Patrick McDowell's Blog

Trust is everything. If major search engines do not trust your website, it will not rank. If your visitors/customers do not feel your website is legitimate, they won’t come back. It is as simple as that. Here are a few quick tips that will help you score points with both:

Structure Your Website Properly – A bit basic? Ya, but you would be surprised how many webmasters I come across that neglect a well organized and SEO optimized structure. Make sure your website is free of any broken links, use structured URL’s, 301 redirects, etc. How to do this all beyond the scope of this article (perhaps I’ll go over this soon), however a quick Google reveals quite a bit.

Create a “Company” Info Page – This is a nice little trick I learned last year that has helped me a lot. Even if your website isn’t a real company, you should still do it.  A nice little “About Us” or “Company Information” page can go a long ways in making your site look legitimate. In fact, most SEO experts believe that a many search engine robots crawling your website are looking for it. Statistically this page is one of the most visited of your entire site.  Here are a few tips to maximize your legitimacy:

• Make sure there is a link to this page from your websites home page.
• You can include a mission statement, company bio, history, what exactly your business/website/blog does, a quick biography about yourself (as owner/webmaster), a paragraph about each employee/staff member, etc.
• Have some kind of contact info, such as an email address or phone number.
• Photos are a good thing! Visitors are much more likely to come back to your site if they can see it is being run by “real” people.

Don’t be afraid to put some work into this page, remember on the web your image and reputation are the only things you have.

Publish a Privacy Policy – This is another area where SEO experts agree, robots look for privacy policy pages. It is generally good practice to have these anyway, but many people leave this out. Unless you are dealing with a whole bunch of legal business, keep your privacy policy simple, easy to understand, and accessible. Visitors tend to feel better seeing one, even though 99% of them will never read it. If you don’t want to do it yourself, here is a great free tool to help you:

http://www.dmaresponsibility.org/PPG/

Design a Sitemap – Again this is a bit basic, however newbies may have skipped it. Sitemaps are important to both search engines and some users. They provide a very simple and organized overview of your website. Sitemaps also help search engines find pages that are usually overlooked, such as standalone pages (a webpage contained within a site that is not linked to) .

If you would like to see a quick example, you needn’t look farther than this blog:

http://crims0n.us/sitemap

If you are using WordPress, I recommend Google (XML) Sitemap Generator, which is what I use personally. For normal sites I would recommend XML-Sitemaps.com

Link Directly, but Thematically – Try not to link to something within your site that is not directly related to what you are trying to rank for. For example, lets say you own a website selling used books, all under different categories. It would not be in your best interest to have a link from your romance novels to you science fiction ones. Although technically they are all “used books”, by doing this you are diluting your rankings for both “used romance books” and “used science fiction books” respectively. If you absolutely must link, consider using the nofollow tag so search engines know you are not passing any relevance. That is just one example, but hopefully that puts it into perspective for you.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have below in the comments section

Some of my readers may have noticed that this blog has not been updated since mid-April, and for that I apologize. I would love to say I have been busy, but that is not entirely true. I have been pretty preoccupied with personal things lately and my online presence has been greatly affected. Nevertheless I have plenty to do from now on, and this blog is in high priority.

I have actually written a handful of blog posts on SEO, and are now going through the polishing stages. Everyone will see those here pretty soon. I also have PLENTY of projects to work on, which is exciting for me. New projects equate to new experiences, and with the knowledge gained from them I can in turn, share them with you.

I want to take a moment to apologize to my regular readers, and RSS subscribers. I believe that owning a blog entails the responsibility of keeping content fresh, and I have obviously been slacking on that. To those that are still with me however, I will not disappoint you again!

Alright with all that said, let me start on some useful content

Using latent semantic content in your posts can help you rank for the terms you want using less keyword density, and still being just as effective. As search engine algorithms become more and more complex, latent semantic indexing is going to become more and more popular.

What is Latent Semantic Content?

Say the keyword you are trying to rank for is public school funding. In the old days you could just repeat that ten times, drop some links and you were good to go. Obviously it is not that easy anymore, and we can really only use the keywords a handful of times before it becomes spammy.

We can use the keywords as little as once or twice and still rank just as high, if we use words that are related to the subject throughout our content. Look at the chart below:

Google sees all of these keywords as related. Thus using any of these keywords is just as good as using the keyword itself. In reality you should use latent semantic content as much as possible, simply because it looks all the more natural. Remember if your are wearing the white hat, you are writing for people, not search engines.

How Do I Know What Google Considers Latent Semantic?

Luckily, the big G made that easy for us. Check out this link, and look at the search box. All you need to do is put a simple tilde (~) before your keywords, and any word in bold under your results is considered latent semantic.

I wrote a nice little php script that verifies links for you and returns one of three values:

• Good!
• nofollow Tag Detected!
• Link Not Found!

The only quirk is that the link you enter needs to be exactly how the code calls it on each site. For example, http://google.com/ not http://google.com or google.com

Download it here or try it out here. I will be giving support in the comments section, if you need it.

Okay so there is a lot of confusion on this subject, and I do mean A LOT of confusion. So I am going to explain exactly what PageRank is, to the best of my ability, and keep it as simple as possible. And hopefully this will clear up all the damn flame wars that go on in forums, not talking about DP of course!

Alright so according to the great Wikipedia, “PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.”

