John A Simpson » Tools

Change Your Job Strategy

John — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:11:31 +0000

Are you in the market for a job? A lot of people are these days. A lot of people are staying on the market for quite a long time. It can sometimes take months and years to find a job in the economy. One of the tools out there that I have always promoted has been LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn profile and I connect to as many people as I can. The reason for this is because I might be able to connect to someone that can help me in my business, through another connection. The flip side is also true, as I can forward contact requests on. With so many people looking for a job, one might want to go from job search to relationship search…at least on LinkedIn. Check out this article entitled Stop Looking For A Job. Start Looking To Meet People. It gives valuable information on the ways one might use LinkedIn to forge those new relationships.

If you enjoyed this post, please make sure you register to receive these posts via email. You can also follow me on Twitter, link to me on LinkedIn, or visit my other blog, at www.spendingless101.com.

SocialSpark.com creates new linkbuilding opportunities

John — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 03:35:55 +0000

I didn’t think of this one. Someone else did. I’m talking about using Social Spark, which I thought was specifically for paid blogging, etc., to promote one’s blog…without having to pay anyone.

I logged onto socialspark.com and after adding all of my blogs, I started looking through the offers. Since my blogs are not approved, I can only accept the offers that do not involve money. I figured it would be a good exercise, so I settled on one to try. It actually was not related to posting. It was a request for an RSS subscribe exchange. I did it. I’ll have to see if the other part reciprocates. I found another offer, which involved writing a post about a site, then leaving a comment on that site. The payment is supposed to be the addition of my blog to his blogroll. The site is a PR3. The problem is, it won’t help me if I cannot somehow tie that site’s subject to the subject of my blog. It just so happens that it is related. In fact, you can check out http://lepixelshoppe.com/scrap4dollars yourself. I will also be adding this blog to my blogroll.

AutoPosting

John — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0000

In order to help your site promotion and blogging efforts, you need to find ways to automate what you do. One particular area that really needs help with automation is posting to social network sites. I’ve come across several FREE applications that allow you to automatically submit your blog posts to social networks when they are posted to your blog. Some of these are:

Using Twitter To Promote Your Blog

John — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:30:00 +0000

You can even use the social networking site called Twitter to promote your site.

Here are some of the ways you can do that:

If your blog software is Wordpress, you can install a plugin that will automatically post an entry to your Twitter account when you submit a new post to your blog.
Add your web address to your Twitter profile and a link to the web address will show up next to your account name on every tweet.
If your friends have a Twitter account (and even if they don’t—they can get one), have them tweet about your site and include a link.

I’m always on Twitter and I have clicked on links from there many times.

Getting The Most Out Of EntreCard and 10ec From Me

John — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:32:00 +0000

EntreCard seems to be an innovative idea in the area of driving traffic, and link exchanging. I wish I would have thought of it.

Once you join EntreCard, there are several approaches you can take when using the system. You should decide what your true motivation for using this type of system is, and this will dictate your usage approach. There are two schools of thought; use the system to drive traffic to your web site and care only about yourself, or, use the system to gain exposure to new and interesting blogs/sites (and bloggers), and in addition, drive traffic to your site.

Regardless of how you plan on using the system, you should do these things to make the most of your usage of the system:

Make a flashy card. The colors should stand out.
When placing the EntreCard widget on your site, place it near the top of the page so it is easy to see for speed droppers.
Click the “Campaign” button and select the section you are interested in.
Visit the sites that look interesting to you. This is where you contribute to the system. When you are at each site, drop your card by clicking the “Drop” button on the EntreCard on the site. You will receive an “ec” for each drop. See ….. for more information on EntreCard rules.

Report any sites that you go to and they do not have an EntreCard displayed on their site so they can be removed from the system.
4. Promote your site. Two ways you can do this are to purchase comments from the Shop, or by clicking the “Advertise” link on the cards displayed under the Campaign button. One key is that you should use your credits to promote your web site as soon as you get them. Since they can’t be sold through the system yet, there is really no reason to hold on to them.

NOTE: You can only drop 300 cards per day. The EntreCard day cycles at midnight East Coast time.

