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Creative Online Marketing, Link Building and Ecommerce
Wicked World Wide Web and the games it plays with us..
Posted by: admin in Untagged on
Mar 2, 2009
I am using Web CEO for the first time to optimize a few sites for one of our clients - they specifically wanted us to use this tool, so we obliged. The very first thing I started on was the keyword research portion. I've used IBP, SEO Elite, Wordtracker, Google KW Tool Etc. in the past so I know a thing or two about keyword research.
Web CEO looks up keywords from your page and lists them. You then pick the ones you want and analyze them. It comes back with Keyword results such as "Daily World Searches". That's where the issue is. The Daily World Searches for most keywords that are 2 or more words was less than 10. That's impossible since I was optimizing for highly searched keywords. Other tools come back with numbers in the hundreds or thoudsands for the same phrases.
Am I missing something or does Web CEO Keyword Research tool really suck that bad?
Posted by: admin in Untagged on
Jan 21, 2009
Every company has to invest into capital - human and technology at some point in the hope that it will bring them additional sales and revenue and allow them to grow. Sometimes, that decision can be a difficult one though, especially in an economy like today's. Some clients are closing shops, which means lost business for all their vendors. Some lines of businesses that we are currently staffed for aren't doing as well as other lines of businesses that we want to launch but that would mean new investment into capital without knowing how soon the return will happen. I am sure every company in the world faces such a predicament, almost all the time. That' where numbers, and that mysterious thing called instinct comes into play. Objective reasioning, combined with instinctive gut are necessary qualities for any entrepreneur. Without getting too detailed about the specifics (some of our clients do read this blog ;). we are in that situation now. 2009 is going to be very exciting for us. We have lots of changes and improvements planned. For one, we are going to add more information on this site about the services we offer. We are planning to offer several free resource for visitors for self-study on topics such as backlink building, search engine optimziation, Joomla and Wordpress. You might argue that there is a lot of information on these already, but really, when it comes to details, there isn't much. Stay tuned.
Posted by: admin in wordpress, integration, forum, bbpress on
Jan 20, 2009
There are several options for integrating a discussion forum into your wordpress blog. bbpress: Pros: The one to watch out for. Integrates closely with wordpress. Makers of wordpress are closely involved with the development of this software. Actively developed.
Posted by: admin in Untagged on
Dec 24, 2008
I've written earlier about how finding and getting a Blog component to work in Joomla hasn't been the smoothest experience . I tried MojoBlog initially, then painfully switched over to MyBlog and spent a considerable amount of time making it work in my currents setup. One of my biggest pain points was that none of the Joomla Sitemap components would work too well with MyBlog - they would just not pick up the URL's. Anyone that knows anything about SEO knows that a sitemap is very important to make sure that Google crawls the right URL's with the right priority. If you have multiple websites in your shared hosting space, then it's even more important to tell the search engines what to crawl. Xmap comes with extensions (plugins) for several major Joomla components. Make sure you check their list of plugins and make sure it has your major components that are installed or likely to be installed on your site. If not, then do not use Xmaps. It will not pick up your component's URL's which could be a deal breaker. In that case, your only choice is to look for another sitemap compeonent that might work with your specific component OR request that extension from either the maker of Xmap (who is really responsive btw) or your specific component developer. Or, if you are a developer yourself, you could write it and make it available to others in exchange from some bragging rights and free traffic from the Xmaps and related sites. Here's what I did.
In my previous post I had explained how selecting an autoresponder is not an easy decision and can often costs hundreds of dollars per month. I had concluded with a statement about Profollow . This post has my chat transcript with the Profollow people. This might be a good solution for those looking for a low cost autoresponder to start with.
Srini: Are you guys an Aweber reseller? How is profollow different than Awerber then? Do I get access to all the tracking and analytics features in aweber or is that different in profollow?
You are now speaking with Erin Carney of Customer Solutions.
