Globalwarming Awareness2007: thoughts and considerations

The moment for the coming-out has arrived: I’m engaged into an Search Engine Optimization contest, the so-called SEO World Championship.

The contest is going to finish, after 3 months and an half, on 1st of may, 2007: it’s just twelve days far. What have I done in this period? Not much, in fact at the moment I do not rank -at all- for the keyphrase of the contest (GlobalWarming Awareness2007 - I love that keyword! ). Meanwhile, others came out with their websites: I’ve seen almost all of them developing old-school link building strategies such as link trading, mass directory submissions, keyword stuffing, and the like. Very few sites in this competition that can rely on a crystal-clean link profile, in my opinion.

Such old-school-seo’d websites, even having a collection of very “suspectable” inbound links, rank, and they rank very good, too: but it’s obvious, there’s nobody other than these SEOs trying to achieve rankings for that keyword, nor producing a document that even contains this apparently meaningless couple of words.

I too am now building SEO-targeted links for my not-so-special page optimized for the keyword GlobalWarming Awareness2007, but I have a secret weapon un-revealed until this moment: that page stands on a domain that is very well linked, altough it’s younger than the SEO Contest itself - as according to the rule board. As “very well linked” I mean, thousands of spontaneous backlinks acquired over time from diverse sources and with various anchor text (most of them containing “global warming” or “globalwarming” in it), and many of that links comes from websites and pages having the global warming and climate change issues as their main topic.

Believe it or not, I didn’t place nor personally asked for ANY of these links. They are just spontaneous: it “just” happened that masses of webmasters, bloggers and journalists found themselves appreciating a resource, and they were happy to cite, suggest, talk about and, last but not least link to it on their own, free will.

More over, this domain’s XML feed, so as some of the website URLs, had been saved/subscribed by MANY people in their search engine’s feed readers/bookmarks accounts: as long as a search engine considers the user’s behavior in relation to a website in its calculation of the value of that website, I can count on a greater consideration from the engine’s perspective; and, further, I can rely on an additional bounce of backlinks every time I publish an item and deliver it via XML feed: some of them are just automated ones, some others not. Search engines know that, and they know and take consideration of the amount of traffic that that site receives day after day.

I don’t know if I’ll manage to achieve some kind of success within this SEO Contest, as I put very few efforts in it (I took just few days - less than a week in total- to produce and promote the 4 pages that compose the website), but I’m sure that if I had the time to work on it some hours a day, for three months, I would had been happy to produce and promote dozens of linkbait pieces, and backlinks would had flown in hundreds of thousands.

A workmate of mine in the SEO field (Hi!) commented the operation with such words: this is the future of the SEO strategies. And I can’t disagree with him. Promoting linkbait pieces through top trafficked social media sites, is an effective (and funny!) way to develop a link popularity that can be further improved with classic SEO link building: with such a rock-solid basis, your efforts in manual link building will be much more effective!

About SEO W.C. organization: how can non-SEOs build up an SEO contest?

As said, I didn’t put much efforts in this challenge because of the time. I was really busy, and still I am, in this period.

But there’s another reason why I didn’t work much around this SEO Contest: I have a very low consideration of the SEO skills of the people that are behind the SEO World Championship, the Eastpoint Media AB staff.

I mean, they came out bidding on adwords for every SEO Contest keyword of the past, organized this contest that from its name (and payoff, too) poses itself as “the world’s most prestigious SEO Contest”, and they’re not even SEOs. Not good ones, at the very least.

Want the proofs? I will cite just two quotes from their former administrator on the forum, his nickname is “seowc2007″.

Someone (me) pointed out that since the beginning of the contest, there were (french) people who were doing 301 redirects from old and widely linked websites to their domain of choice (since, as I mentioned before, one of the rules stated that nobody could compete with a domain registered before the official beginning of the contest).

I was asking (omitting to say who was involved) if this practice of 301s had to be considered allowed or not, since that it wasn’t specified in the official rule board. Their answer (bold is mine):

If we would disqualify contestants that gets 301 redirects then it would be easy for others to sabotage by making their own domains redirect to competitors sites.
A 301 redirect is allowed to do because the purpose of a 301 redirect according to everyone is to show that the site has moved.
We can not keep track of who makes 301 redirects, it will be impossible for us to monitor that.

