Bruce Clay SEO and other things

So im off to Bruce Clay SEO training at the end of next month. Now its just a matter of getting all my questions together so I know what I want to ask and being ready to take some good notes. I will be taking the power book so I can follow along in class and at the same time have something I can test code on. I wonder what it will be like to try and writ html on a Mac I have tried and failed to do any type of .net but I still haven’t gotten to try mono which should work ok. I hope to learn many new things that can help me out with eFlorist SEO as well as SEO for my red frog web sites as well as my other side projects. I hope to revive red frog soon and turn it into the powerhouse of web design that it should be. I have some of the florist sites being crawled by google as I type I hope to see the results soon if I start to see some results soon enough I can do some more tweaking before I have to present the results. I would think that with the current goals of the test coupled with the competition it should not be hard to get good ranking for the florist sites in the test. If you focus on flowers, florist, flower, and florists you are going to fail but if you instead focus on flowers then there is much less competition and there for it is easier to get ranked. Now that being said it also depends on what your equals if is equal to Dallas then you are going to have a tougher row to hoe then if is equal to Podunkville. Its also important to know your keywords for example do I really want to focus my effort to make my page relevant to my pretty flower shop name in Podunkville Texas only if people are going to be looking for that instead why not make my page relevant to Podunkville Flowers that way I can focus on that and I can also get people out of town who don’t know the name of my shop and really don’t care to know it. I plan to share some of what I have learned about SEO in the last few weeks with the rest of the custom eFlorist department so it can help our current batch of florist web sites going forward. I am done with my rambling on about florist web sites I will now get back to work on them.

spam on a blog

i have to put this out here but i wont make it a link. it looks like the same type of crap people use to get past spam filters you put enough garbage out there and the spider sees it as good.
i just have to say
wow

http://plastique-melon.blogspot.com/

Flowers but not really

this is very interesting to me. Looking at my adsense links they have switched. The first few days they were all about the flower links. I have to apologize in the middle of this I am going to ramble on for a few lines the go back to bed I have slept only a few hours since yesterday and i am worn out. Now all of the links are blogging links the first one was a little funny it was how to writ a blog so I wonder if this could somehow be used as some sort of measure of what google thinks your site is about. So if I sit here and talk more about SEO and FLOWERS and FLORISTS and flower seo and what not will it get me a better ranking. We will have to see.

64 bit power

Its 3 am and I am at work testing new 64 bit backend sql servers. I want 64 bit at home now. My wife is going to hate me but I think I am going to build a new dual proc 64 bit system in the next few months. The down side was it has taken the web sites here at work down but they were only down for a short time. Its to early to type so im done for now its off to test more sites.

The Florist SEO deadline looms

I didn’t realize how funny it sounded until my wife asked me about it. We were talking about me wrapping up the first part of this SEO test and I have to present my results in about a month so I would be working a lot over the next 2 days and the first question was “ if you are going to present in about a month why are you in a rush to finish in 2 days so I explained to her about the waiting game you play with wed development and SEO. You make your changes and then you wait to be crawled. Then you change and wait and change and wait. The wait part of this can take as long as a month. Which is hard since if you do something wrong you can’t fix it for a month after you see the problem. Most of my changes are done and most of it I think is good at this point. After that it comes down to tweaks so I guess we will see what happens. I will say I have seen more floral and flower web sites then I would ever have thought were out there some are total hack jobs that look like there done by the shop owners 12 year old son ( which by the way is what I want to be when I grow up a 12 year old ) and then you have the other side of the spectrum where you can tell someone put some real time into the site and it looks nice. But like most things you have a few on the outer extremes but most of the sites are in the middle there not bad there just not good. I might have to post a worst of the worst and a best of the best sometime soon.

random link post

http://www.xs4all.nl/~gp/MacPAR_deLuxe/
http://www.parkersoftware.com/

G4 Titanium Powerbook

Ok so I have now had a G4 powerbook for close to 2 weeks now and I have had the full range of emotions about it. When I got it I was scared I haven’t touched a mac since os7 was new. After a few hours I was excited about this new computing experience and angry that I hadn’t tried it before. I have seen many articles about designers and web developers getting one for kicks and then switching completely and I was starting to feel the same way. I wanted a new desktop and I thought why not get a dual g5. then after 2 days I did a ground up install of the OS and I have to tell you I loved it I have never installed an os without having to know anything my first thought was my mother could do this ( my mom is the woman who thought her email was broken because she wasn’t getting messages she sent to herself as tests so I said “did you hit send/receive?” and she said “hit what ?” her email now works great. ) . Then I had my first thought of “ man that’s stupid windows doesn’t even do that anymore”. After I did a clean install It went right in and wanted to do system updates so me being the windows guy I am I think of course it should want to do updates and let it but I also go around and jack with this new system I have. After about 30 minutes of downloading and installing updates my screen goes dark………… and stays that way ……………….. . I finally have to hard boot the box and it comes to a screen saying something about loading login window ( which is sort of funny ) and sits there doing nothing. Since this is a mac I don’t have a “ press F1 to go to the bios “ so after going ot my other machine I find its hold the “C” to boot from CD. So I have my second experience with the mac OX X install and still love it as much as I did an hour ago on my first experience with the mac OS X install. Then I go in and it wants to do updates and this time I do nothing while it does its updates ( like my OLD WINDOWS 98 OSR1 INSTALL) but this is ok with me since I am a windows guy I am used to having to change how I work based on the version of OS I am installing. So after all of this I now am off and running and I get to the way kewl stuff for example when I got the machine it had MS office on it and a few games all I had to do was copy them to my ipod and then when I was through installing I copied them back. I found out I can even use the ipod as a boot device which just rocks I can use any device I can connect to the machine as a boot device. I then proceed into using the office apps and the few games that were on it and there great. Now for the second blow to me switching to a mac. The second worst thing in computers is getting a new piece of software and installing it and being told you can run this software because your system is to new ( like when I try to run some win 9X apps on win XP they fail but not many ) . so I go to the store and let my son who is 5 buy any game he wants and he got something from some newish movie and we take it home and we install it and we watch it come up with a screen saying “ you must run this in OS 9 compatible mode “ or something like that . now like I said the second worst thing in computers is having to step down to run an app or game the WORST thing is trying to tell a 5 year old why this new game he got for dads new laptop wont work. I don’t like that! So I try to figure out how to run in OS 9 compatible mode and I find out I must first install OS 9 ? ! .. WOW!!!. Some stuff on the mac just works and just works well like when im testing sites for my SEO project or I am righting docs about my SEO project. Something’s just don’t work any better then windows and some of them work worse. So I don’t think im going to convert whole hog this is a sexy laptop and I will keep and use it for some stuff but its really just a toy to me.

