Wrong. This site offers (and has offered) several products I myself find highly useful, so my attention was caught. You see, while some of you might forget this at times, I'm still Dutch. Which means I'm cheap, in a good way. I like hunting for deals. I like getting things "on the cheap". In fact, a lot of my consulting work is for eBay, you could almost say I sort of specialize in cheap. Except for those of you who know my consulting rates. Ah well, let's stop digging a hole for myself by trying to be smarter than Lisa Barone and start talking about those daily deals.

So, in comes Mighty Deals. It works as one expects from a daily deals site, sign up, get emails, see if it's interesting, delete 99% of the time. Well, 80% of the time in this case if you're anything like me. Just check some of their current deals. Like Smaller, an OS X app to easily minify JS. Not rocket science, but bloody useful and at $10, a steal. Picons Icons, 500 icons that are not the ever present FamFamFam icons and royalty free, at only $21.

Or a deal that you've missed already, 3 tests from usertesting.com for $50... Invaluable feedback for $50. I'll subscribe and I'll stay subscribed, and I think you should too. If you're not going to subscribe to this one for the deals, be sure to download this freebie, a web icon set "for business". Not the best ever but you'll never know once these things come in useful. There's more free stuff like that there.

This, to me, is what deals site should look like to keep me happy, I hope you agree. If not, be glad that I got paid for this review and go on with your life, I'll snag the deals away myself :)

Daily deals site for web professionals – Mighty Deals is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

GeoSurf is basically a provider of proxy servers. What's cool about that? Well if you have say a proxy server in San Francisco, CA, USA, I could use that proxy to check the local rankings for a term there, or see how a certain site geo-targets to that area. The issue with most of the proxy servers out there is that it's darn hard to get a reliable proxy server in one place, let alone a reliable proxy server in 80 countries and in 20 of the US' most important designated market area's (DMA's).

GeoSurf has various features, but in its most simple form, it acts as a toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer. I'm too lazy to demo it myself, mostly because there's a pretty good video from them already that I'll embed below, but let me just say that I was absolutely astonished by both the ease of use and the speed of the proxies.

If you're on an enterprise plan, you can also use GeoSurf to connect through a VPN, a very useful service if you need to evaluate other stuff like ads inside messenger, application behavior etc. Though I wish they had an extension for Chrome as well, they currently don't, that wouldn't prevent me from using it.

The verdict about GeoSurf

If you ask me "buy or don't buy?", knowing that you have a need for a service like this, I'd say buy, immediately. I can honestly say that I'll probably keep using GeoSurf, if you're managing international search, ad or affiliate campaigns, you would probably love this service / tool too.

GeoSurf Review – I love it. is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Your rankings matter... That’s why I said yes to being sponsored to review yet another rank monitoring service, because I think this one adds some cool new features that I hadn't seen before.

AuthorityLabs is a service that will monitor page position for specific keywords over time, just like a couple of other rank tracking services we’ve reviewed in the past. If you are optimizing your website to move yourself onto the first page, this sort of tool might prove critical. It makes it possible for you to see, on a daily basis, where your site ranks relative to hundreds of keywords over many domains.

Using the Rank Tracking Service

To create a monitoring campaign takes just a few seconds.

• Enter a Domain Name in the search box.
• Click Add New Domain or Page
• Add Keywords for AuthorityLabs to monitor.
• Come back in 24 hours and see some of the results.  More data will be collected, analyzed and visualized over the course of a week.
• Adjust your link building & search engine optimizing activities and return to the site to see how your work has changed your ranking.

The Rankings Page shows you how your page fares on Google, Yahoo and Bing, and tells you if it has gone up or down in a given time frame. It will make keyword suggestions based on your site content and you can export the collected data via CSV.

What’s very cool and sets this ranking tracker apart from others, is that it’ll also show what kind of results it has found in the search results pages with icons for the specific types of results. So if there are movie results, news results or rich snippets, it’ll tell you that. This is very important data as it might heavily impact your CTR. If you’re result #2, but #3 is a video result, the CTR of your result will be very different (read, lower, usually) than if there are no video results at all.

This also shows you possibilities: if other people are ranking there with a video result, why not try to rank there with your own video and play a bit with Video SEO? If others are getting rich snippets, why shouldn’t you?

It also shows if you've had indents or lower page rankings, which can be very important. If you're #1, and another page on your site is ranking #11 or #12, you know how much work you have to do to get an "indent" on the first page? Not much at all! You see, if that second results comes to #10, Google will automatically group it below your #1 result.

Because it allows you to group your keywords with tags, you can see whether specific groups are doing better or worse. See the screenshot below, or, for a better view, check the live public ranking report for my WordPress related keywords. From there you should be able to click around a bit.

Keyword Rankigns

Next to rankings it shows keyword suggestions, you can use these to start tracking rankings, but of course they might be good topics to write about too:

Keyword Suggestions

The Links Pages tells you which pages are most impacting your search engine ranking:

Links to your domain

The Indexed Pages page shows how many pages on your site are indexed in the different engines, showing you how the improvements over time:

The rank tracking service comes in several levels. You can monitor as few as 100 keywords over 10 domains for $24 and up to 1000 keywords over 50 domains for $99.  They offer a 30 day free trial.

In all, I think this is a pretty good service. Having talked to the guys at AuthorityLabs a couple of times while preparing this review (I've had the service running a couple of weeks now), I can say that they're a cool bunch and they're hard at work at making a good product better.