Erin Carney: Hi Srini
Srini: Hi Erin
Selecting your Email Marketing provider is a VERY important decision any website or online business will make. Why? Because once you make your pick, it is VERY difficult to change the provider if you decide to change your mind in the future. I know what you are thinking. You could always export your list to Excel or CSV and import it into another list management product, right? Yes, but there's a catch. Most list management software require your subscribers to opt in again when you import a list. This is to ensure compliance with the Spam act and make sure that all your subcribers have actually expressed interest to be part of your site. Furthermore, it's not just the list. Each product has analytics and tracking info that cannot be transffered from one product to the other easily. In Email marketing, knowing the history of a specific email list is very important in order to be able to segment your list and make a targeted pitch to each segment. So, long story short, once you pick an email marketing solution, you are more or less married to it for life. I know that sounds scary, but it's true. First off, you need to decide between a Server Software based solution versus Hosted Solution. The difference is that a server-based solution is a software product you buy and install on your server (or even desktop, in the case of certain products). Hosted solutions manage your mailing lists on their servers. Server Based software:
I've used the StudioPress wordpress theme, it's one of my favorites, and the best part is that it's free! It has an excellent color scheme, has a clean Web 2.0 look, overall, I just love it. As with most other Wordpress blogs that I’ve installed, I added Headspace , XML Sitemap generator and many other useful Wordpress SEO plugins. I have written earlier about my Wordpress blog SEO techniques that have worked great so far - including achieving a page rank 3 within 20 days of site launch for one of my blogs. Studiopress was awesome, except that it gave me one major problem. It wouldn't change the Home Page Title. The home page title defaults to the Site Name- Site Decription format. If you know anything at all about SEO, you’d know that that’s a serious no-no. You want your home page’s title to be keyword rich, to include synonyms and include terms closely related to your site that your visitors are searching for. Your home page title is arguably THE most important SEO factor for your website. Of course, bad content and a great title is not going to help a lot, I am assuming that the basics of a website (good content, fast load speed, clean look and feel) are met.
http://www.simplosys.com/blog/yahoo-store-as-an-seo-friendly-ecommerce-platform Like many web developers and SEO's, I've always been on the lookout for the perfect Ecommerce platform. CRELoaded is literally LOADED with ecommerce functionality but does not integrate a CMS into it, an unbelievable deficiency in the Web 2.0 world where content is king. Joomla and Virtuemart looked promising but with Joomla sites, you end up spending a lot of time trying a gazillion plugins (components, modules, mambots) that you need to mix and match to make a great site. And then there comes the upgrade and you never know which ones are going to work and which ones will not. And then you also don't know which of your components are supported by the Joomla third party SEO products such as sh404sef or OpenSEF. These plugins are free but often don't support certain components. You need a good Joomla developer that takes the time to keep themselves abreast of the latest in the Joomla and Virtuemart world. Virtuemart is also sort of limited in some key functionality. For instance, it does not integrate an affiliate management feature (there are workarounds, but there you go, more plugins) and does not have recursive billing options built in. These are core features that several stores need. So, as my hunt for the perfect Ecommerce software continued, I ran into this post, a recent August 2008 post - http://wordpresswebpro.com/seo-tips/yahoo-store-the-best-e-commerce-platform-for-seo/. I am working on a site that is built on Yahoo Store now and I am realizing why this guy is so excited about it. It is pretty good. I am still pretty new to it so I don't know enough about the pros and cons, but it does look promising based on what I've seen so far. With all the speculation about Microsoft buying Yahoo and even talks about Yahoo not doing so well, I hope Yahoo keeps making it's Store offering better!
http://www.simplosys.com/blog/is-seo-spam I remember having a heated debate with a friend that works at Yahoo Search about whether SEO involves spamming the search engines for links and whether all SEO's are spammers. He seemed to be a right-wing conservative on this matter, understandable, considering his job every day is to come up with ways to make seach better and SEO's skewing results makes it harder for him. I've given this a lot of thought and I've come to the conclusion that, if done right, it's not. The focus should be on making sure that's value addition to the Internet all along the way. Testimony to this is that even Yahoo, in their web hosting packages, has entire sections dedicated to SEO, and in fact, has a blog dedicated to that as well...http://ystoreblog.com/blog/category/seosem/. So I guess seo is not really spamming afterall. Finding creative ways to get links is not a bad thing then...it's just marketing. Spamming is bad though, and we all agree on that. The line is gray and it will remain that way until some of the geniuses at the Search Engine companies figure out a way to truly differentiate good content from bad, and start giving less importance to links and more to quality unique content. There are some very good posts on this topic. I've read many over the years and I am going to list them as I run into more on this topic..
Posted by: admin in wordpress, integration, bbpress on
Oct 28, 2008
http://www.simplosys.com/blog/bbpress-review-wordpress-forum-integration Wordpress bloggers often have the need to integrate a forum or a user discussion area in their websites. This is especially true for blogs for a commercial product (software/book/download), multiple-author blogs or blogs on topics that lend themselves to discussion among visitors. My blog at http://www.endlesswait.com is about legal immigration issues in the United States. Legal immigrants are a frustrated bunch, usually waiting in line for years (often more than a decade) to complete their immigration process. During this wait time, there are all sorts of information that they need to maintain their legal status and what not. They tend to discuss this with each other. I am working on adding a forum to this site at http://endlesswait.com/forum. As of today, this forum has nothing in it. Just the plain bbpress install. The installation process is pretty simple. It is documented well here but there are a couple of points where you could get confused. If you already have a wordpress blog and are adding the bbpress forum to the blog, then Step 2 in the installation sequence takes care of that. I managed to install my forum in about 20 minutes from start to finish. It should have taken even lesser time, if it weren't for some minor errors that got resolved by reading the documentation pretty easily.
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