TheVanBlog | Van SEO Design

A Ghoulish Collection of Links | This Month In SEO - 10/08

Steven Bradley — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:49:19 +0000

Boo! Did I scare you? I didn’t think so, but today is Halloween so why not dedicate a month’s worth of links to the eve of all hallows. Nothing below should scare you. You may agree with what’s on the other side of the links or you may disagree, but there’s no reason to fear clicking any of them.

Plenty to get to and more at my Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn profiles.

Now on with the show and if you’re in the U.S. remember to vote on Tuesday.

Social Media

The election here in the U.S. is changing social media. More and more political conversations can be found and more and more mainstream media types are paying attention. Great for us, but that doesn’t help the sites become profitable. Enter Google with open social and some new patents to potentially mine social profiles for better ad targeting. People are paying attention and the money may be coming, but don’t overlook the Achilles heel of different types of social sites.

Micro blogging is still all about Twitter even as sites like Plurk attempt to take the mantle. Twitter is going mainstream and you need to take a look at it. Why? Maybe four months of thoughts from someone who used to think Twitter stupid will convince you.

What? You’re already using Twitter. How about some tools then to make the service more useful. Ok, you’re convinced and have enough tools. So are you conversing or broadcasting? Or are you so advanced in your Twitter skills that you practice mind control?

Digg banned your profile, you say. What kind of karma is that? Are you sure you didn’t do something to deserve it? Maybe you were pushing your commercial site a little too hard. Sorry about the ban, but at least the rest of us can learn something from your troubles. Maybe some who haven’t been banned are feeling a little naughty and looking to boost their profile into that space you just vacated.

Don’t worry about that Digg ban. There’s still StumbleUpon and it’s not too late to learn the most important things to do if you want to have success there. Are three things too much? Then just skip to the most important thing. Self submission isn’t limited to StumbleUpon, but should you do it? It may hurt you if you do. Then again is self submitting really all that bad?

Blogging

If you were starting over as a blogger with a beginner’s mind what advice would you offer your beginning self? Would you offer tips for starting out part time? Would you teach yourself to write better headlines? Could you and your beginner self occupy the same space-time without tearing apart the fabric of the universe?

Do you view your readers as a market or as a community? Think relationships before sales and think community before market. Then look for ways to build your community. It takes a community to build a blog or raise a child or something like that.

Before you begin marketing think strategy. There’s a lot of competition out there and you need to have a plan. With strategy in place you can look to get featured in mass media or drive easy traffic to your blog. Other bloggers will be important to connect with, especially if Microsoft has its way and gives links from blogs a boost.

With strategy and community in place and the New York Times and the blogosphere linking to you, it’s time to make some money advertising. Which ad server will you use? And now that the money is flowing in you can afford a better server. Do you know how to move your blog to its new host?

WordPress

Are you geared up for WordPress 2.7 yet? New look, new features. There’s a lot to like. Even if you’re not geared up for yet another upgrade it’s still a good idea. One reason WP gets a new version is to close holes that have been discovered and to make it more secure. No matter what version you use or will use you’ll probably want to optimize WordPress as best you can.

Ready to build your site completely with WordPress? It can be used as a full CMS you know. You’ll want to design and develop your own theme and consider some of the trends the popular blogs are using. Enhance your design with jQuery, tweak your navigation a bit and you’ll be all set.

Categories or tags, pages or posts. Which should you use? Whatever you decide you may want to show off how many subscribers you have. You can do it without needing FeedBurner’s help. Did you know there are many different ways to display content in WordPress? You can even change what gets displayed under different conditions using context includes. And if you prefer not to do your own coding you can create custom content types with the Flutter plugin.

Design And Development

Dreams can come true again, When everything old is new again. Could be what explains the retro and vintage look in modern design. More likely it’s the reaction against the web 2.0 style. Colorful is still in and can be a good source of inspiration. Art is another great source of inspiration for design. Have a look at some stunning images.

Web design matters. People will start making decisions about you the moment they come in contact with your site or worse in the agonizing moments they wait for your site to load. Logos matter too. They can communicate a lot and speak for your brand. If your site isn’t cutting it or your logo is saying the wrong words it’s time to think about a redesign. Just remember to include the key elements all top sites should have.

At some point your design will likely take a trip through Photoshop. Will your toolbox be ready? Does your toolbox include a color mixer for choosing a color scheme? Have you given any thought to how comments on your blog will look? Do you know how they can look? And there’s no doubt images will play some kind of role in your design. Where will you get those images from?

Sooner or later your design is going to ask to be turned into an actual site. Do you really need to use CSS? Can’t you stick with that table-based layout? Sure you can, well, sort of. It’s actually still CSS. And since you’re using CSS how well do you really understand positioning. Do you know your absolutes from your relatives from your fixed? Even if you know, how well do the browsers know. Time to get out those cross browser fixes and tools for testing.

You should be able to get your CSS to display cross browser, but sometimes a little JavaScript is needed to fix those browser headaches. JavaScript can do much more when folded into Ajax. You can add effects like search suggest or full featured shopping carts. And you can’t beat 20 earth-shattering tutorials from one of the best sources for tutorials. Ok, they may not litterally shatter the earth, but they are worth reading.

