Archive for April, 2009

AVA RS5 – A Gadget for Geeks…

Posted on April 24th, 2009 • Filed under Everything • No Comments

I about to spend £1000 on a computer. A simple little computer, with no screen, no keyboard, no mouse – just a little slot to take DVDs and CDs.

It isn’t REALLY a server although it calls itself one, as it has a pathetic (in server terms) Atom processor. But what is good about it is that it does one job and one job well.

It’s the only machine I have yet to find that allows you to stick a DVD or CD into it and then automatically rip and streams across the network the movie or music. It runs windows home server (Boooooo!!!)  but  I feel confident I can change that to an operating system worth having (Debian!) but what, if any other physical hardware exists that rips dvds and cds like the AVA RS5 with a front mounted slot, multiple hard disk caddys etc ??

 

Urgent Assistance – Are you a graphics dude or dudette?

Posted on April 23rd, 2009 • Filed under Everything • 1 Comment

If you can assist I will be very grateful.

I am many things but a graphic designer I am not. I have put together a PDF for some printing I need done urgently but it is extremely low quality but it does show the general thought process and layout I require.

I would like someone to take that and urgently turn it around so it’s high quality, print ready. It’s a couple of images and loads of text.
Can you help ?
Thanks

Jason

 

How other people mutate your gene pool!

Posted on April 19th, 2009 • Filed under Everything • 2 Comments

I wrote this article about 4 1/2 years ago and have wanted to revisit it to see how things have changed and how the genetic makeup has been mutated in that time. The reality is things HAVE changed and I will update you on how and where but more importantly of all it seems everyone has forgotten the old news and simply ignore DNA markers in their day to day work.

The old article is still a great read in my opinion and worthy of taking the time to read.

Synopsis:

Or how the Search Engines will commit genocide! I believe that the search engines have no option but to commit genocide but before I go on I should explain my understanding of what genocide means: Genocide is the murder of an ethnicity or the extinction of any group sharing a genetic or ancestral affinity

The Article

Searchers and search engines have a symbiotic relationship. Since time (or the web at least) began search engines have tried to deliver relevant search results to their audience of searchers, aiming to build a long term relationship so they’ll keep coming back to search and search again, rather than have their searchers go and have an “affair” with another search engine.

The searchers will occasionally click on an advert and the search engines will earn an income while the searchers get the valuable information they need and want.

Webmasters learnt that getting high rankings in the search engine position pages meant extra, targetted traffic to their shop, store or informational resource allowing them to convert them into money according to their own business model. Many of these webmasters learnt the art of Search Engine Optimisation and over time many of the results pages became skewed with results the search engines and many searchers found irrelevant to their wants and needs.

The search engines had to act. They NEED the searchers, whereas the searchers don’t NEED the one specific search engine and will happily leave their previously monogomous search engine relationship and will dally with all manner of other search engines until they find a new relationship they are happy committing to (for the time being at least)

Then along came Google and the roles were reversed. No longer did the search engine need the searchers as much as the searchers needed Google! The results were so much better than those they received with every other search affair they had previously been involved with. They were relevant, they were clean, they weren’t bombarded with advertising and most of all all their friends and acquantances said “Have an affair with Google as G is happy to partner with you and – I won’t tell if you don’t!”

The SEOers at first weren’t quite sure what to make of Google but in time they worked her out and decided en masse that there is little point in SEOing for the other engines as Google has all the searchers. And then the SEO game really started :)

Over time Google’s results changed from being extremely relevant to becoming more and more affected by the SEOers. It was like the movies where “If you build it they will come” except this wasn’t about baseball stadiums but inward links.

It became clear that the more links you had pointing to your website that the higher up the SERPs you would be and people built links like links had never been built before.

But Google wised up and started employing a new algo to diminish the importance of links for links sake.

Hilltop came to the rescue!!

But I can hear you saying, “What the hell does this have to do with website genocide ?”

Read on, dear reader and I shall explain all :)

Websites, like people have parentage, but unlike people I believe that it takes 4 to tango!

The 4 parents of a website are:

The Domain name
The IP Address
The Whois Information
The Content

These 4 parents come together and all leave a genetic fingerprint on a website and all of them can be analysed and traced back to form a family tree.

I am going to get a little geeky now and apologise in advance for doing so, but hope it is in plain enough English for you to understand

Every website has a domain associated with it and every domain name points to an I.P. address. There are 2 ways that a domain name can point to an I.P. address :

Either using the http 1.0 or http 1.1 protocols.

