Why on Earth does it exist?
By admin | September 22, 2008
I recently did a bit of reworking of things on my computer.
This left me with a few things changed. I went to edit a file I keep on my desktop with links to important places I like to visit frequently, and it opened up in FrontPage instead of my normal editor.
I just went about my business adding the link to it rather than fixing the shortcut.
Next thing I knew, my nice clean HTML file had all sorts of extra code and crap in it.
I know I have spoke of this other times within this blog, and throughout the site, but it needs to be said again. There isn’t any WYSIWYG editor around that isn’t going to add something into your code.
Plain and simple … don’t use them!
I know you probably won’t like the editor I use, it has no bells and whistles, but it works … and that’s all it does! … LOL I use NoteTab Pro a version I picked up back in the latter part of the 90s. It had gone up to $19.95 some years ago, and a new version, which I will probably go ahead and get soon, is now $29.95.
I hear you say, how can it be any good at that price. Well, it’s better than any other program to do HTML editing hands down (my opinion) and is way way way better than FrontPage or DreamWeaver too.
OK, I’ll get off the soap box now, just remember, you are adding extra garbage into your code if you are using one of these WYSIWYG editors.
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Site Redesign Can Ruin Your Day
By admin | September 17, 2008
Or a much longer period of time …
I have a client who has enjoyed years of very good listings. Almost every single keyword imaginable that would be relevant to their site ranked well. They had tons of listings, and they had good traffic and conversions.
Somewhere on the Corporate level a decision was made to redesign the website. Further they decided it was too “wordy” and reduced the amount of content on each page. To take it a step further, they made an entirely new site, removing all of the existing pages and replacing them with brand new pages with brand new filenames. All of the pages now on the site are brand new.
I think you can figure out what has happened … they have tanked, all the way down to zero listings … and so I have been told … zero leads now coming from the site. They are not happy. I can see why.
I was not contacted about this redesign, beyond being informed there would be some changes taking place. After they had launched the new site they informed me of the new design. They are quite happy with the site and love the new design and streamlined nature of all the very short pages.
This is all good but … I will not get this site listed again, with the number of pages we had, for a while. There is no button or switch to push, there is no magic. We had lots of good listings, but the pages have been removed from the site.
Moral of this story: If you have a page that lists well … remember that if you remove it, it won’t list at all.
I know this should be common sense … but then again … common sense isn’t common.
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Pogo said it well … “We have found the enemy and he is us.”
By admin | September 5, 2008
I had a client a while back who utilized a webmaster, who is a friend of his. This young lad was very ambitious and was learning HTML and web design. When my client found this out he coupled his business with his friend and allowed him to create his web presence.
Eventually he realized the potential of the web and that his website, although online, was not producing the traffic, or profit, he knew was available to him.
He became a client and I proceeded to optimize his site … or perhaps I should term that … tried to optimize his site.
His young friend was quite “broken nosed” about having someone else come in and make changes. After a few things were done I realized none of my changes were live and online. This isn’t all that unusual as many clients will not realize I have made changes and overwrite them from their local PCs. Crazy as it sounds, that is pretty much a normal experience.
But upon investigation I discovered that his webmaster had removed my changes because … “they didn’t like the way it looked”. Well, I really didn’t change the looks much, but I had added nice stuff like meta tags and good title tags. The webmaster insisted that the title of the page should be different than I had optimized it to be, and changed it back. He also convinced my client that I was doing things all wrong.
It took some doing but I eventually convinced my client that I was the one doing things correctly. To make a long story short, we went back and forth like this for an entire five months. Eventually the client called in very angry stating that his site can’t be found for his important keywords and he wants a refund.
I had made change after change after change to the site only to have it changed back.
At this point, I told my client that I wanted to revamp his entire site throwing it out and recreating it. It was really crap and really needed this revamp. I just plainly told him that his webmaster was not a designer or webmaster and it was his fault, entirely!, that his site is not optimized today and is still not producing results for him.
After several days of bantering back and forth, he allowed me complete access to update, change, revamp or redesign … whatever I wanted and promised that his webmaster would not step in and make changes.
I proceeded and made some good headway. After several weeks he started getting some listing, I could see on my reports that the site was improving. I was happy. The client, unfortunately, wasn’t, mainly because he had spent a lot of money and still wasn’t making the amount of profit from the site as he really should be. I remember him complaining to me two days after he gave me the go ahead that he still didn’t see results or his site listed in the SERPs. LOL!
I finished my changes to the site and created a very basic site (I’m not a designer either, that’s for sure), that was optimized well and had everything in place to do well. I worked at some inbound links and released an article to the article directories.
At this point the campaign was cancelled and the client went away, and I kept a back-burner eye on the campaign. I had a more serious look at it this morning after noticing that “all” of the listings I had earned from my work were now gone. He now has “zero” results showing up in the reports. A huge and fatal loss to his online business.
