There are about a zillion different opinions about SEO around what works and what doesn’t. Some folks even go as far as to attempt to set up so called scientific studies to prove their hypothesis. 

Anyone with a grade 12 education can see that the bulk of the “studies” that have been done are invalid, usually in more than one way, and are usually statistically irrelevent.

I beleive that many folks place too much emphasis on the ins and outs of SEO, especially those with relatively new sites. You can optimize the HELL out of a 3-page web site – but that’s not going to help you rank well for your terms.  Any niche you enter (except under-served niche areas – which i’ll talk about in a later post) you should expect to have to do a hell of a lot of work to make any headway. 

The first thing anyone should focus on is building quality content. You’ve heard it a thousand times, but still, there are millions of new sites going up with NO content to speak of. Having a cool template or design won’t pay the bills I’m afraid. Think about the sites you gravitate to. They are typically “best-in-class” – take note of that phrase “best in class” – because it is important. 

The search engines treat niches the same way we treat any topic in real life. We want the best, and we don’t want to fuck around with the the lame crap on the periphery. For example – in real life, when you visit a city, you want a map that has all of the roads and highways, not one with just 2 or 3 of the main roads. The same thing is true on the net. If you are searching for information on a city, you are looking for the most authoritative one or two sites on that city. The rest – you could give a fuck about.

My point is that you need to ensure that you at least have some content section, such as a glossary, that is “best in class” – meaning you have the biggest and most complete glossary available on the net, bar none. Glossary is just one example. There are many – and what they are depends heavily on your topic.

Comments welcome.

I stumbled across one of the coolest tools to research a website’s competition. The product is called “Navigator” by TouchGraph. It’s a tool that I’ve incorporated as a staple in my SEO research toolbag.

TouchGraph Navigator for SEO

One of the very critical parts of forming a decent SEO plan for a website is to do research on the niche that your site serves. There are MANY tools out there that get you the data, but this is the only/best one that lets you visualize it and work with it on-the-fly.

One of the central concepts of search engine ranking and SEO in general is the niche hub. Bruce Clay, an authoritative SEO professional has been talking about this for years, and there have been many experiments done that prove the importance hubs. Hubs are esentially subsections of the internet based on a specific niche or topic. For the sake of this example, I’m going to use the niche of “HalifaxNS” – a fairly narrow niche – but the same concept applies for something as broad as “billiards” or “cars” as a niche.

Esentially, when you have a niche that you are trying to develop an SEO game plan for, you need to know who the main authority sites (hub sites) are for your niche. This visualization tool does exactly that…you’ll see the most popular sites inside the bigger circles.  ONE word of caution, however, is that the more obscure the niche (like halifax) the more weird and/or invalid results you’ll see. Even still, with that problem, Navigator is still the best SEO visulization tool available on the net today.

This post focuses on their Navigator product, but they have a bunch of others, including one that shows hubs on Amazon’s shopping site (by ASIN), and another that shows hubs on facebook (by Member) – Very Cool.

I’m building a directory of sorts of YouTube extension plugins for wordpress. I’ve only had time to get it started, but if anyone has any great scripts, plugins, or extensions for implementing the YouTube API into a wordpress extension, please drop me a comment and I’ll be happy to add it.

I recently read a slashdot article about a recent google experiment about how they are testing the ability for users to move up, or down, a given result. This article prompted discussion about how google could never the users preferences into their algorithm like that, due to spammers that would abuse it by paying people to “move up” their results.

Well in that discussion many users agreed, but said “let us set our individual preferences, and have google obey them in the results.” For example, a techie may want to never see results from http://www.expertsexchange.com/ since the don’t let you view content unless you pay them. The techie would enter that URL, and it would be forever omitted from the search results.

There is ALREADY a solution to this that does not involve google. If you are a firefox user, you can use an extension called CustomizeGoogle. The extension is ridiculously flexible. here is what it can do:

#1 – You can set up a blacklist of URLs or sites you DON’T want in your results.

The rest:

Use Google Suggest (suggest words while you’re typing)
Add links to competitors
Rewrite links to point straight to the images in Google Images
Removes image copying restrictions in Google Book Search
Secure Gmail and Google Calendar, switch to https
Block Google Analytics cookies
Hide the Gmail spam counter
Make URL previews on sponsored links visible
Add favicons in the web search result
Remove ads
Anonymize your Google userid
Add a result counter in search result
Filter spammy websites from search results
Add links to WayBack Machine (webpage history)
Remove click tracking
Add links from Google to your bookmark manager
Use a fixed font for Gmail mail bodies
Stream Google search result pages
Sticky Google Preferences

I’m sure you are all 100% familiar with the infamous WikiPedia by now. What you may not be so familiar with is the software that runs the site called MediaWiki. MediaWiki is a fully featured php wiki module and it was built by, and for, wikipedia.

