I was talking with Julian Chadwick of PDXPipeline this Monday about the tools he uses for search engine optimization. We recorded a podcast that will be posted Monday night on Hazelnut Tech Talk. However I wanted to pass on some of the information he gave me regarding the SEO plugins he uses for Firefox. I’d like to review the SEO Quake, as it has been very useful to me.

Basic Information

There are a few baseline pieces of baseline information that any SEO beginner. One of these is Page Rank, or Google’s consideration of what a given page is worth. Page rank varies from site to site, and there are a number of factors that contribute to pagerank. One of them is the amount of websites linking to a given website. This is called ‘inlinks’. One can find out this information by going to Google and entering the string “link:http://www.yoursite.com”.

The amount of links from a site to you website show up differently in Yahoo! Search vs. Google search vs. MSN. Obtaining this data takes a while without a good tool to help you find it. There are additional metrics one can find about a site, such as the page rank, sitemap, alexa rank, and whether the site has been indexed in search engines or not. Site indexing is different from checking inlinks.

If the pages of your site are not indexed by search engines, it is difficult for searchers to find them. Making sure your website has a sitemap and submitting it to Google Webmaster tools is an essential baseline step in the SEO process. You can generate an .xml sitemap for free by using the free tool provided at XML-Sitemaps.com.

SEO Quake for Firefox

SEO Quake is a plugin that adds another layer of information on top of your brower’s basic information. Instead of having to search for inlinks, the inlinks are displayed right on top of the site for you. You can also choose what information you want displayed about the site. There are plenty of options (accessible from preferences) that allow you to view any information you want about the page you’re on. There are Yahoo! inlinks, links to domain, Alexa rank, Page Rank, inlinks from MSN, compete rank, sitemap, and the robots.txt file, just to name a few.

Using SEO Quake rocks. It’s super-customizable and generates a ton of rich information without the need to click. Plus, you can click on the information and download into a spreadsheet or text document for later use or data analysis. Highly recommended.

Download

This is a link to the download site for SEO Quake. Again, it is only available for Firefox browsers, so if you aren’t using Firefox (which you most undoubtedly should), then you’ll be missing out.

Resources

Thanks to Julian Chadwick for mentioning this plugin. You can check out Julian’s site at PDXPipeline or follow him on Twitter @pdxpipeline.

For more information on SEO, Julian and I both recommend SEOMoz.org, a Seattle-based company providing an extremely comprehensive database of resources and tools for beginner, intermediate, and advanced SEO specialists. Try the free Trifecta tool on your site for starters.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

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I spent a wonderful morning at Maryellen Hockensmith’s Organic Farm. Before we went out to check out the garden, she gave me a bunch of wonderful tips on sustainability, growing your own organic garden, the usefulness of worms, high-yielding plants, and crop rotation.

I know what you’re thinking: Hazelnut Tech Talk is taking a break from tech to talk about gardening! Well, that’s somewhat true. It’s not often that our technosocial lives let us take in a beautiful view the countryside, or an enormous bite of a delicious tomato right off the vine. But what about connecting the two?

One of the reasons I wanted to do a podcast with Maryellen is that she is also an active member of Twitter @yogacowgirls, blogs at YogaCowgirls.com, and makes wonderful music.

So if you’re into food, organic crops, sustainability, yoga, Twitter, or Blogging (go WordPress!), then give Maryellen a warm hello. That is, if you don’t know about her already.

Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

This episode features Mario Landau-Holdsworth, an economics major and entrepreneur from Lewis & Clark College. He’s originally from San Francisco, California, and has helped his cousin Valerie Landau with her binary glove project. The project has brought him into contact with Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, and many other movers and shakers in Silicon Valley.

We talked about what makes an application addictive, designing tactile devices to interface digitally, using typewriters in Starbucks, Animorphs, blogging in an ape costume, Arduino-powered character recognition, the Russian Space program, Shiloh-Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, and a house that survived three major fires.

Link to Mario’s new project: Digital to Analog Ape

He’s also on twitter at @thelinguini.

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

This episode features Troy Harlan, wherein we talked about information gathering, filtering and consuming (naturally,) human factors, trilobites, reading at 2,000 words per minute, INTP’s, striving for objectivity, The Black Swan, hunches, and why it’s better to “have no map at all than have the wrong map”—all recorded on the road from St. Johns to downtown Portland.

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

.In this Episode of Hazelnut Tech Talk, we bring you Sarah Lacy, columnist for BusinessWeek. During the podcast, Lacey talks about her new book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: the Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, how she organizes a billion things a day, her decade of experience with tech reporting, and how Silicon Valley compares to the Portland Tech Scene.

The Podcast was recorded at the Green Dragon, a Portland bar that generously hosts a great number of Tech Events, including a weekly Beer and Blog that allows much of the community to get together and share Tech.

Lacey arrived in Portland, Oregon very late last evening after riding with us on the Gnomedex Iterasi bus from Seattle, Washington.

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo.

