created on Tue, 2007-09-18 23:31

We bucaneers at Raincity Studios, in support o' talk like a pirate day with the addition of the mighty fine pirate input filter, be having transfermed a fair chunk o' this website jus' fer today.

For all of ye like-minded swabbies, if ye di'nae get any o' th' free rum last Saturday at Pat's pub, at the pirate art show, ya can still catch some of the art at Jem's Gallery or on secondlife.

Dern't say I di'nae warned ye, ya lily livered scurvy cur!

created on Mon, 2005-10-31 18:18

Err...404s on a bunch of links on Bryght.com this weekend were, in fact, my fault. I flipped some switches in the pathauto module and blasted a bunch of existing friendly URLs away.

Jeff Eaton posts on Drupal.org about the goodness of pathauto when used correctly: Holy Cow, does pathauto ever rock:

A few months ago I migrated my movable type blog over to drupal. I used pathauto as an easy way of creating path aliases to match MT's old archive URL format -- breaking old links is bad, and all that. What I wasn't expecting was the huge spike in search engine traffic.

Now, my blog is clearly not Instapundit, DKos or Engadget, or something like that. It's a personal site where I ramble about drupal and gaming and personal events and post photos and rant about sociology occasionally. With drupal and pathauto, though, I've jumped into the top ten Google hits for a number of commonly used phrases. I'm even the top result for a number of the topics I've posted on.

This is huge. As someone who, back in the day, did 'search engine optimization' for a small web company, the fact that I've jumped into the top results of any google search purely by accident is cool news. Drupal's clean, structured HTML plus the search engine friendly urls are a killer combination.

created on Mon, 2005-07-04 09:03

Joe Kraus, a co-founder of Excite.com, said recently that search engine marketing was making it a great time to be an entrepreneur.

Ten years ago to reach the market, we had to do expensive distribution deals. We advertised on television and radio and print. We spent a crap-load of money. There’s an old adage in television advertising “I know half my money is wasted. Trouble is, I don’t know what half

created on Wed, 2005-02-16 00:20 How to gain popularity on Google?

This is the first of 3 articles on hacks you can do to improve your ranking on SE. The information I am summarizing in this series comes from Google Hacks a book published by O'Reilly.

Hack 88 - 26 Steps to 15K a Day

1) Prep Work:

Plan and build your content. Long before the domain name is registered, start putting together your content. I can't stress this enough, content is key to success. Build it and they will come.

2) Domain name:

Easily brandable. You want "google.com" and not "mykeyword.com".
Keyword domains are out - branding and name recognition are in - big time in. The value of keywords in a domain name have never been less to SE's. Learn the lesson of "goto.com" who became "Overture.com" and why they did it. Think of the costs and seriousness of this action, to blow away several years of branding to change name?

3) Site Design:

The simpler the better. Rule of thumb: text content should out weight the html content.

• The pages should validate and be usable in everything from Lynx to leading edge browsers.
• Stay away from heavy: flash, java, java script. Go external with scripting languages if you must have them.
• Arrange the site in a logical manner with directory names hitting the top keywords you wish to hit.
• Keep it clean and professional to the best of your ability.
• Learn the lesson of Google itself - simple is retro cool - simple is what readers want.
• Speed isn't everything, it's the only thing. Your site should respond almost instantly to a request. If you get into even 3-4 seconds delay until "something happens" in the browser, you are in long term trouble.

4) Page Size:

The smaller the better. Keep it under 20k if you can. Although no one knows for sure, and the data is sketchy, it is estimated that 50% (CIRCA Jan 2005) of your surfers will be at 56k or even less. This figure will increase dramatically if you target countries outside the US.

5) Content:

Build one page of content and put online per day at 200-500 words. If you aren't sure what you need for content, start with the Overture keyword suggestor and find the core set of keywords for your topic area. Those are your subject starters.

6) Density and Position

Simple, old style, SEO from the ground up. Use the keyword once in title, once in description tag, once in a heading, once in the URL, once high on the page. Use good sentence structure and spell check it.

7) Outbound Links:

From every page, link to one or two high ranking sites under that particular keyword. Use your keyword in the link text.

8) Cross links:

Link to quality content across your site. If a page is about food, then make sure it links it to the apples and veggies page. Specifically with Google, on topic cross linking is very important for sharing your value across your site. If you do find one page that drastically out produces the rest of the site with Google, you need to off load some of that value to other pages by cross linking heavily.

9) Put it Online:

Don't go with virtual hosting - go with a stand alone IP.
Make sure the site is "crawlable" by a spider. All pages should be linked to more than one other page on your site, and not more than 2 levels deep from root. Link the topic vertically as much as possible back to root. A menu that is present on every page should link to your sites main page.

10) Submit:

Submit to various directories and SE's. If you have the budget, then submit to Overture. If you don't have the budget, then try the freebie and/or Open Directory Project (ODP).

Submit the root to: Google, Fast, AskJeeves, MSN, Yahoo, Altavista, WiseNut, DirectHit, and Hotbot. Now comes the hard part - forget about submissions for the next six months. That's right - submit and forget.

Continue to Part Deux!

Information summary from Google Hacks
By Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest
Published by O'Reilly
ISBN : 0-596-00447-8

created on Mon, 2005-01-17 21:00

Understanding the importance of developing websites using strict Web Standards is one, if not the key to better ranking in search engines.

A well build website will not only benefit your searchability potential, but it will also load faster, making it easier for your user to access.

Plan, Design, Develop

SEO is more than just submitting the website to various search engines. Submissions are part of the last stage of the optimization. Before you can get to that part much has to be done.

It's all about planning. You can't just jump into making a website, you have to organize the content, develop the IA, plan the website layout, create a user-friendly navigation and design an attractive look. During this process, SEO is kept in mind, the developer takes the time to add all the relevant title tags, using appropriate headings to separate the information, individualizing the meta data, title and description tags on each pages.

A website constructed following the above steps, and developed with standards will achieve better results in Search Engines, helping your optimization campaign and generating greater traffic.

Search Engine loves well design website; each night they crawl the web in search of information to index. Make your content indexable!

Content is key

After all, if your information is not well indexed in your own website, how can you expect SE to find and list it on their own engines?

Take the time required to build it right the first time, it will save you and/or your client money in the long run.

Suggested Reading

Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization
By Andrew B. King
Paperback - 528 pages 1 edition (January 14, 2003)
Language: English
New Riders Press ; ISBN: 0735713243