[then, further down in the same forum topic] It seems to me that many of the people here believes that we can control and check 301 redirects. The fact is that we can not.

It would be an easy way to deliver sabotage to any competitor’s site if it was forbidden, so we must allow it: unappointable. But, be serious: are you saying that is impossible to keep track of 301 redirects redirecting to a little set of domains? Maybe you are joking?

I will teach you an easy way to do that (but there are many): search for backlinks of a domain on Google, and take note of the backlinks that the domain you want to check receives. It won’t be a complete list (just an abstract), but if one relies on 301′d old domains to gain backlinks for a new domain, chances are that at least one of the page that contains a 301′d backlink to that domain will show up in the list. Now, all you have to do is to search for the first lack of match between the domain name and the HREF’s on the pages you’ve found with the “link:” command, and eventually compare that page with an older version (you may use another engine’s cache, or archive.org: it’s your choice). It’s not impossible, is it?

But the funny part has yet to come!
In response to the question: from where will you check results?
Their answer (bold is theirs):

We will check the results from Sweden.
Different computers and our own developed SEO tools will be used to determine the winner. We have already compared this to results taken from the U.S several times and we get the same results over and over again.
We will check rankings from the .com version of all the three search engines. To clarify even further we will absolutely not use any other SE domain extension like .se, .fi, .dk and .no to check results.

This is a completely unsatisfying answer: it lacks informations about datacenter’s IP, requesting IPs (”various computers” is just not enough), browser brand/version/language, login information about any search engine’s account (absolute lack of, I hope)… Last, but not least, they demonstrate to have absolutely no acknowledgement of the fact that it’s not a matter of TLD extension of the search engine’s site, rather than is a matter of the language set into the querystring, the browser/OS informations sendt along with queries to the engine, the “history” of each user - yes, even if it’s not logged in….

Probably these details won’t change the results substantially in this case, but there’s still the fact that they did not answer the question in their forum, anymore. Lack of seriousness, or lack of competence?

Anyway, observing these enlighting demonstrations of that deep knowledge of the insights of SEO, I don’t think that they’ve really “developed an SEO Tool” being other than a web browser opened on Google (dot com, of course! ).

Does anybody out there run a Google Custom Search Engine?

Still wondering how to save your user’s search queries?

If you host yourself your own CSE, and your server can run PHP/MySQL, here is the solution!

First of all, you have to set up a MySQL table where the search terms searched on your Google Custom Search Engines will be saved: to do so, open your favourite MySQL frontend (like PhpMyAdmin), and run this query:

CREATE TABLE `query` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`query` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
`datetime` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM


Done? Well. Now, open the page in which you pasted the Google’s code that displays search results, and add to that page the code that will save data: it grabs search term from the URL:

< ?php
/*-----------------------
First part: db connection
-------------------------*/
$dbhost = "localhost";
$dbname = "mylittledb";
$dbuser = "root";
$dbpass = "password";
$db=mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass);
if ($db==FALSE)
die("Error while connecting to MYSQL ".mysql_error());
mysql_select_db($dbname ,$db);
/*------------------------------
Read and save the search query
-------------------------------*/
$querystat = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['q']);
$datetime = time();
if( ($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] == '') AND ( ($querystat != $_SESSION['prev_search']) OR ( ($datetime - $_SESSION['datetime']) > 60) ) ) {
$insertquery = “INSERT INTO `query` ( `query` , `datetime`) VALUES ( ‘$querystat’ , ‘$datetime’);”;
mysql_query($insertquery, $db);
}
$_SESSION[’datetime’] = $datetime;
$_SESSION[’prev_search’] = $querystat;
?>

That’s all.

This code saves also the time/date of each search, so you can may later analyze searches e.g. per day, per month, or per time period.

Example’d code saves queries only if the referer is blank (i.e. the user did not request the search results page clicking on a link to it, but he has to manually submit the form), and it prevents multiple page refreshes (a minute at least has to pass, or the search query has to be different, before the term is saved into database).

If you don’t want filters, and you want to save right every query, keep just the database connection and the two lines inside the IF statement for the second part.

Google OS stands for Google Operating System.

