There is a very interesting discussion going on in a post on the search engine land site by Stoney deGeyter called Can Small Businesses Really Afford SEO?

I’m thinking that small business can’t afford not use SEO for their sites. It’s the only thing that really levels the playing field with the big boys. Even as the big players are putting up more and more pages and sites in order to build more links to themselves in order to build up their Page Rank, search engines are probably already thinking about neutralizing this. The search engines are always working to provide their customers (the people searching) with the most relevant results and that could be you. Your job is to let them know about exactly what you have to offer and present it in a way that will appeal to both your human visitors, as well as the spiders. There are so many things about SEO that are just simple common sense and are fairly easy and inexpensive to implement.I have written a couple of articles that may help
Why Should A Search Engine Trust You?
SEO is Really Pretty Simple

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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)

I thought since I wasn’t going to the beach this year I would still have a look at some sand sculptures. Here are the best ones that I found. Enjoy!

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The question that I seem to get most often is “How do you get a site found on Google?”

I believe that Google likes it better if they discover your site through their own efforts rather than having you submit to them. This is my own opinion, but I have seen cases where a brand new site that I made and linked to from my own site was spidered right away (2 days) and another that I didn’t link to only submitted took several weeks.

The difference is minor. “How do you get a site found on Google?” is the wrong question. The right question is “How can I get higher rankings on Google?” There may be a small bit of difference as to how your site is treated by how the search engines find you, but there is much more more difference in how you are treated after you’re found. If your site never changes you will be ignored, but if there is something new to see on a regular basis you will be rewarded. It may take a while for you to see the results, but they will be there.

When I am asked where to start with SEO I always say, go right to the horses mouth. Read Google’s and Yahoo’s Quality Guidelines. These are the closest things that you will find to an official rule book. By understanding the positive and negative things the engines look for, you can better understand what your trying to accomplish.

More…Google and Yahoo

Today seems to be one of those days where I just can’t seem to get my mind around a topic to write about. Web design and promotion is something that I read quite a bit about and I am constantly saving addresses to use in this blog so I have several ideas for a post, but none of them are inspiring me to write about them today.

So here’s my idea. I would like to hear from you about what you would like to see here in my blog. Feel free to post here or to send me an email, just let me know what you want to see and I’ll do my best to answer you, but please note that I may be unable to answer your email directly.

Your question does not necessarily have to do with web design and promotion, but I’m unable to give medical advice because I am not a doctor.

Many people have been visiting my post Friday Just For Fun Site - Turn Your Photo Into a Simpsons Character and most have been searching for something like “Simpsonizeme Not Working”. In fact, it’s been my most popular post ever and it makes me think that the Simpsonizeme site is just too busy to work very well.

The people at Burger King have created a site that, if you can get it to work, is very cool and their connection with the new Simpson’s movie could have been one of their best promotions. Today I noticed that if the site is too crowded they are just not letting you in instead of letting you try to start and then giving you the generic error message that really didn’t let you know what was wrong.

Maybe they are not letting anyone in and are taking the time to fix the site, but Burger King may have bungled what could have been one of their best promotions ever. Hopefully it’s not too late to fix this.

The lesson I’m taking from this is that you run a promotion, not only do you have to be prepared for your idea not to work, but you have to be prepared for it to work beyond your wildest expectations (which may be harder).

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One of the best things about being a freelance worker is that you can make your own schedule. You can work or not depending on what you want to do. Unfortunately because of that unless you get yourself into some good work habits it’s too easy to take the “not work” choice. It is also possible because of the feast or famine nature of my business to find yourself working all of the time, which can drain you or not only all your energy, but your creativeness.

It is necessary to find a way to work where you can still get your work finished and still have some time for yourself. Leo Babauta has a blog called freelanceswitch.com and he has recently posted “10 Essential Habits for Freelance Workers” a very good post with some solid basic advise for anyone doing any kind of freelance work, not just web design.

