Flocking cool browser
I used flock when it first came out (www.flock.com)
Back then all it was was firefox slapped with makeup
The newer version I must say is somewhat better, in fact its a lot better.
it’s totally a blogger’s ultimate browser, packed with some really neat features which integrates with all the big web 2.0 social, blogging, bookmarking, networking and video sites.
Seriously cool RSS Handling and it integrates nicely into sites like facebook, del.icio.us, flickr, youtube and even photobucket.
It has a startup page which lets you view your feeds at one glance, and lists your favourite site and most viewed sites.
Flock also supports extensions, although there are not as many as firefox, but still alot of useful ones.
Flock’s rss handling is far superior to firefox’s.
Don’t let the fact that flock isn’t firefox perturb you, because it is, just on steroids.
I am not crazy about the search engine handling, flock uses yahoo as it’s default SE, but that can easily be changed.
I like the fact that you can add facebook, urban dictionary and others to your list of SE’s.
Once you have configured delicious, adding a site to your favourites is as easy as clickong the big blue star that appears to the left of the url in the address bar.
Once you set up your blog’s intergration via flock, blogging about something you just found on the next becomes as easy and right clicking an image and selecting BLOG THIS from the context menu.
I am not way fond of the blog editor but it will do.
So all in all, it’s a web2.0, social browser built on mozilla.
hmm…
I think I just found my favourite new browser
Blogged with Flock
Tags: browser, web2.0, flock, mozilla
WordPress in South Africa
I recently wrote to Matt telling him about our strategy using WordPress and he blogged about it on his blog.
I am quite amped about it although I am a bit sorry that I have neglected this blog for what seems to be forever.
I promise you that I had no intention of not blogging, but due to certain circumstances, I had to rearrange certain priorities.
However I am thinking that I may be back.
I’m planning on completely rewriting my SEO for WordPress and SEO in a nutshell articles.
I went off on a bit of a tangent to see how Search Engine friendly I could make a WordPress site and bought a domain specifically for that purpose, slapped on wordpress, tweaked the bejesus out of it, seo’d it up to the eyeballs, splashed it silly with content , ploughed plugins into it, linked to it from various sites to get the spiders to find it quickly and put it live.
Within a couple of days I was finding links to it on Google and Yahoo! and from January 1st to the 15th it has atracted more than 4000 UNIQUE visitors.
I’ll blog about that sometime too.
SEO in a nutshell
My apologies for not blogging recently.
Working for a giant corp like Johncom can be a burden on one’s blogging/social life.
Apart from being involved in another massive project, recovering from bronchitis and attending courses my life hasn’thad much thrown at me that I can blog about.
However, Bruce Clay ( www.bruceclay.com )was in the country recently and I was fortunate to attend one of his courses in Sandton 3 weeks ago.
Having said that, a week ago a friend of mine asked me how he could get started with SEO.
The reply I gave him was pretty much worthy of being added to this blog, and I’ll share it with everyone.
Here goes!
www.seochat.com
www.searchenginewatch.com
www.webmasterworld.com
www.searchengines.com
great resources
as a starting point… there isnt really a starting point because there are just so many things to take into consideration but here are the best tips I can give you.
My top 25 or so tips
1 .Make sure you have a site map
2. Make sure your code and css are valid (xhtml transitional or nothing)
3. Make sure your site is hosted on a fast server (surprisingly, hardware & bandwidth plays a huge role in ranking, if your site is slow and the hosting server is taking strain, the search engine spiders will report back to the search engines that your site is sow to respond and will will give your site negative rankings)
4. Keep your pages small in size, use small , optimized images
5. Dont try any smart “black hat” techniques like doorway pages
6. Make sure all your links are valid
7. Keep incoming links high and outgoing links low
8. get links from sites that are associated with your site , a link from a baby food comany’s site wont help your car website
9. make sure ALL pages are linked to each other through a daisy chain effort, 1 links to 2 , 2 links to 3 and so on.
10. stay away from using flash or javascript for menu navigation, flash and javascript are difficult for spiders to understand. instead use text links. Plain old html is still king.
11. create “clusters” of pages that all link to your central home page with relevant information on each page with emphasis on 1 particular keyword or phrase. for instance. you have a site thats dedicated to sweets. have your main home page optimized for a theme : “sweets”, you need to mention the word sweet and synonyms a few times.
Then create sub pages, LINKED TO from your home page . each sub page should then be optimized for “specific” keywords relating to your central theme. Hard boiled sweets, toffee sweets, choclates, makes of choclates, brands etc
the more specific you get the better for your ranking.
this means creating literally DOZENS of pages.
12. your keywords need to appear in the meta tags for both description and keywords as well as in the page title and a h1 header. a lot of people neglect to add a h1 because it is big. Use css to resize it smaller, have at least 1 h2 and 1 h3 . They need to be nested correctly
h3 under h2 under h1
13. do a search for the keyword thats relevant to you, take the top 5 sites and check each site’s code and copy it as best you can.
14. you cant get marked as a spammer if you submit your sites as often as you like to search engines. This is a common myth. If that was the case, your competition would spam the search engines daily with your sites address.
15. DO NOT USE AJAX
on pages that you want to submit
16. submit individual pages as well as your home page to search engines.
17. friendly urls !!! make sure you get this :
http://www.mysite.com/index.aspx?article_i…id=5?submit=yes
into this :
http://www.mysite.com/sports/babyjake_wins_again.html
18. avoid using more than 2 dashes in domain names and urls
ie www.my-totally-freekin-hot-site-rocks.com is a huge no no
19. Avoid using subdomains. http://sweets.mysite.com <– rather not.
instead use directories
www.mysite.com/sweets <– much better
20. spend 2 hours a day reading the sites mentioned above.
