admin | December 22, 2011
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LSI Keyword Research and Article Writing

LSI is the new “catchphrase” that you see touted by a lot of content producers and seo firms, but what is it, how is it different, and why should you care?

Latent Semantic Indexing  is the use of related keywords in content so that long and shorttail keywords are used together in tandem to increase the keyword relevance of the content, while at the same time targeting longtail content, while also decreasing the use of 1 term repeating it all over the page, known as “keyword stuffing”. The wikipedia article above tells more than you’d likely ever want to know about the concept.

You can purchase LSI articles affordably, with high quality content running 15-25 dollars for 1000 words, or you can write your own. For some complex topics where you have a specific tone in mind, or if you are frugal or do not like using content written by others, writing your own might be your only option.

How do you get started?

Step 1: Pick a primary keyword. Typically, most articles should start this way if you’re trying to rank the page to make money with it. This can be done in a number of methods, typically I use Market Samurai to find a lower competition keyword with over 10 searches per day on exact match, but any metric here is valid if you wish to gain the traffic from that keyword.

Step 2: Run the primary keyword through keyword research, namely the google adwords suggest tool. Print out a listing of all keywords that are relevant and share the article topic, and can be fit into the text.

Step 3: Arrange the keywords in a natural way, including your main keyword inside <title> <h1> <h2> <strong> and <alt> (image alt text) tags. What you want here is for the main keyword to be in all valid locations. Then arrange your secondary keywords from the keyword research in <h2> <h3> and <strong> headings, possibly <alt> also.

Step 4: Write between 750 and 1250 words on the topic. You can go over this amount, or under. Current research has shown that since the google panda update that pages with over 1000 words are making up the majority of top 3 ranking pages, which throws the old metric of 500 word pages directly on it’s head. Google appears to love text now, and relevant text with included keywords is the way to go.

When you’re finished with steps 1 thru 4, read over what you’ve written and make sure that the article flow is still acceptable. One of the issues with this style of writing is that it can tend to appear forced. An LSI article is not quite as easy to write as one where you’re just trying to use a single keyword 3% of the time and make it 500 words, but it does appear to have much stronger pull with google in terms of ranking.

A good test would be to take a page you have currently, that is off page 1, and do nothing to it other than change the text on the page itself to meet the 4 steps given above, then see if you see upward or downward movement after a month, or any increase in traffic. Because of the randomness built into google now, tracking daily movement isn’t nearly as good an indicator as it once was, you’re much better off watching the awstats module in cpanel to see the change in traffic for keywords you have targeted than to watch tracking statistics because of the changes google made that caused most results to be personalized to the searcher.

I saw personally movement of several positions by just the switch to LSI content on pages, with no change in backlinks, and the page rapidly gained traffic, over 10% increases seen after only two weeks.

Category: SEO | Tags: , , ,
admin | November 14, 2011
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Internet censorship coming to the United States – Stop the legislature.

Internet censorship, the same as you would see in China or other repressive regimes, is coming to the United States via a law mislabled as the COICA,  Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act.

Under the guise of preventing copyright infringement, this overreaching law actually gives the US Government the right to remove any website from viewing from the entire internet. It is a form of censorship NEVER before seen in this country, and it completely violates our rights of freedom of speech, habius corpus, right to a fair trial, etc.

The way it works, any company that wants to claim infringement on it’s copyright can file a complaint, and if the offending material is not removed within 5 days, the entire site can be shut down.

There is no court process, no trial, just a government administrator with the right to remove anything they want from the internet. The potential for abuse is huge.

The reason we have a legal system, courts, judges, juries, is so that the weak can be protected from both the government itself and companies or individuals with much larger amounts of resources, so that our right to speak freely is not infringed upon. This law, as currently written would allow any company who did not like an article written about them to claim copyright of the article because their name was used, and have the offending website removed from the entire internet, worldwide.

It would allow government administrators, with limited oversight, to pull companies websites from the internet because of competing claims over copyright or trademark.

The line in the law that is so broad is:

“The lists are for sites “dedicated to infringing activity,” but that’s defined very broadly — any domain name where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are “central to the activity of the Internet site” could be blocked.”