Our seventh episode was recorded the evening after Bear and Blog and features Steven Walling, Wikipedia Extraordinaire and chicken tender who works with Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham at Portland’s AboutUs.org, wherein we talked about using Wiki as an academic source (and getting an A for it), Recent Changes Camp 2009, The Wikipedia Manual of Style, breakfast, lunch and dinner, sleeping under the stars and by the river, guinea pigs, User Bots, and trees, snakes, owls and grapevines

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo.

Our sixth episode features Megan Nuttall and Allison McKeever, two members of the COLABORATORY program from the team Lattice.

An interview with two members from the opposing team, Kiwi, was aired two weeks ago.

This episode covers James Rice, websites that scroll horizontally, lost dog poster that may or may not masquerade as an invitation to an underground rave party, Triscuits, best Portland agencies to work with, laptops with 17-inch screens, relative durability of the MacBook keyboard, Urban Grind, James Rice (you heard it right) and SEO bombing.

Here are links to Allison McKeever and Megan Nuttall’s blogs.

About COLABORATORY

“COLABORATORY takes place over 6 weeks in Portland, Oregon. 10 participants are selected and individually paired with 3 of the 11 agencies based on their strengths and interests. Interns spend 2 intensely focused weeks at each agency learning from all disciplines.”

Interns:

• Allison McKeever
• Bryan Davidson
• Christene Vo
• Heather Schwartz
• Kim Karalekas
• Luke Rolka
• Melissa Casillas
• Mary McPheerson
• Megan Nuttall
• Whitney Bard
• Brain Davidson

Agencies:

• Ascentium
• eROI
• Anvil Media
• Fish Marketing
• the|new|group
• Grady Britton
• CMD
• Asterix Group
• HMH
• Livengood|Nowack.

Hazelnut Tech Talk is proud to report the COLAB experience, and wants to connect its members with local networks, people and events.

To follow all their blogs and Twitter actions, check out Bram’s COLAB Feed Aggregator from Yahoo! Pipes.

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo.

Our fifth episode features Craig Schwartz from toonlet, wherein we talked about how the web bubble burst helped form FooCamp, why San Fransiscans are dastardly good at spotting werewolfs, history and future of the button, BlackBerry camp, ribs breakage due to excessive laughter, online comic that shares the same spirit with SPORE, and text adventures built on HyperCard.

Let the Comic Making Begin!

If you’re interested in making your own comics really, really quickly, head on over to Toonlet, where you can do pretty much whatever you want. (And the replies to comic posts are in comics too, making it an amusingly spam-free environment!).

Digitally Yours,

Hazelnut Tech Talk

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo.

Our fourth episode was recorded right after Cre8Camp and featured Christine Vo and Kim Karalekas, two extremely talented, dedicated individuals with the guts and wit to take on a demanding and often stressful internship program.

We covered topics such as COLABORATORY’s application process, the acquisition of over 100 business cards over the period of two weeks, an intercom at eRoi’s new entrance, @dtboyd, @jamesrice, and the possibility of a Google-run US government.

Sponsored by the Portland Ad Federation, the COLAB project believes that “Interning at 1 agency is so pre-millennial”, and takes a different route in inspiring the creativity and professional education of its interns.

“COLABORATORY takes place over 6 weeks in Portland, Oregon. 10 participants are selected and individually paired with 3 of the 11 agencies based on their strengths and interests. Interns spend 2 intensely focused weeks at each agency learning from all disciplines”.

Interns:

• Allison McKeever
• Bryan Davidson
• Christene Vo
• Heather Schwartz
• Kim Karalekas
• Luke Rolka
• Melissa Casillas
• Mary McPheerson
• Megan Nuttall
• Whitney Bard
• Brain Davidson

Agencies:

• Ascentium
• eROI
• Anvil Media
• Fish Marketing
• the|new|group
• Grady Britton
• CMD
• Asterix Group
• HMH
• Livengood|Nowack.

Hazelnut Tech Talk is proud to play a part in reporting the COLAB experience, and is dedicated to connecting COLAB members with local networks, people and events that are moving and shaking the design world.

All of the members of COLABORATORY have been blogging about their adventures since their first day. Bram Pitoyo built a way to follow all of the action at once. It also checks the latest Twitter conversation that’s hastagged #COLAB, so you do none of the work and get all the results. Check out Bram’s COLAB Feed Aggregator from Yahoo! Pipes.

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This is the full 84 minute audio recording of the talk that Mark Shuttleworth gave on Monday, July 21st at McMenamins Mission Theater. The talk was sponsored by Oregon’s own Strands and Legion of Tech. Mark Shuttleworth will also be speaking tomorrow at O’Reilly’s OSCON 08, a week-long Tech Event here in Portland.

In this podcast, Mark talks about the Ubuntu Project, his time as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station in 2002, and the future of technology in developing countries.

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is very proud to have the ability to present Shuttleworth’s vision to a wider audience.

Transcripts to follow.