The main difference is that http 1.0 domain names all have their own IP address. This means there is a direct, 1 to 1 relationship, between domain name and IP address.

Under http 1.1 many web sites may live under 1 single web address. This means there is a many to 1 relationship, between domain name and IP address.

With the massive growth of the web and other services on the internet it was thought IP addresses would become scarse and so because it is so much more frugal with IP addresses http1.1 became the norm in web hosting.

It is more likely than not that your web sites share their IP addresses with many other web sites without you even realising it.

Now onto the other 2 parents :)

Every time a domain name is registered, at least under .com, .net and .org) information is recorded about the domain owner, technical contact and person to bill. This information is publicly available and is stored in a variety of databases the world over.

Finally there is content. The meat and potatos of a website, the very words that make up its being.

As I said above the search engine’s had a problem and some clever guys thought of a way to help them solve it using an algothey thought of called Hilltop. Hilltop is a very vey very clever idea and many people (myself included) believe that it is active right now in the world’s most dominant search engine.

In essence The Hilltop algo extends the previous Google algos by still using links to ascertain the relevancy of a web page and it’s authority on the subject matter it purports to but it does it in a special way.

It looks for genetic traces between web sites and their extended web site families.

Pre Hilltop it was a standard SEO technique was to build lots of web sites and link from one website to another to another to another to another so that link popularity would build and a websites’ ranking in the SERPs would raise. Hilltop said “Woooahhhhhhhhhhh there SEOer. I don’t think this is fair or right for us, our bank account or our searchers” so we are going to look at the genetics of a website linking to another and throw away those that are geneticly similar.

The original Hilltop Algorithm states that:

“Two pages are non-affiliated conceptually if they are authored by authors from non-affiliated organizations.”

It goes on to state that:

“We define two hosts as affiliated if one or both of the following is true:
They share the same first 3 octets of the IP address.
The rightmost non-generic token in the hostname is the same.

and further says:

“The affiliation relation is transitive: if A and B are affiliated and B and C are affiliated then we take A and C to be affiliated even if there is no direct evidence of the fact.”

They also recognise that:

“In practice some non-affiliated hosts may be classified as affiliated, but that is acceptable since this relation is intended to be conservative.”

I can hear the SEOers jumping up and down shouting that all their hard work on link buildinfg will become defunct unless the links come from an page that is an expert on the subject matter AND not genetically related to their own !!

I believe it gets worse than this as Hilltop only says that a website has 2 parents:

An IP address
and a Hostname

I think that for genetic cleansing to work in the SERPs that Hilltop has been adapted to take into account the other 2 parents I spoke of above, the whois information and the content itself.

Why stop at identifying relationships at IP address and hostname when Whois info is freely available and why not check to make sure that the content a website has is unique and not a copy from somewhere else ?

SEOers can still work to get high rankings under Hilltop by looking to build Expert pages that will link to their target site they wish to raise the SERP ranking for but they’ll have to be careful when they build them.

An Expert page will HAVE TO make sure that it does not have any siblings or distant cousins as the target site.

I’ll give you an example:

Website 1

IP namespace:        1.2.3.4
Generic Hostname:     foobar
Whois Info Line 1:    abc
Whois Info Line 2:    def
Whois Info Line 3:    ghi
Whois Info Line 4:    hij
(all the way to)
Whois Info Line N:    xyz
Content:            fingerprint#12345678

Website 2

IP namespace:        1.3.3.6
Generic Hostname:     barfoo
Whois Info Line 1:    abc
Whois Info Line 2:    abc
Whois Info Line 3:    ghi
Whois Info Line 4:    qwe
(all the way to)
Whois Info Line N:    xyz
Content:            fingerprint#rer6567fdg

Website 3

C class IP namespace:    1.3.3.234
Generic Hostname:     barfoofoobar
Whois Info Line 1:    hgfh
Whois Info Line 2:    kiuo76
Whois Info Line 3:    343
Whois Info Line 4:    fggji
(all the way to)
Whois Info Line N:    56hfghg
Content:            fingerprint#656fdsfdsf

Website 1 is a quarter sibling to Website 2 due to Whois Info
and
Website 2 is a quarter sibling to Website 3 due to IP address
which means that
Website 1 and Website 3 are distant cousins!

In practice this means that if, as an SEOer you wished to construct a set of Expert sites for the niche areas you operate in you MUSt do at least the following.

