I don’t know why I still subscribe to Freecycle. Except sometimes it’s handy to list your stuff and have someone come and get it for you. All the emails go to a folder, but I caught this gem:
“My wife overdid it a bit and boiled five dozen eggs. We are going to
use about three dozen, so two dozen hard boiled eggs are up for grabs.
Whoever can pick them up the soonest can have them.”
They were taken rather quickly. Happy Easter everyone.
Top 20 SEO Factors from the Search Engine Ranking Factors Guide by SEOmoz.
Each principle has commentary by SEO experts. You can learn a lot by reading the comments. Some of these factors work better in some search engines than others (like misspellings in meta keywords work in Yahoo but not many other search engines – though perfect to use in your PPC ads). Some of the factors I’ve completely ignored or don’t quite know what they are speaking of.
My biggest SEO lesson. Your title tag, and H1 header tags should match exactly and have the main keyword for the page. I changed my title tags on a site, it lost page rank and it has never returned (big regret that I can’t change it back!).
The top 10 positive factors – what you should be doing (in order of importance)
1. Use keyword in title tag (can you believe this simple factor can have the biggest benefit?)
2. Global link popularity of site (how well linked is your site?)
3. Anchor text of links going to your site (use your keyword as the text that is linked, rather than making all links say “click here”)
4. Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure (not sure what this means)
5. Age of site (unlike people, search engines favor the old. It shows a sense of permanency and therefore greater trust & higher ranking)
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site (if your site is about internet marketing are your links also about internet marketing and related terms?)
7. Link popularity of site in topical community (so if your site is about affiliate marketing, get more links from other affiliate marketing sites)
8. Keyword use in body text (repeat your keyword a few times in the body of your web site, especially as links, bold, headers, or italics).
9. Global link popularity of linking site (get links to your site from authority sites, like .edu sites, Wikipedia, high page rank, etc)
10. Topical relationship of linking page (just meaning does that particular page that links to your site relevant?)
5 negative SEO factors to avoid:
1. Server is often inaccessible to bots
2. Content very similar or duplicate of existing content in the search engine
3. Your site links to low quality or spam sites
4. You participate in link schemes or you actively sell links
5. Duplicate title/meta tags on many pages (mix them up, a new title and meta tag for each page on your site)
This is the question that popped into my head today. I have been working from home since November. I counted the months. I thought it was so long, it feels like at least a year. It’s only been 4 months.
I’ve learned a bit about myself: I like to work around real people. People I can see. I’ve become so comfortable in the online world that it’s messing up my real world perspective. I will respond to an IM or Skype, and email most of the time, but in real life I withdraw a lot more easily. You have to draw me out. I stand back more. Take today, I haven’t seen another human face so far. Good thing I have a meeting in an hour.
I know everyone claims being a consultant and working from home is the bomb. I’m just not seeing it. Payday changes all of the time. My business partner isn’t ready to quit his full-time job yet. We’re in the process of legally acquiring our new web site.
I’m ready to get out of my home. Maybe people who love working from home have other people around. Like Justin.tv who always has people in his house. How do you get work done if you’re talking all day? And how do you handle not talking at all? In case you can’t see, the jail in the picture, is virtual. It’s completely made up by computer.
If you work from home and your clients are mostly virtual, tell me, how do you do it?
Here’s a list of helpful definitions or lists…I’m trying to find more lists, my favorite is a list of social networking sites.
• What is Twitter? (someone please edit to add business uses of Twitter…) YouTube Twitter video by Sam Harrelson.
• List of social networking sites (to link to your blog or web site from).
• List of web directories.
• Definition of a blog.
• List of content management systems to manage web pages on your site. Anyone have a favorite? besides WordPress? I think Drupal and Joomla are too complicated.
• Learn about Squidoo (to get some backlinks to your blog or site). Create series of lenses with your main keywords.
• Definition of affiliate marketing, and affiliate networks (this needs some work, please help edit!),
• Definition of search engine marketing or SEO.
• Definitions of social media and web 2.0 or web 3.0.
• RSS
• Podcast
If you have any to add, please feel free.