Sites such as youtube, vimeo, or even google could be claimed to be under this umbrella. Since you can search on google for copyrighted things, or watch video on youtube that might be copyrighted, obviously they fall under infringing activities of the website.

A website that sold insurance, for an agency, could be pulled down for showing images of the carriers they represent, because the carriers wish to remove their competition from the internet.

Car dealerships could be pulled down, for using corporate logos, because the corporation wanted to be the only direct seller online.

If you like a product, and talk about that product but they do not like how you talked about them, they could claim copyrighted material was “central” to the activity you performed, and without a judge, jury, or trial, your entire website could be removed without warning from the internet.

This is not just a way to prevent copyright infringement, this is an attempt by large media outlets, corporations, and their lobbyists to remove competition from the internet, so that they can control the commercial traffic.

For many years now the internet was a true free market, and their goal here is to take the massive amount of traffic on the internet and remove freedom of choice, drive traffic to themselves, and reap the commercial rewards, not by having better content, or better sites, but by having their competition literally deleted.

Large corporate interests in the United States are using their money in order to control the market, much as the robber barons of the industrial revolution, by buying our politicians, and violating laws that have been on the books for hundreds of years to prevent this type of market manipulation by forbidding monopolies.

The only way to prevent this is to contact your representatives and senators and let them know that you see this law as a violation of your freedom, and that if they support this type of large government censorship that you will not only vote against them, that you will campaign against them and work to influence others to remove them from office.

We cannot be free as long as our politicians can be purchased by lobbyists to empower the corporations that pay for their campaigns.

Category: internet |
admin | November 8, 2011
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Fedora 16 Released today

Fedora 16 came out this morning, I’m testing it out in just a second, review will be imminent.

I had spent some time with the beta of 16 already, the big thing in it was the way they changed the bootup process, it is dramatically faster now.

Even in beta it was stable, however, I did manage to break it a few times by doing basically nothing. Still has gnome 3, up to 3.2 now, with all the good and bad that comes of that, still using evolution as the main email but some improvements were made to evolution.

The core systems and kernel have been optimized better though, and it did show even in the beta.

 

Category: Fedora, linux, Uncategorized |
admin | November 7, 2011
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Ubuntu 11.10 Review

Ubuntu 11.10, to me, is a big step forward for the OS. I used to prefer the Fedora distributions to everything, but it’s almost as if they looked at Ubuntu and said, “Hey, what are all the programs that this guy likes? Lets build all that into the OS.”

It has integrated Thunderbird for email, empathy (basically every chat program on steroids in 1 interface) for IM, Libreoffice (think Microsoft office before they added the stupid paperclip) for office, plus several other extremely useful apps.

Unity is a step up from Gnome3 in several ways. It’s cleaner, easier to navigate, really designed so that a beginner can use the system. For an old hat, you might be more comfortable with something less BIG on the screen, but it does seem to meet the balance between ease of use and power. If you dislike unity, break out the windows start menu in 7 and compare them. Unity is easier to use, easier to navigate, and can do more. Personally, I just install gnome-do and use it for basically everything, but Unity is a very good desktop. My sole complaint with Unity, I really do not care for how it takes the menu bar for a windowed application and puts it up on the top bar of the screen. It’s cumbersome, hard to find, and if you don’t make sure the proper foreground menu is pulled up it gives you the wrong thing, if you’re using synergy it will throw you off and sometimes let you exit the screen without even showing the menu bar. I’d prefer if unity put the menu bar ON the window by default for those exact reasons. I also do not care for how some background applications are included in the left side menu by default, even though you are just running them as background apps. I don’t need an icon in my menu for something like gpodder, or twinkle, or quicksynergy (lazy man approach), but by default they’re there, and they take up room that could be used for something else.

I know “uber” users would take offense to this also, but the software store is great for new users. It allows you to find basically any software and install without issue, works very well, I haven’t encountered 1 bug with it the entire time using 11.10.

