Bridging the Designer-User Gap (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
“If you thought it’s easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn’t do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.) “
The point? Never over estimate intelligence!

Study Says Get In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites:
Get into the top 5 or you’re in the wilderness

Public Relations: The Other Important PR In Link Development
Yes for those of you who in the link building business, who have been hiding under a rock… its about PR these days (mixed in with good SEO) and link begging doesn’t work anymore. So this article goes into some basic ideas on PR’ing your link building

The ultimate open source SEO tool
Its good - perhaps not ultimate. I’ve asked my SEO crew to check it out and they didn’t go crazy. However for me the interesting bit is how they leverage the Yahoo API. I wantto initiate a project where we use the API to do help usget related pages ‘from a search engine perspective’

Microsoft Discovers You Are Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon
If you have read ‘6 degrees of separation’ then you will be into the whole social interconnectivity thing on the internet. In essence, the world is a small place and sites like linked in, facebook, bebo and so on demonstrate this well. Its use? probably in hiring well connected online PR guys to dig into their networks to get links !

15 Free Social Media White Papers and Ebooks
Some good stuff here. I just go around in circles on this stuff. I don’t know how to make money out of it.The core issue is the lack of commercial intent with the vast majority of this traffic. I guess the relevant part for me is keeing in touch with the cultural shift this has initiated. Its all a little like cluretrain V2 playing out

12 Reputations Every Company Should Monitor Online
Reputation management is a growing tide on the internet. If you’re in a sector where online matters, then keeping your ear to the internet wire make sense. The problen with reputation management online is that there are very few filters between an idiot with a grudge and a well informed opinion. its easy for the idiot to make noise in the right place and BANG - you have a problem. And I haven’t touched on negative PR using SEO!

Study: 80-Percent Of Searches Are Informational, 10% Are Navigational
What does this mean commercially? well 80% of the time users are building a background picture of you. 10% of the time they want to transact once they are confidant about you. (the other 10% is where they know where they are going i.e. looking for a regularly visited site/brand search)

This is why a strategy I employ for my lovely employers works soooooo well. have a really good informational site, where there is no pressure to ‘CLICK HERE NOW, JOIN NOW, FREE MONEY NOW’ - you read, understand we care about what we do and when you’re ready, join and we will give you some free money. It works beautifully and this article endorses this principle.

Psychographically Targeted Web Advertising - ClickZ
Whats ‘psychographic’? (from wikipedia) psycho graphic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. They are also called IAO variables (for Interests, Attitudes, and Opinions). They can be contrasted with demographic variables (such as age and gender), and behavioral variables (such as usage rate or loyalty).
I’m sure youve heard about demographic targeting? i.e. pick a social group and assume certain behavioral tendencies. its a nice idea for broadcast media, however for online its really difficult to do demographic targeting. hence this behavioral stuff. By building pathways around user behaviours, you are morelikly to get better conversion rates. Its a huge subject which I won’t get into here, but suffice to say this article gives a small insight into it.

Yahoo’s Quality Score Change Effective Next Week
So Yahoo are stepping in line with Google on PPC quality scoring on ads. Nice idea but I always wonder how you define the ‘quality’ in the scoring. I hate this subjectivity.

Your turn: Readers choose their 10 favorite Windows programs | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com
Some old classics like winrar!

11 Tips For Recognizing A Bad SEO Firm | WebProNews
I get asked a lot about microsites…i.e. building them up and getting them to rank. For some reason the idea that they can work persists. So this article just goes through some of the idiocy people actually believe.

Six Explosive Organic & Paid Link Building Tips
I agree - they are good. Written by a pro in the game, these tips are useful. I particularly like the nofollow comment!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
Another day and another interesting post from Rand. some good pointers on what really counts when it comes to anchor text

http://sphinn.com/story/36595
Yup DaveN keeping the internet clean! He picked up on a campaign by Dell I happen to have been following. I kind of figured it there would be tears in the end - an there were !

http://www.247wallst.com/2008/03/the-twenty-five.html
Does blogging pay? it seems so for a few. I hang out with a couple of big’ish bloggers and they are always moaning about how they can monetize their sites. Usually they default to advertising, which is ok, but inherently does not align well with users about 99.4% of the time. (the click through rate on an ad is about 0.06% typically) I’ve been trying to persuade them to look carefully at affiliate marketing, since in thory it pays better ten ads.