I went to the site to have a look. I viewed the source code and compared it to my own, the last pages I had uploaded. Lots of things were changed, but most annoyingly, all of the title tags were changed. The title tag keywords are now gone, many code optimization techniques have been overwritten/changed or just plain deleted. Important heading tags altered, and not within the scope of what I was trying to accomplish.
So … I guess the webmaster now feels like he is back in control of things, and the site is looking like it is one of his creations.
And it is … it’s called … failure.
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Dub Dub Dub or domain.com?
By admin | September 4, 2008
It has often come up about whether a site should be known as www.site.com or just site.com … you should be one or the other, but my advice is to be www.site.com … case closed.
But, people are going to type your site in as site.com over and over. I’ve even seen sites listed as wwww.site.com and also site.com on the engines, although the major engines today deal with this better. I still believe strongly that you should redirect anyone who types in site.com to www.site.com.
Here is how to do it. Open your .htaccess file (you are on an Apache Linux system right?) and add this to the file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]
That’s it … just those three lines of code is all it takes to Permanently Redirect anyone who types in site.com to www.site.com. Nice, easy and the appropriate, accepted by the engines, way to do it.
Cheers!
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URL Rewrites
By admin | September 3, 2008
Often the dynamic URL problem will arise while doing SEO work.
Dynamic URLs are those which look back to a database for information to
display on a page.
Think of this like software searching for something to put up onto a web
page. Consequently there is no static web page containing the data that
gets displayed.
These URLs always contain characters like “?”, “=” and “&” which are
difficult for search engine spiders to deal with … basically, they don’t
follow those URLs.
Bottom line is that your pages don’t get indexed!
It’s a bit complicated to deal with this, although once you know how I
guess it’s really a simple chore to remedy.
Here is a site with a very good, and simplified explanation, of the
dynamic URLs and how to deal with them.
http://www.addedbytes.com/apache/url-rewriting-for-beginners/
This will take you away from this site so don’t forget how to get back
here! 
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Sorry I have been quiet lately
By admin | September 2, 2008
Launching the new site proved to be a task. It took some time.
Yes, I know, there are many loose ends still. I’ll get to the task of cleaning it all up and optimizing now.
Glad to see you are following along!
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Link Popularity Checker
By admin | August 15, 2008
Here is something I want to mention while it is fresh on my mind.
http://checkyourlinkpopularity.com/
It’s called Link Popularity Checker.
It works very well … it goes to the major engines and checks on links back to your site.
It provides the numbers in a nice list that you can paste into a spreadsheet to keep track of progress.
Download it … it is of no cost!
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Article Marketing
By admin | August 13, 2008
Article Marketing has become a really great way to get some inbound links. Like any other though, I expect the value to wane after a while as the masses begin to spam this very valuable resource.
It amounts to writing something about your subject and adding an authors bio box at the end of the article. 500 word articles go over very well, and this really isn’t a huge undertaking for anyone. The bio box will contain one or two links back to your site, using whatever keywords you like.
One great place to do this is Unique Article Wizard, where you can use their very unique system to create three very similar articles. The system will then mix and swap paragraphs from each of the three articles to create one that is unique to the three you started with. It does this over and over and will then submit to article directories.
I finished up one of these yesterday afternoon and did the submission. This morning, now this is less than 24 hours later, when doing a search for some unique text within this article set, I found it coming up six times on Google. Wow, six submissions already indexed, representing 12 links to my client’s site, all within 24 hours.
My client discovered this when he went looking for the articles after I informed him it had been submitted to some 468 sites!
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SEO or SEM
By admin | August 12, 2008
Whenever a discussion of SEO ensues, you’ll wind up with a discussion of SEM as well. One enhances the other, and at time, it’s hard to see the fine line that really exists between the two marketing efforts.
When you get to the point of having all of the standard SEO efforts done on your site, and you have been working at content and inbound links, there comes the time to look at other methods of getting traffic to your site.
Let’s look briefly at your users, and making them feel at home with that warm fuzzy feeling. How do you provide that to them? Good question. It isn’t the easiest thing to do, for sure, but placing any type of avatar or icon, from any service that validates your site, and adds to it’s credibility is a definite plus.
There are a lot of these services around. If you are using Firefox for your browser there are add ons that will let you see how many errors are within your HTML. You can correct all of these errors and then get a W3C Validation. There is a nice graphic you can use for your site.
Hacker Safe … I’m sure you’ve seen this one around. There are several places online that offer this type of service and will check over your site to ensure that it is compliant with their terms. All of these endorsements will go a long way to increasing your credibility, and provide that warm and fuzzy feeling to your clients when they visit your site.
Google is now offering a service of this nature as well. I’ll have more on that once I check it out.
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