Posts by Dani

What is the infatuation with PR nowadays? Google's PR toolbar is completely irrelevant and no one knows the real truth to everything it takes to rank well in Google's SERPS.

Never heard of them. Their website doesn't look too reputable.

Well ... traffic and a good click thru rate, because a million bots who don't click ads isn't going to do anything. Once you've got a handle on that, high paying keywords doesn't hurt either. The same way you use on-page SEO to focus on the keywords you want to rank for, you can use on-page SEO to focus on the keywords that are the most competitive in AdWords and therefore get the highest CPC rates.

I'm actually surprised how well link units work for me, considering they're so small and require two clicks.

Get lots of inner links from authority sites to inner pages throughout your site ... that spreads PR in a very natural looking way.

We recently started working with a new ad network. Someone brought this up a couple of days ago and I thought it was taken care of. I'm going to handle this for once and for all today.

Get lots of incoming links from lots of quality sites.

Well colleges start late August/early September which is actually why our traffic goes up in Sept ... All those freshmen taking intro to programming courses!

Myth 3: Frequent updates to your pages may increase the search engine crawl rate, but it won’t may not increase your rankings.

Yeap, that's what I said :)

I'd assume because they'd come off as keyword stuffed domains.

I think that a good search engine marketing campaign encompasses on-page SEO (having clean html code that proper utilizes page titles, h1 tags, etc), off-page SEO (having a constant stream of new backlinks, getting blogs to link to you, viral marketing), and PPC (buying clicks to your front door pages of your site and your high converting pages).

The pages of your site that are content rich and get the free traffic from Google SERPS aren't necessarily going to be the best converting pages of your site (so that's when you use PPC). That being said, DON'T underestimate the power of backlinks and link building and press releases and viral marketing and getting buzz going around your site ... It gives you a name in the industry, gets people coming back, and can get you traffic from the SERPS at pennies on the dollar of what you'd be spending with PPC alone.

1 => Search engines automatically find you when other sites link to you.
2 => Search engines are pretty smart about figuring out your navigation and site structure. However, creating an XML sitemap certainly can't hurt, and is a good idea if you've found the search engines aren't indexing your most important pages.
3 => When you update your site frequently, the search engines come back more frequently so that they can always have the latest content indexed. However, it doesn't affect where you rank in the results AFAIK.
4 => PPC ads have nothing at all to do with organic ranking.
5 => It's possible to get banned from Google if you link to many "bad neighborhoods", use advanced cloaking techniques to specifically outwit the search engines, etc. If you have a Webmaster Tools account, you can sign in and send an email to Google and they'll usually look into the situation fairly quickly and get you reindexed.
6 => The common theory is that buying links can't hurt you, but if Google finds out that they're paid, they won't help you either. Technically, that could negatively impact you because you'd be throwing away lots of money that doesn't help you. That being said, your rankings can be affected if it's you who is caught selling links.
7 => On-page SEO can be just as important as off-page SEO. Ensure you have clean html code, are making good use of CSS, headings are …

Since my last post in this thread, I've created a Facebook account and I actually use it much more than LinkedIn now for business purposes. I've joined a couple of Internet marketing groups which use it to plan events here in NYC. It's also a great way to meet other people in the industry since a lot of my colleagues are my Facebook friends.

Use the Thread Tools dropdown menu and select Edit Thread. Unfortunately this is a moderator-only function so the OP will need to request a mod to make a change for him.

Unless they're seo types :)

When I do a Google search for all of the keywords that you do rank on, there are about a couple hundred thousand results each. However, "bailout bill" returns nearly ten million results for me. It's most likely that this keyword is just super competitive (compared to the others that you're aiming for) and therefore requires going above and beyond to rank for it. It's even possible that it's so competitive that it's not possible to achieve with on page SEO alone.

I mean with respect to speed and also searches tend to be super literal ... I've had the literal problem with Sphinx as well (i.e. it doesn't automatically do searches including/excluding prefixes/suffixes). I've heard really good things about Lucene but never tried it out myself.

Easier said than done :) Where could I go to purchase such a campaign without a five figure budget? Unless I were to set up a DaniWeb affiliate program of sorts myself :)

You should always include a unique page title, unique meta keywords, and a unique meta description tag on every individual page, that explains the contents of that particular page.