21 You need a blog associated with your site. ( www.mysite.com/blog )
You need to link from the blog back to your main site and you need to update the blog at least once a day, Content is King.
This will help the search engines spider your site more often.
22.you also need a video on youtube with links back to your site and links from your site back to the video.
you also need a map and phone numbers
If you see Google’s new SERPS when searching for anything imaginable, you’ll see sites with assocaited videos are starting to come up in the rankings
for instance do a google for “Shakira” 4th result is a video
23. You also need an image gallery, same reason as above.
24. dont bother trying to optimize for yahoo, ask msn or any other Search engine, concentrate on Google alone and the rest will follow, although DO submit your site to as many other search engines as possible.
25. Get listed on the Yahoo directory (not the search engine) as well as on DMOZ.org
it’ll take time but they count as some seriously important links.
26. dont call your home page “home” in your menu and use the anchor tag “home page” or “home”
if you have to, use a small image of a house and change the anchor text and URL to “sweet fantasy” or something thats relevant. linking to home page is not gonna help you.
and avoid using “click here” with a hyperlink on it , instead use something meaningful like “more information on SWEETS”
because why ?
because the search term “click here” JUST happens to point to adobe’s website.
any idea why ?
because 8 gazzilion people all pointed their sites to adobe’s web site with the following text
“click here to download adobe acrobat reader”
27. Make sure your hosting server is not in a “bad” neighborhood. Effectively, a bad neighborhood is one where associated sites that are hosted on the same ip range are link farms/ spam sites.
there are plenty more small tips and tricks but I’m tired and my head hurts.
Good Luck!
oh yeah, make use of rel=”no follow” on outgoing links.
another thing with regard to rel = “nofollow”
( you write a url like such <a href=”http://www.link.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a> )
if you are creating “clusters” of pages
lets say you have 4 sections which are clusters around a central theme of sweets, you need to create a “pyramid” of pages working down, linking down
A = chocolates
B = boiled sweets
C = toffees
A1 = dark chocolates
A2 = belgium choclate
etc
B1 = flavoured boiled sweets
B2 = plain boiled sweets
etc
you get the idea?
when linking to a senior page, like the top page of a category from anywhere dont use rel = no follow
say for instance you are linking from B2 to A, or A1 to A or B3 to B or C4 to A then dont use rel = nofollow
but if linking from A2 to B1 then DO use rel = nofollow
you wanna preserve the pagerank within a cluster and only reserve it for outgoing links to top hirearchial pages.
And that my friends, is it.
Please let me know if this was useful to you.
WordPress vs Habari
Since Google announced the developer release of its CMS blogging platform Habari (Swahili for ‘what’s in the news?’) I expected there to be a huge exodus of people over to Habari, but funny enough, the reception I expected was not to be. The release started out as being a well publicised event but then seemed to quiet down to an almost standstill.
Ok sure enough, the current release is still only a very alpha developer version (Which, by the way, I tried to install it but could not get past a “driver error” which seemed to break the install. A quick rm -rf habari/ sorted that problem out quick enough.) but I was still honestly expecting more. And so far, nothing.
The cvs team after a number of months only consists of a whopping 58 members. hmmm… updates to cvs releases have been less than 1 a month, if that.
Even The Habari project blog has 1 post on it, made back in February.
I don’t get it? Why would Google try and launch something like this and not support it, financially or through aggressive marketing. And one of Habari’s selling points is that it “implements the full suite of the Atom Publishing Protocol“. Excuse me, but aren’t more and more people moving away from Atom?
This is exactly the same as pumping effort and money into BetaMax 10 years after VHS dominated the market. (For the younger readers of this blog, BetaMax was a large video cassette format in the days before CD’s, DVD’s, Laserdiscs or MPeg4 when Michael Jackson was still black)
One of the most dissapointing things I came across was the knowledge that some WordPress plugin developers were moving away from WP and over to Habari.
After what I have learnt about Habari, I don’t think it will last and will sooner than later be abandoned.
I am firmly in the belief that WordPress is here to stay as one of the most popular platforms.
(This is NOT a paid for post)
A journey of a thousand miles
Some wise man once said that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step and this post is my first step.
My name is Paul De Sousa, I am a web 2.0 enthusiast and Search Engine Evangelist in search of knowledge, a deeper purpose, the meaning of life and of course some serious linkage and better rankings.
I have been known in the past to design processes for a number of web2.0 applications, although I am not a developer, I am an analyst, an ideas person. I find faults and provide new ideas and solutions.
I am employed by JohnCom and am grateful and honoured to be involved in the “The Times” project from a search engine perspective.
My involvement thus far has been more than just the SEO aspect, but general change control management of the current build as well as various documentation on where we would like to take The Time’s site.
Being a System Analyst for the group has allowed me to be involved in some seriously awesome projects, but The Time’s was a project that I was looking forward to for sometime and one that is not only right up my alley, but definitely a place that I feel I will shine. Do what you love, and love what you do.
I’ve had a number of blogs over the years so blogging is not new to me, I also helped design a number of ideas and processes for www.blogmad.net – a traffic exchange program for bloggers who are looking for new audiences, so blogging is not new to me. And neither is laziness, which is why I have had many blogs, but none that I have maintained for more than 2 years at a time.
So I have decided to run with this blog as a progress report on my journey with The Times project as well as any cool new things which I find and decide is good enough to share.
Enjoy, stay in touch and lets hold hands and share that link love!