WOW!

Ok so posting everyday hasn’t worked out so well. I have all these ideas that I really want to get down but just never seem to have the 5 minutes it would take to do them for example right now I am watching before sunrise on the powerbook I have the ipod playing the new moby on the desk speakers I am also switching back and forth from this blog to the new template I a m working on for allen ( one of the florists in my SEO project ). This is somewhat of my standard modus operandi I don’t seem to focus on one thing at once well. As I have been thinking about the blog I have decided something i can do is to research different styles of writing and see which ones work well for me then hone in on one style and refine it to an art. The scoop of that is immense seeing as how right now I couldn’t even identify the style I write in most of the time and there is not much of a chance that I could come up with a different style to save my life. On that note I will have to remind myself to look at amazon for books on writing and go from there. I am going to write out a list of different topics I want to write about and then I will take one off the list every day for a few weeks and see how that goes this will help me have some idea of what is going to come and what has been already. I will post this list for the world to see. One thing I seem sure of is that this will work much better if I just decide that someone else is going to at some point read all of this and have an opinion on all I say and let me know what that opinion is. So now the list

• First on the list is anti Microsoft crap on the web in a word ( or 3 ) Get over it


• web dev


• web design


• stupid a$$ web tricks that do not work ( this refers to something else I will post about on web standards)


• development and code standards


• love and poetry ( I will even post my poetry which should be great fun)


• discontinued product lines that I don’t feel I can live with out


• art


• MACS and why I think I will never want to own another one


• PCS ( not as in sprint I just don’t want to use punctuation )


• blogging


• web design vs web development

ok list done
day done
typing done im going home

addsense

i have added google addsense to the site today lets see what happens

Link post

this is really just a post of the diffrent links i have been looking at over the last few days that i thought were good enough to keep
SEO
Random Link
Random Link
Random Link
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Random Link
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Random Link
Random Link
there is a lot of stuff from 9rules.com on there but i thought there was some good reading about all types of diffrent topics.

CSS and SEO

Im not sure how much it really helps but I can’t see how it could hurt to try and build a page using full css for placement and style. This helps get all the extra code out of the document allowing your keyword density to be higher as well as your content to code ratio. This being said I still see a lot of terrible sites that show high rankings I wonder if this is because they have a lot of back links and have been around for a long time. Or it could be that search engines have gotten smart enough to not care about things like not using tables for anything other then tabular data. I am getting ready to launch 2 sites with very similar urls that will focus on some obscure keywords like "Samarian rock cutting devices in present day use" or "my roommate has 3 toes with pink toe nail polish on them" I am building both sites with the same key words and metatags also they have the same images and the same ip the only difference will be one letter in the url and one will be built in css and one using old style tables. On the table site I will use Bruce clay's table trick and on the other I will use pure css. I understand pure css doesn’t work for all types of designs due to browser compliance so I will make the design something that can work with pure css and work cross browser. This will allow me to test if using a css layout with all other factors being the same makes a difference. Each site will have 4 pages of content with each page having a minimum of four paragraphs and 3 images. i will then post them at the same time and on the same search engines and see what happens. Once I get the urls and the sites up I will post the addresses here.

posting everyday

I have seen and sometimes read blogs by people that seem to post everyday I dont know how that seem to do that I guess we will see what happens and if I can post everyday. I would love to but then it sort of becomes a job and i dont think im getting paid for doing this.

SKS

I always use any new online medium to post at least one picture of my son

SEO Work

I will be working on some SEO testing for a few flower shops that host web sites with Teleflora. Teleflora is a flower wire service. the pages I will be working on for the test will be.

Bakanas Flowers
Flowers to go online
The Flower Concern also known as 11flowers
House of Flowers, Inc.
Gizmo's Flowers & Gifts
Bices Florist

My goal will be to see how I can better code their web pages and still stay with in the framework of a teleflora eflorist flower web site. The goal is to help out the florist gain a larger presence on the internet and to help them compete with large online flower order gatherers. I am also pursuing bloging and thought I could bring these two things together. Over the next few months I will keep this up-to-date on my efforts for the flower shops and I hope I can find some good techniques to help all of teleflora's eflorist sites.

test post

this is my first test post
here are a few links to sites i work on
little big toe
red frog labs
two ton studios