Google Webmaster Tools

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard

I figured out why my niche site went back down in the rankings. Oh. Didn’t I tell you that? I was hoping that it would bounce back on it’s own, so I was waiting to see what would happen.

They still have not listed all of the links that are pointed at the site. They seem stuck on about 3 weeks ago. I’ve had 3 ezinearticles.com articles published with links and they haven’t gotten those yet. I’m not sure when they will get around to catching those.

But it wasn’t ALL just google being random. I do think that I found a problem and the reason that the site went back down. One of the site maps that I submitted to Google had some errors in it. Actually, the site map was correct, but I was messing with permalinks and some other settings, so by the time they saw it, the site didn’t match the site map. They even gave me about 3 days to correct it before penalizing the site. Since I wasn’t aware, it never got corrected.

If you have not gone to the web master tools page, you need to go now and create an account. This can give you information about when Google crawls your site and when it looks at your site map. It also, if you actually read it, tells you if there’s an error in your site map. This should be a regular stop on your daily routine.

I’ve made some changes to the site, added some internal links, and resubmitted the site map. I’m hoping that when I check on it tomorrow, we’ll be back on the first page. Stay tuned and stay aware.

Posted in SEO |

How Much Is A Domain Name Worth?

A domain name is worth whatever it takes to acquire it from it’s current owner. Is it worth that much to you? Maybe not.

The primary areas where there is value in a domain name for a business owner is in “ease of use” and in search engine traffic.

Ease of Use
If your business name is “Joe’s Bar and Grill”, then it’s easy for people to remember www.joesbarandgrill.com. It’s recognizable and easy to tell a friend. You don’t have to think too hard to know what to type in to find that web site. This domain name would be worth a lot to Joe, the guy who owns the bar and grill.

Search Engine Traffic
The stuff of SEO. If you have keywords that you want to be found for in your domain name, then you get points for SEO. Google likes to see those keywords in the domain name. Having them in order is even better.

As a business owner, those are really the only two factors that add value to the domain name.

Now, there are other factors that also add value, but perhaps not as a business owner. The less characters in the name, the more valuable. I can only imagine that it’s harder to get those and that more people want them, so supply and demand drives the price up. If a domain name can be used by more people, then the demand goes up with the price. None of these reasons interest me as a business owner.

If there is some sentimental value for the owner, then you will not be able to buy the domain name from them, even though it’s not worth as much to any one else. This whole post was prompted by a recent offer I got to by this domain name. It’s got a value on the open market, but it’s also my last name. I registered it on June 18, 1995. In those days, it was free to register a domain name. It was one of the first I had ever registered. (Wow. 14 years already? Time flies.)

I don’t want to sell this domain name. I can’t say I would never sell it, because realistically, if some rich person offered me enough money so that I didn’t have to work for a few years, I might take it. But in the meantime, it’s mine.

I’ve seen good domain names wasted by people who park them and hope to make a big cash score by selling them. There’s more value in developing them that in selling them. I own survivor.com, so naturally, as a fan of LOST, I talked to the guy who owns lost.com. He wasn’t interested in selling it or developing it. He’s done a bit with it now, but not as much as he could have. I also had a friend that was into Zydeco music. That domain is for sale on a parked web page. They want a bunch of money for it. Waste of a good name. Oh, well.

My advice is to get a good name that’s available. Make it unique. Make it yours. Make it easy to remember. Use keywords. Use your name. It won’t cost you much and you’ll get good results. Making money is the reason we’re in business, so keep your eye on that prize.

thanksforreadingmywebsite.com is available.

Posted in DNS |

Why Are You Here?

This post has nothing to do with SEO, web development, or small businesses. If you are a small business, get a web site. Now, back to what I want to say.

I was talking with a friend the other day. They had had some stories to tell about their childhood and growing up, but then, we all do. They told me that they had a light bulb moment, an epiphany. (WARNING – religious content ahead. Avert your eyes now. NSFA – Not Safe For Atheists.)