Downsides:

Driver support could be better. Always the issue I think with every distro. My Brother printer/scanner is a bear to install, requires copying lib files, modification of the rules.d files, after installing of drivers, and even then still sort of prints goofy. I don’t think Brother has bothered to update anything with their drivers since version 8.04 of Ubuntu.

I tried installing the propriatary ATI drivers 1 time, then had to reinstall the whole OS to correct my mistake, when I figured out that would be faster than trying to fix what had happened. Can’t use more than 2 monitors because of the driver issues with ATI, I don’t necessarily blame Ubuntu for this, I’d say the blame can be passed around to ATI on that one, for failure to support their graphics cards on linux systems in general. Having said that, using the base graphics driver out of the repo worked fine, I don’t play games or anything so I don’t necessarily NEED the proprietary driver. Have some wierd graphics artifacts on the change desktop screen where it basically does a infinite loop of screens in 1 monitor, but doesn’t crash anything and is nothing more than slightly inconvenient.

Compiz setup app is completely busted atm for 11.10, don’t use it. Setting something that is only half working, like turning on desktop cube, can cause you to have to go through an hour of debug just to turn it off.

Basically, what I found was, the core apps are working great, the OS itself is stable, the apps included are stable, but when you get into other applications, you might run into “issues”. However, the OS itself is perfect for everyday use, in particular for those that don’t have printers with massive fail driver issues and ATI cards. I’d imagine Nvidia is supported better as it always was in the past, but I don’t have an Nvidia card so I cannot confirm.

Conclusion:

Ubuntu 11.10 is stable, usable, runs and works great, and is a viable desktop for everyday use. I’d give it strong consideration for anyone using or considering using linux, along with Fedora and Mint as a very viable desktop solution. For more advanced users, of course you could go with a more “expert” os, but for someone that doesn’t care to fiddle with the OS, it would be near impossible to beat Ubuntu. If the drivers worked out of the box, it would be a more pleasant experience than windows to install and use, without question, and if the stars aligned just right you might actually own hardware that is perfectly supported, and in that case there is no question to me that Ubuntu gives greater usability than a windows installation would, for hundreds of dollars less.

This was written after several days use of the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 11.10, I would imagine the 32 bit version is similar or near exactly the same, but your mileage may vary.

Category: linux, ubuntu |
admin | October 4, 2011
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Basics of network security for web servers

As my old vps provider was recently a victim of a hacking attack that didn’t intrude on my server itself, but caused defacement of index pages till they could be restored from my backups, because of very dumb security setup, I thought it might be smart to cover the most basic concept of network security for people who have their own websites.

Here’s the most basic concept there is. The circle of trust.

The circle of trust concept says that you only allow certain systems access to your sensitive files, by blocking all other systems from access. In the case of a web host, you want to keep a duplicate of EVERY file on the host, on another system, which the first system does not have access to in any way.

When inmotion was attacked, they had violated that concept, and their tech support system had access to overwrite files on every single server in their network. 1 attacker disrupted every site in the network.

Your offline copy should not sync both ways. It needs to be a 1 way sync that only uploads, but does not download unless you tell it to. This way, if the upstream server suffers attack, it has no effect on your files.

This can be done by having a small backup server in your house, another remote host, or other options. I work in netbeans from my home, a great free system for coding, which keeps a full working copy here, then syncs to the server as it is saved for changes to sync. This ment that when inmotion was hacked, as soon as they restored ssh access to my server all I had to do to make sure that all files were the right ones was hit sync.

You can also do this via setup of rsync or lftp for mirroring with a linux server in your house or at another hosting company, using the crontab scheduler to automatically grab the files. You can also use crontab to generate tarballs of the site, and full mysql dumps, and sync only those files.

Good practice for a server is to rsync a full copy of the site once a day untarred, or keep a working copy on the home server, but also tarball one backup weekly, and one backup monthly, in seperate folders, and sync those as well, so that you have backups you could revert to in case of an issue.

With mysql dbs, my preferred practice is to make an hourly backup, a daily backup, a weekly backup, and a monthly backup in seperate folders that overwrite each other so only 1 of each is kept. Then, I sync the daily, weekly, and monthly backups offsite. This way in case of a database corruption, you only lose an hour at most of your data.

