01.24.07
Posted in the webmaster series, Tutorials
at 2:27 pm
I’m starting a series of posts that teach you how to get started as a webmaster. It is going to be very specific and written so that somebody with no knowledge in this area can get started. The only thing I won’t cover is how a site looks graphically. If you put your site together the way I specify you will be able to get a good designer to come in and make it look nice and you will be able to change designs easily in the future. Read the rest of this entry »
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01.17.07
Posted in blogging, reviews, Tutorials
at 4:51 pm
I have made a lot of changes to my blog lately and I wanted to update some of the things I have done to protect my blog and things I have done to improve it. The most important thing I did was update to wordpress 2.0.7. After what happened to Graywolf I thought it was best to keep on top of wordpress updates. I noticed the other day that somebody came to my site with the term
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01.12.07
Posted in yahoo, Tutorials, Other Search Engines, Google
at 1:50 pm
There has been a lot of talk about the long tail. According to Wikipedia “The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article”. I think shoemoney is the one who made it popular for SEO and SEM. The idea behind the long tail is not new just what we call it. I have talked about it for years.
to me is a phrase typed into a search engine that is 4 or more words. 3 words I consider medium tail. There are some 3 word phrases that are easy to get and some that are very hard. One of the things that goes with long tail is that most of the time you may only get 1 visitor a month or even one visitor from that term ever. I used to run some pretty busy spam sites that were auto generated from lots of keyword research. One of the things I would see in the logs was that over 50% of my traffic over a month period were from phrases that were only typed in once that month.
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06.14.06
Posted in SEO, Tutorials
at 3:03 pm
One of the things I often have to do when I take over a website is convince the owners that their current site is turning people away. There is a nice article about this at inforworld.com called “What users hate most about Web sites” that expresses what I have been trying to say for some time. I wrote about some of this a while back.
When most people get on the web they are looking for information. Most people that come to a companies website are looking how to contact them. If you sell something they are looking for your product and the price. People do not like to read. I used to have a business on ebay and I would put stuff in huge red 28 point letters that gave the shipping information. I constantly got email when people were surprised about the way I did shipping. I read over at www.digg.com a lot and it is very common for people to digg an item or makes a comment on an item just from reading the items title. You need to get them what they want as fast as possible. Don’t get me wrong some people do read every word on your site but they are a very small minority. Put the text furthor down the page. The first seen part of your page or fold as some put it should be clean with few choices.
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05.18.06
Posted in SEO, Tutorials, Other Search Engines, Google
at 9:50 am
Internal linking is very important in SEO. One of the first things you can do is change the link to your front page. Most people put “Home”. You should change that to your keywords like widgets or my service or whatever term you are trying to get on your front page. You could even have a different keyword per page. Another mistake is people put the link to their home page as /index.html. Don’t do this your going to be telling search engines you have 2 front pages. They will see www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.html as 2 pages and they will see them as duplicates. You will not be passing any of your internal link value to the home page. I try to use absolute URL’s. (i.e. http://www.domain.com/page.html) If someone hijacks your site they can only hijack one page this way. Every so often to hack comes out where somebody can hijack your site. It does not happen often but why risk it. Another thing I try to tell people is don’t put a link to your home page on your home page. You are just wasting space.
Next you want to have all your pages pointing to other pages on your site. If you have a small site with 10 pages or less you can just have each page point to each page. If you have more you will need to pick a number of links you want on each page. Then you will need to make sure that each page has that many internal links plus the link from the front page or directory page. So if your number is 6 then each page should have at least 7 internal links. Be sure that the links to each page have the right anchor text for that page.
This will give you the power of keyword rich anchor text to help boost each pages rank. It will also make sure that when you do rank for something you will get a second indented result in the SERPS because you have that keyword on at least 2 pages. It is good to organize the links into groups so that you also get more keyword density on the page that has the links.
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03.11.06
Posted in SEO, Tutorials
at 3:00 pm
I have recently spoken to a few webmasters that say no. I saw one website that was 1.5 MB in size with 66 objects. That is a bit out of the norm. Most often you will see sites that are around 200k which best case will load in 45 seconds. This does not mean they don’t see anything for 45 seconds. Often your text will come up but not your pictures or flash. If you just really need to have a big web page make sure you have useful information in text that comes up quickly. If you design a web page you want people to see the whole thing. If your sites takes 20-60 seconds to load they are not going to wait to see the whole thing. They may just give up and hit the back button and try the next site on the search engine they used. In another article I posted a link to a CNN story that showed 76% of rural users have dial up and 61% of urban/suburban users have dial up. This is a huge group of people to eliminate.
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