They had been thinking about a question that I had asked them a week or so before. I asked them “If God loves you, why did he give you the parents that he did?” This is like asking how God can be good when he allows children to starve. This is followed by long debates and much drinking of beer. I think I’ve sorted out the answer, philosophically, in my head, but when it comes down to me and my childhood and my parents, that feels a little different than a philosophical argument.

My friend told me that it popped into their head that God didn’t give her parents to her. God gave her to her parents. She was the gift, not her parents.

She felt that her parents would have been worse off in their lives if God hadn’t given her to them. This hit me. This is a new way of looking at things.

It’s not about me and how I feel about the world. It’s about how I can impact the world and make it better place. I have to let go of anger and fear and all those selfish emotions and go out and just do good things because that’s what I do. I want to be angry. I want to feel the pain. I want to be the victim. I want to hang on to the bitterness.

I need to open my hands and let all of that float away into the air.

I am here to make things better. Maybe that does apply to building web sites for small businesses. Maybe that does apply to how I treat clients. Maybe that will impact how much I get paid. I don’t know.

But, I think I have a better handle on why I’m here and what I need to accomplish. I need to be that help, that benefit, that nice guy, that helping hand, the guy you can trust. I need to change the world, no matter what the world has done to me or will do to me. I need to do the right thing.

Why are you here?

Posted in other |

SERPs

Search Engine Results Pages = SERPs

Who knows what magic algorithm Google uses to calculate what to return on those search pages? I’ve read about them. I’ve studied them. I’ve tested them. I don’t understand them. The more I know, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

I have a site that I’ve been trying to get ranked high. Per my research and everything I know about the on-page and off-page SEO and the competition, it should be doing pretty well. When I published it, it was #8 on the first page. Since then, it’s been slowly moving backward.

Down, down, down, into a burning ring of fire. – Johnny Cash

It’s been beyond page 3 for the last week or so, i.e., it doesn’t exist. I was bummed. What was I doing wrong? I knew a couple things I could do to make it better. I needed to work on the off-page back-links. I’ll get to those after some client work that needed to get done.

I check again this morning and it’s back on the first page! #10 with a bullet! I do some research on it and it seems that Google rolled through another one of my sites and recorded a bunch of links from those pages.

I guess my point is that random chance still has something to do with how you are rated on Google. The more I know, the more I realize how much they don’t know. They apparently are not quite networked with God yet, so they don’t quite know everything, all the time, everywhere. Yet.

If you are doing the best SEO you can and not getting the results you expect, give it some time. Time seems to be the great equalizer. Random chance will settle down over the long haul and the trends will stabilize.

You’ll get there. It will just take a while, or maybe a bolt of lightning.

SERP Position by Date

Posted in DNS, SEO, Wordpress, free |

Costa Mesa

Just wanted to point out that the fair grounds where we saw the cool cars last week is the exact same place that Obama spoke yesterday. I like the cars better.

Posted in other |

Hot Rods and Hackers

We went for a drive on Saturday. I knew there was a car show at the Orange County Fair Grounds, but I didn’t want to spend the money or the time walking around in the hot sun. We ended up close to it anyway, so we drove around the area. We found where the exit to the car show was and since it was later in the afternoon, cars were streaming out. We parked right across the street and watched our own private parade of cool cars.

I saw my first Corvette ZR-1, too many deuce coupes, 55 Nomads, and outrageous cars. I saw a 65 Chevelle that looked identical to the one I street raced in the summer of 1974. That brought back a flood of memories of growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, working on cars. I wondered how I got from there to where I am today, building web sites and doing Internet Marketing.

Those “high boys” got to be so common because the guys that built them were trying to take a stock car and make it better. They took what they had, a cheap, plentiful, easy to get car, and make it drive faster, handle better, and look cooler.

That’s essentially the definition of a hacker. Some one who can take what is easily available and make it better. It’s the mind set of the DIY movement. Take what you have and make it better. Don’t wait for someone to do it for you. Don’t wait for next year’s model. Take last year’s model and make it better than anything that any company will ever sell.

