I’ve been recently contacted by Mark Collier who asked me to answer a few (guest blogging-related) questions for his future eBook on link building.

The eBook has been released recently and I have finally got a chance to see it in full (with my interview included). I must say I was pleased with the information shared there: the eBook actually looks like it has taken pretty much time and effort.

I paid more attention to guest blogging part and found it really in-depth and properly researched (and it was also giving much love to MyBlogGuest, so I couldn’t help liking it )

Feel free to check out the eBook:

>>>> Link Building Mastery <<<

Here’s also a free eBook called Social Media Mastery from the social media chapter of the main eBook (for you to get familiar with style).

Enjoy!

Blog comment spam gets even smarter day by day. Today I got an email from Mike Blumenthals of Local Search blog who was letting me know that my comment at his blog was approved but he was surprised to see my anchor text which was obviously keyword-stuffed.

I was very much surprised to see that email, as I never commented at that post and obviously I’d never use that anchor text.

I also noticed the comments using my Gavatar photo and keyword-stuffed links in SEJ dashboard.

So, people, if you see comments like above which seemed to be from me, that should be a spammer who used my Gavatar email ID to hijack my Gavatar. If you see something like that, please let me know.

Are you addicted to all-things-search? If yes, this pretty nice little start-up will amuse you:

JustFoodStuff.com offers “reverse recipe search”: give it ingredients and it will search for recipes for you! With me it worked not so smooth – but I just loved the idea!

Image by *clairity*

Check out this awesome dictionary of sniglets – words that are not in the dictionary but should be. That’s a great source of inspiration to brainstorm new link-bait or a domain name!

A sniglet is a word that should be in the dictionary but isn’t. Sniglets are the brainchild of comedian Rich Hall who, with a little help from his friends, wrote a series of books containing sniglets in the mid-eighties. While Rich Hall invented the word “sniglet” itself, sniglets are actually a long-running popular joke in which people make up their own humorous words to define things or concepts that have no “official” definitions.

Also check out this cool list of worst 100 nonexistent words of all time.

Dooblet is a new search engine that offers to find the best alternative for anything:”car model, software name, music group, technology name, philosophy term, medicine, company, … “

Here is the suggested alternatives for “apple” (note: all I meant was the fruit:)):

[Post credit: FriedBeef.com] Even if you never publish your email address online, you can still receive spam because you use this email address to sign up for various newsletters or membership-only services. One of the methods to avoid that I’ve been using so far was to keep a separate free email account for all sign-ups. But this way you can miss some important alerts from the service you have registered with.

An excellent post “How To Sign Up And Avoid Email Spam” offers a geekier approach to registering online and I thought it should definitely be shared with my readers.

And here is another great free no-registration service for that: Mailinator.com that creates temporal account for you to check the site you are going to sign up.

Post image: “hooray, no spam here!“

For all of you wondering what clean, SEO-friendly HTML code looks like I recommend studying this pretty diagram that explains the whole thing perfectly:

I for one am going to show it to each web developer I will be partnering in the future. And besides, it can be a good reference material for an HTML newbie.

That’s what I call a fresh idea! We have seen plenty of PDF converters (that can create PDF files and eBooks from MS Word, RSS feed, etc) but this is the first time I’ve seen a tool that positions itself as a magazine creator.

Basically, Tabbloid does nothig more than conerts the RSS feed you submit into a pretty two-column magazine-style PDF file – but congrats to the guys for a clever linkbaiting idea.

Mobile texting, micro-blogging and overall daily active typing – all that caused the boom of acronym culture. I stopped keeping track of them long ago but some of them are so funny that I just can’t help taking notice.

Acronym dictionary gives a nice collection of modern funny acronyms (you can check Urban Dictionary for more user-generated ones).

Here are just a few of them:

• AKK = Asleep at the keyboard
• BIL = Boss is listening
• BTDTGTTSAWIO = Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and wore it out, etc

While at SEOsmarty I posted the results of my experiment with 5 second usability test, here I am looking at another usability tool that may turn useful for your website testing: Feng-Gui that is claimed to show you the heat map of any image you submit.

Here is how the heatmap of SEOsmarty.com looks:

According to their FAQ:

The Feng-GUI heatmap service is an automatic alternative to eye-tracking. Unlike eye-tracking or click-based heatmaps, Feng-GUI creates heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at.

Simply put, the algo is based on:

• color;
• orientation;
• density, contrast;
• intensity;
• size;
• closure;
• curve.

The tool is also claimed to be 70% as accurate as Eye and Mouse Tracking.

I never did any eye-tracking research for SEOsmarty.com, so I can’t compare but clicking through their recent submissions, I do find the tool worth checking.