When a person types into their web browser http://www.yourcompany.com. Their computer contacts your website and says “hello, would you like to show me anything” and your web host responds immediately with “Yes, you’ve come to the right place and I know what you are looking for…here it is” and sends the information (webpage, images, etc) over to their computer where their browser displays everything the way you intended it to be displayed.

There are different types of web hosts. Some hosting services handle almost everything for you, some you are almost entirely on your own, some are powerful, and some are extremely inexpensive. I will cover some of the most common choices:

Shared Hosting
With a shared host the price is typically the lowest and your “site” is on a computer with MANY (possibly 1000′s) of other sites. The two most popular are HostGator and Bluehost.

Bluehost is the best shared host in my opinion. It is super cheap, has great customer service, will handle decent traffic, and gives you unlimited storage and bandwidth, allows you to host unlimited domains, gives you SSH access, and an extensive amount of optional scripts and ecommerce options. To me, this is the best choice for small to medium sites. It’s only like 4$ a month when you click on a coupon like this!

Once you outgrow the site (database issues, slow response time, etc) then you need to consider a VPS (virtual private server) or a dedicated server.

A good VPS service (like SliceHost) gives you root access so you can really get into the your hands into the system on fast machines, is completely scalable, has no contract and no setup fees. I like slicehost because of the price and performance. Also: Take a look at some of the tutorials available at articles.slicehost.com. The articles, mostly provided by “PickledOnion” are unmatched in their ease of reading, and thoroughness. If you have questions about setting up mySQL, Postfix, Apache, Nginx (basically anything you can thing of) it’s there. I highly recommend this company and those tutorials.

Dedicated.Rackspace

If you have outgrown your VPS, the next logical step is a dedicated server (you are the only one running processes, etc on the system) and Rackspace or The Planet are both great choices. Visit their site for more info.

Cloud
People pay for what they use versus what they can use. Cloud hosting is gaining popularity and revolves around load balancing. It seems like someone new is entering the cloud market everyday.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them! I will try my best to answer them and I am sure others have some insight as well.

It’s pretty well known that Craigslist is one of the most popular sites in the world and many of the top companies in the world as well as small businesses post their job announcements in the Jobs categories.

It’s easy. You visit craigslist.org and either search in the “Jobs” category or in one of the subcategories.

But what happens when you close the window? What if you didn’t enter the right search term? What if your dream job was posted in another state and allowed telecommuting? Simple, you’ll miss the opportunity.

A trick I learned early on was to use the Craigslist RSS feeds to keep me updated on all the opportunities available for my industry. I know that each person probably has his or her own way and I invite people to share their tips/tricks to help other readers, but below I will explain how I do this.

First, I visit a site called crazedlist.org. I like this site because here you can search as many craigslist sites as you want with one search box and the best part is you can generate an RSS feed of the results.

Next, I import the newly generated feed into an RSS feed reader. I personally use WhizRSS Feed Reader for those who are curious.

Lastly, just click on one of the search feeds in WhizRSS and voila! The newest opportunities are displayed (I typically have WhizRSS feed reader in the left column of my browser window so I can work on other things and occasionally glance and react to any new opportunities.

One of my favorite applications on the web is a free Java application called TouchGraph Google Browser. I use it to help in everything from finding inbound link opportunities to planning a linkwheel strategy and even helps with reputation management projects.

There are a couple tools available on the TouchGraph site, but the one I use is the free TouchGraph Google Browser tool and you can find it here: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

You can type a keyword or website into the search bar and this free Java application will build a graph of related sites. It uses Google’s database of related websites to generate the graphs, but it’s the presentation of that information that keeps me coming back.

The image above is an example of running the application for the keyword “golf”. I really recommend you visit the site and give it a try. It’s free – you’ve got nothing to lose! Again, you can type in a keyword, phrase, or site.