Expiring Domains

A friend of mine has made a killing in selling domain names over the past few years. He had the vision in the mid 90's to buy up as many names as possible for future sales. That vision has enabled him to basically live off of auctioning these domains to the highest bidder. Now I'm not going to tell you to try this, there are plenty of people who have honked that horn. But I do want to point out a site he recommends for finding expiring domains, www.domainsbot.com. I've been looking to move this blog to it's own url for the past few days, and I'm pretty amazed at some of the urls that are for sale. These are from people who may have had lofty ideas for a website who have let it go, or from people like my friend who just decided not renew anymore when it didn't sell at auction. Either way, it's a great place to look, especially if you can't come up with a good domain name for your site. You can use someone else's idea!

Increase your Google Ad Sense CTR

A great summary of a forum thread discussing ways of increasing the Click Through Rate (CTR) of Ad Sense ads on websites by using images to attract attention.

A must read for any website owner, but be very very careful, or you'll get you A$$ banned by Google.

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Page Rank Solved

Well it seems that my site, and many others, didn't actually lose Page Rank this past week. The problem seemed to have something to do with Google Toolbar.

However some sites were affected greatly. Google has begun punishing sites that are gaining too many inbound links and using other black hat tricks. More on that later.

Web Creme

I just thought this was cool. Check out this new showcase that features most beautiful and inspiring web designs.

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Linking Networks

Good Article about using Linking Networks. Worth checking out if you are considering using one of these for reciprocal linking exchanges.

Page Rank Problems...

Ok, I'm not sure what I did to deserve it, but I lost my page rank on my site loudorange.com. It wasn't too impressive to begin with, not even at 50%, but it was something. According to my Google Toolbar it is now at 0%. Wow, I have been punished. Maybe lots of low ranking sites linking to my site? Other sites more deserving? Probably. Oh well, back to the drawing board. (However hits to my site were higher today than anytime in the last two weeks, go figure.)

SEO From Wikipedia

Some helpful tips from Wikipedia on SEO.

As a result, SEO practices that improve web site quality are likely to outlive short term practices that simply seek to manipulate search rankings. The top SEOs recommend targeting the same thing that search engines seek to promote: relevant, useful content for their users. Means of improving web site quality include:

1. Clean, fast loading websites, that are content rich, and frequently updated.
2. Websites that follow the web's simpler conventions (short and descriptive titles, easy navigation, no disabling of browser buttons, no keyword stuffing or other blatant SEO work).
3. Natural-looking link building: a few links from directories, very minimal reciprocal or three-way linking, no apparent buying or selling of links, no attempted PR manipulation (buying/selling/hogging), no outward links to less reputable sites.
4. No auto-generated nonsense content and no machine translated content, but original, useful material.
5. No technical errors, no duplicate pages, a valid robots.txt, a sitemap, and custom error pages.

Straight From Google

Good article from Google itself on SEO.

SEO More Important Than Ever

Study: Search Now No. 2 Among Web Tasks

Google lets Web sites sign up advertisers directly

Reuters Story on how Adverstisers can now advertise and create ads specifically for the websites they want to advertise on. It looks like an advertiser can click a button on AdSense ads that say, Advertise on this site. Very cool, and about time. Story here.

And Another...
To follow up on my last post, here's another color generator, maybe better - http://stylephreak.frogrun.com/cm.php

Color Scheme Generator

Off topic here, but this cool little tool helps out with brain freezes when trying to come up with color schemes for your website.
http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

Top Ten?

I'm always a little steamed when I see an article like this "news release" - http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/11/emw311042.htm
where a company states that they will get your website in the top ten in Google. There are a lot of businesses out there claiming that they can do this. So if there are 200 companies selling music CD's and they all use SEO firms claiming top ten placement, then look, there isn't anyway every company is going to be in the top ten. Well, at least not for more than a couple of weeks. Which is a catch some companies use. "Hey, you were in the top ten at 11:11pm on Friday!"

I'm not saying not to use these companies, just use common sense when using companies that provide these services. And remember, without good content, you aren't going to stay on top for long anyway.

Google Offering Urchin for FREE

Adfunk Tech Assist reports on Google launching a free web analytics tool - Adfunk Tech Assist: Google launches web analytics tool

Straight from the Source

Although A LOT is written about Google and how to get ranked in their search engine, some don't know that they have their own webmaster tip page -http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html. Most of the information is common sense, but the thing that struck me the most was Google saying that make sure you have quality sites link to you, not reciprocal links, but links to you. I'll be writing more on this later.

Meta-Tags

The question often arises on whether meta tags actually help out with search engine ranking. I'm under the opinion that it doesn't, sure metacrawler and Mamma use them in ranking, but do the big boys Google and Yahoo? They mostly use the content within the page among other factors. However I'm yet to give up on using meta tags on my web sites. I recommend using the Overture Bidding Tool under my links to get an idea of what keywords people are paying top dollar for, and incorporating them in your meta tags.

Hey there and welcome to SEO Fun, my new search engine marketing blog. As I say in my profile, this blog is going hand in hand with my normal website, Loud Orange. The reason for this, is to show my trials and tribulations to get that site to the top of the search engine heap. Now I'll also be posting lots of links for you site owners that will come in handy in attempting the same thing I am. So bookmark this page for all kinds of SEO fun.

Paul