ATTENTION: this is not a real news, it’s more likely to be a guess on what web service Google is going to acquire for next.

My guess is for www.youos.com.

What is YouOS, and why is Google supposed to be going to buy it?

Let’s explain.

YouOS is an on-line Operating System: it’s free, it’s open source and it’s very easy to use: you don’t need to install it because it’s ready to be used online. You just need an internet browser.

YouOS, despite its development still being in Alpha stage, is powerful: you can create, save and upload documents in the most used formats; you can read feeds; surf the internet and collaborate with other people on the same virtual computer machine. Everything remains safe on the remote web server.

Doesn’t it sounds unbelievable? So it sounded for me, but i changed idea when I tried YouOS: and you should do it, too.

Now, why Google Inc should buy YouOS?

Take a breath, and read on:

Google is trying to create a comprehensive desktop operating system environment, based on the web, online 24/7.

Signals are clear: Google has prior acquired writely, and then integrated it with another self-developed web application, called Spreadsheet: the joint is called Docs & Spreadsheet.

Further, we must add to the mosaic the famous Gmail service, and some other stuff coming out from Google Labs (everything cleverly protected with patents which meaning sounds obscure sometimes; in some other cases it seems both genial and faithless).
Mix these things together and the picture becomes clear.

Now that this fact (Google wants to create an on-line OS) is assumed, the question is: Why?

Why is Google trying to create a web-based, online Operating System comprehensive of everything a medium desktop user would ever not only need, but wonder?

Q: They’re doing it for the money?
A:The answer is simple: of course. Maybe not only for that purpose, anyway.

Q: But how they (I assume) plan to earn money from YouOS?
A: I don’t figure they will turn YouOS in a paid service.

Q: Maybe they aim to it up with Ads? Advertising embedded into the “core” of the future OS?
A: Possible, nevertheless not probable in my opinion.

Q: Should it really be only for the sake of indexing everything, knowing everything of everyone, and being able to track relationships between people, documents, and other relationships, as in a kind of Orwellian omnipotence delirium?

I don’t have an answer for that question. I can just imagine what will go on tomorrow.

Many people are scared about Google will to be the Big Brother, and that we’ll be happy with let him change our lives.

These people are wrong: I know that not only Google, but the whole communication new media (Internet, the World Wide Web and don’t forget about “just” the mobile phones) long before Google have already changed our lives.

Nowadays, I’m just an happy user of YouOS (which is not yet marked with a Google sign).
I’ve found it helpful in sharing documents and notes between different hardware machines, and in general for everyday work usage. You should really give it a try.

This entry was posted on October 25th, 2006.

What analyze keywords means?

When doing the initial analisys of keyword on a topic or document, the first thing to do is to identify an initial set of keywords related to the area of interest, in order to see how much competition they will find in search engines listings (both natural and paid).
Then, one can choose which ones are worthy to compete for, and find new keywords of interest.

The further step is to know which searches leads visits and conversions, and which ones are more profitable: so, one can apply to improve rankings for keys of interest (where possible), and produce new content for keys not considered before.

There are many tools online to do that: here I present a list of most useful ones.

High paying keywords

Overture bids

Keyword difficulty (quick)

Keyword difficulty (detailed)

Overture suggestion

HitTail

Google Trends

Overture suggestion enhanced

Typos

Miva keywords generator

Keyword suggestion

Keyword suggestion (Google)

Zeitgeist

List keywords/cost

Hi, there!
I came back from a long silence (sorry for that), with two great news!

Let’s begin with some anticipations: I’m going to publish a very large collection of useful resources for webmasers and SEOs. I’ve bookmarked them over years of web developing, and now I’m going to share my lists.

I’ve got just too many links to fit in a single post, so I will split them in four main categories:

1. Keyword analysis: search volume and pricing
2. Link building and reviews: good list of offerers
3. Tools for webmasters: page analisys and stats
4. Search engines reporting: automated searching

Let’s go on with news: if you aren’t new to this blog, you should have noticed the new design look (and if you’re reading of that in your feed reader, you should check out the new look ).

I’ve tested it successfully on:

• Firefox 1.5
• Internet explorer (both versions 6.0 and 7 Rc1)
• Opera 9.02
• Safari (even without a real Mac)

In these environments, everything looked fine. Anyway, please notify me of any error you may notice. Thanks

Of course, if you have comments about the new design, they are more than welcome!

