Seeing a tweet from @jonathanmendez got me thinking a bit this morning. “Don’t be evolutionary. Be revolutionary.” There has never been a time where that is more true. With the Internet it is very easy to get in a routine or a siloed structure of creating things. Marketers are constantly copying others techniques and rehashing them. This does no one any good.

Take for example a blog post (if you want to call it that) created by Iampaddy.

http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/

I would be willing to bet you a pretty penny that if Mr. Paddy created this same topic in a blog post, with no images, on a stock wordpress install this would have gotten no coverage what so ever. Instead, this piece trended on Twitter (that’s a ton of sharing), and will undoubtedly get passed around for the next few days and could even find itself front paging DIGG or REDDIT.

The unique nature and creative aspect of this example brings real world perspective to the saying “Don’t be evolutionary. Be revolutionary.”

How are you thinking outside of the box with your content?

Good friend and fellow code magician SEOcracy has come out with what appears to be a pretty helpful and usable search analysis tool. The site joins a crowded space of search analysis tools such as google analytics, google ad planner, yahoo site explorer, semrush, alexa and compete. Although getst.at doesn’t crawl and analyze sites itself it taps into API’s to compile its data.

From what I have seen so far this tool looks very comparable to google ad planner. The key difference is it attempts to show website analytics based more around search ranking metrics, such as backlink and indexed page counts, than actual traffic levels (although that looks like it might be coming later).

One can peruse through the codex iteration of the tool here: http://codex.getst.at/

You will find multiple verticals that allow one to quickly assess the competitiveness or lack of competiveness in each vertical (denoted by backlink count and index page count, albeit not the best metrics, gives you an idea none the less). I will enjoy seeing each category built out.

You Can Already Access All These Sites Metrics Elsewhere

You can in fact access all of these metrics with tools like yahoo site explorer, majestic seo, raven seo, link explorer, google ad planner etc. However, the shear speed at which one can compare the different sites is what sets apart this tool.

Google has just dropped a bomb shell here in my opinion and is giving users the ability to monitor any page on the web, with RSS like updates on page changes. There are 23,423 different ways this can be used, such as Andys idea to use this for unblockable scraping. However, one simple method is to monitor your competitions backlinks.

• Pick the backlink page from yahoo site explorer for the page you want to track
• Create a link to the URL you just copied by clicking “add feed” in google reader
• Save the link.

Bingo.

Now, potentially, (I haven’t tested this since it just came out) any time new links are acquired and pop into the 1^st page of the top 10 results, you will get a notice of the link as if someone posted a new post on a blog.

What are some other ways you can think of using this outside of the obvious reputation management side of things?

I recently got hacked on not one but two different Wordpress installs I have. The intentions were made obvious to me after I actually saw a very sharp rise in long tail traffic from Yahoo. This might seem odd, but it made clear sense to me that something was embedded on the site causing it to rank for extraneous long tail phrases. Someone had installed a script later I found in the htaccess and index.php files (this is typically where they drop malicious scripts).

The first measures I took to clear the Wordpress Malware threat were:

·         Changing Wordpress, ftp and database passwords

·         Analyze my database for suspicious new fields (or modified fields)

·         Assessed my index and .htaccess files

·         Looked at Google caches of my site

·         Run the ‘fetch as bot’ in Google webmaster central to see if they were cloaking

After wiping the php code that created the website.com/search?spam-long-tail-pages on my site and removing the htaccess modifications that made the server check the index file, I had effectively killed the malware. Google later came by, noticed the malware was gone and gave me my rankings back.

Read more on what to do about Wordpress hacks:

Hidden Admin Hacks On Old Wordpress Installs

How To Secure Wordpress

I came across a post yesterday that lists over 200 different infographic posts. It can be a handy resource when you are looking for inspiration.

With that said I will note that in the last 6 months there have been an onslaught of people pushing inforgraphics. If you are going to use this hook make sure that the layout and accompanying statistics are crisp.

Ive seen quite a few examples recently that don’t appear to have been too well thought out and designed. For some thoughts on how to create your own infographic, read this interview by Matt Inman where he outlines a few ways he comes up with his comics. Jump down to the “where do you source your inspiration” question for details.