Logo Can Make You ‘Think Different’
evil laugh - HA HA HA HA HA
I’ve always felt that subliminal advertising was very powerful and shrouded in misinformation, so its great to see a useful report on the subject. Does it work? yes but not in the way you think.

YouTube Insight: View Your YouTube Video Statistics
More stats to help you feel like you know whats going on.

Link Buying Replaced With Bartering
As this article points out, when you otlaw something and there is a desire to carry on the practice (alcoloh prohibition in the 30’s) all sorts of unforseen things happen. In this case Google’s PR assault on link buying as caused all sorts of interesting activities to emerge, amongst them is impersonating google ad sense ads !
The root of this is that if the liks are placed in the right part of a page (not in header / footer / sidebar) and in ‘context’ then the ‘Algo’ cant see them - so tis down to human judgement, hence this trick with adsense. Personally, I think there are better ways of doing linkbuilding.

18 Or Older To Use Google?
What do gambling porn and horror movies have in common with google? you guessed it - you have to be 18 and over. or in other words to use google, you have to be of an age where you can enter into a legally binding contract!

Hackers and Spammers, How will the industry survive
I have had the pleasure of dealing personally with DaveN and I found him charming and knowledgeable. However i do feel his skills at gaming the engines are becoming less and less effective as the engines get more capable at dealing with spammers. Still he has done well out of it and I hope he continues with his successes in this arena.

The assertion is that 80% of traffic to bingo, casino and poker sites are from blackhat efforts. I guess the 1st quesiton is what do you call black hat? Is that any deviation from the Google webmaster guidelines? If so, then thats a reasonable figure. But all things are relative as you would see if you read this real blackhat hard core approach to getting ranked. This level of activity probably gets about 30% bingo, casino, poker sites ranked for secondary terms.
What are secondary terms? In these areas (casino, poker bingo) there are very few keywords that make money, in other words they have a very short tail. So once you’re outsitde of (forinstance) casino, online casino, casino UK, then you are in the secondary and 3rd level keywords where spammers rule, but where the pickings are not great. The lack of economic incentive means a restriction in spammers efforts.

And since Google treat different verticles differently, it means they will probably hand pick those top sites for casino, poker and bingo. I believe the reason they do this, is to prevent a spam arms war which would go on to contaminate large chunks of the internet.

The reality is that black hat works, but not like it used to. The cleaver money is on building love of a site and being clever at optimising it efficiently. I know, since I’m lucky enough to be responsible for one of the great new affilaite success stories… and no I haven’t spammed, I’ve just helped things along. ;-) 

Link: Affiliates4u article

DigitalPoint Co-op, spammers heaven. Use these links to build the base for your spam network, but don’t get busted by the BOG G Blogstorm

Google releases benchmarking on analytics. Apart from the coolness of being able to match yourself against the industry norm, it also gives you an idea as to how Google are able to effectively segment the internet into specific verticals. (they also do this on their adwords console when you define which type of sites you want to advertise on when advertising banners etc)

When you mix this with the leaked google reviewers document you end up with a sense that they really do have a very solid handle on what sites are good for what subject and wether they are genuinely worthwhile to the user. It all comes back to the idea that content is king and if you make like easier for search engines through sensible optimisation, you will be rewarded.

Make those landing pages faster! If you are running a Google PPC campaign, then remember to keep an eye on your landing pages, since you will be penalised for slooooowww loading, iframe, interstitial riddled pages. Yes the BIG G is more interested than ever in making sure you work to their guidelines, as opposed to letting your profit/loss determine how you should deal with teh traffic you have paid for. Affiliates4U

As a result, I’ve been sending friends various links, so I figured you might like to see some of them too. I expect I’ll doing a fair bit of this link finding on an ongoing basis.

Online reputaiton management : 10 ways to protect yourself online
http://mashable.com/2008/03/11/online-reputation/

Black hat spamming how to
I have copied this to my blog since i don;t know how ling its gogin to remain up for. if you ever wondered how genuine black hat spammers do their thing…. then this is the ‘tell all’ guide to a small piece of the dark arts of spamming. My version

The growing power of google - the moral: absolute power corrupts!