Mysql dumps are incredibly small, I have a sugarcrm db with hundreds of thousands of total records that takes less than 50mb of disk space.

Since disk space is no longer expensive and everything can be handled by automation, there is no reason to not keep multiple backups of everything so that you never suffer a large loss of data, as it can be DEVASTATING to a web based business, or even one that just makes some sales that way.

If you need help with this sort of setup on your own server, and have access to ssh and crontab, I can assist you in the setup for around $100, (should take approximately 2 hours max for a server to do this using your storage, small fee involved to use me as your backup storage provider) and give you the peace of mind that your backups are taken care of.

Category: business consulting, linux, Security, SEO | Tags:
admin | October 3, 2011
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How to avoid scams when buying a website

A great place to make money from an endless pile of leads in any business is via Organic (non paid) website search engine results. This gets called SEO, SERP, etc, but if you don’t know what you’re doing and you go out trying to buy these type of services, you’re hanging your wallet out to thieves.

Midrange to high range independent tech workers in the US make on average 50$ an hour working on a standard schedule (non emergency work). If you’re paying for website design, seo, or any other services, and you’re getting charged over 50$ an hour, you’re being taken as a mark.

Ask to see time estimates, estimates of work completed, and ask for exactly what they’re going to provide you with an how long it will take. If it sounds fishy, it probably is.

Ask to see examples of their work. Lots of them. See if you notice similar code being “reused”, and if you do ask for discounts on the work, as there is not as much time involved.

The site I received initially when I started in insurance had no text on it, limited menus, was pretty but missing what was necessary to make it “work”. After purchase I literally had to break out books to learn modern web design practices (at the time I knew how to build a website in 1998, but it was 2008).

Don’t trust “reputations” or what so and so said. Ask for work samples with website names, if they wont give it to you, walk.

Ask what work you’re getting. I’ve seen a guy do local search engine seo before for 50$ for google/yahoo places on an affiliate marketing site, and seen the EXACT same service offered by a website vendor for 1000$.

In general, you’ll see quotes on web design running out there in the thousands of dollars range, and still have all the work outsourced. You can get content for a website for 2.50 per page, or buy it from a “pro” for 25$ a page, however, the content you buy is likely the same 2.50 content being outsourced via the vendor.

What you don’t know to ask can get your money literally stolen.

If you know how to do some of the work yourself, its a good idea to do so. There are TONS of videos up on youtube showing how to do different things in terms of wordpress, and that’s easily the best place to get started.

Get keyword research done at fiverr.com, from 2 or 3 sources, and compare the results. Cost you 10 or 15 bucks, target the terms that the people show that overlap. Write 350 words using those keywords as the title and in the article.

Do that for 6 months, then worry about a revamp and launch of a landing page.

Then worry about a bigger site.

In particular if you’re new, you have much bigger issues in play that having a website, you will not see returns for 3-6 months usually from that investment, and starting as a blog then adding a landing page will likely see the EXACT same result as starting with a full blown site would.

The most important thing with a new site is to research keywords, find a domain name that includes keywords or that you’re happy with, and start putting up reusable text content that targets your keywords.

Being original is good, keeping a schedule is very good, but you need content there before you’ll get indexed or seen. I didn’t get my first lead from my website until after it had been up almost 8 months and I had rewritten a lot of it from the ground up to fix errors caused by the original designer.

Now, I buy some limited ppc, I have quite a few organic terms, and I make a good living from what my website produces. A website can be your only source of leads in sales, but you do have to work at it, just the same as cold calling or buying leads.

You’re not going to find anyone that makes money outsourcing all the work. If you know enough to outsource and make money and not get overcharged, you also know enough to do a lot of it yourself.

Other than certain things which do require technical knowledge, such as initial installation of wordpress or an autoresponder, a build of a site, or a move between servers, the majority of content building after the fact can be done with very little technical knowledge. You don’t need to know how to log into ssh, tar xzf your tarball of wordpress, make the mysql tables, and set up crontab to run backups, pay someone 20-50 bucks to do that, then make your content.