Link Building

Before you can move on to advanced concepts of link building you need a firm grasp of the fundamentals. With a basic understanding in place you can then develop an overall strategy. Directories might become one tactic in your arsenal and if so you’ll want to know how to identify the good from the bad. And perhaps most importantly you want to understand how to measure the value you’re getting so you can readjust both strategy and tactics.

Follow, nofollow, dofollow, don’t follow, let’s call the whole thing off. Are there benefits to PageRank Sculpting? Is PR Sculpting worth the effort? The answer might depend on whether your site is a Ferrari or a Gremlin. Since a followed link is preferable to one that isn’t followed should you turn your blog into a dofollow blog? Will it increase the quantity of comments on your blog at the expense of quality? No matter which side you lean on the nofollow/dofollow fence, one thing is certain. Internal linking does matter.

Link algorithms change. Today’s best tactics may be useless tomorrow. What works today could hurt tomorrow. Will the link you turn on today return the favor? Will it still return that favor next month?

Do you ask for links in emails? Should you? Is there really anything wrong with the practice or is it simply the implementation that’s awry? When you have control over the anchor text in a link how many words and characters do you use? Might be more important to know the answer than you realize? Maybe you’re tired of all these link building specifics and prefer to let links into your site grow naturally.

SEO

You have 5 goals when optimizing any page on your site. Do you know what they are? If you don’t you could always try a little Q&A with Google directly. Maybe it will help clear things up. Of course Google can’t be entirely up front about everything so myths will often prevail. They may not always be right, but that’s no reason not to learn from your fellow SEOs.

You can never have too much knowledge of keywords. Most any guide that comes your way is probably worth a look, though some guides are more comprehensive than others. Keyword Discovery is not enough. You’ll still need to measure the effectiveness of your keywords and go beyond the research to apply what you’ve learned. You can leverage keywords through older posts and then start the research anew by mining the conversation on social media sites.

How do you know when your SEO is done? Well it’s never done. You need to keep measuring where you are to adjust for where you want to go. You can use a checklist to make sure you’ve covered your bases, use advanced search operators to explore the current situation, and even spy a bit on your competitors without getting into trouble.

Not everyone has the same love of SEO tools of course. Fortunately the community is happy to share it’s opinion. And while tools can tell you where things are now and have been in the past, patents can give you some ideas about where things might be going.

So what should you measure with all the tools you’ve collected? Is PageRank the ultimate measure of online influence or is it a horrible measure of that influence. The reality is probably somewhere in between.

Business And Marketing

What’s step one in starting a business? A sound business plan, of course. It should be obvious, but sadly too many businesses neglect this necessary first step and fail. It’s not the only reason some businesses fail, though. There are at least 5 reasons your affiliate marketing business might not succeed.

Some do succeed so how about some inspirational stories about how they did. And while it may sound counter intuitive sometimes the way to end up with more is to give everything away.

Hand in hand with a solid business plan is market research. Where do you go to learn more about an industry. You might stop off at the magazine stand as part of your research or you might find the top sites in the industry to learn about the market.

There’s a psychology to selling. People make decisions emotionally, sometimes out of a fear of losing something they have. You want to persuade people instead of forcing them to see your point of view. Make them realize the truth on their own instead of telling it to them directly. Stories can be powerful persuaders and if you do everything right you’ll be consistently driving people toward closing the sale.

It’s getting closer to the witching hour. Day has turned to dusk and the night is beginning to fall, bringing with it ghosts and ghouls, witches and goblins. And maybe a few late night trick or treaters. Break out the big kitchen knife and carve up a pumpkin or slice into a piece of pumpkin pie.

Enjoy the weekend and happy reading.

Post from: TheVanBlog | Van SEO Design

20 Quick Tips For Squidoo Newbies

Jerry Low — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:48:55 +0000

The following guest post was written by Jerry Low of Web Hosting Secret Revealed.

I bet you had already heard about Squidoo.

No? Well, in this case you are losing lots of good publicity opportunities for your blog, website, or business.

What’s Squidoo?

Squidoo is a web 2.0 platform designed to make it easy for web users to create web pages online. Imagine it as a platform for one-page-blog, where the owners get to share ideas and sell products online.

At the time of writing, Squidoo is one of the top 500 websites in Alexa ranking.

For years, marketers have been leveraging the power of Squidoo. Squidoo lenses (webpages) are used to attract website traffics, building one way links, as well as developing personal authority in certain niche.

Getting Success With Squidoo

If you are totally new to this, the best way to get started is to create your own lens. It is ultra easy to start making a Squidoo lens but before you begin, here are the best 20 tips for beginners.