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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)

To promote the launch of the first full-length Simpsons feature film, Burger King and Fox have created The Simpsonizer. Woo-hoo! Go to simpsonizeme.com, upload a photo of yourself and the application analyzes your face, turning you into an honorary Springfield resident. There’s a picker tool to help you add details once your photo has been Simpsonized.

I did have to try several pictures to get it to work. Just a head shot with a plain background works best.

It’s a very busy site so if you get an error try again.

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I have written before about Google Webmaster Help, but I haven’t talked about Google Webmaster Tools. This is a great resource for anyone who owns a website that lets you know many things about how Google sees your site. They give you reports that you can download about how they crawl and index your site. There is information about diagnostics, statistics, links and sitemaps.

Any one of these make it worth signing up for these free tools, but they just added something that makes it a “Must Have” for any site owner/webmaster.

Google used to try their best to contact any webmaster whenever there was a significant problem with their site (hosting malware, etc) and they were in danger of being banned. Unfortunately spammers saw this as an opportunity to send out spoof emails phishing for anything they could get so Google was forced to discontinue this practice.

Now they’ve added a webmaster message center to the webmaster console. So when you log into your account you can instantly see if there is any major problem.

If you haven’t signed up for Google Webmaster Tools yet you should consider doing so right now.

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I was reading a post on the searchenginewatch By Justilien Gaspard called “Exploiting Your Current Backlinks and Link Referrals” where he talks about how links that you already have are often taken for granted. That’s very true, it’s much easier to get help from people who already know you and your site than someone new. It’s like the cost of attracting a new customer vs servicing an established one.

This post got me thinking on another track, which type of inbound links are better to have. While it’s true that one link from a valued high ranking site may be worth 100 or maybe 1,000 inbound links from lesser sites, they tend to be more fickle and much harder to get. Not only that page rankings tend to go up and down. While it is not likely that the high ranking site’s value will plummet, it may come down some, it is much more likely that a lower ranking site’s value will increase as they get older and more established. Of course many sites will stagnate or simply go away.

So what’s a site owner to do? My advise is to keep adding new content. If it’s good enough other sites will want to link to it and it will help you. If you are taking the time to actively solicit links to your site the high ranking sites are probably worth more of your time, but don’t ignore the others. Whether they have a high page rank or not will sort itself out.

High ranking sites tend not to give out links which amounts to their endorsement or vote for your site easily, but the only way you even have a chance to “hit the backlink jackpot” so to speak is to keep plugging away. One day you may write the article or come up with the idea that will make you famous (infamous), but one thing is for sure if you don’t even try it won’t happen.

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There is a post on the blogoscoped site dealing with people getting high rankings by hotlinking images from other sites. It’s an interesting idea, but now that the word is out I’m sure search engines will change and this practice will not work any more.

In case you don’t know, a hotlinked image is one that you place on your site and connect to from someone else’s site.

When you place an image on your site what you actually put on the page is a link to the picture. The browser copies that picture and places it on the page where it belongs. If that image is on your site in a folder, you have put the image there and have complete control over what it actually is. If you were to link your webpage to an image on someone else’s server, that’s called hotlinking.

There are two main problems with hotlinking.

First, when a visitor’s browser copies an image or text (or any file) from your site the amount of data that is transfered is metered and is called “bandwidth”. The bandwidth for the picture that is hosted on another site and you have put on your site is charged, not to your site, but to the other site where it is actually copied from. So even though the picture appears to be on your site, it’s not and you are stealing their bandwidth. Most people do this unintentionally and bandwidth like most data storage is getting less expensive, but in any event you are still stealing.

Second, since the picture is on someone else’s site you have no control over it. If they delete the picture from their site or change the name it will instantly disappear from your site. They could also change the picture and keep the same name and you would have another picture on your site of the other site owners choosing.

So if you see a picture that you want on your site, copy it (with permission of course). Place it on to your site and link to that.

On one of my sites (FastDiscountBanners.com) people used to hotlink to my images before I eventually turned that feature off so hotlinking wasn’t allowed anymore.
Before that I used to swap images when I found someone hotlinking. So when they opened their webpage and expected to see

they got…

It could have said or shown something much worse.

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