You can get a website up for a whole year for less than 50 dollars including buying the domain name and initial keyword research, and you’ll likely see just as much return in the first 6 months as you will spending 2000 on a site builder and SEOexpert.

However, you will still have 1950 dollars left over.

If what someone is selling sounds too good to be true, it is.

Category: business consulting, SEO, technology consulting, Web Design | Tags: ,
admin | October 2, 2011
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Google rolls out new panda update

Google is making changes to their panda system which basically penalizes websites for being bad. I don’t have a better way to describe the idea.

What they appear to be doing is trying to compare sites that were found by humans to have bad behavior, then give penalties to other sites that appear similar, yet every day I still see sites crammed with bad content and duplicate content right at the top of the google results.

Sort of hand determining every search result in the entire world, the concept is likely only going to make it harder for an individual to rank on google for competitive keywords, easier for a large corporation that can afford a large seo team, and create more barriers to entry, not less.

Maybe that’s the idea.

The one thing I have noticed that would be a great idea to avoid would be purchased links from home page backlink networks. They’re getting their authority removed at a very high rate, and you’re likely wasting time and money buying them.

Category: google, SEO |
admin | October 1, 2011
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How to blog effectively for your small business

The principles of blogging are the same for any purpose, but for small businesses you see massive mistakes in content decision, length, scope, limitations of content, and more.

You don’t have to be a great writer to be a great blogger.

What you do have to be is either a great researcher, or have a great understanding of what people want to read. People only read your articles if the content of the articles were something they were looking for. Because of this, it is very easy to see that you should write about things people are both looking for and that you have unique insight or information about.

One of the two is fine, but if you have neither of those two criteria met, no one cares about your content.

You’d be lucky to get your own mother to come read what you wrote every day if it isn’t something she was interested in, no matter how much she likes you, and that’s your own mother.

Either you understand what people are looking for, or you use a tool to help you find what people are looking for. Google keyword suggest is a free way to do it, gives good results, or you can use a paid resource to find out what keywords are being searched for. Personally I like Market Samurai, because I feel it gives great information quickly. You could also swing by a site like fiverr.com, and pay someone 5 dollars to do keyword analysis about your topic.

What you really want are things people search about more than 20 times a day, that there are less than 100000 websites that use the term. More searches and less sites are always a good thing. Up to 250000 sites about the term can still be targeted, but at some point you’re never going to be seen and you might as well do something else.

Secondly, content frequency is important. I break this rule a lot because I’m just 1 guy, and I don’t always have time to post, but you need to post on a schedule, and typically no more than 1 time a day unless you’re a huge company or you have a ton going on. A better solution than multiple blog posts per day would be twitter or facebook status updates, and embedding twitter into your site so that the tweets are seen there also.

Blogs are a plate of food in a restaurant, where twitter is an accidental nibble in a food fight.

Third, and very importantly, leverage your content. If you have great content in a blog post, use it on your webpage. Post about the new blog posts to twitter, facebook, google+, and anywhere else you can. Post ebooks or articles about the content or using the content if the content is good enough to be syndicated.

The difference between bad seo and good seo is often completely in keyword research and leveraging. Most people do neither of those things, and because of that they are never successful in getting their content seen or used.

Since Panda, Google gives a very high regard for quality engaging content and one of the best ways you can get your message out in your own voice and create content for your site is by blogging. Results may come slow, they may not come at all, but likely the issue comes down to keyword research, scheduling or leveraging, and if you’re doing those wrong all the content in the world won’t matter. Do those things and even your average content will probably get attention, lead to conversions, and help your business overall.

Category: blog, SEO, wordpress | Tags: , , , , ,
admin | October 1, 2011
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Restaurant Web Design

I’ve always wanted to own a restaurant. I LOVE food. I have to have at least 50 concept restaurant ideas that have been floating around my head for years, and I’ve spent tons of time trying out restaurants and looking at websites belonging to them.

Restaurant websites are often lacking things that people want them to have, lacking engagement with customers, and the mistakes are made in such simple ways that it is basically insulting to the users. A lot of this can probably be attributed to web designers not understanding restaurants or what the customers would like to see.