Early hot rodders were outside the law. Some hackers are outside the law. It doesn’t matter. They both do whatever they want to make whatever they have better, according to their own rules, their own goals.

Building a web site is like building a hot rod. Have an idea of what you want. Take the tools and materials at hand, and just build it.

Some people have the ideas, but not the skills. There are hot rod shops that can build you the hot rod that you want. There are development shops that can build you the web site you want.

Take control. Do it yourself. Don’t take what they give you. Make it your own. Make it what you want. Be a control freak. I am.

Posted in web site build |

What Keywords Should I Target?

I’ve been doing some research on keywords for a couple clients and for a couple of my own sites. It’s amazing what sites are out there and just how many of them.

It’s frustrating to think that you can pick a keyword or a keyword phrase and own it in a few weeks. Even if the competition is not that tough. There are thousands of pages out there that talk about exactly what you want to own.

A lot of the tools will give you some phrase that seems really good, but there’s no way that the data they are telling you can be correct. It’s just wrong sometimes. I’ve been checking Yahoo against Google to see if they match what they are saying as far as number of searches per month, etc. Yahoo seems to have some strange bumps in the data, so I’m trusting Google data much more.

I think that the key to it all will be time. Get your domain out there as soon as possible. Get some content on it and try to optimize it. It looks like we are moving past keyword density and towards relevant content. Even if it’s not the exact phrase that you want to score well for, you need to have a lot of related, relevant content around your phrase.

Back links seem to be king also, but be careful on the timing, the anchor text, the page rank of the source page, the keywords on the source page. Again, it seems that having relevant content, that works for people, is the best way to get ranked for your search terms. There are no games, not magic potions, or secret back doors.

Target the keywords that you want to target. Work the back links. Write good content. It’s pretty straight forward, but a lot of hard work.

Posted in SEO |

Inertia

I’ve been building web sites since 1994, back when each page was lovingly hand crafted and slowly placed in the server. Web sites are in my blood. I’ve grown old with HTML. I’m so intimately involved in web sites that I dream about them and speak HTML as a native language.

But, not every one is like me.

Imagine that.

Some people actually think that building a web site is difficult and expensive. Some people think that they don’t know enough to be able to create one. Other people think that web sites only exist in the realm of those techie guys and geeks.

Some people are afraid.

I want to tell everyone that putting up a web site is cheap and it’s easy. There are a couple technical things to know, but there are a couple technical things to know about driving a car too. Setting up a DVR can be tricky. If you can figure out how to use a cell phone, I think you can set up a web page.

The basic steps involved are:

1. Register a domain name.
2. Rent space on a web host.
3. Install wordpress.
4. Pick a theme and activate it. (one click.)
5. Write content.

That’s it. There are no more steps to setting up your very own web site.

Want a free site? That’s even easier! In that case, you only have the last two steps. Go to Wordpress.com, sign up, pick the theme and start writing. You don’t have as much control, but it’s free!

It seems that the biggest reason that more people aren’t doing this, is inertia. They think that it’s hard and they are afraid. It’s easier to site on the couch and watch TV.

If your church does not have a web site, why don’t you go to http://www.wordpress.com right now and create one. Don’t tell anyone about it quite yet. If it doesn’t work, you can bail on it. Play with it. Put in some content. Change the theme a few times.

When you feel like it’s pretty cool, go tell someone at your church about it.

They won’t like how to you did it or what you wrote about something. They won’t like the color. They’ll ask you to make changes.

What will happen then is that the question will be the color or the content or the style or something. It’s no longer about “Do we need a web site at all?”. Now it’s “What kind of a web site do we want?”.

Make their changes and you’ve done it! The world is a better place. Your church will have a web site, more people will attend, members will better know what’s going on, and everyone will be happier.

You might actually be responsible for someone knowing Christ. Isn’t that better than watching TV?

Posted in church |