Wtf you ask? I know this seems confusing at first, but it’s really quite simple. Google assigns a number between zero and ten to each and every html file in your website, with the exclusion of ones you block from it, based on how much Google trusts the content on your website. If you are new to PageRank, I suggest installing the Google Toolbar to your favorite browser. There is a nice, simple tool that will display the PR of every page you visit:

Click the image to make it larger if you need to. It is worth noting that this toolbar does not give you a real-time representation of your current PR, but more of a “screenshot” of your PR when Google last checked. Google tends to check  and update every three or four months. If you are a devout follower of any number of webmaster forums, you may notice a buzzing about a “PR update” once and a while. That’s what this is.

In its simplest sense, PageRank is the transfer, containment, and distribution of trust from Google.

I could get into all the mathematics behind it, but believe me they are all kinds of complicated. Here are some basic points to keep in mind:

• Every single outbound link on your website transfers some of your PR to the links destination.

• You can’t give away PR you don’t have. If your website is a PR0, outbound links on your site are pretty much useless.

• If (A) links to (B), (B) should not link back to (A). This just doesn’t work like it use to, and it’s a waste of PR.

• PR is not everything, but PR is trust, and it directly effects your SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page) . Anyone who says “PR doesn’t really matter” is a fool.

• A high PR link from a related site is worth more than hundreds of little to no PR links, keep this in mind.

• PR is URL specific. Just because you are getting a link from a high PR domain, doesn’t mean you are getting much PR from it, keep track of where your links are placed.

• Stay away form the “nofollow” tag. This blacks any and all transfer of PR. This was initially designed for spammers on blog comments, but sometimes webmasters will “link” to you with this tag, thinking you won’t check. Make sure you do, and if you come across it kindly ask them to remove it.

See? PageRank is much simpler than people make it out to be.

Status: Canceled

Total investment -> profit:

$800 -> $4200 USD

Total time spent working per week:

2-3 hours

What I did:

Carolyn and I started selling imported Japanese animation (anime) on Amazon. We would list things under the American box sets to maximize exposure, then made it ABUNDANTLY CLEAR to the consumer that they were buying imported anime and not the domestic release. Because we could buy in bulk from our distributor at such a cheap price, then turn around and sell it for double or triple the amount, while still maintaining the lowest price on Amazon, the profit margins were huge. All we had to do was keep up with product listings, returns, and shipping orders.

Why it didn’t work:

Roughly 20% of our orders were returned back to us, and about 2% of that 20% filed A-Z claims with Amazon. That was enough to get Amazons attention and issue a ban on our account. In short, PEOPLE DIDN’T READ PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS. But what doesn’t work, doesn’t work. Despite all of this though, it is worth noting 99% of our customers left a 5-star rating.

What I learned:

1. Treat customers like they are 5 years old, without actually insulting them. Make everything as clear as possible, and keep in constant communication with them when appropriate.
2. If a customer is comfortable with the way the system works (in this case, Amazon.com) don’t try to “pull a fast one” on them for the sake of making more money (we should have made new import listings, instead of using the preexisting domestic listings) . Quality > quantity.

My Thoughts:

Meh, whatever. It made money, but it was boring. It was a great learning experience, but was never meant to be a long term solution. Time to move on to bigger and better things.

(click to make it bigger)

Some of you guys have been requesting pictures, so pictures I give you. Carolyn gave me a nice new 7.0 megapixel camera so I have been having fun with it

Overall I am fairly impressed with the place, especially the neighborhood. People are nice as ever, and its 55 degrees today! After the last three days of buying and building furniture, today Carolyn and I are taking a break and enjoying the city. More pics are sure to come…

Edit: Okay I can’t find a decent wordpress gallery, so I uploaded them to flickr.

Finished my last day of work today… and I am leaving the state for good on Tuesday. With the exception of visitation reasons of course.

A few days ago I took a flight over New Hampshire to take in its natural beauty one last time. I even have some pics below the post. I was lucky enough for my friend Dale to take me up in his Sierra. It was an amazing site for sure, but it was bloody cold. We flew up to about 3000 feet, which consequently kept the ambient temperature at about -8. Fun times.

Dale is an interesting character. He is a multimillionaire, and an original gangster. The mob kind, the good old fashioned “bad guy” with morals, which I love. I shouldn’t really say much else about him in the line of details though, since this is a public blog

Part of me is sad leaving. To be honest, NH is where I became an adult. I came up here broke, in debt, without a license, and still a child. Since then I turned my life completely around! I own my own business, have some money to play with, and am in love with an amazing girl. I have had some good times here, met some great people, most of which I will never forget.

The only thing that makes sense to me is to move forward, so onward I go. Thank you New Hampshire for getting me back on my feet, it will not be forgotten.

Well it’s early Monday morning and I can’t sleep yet again… I think my insomnia is getting worse, but oh well. I have a lot on my mind, and I guess I have been letting myself get a little bit stressed out about moving.

Carolyn and I have to drive down to NC from NH this Thursday, a 13 hour trip if we are lucky. Then we have to drive back up on Saturday, then back down on Monday. My brother was kind enough to come up with us though, so that will help. Plus my parents are letting me use their conversion can, so that will help out a great deal.

We are not moving down with ANY furniture, so we are going to have to buy it when we are there. I am not really too worried about money, just the job market. But I know I can make money online many different ways, so I should be fine. I hope Carolyn finds a great job without having to resort to bar tending. Not that bar tending is bad, but it can be conflicting in a relationship. Her words.

I don’t have much to pack, but then again I barely even started…

I am looking forward to the move though. Raleigh seems like an okay place to start making a name for yourself in the business world. Plus the weather is so much better, and I’ll be closer to my family.

Meh… I need to get to bed, its 3:12 AM, this is getting ridiculous!

Anyway to my all my friends in NC, I hope to reconnect with you guys! I have changed a lot, and can’t wait to see what you are all up to