Google will own your banner ad distribution soon

Don’t mess with the BIG G
Interesting article about a company buying old domains and loading the up with spam content and then running adsense (yahoo version) - then getting busted by google because someone from Cambridge Uni worked out that it was a network of 329 spam sites.
Lesson here …. if you build networks of sites, be very careful to really, really hide your tracks

GoCompare gets busted for spamming! Google search for their brand / an interesting article on the case showing the dive in overall traffic to the gocompare site , again its a case of if you excessively pollute the internet - expect BIG G to whack you!

Great beginners chart for learning how to linkbuild (PDF)

This doesnt mean Google human rank the index, it just means that the algo they use is augmented by humans . Occasionally of course a spam site is identified and blown out f the index, but generally G like to let the algo do the vast majority of sorting.

So what do these human reviewers look for ? Well now thanks to a very, very helpful person, the human reviewer document has been outed and I have uploaded a copy for you to read. Its 43 pages of SEO heaven!

Download it here (2mb)

Link building expert Peter van der Graaf dishes out a never-before revealed link building strategy.

“Nobody will ever link to this!”

So how do I score in search engines?

Creating linkable sites and redirecting them

The dilemma

Many industries pose a problem when it comes to getting links. For instance, how do you get links to a porn site? I had this problem with a website about bukkake (What? A Japanese fetish of mass ejaculation on a woman).

When I was asked to get links for the Bukkake website I first got many links from crappy porn directories and traded a few links with other porn sites, but that was all I could get. It provided me with a top 20 position but because budget was limited, I couldn’t rent/buy the amount of links the results above me had.

So how could I get links to a porn site with a limited budget? Good links would require some relevance to bukkake and in an ideal case the anchor text would contain the word bukkake.The solution

The real question was: What would people link to? As I began brainstorming for linkbait it was clear to me that it would be hard to get any links to the Bukkake website. I needed a decent site that had little to do with erotic content.

Should I explain the working of bukkake in a clinical fashion? Should I publish some research explaining a mental illness causing the crave for bukkake? Or should I just take all sexuality out of bukkake?

The last option gave me an idea. Not that many people know the word bukkake (or act as if they don’t). The best related keyword to bukkake is “facial”. I would create a website about “John Bukkake” a professor of “facial dermatology” on the University of Calcutta, India.
Click image to enlarge.

Because this website was more about proving the success of the following technique, I can be very open about what we did. The website is still live, but it has no financial value for the customer anymore. Naturally I’m very discrete about other projects that still use suspicious techniques.

The problem with sharing techniques, is that search engines develop cures for them once they get overused. Once you share them, they lose their value. Hopefully this example won’t be copied exactly, but it should serve as an eye-opener to create your own mutation.

http://www.johnbukkake.com Read on to find out more about the used techniques.

The details

Creating the website

To make the site look more authentic we copied the look and feel of the original University of Calcutta. We took a picture of a serious looking Indian man and made him our professor. To add some extra credibility we added research and more linkable content like the Bukkake fund for research in facial dermatology.

A couple of jokes were added, like the buildup of semen that would work good as a treatment against eczema.

Getting links

After we created a non-commercial, non-erotic website it was fairly easy to get links in all kinds of directories. The anchor texts all contained the words “bukkake” and “facial”. But could we get even better links?

This joke worked better than planned so we wanted to try even harder links. We created some fake Bukkake research that confirmed that the chemical compounds in Bayer eczema treatment worked under certain circumstances. The result was astounding, we got a couple of great links from Bayer that also included the search terms we were focusing on.

Getting links from Wikipedia wasn’t that hard either, but eventually somebody that knew the word bukkake removed it. And yes, there are still link types in Wikipedia they forgot to nofollow.

The Bukkake Fund pages got many links by trading them with other medical funds. The link pages were eventually removed from johnbukkake.com because it also showed where we got links from.

As you can imagine we got many links from many different places and if we wanted to, johnbukkake.com would rank number one on “bukkak””.