Not keen in writing? No fear, fully utilize Squidoo built-in modules to minimize the writing task.
Good keyword research work is a must before creating a Squidoo Lens.
Good keyword research work is a must after creating a Squidoo lens, use the stats feature to check which keywords are referring you the most traffics.
Long tail keyword helps, include them in your lens tags.
Squidoo lenses rank well in Google, always keep SEO in mind while writing – use keyword in your lens URL, bold your keyword, include keywords in your title, make your lens description keyword rich… etc.
Squidoo disallow drug reviews and sales, so forget about writing your 101 tips on cheap Viagra shopping.
Implement Squidoo tags – use up all the 40 tags progressively.
Join Squidoo Groups that are related to your topics.
Be active in the Squidoo community – the more your profile get exposed the better your lens ranks in Squidoo.
Be friendly – there are tons of Internet marketers hanging around Squidoo and unlimited ways to partner up with the big dogs.
Set ‘Contact’ on in your profile so other Internet marketers can get in touch with you.
Submit your lens to social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon.
Squidoo marketing can be a quantity game, break your subject into smaller part and create more lenses on various sub topics.
Leaving meaningful comments on other lenses helps, try start with the Lens of the Day.
Keep your lens fresh, it ranks better in Squidoo.
Use “Poll” and “Plexo” to increate your lens interactivity.
Use “The Most Important Thing” and “Talk Bubble” modules to promote your primary ideas or products.
Squidoo lens gain Google PR fast, thus remember to link back to your related website or blog via keyword-riched anchor text.
The “Black Box” module is best to highlight your free email courses or ebooks, use that to capture more leads.
Use “RSS Feeds” module to promote your blog in your Squidoo lens.

Wrapping Things Up: The Best Of Squidoo…

The best of Squidoo is that it is totally free. By signing up with Squidoo, you get the power to create unlimited lenses online with no cost at all. More over, you can even earn money via Squidoo profit sharing.

With nothing to lose on the table, I don’t see a reason why you are still hesitating with Squidoo. Go start a lens today!

Bio: Jerry Low is the owner and operator of Web Hosting Secret Revealed. He offers unbiased reviews of web hosts to help make your decision easier.

Post from: TheVanBlog | Van SEO Design

Who’s Up For Guest Posting?

Steven Bradley — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:01:01 +0000

You may have noticed it’s been a little quiet around here lately. TheVanBlog has become something of ghost town (or maybe it’s a ghost blog) in recent weeks. Other things have kept me from writing, which I’ll get to momentarily, but first I’ll put the offer out for guest posts. If you’re interested in writing a post here send me an email.

photo credit: lemonjenny

If you need a reminder about how guest blogging can benefit your blog you can revisit these posts.

You can also check out how guest blogging here and other places helped James grow his blog a few months back.

The guest blogging bonanza: My motivations (Part 1)

And if you decide to write a guest post here or elsewhere you can learn how to increase the return on your investment.

How To Improve The ROI Of Your Guest Posts

Computer Problems And A New Laptop

It’s somewhat lame to tell you the reason I haven’t been blogging regularly the last month or so is that I’ve been busy, but I’m going to tell you anyway. I’ll offer some more detail in the hopes of making the excuse a little less lame.

A month ago today, just after hitting the button to publish this post about how to highlight the current page in wordPress, my laptop decided it was a good time to shut down permanently. If you remember about a year ago the same thing happened to the same laptop.

photo credit: Brymo

This time it was the motherboard that failed and unlike last year the warranty had expired. Oddly I didn’t panic. The laptop that died was close to four years old and I had been wanting a new one anyway. Seemed like a good time.

I decided it was time for a change and bought a MacbookPro. I had been thinking of making the switch last year and despite a few reservations was convinced it was the right move in part by this post from Dan Thies. Dan, if you find your way here, thanks.

I won’t go into all the details of switching to a Mac in this post. (if you’re interested in my switch to a Mac, leave me a comment and maybe I’ll write about my experience in a future post). I will say I’m happy I switched and that changing to a new OS did keep me from being productive for a few days. That’s when the busyness started.

Work, Work And More Work

At the time work was moving at a nice pace. I had a couple of projects that were ahead of schedule without pressing deadlines. A week without work later and with deadlines moved up I wasn’t all that far ahead of schedule as I had been.

As luck would have it many of my clients started calling around the same time with new requests. Not that I’m complaining. I’m happy when clients have more work for me. Still it contributed to a lack of time for blogging.

Since then new clients have arrived and existing clients have sent even more work. It seems like every day someone else is calling. Good stuff for me, not so good for keeping up with this blog.

Personal Demands On My Time

One last thing has added to the time crunch. I have something going on in my personal life that’s demanding a lot of my time. I’ll hold off on mentioning what it is at the moment, but it’s all good. Just something that requires a lot more of my time than I realized. I’ll fill you in on the details in a few weeks.

None of the above is meant to offer a excuses and I know being busy sounds a bit lame for why I haven’t been writing much. I mostly wanted to let everyone know I was still here and fill you in a little on what’s been going on.

Along with a lack of blogging, I haven’t been as active at most of the social media sites where I participate and have even been lagging some in replying to email. Thought I’d let people know I haven’t entirely fallen off the face of the earth.

So once again I’ll ask if anyone would like to write a guest post or two. While I do hope to find more time for writing in the weeks ahead I suspect my posting will still be on the light side for another month at which point we enter the holiday season. If you’re interested in writing here send me an email. Thanks.