Did I leave anything out?

Tell me about your experience with EntreCard. Leave a comment on this post and I will credit your EntreCard account with 10ec. It has to be a comment of substance (at least three sentences).

SEO Tools

John — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:25:00 +0000

I just came across this tools site that has a bunch of cool tools on it for SEO and site promotion. It’s http://www.seomoz.org/tools. Now I am still going to come up with my super massive list of SEO tools. I just wanted to post this just in case you can’t wait.

Use Technorati to promote your blog

John — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:25:00 +0000

If your business has a blog, you need to promote it. Use Technorati to do that. Here is my Technorati Profile. Check it out.

Keyword Density Checker

John — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:46:00 +0000

Keywords are important to SEO. If you are not using enough keywords in your content, your site will rank low in the search engines. Here is a tool that can help. It’s a keyword density checker. It will tell you the number of times each keyword appears in your content. Check it out. It’s FREE.

Free Button Maker

John — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:33:00 +0000

Make your site look professional with this free

How important is SEO to your company?

John — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 08:00:00 +0000

How important is SEO to your company? I'm finding, through personal experience, that SEO is not that important to a lot of companies. I believe this is because there is no tangible immediate gain. There is nothing that your company's decision-makers can put a finger on that can be labeled as a tangible benefit. SEO also takes time to show a result and a lot of businesses want to work on things that show an immediate benefit to the exclusion of SEO. Instant gratification has positive gains now, but no gains (and sometimes negative gains) down the road.

SEO is very important. If you want a mediocre site that just barely gets by with low ad revenues and minuscule traffic numbers, stick to the status quo. If you want a site that rocks with high traffic and high ad revenues, work on your SEO.

SEO, however, does not have to be the number 1 priority. SEO can actually be done in a relatively short amount of time each day. A couple of blog posts, a couple of comments on other blogs, and some forum posts can be enough for a day's work. There are even passive approaches, such as using the Alexa toolbar.

When writing this post, I'm reminded of a quote from the movie The Cheetah Girls, which is “Sometimes, you have to walk alone.” Maybe, when it comes to SEO, “Sometimes, you have to walk alone”.

So what's it gonna be?

Related Information:

Why Technorati Is Good For Site Promotion

John — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 04:30:00 +0000

Web Site Promotion For The Small Business v2
December 18, 2007

Although, on the surface, it would appear that adding another method for people to get to your site would be a positive thing, however, not all bloggers agree that Technorati tags actually help your web site traffic. On dailyblogtips.com, the list the following fours reasons why Technorati helps your blog:

technorati tags will allow more people to find your blog
technorati tags will increase the traffic coming from Technorati
technorati tags will increase the keyword density of your posts
technorati tags will increase your search engine traffic

Although these reasons seem to be very convincing, some bloggers have run tests to determine if the tags help traffic by removing the tags from their sites, then monitoring to see if the traffic level changes…and it did not. Coincidence? Who knows? All I know is if there is a possibility that Technorati can help my site's traffic and others are using it successfully, I'll use it too.

I found one blog post, entitled Are Technorati Tags Useless?, that indicates Technorati tags are useless. I would think, however, that if they were so useless, the information professing this line of thinking would be more prevalent. Decide for yourself.

11 SEO-related RSS Feeds

John — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 03:17:00 +0000

Web Site Promotion For The Small Business v2
December 18, 2007

Need more to read? I can't image that you would, but if you are like me and you soak up information like a sponge, here are 11 SEO-related RSS feeds. Read to your heart's content and don't blame me if you lose some sleep:

SEO Chat

John — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:56:00 +0000

Google Local Business Center

John — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 01:44:00 +0000

Web Site Promotion For The Small Business v2
December 14, 2007

Are you listed in Google? Now are you listed in Google Maps? See the image below for an example:

Another tip for those wanting to promote their small business via the Internet is to get listed in Google Maps. This listing is free and not only provides the user with more information about your business when they search for your business in Google Maps; it also displays a map under your listing if it shows up first in search results when searching the web. Tools to increase your rank in the search engines…from the best search engine in the world. What more could you ask?

