The V-E battle heats up
April 28th, 2006 by Sarah KingIt’s less than a month to V-E decision day and the front runners are starting to pull out all the stops to make their site #1. If the comps are meant to simulate the real life efforts of SEO consultants then we all need a wake up call. They no longer do. The level of sophistication has increased and the tricks and traps to get that one day peak won’t lead to anything we’ll use for our real clients.
To check out the current standing go to Google.
As always the Celiac v7ndotcom elursrebmem webcam gets my vote and you can read more about the V-E competition on this page and at my V-E lens.
Go Squidoo Yourself
April 20th, 2006 by Sarah King
Oh, I couldn’t resist the graphic from BizUnlim 
I discovered the concept of Lens a while ago and have recently revisited them at Squidoo. You can see my meagre efforts of exposing
A lens is basically a single page fact sheet. You could have one for every day of your life I guess, or for every topic which interests you. It’s not designed to be a blog, but as a collection I guess there is some cross over.
Squidoo have included the basics of writing articles, lists, including RSS feeds and images. They’ve even found a way to monetise it with revenue sharing. Read the rest of this entry »
Guaranteed Google in 7 days
April 19th, 2006 by Sarah KingA common question in the forums is
I’ve had an email from a company saying they will guarantee my sites will be indexed by Google within 7 days. Is this a good deal?
that would be from a company saying things like
Based on our research, G-Submit ensures that the vast majority of web pages will be included in the main search engine results pages of Google within 7 days of service completion. And the good news is that G-Submit is totally within the guidelines of best practices set out by Google, so you won’t be penalized.
Bollocks! Ofcourse it’s within the guidelines, but should we pay for it? No Way! Read the rest of this entry »
Indexed in less than an hour! #1 for a month!
March 20th, 2006 by Sarah KingSEO experts despair! I launched a small forum recently and as I mucked about at Open Source CMS trying to decide which software to use I renamed the test category “SH20 Activists”.
Open Source CMS refresh their test systems every hour so I know that the forum lasted no more than 60 minutes, and probably considerably less! Read the rest of this entry »
Link Vault: No SEO Contest adverts allowed.
March 2nd, 2006 by Sarah KingIt’s good to see Link Vault step up and work to keep the network clean. Granted I was an offender but I totally support their stand and am glad to see them tighten things up. They’ve sent me a nice, brief email and left it up to me to clean up my account too – rather than just taking over and throwing the item out. It’s official too, and listed as item #15 in their guidelines.
BlogParty’s latest Incarnation
February 24th, 2006 by Sarah KingMike Dammann from BlogParty is one of those people with infectious optimism and energy. His blogs are spawned all over the web and I lose track of what, where and why.
BlogParty now seems to be just a blog, with the forum moving back to it’s blogparty.com domain. Lets hope the hosting is more reliable than some of the others used!
So, to try and drum up some attention, he’s offering $250 in a prize draw for bloggers mentioning BlogParty. The only problem is that by blogging about it you’re likely to increase the number of contestants and reduce your chances of being picked. Damn Dammann!
SEO contests are so “Middle Class”
January 17th, 2006 by Sarah KingA new SEO contest started yesterday, day before, all depends on your time zone. I created a v7ndotcom elursrebmem page out of idle curiosity and a v7ndotcom elursrebmem contestants directory for people to get extra, themed, links to their sites.
There’s been stacks of activity with domains being bought and onsold, ebay auctions, charity contestants (go Alek) and, of course, spam.
I just checked my Google Analytics page for the directory just to see who the competitors are. Now it is an international affair, but look at the countries. Pretty much only western, first world countries.
So, is SEO and the little games associated with it, just for the bored middle classes?
Google Sitemaps and Verification
January 16th, 2006 by Sarah KingIt’s been a while since I checked back at the sitemaps pages to see how my sites were doing, they’d all been pinging happily and Google had been checking frequently so I’d been happy to leave them be.
I visited today and found that Google have added a verification process whereby you upload an empty html document onto your site, Google find it, accept that you are authorised to have access to the site and then feed you extra info from their databanks.
I can get this overview of whether Google has problems with the pages and how they are ranked – proving that Google still buy that PR matters.
Another page shows the queries where my site has been returned as an option (top 10?) and where my site has been selected by the user. This gives me good clues about optimisation and page building – and about the topics that people actually want to read about!