Diverting links

We needed the links for a porn site, so how did we get the links there? We cloaked a 301-redirect!

First we created a rewritemap text file that contained the IP addresses of all search engine bots. In this case http://www.fantomaster.com/ provided us with a nice up-to-date list we imported on a daily basis. Then we used rewrite rules to redirect search engines the correct way. Only the Yahoo and Google search bots received a 301-redirect instead of the normal professor website.

Normally cloaking can be detected by humans when they look at for instance the Google cache. Because of the 301, Google didn’t index the site and didn’t show any cache. This could arouse suspicion, so we added an obvious noindex, nofollow to each page, so not being indexed had an obvious cause.

They could also use Google translate to see something like Googlebot sees it. But Google translate uses its own IP ranges and we excluded those from the redirect.
Detecting the cloak should be very difficult, but please mail me if you know other ways?

Other advantages

In stead of cloaking you can also add the 301 for all visitors after you’ve gotten the links. After I stopped my involvement in the website, that is just what the owner did. He removed the cloak and placed the 301 for everybody to see/follow. It caused the removal of many links, because people found out. He has recontinued the cloak, so it should work again. So this proves that a cloaked 301 is more efficient in the long run.

We also stole/borrowed some content and research about facial dermatology. Normally a Google query would reveal our fraud to the original author. But because johnbukkake.com isn’t indexed it will never show up.

The porn site has a PageRank of 5, but when you do a Yahoo linkdomain: it shows only a few crappy links. 301-redirects never show in any reports, so it made the ranking of the porn site even more mysterious.Conclusion

When nobody will link to you, what will they link to?

Create a separate website with much more linkable content. Non-commercial messages work best.

Requesting links still works

You could hope for people to find your site, but it is better to create linkable content specifically for a linker. Then you mail them to get their attention.

301redirects divert all linkpoints

A cloaked 301 however diverts all linkpoints without showing to normal visitors.

Tricks are fun until they get overused

This is a trick and nothing more. When it is detected a cure can be devised and it stops working for everybody. Learn what you can but don’t copy it blindly.

Peter van der Graaf
http://www.vdgraaf.info

the post http://www.seobook.com/bloggers

and a great video from one of the authors of boingboing.net about how to write a discriptive seo friendly blog headline.

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

it scans a given page and uses its algo to work out wether the links on that page are going to spammy sites.

On the fly tool (add in a URL and go) HERE

Download old verisons of internet explorer HERE ( I found this link on About.com and downlaoded the software, so its safe)

And make sure you go HERE for instructions on how to run both internet explorer ie6 & ie7 together

Speed reading - tips and tutorials on speed reading HERE

For my own part I can get through a 350 page book in about 1 hour. I find the trick is to just let it subconsciously ’soak in’ and as by magic I know what the book was about and I can recycle the ‘learnings’ from it

My OPML file for your RSS reader | My RSS list:

I have always thought search engines were fairly bad at understanding what is good or bad content - it goes back to an idea in zen and the art of motocycle maintanance about quality. I.e. you can’t define quality. Certainly from a search engine algorithm perspective, how do you judge the ‘qualty’ of a particular site or the content in it?

Obviously you can assume more links into a site is more, but then spammers can do a site with 100′000 links in an afternoon - so within reason that idea doesn’t hold water.

So how about having humans do the quality control for the engines ? i.e. if a link comes from an authority blog, then maybe it does have currency, after all it has been quality checked.

And this is where i go to blogging and seo. Blogs ‘wash ‘ and ‘filter links, engines pick up on this distinctive footprint and if you have plenty of blog references and youre seo’d properly, then you will rank.

I really believe engines need bloggers for quality control.

Of course there is the question about why blogs don’t do as well as they should on seo. My take, is that by their architecture, they are just not built right for search engines.

As you know, engines dont like content churn, it means they can’t grab on to anything. Also they like a pyramid internal links structure, which helps them work out which pages are the most important within a site. Blogs dont do this structure at all well…

so you have to do a lot of hacking and manipulation to get a reasonable spread of phrases up there.

So if you sort out your site SE, get involved in the conversation, then in time you will rank.