Post from: TheVanBlog | Van SEO Design

Have You Ever Known Poverty?

Steven Bradley — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:53:37 +0000

The closest I’ve ever come to poverty was when I first moved to Colorado. I left New York with very little and arrived in a new city without a job, without a place to live, and without a friend in site.

It didn’t take too long to find all three, but still I went without more than with for close to a year. I lost more than 30 pounds during the winter because I couldn’t afford to eat as often as I should have. I picked up change off the ground one month in order to feed myself for the weekend. Some days the only reason I was able to eat at all was thanks to the charity of others.

Often I woke up not knowing where my next meal would come from and yet I have never known poverty.

From the Global Issues website

For the 1.9 billion children from the developing world, there are:

640 million without adequate shelter (1 in 3)

400 million with no access to safe water (1 in 5)

I may have scraped up some change, but I had shelter. I may not not have had as much to eat as I would have liked, but I had plenty of access to safe water. I might not have known where my next meal was coming from, but I had a feeling it would come. I have never known poverty.

For the last couple of months I’ve thought about what I would write about poverty for Blog Action Day, but most everything I could think of seemed somewhat hollow. How could I possibly begin to understand poverty having lived my entire life in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet? Intellectually, sure, but can I really understand.

For the last few weeks I’ve watched the U.S. government talk about $700 billion dollars. That’s a staggering amount of money. Last week the stock market in the U.S. lost $2.4 trillian and then gained back about a trillion of those losses at the start of this week. Again, staggering amounts of money. People in this country are losing thousands and even millions in retirement savings and investment portfolios, and yet none are experiencing poverty.

Consider the following two tables, which I’ve borrowed from the Global Issues website

Spending in 1998

Global Priority	$U.S. Billions
Cosmetics in the United States	8
Ice cream in Europe	11
Perfumes in Europe and the United States	12
Pet foods in Europe and the United States	17
Business entertainment in Japan	35
Cigarettes in Europe	50
Alcoholic drinks in Europe	105
Narcotics drugs in the world	400
Military spending in the world	780

Estimated additional costs to achieve universal access to basic social services in all developing countries:

Global Priority	$U.S. Billions
Basic education for all	6
Water and sanitation for all	9
Reproductive health for all women	12
Basic health and nutrition	13

That’s $40 billion to achieve universal access to basic social services. That’s 5% of the world’s military spending in 1998, 10% of what the world spends to feed drug habits. The numbers are sobering. Seems pretty clear the world has some priorities out of whack.

You and I probably aren’t going to get the people around the world to change overnight. I don’t expect Europeans to suddenly quit smoking or for people around the world to stop feeding their pets. We’re going to continue to drink alcohol and eat ice cream and apply cosmetics. But it’s hard to justify an extra drink on Friday night when the price of that drink is more than what many people around the world live on every day.

Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day

I don’t know poverty and odds are neither do you. You’re reading this post on a computer, which you likely paid for, over an internet connection that you might pay for each month. Maybe you’re reading at work, which means you have a job, or over a free wireless connection while you sip a latte.

I’d like to tell you I know how to solve the world’s economic problems and end poverty instantly. I don’t. I know there’s more to it than to simply stop spending in one place to give to another. But I do know if we’re going to solve the problem of poverty around the globe the first thing we need is an adjustment in priorities.

Those of us living in industrialized countries waste more on any given day than nearly half the world has for basic necessities in a given week or month. There’s something fundamentally wrong with that dynamic.

Post from: TheVanBlog | Van SEO Design

A Playoff Worthy Lineup Of Links - This Month In SEO - 9/08

Steven Bradley — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:16:59 +0000

This Month In SEO almost wasn’t as my laptop decided last week was a good time to call it a day for good. Fortunately the laptop’s hard drive didn’t agree. Should we dedicate the post to Steven Jobs and my new Macbook? Maybe fall would make for a good dedication as the season’s recently changed.

Even better would be the Fall Classic. Baseball playoffs started a few hours ago. There’s only one October and a seamhead like me has to dedicate most anything this time of year to the greatest game every invented.

You know the drill by now. Lots of links below and even more at my Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn profiles. And once more I’ll throw a little love to my new Small Business Forum. I hope you’ll join the conversation there.

Now on with the show.

Social Media

Why get involved with social media? Because organizations and individuals who build a community around their brand win. The secret weapon in that win? Perhaps combining social media with a little empathy. So if social media is such a good thing, what’s the value of a social media visitor? Is the goal to bait people into linking to you and spreading your message? Is the value ultimately in how social media affects search? Maybe what we need is some quality metrics.

Many will tell you the goal of social media is branding and when it comes to branding you can’t beat microblogging through a service like Twitter. Not all is sunshine in Twitterland though as the company recently bowed to Google pressure and nofollowed bio links. Some would argue that Twitter was never about link building in the first place, but still…

Then again is microblogging really all that hard? It’s simple isn’t it. It’s just a dialogue after all.