  • Check the relationship between the web hosting company and specific class C addresses against the target SERP gaining web site
  • Check the relationship between the target SERP gaining web site and the expert hostnames
  • Check the relationship between the target SERP gaining web site and the expert whois info
  • Check the relationship between the target SERP gaining website and the expert content

And you MUST do this for all the websites, domain names, content matching or C class of IP address that score a “HIT” for any relationship as well.

Although this is not impossible I forsee many SEOers saying this is too much work and the genetic cleansing of the SERPs will work!

So what do YOU think of the genetic cleansing in the SERPS and are you checking each of your web hosts for IP relationships on an ongoing basis ?

Jason

Jason Duke is the owner and operator of Strange Logic, the business that helps your business which by using scientific analysis of the search engines and wider online marketing world.

Widget Words is the definitive keyword resource to assist in your search engine marketing and pay per performance campaigns and Widget Reports.com the site that delivers industry specific reports for your target area of business.

Jason can be contacted by email jason@strangelogic.com or telephone +44 7595 924 934 to discuss any of your needs or simply just for an informal discussion about the marketplace and his unique point of view.

 

10 Secrets to Become a Ranking Ranker

Posted on April 15th, 2009 • Filed under Everything, SEO • 14 Comments

There is no feeling like being a world class ranker. Searching for your chosen key phrases on all the major search engines and seeing your site on top makes you a world class ranker. I’ll aim to show you what you can do to help yourself and your business on the way to being a dominant ranker.

I once had a call from the editor of .net magazine asking me to take a new site to the top of the search engines. He wanted the whole of the .net crew to retire from the proceeds, but as well as undertaking the SEO work he wanted me to write an article for the magazine explaining the process.

Once I caught my breath from my belly ripping laughter, I said I would be happy to dispel many of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) bunkum and add some clarity to a world full of myth and mystery.

This is what I wrote for the magazine readership:

Despite what you may have heard, there are no secrets in SEO. The web is a very open place and if a site is riding high in the search engine listings, then you can, with enough persistence, get to see why it ranks so well. Replicate it and you can join them

Being Number 1 on the search engines won’t make you rich without either spending money or investment via “sweat equity”. A ranking without an effective business model will just deliver targeted traffic and traffic without monetisation is a drain on your wallet. Bandwidth costs you know!

Yahoo, MSN and even little ol’ Ask are great sources of targeted traffic and that is the key thing when it comes to SEO. You want targeted traffic, people pre qualified by their conscious decision to search for a phrase in their preferred search engine. Do you really care which engine they come from?

So let’s begin the task of taking your site from where it is now, to climbing up the listings. I am going to presume that you already have a site and are happy with its design and layout. I also hope that it isn’t too heavy on any flash, graphics or non textual based content as:

Search engines look for words to incorporate in their index. Words are important, VERY important and if you don’t have them in a format that is visible to the search engine then you are reducing your chances of success.

You may have noticed that I said Content is Queen, rather than the often touted phrase that content is King. The reason is simple, in SEO …

Links, links, links and more links. Links are what makes a search engine find your page and then they combine to rank it higher in the search engine results page (SERP) than any other single criteria.

The little blue text that you click on a page, taking you to a new destination is the single most important aspect in helping your page rise above the competition.

The search engines will be looking to show the most relevant page to a searchers’ query. You can utilise this to your benefit by making sure that each page within your site has a clear and concise topic within your niche area of work. Simply take your time and write more content (refer back to secret number 4) that adds value on your topic of business. Every page that you write gives you the chance to rank for more and more searches phrases, because…..

The long tail is a phenomenon that is spoken about in search to explain how people search. Statistics vary from various studies that have been done over time, but most (over 80%) of searches that are undertaken on search engines are specific, targeted phrases of 3 or more words.

When I build a site the very first thing I do is lay some keyword foundations. The keywords are the phrases that our potential visitors will search for and we hope to rank high on the search results page for.

There are many online resources that assist in helping find what people actually search for starting from a seed word or idea.

I have detailed many of them in the research section but the single most important technique I use is to gather all of our team into a room, with a large pack of blank postcards. We all start from a word and keep extrapolating words and phrases, writing each new phrase on a card, until the floor is full with topics and titles.

These words and phrases become the structure for your site, with a page for every topic. Laying these foundations and allowing them to grow according to what you, your team and your visitors’ think is the key to successful opportunities to rank.

Use the automated tools I have mentioned below to assist but please remember that although automated tools are brilliant, nothing is better in understanding the minds of people, than people.

Make sure that you have stats available to analyse the traffic to your web site.