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html

and here is an article from an online pr site which explains why these are useful for understand keyword competition.

Anyway, the thing he did’nt make TOTALLY CLEAR is the importance of installing Xampp on C:\xampp

For some reason if you put Xampp in C:/Program Files/xampp  - Movable type will just not work… it something to do with the .cgi files not being able to find xampp when there is a space in the file name.

So remember :      C:\xampp

“Total power used by servers represented about 0.6% of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2005.

When cooling and auxiliary infrastructure are included, that number grows to 1.2%, an amount comparable to that for color televisions. The total power demand in 2005 (including associated infrastructure) is equivalent (in capacity terms) to about five 1000 MW power plants for the U.S. and 14 such plants for the world.

The total electricity bill for operating those servers and associated infrastructure in 2005 was about $2.7 B and $7.2 B for the U.S. and the world, respectively.”

what does a 1000 mw station look like ?

check it out here ref: http://www.gxed.com/en/achieve-hd.asp

I see it as thus:

• High level online PR
  • Actually contacting bloggers and online publications and tailoring ideas for them so they can recycle your ideas.
• Mid Level
  • Contacting sites in your keyphrase space.
• Low Level
  • Donkey work online link building, dropping links in comments, forums and doing reviews and so (this is the least pretty)

This is a very shortened version, in another post I’ll go through it in far more detail

And so I  have been planning out the core strategy for this online PR campaign.Long term:

• Make sure the site im pr’ing for stays up the rankings despite various algo changes
• Dont get a penalty for agressive SEO’ing
• Assume Google for commercial reasons will get more and more agressive about any ‘manipulation’

Medium Term

• Make sure we have content worth linking to
• Refine the link placement process (the ratonale is simple: better links = more effency with link builders)
• Keep our link placement footprint ‘organic’

Short term

• Get the link building system up and running
• Tune up our link finding procedures
• Have a well optimised CMS to work off (were using movable type for this project)

Since Link building is essentially a sales process, ive been looking at sugarcrm as a way of organising the acquisition process. So we seperate the lnk finding process and then import this data into Sugar and manipulate the back end interface to de-clutter it and away we go !

I’ll keep you posted on how this goes over time !

anyway another post - another very useful and cool tool.

This one looks at the link structure of your site and picks out the 30 strongest pages on the site in terms of number of links going to a given page.

Its here : http://www.webuildpages.com/

I’ll be using this tomorrow to analyse a site im working on and redivert a bunch of links from some old pages and point them at more important content.

Of course google webmaster central gives you all this info in a far more detailed manner, but you have to varify a site before you get this data …

The ususal story is:

• Don’t put your links into irrelevant directories
• Don’t suddenly show up with 20,000 new links overnight
• Keep away from link farms
• Dont submit to 50,000 search engines
• Keep the link text relevant to the site

So if you do this, you will get demoted. Since link farms are cheap to link from, crap irrelevant sites with footer links are cheap to get links from and of course putting in the ‘wrong’ link text is easy, you can see how simple it is to do warfare on a given site.

Some interesting further reading from Forbes

Hmmm…. all a bit ugly really.

Having looked through my logs its clear that users arent migrating the new imporved IE7 like they should. So when you build a site, annoyingly , you have to factor in the laggers.

Stats from: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

To help you get around this pain in the neck situation, you need to see your site in development on IE6 - the problem is that Microsoft don’t let you run the ie7 +6 side by side unless…. you have a standalone version of IE6

check evolt.org for standalone ‘old school’ IE browsers 

or use this online browser compatability tool if you cant be bothered to download and install a new browser on you PC

By the way, in case you get upset and scream privacy ! ! ! bear in mind companies like hitwise, comscore and nielson net ratings, sell this data for an absurd amount of money to businesses so they can work out ‘user site pathways’.

I hav’nt tried this tool yet, but I will (not here) but on a big’ish commercial site I work on. My understanding where users have been before my site, I can then either target them from an SEO point of view i.e. rank where they do, or get some advertising on these sites

The tool in question is Spyjax

1. Neilson Net ratings said that 36% of online users think that 1st result in the search rankings means that company is the BEST company.