Live Search Webmaster Center

John — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 07:17:00 +0000

Web Site Promotion For The Small Business v2
December 3, 2007

Microsoft has now created a webmaster area for people wanting to tweak their site performance on Live Search. I have not yet had a chance to use the Live Search Webmaster Center, so I cannot comment about it but maybe some of my readers can review it and comment on it. Not sure when I’ll have the time to get over their. SEO is a 26 hour per day job…and then some.

Get help from the search engines? Are you kidding?

John — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 02:00:00 +0000

Web Site Promotion For The Small Business v2
November 20, 2007

Yes. The search engines do offer some measure of assistance for web site promotion and recognition. Now, if they would only publish their actual rules for ranking…

Yahoo's Tools

Yahoo Site Explorer – https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Yahoo Developer Network – http://developer.yahoo.com/
Yahoo Web Hosting – http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/sitebuilding.php
Yahoo User Interface Library – http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
Yahoo Geocities (Free Web Space) – http://geocities.yahoo.com/
Yahoo Publisher Network – http://publisher.yahoo.com/index.php?loc=USYPN0023
Yahoo Search Marketing – http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/

Google's Tools

Google Web Toolkit – http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
Google Webmaster Central – http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Google Webmaster Help Center – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/
Google Trends – http://www.google.com/trends
Google AdWords – http://adwords.google.com/
Blogger Web Comments for Firefox – http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/webcomments/index.html
Google Web Site Optimizer – http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/index.html
Google Analytics Blog – http://analytics.blogspot.com/
Google AdWords Blog – http://adwords.blogspot.com/

Other Tools

Tripod (by Lycos) – http://www.tripod.lycos.com/build/

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

John — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 08:00:00 +0000

This is information you need to know. This will give you some idea what the people at Google were thinking when they decided on the inclusion algorithm for their search engine. This guide is being re-published. The original is located at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&topic=8456

Webmaster Guidelines

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank
your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these
suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to
the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices
that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or
otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer
show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

Design, content, and technical guidelines

Quality guidelines

When your site is ready:

Have other relevant sites link to yours.

Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.

Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.

Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

Submit
your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project
and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Design and content guidelines

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Offer
a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts
of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may
want to break the site map into separate pages.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Try
to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or
links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.

Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

Check for broken links and correct HTML.

If
you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?”
character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic
pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short
and the number of them few.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical guidelines

Use a text browser such as Lynx
to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site
much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies,
session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your
site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble
crawling your site.

Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs
or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques
are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access
pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may
result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to
eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since
HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether
your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting
this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This
file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make
sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block
the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html
to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test
your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google webmaster tools.

If
your company buys a content management system, make sure that the
system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl
your site.

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other
auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or
manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other
misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by
registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to
assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included
on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their
energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a
much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than
those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport.
Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems,
so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports
we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and
block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines – basic principles

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive
your users or present different content to search engines than you
display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

Avoid
tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb
is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a
website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does
this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?”

Don't participate in link schemes
designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular,
avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your
own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Don't
use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings,
etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of
Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

Don't send automated queries to Google.

Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.

Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration.

You may also be interested in…

How do I add my site to Google's search results?

How can I create a Google-friendly site?

SEO and Web Site Promotion Tools: An Overview (Part 1)

John — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 08:00:00 +0000

Web Site Promotion For The Small Business v2
November 17, 2007

There are many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) sites out there and one these sites are many tools that can be used to assist the web site owner in the optimization and promotion of that person's web site. Here are some of the tools and what they can do for you:

Page Rank / Web Rank Checker

This tool will allow you to check the ranking of your page/site. Tools like this are usually specific to a particular search engine.

Google Pagerank Prediction

There are so many factors that go into a site's PageRank that it is hard to predict what a page's rank might be in the future, however, the site listed below contains just a predictor. It provides a prediction of future rank based on current links and references to your site.

Google PageRank Predictor on www.selfseo.com

Google ban check

There is no such tool. This is a simple search check for the web URL.