Most hosting packages offer software that allows you to see where your visitors come from, and those that don’t you can easily use third party packages that will record the information. Knowing what real people actually searched for to come to your site can be an eye opener, and using these to expand upon your keyword pool will open up areas for future visitors to find you.

Knowing that you are getting referrals from the search engines gives a nice warm feeling in your belly and confirms that your previous SEO tactics are providing real and tangible visitors.

Because you have followed the advice above and found the keywords, extrapolated upon them to build a list as long as your arm, make sure that you get the keyword in the title tag and you name that page with the keyword in the filename.

Don’t worry about any other “on page” SEO, such as keyword density, meta tags, this trick or that trick as it is ALL so 1999 and we are in 2009! Just make sure that your chosen keyword or phrase is contained within the title and URL and then simply make sure your content is on topic. The search engines are now more than intelligent enough to understand the semantic relationships between words and phrases so trying to assist them with certain keyword densities is an amost fruitless effort. Leave them to their algorithms and simply enjoy the rewards their efforts can deliver to you.

Special Offers help give you a reason for building content and give people a reason to link to you. It may be 15% day on Thursday but even better would be the route of Link Bait, the technique of getting others to link to you due to controversial or other means. Remember links are king!

Why not offer 75% off to everyone who is over 75 and can bring proof of 4 living grandparents, with 10% off to everyone else ?

My personal favourite and best functioning tip is to think old school. Get on the phone and ASK for a link from sites that link to your competitors. If they link to your competitors why wouldn’t they also link to you?

And my special offer is that I promise that you can and will have a site with increased traffic by following the 10 secrets above, but this offer lasts for today only and no guarantees can be made for tomorrow. To give yourself the best chance of knowing what is required tomorrow, you need to undertake research in the industry of search.

Time spent researching what is happening in the Search Optimisation area, along with the important details of what works and what doesn’t is essential to ensure that your energies are best placed.

As well as various print publications I suggest you spend some time acquainting yourself with the following online resources.

SEOMoz Community – http://www.seomoz.org

Where Rand leads you should follow. Watch out for his Friday specials!

Web Master World – http://www.webmasterworld.com

The world’s largest general topic search and Webmaster related forum

SEO Book – http://www.seobook.com

The definitive constantly updated book on SEO there is. It’s available as a PDF rather than hard copy but there is no better product out there.

Search Engine Roundtable – http://www.seroundtable.com

Keyword Research:

Simply use the best there is out there and forget the rest – Google’s Search Keyword Tool – http://www.google.com/sktool/

The most important thing to remember is that simply reading and not implementing means there will be no more growth of traffic, simply growth of intellect. I suggest a balance to ensure your greatest chance of success.

Targetted Traffic beyond SEO

Garnering targeted traffic via search engines is the single largest route you will find visitors, but it is not the only way. Just like an offline business much of your business will come from referrals and word of mouth marketing. The major difference is that online you can go and find where your prospective customers hang out rather than waiting for them to come through your front door.

Social Interaction and bookmarking sites, such as Digg (http://www.digg.com) Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) ) as well as the myriad of others, not forgetting the forums that are related to your industry can deliver amazing amounts of traffic and all of it targeted.

Try searching at your favourite search engine for (forum industry) remembering to replace industry for your own. Before diving in and delivering a sales spiel, I suggest you sign up, read the existing posts and become part of the community. You should look to nurture a relationship and deliver real value and advice and see sales as an added benefit to credibility you are building with a new group of people.

Links within your profile and, when relevant, within your forum posts, don’t do any harm for your SEO campaign either (See Secret Number 5) and combined with your expert knowledge can the SEO that the forum owner does on his site, gives another route to gaining search positions.

If your site is number one, what better number two position could there be than a forum post where you are explaining the virtues of your company and product?

The Dark Arts

Like many traditional marketing routes SEO also has it’s darker techniques. Often called Black Hat SEO, it generally takes the principles of traditional SEO and pushes the moral boundaries to deliver greater results, at a lower cost and in a much riskier manner.

These techniques can include automated content generation, automated link gathering and tricky redirections from one page to another. Make no mistake about it, if you undertake some of these techniques you will annoy a lot of people, whether that be site owners, searchers or the mass populous of the web.

The search engines themselves publicly frown on these techniques and offer guidance as to what they see as acceptable optimisation.

Google – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Yahoo – http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html

MSN – http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm

But that’s not to say that real financial rewards aren’t delivered. The reality is that if you are prepared to risk the brand that you have built up in your domain name for a short term financial win, black hat SEO can deliver tremendous results, but if you are found to be breeching the search engines guidelines you run the risk of that site being permanently banned from their engine.