2. You may remember the accidential release of AOL’s user data? these were the amazing results from Jim Boykin’s analysis:n (the big number is volume of clicks on the data sample) 42% if users click No1 result, 11% No2 and 8.5% No3. It pays to be No1.

% of clicks
Click Rank1: 2,075,765 42.13%
Click Rank2: 586,100 11.90%
Click Rank3: 418,643 8.50%
Click Rank4: 298,532 6.06%
Click Rank5: 242,169 4.92%
Click Rank6: 199,541 4.05%
Click Rank7: 168,080 3.41%
Click Rank8: 148,489 3.01%
Click Rank9: 140,356 2.85%
Click Rank10: 147,551 2.99%

1st page: 4,425,226 89.82%
2nd page: 501,397 10.18%

3. We assume natural search listings are neutral i.e. they are the most relevant they can be. Therefore asking a search engine a question is like asking a friend ‘what is your opinion’ - if you can influence this process, you are influencing the ‘friend to friend’ interactions of millions of people.

4. Where do journalists & Bloggers go for information? Yes, the internet. Be 1st in the right key phrase territories and you get into their mind space.

That is why i really believe SEO is simply a subset of online PR both here in the UK and internationally.

The footprint is the keywords they rank for.

So ive been looking through SEOBook.com and in this post, I found:

 SEODigger.com (find the keywords competitors rank on)

urltrends.com  (get a handle on how competitor site are building links etc over time)

Having looked at several sites, SEODigger looks really useful. Why? because it means I can pick off certain targets and keywords I hadn’t thought of before. Interestingly, if i run the info through my copy of TheDowser, which uses yahoo search volume data and through google adwords keyword finder, i can get my head around the search volumes and relative competitiveness of certain keywords.

The main point is that when you come across a very aggressive competitor who you know has a ton of SEO resource, by using SEODigger, you can see their footprint very easily. Assuming they are in the same space as you, you can be fairly sure those keywords are worth money.

Once you have a target, its easier to hit it !

Links and communities: how do you define a good link? How do you place your site in a good community?

Find who’s linking to your competitors, and get links from them. We use one of our own tools to find them…think there’s other tools on the market which do something like this, but ours looks at all the top sites and find where their backlinks are coming from and any site who is linking to 2 or more of the top sites are located in the community.

We also have an authority finder, similar to your hub finder tool which we use to find possible industry authority sites. This is the community and where you want links from. This is kinda old “forgotten” knowledge (replaced with pushbutton link programs), but still work great.

We also analyze “who you link to” and try to optimize sites for linking to certain industry authorities and resources. The mix for a neighborhood is partly, who links to you, who links to those who link to you, what are the similar backlinks of those in the top to (Google’s “Similar Pages”) and who you link out to.

I believe getting 100 links from outside the community are not worth as much as 10 links from within your community, so if you’re seeking links, where do you want to put your efforts?

Too true ! For more, go and buy the book !

As you may know form your stats, you will see that about 1/2 of all internet explorer users are still on the totally CSS non-compliant internet explorer 6 - whjich makes for BIG headaches !

Anyway I have found this cool site : http://websitetips.com/tools/ full of browser compatibility tools

the one I have used is http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/ which covers all the more ‘modern’ verison of IE

Generating personal recommendations as well as referrals for brand names, products and services

“I believe you, I trust you, I’ll do it”

“Markets are conversations” www.cluetrain.com

‘Word of mouth’ / ‘viral’ / ‘referral’ / ‘we don’t know where they came from’,  marketing is the result of individuals evangelising about your product or service.

“Markets are conversations”. Because we like to share a good thing, we spread ideas through our personal networks. We talk. We are markets.

A ‘down and out’ suggesting to you: ‘Try Chanel perfume, Mate’ might have less weight than Nicole Kidman saying the same thing… Who gives the message, matters.

Where ever humans communicate, there is an opportunity to spread a good message.
‘I believe you, I’ll do it’. Anything or anyone who is trusted, is part of this word of mouth process. Humans, web sites, search engines.

For more and more businesses, the internet is where opinions and trust are largely formed.

So you have to get this right.

This is really useful if you want static content on the front page, but you want to run blog posts below the content.

