Finding a domain name you like that is available for registration as well can often be a chore enough, let alone picking a domain out that utilizes a TLD extension as part of it.

What, you say? I’m talking about domain hacks, which are domains that are words or phrases that use a TLD extension as part of the URL. Sites like blo.gs, del.icio.us, domai.nr, and ma.tt are domain hacks. Let’s just say it gets a little frustrating sometimes.

Well, you can quit worrying (a little bit at least) because there are several search engines that do the bulk of the work for you. You can perform dictionary searches against these websites, and they even have suggestions for you!

• Domainr
• Wordy
• Xona Domain Hacks

If you’re like me, you have a pretty busy work day, and sometimes you just can’t spend the precious moments you have off (or you can’t afford to pay someone) doing smaller tasks (that of course, must be done) because you’re focusing on the big picture, working on something larger in your project.

Here are a bunch of time and money saving resources that will help you in both online and offline marketing.

Free 125×125 Entrecard Badges & Advertisements
Free 125 Cards provides quality 125×125 for public use, and provides a web interface to customize them on the fly!

Free Web 2.0 Badge Button Generator
Fresh Badge lets you create smooth looking badge graphics for use in your website or emails, or even pip icons for rankings! (Honorable Mention: Web 2.0 Badges)

Free Web 2.0 Logo Generator
Creatr lets you choose from six different styles that mimic popular Web 2.0 logos to make your own.

Free Web 2.0 Icons
UtomBox provides some great Web 2.0 themed icons to use on your website for linking to your RSS feeds, popular social networking websites, and more. If you’re just looking for icons to link to your RSS feeds, check out Feed Icons.

Free Tabbed CSS Menus
Exploding Boy has some really sweet looking CSS based navigation menus that can easily be incorporated into any website you are designing. Explore the rest of the site for more excellent resources.

Free Chart / Graph Generator
Maani.us’s XML/SWF Charts can help you out if you’re in a swift bind to get a presentation ready for the meeting you have in the morning with Mr. Kawasaki, fresh off his red eye flight.

Free Vector Imaging / Conversion
Vector Magic is an online utility that will take images you upload, and convert them into vector format. You can download your vector in EPS, SVG, PDF, or PNG.

Free HTML to RSS Converter (RSS / HTML Content Scraper)
RSSxl is a really useful web application that lets you take content from an HTML page and convert it into an RSS feed you can publicize or handle with a web scripting language, like PHP. Many things can be done with this.

Hope you guys found something you can use!

So, you’ve probably been noticing a couple new things around here, namely the new tab in the upper navigation bar that says “Internet Marketing & SEO Tools” … this is a new section I’ve made to keep track of various internet marketing tools and seo tools that I have created for public use. (Oh, and, of course, make it easier for you to find and utilize.)

Right now, there are two available tools, FeedStub and GREMLin. I’ve already spoke with you about FeedStub and RSS feed directories … so lets get on to the hot ticket item.

GREMLin is a new link building tool that I am developing. It works exactly like the Google search engine (because it uses it, duh) … except that instead of returning the usual results pages that you are familiar with, GREMLin returns a list of clickable links for you without all the other text you weren’t going to read anyways.

Using search queries like the following return the best results:

[KEYWORD / KEYWORD PHRASE] “leave a reply”

[KEYWORD / KEYWORD PHRASE] “remember my personal information”

[KEYWORD / KEYWORD PHRASE] “notify me of follow-up comments”

Each of these will return links to commentable WordPress blogs related to your desired keyword. For now, you have to check if they are nofollow’ed or not yourself, but hopefully not for long.

This should help some of you out on cutting down time spent finding “do follow” blogs to drop backlinks on.

Anyways, enjoy the new toys, and please please PLEASE PLEASE …

Comments about GREMLin are welcome! What features do you want to see? Do you have some more useful search queries I can post up here for people to use?

If you’re a true internet marketer, you spend alot of time dealing with “buzz” … “buzz” is what we refer to the hot tickets on the web as.

This tool cuts down on time spent looking for the best keywords to start with, note that I say start with. You still want to use other tools like Wordze and Wordtracker to generate your more optimized keyword lists and keyword phrases!

CyberWyre’s Current Top Internet Searches tracker the current fifteen most searched phrases and keywords in real-time, enabling you to stay on top ahead of the buzz and your competitors!

Link: http://www.cwire.org/current-top-15-internet-searches/

Things around the bend are looking very exciting … DaftSEO will eventually be releasing its own suite of SEO tools, and as we go through the various stages of programming them, we will need people to test and help us debug our programs.

The suite will consist of various software, some will be like “Fast Blog Finder” or “Comment Hunt” to build backlinks, some will be diagnostics software for your blog, and there are some really fascinating ideas that we don’t wont to let everyone know about just yet … but you’ll see.

If you are interested in beta testing software for DaftSEO, then leave a comment to this post stating your interest, and you will be inserted into our beta testers pool, where we will select testers at random. Selected testers will receive an e-mail, so be sure to leave a valid address!

Cheers!

Good God, I’ve resorted to making a list of tools and utilities that are well employed by any internet marketing specialist or seo practitioner.

ValidRank – Provides an analysis of a website’s PageRank and checks to see if the data projected is accurate or not.

Google Ranking Factors – Good resource for double checking your own website’s optimization strategies.

SEO Test – Rates the search engine optimization techniques used on your website, provides a nice basis to improve your SEO.

Shoemoney SERPs Tool – Easy to use SERP checker, check your URL against your keywords.

NoFollow Check – Check if a website or blog has the nofollow attribute enabled.

Page Strength – Rates your website’s relative importance and net visibility.

StatCounter – My favorite website metrics and analytics utility.

Backlink Checker – Categorizes the backlinks by domain linked from, useful tool.

Hope you found the list useful, if you have any really neat utilities I failed to mention here, please leave a comment, thanks!

I was browsing through Google’s Webmaster Tools, and after submitting and verifying TYPELiFE, I noticed when I expanded the “tools” tab on the left, there was a menu option that said “set crawl rate” … hmmm, I wonder what this does?

A quick skim over the tool page shows me:

“Google collects documents on the web using Googlebot, our web crawler. You should leave this control at the Normal setting unless you are having trouble with the speed at which Googlebot is crawling your server.”

“We’ve detected that Googlebot is limiting the rate at which it crawls pages on your site to ensure it doesn’t use too much of your server’s resources. If your server can handle additional Googlebot traffic, we recommend that you choose Faster below.”

It also lets you know the current rate Googlebot is indexing your website.

If you think you can handle it, choose a new crawl speed! I set mine to faster, now I’m just waiting to see the results!

This site is currently set at a Faster crawl rate. This rate will return to Normal on Mar 10, 2008.