How to Save Money on SEO & SMO

Thinking about hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) guru? I've said it here before, SEO is voodoo. SMO (Social Media Optimization) is worse. Well designed sites with good content or inherent authority get the top positions in the search engine results. Every time. Period. End of paragraph.

Don't pay for SEO. Instead, pay for a good site design (or redesign) or hire a writer to produce quality content.

Why people hate SEO... (and why SMO is bulls$%t) - The Jason Calacanis Weblog: "There are some whitehat SEO firms out there I know, but frankly the whitehat SEO companies are simply doing solid web design so I don't consider them SEO at all. SEO is a tainted term and it means 'gaming the system' to 90% of us. Now, if you make great content, keep your page design clean, and stick with it you're gonna do just fine in the rankings. Don't smoke the SEO-crack... you'll just wind up chasing your tail as digg and Google close the tiny SEO loopholes and put your domain on the black list."  ¶ 1:16 PM 0 Comments Links to this post  

  Gaining Publicity Through Good Deeds

Celebrities and corporations have known for years that supporting charities makes good business sense. It is good PR for them, helps promote a cause they believe in and makes the world a better place.

If you have a cause that you want to give something back to, Kevin Bacon (the actor) and Network for Good have teamed up to create a website called "6 Degrees". Through them, you can create a badge like the one to right that promotes your favorite causes.

Here a quote from Kevin Bacon:

"You've probably heard of the Six Degrees concept. Any one person (including me, Kevin Bacon) is connected to any other person through six or fewer relationships, because it's a small world.

"www.SixDegrees.org is about using this idea to accomplish something good. It's social networking with a social conscience. Through this web site, you can learn about and support the charities of celebrities and your friends, as well as fundraise for the causes close to your heart.

"I started www.SixDegrees.org in partnership with the nonprofit Network for Good in January 2007, more than 10 years after the game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” made the rounds of college campuses and lived on to be a shorthand term for the small world phenomenon. It is my hope that Six Degrees will soon be something more than a game or a gimmick. It will also be a force for good."

So take this chance to get yourself a little publicity and give something back to your favorite cause.

  ¶ 10:02 AM 0 Comments Links to this post  

  'Helpful Tips' has a New Home

Sexy Kenny's Tips for Webspace Owners has a new home and a new name. You can now find it at http://modernwebtips.com. http://sexykenny.com still works for now, but that may change in the future.

This change reflects that this isn't really a personal blog any more. It is being written conjunction with my internet consulting business and so needs to be a bit more formal.

  ¶ 6:30 PM 0 Comments Links to this post  

  Using Postmaster Services of Major ISPs

Having your server blacklisted by a major ISP can seriously disrupt service for your business. Many people use free email accounts at AOL, Microsoft Live, Google and Yahoo. If one of them identified you as a spammer and began blocking your email, you would have a tough time doing business with many of your customers.

To reduce the chance of getting blacklisted, it is important to be familiar with their spam feedback services and follow their bulk sending guidelines closely. Though they do not publish their blacklists, many major ISPs provide guidelines for senders of large newsletters to monitor their email. Even if your newsletters are opt-in, you must follow the ISP's bulk sender guidelines to assure delivery of your email.

Each major provider handles these issues a little differently. Fortunately, they all have websites that describe their policies and the tools they have available. To get a list of the tools at some of the major email providers, check out this great article at rackTIPs:

Playing Nice - Using the Postmaster Services of Major ISPs

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  Don't Let Spammers Hijack your E-mail Addresses Did you know that anyone in the world can send e-mail that looks like it came from you? All they have to do is type a few simple commands on a unix computer or download a spam utility from the internet and, viola, they can send e-mail as anyone they want. As a business owner, you need to protect yourself against this. You don't want to be accused of sending spam, or worse, viruses. All of this can be prevented by setting up an SPF (Send Policy Framework) record on the DNS server for your domain. If you are so inclined, you can get the hairy details at the Open SPF website. In a nutshell, SPF tells other mail servers the addresses computers that are allowed to send e-mail from your domain. If someone tries to send e-mail from an address that's not listed, the e-mail should be considered unauthorized. SPF records are highly recommended, especially if you send out a newsletter. In October, 2004, some large e-mail providers, like hotmail started quietly dropping e-mail that violated the SPF record. Even so, most webhosts still don't add them by default. How do you know whether you are vulnerable? You can go to you command prompt (on just about any computer that can access the internet) and type "nslookup -q=TXT your-domain.com". Look for a line that starts with "v=spf...". If it doesn't show one, then your domain name isn't protected. If you need assistance configuring an SPF record, contact Modern Webspace about our website checkup service. We will check over 200 settings that could affect your ability to do business on the internet.  ¶ 1:35 PM 0 Comments Links to this post  

