Its okay - you do not have to blog.

April 4th, 2008, 10:02 am Michael 4 comments

a couple of my buddies comment on the fact that i do not blog that often.
its simple - i never see any real need to. everything else is covered and the stuff that isn’t covered shouldn’t be (if that makes any sense)

i know when not to blog.

does the world need another top ten list? does the world need another “quick ways to SEO your website”, post? does the world need another post talking about buying links? does the world need another post proclaiming how amazing social media is?

no.

so believe me - when i think of something useful i will happily post it or when i get something useful to post i will post it.

on the upside i have contacted a SEO who i would like to interview - if he agrees that will be the next post.

until then.

Google, Gray’s Papaya & Reporting Index Spam…

March 5th, 2008, 12:37 pm Michael 10 comments

The majority of the sites that I do SEO work on are highly competitive key words. Where even my site being on the 2nd page of results usually turns out to be a valuable position. The site that I am currently working on is young - PR1 with a good majority of targeted in links & a steady stream of fresh original content to keep the spiders happy.

For the past 2 months I have watched the site bounce around for some of our target terms, usually on the bottom of the first page. Why I say bounce is because just about every day there is a new .edu domain that has its CMS hacked and gets loaded up with keywords & then is cloaked and sends to a another page witch is just a fat bunch of PPC links. Your typical blackhat shady type thing…

Now, seeing as this basically bumped me off of my spot - I do like any good pissed off SEO google user would do, I report the site via Webmaster Tools.

Every morning I have made a ritual about it. I arrive at port authority at 8:00 am & stroll down 8th to Gray’s Papaya where I pickup my morning breakfast of a Sausage Egg & Cheese + a large coffee (all this for only $2.25 - which is an amazing deal) - I then walk across the street to my office, get situated at my desk, put on my sheriff badge and become a google cop for the next 60 minutes. I usually report a good 5 websites before I am half way done eating the Gray’s Papaya goodness.

So I guess what this rant is about is simple - Google likes to penalize like a Mo-Fo for websites that buy and sell links or do other stuff that they deem ungooglish - So why not reward?  Could we see in the future google actually saying, “Holy crap, this guy spends atleast an hour of his day, (while eating his Gray’s Papaya breakfast) helping to clean up our search index! This guy should get some kinda juice on his site for this!”.  So Matt can we expect a rewards system to ever come up?

**Sigh** It stinks, cause no matter what in this whole situation I am googles b!tch.  Everyday it’s my daily routine - just once I would like to be able to eat my breakfast in peace.

Guest post…

February 28th, 2008, 1:31 pm Michael 1 comment

I did a guest post over at SugarRae.com - go check it out…

Digg Algorithm changes force users to REVOLT!

January 24th, 2008, 10:42 am Michael 3 comments

WHO THE HELL CARES?

Google changed its algorithm - when was the last time you saw SEO’s stop submitting to or optimizing for google.

Please refer to this past post if you have any other concerns.

Now please return to your home before the digg riot gets out of control and people start burning down buildings and looting stores.

Keeping Content King & Not Crap.

January 15th, 2008, 10:26 am Michael No comments

Every SEO will come across that one site that is very straight forward with a negative amount of content on it. Usually it will be a combination of a bit of actual text but mainly just some pictures and a flash file here or there.

So what the heck do you do to make it a bit more substantial?

I for one love a good clean wordpress install but not labeled as a blog - instead I use “News” or “Information” heading on the menu bar. I then find a theme which matches the main site as close as possible. Throw a bit of my css/php ability in there and I can usually make it look as if it was an extension of the site.

So bam, you have just made a normal site now have an RSS feed and also the ability to hold a lot of content which you control and write.

So what to write?

Topical content generally sucks & rather then blast the user with 25 pages of meaningless crap which is nothing more then a bunch of keywords repeated 20 times with some sentences in between - I tend to use the Google Keywords Suggestion tool to aid me in my writing. I drop my main keywords into the tool and see what other ones google comes up with. I then sort the results by Avg Search Volume and begin to write from the top. This way when I get to the bottom hopefully big “G” will have already graced my first posts with its presence so I will be able to have fresh new content on a high volume search term ready and waiting for its next visit. After each time I post I usually run to a blog ping site and let all the blog scrapers know that I got some new stuff going on and they should come and check it out. Make sure you do your best at trying to keep the articles on topic and actually something that the person would want to read - cause this is also where social bookmarking can come in. Remember the better your article & information you give the better your chances are to get in links from it via a Social bookmarking site.

So, you have some content on your site - but the only way to get to it is from 1 single link off of the main page - how can we pull some of the information onto the main site and still make it look good? There is 2 ways to do this - the ghetto way or the respectable coder way.

1) the Ghetto way - Pulling the RSS feed from Wordpress and displaying it on your homepage. This is not that difficult if you are using php. If you are using HTML on the main page it gets a bit tricky. If you are a ninja coder you should be able to figure it out - if you are not - there is a freeware script that will actually do it for you. You will have to edit the CSS to make it all blend and It might take a bit to figure out. But this way you will be able to gain some good changing content on your homepage while also gaining substance in the back of the site.

2)the Respectable coder way - If you are using PHP the other way to do this would be to actually make a call to the MySql database and display the topics & a snippet from the postings on the homepage. Now I am not a respectable coder by any means so I can not take credit for what I am about to post here - this was actually done by someone else for the site I was working on. (Credit: J.P. & Dan Zarrella)

$buff = mysql_query('SELECT ID, post_title FROM wp_posts ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 3');
while($line = mysql_fetch_assoc($buff)) {
echo "<a href='--YOUR%20WORDPESS%20DIR--/?p=$line[id]'>$line[title]</a>";
}


So what the above code does is gives you the Title of your 3 latest wordpress posts. Now again I am no coder so more then likely you are going to need to do a bit of tweaking in there to get it to work properly - but you get the basic idea. This is the best way I have found to keep some fresh content on a site that is lacking a place for content and sometimes a need for it.