Archive for April, 2006

The V-E battle heats up

April 28th, 2006 by Sarah King

It’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.

Mike Dammann: Lets rally together to make him a US Citizen

April 21st, 2006 by Sarah King

SEO entrepeneur Mike Dammann has been noticeable by his absense from the online world this month and apparantly his USA residency papers were not what they should have been [source1] [source2].

Now the first rules of illegal immigrants are

  1. keep a low profile
  2. don’t leave the country and try to get back in

Read the rest of this entry »

Go Squidoo Yourself

April 20th, 2006 by Sarah King
go squidoo yourself

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 »

Outlook Activities

April 19th, 2006 by Sarah King

I just got the latest Quick Business Tips email from Debbie Mayo-Smith and she always includes little hints and tips on email marketing. They’re normally pitched very, very low but Debbie is no fool so I was astounded by this: Read the rest of this entry »

Guaranteed Google in 7 days

April 19th, 2006 by Sarah King

A 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 »

TradeMe phishing is not harmless

April 13th, 2006 by Sarah King

There’s an article in the paper today quoting Keith Ng as saying there is little point behind the latest round of phishing, this time targetting online auction house TradeMe. Read the rest of this entry »

Genuine 404s and Google Verification

April 12th, 2006 by Sarah King

Google is steadily building up it’s webmaster tools and winning over the hearts of webmasters. As covered in my Google Sitemaps and Verification post the feedback can be very, very useful.

I have run into problems though on Mambo and Joomla sites because they don’t throw true 404s so as far as GoogleBot knows every page is a good page. Google and Googlebot have given webmasters an incentive to change… access to the stats!

To get Mambo and Joomla to throw a 404 you need three things! Read the rest of this entry »

Javascript Test Page

April 11th, 2006 by Sarah King

I’ve just been playing with javascript changing the style of an item directly as part of my prep for an AJAX integrated project. Making sure the code is cross browser is really important so I pulled together some bits and pieces from all over the place and have put together a test page with tabbed forms and a style changer.

Javascript Test Page

The key elements are the ability to get the element using any of the browser types. Read the rest of this entry »