I have had sooo many problems with this. I have tried ‘sticky posts‘ and a number of other plugins to get s ingle static piece of content to just sit there without affecting other parts of the site ( i wont extrapolate, aside that this issue is a pain)

The usual route is to set up an include on the theme above the blog posts. the downer is that this include then repeats itself on the ‘previous articles’ pages and so you get duplicate content…. not good for seo

So here is my fix

I have added this code below

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

and ive made sure it’s within the div tags theming the content.

<?php if ( $paged < 2 ) { // Do stuff specific to first page?>
<?php if ( is_home() ) : ?>
<div id=”category-description”>
<?php echo get_staticpage(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php } else { // Do stuff specific to non-first page ?>
<?php } ?>

I have then set up a page called static-content.php and added the relevant content and saved it within the template files.

and then i have edited :

and function get_staticpage() {
do_action( ‘get_staticpage’ );
if ( file_exists( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’) )
load_template( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’);
else
load_template( ABSPATH . ‘wp-content/themes/default/staticpage.php’);
}

then i have edited :

wp-includes/general-template.php

and added at the top of the file (below the php tag) :

function get_staticpage() {
do_action( ‘get_staticpage’ );
if ( file_exists( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’) )
load_template( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/staticpage.php’);
else
load_template( ABSPATH . ‘wp-content/themes/default/staticpage.php’);
}

and it should all work !

Links and communities: how do you define a good link? How do you place your site in a good community?

Find who’s linking to your competitors, and get links from them. We use one of our own tools to find them…think there’s other tools on the market which do something like this, but ours looks at all the top sites and find where their backlinks are coming from and any site who is linking to 2 or more of the top sites are located in the community.

We also have an authority finder, similar to your hub finder tool which we use to find possible industry authority sites. This is the community and where you want links from. This is kinda old “forgotten” knowledge (replaced with pushbutton link programs), but still work great.

We also analyze “who you link to” and try to optimize sites for linking to certain industry authorities and resources. The mix for a neighborhood is partly, who links to you, who links to those who link to you, what are the similar backlinks of those in the top to (Google’s “Similar Pages”) and who you link out to.

I believe getting 100 links from outside the community are not worth as much as 10 links from within your community, so if you’re seeking links, where do you want to put your efforts?

Too true ! For more, go and buy the book !

but my luck is in and here is the perfect tutorial for that ‘end user client’ you  have, who needs hand holding

http://edublogs.org/eduvideos/postsandpages/postsandpages.html

There are a couple of plugins that are ‘must have’ for title tag optimsiation

Reordering the tag  so that the name of the post comes 1st and your site title comes second. the ideas is that the words at the front of the tag more more important than at the end.

 http://elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/

And then taking th etitle tag optimisation thing to another level there is  http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

This allows you to edit title tags so they can deviate from teh title of the post you are writing. I hav’nt used this one yet, but i expect i will in time.

ref this page for the original advice : http://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates and go half way down the page for this.

Instructions : (wordpress version 2.1)

in the Archive template just above…

<?php $post = $posts[0]; // Hack. Set $post so that the_date() works. ?>

Use this code

<?php if ( $paged < 2 ) { // Do stuff specific to first page?>
<?php if ( is_category() ) : ?>
<h2 id=”category-name-header”><?php echo $cache_categories[$cat]->cat_name ?></h2>
<?php add_filter(’category_description’, ‘wpautop’); ?>
<?php add_filter(’category_description’, ‘wptexturize’); ?>
<div id=”category-description”>
<?php echo category_description(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php } else { // Do stuff specific to non-first page ?>
<?php } ?>

To be able to use HTML go to :

wp-admin/admin-db.php

and edit out
//$category_description = apply_filters(’pre_category_description’, $category_description);

As I have done

then go into your category editor and edit whatever category you like and add the relevant HTML into the description and save

and now you have fixed content for a linked to category page !