Social media is more than microblogging. It’s actually two crazy monkeys and one clever fox. The monkeys are Digg and Reddit and if you want to influence social media you might want to first learn what drives Digg and Reddit users. And if you want to know what drives a top Digg user why not ask. Brian did. And Diggboss answered. The fox? It’s not Sphinn. Sphinners are a dysfuctional lot. The fox is StumbleUpon

Blogging

It might not be as important as the state of the union, but the state of the blogosphere seems to indicate it’s still growing and the lines between blogs and mainstream media are blurring. Blogs have attracted somewhere between 77 million and 184 million unique visits, depending on who’s numbers you believe. Either way it’s a lot and you probably want a piece of that pie.

It all starts with blogging ideas and here are 50 ideas you can adapt to your blog. What to do with those ideas? Follow these 7 steps and you can turn them into more coherent posts to attract some of those millions of visitors.

You have your ideas and know how to construct a blog post, but what makes for good content? Sometimes it’s not what you say, but how you say it. Be opinionated. Be emotional. You can even take a cue from politicians and launch a negative campaign on occasion. Just don’t be spineless.

No matter how well written, your post you can always add a few new dimensions to improve things. Your post design matters and could help lead to new visitors subscribing. Where should your calls to action be? Might they convert better at the bottom of your post? If you want someone to subscribe after reading it only makes sense that’s where the subscription form should be. Done right you could end up with one very effective blog theme.

With everything in place to convert visitors to loyal readers, now it’s time to promote your next post. Don’t stop at a single post, though. Mine the long tail to develop an overall seo strategy for your blog. With a little work you might be able to take your blog to the next level. But keep in mind through it all who you’re trying to attract. Is it eyeballs or brains you’re after?

WordPress

WordPress 2.7 is on the way and it aims to be another big release with some pretty major changes. The future of WordPress is looking good. Or is it? Not everyone thinks all is rosy in WP land. With all the love thrown in WordPress’ direction a little critique can be a good thing. Still it’s unlikely WP is going anywhere so make sure to keep building your WordPress developer toolbox.

Your toolbox could start with knowledge from more than 25 beginner articles. You could then include some advanced rss parsing so readers can subscribe to only those posts they’re really interested in. Toss in a little Ajax for a better auto completing search form. And did you know there are a variety of ways to display content in WordPress, giving you more control of what readers see on different sections of your blog?

With your toolbox full it’s time to start designing your WordPress theme. You can build one from scratch or use another theme as a framework and build on top of it. Magazine style themes are popular. Regardless of the style make sure to understand how WP handles and displays categories. There’s a lot you can do with categories. More than you might initially think.

If you work with themes you’ve likely spent some time customizing WP files. Stop. Instead of customizing the existing files, write a plugin instead. It’s easier than you think. Speaking of customization and plugins, have a look at the new Customize Your Community (CYC) plugin and give your readers their own profile page. Have you installed the AllinOne SEO plugin? Sure you have, but are you taking advantage of its full potntial?

Design And Development

Looking for design inspiration? Want to create outside the box? Would 40 layouts give you some inspiration? Maybe your design needs a little energy to make it irresistible. Maybe a deeper look at the color brown is all you need for inspiration. Working on a logo? Want to know the process one graphic designer uses to create them? Inspiration is all well and good, but remember others are being inspired by some of the same designs. It can lead to some techniques being overused.

Design aesthetics are important as long as you remember your design is meant to communicate. Are you aware of all the issues involved in website communication? Did you know that contrasting elements aids in that communication and enhances the meaning of design elements? One thing your design should aim for is to communicate a strong brand. What colors should you use to convey your message?

How well do you know JavaScript? If your JS skills are still a bit lacking you might find these 75 techniques really useful. Only 75? Ok, how about 10 more techniques to make your JavaScript smarter. Among the tips you’ll find is to adopt one or more JavaScript libraries to speed up development. jQuery is becoming one of the more popular libraries around and it’s about time you took a look.

Is a website ever truly done? All sites can be made more effective, but to do so requires some analysis of how it’s currently performing. You might think alternating table rows with color makes it easier for readers to absorb the information, but it it true? Does zebra striping tables aid or hinder communication. And why make people come to your site when you can send your site to them. HTML emails can be a great way to interact with your audience and remind them you still exist.

Link Building

The total amount of link juice in an isolated system remains constant. Oh way that’s the first law of thermodynamics about the conservation of energy.

Still link juice is a finite resource. It creates a gravity around a site the pulls search traffic to it. Build more links into a massive site and the gravity increases. What happens when those massive sites stop linking out. Much as light doesn’t escape a black hole, links don’t escape black hole seo. Then again a site that does nothing but link out can bring people back every day.

Once upon a time link building was synonymous with directories. Few would argue that’s the case today, but that doesn’t mean directories can’t be a valuable part of a link building campaign. They still have power so how can you get the most from web directories? All directories are not created equal. Before you start submitting your site know the red flags to watch out for.

Once upon that same time reciprocal linking was an effective way to build links. The future though, is in building relationships that lead to links. One way to build a relationship with a blogger is through their blog. Leaving comments that add value to a post is a great way to get to know someone. Don’t stop with bloggers. Start looking to build relationships with the general media. It’s not what you know, but who you know after all.

