ConvertorDie

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

If you are anything like me your desktop or laptop computer is on 24 hours a day.  When I need computer help I really don’t want to have to pay for it. Call me cheap but computer technician repair can can be expensive. Wouldn’t it be great if you could stop the computer problems before they happen!? Just like your car, your computer needs are critical to proper operation.  The last thing anyone needs is a virus, adware or trojan software to add to the already flawed Windows operating system.

All  Geeks aren’t created equal and this is the reason when I want freeware Windows compatible software, PC maintenace or computer help I head over to JHoodSoft.org.

Are you new to using SEO tools?  As far as SEO tools go, there are many sites and tools out there that you could use. Although, there are only a few functions that you would need just starting out.

The most important are:

Keyword Recommendation Tools - A tool that will tally search engine queries to help you developing a complete set of keywords and phrases used by your target audience. WordTracker.com, and inventory.overture.com/ are good and both have either free or trail periods.

Spider Simulators - This type of tool mimics a search engine spider, allowing you to see how well your links are working. http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php

Link Popularity Check - This enables you to see which sites are linking to your site. http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/

You can also take advantage of Google’s Webmaster Central - http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Analytics Software - This shows you information about the traffic coming to your site. More than likely this is already provided by your hosting company.

This should be enough to get you started, but even more important than any tool is having a solid strategy which can be pretty difficult if you’ve never made one. Whatever you do focus your time building on what’s already working. If you can drive 5 people to your site, then you can drive 5000. You just need to understand the all the variables that drove the 5 and duplicate your efforts proportionally.

I’m having fun working in Google’s API.  Didn’t realize how much you could do. They offer alot of tools for the basic webmaster to make just about anything. I still learning but have been enjoy working with this component over the Christmas break.

If you have anything made with Google API worth viewing I’d be interested in seeing it.

link

Keyword research is definitely one of the most important aspects of building a successful SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (Pay per click) web marketing campaign. Proper keyword research and proper selection helps create an effective foundation to drive targeted traffic to a website. The keywords you chose will make or break a search marketing campaign. Before you can begin your marketing efforts you must know what key terms you will build your successful search marketing endeavor.

Keyword research and development should be the first thing you do when optimizing your website in regards search engines and navigation. Yes, I said navigation. A properly optimized website structure not only will allow you to capitalize on secondary keywords with the search engines, but will also aid you in developing proper website themes that have user-friendly navigation.

Over the past 10 years I have used or researched just about every paid or free keyword tool available. Keyword tools are not created equal. Most successful search marketers tend to use many tools at once when developing a search engine optimized campaign. By far one of the best keyword research tools to date is Keyword Discovery. When it comes to accuracy and user-friendliness nothing beats Keyword Discovery.

>>> Take advantage of Keyword Discovery’s Free Trial!

 It looks like Will Smith has done it again. I am Legend is guaranteed to be a smash hit. I for one will be there when it begins 12/14/07. Be sure to checkout the official I am Legend Website. It’s off the chain!

Visit the Official I Am Legend Website

You may ask, “What is a SEO Hyena?”. Well just like a hyena in the wild it’s not something you want too close. A SEO Hyena is a predator that hunts and seeks to devour freelance search marketers, for the purpose of squeezing as much work or information out of them for as little investment as possible. Or it’s a person who can talk about all the SEO rhetoric (dragon breathe) like using keywords, submitting to search engines, or content is king and have never driven traffic in there lives. Beware of these folks. SEM is not something you try. It’s something you do.

The crazy thing is that SEO Hyenas are usually well indoctrinated from reading articles, books, and forums about how to drive web traffic, but they never seem to have enough understanding or guts to do the work themselves. It’s even possible there are those who have good intentions about using a freelancer but because of fear of the unknown they choke and die on their own spit.

I can’t even begin to count the people I have run across who want traffic for there site, but because of there indoctrination of SEO rhetoric, they never get to the place of actually driving traffic.

A business owner with a website is definitely at a disadvantage when it comes to out sourcing any type of web marketing. It drives me up a wall when I’m in a room full of EXPERTS WHO HAVE NEVER DRIVEN ANY TARGETED TRAFFIC IN THEIR LIVES. I swear it’s these people that will kill a site.

Since Overture seems to be on a come back, I’ve decided to have a little fun to see if we can determine the real difference between the two tools. I’ve always used them both just not in the same way.
For starters Overture’s results don’t seem to discriminate hardly as much as WordTracker. It seems that OV’s results are more keyword specific as opposed to Wordtracker’s more semantic results.

If you type purple into OV you are going to get deep purple, the color purple, purple heart etc. If you use WT you’ll get deep purple, purple haze, purple rain, prince purple rain etc.

If I was really being fair I could add alot more than just OV and WT. Maybe another time. In any case I’m glad Overture is back and I hope it never leaves again.

There was a time when getting your website in the dmoz open directory was the holy grail of web promotion and provided the foundation needed to get your site the proper exposure to be on it’s way to SEO super stardom. This was the primary reason I became a dmoz editor. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the directory that search engine marketers would sell their first born to get in.

My first application attempt to be a dmoz editor was in 2000. I attempted to to become an editor in the Financial Services area. More specifically “Credit and Collection“. I operated a few sites in this area and for whatever reason I could never get my sites accepted by the dmoz editors in these sections. My first attempt was met with a crude rejection letter.

I re-applied to become an editor in 2001 in the Anime area. This time they accepted me. Even though anime is not as prestigious as financial services I figured I couldn’t learn if I wasn’t on the inside. Once on the inside it was nothing like I thought it would be. Evidently they had be without an editor in the anime area for quite some time and it was back logged big time.

Once you become a dmoz editor they assign a mentor/manager to help you deal with the complex rules and regulations or answer any questions you may have. I had a serious learning curve to overcome. You just couldn’t start editing sites, you had to go thru a certain process. After a lot of reading and coaching from my mentor I thought I was ready to begin editing the 1000’s of backed logged website submissions.

IMHO dmoz had one of the most unorganized and inefficient processes at editing website entries.

Many times I would log on to find another editor approved or removed a site that I already handled. It was sort of like an old boy network. Like the mob. My mentor would come down hard on me about something that was well within my rights as an editor to do. For instance, I re-organized the editor picks in the Anime area only to be met with an email from my mentor telling me that I’m making to many changes.

I thought my changes made prefect sense, but without reason outside of “making too many changes” my mentor changed my top picks and some of the page orders back to the way they were. I didn’t get it. After finally becoming an editor to be met with such a lack of professionalism.

After a short time I started to hear grumbles from other webmasters about having to pay to get listed in certain areas in dmoz. After researching the editors forum I could see how the dmoz infrastructure was flawed and could allow for something like this to happen.

Even though I was an editor I was still on the outside of the old boy network at dmoz. Personally, I never accepted money for placement also I have no solid evidence others were accepting payola for placement. All I have is what I heard from webmaster submitting sites and the crime-like activities that seemed to be taking place with some of the top dmoz editors.

I’m sure there are many honest editors at dmoz. But unfortunately there are probably some crooked ones as well. After a short while I lost all motivation and stopped editing my area. Which of course was met with a lack of activity boot email.

The funny thing is that I see some of the same potential for this sort of thing at Wikipedia.

Do you have any experience like this with DMOZ or WIKI?