This article is about how to make Wordpress search engines friendly, and optimized for.

A default Wordpress installation is SEF enough, which means that the structure itself performs pretty good in Search Engines.

But with these hints, you will give your posts the best environment as possible to compete in the Search Engines Results Page (SERPs).

This guide is divided in five points:

• Site structure
  Present your website with “the best looking face showing” to the Engines robots that scan and index your work.
• Content organization
  Don’t play messy: if you give order to your content, it will be more “searchable”.
• Write content
  A few tips about how to write your content optimally - not only for Search Engines.
• Interact with others
  Subtitle is: Don’t just publish your stuff. It’s about being "social" when blogging.
• Help Search Engines Directly
  Some final hints to perform well and maximize the power of your blog.

Site structure

• Optimize your theme markup

  First of all, assure that your theme markup (both CSS) follows the W3C standard guidelines.
  Put posts content’s code as higher as you can in <body>, the code block of your sidebar menu should follow the main content.
  Use headings (<h1>, <h2> etc) for titles and category names.

• Permalinks

  Have static URLs for your posts.
  Unless you own a news weblog (for which news evident freshness is force), I suggest to adopt this permalink structure: /%category%/%post_id%/%postname%/. It drops the defaut inclusion of date information in favor of more descriptive URLs, with a significant keyword inside (that is the category name).

  Remember: unless you’re familiar with HTTP code status redirects AND search engines indexing behaviour, DO NOT CHANGE YOUR PERMALINK STRUCTURE once your website gets indexed and posts linked.

• Link between posts having the same topic or subject

  "If one is reading an article focused on a specific subject, probably he’s interested in reading other posts about the same, or at least similar, topic".
  Do you agree with this sentence? Believe me, search engines do.

  All you have to do, is to facilitate the chances of jumping between articles.
  Link every post with others by the same category (maybe my plugin can help you), and also link posts that are in some way related each other, even despite the category information (try Related Entries plugin).

Content organization

• Categories

  If you write articles on different topics, you should organize them in categories.
  Open a category for each topic, and be descriptive in its name choose.

  Then, be strict when it’s time to categorize your posts. Don’t worry about open a new category, if it’s necessary.

  Organizing content into categories helps both visitors and search engines to easily understand what your articles are about, and to search them.

  Don’t forget to place a link to the filing categories, for each post, in your template!

• Posting order

  If you already know the number of articles you’re about to post for next, and you already know that some of them will be about the subject area A, and some other about another topic, say B, then try to post all your article about A, before you start posting about the topic B.
  If you can, don’t alternate topics, but make a post being semantically related with its previous, naturally following them.

  This will give continuity to your content posting, and will add strength in the engine’s view of your site.

• Make your content searchable

  Wordpress gives two ways to search content: the search form, and the archives.

  There’s not much to say about the search form (but maybe you want to track your user’s searches with a specific plugin).

  But about archives, I suggest to give up the archive by date, in favor of the category-based one: users will be likely to search articles by content, and not by publish date. I’m sure your statistics will confirm it.

• Tag your posts

  Did you ever see a tag cloud? It’s a direct and very fast way to: 1) see what a blog is mainly about, and 2) find posts focused on a specific subject.

  With the keyword tag plugin you can assign keywords to your articles: for every post, you will have links to searches for other posts tagged with the same key.

  Since this plugin stores tags in a custom field named keywords, it’s particularly useful when applied in tandem with the meta keyword plugin.

  I have noticed that the use of this tag plugin, in conjunction with the meta keyword one, gives great benefits on services like Technorati (without doing the claim for this blog, people are able to find my posts in Technorati by searching the tags I choose for them).

Writing content

• Content

  What you are going to talk about, is all up to you.

  But you can help both human readers and search engines, making your content friendly. What does it mean, practically?

  When you have found an interesting subject for your post, try to write an article that exhausts the subject matter in a single post; don’t break up the article in multiple posts: if you have long text, break it with a "read more" link, and don’t be afraid to use lists and paragraphs to separate periods (this helps readability).

  If the subject is really wide, write a post for each sub-topic, and exhaust it in the article.