It’s still a bit confusing I know. Let some experts demystify it for you. You’re right, experts can sometimes talk over your head without realizing it. Why not let an SEO kindergartner explain things instead. You could always grab a guide to one-way link building or watch a video on developing hooks to get others to link to you.

No matter how you build links, please don’t be an idiot about it.

Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker

SEO

What are the top search marketing tools? Are they Firefox extensions? Do they analyze backlinks? Will they help you with more than PR and SERP analysis? Sometimes the best tool is your own brain. Amazing what real people can figure out when they put their mind to it.

Me no unnerstand URL rewriting. Google say no worry. They good at unnerstanding and figuring out. Ummm…no offense Google, but I’ll continue to rewrite my dynamic URLs and make them search friendly and people friendly. Most of the industry agrees with me too. Maybe next time you could just tell us how to redirect things the right way.

And penalty of not I’m still on the side that thinks duplicate content is a big issue and can hurt a site. Google, I know you’re trying to help, but sometimes that help confuses the situation more.

Should you be concerned with measuring search rank? There’s a loaded question. Instead of arguing it based on opinion, how about testing to see whether or not a given rank is worth holding onto. You can learn a lot from some time tested advertising strategies. You could also turn your attention to images and worry about how to get them to rank.

Once you get past the idea that your rank is the end goal you’ll be ready to write effective SEO articles. Sure they can improve rank if done well, but they can do so much more. And no, seo copy writing is not all about stuffing keywords. It’s not natural. Think about using phrases related to your topic instead. Everyone else is using that phrase, shouldn’t you include it too?

It’s tiring being an SEO isn’t it? So much to learn and as soon as you think you have a handle on the rules, the rules change. Might be time for a break from SEO. Go enjoy a bowl of fruit instead.

Business And Marketing

Need a lesson on affiliate marketing? One lesson you may be interested in is on the mechanics of arbitrage. You know to buy low and sell high, but how do you measure each side of the equation to understand if you’re going to make money.

Of course if your arbitrage is buying AdWords to sell AdSense you may not make Google so happy. A large audience can certainly help with marketing your affiliate products, but stop complaining that you don’t have that audience. Just grow a pair, will you.

Many offline wholesalers and retailers are moving their business online to expand their market. If your business is selling products through a website shouldn’t you spend some time analyzing the online retailers with the highest conversion rates. Are you still using manufacturer product descriptions? Why not take a look at how customers review those same products on your competitor’s sites. In the end you just need to be a better choice than your competition.

Mini or micro sites have lost some of their luster as the Google algorithm seems to favor large authority sites, but can you create a bunch of mini sites that funnel search traffic to your main site? WordPress makes setting up a mini-site easy and with some decent content you can make a few bucks from each. A network of micro-sites could even help build links and build brand awareness.

There’s a lot to know when it comes to building and marketing your website. Would a checklist help? How about the best damned checklist ever? How about 6 tips for making your message sticky? Did you know that listening to your market is one of the surest ways to success. It could help you craft a message and build your brand without having to spend a lot. And once your basic message is in place you can put some money into AdWords to extend your brand’s reach.

Search Engine News

What does search mean to you? To search engines, search means advertising. Google is expanding where they place ads. Look for some on NBC in the near future.

If the deal goes through they’ll be displaying ads on rival Yahoo. Does Yahoo need the extra ads, because more advertisers use Google or because Yahoo’s targeting is so poor? No question Google is the 800 lb gorilla in search, but is the company really a primate or would bees in a hive be a better analogy.

Oh yeah, did you hear Google released a browser? You downloaded it and used it and formed an opinion of it already. But just in case you wanted to read or reread the initial thoughts or compare it to IE8…

My first TMISEO on a new laptop. Seemed to go ok, even if I’m getting it to you a day later than usual. This was the post that almost wasn’t. Fortunately the old hard drive was in tact and a few weeks of collected links were able to be easily transferred.

It’s autumn I know, but summer’s still hanging on here in Boulder, at least on this Wednesday. Works for me since it should mean nice weather for softball in a couple hours. Enjoy your mid week wherever you are and know you’re closer to the coming weekend than the one that recently passed. Happy reading.

Post from: TheVanBlog | Van SEO Design

How To Hightlight The Current Page In WordPress

Steven Bradley — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:12:32 +0000

One of the more common questions people ask about WordPress is how to highlight the current page in the main navigation. It’s a nice effect that aids usability by giving your visitors a cue as to where they are within your site. It’s also surprisingly easy to achieve.

Highlight Your WordPress Page Links

Many themes are designed with a simple html and css navigation bar that displays your home page and a list of your WordPress pages. It might look something like the following:

In the above navigation bar each of the links would be a WordPress page with the exception of Home, which would be a link back to your blog’s home page. You can see how About Us is styled differently to indicate it’s the page your visitor is currently viewing. The code WordPress uses to display the html for the above is:




 echo get_option(‘home’); ?>“>Home

 (‘title_li=’); ?>

The code above is taken directly from the WordPress default theme, but it’s very typical of free and premium themes as well. The code in the list-item provides a link to your blog’s home page and the following line of code uses a WordPress template tag to run through all your WordPress pages and wrap them in html list-item and link code.

