I’ve just signed up to a new SEO service that promises to build hundreds of one way links back to your site. I’m always more than a little bit dubious about such claims so I went out on a limb and signed up. It was only $10/mo for 100 links so I thought it was worth it just to get a concrete answer on whether it works or not.
The site that I am optimizing is HYIPJunction. The site is doing really well in Yahoo for various search terms, but not so well in Google and Live Here are the current rankings, as at 26th September.
So, one month from now, I’m hoping that my rankings in all the search engines will have improved from using this One Way Link Exchange service. If not…then we know that buying links from this company sucks
There are plenty of awful adverts on TV, I’m sure people can reel off about a dozen ads that do their nut in too. I’ve got a couple of ads that really annoy me, not because they are bad ads (they are actually mildly amusing) but because the marketers that made the ads are so far off base and out of touch with the consumer market they might aswell be trying to sell AK-47’s to the Peace Corps.
I know that I’m playing into the hands of these marketers by showing these ads here, but I don’t care. I need to vent my fury at the stupidity of whoever made them.
The first ad is for an alco-pop called WKD. It’s the drink of teenage girls, and underage kids looking to get drunk on something that tastes ‘nice’.
So why then, given that these are the sorts of people that drink WKD, are they marketing the drink at young 20 something lads who drink beer lager and if they don’t drink lager they drink vodka red bull. It makes me mad. The worst part is, these ads appear when there’s a football match on because that’s when the majority of lads are watching football.
Dear Stupid Marketers…You have it all wrong! Redo your demographics, guys just do not drink alco-pops.
Here’s the first movie:
Yes, it is quite funny, but it would be far more effective if it was selling beer.
Wouldn’t you know it, but I’ve completely forgotten what the second advert was. I will try and remember and edit this post later on. Actually, next time I watch football the entirely inappropriate advert will probably come on. It might be some of those new age ‘moisturisers and skin care’ products for men from Nivea.
Do you have an ad that really annoys you because the product is aimed at completely the wrong person
On one of the forums I visited recently someone asked what was the perfect website design for SEO. It got me thinking because although I have a good idea what makes a perfect (or at least a best guess perfect because who really knows how the search engines work) design, I’ve never sat down and created one.
What’s more, I don’t have any evidence to suggest that a search engine optimized layout will do any better in the search engines than a normal HTML layout. Using an SEO layout could be wishful thinking for all I know.
With that said, here are the ingredients that in theory make up the perfect SEO website layout.
The code has to be as clean as possible. This means using tableless CSS to define the layout rather than tables because it makes the website much ‘lighter’ and the content becomes the dominant factor rather than the table dividers, rows, font attributes etc.
The should be as little text and or code from where the body starts to where the content starts. Again, this is the case for using tableless CSS as you can virtually have the content be the first thing the spider reads as it crawls your site while still maintaining an attractive design
Your H1 and H2 tags should be as close to the beginning of the code as possible. This is to make sure the spider reads it first as the H1 tag is often given a lot of prominance in the search engine rankings. It’s like a big neon sign that says “this page is about ABC”
Make your content appear before the menu in your code. This makes sure the spider doesn’t get distracted by all the other keywords in your menu and indexes all your content before it moves on to another page
Use the title attribute in your h1, h2, a and img tags. The title attribute enables you to add a few more relevant keywords about the page and increase the keyword density of the page
What ever method you use to code the website (HTML/XHTML) make sure it is valid code. It is often said that Google will rank a valid code website above a non-valid one, however, I don’t have any evidence to support this. But hey, it can’t hurt, right?
Using the pointers above, i sat down and attempted to create my first XHTML/tableless CSS valid website that was extremely optimized for the search engines. Here’s what I came up with…
A couple of months ago I launched a massive portal site called HYIPJunction. It had been in development for over 18 months and as I had mentioned in my previous blog entry it was a complete project disaster. In the end it was decided to take it live and open it up to the public with all the bugs and see how it would get on.
Two months later and I want to come back and look at how the site has got on since we launched it. What has been good, what has been bad.
To start off with, I think the site has done better than expected. We managed to get several core features fixed quite early on after going live so the impact of the bugs has been minimal. There are still a host of bugs that need to be fixed and the programmers have been working on them a bit at a time. Mostly though the members have not been complaining or shown us too many ‘new’ bugs.
I’m not sure if we haven’t received many bug reports because the members are apathetic towards the site or if they simply haven’t noticed them. When you have been working on a site for so long the bugs, errors and little annoyances become glaringly obvious, maybe when you are just a user these things are taken to be part of the site. Who knows, maybe the developers of Google’s Gmail fret over a million bugs that they must get fixed, but I’ve never noticed anything wrong with Gmail.
Here are the current rankings, as at 26th September.
