 |
 |
|
|
||
Folks, this is an interview with Ralph Tegtmeier of the famous fantomaster.com When I first visited the http://fantomaster.com/ site, over a year ago, I was impressed with the array of cloaking, IP address blocking, search engine spider, server logs, code napping prevention, and other software tools available there. Since then, I've come to know Ralph as a professional business person, a fellow programmer, a friend, and a true expert in his field. fantomaster.com has free and commercial programs, tutorials and manuals, FAQs, resource lists, search engine services, its own ezine, and content you can use on your site or in your ezine. Also known as "fantomaster," Ralph has graciously taken time to participate in an interview for WillMaster Possibilities readers. [ED: The interview is too lengthy to publish here in its entirety. The unedited interview is available on-line at http://willmaster.com/possibilities/special/fantomaster.shtml (The URL is also printed at the end of this article.)] Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation:
Will: The word "fantom" is in your domain names and software titles. How did you happen to select that word for a brand?
Ralph: Then, in our research and development stage, we were looking for some fairly competitive keywords to test both our products and our personal skills in regard to search engine optimization. This led to "Fantomas", a rather infamous literary figure, also featuring prominently in cinema lore with quite a cult of its own. So we optimized tons of pages for keyword "fantomas" and submitted them to the search engines to check performance of our own cloaking software. The results being very good indeed, we decided to go for it for real in future — but as the fantomas domains had all been taken, the next logical improvement was to create the "fantomaster" — the "master of phantoms". So we incorporated in Belgium and the UK as "fantomaster.com Ltd.", and here we are ...
Will:
Ralph: For cloaking software to work properly, you need to have as comprehensive a list of verified search engine spider IPs as possible. While there were lots of lists freely available on the net, all of them were focused on US based search engines only, and even these were far from comprehensive or state of the art. So we started off by setting up a network of "spider traps": In general, these are domains dedicated to catching search engine crawlbots, to analyze their IPs, etc. We soon realized that you have to make a commercial venture of this to keep it going because the workload involved is truly immense. Amateur efforts, while highly laudable in their own right, will typically lack the sustainability required. So our fantomas spiderSpy™ subscription service was born: The world's largest database of established search engine spiders. This covers about 100+ world wide bona fide search engines with some 9,500+ entries. The botbase is updated every six hours, seven days a week. Another world first was the fantomas keyMixer™, a server based application which allows you to precisely fine tune your cloaked pages' keyword density to the first decimal digit. While there's a lot of fine keyword density analysis software out there, tools for actually generating tailor made keyword densities for cloaked pages were conspicuous only by their absence. But keyword density is quite crucial if you want to achieve good to excellent search engine rankings, and generating it by hand can be extremely time consuming and error prone. As for being the first in our field, it's simply great! No boss leaning on you, no one to tell you your ways, living off your wits, analyzing problems, inventing solutions, developing them. All in all, it's a highly creative sort of work. And whatever you end up with, whether it's a hit or a miss, you only have yourself to thank (or blame) for. And everybody on our team shares this attitude, it's a really a very cool way of working and making one's living. For us, being at the cutting edge means more freedom, less conformity to others' values and expectations, and, hopefully, more profit in the long run as well. [ED: This reponse has experienced extensive editing. See the URL below for complete, unedited interview.]
Will:
Ralph: Rather than harp on competition, we prefer cooperation in the spirit of mutual acceptance and respect, which is a lot more constructive and profitable. And up until now the web has certainly been very good to us on that score.
Will: You are an expert in your field. You offer tutorials and FAQs, free and commercial programs, and custom services. Many of your software is cutting-edge. Tell the readers how fantomaster.com can benefit them. Some of your products might serve as examples.
Ralph: [ED: SEO — Search Engine Optimization] For webmasters who want to go into industrial strength cloaking, I'd say our fantomas Webmaster Suite™ offers all they'll ever need, including a 12 month subscription to the fantomas spiderSpy™ botbase. We also offer unlimited email support to our registered users. If your readers want to see the full scope of what we have developed, both freeware and commercial products, I'd like to invite them to check out our products overview page at http://fantomaster.com/faprogs0.html if I may. [ED: This answer has been edited. See URL at end.]
Will:
Ralph: One way to measure our success, apart from business turnover, is the number of calls we get from overseas prospects and clients. I mean, depending on from where you're calling, this can be pretty costly! It's certainly not a given that someone in the States or in Japan will phone up a small company like ours in Belgium on the mere strength of our web site's content and presentation. So, as I'm fond of saying, we must be doing *something* right! While hardly tangible, peer support has always played a major role in our marketing success. Probably the most overlooked marketing resource on the internet is personal contribution. If you can contribute new stuff to the online community, be it inventive, funny or plain useful, people will appreciate it. Marketing hype is generally quite counter productive — with everybody going it, how can you make a difference? Certainly not by shouting out louder than the next guy. [ED: Pertinent observations and advice have been omitted to keep the article within acceptable length. See URL at end for unedited interview.]