The html that us ultimately produced will look like the following code block. Note that I’ve replaced the actual URL each link would point to with a # for simplicity.


"#">Home
"current_page_item">"#">About Us
"#">Services
"#">Products
"#">Contact

The key to the above code is the class=”current_page_item” which WordPress automatically adds through the wp_list_pages template tag. When your viewing the About Us page the class will be applied to the list-item containing a link to the About Us page. When you’re viewing the Contact page the class will be applied to the list-item for the Contact link.

Given this class will only appear on the currently viewed page all you need to do highlight the page is give the current_page_item class a look that makes it stand out. How you highlight the current page link is up to you and will depend on the style of your theme, but a simple way to highlight the link is to give it a different background-color and a different color for the text itself.

Highlighting Your Main Blog Page

Everything above works great for highlighting the link in your navigation when you’re viewing a page, but what about when you’re on your blog’s home page? The home page link wasn’t being produced with the wp_list_pages tag and won’t automatically have our class applied. We need to find a way to have the class added when you’re viewing the home page.

Fortunately WordPress makes this easy through the use of conditional tags. Combined with a little bit of php we can apply the class just as above. The conditional tag used to check if the current page is your main blog page is called is_home() and the code you would use to add the current_page_item class can be seen below.




 if ( is_home() ) { echo ‘ class=”current_page_item”‘; } ?>>echo get_option(‘home’); ?>“>Home
 (‘depth=1&title_li’); ?>

The code we’re concerned with is:



if ( is_home() ) { echo ‘ class=”current_page_item”‘; } ?>

All the code above is doing is checking to see if we’re viewing the main page of the blog and if so add the current_page_item class to the list-item. The css in place for the pages will do the rest. Pretty simple.

Highlight Blog Posts And Other Blog Pages

Of course your blog has more pages than just the main page. You have post pages, search pages, and archive pages. Your main navigation likely won’t include all these pages, and the code we’ve been using here doesn’t so we’ll highlight the home page whenever we’re viewing one of these other pages.

All we need to do is add a few more conditional_tags to our Home link




 if ( is_home() || is_single() || is_search() || is_archive() ) { echo ‘ class=”current_page_item”‘; } ?>>echo get_option(‘home’); ?>“>Home
 (‘depth=1&title_li’); ?>

is_single tests to see if we’re on a single post page, and is_search and is_archive test to see if we’re viewing any of the search or archive pages as you’d expect. The double pipe || is php to say or. So the statement is testing if we’re on the main blog page or a single post page or a search page or an archive page and if we’re viewing any of those pages add the current_page_item class. Our css will handle the highlighting as it has above.

Nothing too hard right?

What If Your Navigation Isn’t Using The WordPress wp_list_pages Tag?

Occasionally you’ll come across a theme that doesn’t use wp_list_pages to create the main navigation. Maybe your blog uses a lot of WordPress pages, but you only wanted a few to show in the navigation. Your developer may have decided to hard code the html instead of using the WordPress tag.

One more time WordPress to the rescue. Even if your theme doesn’t take advantage of wp_list_pages to automatically add the class you can add it in same manner we added it to the main blog page, that is with a conditional tag. This time we’ll use is_page() and specify exactly which page we want to test for.

You can test for a specific page if you know it’s WordPress id. Say your About Us page us id 9. You’d write the conditional as:



is_page(’9′)

What’s that? You don’t know the idea of your page? That’s ok. You can also check for it’s permalink. Your About Us page will likely be called about-us and you could use it in the conditional like the following:



is_page(’about-us’)

Putting it all together your hard coded navigation might look like:




 if ( is_home() || is_single() || is_search() || is_archive() ) { echo ‘ class=”current_page_item”‘; } ?>>echo get_option(‘home’); ?>“>Home
 if ( is_page(‘about-us’) { echo ‘ class=”current_page_item”‘; } ?>>About Us
 if ( is_page(’services’) { echo ‘ class=”current_page_item”‘; } ?>>Services
 if ( is_page(‘products’) { echo ‘ class=”current_page_item”‘; } ?>>Products
 if ( is_page(‘contact’)  { echo ‘ class=”current_page_item”‘; } ?>>Contact

As long as your css is in order and you’ve style .current_page_item in a way to highlight it, you’re blog should be all set to highlight the current page.

Post from: TheVanBlog | Van SEO Design

Why 95% Of SEO Posts Are Wrong…And Right

Steven Bradley — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:40:15 +0000

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords.
—Wikipedia

A few months ago Shoemoney posted to declare that SEO has no future. While the post was most likely nothing more than an attempt at linkbait, the reaction was interesting. Your view of whether Shoe’s post was right or wrong probably had a lot more to do with your definition of SEO than anything Jeremy said in the post.

The post takes a narrow view of SEO and in doing so is generally correct. The SEO Shoe is talking about is going away, but most SEOs would define what they do in much broader terms and when you consider the more liberal definition, SEO isn’t going anywhere.

Shoe’s post is hardly the only one where the argument depends on your definition of SEO, but it’s one of the more recent posts to come to mind.