  Start your post with one or two sentences that summarizes what the article is about.

  Repeat key-words and key-phrases of interest inside your post, and emphasize them with a bolder font weight.

  Once you’ve finished, read again your text, and make it shorter. Summarize, and don’t go off-topic.

  Don’t forget to check text for errors: avoid mispelling, typos, and grammar mistakes!

  Try to post new content regularly.

• Link well

  Linked resources should help your post communication, deepening the subject. To do it well, simply follow these rules:

  • If you cite a resource, link it. If you think that a resource can be useful to your readers, link it, too. But don’t place random or useless links.
  • Place links naturally into text, don’t put them in a meaningless list at the end of your post.: a link should be a phrase that fits good into the flowing of text.
  • Give descriptive names to link anchors: don’t call a link "click here".
  • Give more descriptive titles to your links.
  • Link regularly: no javascript, no server-side click counters, no cloaked nor shorted URLs.

  These rules applies both to internal links (links that point to a page of the same domain they’re on) and external links (a link pointing to another resource on the web).

• Post titles

  Once you have the content ready, think to its title.

  Find a short phrase that is well-descriptive of your content, possibly not shorter than three words and not longer than seven.

  Then, run a search on your favourite engine for your title. See if someone appears in the first page with the exact match of your sentence.
  Try a search with only the keywords of your title. Take note of how much results you get, and of who your competitors are.
  Do the same for each possible title you’ve thinked at.

  Then, think again at your title: be original, try to figure out what will be the keyphrases or keywords that one would type in a search to find an article like yours. If this match with your title, then use it!

Interact with others (don’t just publish your stuff)

• Open your post to comments

  Open comments, encourage visitors to comment your posts: place an evident Comment link, ask questions in your articles; in other words: set up some space for your visitors in which they can express themselves!
  Comments are content; a good comment is related to your article and can add value information to it.

  Reply to your visitor’s comments: they’re precious!
  Fight comment spam, both manually and automatically (with askimet).

• Track back other’s posts

  If your post deeps something discussed on another blog’s post, or if you take a post just as reference to write your own, then link it and use the Trackback function to send a ping to the post you refer to.
  There will be a link to your post in some other’s one.

  Ping only posts that you cite in your article or that are, at least, strongly related with yours. DON’T DO TRACKBACK SPAM!

• Once you’ve written your own, Comment others

  Find another blog article related with the topic your post is about. Read it carefully, think on it and then, if you have something to say, leave a comment.

  Comment intelligently, DON’T SPAM COMMENTS!

  Don’t be shy about leaving your Website’s URL, just remember that many adds rel=”nofollow” to any link in the comment area.

Help search engines directly

• Meta tags and information for search engines

  Make sure that you have the following code in your <head> section:
  <meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”/>.

  Use the Description meta tag, as following:
  <meta name = “description” content = “your blog description ” /> This description will be displayed in Search Engine Results Page in some cases, so use a short phrase that describes well your weblog, and invite users to visit it.
  You could also use a personalized description for each post, page, and category page. I suggest to use the meta description plugin for this purpose.

  Finally, add the Keywords meta tag. It’s useful if you customize it for every page of your blog, and show, for each post, only the really specific keywords. The meta keyword plugin can help you: it takes keywords from the custom field named keywords of each post. They will be likely the same as your post tags, if you tag your posts (see) .

• Google Sitemap for Wordpress

  This great plugin automatically generates a fully-featured, and fully-customizable Google Sitemap of your Wordpress blog.
  It automatically updates the sitemap every time you update your blog, and then pings Google. This plugin’s result can be really fine-tuned.

• Ping services

  Use the Update service function, to inform tracking services that you have updated your weblog.

  By default, Wordpress pings rpc.pingomatic.com, which is good (if you don’t want to change this, you don’t have to).
  But if you want, you can add/remove services to ping from the list. There is a list of ping services you can refer to when modifying your Update Service list.

…that’s all, folks!

Post Scriptum: these hints are focused on Wordpress and blogging in general, but many of them applies well to many types of websites: take the best of them and use it for your own!

As you may have noticed, I’ve added a new little section at the very bottom of each post.
That section name is Bookmark this: clicking on an icon below it, you can add any post to your favourite social bookmarking site.