Will:
Ralph:
Will:
Ralph: We were not particularly amused by this sort of activity, even though we have nothing to hide. Legitimate pursuit of copyright infringements and trademark piracy, etc. is one thing - violation of privacy and provocation of unwarranted, frivolous litigation because of mere greediness is another. If you've got serious money to lose (or if you simply manage to give that impression), you can safely bet on it that some shark will try to get at it sooner or later. This may very well concern your clients as well. Seeing that people have been (and are being) sued for a mere link on their site, this issue should not be trivialized. If you simply so much as mention Microsoft Windows or Dell or what have you on your site, you run a very realistic risk of being sued brainless these days. Our fantomas blockFrog™ helps you block established snoops from your site by setting the spider to "sleep" — that way, you will only incur microscopical bandwidth usage and equally minimal system CPU resources drain. It will also keep dumb, misbehaved spiders running rampant on your site at bay — a major problem even some of the Big Players like Google and Inktomi are prone to occasionally. We will soon be launching a professional version, too: The fantomas multiBlocker™. This one will allow blocking of multiple IPs (even those from unrelated IP blocks) as well as blocking by UserAgent to keep those parasitic email extractors (harvester bots) from your site, etc. It will also feature a clear, easy to use GUI so you can generate customized CGI blocking scripts right from the comfort of your web browser.
Will:
Ralph: Your external links hits are then stored in a dedicated log file for later analysis and evaluation. You can even use this to track your own web site pages and your visitors' navigation behavior. [ED: The rest of this answer deals with a commercial version and great ideas for using the software. See URL at end.]
Will:
Ralph: Generate lots of fresh, useful content. Do it often, preferably regularly. Keep your blatant marketing activities on economy drive (pardon the pun), be subtle about your promotion. Far too little subtleness/subtlety around in these blaring, excitement driven times! People will notice, will favor: less dumb hysteria, more openness, honesty. Admit to mistakes if you make them (as you're bound to), but don't cringe, don't give the impression of reacting self-assertive or self-deprecating for the heck of it. (Rest assured, everybody's tired of everybody's ego but their own ...) Remember you are free to come and go as you please on the net. Submit your new content. Possibly resubmit your older content, depending on ranking and various other factors. (Introduce at least some minor changes before you do.) Read, read, read — learn the trade from scratch. Test out stuff — your mileage may vary immensely from the gurus'. Every web site is different, or, at least, should be. Link to lots of useful sites not directly competing with yours. Request reciprocal links. Contribute to mailing lists. If you can, issue a newsletter of your own. Never mind if you only have yourself, your wife and your stepmother for subscribers — put it on site and submit it to the engines. (They simply love that sort of all-text stuff currently!) Check your logs daily. Learn how to recognize search engine spiders. Check out all search engine generated hits to determine: a) your current ranking, and b) what people are actually searching for — you may be in for a surprise or two on that score. Look at what your competitors are doing. However, don't just copy them — better them! Create more domains and interlink them all.
Will:
Ralph: The professional version, fantomas logFrog PRO™, even allows for Boolean search of your server logs, and it also enables you to extract precisely the data you specifically require. Beyond that, it offers instant email delivery of your reports to up to two different recipients - this is ideal for webmasters, ISPs and traffic builders who want to service their clients with customized string search based log extracts. In many cases this will be very valuable information they can charge their customers handsomely for.
Will:
Ralph: It's also fun to do, one reason probably being that we have chosen not to get stuck with any fixed "publish or perish" schedule — we publish on an as-required basis. This also keeps it fairly low volume, even though individual issues can be quite lengthy sometimes. For shorter, breaking news sort of stuff we have started to supplement it occasionally with our fantomFlash news bulletin. Just like you, we make a point of generally shunning canned content. This keeps the fun in it, provided you are of a writing bent, something I've been guilty of since I wrote my first novel at the age of twelve. Thankfully, it was never published, but the exercise did become habit forming. (Laughing)
Will:
Ralph: Also, we've been using your wonderful time zone conversion script right on our corporate data page at http://fantomaster.com/index2.html#hours for a long time now and quite a few of our clients have complimented us on offering this feature because it shows that we really value their time. I can only recommend webmasters catering to an international clientele to feature this script of yours as well: Your customers will love it! So I'd like to return the compliments, Will, and thank YOU for doing this interview with me. It's been a real pleasure.
Note from Will: Copyright 2001 William Bontrager
| ||