I tend to find interesting angles for things that I read and more and more, things I’m going to write about in my book (I’ll have a website/blog up for the social media analytics book shortly where readers can give me feedback on ideas I’m developing to write about).

With that in mind I read a post yesterday on How To: Allow Google to Crawl your AJAX Content in JaTin’s blog that perked my interest because Google had actually solved the problem for content developers but most people probably aren’t even aware of it.   Not only that, what Google can’t pick up (aka Ajax and Flash) isn’t available to Social Media Monitoring either.

Not that most of the Flash movies would be anything that Radian6, Brandwatch, Synthesio, etc, etc, etc, could do anything with, but then again, many movies, many Ajax sites actually do have a lot of content, but it’s invisible or Ultraviolet and fits nicely into my Spectral Analytics approach – clearly there’s a way to enable Ajax tracking of a website and Google wants you to know about it and implement it if you really care about getting that content ranked in Google.    Once Google can get at it, I’m pretty sure that will also be the case with Radian6, etc.

But there’s another issue that comes up which I need to ask vendors about – how much does Radian6 or Sysomos actually pull data from Google?    I mean, Facebook and Twitter are selling their data to Google, but do monitoring platforms actually look at Google to get data because I haven’t seen any evidence they do?   If they don’t why don’t they?

I don’t love Google but I noticed no monitoring platform even attempts do deal with site ranking – why not?   The same thing goes for Google Webmaster Tools – fantastic collection of information about a subscribed site, much of it may not apply to monitoring but some of it could – why isn’t anyone pulling data from it?

Anyway, getting back to Ajax enablement for SEO, it’s not that different than Flash Enablement in that you have to make 2 versions of the content, one for your users and the other for the search engine (sounds like Cloaking, eh!?).  Well, who says all Cloaking is bad, maybe there are approved reasons for it and this appears to be one of them.

Essentially, sites following this proposal are required to make two versions of their content available:

1. Content for JS-enabled users, at an ‘AJAX style’ URL
2. Content for the search engines, at a static ‘traditional’ URL – Google refers to this as an ‘HTML snapshot’

Historically, developers had made use of the ‘named anchor‘ part of URLs on AJAX-powered websites (this is the ‘hash’ symbol, #, and the text following it). For example, take a look at this demo – clicking menu items changes named anchor and loads the content into the page on the fly. It’s great for users, but search engine spiders can’t deal with it.

As soon as you use the hashbang in a URL, Google will spot that you’re following their protocol, and interpret your URLs in a special way – they’ll take everything after the hashbang, and pass it to the site as a URL parameter instead. The name they use for the parameter is: _escaped_fragment_

Google will then rewrite the URL, and request content from that static page. To show what the rewritten URLs look like, here are some examples:

• www.demo.com/#!seattle/hotels becomes www.demo.com/?_escaped_fragment=seattle/hotels
• www.demo.com/users#!name=rob becomes www.demo.com/users?_escaped_fragment_=name=rob

As long as you can get the static page (the URL on the right in these examples) to display the same content that a user would see (at the left-hand URL), then it works just as planned.

Turns out this is exactly what Twitter just did (which also uses Google Analytics to track everything they are doing, bet you didn’t know what).  Here’s an example from the post that was actually written by Rob Ousbey.

Now we know why the ugly pound-dash URL rewrite that Twitter had do to – they are tracking Ajax and following Google’s guidelines.  Question is – will  we?  I think the answer is yes, if you want to get your content ranked and… picked up by Radian6 and monitoring platforms because they can’t read Flash and Ajax, either.

Fortunately for us, there’s a great demonstration of this proposal already in place on a pretty big website: the new version of Twitter.

If you’re a Twitter user, logged-in, and have Javascript, you’ll be able to see my profile here:

• http://twitter.com/#!/RobOusbey

However, Googlebot will recognize that as a URL in the new format, and will instead request this URL:

• http://twitter.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/RobOusbey

Sensibly, Twitter want to maintain backward compatibility (and not have their indexed URLs look like junk) so they 301 redirect that URL to:

• http://twitter.com/RobOusbey

From time to time people reach out to me to review their tools and platforms and that was the case with Dmitry Gushchin who hails from EasySeoTracking.com.   I spent a little time testing EasySeoTracking against a few keywords where I might expect to rank on like “social media monitoring” and “social monitoring”.

The tool can be used for free but the paid version only costs $5.95 which is almost too low a price (I wonder why Dmitry didn’t charge $19.99 or something inexpensive but would denote EasySeoTracking was a serious, quality tool).

EasySeoTracking found a page of my site in position 59 at Google and for Social Monitoring at position 54 (though I found it at position 63).