It’s possible due to the Sociable plugin for Wordpress (check it out, it’s a really good one!).
Here is a list of the social bookmarking sites supported by the plugin:

I didn’t want to have a huge and messy list of icons in my posts, so I’ve added just few of them.

But the question is: which social bookmarking service do YOU use?
Comments are welcome

I’ve upgraded Wordpress from v.2.0.2 to the new version 2.0.3, that fix a security issue and introduce some other minor improvements.

I’ve just replaced the old files (after a double FTP and Database backup, of course!), and then launched /wp-admin/upgrade.php.

I didn’t found problems at all. All the plugins works fine.

You can see the changelog here.

This code snippet will allow your users to choose between different styles to apply to your website.
Yes, it’s a PHP skin selector for websites!

You can view a live example of it in this weblog itself: it’s the switch style icon on the top right corner (Click it right now!).
Due to an heavy layout restyling, this function is no longer available on my blog. Sorry for the inconvenience

Here is a little presentation of the features that this little code provides:

• Have a default style (in absence of previous choices)
• Unlimited choices (depending on your fantasy and ability)
• Style choose take effect immediately, and site-wide
• Switcher link brings you back to the page you were seeing, but restyled
• The preference is saved for each user, for successive visits

And now, let’s explain the technique.

Before diving directly into the code, I like to spend some words on the idea behind the switcher.

The main thing we do is printing links to different CSS files into our page HTML <head> section, depending on what we read from a cookie.

Why CSS files?

There are several advantages with having your site presentation and style informations stored into a separate CSS file, instead of having them embedded directly into the markup.

Without listing all of them, I just say that you can vary the look & feel of a whole site by changing only a single line of code - that one that tells us the name and the path of CSS file.

What I need?

An (X)HTML output for your website (ok, you already got it); two or more CSS files applicable to that markup output; a server that can run PHP; and a client that can save cookies!

For multiple pages, it would be useful to have a template-driven output, so you don’t have to change every single page <head> section, but only the template one.

Please note: the more standard, well-formed and separated from presentation your markup code is, the more effective and powerful this technique will be.
(XHTML Strict, without any embedded style information, is the best.)

How it works?

Ok, do you have at least two CSS files for your markup? Let’s switch ‘em!

First of all, change the line that display the link to your CSS with something like this:

Substantially, you have to change the CSS filename (without its extension) with the echo of $style variable on PHP.

To fill this variable with a valid value (that is an existing CSS file name in the specified path), put this code immediately before the previous line:

With these lines, we control if there’s a cookie named STYLE, then assign its value to $style, else we assign a default value to that variable.
I guess that you already know what comes next…

The last thing to do is to write a script that will write a custom value (that is CSS name) in our cookie, and then send the client back to the page it was on before calling that script.

Create an empty file called switch.php and fill it with the following:

You can call it from any page with a link like this:

When you click the link, the page reloads: the cookie will be read and the new style link will be shown, and the page from where you clicked on the switcher link will be styled accordingly!

Welcome to my completely re-fashioned weblog!
I’ve worked a lot on it, and this second-version design is supposed to:

• make the page look cleaner and text more readable,
• put a strong focus on contents,
• reduce the number of used colours and put things in order.

Okay, but what about the first-version design? I’d liked it…

Don’t worry: just click on the style-switch image in the top-right corner: the page will reload, and from that moment on you’ll have the whole site styled as you want, every time you come back!

And now, it’s poll time: do you like this work or not? I’d like to know your opinion: you can just vote the poll, or leave a comment to send detailed feedback.

Some notes on this work:

New design is all made out by Cascading Style Sheets (which are valid, of course): when you click on the switcher, the XHTML source code of the page remains the same; the only thing that vary are the links to CSS files.

That’s the truly power of CSS: by separating structure and presentation, you can vary the presentation with just a line of code in the markup, and the new stylesheet will be applied site-wide.

Last, but not least, the new LIGHT cascading style sheet was tested (as well as the GEEK one) on: Firefox, Internet Explorer (both 6 and 7-beta), and Opera 8.
Safari users, do you see errors?

P.s. Do you want to know how the style switcher works?
Let’s check out the explanation of this PHP Cascading Style Sheet Switcher!