What sorts of content do most restaurant web sites contain? They have the times they’re open, their phone number, maybe a menu, and some pictures. Typically, that’s where the page ends. There is 0 interactivity to the page, and if there is, its usually something stupid like a bad flash game. They usually dont even list coupons or specials.

Dare to be different. I so want to see a site do this that I’m happy to give these away just in hopes someone out there will notice these ideas and use them:

Put your menu on the site, and let customers VOTE on the quality of items. If they don’t like something, let them vote it off the menu. Introduce new items, and do the same thing, let them vote on a selection of 2 or 3 items to add to the menu.

Give out recipes. I’m not saying give away your grandmothers secret barbaque sauce recipe, but there is absolutely no reason that your restaurant can’t give away the recipe for nearly every item on the menu. People don’t always cook, they don’t always eat out, and if you give them a roadmap to making their favorite foods at home, you can give them reason to visit (to print out recipes) and a reason to think about YOUR restaurant and YOUR food. You couldn’t buy advertising that powerful. You’re engaging 5 of their senses, try to do that with a television ad.

Use facebook, twitter, foursquare, a mailing list, and every other social media method you can possibly think of to give out announcements of deals, menu changes, specials, and more.

Make videos of the back end of your operation, show videos of your cooks and the techniques they use to do certain things to go with your recipes. Have your cooks explain how to cook special things they might see, or how to do interesting or creative techniques. Not only will this benefit your customers, but the cooks need love too. They can be picked out for the month as a reward for good performance, and you’ve done 2 great things as an owner.

People today have so many options when buying food that you have to dare to be different to be seen. As a national chain, or a local restaurateur, there are tons of ignored outlets for creativity that are simply being ignored, and if properly leveraged could be not only a bump to your income, but also a fulfilling creative outlet for yourself and your employees.

Category: SEO, social networking, Web Design | Tags: , ,
admin | September 24, 2011
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Google Seo Guide to Panda

So most people who do seo, own a website, or use the internet have noticed that earlier this year there was a major change to how google determined page position. Tons of sites that had top positions dropped off page 1, pages that had never seen the first page leaped forward, and very few people understood how it happened or why.

A quick explination requires understanding why google makes changes, and what their intent is. Google’s well known motto “Do no evil” applies here. They were trying to improve the user experience for people using their search engine, by attempting to change the results to show pages which give the best user experience to those that use them. In order to make this adjustment, they first took human surveys for several months, then used the results of those surveys to cause a learning algorithm to attempt to learn what it was that the users liked, and did not like.

The old pagerank still applies, as do all the old links, however, if your site is noticed to contain markers that are typical to sites which produced a poor user experience, then google gave your site a negative penalty score which adversely affects the position of the page in search results.

Panda caused some very well known sites to jump to the top of a ton of categories, such as Amazon.com or Facebook.com, an easy answer to this is that those sites took money and focused it back into user experience, and because they’re huge companies with tons of money and they put it back into user experience, they were perfectly aligned for Panda update.

A negative consequence of the nature of the way search engines are now penalizing and rewarding the actions of huge companies that they can achieve only because they have the resources of a huge company is that ultimately the barrier to entry of a new company that desires a web presence will become much higher, however ultimately that benefits google in terms of PPC sales, because if it is much harder to organically rank, then more people will buy PPC out of sheer necessity.

So, how do you fix the issue, or benefit from the panda changes?

  1. Remove anything from your site which might be common to a site providing a poor experience, such as unnecessary advertisments, useless text, or bad pages which noone visits.
  2. Focus on getting links from sites that are known to provide an extrodinary user experience. Those links will now have even more value.
  3. Create excellent resources and content on your site. Give the user what they’re looking for. Don’t harass them. Give them things to watch, listen to, and read. Engage the user. Give them things to play with, and reasons to come back.

What was always the best possible practice is just more important now. That’s all panda did. To achieve better results, focus on better content, and stay with the same strategies you should have already been using.

Category: google, SEO | Tags: , ,
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