I'm confused what you mean by finding these pages in your sitemap? Is another site out there linking to these nonexistent pages? Adding :80 to the end of a domain name indicates to connect to the web server on port 80, which is the standard port that serves websites. It's implied by default when you connect to a website and don't specify a port (as we normally don't do).

So if you use dashes in that domain name why would you not use dashes in medical-malpractice?

I was just wondering how those of you with large communities handle site searches? With very large forums, even MySQL fulltext isn't good enough, nevermind the search feature built into software like vBulletin or phpBB.

Anyone play with www.sphinxsearch.com or something similar? Or are we all switching to Google's CBE nowadays?

May I ask why not? Buying links on other sites is definitely a black hat technique, but there are many legit ways to do off-page SEO that are fully endorsed, and even recommended, by Google. It's definitely super important to get yourself out there and get other sites talking about you ... in forums, in blogs, in social networking sites ... Viral marketing is key to a well-rounded search engine marketing campaign. On-page SEO can only take you so far.

Are you doing off page optimization ... i.e. getting backlinks to your site with 'bailout bill' anchor text or the words 'bailout bill' mentioned on the pages that link to you?

I am of the belief that there is very little weight in keywords in domain names. And when it's more than one word, Google only separates words with a dash like medical-malpractice.com. Otherwise, it's just a big mosh of letters and Google doesn't know where one word ends and the next begins.

That being said ... I'm a big fan of short, simple, and sweet ... There's obviously the viral marketing / word of mouth / branding advantage to malpractice.com.

Hi,

Firstly, I received your PM and want to apologize for taking over a month to reply. September was a very crazy month for me.

That being said, I think I'm a bit confused as to what it is that the mods aren't excited about. What do you mean by having the mods and editorial team work together to develop content? Is it just that the mods don't want to create the content but just want to be mods and edit/review it? Perhaps the mods just want to be the idea people, giving the editorial team suggestions on topics to write about or what they think the community wants to read.

I've created portals that include latest threads, most popular all time threads (by views / replies), this week's most popular threads (i.e. hot topics of the week), etc. These are all ways that portals can be completely automated with regular fresh content by taking top content out of the forums automagically.

Something else to play around with is to make a portal that is custom for each registered user. For example, keep track of which threads the user visits, and display the last ten threads the user viewed or posted in. When they return to your site later to see if anyone replied to them, they'll appreciate that all of the threads they want to check out are all there in one convenient place for them (without them having to subscribe to them, if your …

[search]SEO[/search]

In getting started when my forum was new, one of the main things that I tried to do was respond to every single poster within a couple of hours. I found that users didn't always mind that the site was empty as long as THEY had someone to talk to and THEY were being heard. That's what got them to come back with their friends. Eventually you do reach that critical mass.

This thread was created because I spent half of today in AdWords trying to drive traffic to the Site Management category, one of the categories here which gets hardly any traffic (at least compared to others). The Site Management blog definitely leaves a lot to be desired as well ... It's a community-based blog so you can actually contribute to it by visiting our blog section.

Hi and welcome to DaniWeb! I can't really point out specific threads because your interests seem rather broad :) Plus, I don't hang out in the programming forums a whole bunch lol.

> Being new to computer programming
He says he's not new ;)

It depends on the directory. There are some really good quality niche directories that have real targeted traffic. And it's always a good idea to get yourself into DMOZ (although not as important as it once was IMO). With both directories and link exchanges, you just have to be careful about just being lost in the masses, whether it's 10 levels deep in a directory or halfway down a link swap page with 500 other links.

There are so many different aspects to SEO that it's hard to answer in just a single post. Start by reading through all the threads in this forum ... There are two main components to seo. Off-page SEO means getting other sites to link to you. On-page SEO means optimizing your HTML code, meta tags, title tags, and the actual content of your site (such as keyword density). It's definitely something that you can do yourself from home, but it is also something that takes time to learn, dedication, needs to be done on a continual basis, and can be monotonous at times. But, if you take a liking to it, it can be fun and rewarding as well.

Glad you got it working. I fixed code tags for you. Could you maybe post what you were able to do to fix your code so it might be able to help others in the future?

Well keep in mind that search engines do think about what elements are designed for ... Proper use of the <ul> tag for lists, <h1> for headings, <blockquote> to quote other sites, <strong> to emphasize certain words, etc.