Much discussion occurs over the latest and greatest cutting edge techniques for black hat SEO with many of the world’s largest search related earners and entrepreneurs participating in the discussions daily.There used to be only one place to go but now everyone and their dog thinks they are a dark art extremist. Search and you shall find the place you feel most comfortable in.

Please be aware this can lead you to an area of optimisation that can be extremely worthwhile but also potentially dangerous to your site and brand. Don’t say you haven’t been warned!

I Bet you Never Knew this about…

Google: Google was meant to be called Googal, the mathematical number of 1 followed by 100 zeros but a typo meant that the Google spelling stuck!

Yahoo: The name Yahoo as originally settled upon was an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,”

Bill Gates: Bill famously said, “WWW? Nice toy, but what a waste of time.”

Google Founders: According to the Times Rich List, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the joint 34th richest people in the world. With a worth of £7.3Billion each

Google: Google are the largest aggregators of personal information online. By default they collect information on everything you do on Google’s sites, and potentially every site that you go to until (by default) at least 2038.

Do you want to know the most important of all tip you shall find?

Make sure you read all the way to the bottom …..

… as if you do you’ll find my phone number which you can use to call and get some one on one advice. Contact me as long as you link to this post http://jason.sh/10-secrets-to-become-a-ranking-ranker-2009-04-15 and keep coming back here to my personal shell – so make sure to subscribe to the RSS Feed

Speak with you soon!

Jason

 

How do you propogate online?

Posted on April 14th, 2009 • Filed under Everything • No Comments

Propogation in the social space

Propogation in the social space

Hmm – interesting!

 

Black Hate Book – How NOT to name your product!

Posted on April 14th, 2009 • Filed under Everything • No Comments

If you write a book on search engine optimisation, decide to focus on the more nefarious parts of fooling the search engines and decide to offer it in an electronic version may I suggest that you do NOT call it the

Black Hat EBook

Nor the domain name be a dot.com version of the above

As the domain name will end up making you look like someone who wanders around southern American states with a pillow case over your head!

 

Get the Marketing Basics Right

Posted on April 9th, 2009 • Filed under Everything • 4 Comments

#1. Find a program, ANY PROGRAM, to promote

#2. Put a page up – Use a template to get up there quickly

#3. Send Traffic

#4. Rinse and Repeat!

If you follow the above 4 points you will be earning a lot more than if you contemplate, procrastinate and do bugger all!

 

Terrorism, SPAM, Google and Government

Posted on April 9th, 2009 • Filed under Everything • No Comments

OK I have seen it all now. The Register are reporting that:

The Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT), a 200-strong Home Office unit created 18 months ago, has said in meetings it wants to “flood the internet” with “positive” interpretations of Islam. It plans to train government-approved groups in search engine optimisation techniques, which it’s hoped will boost their profile online and battle radicalisation.

Read the rest of this entry »

 

SEO Easter Egg Hunt

Posted on April 8th, 2009 • Filed under Everything • No Comments

As it’s Easter and you’re almost definately an SEO can you hunt for the search engine related Easter Egg on this site?

A beer to the winner at the next conference or meeting we are both at :)

 

Free Stuff Giveaway

Posted on April 7th, 2009 • Filed under Everything • No Comments

There is nothing worse than a marketer’s latest attempt at a blog not being found in it’s own right, so…….

Free Stuff Giveaway!

To help make sure I don’t end up in that quandry I want to incentivise you to link here by giving away some free stuff.

I know you think it’s just same random rubbish that I have laying around but the truth is it’s quite good. I will give the winner a set of video glasses. You know the kind of thing you wear when you want to look a knob but is so damn cool in owning and using them you can’t help yourself in wanting a pair. You can hook them up to watch videos (DivX etc) with the included media player, DVB TV, your PS3 etc etc etc.

I bought myself a pair of these and I think they are superb. I loved them so much I bought my missus a pair but she didn’t agree they were as cool as I thought and told me where to stick them – If I’d have rammed them up that particular orifice I can promise a few things. The arms of the glasses would definately be a pain if they opened on extraction and the covering would almost definately render them useless.

So they are up for grabs to the person that gives me the best link – As to what defines the best link, I will be according to what Rand Fishkin’s Linkscape tool defines is the best – balanced against what I think is the best. The top 10 will go in a hat and I will pull the winner out.

The downsides is Rand will need to complete another run or 2 of his system doing its crawl to get the data so I will pick the winner once that has been done.

Good luck and make me rank :)

 

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