Sponsored review: SEO Rank Analysis with Authority Labs is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The reason Directory Journal and some other directories can still survive is because they do editorial reviews of sites they list in their directory, and as far as I've been able to tell, they really do a pretty good job of those. If you check out a category like Business Software, you'll see a couple of listings, and when you click one, like the one for Fuel Quest, you'll see that along with the homepage link you get up to 3 deep links you can submit. Now Fuel Quest doesn't rank top notch with those links yet, but they do rank second page on some nice terms when they've only got 2-3 links, one of them being from Directory Journal.

I've investigated some more sites, and it seems that these links do help. After seeing that I dove into why that is true, after all, to be able to give away link equity, a site must have some of it first. If you check out the Majestic SEO report for the site, you'll see they've got an awful lot of nice pages with pretty good backlinks, acquired through multiple methods. They've got some free WordPress themes to download, not one but a couple of very decent blogs with some real quality, unique content and some nice tools for webmasters as well. In all: they've earned their links, and have quite a few of them, which explains why a link from the domain would help in your rankings.

So I think I can honestly say that I think investing the $159.95 for a permanent listing along with 3 deep links is worth it if you need a couple of extra links, and that Directory Journal belongs in the small list of directories that you can still use and feel good about.

DirJournal: a directory still worth submitting to is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I liked the tool back then, and provided some feedback to Dan. Today Dan e-mailed me that Crawl Score was now released in version 1, and immediately ordered a sponsored review from me to show it to you, my readers. I of course happily said yes to that, and started looking at the tool again.

What does it do?
Well, it crawls your site, and creates pretty reports from the data it gathers while doing that. When I started doing this review, I made it crawl this site again, to see what it came up with and be able to make screenshots for you people.

First off, this is the menu that it gives you, which immediately shows you that is has a very slick interface (made it a bit smaller to fit):

The report that is now highlighted, the 200 report, shows all "normally" accessible pages within your site, and looks like this:

You can then click on a page title to get a summary for that page, which looks like this:

As you can see there's a small bug there, it's mixing up the keywords and the description, but the information is very complete and useful.

Another nice feature is the reporting of duplicate titles and descriptions, for instance this duplicate title report for my blog:

This is only a small sample of the reports it gives, and I think this can be a very useful tool. It has some bugs, and it will probably improve a lot over the coming months. You should probably check the features page if this interests you.

Pricing
If you use this service to take care of a few websites, the basic subscription will be good enough, and will only set you back $99.99 for 3 months, which translates into like €67 at the moment.

So, is it worth it?
If you consider how easy this service makes some stuff, I think it's well worth it! You might say "Google Webmaster Tools can give me this info too". First of all: not all of it, and secondly: have you found the crawl now button in Google Webmaster Tools yet? No? You won't. There is none. You can use this tool when you want it, and get the data at the time you need. Of course this tool isn't finished yet, but I seriously think this could be a good addition to the webmasters' toolbox.

If you want your product or service to be reviewed like this as well, see the sponsored reviews section of my advertising page!

Finding crawl issues with Crawl Score is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I got a request to do a sponsored review for Bidvertiser for Advertisers. Requests like this are always fun, and this one started off even better, since the people at Bidvertiser really get how this market works. They encouraged me to sign up for their referral program and use the code in there to link to them, because that would give new advertisers a nice $20 in free clicks. Apparently they do not mind at all that I will get paid for that as well, which shows that they really like to be reviewed!

I must say I'm pretty impressed with their interface, it looks nice, reports well and fast and does pretty much everything you'd want it to do. Searching for cars gave me a load of sites on which you can advertise, and quite a few subcategories to do even more targeted niche advertising.

After I had selected a few for my car advertisement, I got the option to set up geotargetting. I chose US only for this testrun, but having the option to target your ads as easy as this is pretty nice. After that I got the possibility to set my bid prices, and what I found really good to see is that they're not inflating expected clicks. If they expect you to get 12 clicks a month from a site and tell that honestly, I'm impressed.

I think that using Bidvertiser you can get some pretty nice exposure if you pick your sites right (there is some crap in there, just skip through that), for a pretty low amount of money. Now what more would you want? So go sign up already!

Bidvertiser.net – Text-Link-Advertising is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I got an email today from Text-Link-Ads, saying that my site had been pre-approved for ReviewMe. I thought: now that's the way to go, that is an awesome marketing action. They probably just automatically pre-approved all Text-Link-Ad approved sites, and sent out an email, easy to do, and that's one hell of a quickstart for ReviewMe, very clever.

So I went and signed up, that was actually quite easy, it allows for payment through PayPal, and I immediatly got the chance to do a review of ReviewMe, to get me started and earn the first cash.

So let's talk about the looks: it looks great, very web 2.0 and very clean. I haven't had to think once about where I would find stuff, which shows that they've really thought it out well.

The signup was smooth as well, I simply added my blog's URL and feed URL, categorized it, tagged it and gave a small description. Thanks to the pre-approval, that was it, and I could go about my business of accepting the first review.

Accepting that first review was easy as well, I could just click on it, see the guidelines, accept it, and then it said: you have 48 hours to complete your review. What you do next is write your review, feed the URL for your review back in to the system, and you're done.

The content guidelines contained a very nice rule: "You must disclose that the post is a paid post in some way. Here are some ideas: "Sponsored Post:", "The following is a paid review:" "Advertisement:". I really digg that, no cheeky paid blogging: just be honest about it.

All in all, I'd have to give a big thumbs up to Patrick Gavin and his team for getting this done. I love it.

ReviewMe is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Online shopping is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

After that they went the extra mile and made a list of the best directories to submit your site to, based on Seomoz's page strength tool. It's a very cool list, with directories and their submission prizes. Among those are quite a few free ones if you're willing to wait a while. I'd say: go check it out: "What are the Strongest Directories?"

The strongest online directories is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Apogee Search is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!