I'm not sure what you mean by duplicate URL issues. The onclick parameter allows you to have scripting code executed when something is clicked, and search engines can't parse JavaScript.

Wow, thanks for that Google Blog link about flash indexing.

Well, affiliate marketing really isn't a subset of SEO. SEO is search engine optimization ... ranking high in the search engine results. Affiliate marketing is when an eCommerce website has affiliates who sell their product for them in exchange for a commission when a consumer buys the product through an affiliate. You can learn more about affiliate programs through our Advertising Sales Strategies forum.

It is not a problem at all - whatever the Google PR toolbar says. Don't focus on it. Instead, sign up for Google's Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/ and it will tell you the truth about how your site is doing in Google.

You're not going to like the simple answer: Search engines aren't capable of reading Flash. If your entire site is flash-based, search engines won't be able to read any of your content, and they won't include you in any search engine results (although they'll know about your site just as soon as it's linked to from anywhere on the web).

Create a non-flash version of your site (aside from the seo benefit, this is useful for accessibility reasons too, such as making the site available to the blind who rely on screen readers). Use flash only when it is necessary to demonstrate something or be super flashy ... If you can get away with doing something using text and a Javascript effect instead, then do so. You can do some mighty fun things with AJAX nowadays too. (Although be careful, because search engines can't parse Javascript code either.)

The simple answer: Use Flash when it's super important to do something and Flash is the only way to do it. Use plain ole text for all your actual content. Use Javascript/AJAX to add fancy effects without the heavy weight of a Flash player.

It would be mighty hypocritical if it did since Google's code doesn't even come close to validating. However, the cleaner your code is, the better off you'll be. It's also a good idea to use html tags the way they were meant to be used: H1 and H2 tags for headings, use <em> for emphasis and <strong> for strong emphasis, make proper use of CSS, use <cite> or <blockquote> when quoting from another site (it will get you out of any duplicate content issues), etc.

I'm not sure what you mean by social media optimization? Social networking is one of the best ways to advertise on the web for free ... It's a great way to do word of mouth viral marketing while earning a positive reputation among your peers.

I don't know of any tools that save the old PR toolbar value in their database. However, I seriously would not spend much time thinking about it ... Google's toolbar PR value is massively overrated and very inaccurate ........ by design. Google spits out the wrong info on purpose.

It's not quantity, it's quality. Get lots of backlinks from a wide variety of different domains. Get links from inner pages of sites to inner pages of your site. Homepage to homepage links are massively unnatural looking, just as sitewide footer/sidebar links have become.

The SEO and Internet marketing industries have brought forth the world of buying and selling domains at the drop of a hat. It's part of Google's algorithm that companies that are long established are the most trustworthy. Therefore, if the same domain is registered to the same company for a very long time, it ranks higher in the SERPS. Or so the story goes.

The reason not to have so many links is because it comes off as unnatural to the search engines ... If a link is supposed to be a "vote" for that page, and you vote for half the Internet, there's just way too much dilution to make any of your votes count.

Plus, it's really sketchy just how the search engines respond to nofollow. I've played around and solidly found beyond a doubt that I actually do pass massive amounts of PR with DaniWeb's nofollow links (so you might want to consider adding a forum signature even though it's nofollowed!).

Trackbacks include pingbacks, refbacks, and ... umm, I think there's a third one? Basically they are sites that link to a particular article. It's useful for the author of a post to see who's linking to what they wrote, and it's useful for readers to see if comments about the story they're reading exist on social bookmarking sites elseweb.

Same problem here, unfortunately. I do AWESOME with Google but no love from Yahoo!. Funnily enough, I was just browsing some old stats from Google Analytics, and I found that Yahoo actually did like me back in early 2006, and then just sorta fell off the radar and never came back.

Are you talking about changes to the sites that you link to that are beyond your control? If you think that a site might potentially change to include something you wouldn't want to link to, don't link to it. Period.

Check out our Webmaster Marketplace => http://www.daniweb.com/forums/forum36.html

Otherwise, as ithelp said, check out our Directory ... Free PR5s and some 6s I believe, depending upon the category.

I've never heard of using a "noodp" meta tag, which I assume means 'no open directory project'.

The page redirection is most likely your problem. If googlebot goes to www.site.com and gets instantly redirected to www.site.com/blah/, they have no where to pull meta information related to the specific page "www.site.com/" from other than the ODP.