While I didn’t signup yet for the paid version of EasySeoRanking I liked the description of the backlink tool for any of your competitor urls (assessed in the Niche Analysis Tool) because it includes the backlink pagerank which is really useful – considering for the time being – Google is largely governed by links – especially links with high pagerank (PR5 and over, according to advice I found on this site).

Used the SEO Recommendations tool and got some basic stuff – good information but easy to get by must looking for myself – in fact the advice might be over simplistic.

The Crawler Simulation tool wasn’t particularly useful for me except for one thing – it captured all the links on a page (in this case, the New York Times homepage) and that could be a real time saver when looking at sites and possibly scraping content – if your into that kind of thing).

At the end of the day, I found EasySeoTracking perhaps a little too basic for my uses, but I could see myself using it in a pinch if I needed an SEO Ranking Checker.

However I want to take a moment to talk about the changing nature of SEO.   For one thing, my search results in Google (the tool doesn’t look at Yahoo! or Bing, or anything else) are going to be different than EasySeoTracking’s or for that matter, anyone else, due to the increasing incidence of personalized content – Social Media Streaming, Universal Search (based on all of that), Paid Search targeting.   A simple rank checker might not be a very useful tool anymore – even if it was 5 years ago, or 10 years ago – things are totally different now.

Also the position your site is listed in is not as  important as the probability and frequency of showing up in a position – which Google Webmaster tools does cover, but most rank checkers are unable to provide information on.

Niche Tracking – I think Niche Keywords are effective if you have a lot of content – the aggregate of all your long tail traffic might add up when you have enough of it out in search engines – but unless you can create and a prolific amount of content crawled and ranked – I don’t think it will help much.

On the other hand, tools like this one serve Google’s purpose of trying to get people to improve their content -  problem being – such attempts  too often by a desire to rank well, not as a result of really wanting to create good content – which Google also talks about often.    Since Google just bought  Metaweb To Bolster Answers, Google Squared & Rich Snippets I think Ranking Checkers address that SEO isn’t really about ranking now, if it ever was – it’s about finding the right content and getting rid of spam results – something Google has way too much of.

I looked at WordStream’s  keyword tool last week but waited till it was formally announced before writing about it.  According to Wordstream, their keyword tool compares favorably to Google’s and WordTracker:

I almost have to wonder why anyone bothers with WordTracker anymore – I’m not sure that paid keyword tools are really worth it – esp with so many free tools, including an excellent one by SEOBook (though it might be packed with too much information).

But in another way, using different keyword tools leads to different ways you’d want to use them, ending up with different results, overall.

I did a search on Netbooks (I just bought 2 netbooks, today)

What I like the most about Wordstream’s keyword tool is the related keyword sections on the right – I started with “Netbooks” by itself, but the volume of that keyword must be low, since no suggested words were present – then I added “laptop” and got several – I can use the related keywords to build out a better keyword list than I can get from WordTracker, alone, and perhaps, from Google’s Keyword Tool – which is more focused on sales.

In the interest of being transparent – I am doing some freelance work with WordStream – though this review of WordStream’s keyword tool is not part of that work.   What I’d like to see WordStream do – is make this keyword tool a widget – and let people embed it whereever they want.

The WordStream Keyword Tool is also a nice way for WordStream to do lead generation – you can get the entire list of keywords on any query by giving them your email address – and WordStream has a guide to show you what to do with the information you get out of their new free tool.

If anything, WordStream’s new Keyword Tool is another free resource you can use to write better copy for your website.  Using WordStream’s new Keyword Tool as a guide – here’s an example of how I’d write a little review for my new netbooks -

I bought two new Acer Notebooks today, both Eee PC 1101HA Seashell (though my are black) with 11 hours of battery life (though I ‘m not sure that’s true – since it depends on which of the 3 battery types came with the laptops – 3 cell, 6 cell, etc).

While at Best Buy, today, I was looking at the Samsung netbook which was a little more expensive, but didn’t as far as I could tell, seem to have any better features – and it was about 70 dollars more than Acer Netbooks I decided to buy.  True, the MSI Wind netbooks with 2GB of Ram built in, might seem, a better deal than the Acer Netbooks that  I bought and had to add an extra GB of ram to; the reviews on MSI Wind netbooks in technical forums suggests a netbook will outperform many laptops that are more than 2 years old.

One more nifty feature of WordStream’s Keyword tool is the ability to easily remove words from the keyword results.

All you have to do is hover over a keyword in a phrase and delete any term you don’t want to be part of your results.

I could definitely see myself myself WordStream’s new Keyword  tool for SEO Analysis and copy writing.