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Senin, 04 September 2006

Increase Traffic to your Site: Free SEO Tools from ThinkSeer

As promised in an earlier post about Search Engine Optimization (a great speech by Wil Reynolds at Affiliate Summit East, Orlando, 2006), I'm sharing the free SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools from ThinkSeer.

Here they are. A link to this list has also been added to the sidebar of this blog's home page for future reference. Thanks again to Wil from ThinkSeer for sharing this great list!

Forums

Open Directory Public Forum
Search Engine Marketing & Optimization Tips & News searchengineblog
WebmasterForums Index

Tools

Keyword Proximity Analyzer v1.03
SEOmoz | Keyword Difficulty Tool
ResearchBuzz-- GooFresh
Search Engine Saturation - Search Engine Marketing Tools

Google Tools

Check PR, Scripts that finds quality link partners
Google Datacenter Watch Tool - 56 New Datacenters
Upcoming PageRank value checking tool
Yahoo! WebRank Checking Tool
Google Dance Tool
RankPulse: Keeping the Pulse of Search Engine Rankings
Google Dance Tool
Google AdWords Dynamic Keyword Insertion :SEO Book.com
Keyword Generator.Google AdWords. Overture.
Google w/ PR
Google Trends

Yahoo! Tools
Spider simulator

Lynx Viewer (Show page text)
Webconf's Spider Simulator
StickySauce.com - Search engine spider simulator optimization tools
HTTP / HTTPS Header Check

Link Popularity Checkers

Adword Report
AdGooroo :Home
GoogSpy- AdwordsCompetitor Research by Velocityscape
Yahoo Tracker :: search engine keyword ranking tracker
We Build Pages Anchor Text BacklinkChecker - Neat-O Free BacklinkCheck Tool.

Firefox plugins

SEO for Firefox
SEO for Firefox is a free Firefox extension
which adds many search engine optimization data points into Google's
SERPs and Yahoo!'s SERPs on the fly.

SEOpen: The SEO FirefoxExtension
Free search engine optimization
tools and resources. Home of SEOpen, the SEO Firefox extension.

Microsoft adCenterLabs Presentations
Microsoft adCenterLabs Demonstration

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
Free Overture and Google Keyword suggestion tool.

SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization Tools
Similar Pages Checker - Duplicate content checker
Search Engine Spider Simulator
Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker

Class C Checker - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization
Class C Checker

PageRank Search - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization
A Google META search engine featuring PageRank display and
additional features. Streamline the link building process with this
popular tool.

Technorati Tags: SEO, traffic, searchengine, thinkseer, cafepress

Jumat, 01 September 2006

T-Shirt Design Inspiration from the Minnesota State Fair, 2006

Well, I survived another fun annual trip to "The Great Minnesota Get-Together," the Minnesota State Fair. My feet are sore, my tummy is satisfied, and my mind is spinning with T-shirt ideas.

Yes, you can get hotdish on a stick at the Minnesota State Fair!

A Slice of the Midwest
I can't think of a better slice of the good ol' midwest - flyover country - middle America than our fair. It's the largest state fair in the United States, by the way. With the daily attendance record broken at 128,966 people at the fair on Wednesday alone, it serves as a pretty good look at what regular folks are wearing (and eating...but that could be a blog of it's own!).

Good News for CafePress T-shirt Designers
After looking around today during the 8+ hours we spent there, one could safely assume that of those 100,000+ daily attendees, at least half or more were wearing T-shirts. I think the T-shirt market is here to stay.

What are They Wearing?
Since I was there in the morning/afternoon hours, we saw more mainstream families (the later hours at the fair seem to attract a more fringe crowd). I saw a lot of funny phrases...they never seem to go out of style. I saw more skulls and cross bones, Harley Davidson Tees everywhere, kids with shirts about being in band or sports. Overall people are wearing things they're proud of; something that identifies them, whether it's their heritage, their school, their religion, their sport, their political candidate of choice or the latest concert they went to.

Here are a few pictures I took at the Minnesota State Fair today...hopefully they can provide you with some inspiration...

My favorite T-shirt at the Harley Davidson tent. Nice use of tattoo imagery.

The 93X FM (Twin Cities hard rock radio station) booth was selling T-shirts. Lots of skulls and cross bones.

Harley Davidson T-Shirts for babies and kids.

"Eat, Sleep, Hockey!"

More Harley T-shirts.

"FBI Full Blooded Irish"

Another great retro-looking Harley Davidson T-shirt.

Fair fashion at it's best (or worst?).

Some cute signs being sold in Heritage Square. Great T-shirt phrase ideas.

The "Freak Show" in the midway had some interesting artwork. Any T-shirt ideas here?

I was excited to find these old seed corn bags.

In the Ag-Hort Building (Agriculture-Horticulture for you non-Minnesotans) there was a big seed display where corn and various seeds were judged and awarded ribbons. Hanging above the corn on display were these great old seed bags from various seed companies (I think they were all from Minnesota).

Throw sleeves and a neck hole on these and you've got some pretty cool retro T-shirts! Great inspiration for you own retro graphic designs.

Well, that wraps up my T-shirt inspiration from the Minnesota State Fair for 2006.

What T-shirt inspiration are you seeing at your local fairs?

Please Note: Just a reminder that anything posted on this blog is for inspiration only, not copying (or worse yet, stealing!). These photos of T-shirt designs and other artwork are copyrighted material and cannot be used in your own T-shirt design. Use them only for reference, ideas and inspiration for your own designs. You may feel free, however, to link to or blog about them.

Technorati Tags: minnesotastatefair, t-shirt, inspiration, design, cafepress

CafePress Chats & Workshops: Using the archives to learn a lot

The CafePress website can be a little overwhelming, to say the least.

And when you want to find answers to questions about running your shop, there are several places you can look: The forums, the learning center tutorials, the help center, and click on any question mark icon in your account to get answers on using features in your account.

But there are also the chats and workshops. If you're like me, you've managed to be unavailable for just about every one of those things, but not to worry! There's a great archive of all the chats and workshops for you to read. Though you can't participate once the chat is over, you'll find helpful info in these chats.

Here's how you can find the CafePress chats and workshops archive:

1) On the CafePress.com homepage (or your account page) click on "Community."