The MediaWiki software is 100% free and installs really easily on most shared linux hosting. It has an authentication feature which allows you to password protect the entire application’s content, which makes MediaWiki the perfect software for organizing your life.

I personally have about 4 installs of mediawiki running for various projects I’m working on. I have one to organize my online properties and projects and it helps me track bugs, changes, ideas for future development. My team has one installed on our boxes at work to track the various apps and projects that we’re responsible for.

Before you begin to use MediaWiki as a project manager or organization tool, you really need to become familiar with a few of the main concepts.  Wiki code is something you’ll have to learn if you want to use a wiki at all. The second most important one is to learn how the page relation works. There is no formal hierarchy – which is good. The whole system relies on tags or categories. This will be essential to organizing your MediaWiki.

If you have questions about install or config just visit their site. Its rediculous full of easy-to-follow instruction for everything.

Yup – I pretty much hate camping but it can be made a wee bit more bearable with free wireless internet access throughout all of the camping sites. Last week we visited the KOA campground in Sackville NS and they indeed had wireless internet access. If you are a webmaster or just need to be hooked to the juice 24/7, then this campground might be for you.

If you have ever received the 1and1 Service Unavailable Message you’ll know they can be a pain in the ass. Most times they just go away after a few minutes. This means you had a temporary spike in traffic and one of their automatic monitoring processes shut you down temporarily.

I however, had this happen over 7 days ago, and it never went away. Every day my web properties are down, I lose $30 – $50 dollars.  After about 3 days, and 6 calls, and one supervisor, I finally found out that because my site was getting so much traffic, they “moved” it to another part of their server, and decided to keep it off. I should seriously sue them for doing this without notice. At least if they had have told me, I’d have happily paid for a better hosting package and could have avoided the downtime.

With no end in sight, and multiple hang-ups, I made the switch to GoDaddy. Now there are errors with transferring my domains. 1and1 technical errors. God they are such idiots. Customer service has NO power. Everything and anything they need to “ticket” to another department.

“Thank you for contacting us. This e-mail is in relation to the “service unavailable” messages you are receiving on your domain names. Our administrators noticed that you were consuming a unusually large amount of memory on the server and slowing it down. You have since been moved to a different application pool and stopped for the moment. The log of the error message is below i suggest you investigate your scripts and see what is going on with them. Thank you for your patience in this matter.”

Well, my issues with 1and1 continue to get worse, yet I’m suspiciously not at all surprised. After the last 1and1 service unavailable fiasco, I decided to transfer out my domains to my new hosting provider, and now, not surprisingly I’m seeing a 1and1 message saying “There is a domain registration error” and all typical actions are unavailable in the control panel. surprise surprise.

I called customer service about 7 hours ago, and the lady I tried to understand basically had no clue, and had to open a ticket with the “transfers” department. Yeah right. So how I wait. My most valuable and highest earning domain is stuck in never never land with 1and1.

Take my advice. You get what you pay for. If you plan to have your site earning you decent money someday, don’t go with the lowest cost provider.

As my issues with 1and1 continue, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. The errors and problems I was encountering were not solved or explained by their FAQ/Help pages, and in most cases, no help even existed. What I did notice though, was that I could google my issue and there were literally hundreds of results from other disgruntled 1and1 customers that were very helpful to me to at least learn more about the issues that I was facing.

This is a subtle example of crowdsourcing in it’s unorganized form – masked as a virtual crowd connected by the internet. Thanks to the internet, and today’s search technology, crowdsourcing is a reality.

What is crowdsourcing? Well, it has many definitions and comes in many forms, but in the broadest terms, it refers to the distribution of a defined task with a defined outcome and “putting it out there” (usually via the internet) to many potential task performers. The goal is that the collective knowledge of the tens, hundreds, thousands of task performers will help find a “better” solution. Here the term “better” may mean cheaper, faster, more original, or even a solution at all.

There are a ton of real world examples of crowdsourcing out there. Wikipedia is one. The task is compiling an internet encyclopedia from scratch. Instead of hiring a team to accomplish this, the work was effectively croudsourced.

Wired magazine first tackled the answer to the question “What is crowdsourcing?” in their june 2006 issue.

As the saga continues with my 1 and 1 hosting problems, I’ve ran through several fully charged batteries on my blackberry trying to get things straightened out. Some of that phone time was spent trying to get the phone number for the 1and1 corporate offices on Lee Road in PA. (This is where the sales team is, coincidentally.)

So I called the sales team (which is the number the tech support people give when you ask for head office) and was hung up on twice, and transferred back to tech support in the Philippines twice. I finally got a mature sales agent on the phone who basically admitted that the company was way to big to handle true tech issues in a timely manner.

Still no executive numbers. Even after an extensive search online. I did manage to get a 1&1 sales manager’s name and extension:

Burt – Sales Manager Supervisor, at Ext 2579 – I’ll be calling old burt tomorrow morning.

Again, I understand now that I got what I paid for.