Today’s guest author is a prolific columnist and consultant about SEO strategies and author of the e-book Nine Thousand, Eight Hundred Seventy Six Ways To Put Your Site In Front Of People Who Have No Use Of Your Services, available soon from Churnumout Press.
It happens to the best of us: We get stuck in the marketing doldrums. To break yourself out of your marketing doldrums, you should do some kind of search engine optimization that you haven’t done before. Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your site for the benefit of being found through search engines. One of the best ways of learning about breaking out of marketing doldrums through search engine optimization (or SEO, as the experts call it – and now you can be one too!) is to read a numbered list, for which there is an example below.
- Read a numbered list of SEO strategies, of which this is one.
- Break yourself out of your marketing doldrums, for example by doing some kind of SEO you haven’t done before.
- Try a new SEO strategy, because it may break you out of your marketing doldrums.
- There may be things you haven’t tried before in the realm of SEO, so study numbered lists of them for ideas. For example, this one. Many people find this useful for breaking themselves out of their marketing doldrums.
- Many SEO experts recommend experimenting with new SEO strategies. Such things are available online, helpfully itemized in numbered lists.
Do you often find, after skimming to the end of a blog about online marketing full of useless factoids gleaned through lazy research from Wikipedia, a pointless and awkwardly-phrased leading question meant to invite conversation in a hollow attempt at fostering traffic and precious advertising revenue? Tell us about it by using the commenting form to comment!
Tags: blogpadding, filler, seo, webmarketing
Posted in: Web, advertising | No Comments »
Aside from the geek-awesome alternate universe Atari 2600 game packages, I’m just plain grooving on the site’s design. Usually page designs with multiple motifs look like bad ideas executed badly but this is wonderful in all kinds of ways. (edit: Use the Safari or Chrome web browser for added grooviness.)
Posted in: Found, Web, wordpress | No Comments »
I spent some holiday down time browsing gadget websites and enjoying the para-poetics; “Fruit forks on tree”, “Flower style alloy white fashion handbag table purse hanger hook“, “Bloating water crystal soil“. It’s slightly tempting to offer a prize for the best short free verse that incorporates these or similar product names, although probably mean to offer the products used by name as the prizes.
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Matt Haughey attempted to spec a bike with as many domestically-sourced components as possible. The result is beautiful, although it’s also a reminder of how dependent we are on overseas manufacture, even when cost is no obstacle; no American company makes all the components necessary for the drivetrain and that’s unlikely to change. Commuter bikes, at least, can depend on American-built baskets from Wald and bags from various companies.
Posted in: Bicycles, Found | No Comments »
A free web service from 37 Signals for you to make and manage checklists. It’s personal organization stripped of complication and methodological orthodoxy.
This site has been around for a while but it never crossed my path until namedropped by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber the other day. I’m already fond of it; I can add to-do items from whatever device (computer, phone, netbook) I’m on at the time and check them off from any other. It has a custom UI for the iPhone and possibly other mobile devices. It’s unrelated to 37 Signals’ other fine products, some of which I use, aside from the one-line ads for them in the computer browser version.
It does one thing and does it well.
Posted in: Found, Phones, Web | No Comments »
The Internet Archive corralled a bunch of URL shortening companies and has begun collecting and logging shortened URLs. Prominent in their absences are one of the most popular of the services, tinyurl.com and one that’s already suffered prominent downtime, tr.im.
Shortened URLs (translating, for example, a Google Maps location into a twelve-character URL) are a necessary evil in the era of message systems with short character limits, but among their many problems are two related to keeping web content usable.
The major problem is that if the URL shortening service fails or goes away (as tr.im temporarily did), every link on the web using that service is now disabled (or possibly maliciously diverted), even when the targeted web pages (for example, a Google Maps location) is still alive and healthy.
The minor problem is that more people are developing the bad habit of shortening all their links, even where it’s not necessary (for example, when the target URL’s already short or readable, or when embedding a link in conventional HTML), masking the identity of the target page and unintentionally destabilizing their own content.
A persistent archive of shortened URLs is a major first step (and a respectably massive effort), but its utility is limited unless there’s a means to recall from that archive as needed from anywhere, and that will be a hard problem to solve.
Posted in: Found, Web | 2 Comments »
Following last week’s epic post about running Mac OS X on a Dell netbook, this link is obligatory now that the news has dropped. Rumors of problems with 10.6.2 were widespread while it was in beta but there no useful confirmation of the problem was possible until last night, when the public release shipped.
In a nutshell, Apple’s latest update to Mac OS X (10.6.2) disables support for the Atom CPU common in most netbooks, including the Dell Mini 10v used in my review. Whether it was a side effect in fixing an unrelated issue or because Apple is now actively trying to inhibit hackintoshing, the result is the same as far as the Mac hacking community is concerned: From here on out, every Apple OS update is going to have to be reviewed and possibly modified by the hackintosh community before it can be safe for installation on non-Apple hardware. For my thoughts on the matter, see the late addition to the long Mac netbook post.
Posted in: Apple, Found, hacking | No Comments »
This is a bookmarklet for restyling the text on the page in a minimal single-column presentation, with superfluous content stripped out. Clever and useful, but has some problems (On Arc90′s own homepage, for example, the first context box is displayed and there’s no apparent way to view any of the other content boxes).
They’ve also released a Readability add-on for Firefox which works similarly.
Posted in: Found, Web | No Comments »
I’d figured out a couple of these on my own, but this is a handy reference. Otherwise, the Wave interface has you moving from keyboard to mouse and back an awful lot.
Unlike GMail, which could be used to communicate with anybody with an email address, Wave’s usefulness is relevant to the number of people you want to use it with. But even with a fairly limited range of acquaintances signed up, it’s already surprisingly useful.
Posted in: Found, Web, google | No Comments »