OVBlogger: Blogging and SEO

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Do you know what Squidoo is? It’s a social site where you can set up lenses on any topic, whether it’s for business or just plain fun. I’ve known about Squidoo for a couple of years almost and have a couple of lenses myself, but…

Brian Terry really takes the whole Squidoo thing to the next level for Internet marketers in his post,

Your Website Traffic: 7 Crucial Reasons Why You Should Be “Squidooing”

Not only does Brian provide some brilliant insights, but he maps them all out for you. Get on over to Brian’s blog: BigSellingWebsiteDesign.com and check it out.

Brian is also one of the most talented graphic designers on the Web. His stuff just totally rocks, all around. Ever watch a Brian Terry video? Well… the guy’s just magic.

Subscribe to this RSS feed. You won’t regret it.

Popularity: 33% [?]

SEO and Affiliate Marketing genius, Jerry West, who’s also a faculty member at Stomper Net, says that the directories have lost beaucoup PR points at Google.

You can see the results of his hand-done survey here:

SEO Revolution

So, apparently many directories lost ground in the recent PR update, and many are below PR4. Some lost their PR entirely.

Only Family Friendly Sites walked away with a PR6 and Seoma and Clickey came away with PR5s.

PR4 sites are still good to link to, if you have low PR, but are directories still worth the time and effort? Hmm… I guess you’ll have to decide. For me, I can think of much more productive ways to spend my time.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Over at Shoemoney’s blog today, he posted his favorite Firefox extensions. You can check them out here:

http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/03/10/11-must-have-firefox-extensions/

I have to agree with him on most of them. But I have a list of my own:

Fasterfox: Makes firefox run just a little faster

Firefox Bookmarks Synchronizer: This is great, if you’re going from desktop to laptop and vice versa.

IE Tab: Very cool for developers. You can see things in both browsers, which we sometimes forget to check and then our pages look wanky in one browser or the other. (Usually not Firefox, but the Other)

SEOQuake: Allows you to see what’s what with any web page, including the three big search engines’ pages indexed, backlinks, page rank, Whois, Age, Alexa, and a bunch of stuff.

Tab Mix Plus: Lets you move your tabs around and all kind of stuff you can’t do without it.

Having all these awesome extensions makes Firefox the best browser on the planet.

Anyway, you can search for them all at: https://addons.mozilla.org

Popularity: 37% [?]

If you aren’t into making video for your website, your blog, or a membership site or whatever, you probably don’t know about the “Chipmunk Issue.” How did Alvin and his friends get into all those videos online?

It was an upgrade for Adobe Flash that did it. That new version of Flash wasn’t compatible with any Camtasia made before version 5.0.2. The new upgrade, and how most videos online are rendered, gave all those videos the effect of garbling in the audio, but only intermittently. It was weird.

There is a fix for it, but don’t bother. It doesn’t work.

The only solution that I’ve found is that you have to re-render all the videos in Camtasia 5.0.2 . Lots of incentive for upgrading, eh?

And it’s a total pain in the butt. It takes a while to render videos, but to re-upload them if you have a lot of them takes like… forever.

I had someone berate me for this in my membership site and ask for a refund. Argh! People can be very unforgiving, especially when they’re paying for something. So… beware.

If you have videos made before Camtasia 5.0.2, get busy. It should only take, like…

For.ever

Grrr…

Popularity: 25% [?]

I just finished writing a post over at the Conquer Your Niche forum about directories and thought I’d share:

Actually,

Google specifically isn’t really counting links from many directories. DMOZ.org, Yahoo, or Joe Ant are quality listings in their eyes. A plain old “link farm” directory won’t get you anywhere.

What they’re concerned about is that the directory makes sense. If you’re listed in a golf directory for an Internet marketing information product, it won’t help a bit.

Also, if the links aren’t reviewed and validated by humans, you won’t get any link juice, either, because that’s one of Google’s requirements for a “quality” directory.

I wouldn’t waste too much time on directories.

My advice is to apply for a listing in DMOZ at http://dmoz.org, which is free. Yahoo’s directory is $299 a year, so unless you’re making the income to justify that, it’s probably not going to work for you. But…

Joe Ant.com, (http://joeant.com) for example, is like $40 one time and it will get you the kind of backlink you want. Not a bad investment, IMO.