Link Popularity Checker

Link popularity is defined as the amount of incoming links to a particular website. This is one of the most important factors for achieving top positions in search engines. The more quality links you can get the better. With this tool you can check the link popularity for any page. The results will indicate how many links to your page have been noticed by the major search engines, which include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Alltheweb & Hotbot.

Link Popularity Checker located on www.selfseo.com

Keyword Suggestion/Popularity Tool

This tool allows you to find out what combinations of keywords are best for you to include in your keyword META TAG.

Keyword Misspelling

We all make mistakes. This tool will allow you to compensate for the mistakes people make in spelling when entering data into a search engine. It generates a list of popular keyword misspellings. You should also add these to your keyword list.

http://www.selfseo.com/keyword_typo_generator.php

Keyword Search

Check out your competitor's web site and find out what keywords he uses.

http://www.apogee-web-consulting.com/tools/keyword_tool.php

Vs. Check (You against them)

I am currently the web site manager for a martial arts web site (www.stlouisselfdefense.com) in the St. Louis Missouri area. We have a direct competitor. I knew in my heart that our web site was better, but until I found this tool, I didn't really have a way to validate those feelings.

http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/seo-challenge.html

Outbound Link Checker

If you don't already know what sites your site links to, this tool is for you. I tried it and I believe you may have to check page by page, but it does work well.

http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/outbound-links.html

I am breaking this subject up into several posts because there is so much information to digest.

Stumble Upon

John — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 08:00:00 +0000

Web Site Promotion for the Small Business v2
November 6, 2007

StumbleUpon is a social networking site that allows you to share bookmarks with other users. You install a toolbar and that toolbar allows you to give the thumbs up to websites that you wish to rate. This method is GREAT because you can give your blog the thumbs up daily, because you know your content is excellent. People using the StumbleUpon service will also get exposure to your blog, or any other site you give the thumbs up to. The more people giving your blog the thumbs up, the more
traffic you will receive. Many sites and blogs receive thousands of
stumbles in a single day thanks to member approval. Keep in mind that this may create a short-term burst of traffic and that the traffic will, most-likely, not last. While you might see flowing traffic from StumbleUpon for a good
week or two, after that you might get only a stumble or two here or
there. The good news is that you more than likely landed a few new
regular readers.

Don't just take my word for it. RT Cunningham mentions some testing that he has done to prove this point in this blog post http://www.untwistedvortex.com/2007/07/10/stumbleupon-a-blog-authors-best-friend-for-now/. Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger.net even goes as far as to publish a how-to on using StumbleUpon for promotion in this blog post: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/09/26/building-your-blog-with-stumbleupon/.

Measuring Page Rank

John — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:34:00 +0000

Web Site Promotion for the Small Business v2
October 19, 2007

All of this site promotion stuff is great, however, if you can’t measure your efforts, what good are they? If you spend 40 hours a week to promote your site and you gain 1 new visitor, you’ve wasted 40 hours. Promotion of your web site increases your PageRank™. Instead of trying to explain how this works, I’ll let the pros do it. Below, you will find a quotation from one of Google’s pages and it explains how PageRank™ works. They should know. They created it.

Introduction

Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC’s we’ve networked together to create a superfast search engine.

The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools.

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Integrity

Google’s complex automated methods make human tampering with our search results extremely difficult. And though we may run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a particular or higher placement). A Google search provides an easy and effective way to find high-quality websites that contain information relevant to your search.

Google Technology. 25 April 2007. Google.

Now that you know what PageRank™ and how it works, you need to know how to tell where your site stands, ie, what’s your PageRank™. In simple terms, your page rank is your location in the search results. You want people to find your website before they find another site with similar information. The simple answer on how to measure your PageRank™ is to search Google for keywords that are in your site and count how many sites come before yours. In the example below, the search term was “coffee” and my site, for the purposes of this example, is www.starbucks.com.

In this search, my site came up as the third actual entry, but the second item overall. This is a good placement and the site has good SEO.

If your site is not ranking high enough, you may need to adjust the content on the site to better match the keywords being used to find your site.

John A Simpson » Tools

Change Your Job Strategy

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Stumble Upon

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