A couple of weeks ago I asked how do you define SEO? My post was in reaction to criticism Dave received for not including conversions as part of SEO when he talked about the evolution of SEO. I promised to offer some of my own thoughts about what SEO is at the end of my previous post, though before getting to my thoughts what do others think the definition of SEO is?

photo credit: quinn.anya

Who Coined the Phrase Search Engine Optimization?

It shouldn’t be surprising that there isn’t a very clear definition of SEO when you dig into the origins of the phrase, though the question of who coined the phrase has been asked. You might think Danny Sullivan was the first to coin the phrase (I know I did), though Danny himself seems to indicate it was Bruce Clay who first used the word optimization in relation to search engines.

Regardless of who first used the phrase search engine optimization, if you read Danny’s post above, you’ll notice the phrase originated without any formal definition being applied. Despite efforts to promote a better phrase, search engine optimization is the one that stuck.

But does it really describe what an SEO does?

SEO Definitions from the Experts

Shortly after Shoe’s post proclaiming the death of SEO and the resulting criticism about his definition, he asked a number of industry leaders for their definition of SEO. I’ll leave it to you to read through all the definitions and decide which you like best, but I’ll pull a few snippets from their definitions here.

Danny Sullivan

An SEO is someone who understands how people search for information and ensures that they or their clients are visible in the unpaid listings that are provided.

Andy Beal

Making changes to the on-page and off-page relevance of a web page in an effort to increase the volume of quality traffic from the search engines.

Lee Odden

Definitions of SEO will change as search channels and user behaviors change, so it’s a waste of time to try and create a standing definition - in my opinion anyway.

Aaron Wall

As the web has grown and Google has become more sophisticated, the field of SEO has been aggressively merging with traditional marketin

Ted Murphy

SEO is the art of optimizing an online presence in order to maximize relevant search engine traffic.

Todd Malicoat

The irony with SEO is that the acronym is poor marketing created by a new generation of marketers - it should be WSO - Web Site Optimization.

A couple of things stand out to me with the snippets above and the full definitions from Shoe’s posts. SEO as you’d expect is concerned with search engine traffic and as such is often concerned with search engine ranking. Many things though might contribute to what’s considered optimization.

A few things that were mentioned as being part of SEO:

information architecture
keyword selection and placement
link building
social media
crawl-ability
branding
viral marketing
conversions
user experience

The above is far from an exhaustive list. Is it realistic for one firm to be skilled in all the possible items that might be included in helping a page rank? Is it realistic for a lone SEO to be skilled in all?

For fun here’s Google’s Webmaster Help Central page about search engine optimization. Google doesn’t define SEO, nor would you expect them too, but they also list a few services SEOs might offer.

Review of your site content or structure
Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
Content development
Managment online business development campaigns
Keyword research
SEO training
Expertise in specific markets and geographies

When you consider the definitions from the industry and potential services an SEO might offer you can begin to understand why it’s hard to define SEO.

Your average lone SEO would have a hard time becoming an expert in every potential aspect of helping a web site pull search traffic. It wouldn’t be easy for a full service firm either.

One other thing to note is that so many of these potential services aren’t really improving search traffic directly, but rather indirectly.

For example social media doesn’t really affect ranking directly, unless you consider any direct links you might get. The real SEO value is in the connections you make with people who later link to you.

You’ll find even more value in social media not directly related to search traffic, of course. Does that then make social media part of SEO or is it something separate that could indirectly lead to improved SEO? Is social media SEO or is it something different?

You could ask the same question of many different services SEOs offer.

photo credit: micsalac

My View Of SEO

Neil Patel’s definition from Shoemoney’s post most closely aligns with my own view of SEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of understanding search engines and using that knowledge to make a website rank high on search engines.
—Neil Patel

I’d broaden the definition a little:

SEO is the art and science of understanding search engines in order to make more informed decisions about your website and marketing your website.

My definition takes what I consider to be a more holistic approach to SEO and marketing. Ultimately you have a website and you want people to take one or more actions on your site, usually leading to some revenue.

Say I have a site selling widgets. All I really care about is selling more widgets. If more search traffic leads to more widget sales, great. If more sales come as a result of a handful of nofollowed links on some widget sites, that’s great too.

I want to understand as much as possible about search engines because search traffic is potentially quality traffic. But I’m aware that search engines are only one source of traffic and only one aspect of the overall marketing of any site I work on.

photo credit: Pat Hawks

The problem with defining SEO is that the Wikipedia definition at the start of this post is really as good as it gets, yet that definition doesn’t mention all the possible disciplines that might entail. It also
ignores the idea that most SEOs know that search traffic isn’t the only traffic.

Is it possible some kind of SEO standards could help? Most SEOs don’t really need a definition. We do what we do regardless of what you want to call it. But what about the public? Would the reputation of the industry gain a boost if there was an official definition of SEO?

The next time you come across a post about SEO that affects you strongly take a step back and consider how the author is defining SEO. Odds are they’re both right and wrong depending on how you define SEO.

Optimize: (verb) to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible.
—Dictionary.com

Post from: TheVanBlog | Van SEO Design