Nice

So I explained myself as an SEO guy and i was about getting us up the search engine rankings - pretty simple, but really a fairly inadequate description

So here is what I said in the bar afterwards

there are 2 parts - the 20 % part which is actual search engine optimisation (tec stuff all done before and definable)

and the 80% part - getting links, and building buzz. (not teccy, undefinable, impossible to accurately predict)
I explained that to understand search engines, you need to understand human behaviour as expressed online. From that you begin to understand where to go and how to get links. (have a look at the map showing a social network of a blogger - you will notice how its very similar to how websites connect with each other)

I also explained that engines have customers they have to please, (you the searcher) and to understand what their customer wants, i.e. great content with great site usability, you will be at the point of enlightment.

The you give yourself a leg up with a bit of black hat (clean-ish style) - some clever paid for link acquisition and site content manipulation and mix it with a genuinely great content site you will rank.

Sounds simple enough and in a sense it is, but of course the devil is in the detail as is the complexity.

http://www.stuntdubl.com

My test site is www.anorak.co.uk

As you may know, in a typical install for wordpress you assign stories to categories and if you have lots of stories, then you probably would set up subcategories for those stories. BUT the problem is that folder ‘maincategory’ will also show subcategory stories. = duplicate content.

So i’ve found a plugin HERE which only shows stories actually assigned to that particular story - so each category home page only shows stories from that category.

for example :
http://www.anorak.co.uk/reality-tv/ only shows reality TV stuff and no big brother stories
and http://www.anorak.co.uk/reality-tv/big-brother/ only shows big brother stories

I’ve also worked the anorak robots.txt file so I stop indexing of the RSS pages (im sure you have seen these around the place on searches) and im blocking the archive pages from the engines idea being i funnel them to category home pages

I’ve also manipulated the footer pagination, so the spiders will crawl deeper via the category pages as opposed to the index page - ive added a no follow there.

The strategy is to get the category home pages ranked along with the main index page - so its all about diverting the bots in the right way and overcoming the issues associated with link churn

My next task is to do a script which presents a static include on the category home pages, which does not repeat in the archive pages

so i’ve got to work out a workaround - either by customising the menu so it doesn’t show the offending pages or by doing something interesting with robots.txt

anyway on the theme of robots.txt here are a few from famous wordpress blogs

Mattcutts.com
User-agent: *
Allow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /files/

seoegghead.com (note the satan bit / hiding the contact page)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/seo/automatically-highlighting-internal-links-p51.html
Disallow: /blog/seo/msn-search-p5.html
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/
Disallow: /contact-the-egghead.php
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /blog/seo/msn-search-p5.html
Disallow: /*?cat=
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/
Disallow: /contact-the-egghead.php
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /blog/seo/using-referers-http_referer-to-increase-conversions-and-perceived-relevance-p9.html
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/
Disallow: /contact-the-egghead.php
User-agent: slurp
Disallow: /blog/seo/yahoo-hostings-lack-of-htaccess-support-p8.html
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/
Disallow: /contact-the-egghead.php
User-agent: satan
Disallow: /

wordpress.org
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

scobleizer.com
User-agent: IRLbot
Crawl-delay: 3600

User-agent: *
Disallow:

davidnaylor.co.uk/
doesnt actually use them !
which is interesting… ( i’ll email him and ask why )

Google can be spammed, but not like it used to be. In the past it was ‘all inbound links are good’ (within reason) and volume of links are good. Now its more about ‘quality’ sites back linking to you.

How do you qualify quality? - good question. I suppose a simple answer is :
- there is a human guardian looking after the site?
- the site is has a theme like your site?
Anyway…if you want to see spamming in action i.e. keyword stuffing, page redirects and cloaking, then just go to google and do a search for ‘viagra’ i almost guarantee you will find a couple of spam sites in the top 10 results.
Yes spamming works - but not for long, its only a quick fix. Check that search again in a few weeks and those sites you saw will have long disappeared and replaced by more spam sites.

The other thing I realised was how closely knit the black hat community is. It seems to be dominated by a handful of main players who are good programmers and who understand the technical weaknesses of the search engines.

They seem to do well financially , but they are constantly playing a cat and mouse game with the engines working in the ‘bottom feeder’ areas on the internet - porn, financial services and medicine sales. The funny thing is that these sites typically don’t build reputation, they just get big exposure for a while and disappear.

a good launch point is www.blackhatseo.com

Check it out, its very useful  - it even has a viagra ad there !