Articles work much better. Plus, you can turn around and re-purpose them for your blog. Of course, you don’t want to use the same article in your blog that you post to Ezine Articles or Go Articles or another quality directory. You need to rewrite the whole thing so that it’s at least 60% different so that you don’t run into the “duplicate content” issue. You won’t be penalized, but you won’t benefit, either. Google may decide that some other site gets credit for your work, as they tend to pick only one site to credit for a particular piece of content.

Directories aren’t even as powerful as blogging. Writing in a blog everyday will get you far more traction with the search engines, however Google does love itself. A DMOZ listing is just as good as ever.

Does anyone ever get DMOZ listings? I’m not sure. I placed links about two years ago that still haven’t shown up. But then, I didn’t become an editor, either. I hear that’s a quicker road to success there.

Bottom line? I wouldn’t waste too much time with directories. Concentrate on other stuff that works much, much better–articles, press releases, social bookmarking, and so on.

And of course… my favorite… blogging! It totally rocks.

Come to my telseminar series on blogging with some of the biggest names in the IM world… Call tonight!

Popularity: 31% [?]

Well, I do. It’s a place where people can plug Internet marketing sites, just as they can at the mainstream sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

But I really wish that they could get their programming together. I know how hard that is, though. I’ve been paying a programmer for weeks now just to get my site the way I need it to be, so blessings on its owner.

However, I don’t like having this little “My SQL error” in place of my widget. (May not be happening now, but does on occasion.) Though the PlugIM people didn’t create the widget, they need to either fix the one they have or create one themselves.

And then, when I go to the site, I try to click on a popular post or story and I get another screen error.

Argh!

And if you ever try to give people the news of your post, you go through all the filling out of the proper forums (The system won’t allow you to do it any other way.), you’re stopped at the send.

Frustrating, I tell ya.

But I’m not going to give up. PlugIM is a great site, and probably experiencing growing pains. I just hope they’re able to get their stuff together real soon.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Ha! Is that a word? Foruming: The act of posting in a forum. Well, I just invented it.

And I’ve been forum posting. I used to hang out in a special forum (Net Marketing Forum) all the time when I was new, and I made a lot of great friends and learned more than I can say from some very smart people.

But my online life is much different now, and I’ve been too busy to hang.

Or have I?

Haven’t I been neglecting something very important?

Well, two things, actually.

The first is my very important friends, whom I haven’t been able to spend much time with. I miss them, and I think of going there often and just hanging out and then, something else comes along and POOF! I forget and then, there’s no time because something else came up, and…

bollocks!

Not spending time in forums can hurt you. You’re not keeping the lines of communication open between you and people you care about, which is bad in itself (’course they always know where t find me, if need be.), but you’re hurting your business.

One way links back from a forum are good for you SEO-wise, not to mention the advertising you get just from having those links in your signature file. Well, duh… I didn’t have much business to really, really care about until now. Oh, there’s this blog, which I love and my ebook: 7 Secrets to Writing Killer Articles, which is pretty cool, but old.

So now, I have this new membership site and an awesome teleseminar series that I want people to know about. So, here’s the plan. I’m going to make 5 forum posts a day, after work. That way, I can get back in touch with friends, and promote my biz at the same time.

Shame on me for not doing it sooner. And if I don’t keep it up, everyone has my permission to give me the smackdown. (Not that you need it. LOL) I have a few forums I’ve been neglecting. Time to get back to it.

And if you’re not foruming, you should be.  Shame on you.

Popularity: 20% [?]

What’s up with WordPress? Every other day, there’s another security issue and we have to upgrade again. Argh. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could figure out everything at the same time so that we only needed to upgrade once?

Would be. Not possible, but it would be nice.

So, I’ve upgraded this blog at least three times that I can remember, and then, there are the plugins and the themes that don’t jibe, and on and on…

It’s exhausting.

People who are new to blogging are usually wary of doing things like upgrades. But here’s the thing to remember, if you don’t, you’re leaving yourself wide open for mischief.

You may or may not know this, but someone hacked my blog around September and I lost everything. It’s my own dumb fault for not backing things up properly (and WordPress Databackup Plugin is so frickin’ simple to use that I should be smacked). But you get busy and you think you’re going to do something, and who’d want to mess with my blog, anyway, and you just never get around to doing things.

How would you like to lose 2 years of posts? Thousands of trackbacks and comments, and on and on…

Very frustrating.

Still, I wish I had that stuff back. WordPress Database Backup plugin now mails the contents to me every week.

I won’t be taken to the cleaners again.

At least, one can hope.

Popularity: 22% [?]