  Research Your Domain Name Whether you already have a domain name or you are thinking about registering one, Domain Tools can provide you with a lot of great information. When you type in a domain name, it gives you a page with over 25 pieces of information about it. It tells you how many times it's been registered, who owns it, where it's hosted and a brief history of the domain name. The tools is free and easy to use, so give it a try.  ¶ 4:16 PM 0 Comments Links to this post  

  Getting Your Newletter to your Subscribers If you plan to do e-mail marketing, it is very important that your e-mail server is not on any blacklists. The blacklists are lists of servers used by known spammers. Often, a spammer will use an IP address for a while, then abandon it when it gets blacklisted. If that address gets reused, any e-mail sent from there will be ignored by any e-mail servers that check the blacklists. If you have an opt-in e-mail newsletter (or any business that uses e-mail, for that matter), it is important that you check the blacklists occasionally. Sometimes, legitimate opt-in newsletters will get blacklisted, even when they shouldn't. If your e-mail server does get blacklisted, you need to know it right away so that you can take steps to resolve it. Some blacklists have a way of getting your server removed from their list, but sometimes, you may need to start sending your newletter from a different server (or the same server with a new IP address). Fortunately, there is a website where you can easily check your server against 710 known blacklists. It is called dr. Jørgen Mash's DNS database list checker. The page isn't pretty to look at, but it is a very effective tool. The information that it gives you is pretty straightforward and easy to understand. It's hard enough to get you subscribers to read your newsletter, but you're doomed if it doesn't even get delivered. Be sure that your not being stopped by the blacklists.  ¶ 12:38 PM 0 Comments Links to this post  

  Keyword Research Guide

Here's another great link at Wordtracker. They publish a free ebook about how keyword research is done and how it can be used to increase traffic to your site. It includes expert advice from 9 SEO professionals. This is a great resource for anyone interested in increasing the amount of traffic they get from the search engines.

Topics include:

• Convert more traffic using Wordtracker
• Understand your customers' real motivations
• Combine thousands of phrases for an effective PPC campaign
• Use Wordtracker to find the size of the market
• Discover the most important sites in your marketplace
• Find inspiration in Wordtracker's Top 1,000 Words report
• Learn how an ad agency uses keyword research to position a client
• Use Wordtracker to identify niche opportunities
• Incorporate keywords into your content and copy

Read it

  ¶ 11:02 AM 0 Comments Links to this post  

  Wordtracker Launches Free Keyword Suggestion Tool Wordtracker has launched a free keyword suggestion tool to help website owners and managers optimize their websites so that they appear higher in search engine results. The free keyword suggestion tool and gives webmasters up to 100 keywords a time. It's not a nearly as good as their paid keyword research product, but it's a great place to start.
try it  ¶ 10:26 AM 3 Comments Links to this post  

  PHPlist: One of the best newletter managers PHPlist is an open-source newsletter manager. It has a huge feature set including double opt-in signup, scheduling, RSS feed generation, click tracking, attachments, bounce management and much more. Best of all, PHPlist is free to download, install and use, and is easy to integrate with any website. If you've been thinking about starting a newsletter for your business or group, take a look at PHPlist. It's a great tool!  ¶ 12:22 PM 0 Comments Links to this post  

  Get Rounded Corners on Your Website Without Images

A lot of Web 2.0 sites have rounded corners on everything. This is can be done with background images, but this leads to bulky webpages and areas on your web page that can be difficult to resize or change the colors.

This website demonstrates how to get rounded corners with only CSS and a downloadable javascript file. Pretty cool stuff! This is a great way to jazz up your website with only a little effort.

2/2/07 Update - I spent a couple of hours working with this code yesterday. It does some cool things, but it's not a magic bullet. It doesn't always knew what color to use as a replacement. And, if you have two rounded corners that are too close together, it does some funky things. I tried to round the corners of a div closely next within another div to create a rounded border effect and this is what I got:

Update #2 - The "fixed-height" parameter helped. The corners are smooth, now but still not the right color.   ¶ 9:38 AM 0 Comments Links to this post