Sunday, December 30, 2007

Another Site Launch: Blueprint Bluepers Constuction Humor Site




Last night a site I have been working on for the last week was launched. The site is Blueprint Bluepers and is site dedicated to construction humor, published by the Nigro Firm, Inc.

This site was tons of fun and interesting from a writers perspective in two ways. First, how I first imagined the site changed as we went along dramatically, it evolved. Compared to most construction humor sites, this one is much different, it has all original content including the cartoons and is quite intelligent. Secondly, they allowed me to have a page on this site and I learned that writing about yourself is much different than writing about someone else, I will have to run that page through my editor so he can make it represent me and my work better. As mentioned in previous posts, every writer needs an editor.

Anyway, please go visit this site, even if you do not work in the construction industry you will enjoy the quality construction cartoons by artist Chaise Payan.

Blueprint Bluepers

Author: Pamela S. Stevens, SEO Jive

Monday, December 17, 2007

Another Site Launch


I just finished the content for another site this weekend, we basically built this one and completed it in less than three days. It is a clean, simple yet amusing site that is lots of fun.

If you are a dog lover you will love this site. It is a site created for a newsletter published by The Nigro Firm, Inc, but it lacks the staunchness of most corporate related sites, we wanted it to be fun and a refreshing break from the norm.

Beagle Review

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Bad Old School SEO Tricks

If you have been in the SEO business a while you have likely seen many search engine tricks come and go. Maybe you are even employing a few still or you have old sites that still have old stuff on them.

Overall, the search engines want to rank high- good sites. Sites that people like, sites with unique content and sites that have good basic coding construction.

Bad Old School SEO Tricks
  • Invisible keywords: You have likely seen this from time to time by highlighting a blank looking section or a section of background to make dumped keywords appear. Naughty, naughty and Google doesn't like it.
  • Link Spamming or Link Dumping: Go to any popular blog site or abandoned forum and you will find this, literally tons of keywords with links back on unrelated sites. This was used to obtain high ranking site link backs. It is likely the links will not even be followed back unless you do it yourself. Good sites do not have to pay for links back nor do link spamming, good sites are linked back organically by customers or visitors who want to share your site or by legitimate associates or partnerships.
  • Redirects: This was popular till it was frowned on by search engines, it involves a company creating numerous fake or keyword laden sites with redirects to a single site that they are trying to push. The idea was to spread out your web presence with multiple sites instead of just one, this is still popular with and without redirects. Sometimes this happens for legitimate reasons, like a company name change, which can be done with care, but shouldn't be tried unless it is necessary.
  • Keyword Dumping: Often webmasters will dump tons of keywords into the code that may or may not be in the content or directly related. This was done to try to capture visitors who are searching secondary terms. It is better to list keywords that are specific and in your content and keep in mind that many searchers nowadays are entering up to three terms at once, such as "Seo, Tips, Blog."
I am sure you can think of many more, but this is my list of bad SEO tricks that must go.

Author: Pamela S. Stevens, SEO Jive

Monday, December 10, 2007

See my Newest Site


This site was launched last week for the Nigro Firm, Inc. It is for a small Utah company that has an interesting, hard to market construction service. I did all of the content development and writing. We are still working out the kinks and will clean up the code soon. But over all it looks good, considering a content person and a graphic designer did most of the work. Though, like many sites it looks better in IE than FireFox.

The site includes all original content, graphics and images. The website launch will be followed by a direct marketing campaign, since the product is relatively unknown. The site, though SEO friendly, is more for information than internet marketing. Some services, like this one, are rarely searched for online and more general search terms are highly competitive, making it a challenging project that must include direct marketing and word of mouth to succeed.

Nigro Firm, Inc.

Last Minute Things to do Before Launching a New Site

If you are like me, you are a content development person or a writer, and not a coder, but there are things you can do to make sure your site looks good and is functional before launch.

  • Cover the basics. Make sure your page titles and descriptions are good. I have seen many sites with a page title of “home page” or “about us.” About who? Try to get your company name in there, for example ABC Technologies: About Us.
  • Make sure your images are labeled. Often images are left with an empty “alt” tag, so when someone mouses over the image or the image does not display alternative text is not displayed.
  • Check all links. Check links in both Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox and other browsers if your visitors commonly use them. Also check email links and verify they work, send a sample email to yourself to test.
  • Ask for a third party grammar, spelling and content edit. Often we fail to see our own errors or we think we have conveyed information well, but we have not. Always ask for a third party opinion.
  • Look at every page. Check for good spacing, image placement and so on. Is it easy to read? Can the user learn about your product in the less than three seconds they may visit your page? What stands out?
  • Check dates. Do you need to update any dates or other dated information that you may have written a long time before launch? Are your copyrights current?

After all of these checks and your third party review, you will still find errors, so keep tweaking your site, good luck with your launch.