Posted by Darrell Long on September 20th, 2007 — Posted in Miscellaneous
For the past couple days I have been receiving emails from Bank of America saying there have been unauthorized activity within my account. I knew this was a scam because I don’t have a bank of America account but if anyone does please make sure you DO NOT click the link in this email scam. I have already heard bad stories of people that have been deceived by this scam. Below is the email I received, supposedly from Bank of America.
Email Title: Unauthorized Activity
Email Address: bankofamerica@google.com
Your Online Banking is Blocked
Because of unusual number of invalid login attempts on you account, we had to believe that, their might be some security problem on you account.
So we have decided to put an extra verification process to ensure your identity and your account security.
Please click on continue to the verification process and ensure your account security. It is all about your security.
Thank you.
Continue To Online Banking ( This was the link)
© 2007 Bank of America Corporation. All rights reserved
By clicking this link you and filling out any information you will be sending you account information out to be used against you.
I love it how the people who cooked up this scheme know there unsuspecting victims will click the link even though there are big tells that this is not bank of America.
Let’s examine the big tells shall we?
1. If my account had unauthorized activity the bank would definitely call me not email me.
2. The email address it was sent by is not a bank of America email.
3. The URL it was directing too is not a bank of America email.
The point I am trying to make is to be careful what you read online and how you conduct your finical accounts online.
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Posted by Darrell Long on September 19th, 2007 — Posted in Bad SEO Practices
There is a great article over at guerillainternetmarketing.com entitled “What happened to ethics? SEOs that hide their methods and mislead clients”. I thought the insight into how many SEOs, consultants, and agencies are conducting their services and misleading to the clients they acquire to be dead on. The article goes into detail on a couple of the ways clients can be deceived as well as not having the clients best interest at heart.
My only comments to the article would that with many firms, more so with larger firms they tends to be have a “cookie cutter strategy” which is used for each and every client versus evaluating what the client really needs and developing a strategy which will work. I call this method the “herding of the sheep”. We all know that no two clients have the same goals so why would you use the same strategy for both? It’s just a really bad disservice to the client and in the end gives the rest of us a bad rap.
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Posted by Darrell Long on September 17th, 2007 — Posted in General
Over the course of a couple months I have heard countless individuals, (which will remain nameless) in the search engine optimization world talk about the effects of “over optimizing” pages on a website to achieve organic success. When you take a step back and really take in what that means, it just doesn’t make any sense. There is no such thing as over optimizing anything.
Let’s take a look at what dictionary.com says the definition of optimize is shall we? The term optimize says and I quote:
1. To make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible.
2. To make the best of.
3. Computers. to write or rewrite (the instructions in a program) so as to maximize efficiency and speed in retrieval, storage, or execution.
4. Mathematics. to determine the maximum or minimum values of (a specified function that is subject to certain constraints).
If we use the logic of thinking that many in the search engine optimization world have, to over optimize is to make something over useful? No what that this is called is simply Spamdexing.
What is spamdexing you say? Spamdexing is the practice of deceptively modifying web pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner. ~Wikipedia
My advice would be to make sure your following best practices when it comes to optimizing your pages for natural search and to always keep your main focus to enriching your visitors experience first.
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Posted by Darrell Long on September 16th, 2007 — Posted in Blogging, Advertising
Just recently Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney reported a new site which acts as a blog syndication network. This new network is called Blog Rush and it seems to be a great potential way to send relevant traffic to your blog for free. It is very easy to create an account with only needs just a couple pieces of information.
Once you sign up it will ask you to apply a piece of java script to your site. This java script is a widget which appears on your page and scans the content of your web page. It will then try to match the content with other relevant blog articles recently submitted on other blogs.
Once everything is setup and ready to go, you will start receiving traffic to your blog! The big question is well how does this work? What Blog Rush does is track how many unique visitors your blog has per day. Let’s say for this example it’s 1500. The system will then showcase your recent posts on other blogs which have the system setup 1500 times.
Blog Rush also adds referrals into the mix by allows you to reap the benefits of having someone setup a blog Rush account which you referred. So let’s say your buddy Todd saw the Blog Rush widget on your blog and decided to click the “Add your posts – for Free” button. You will now not only receive traffic from your unique visitors but also Todd’s.
I think this could definitely be a great possible way to bring in free qualified traffic to your blog. Since the widget is in java script the text links will not be seen by the search engines (Google should then give their blessing). The only question that I have at this point is how well Blog Rush is going to catch on within the blogging community. The success of Blog Rush depends mainly on many bloggers incorporating the widget into their blog. It will definitely be interesting to see how the plays out.
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Posted by Darrell Long on September 14th, 2007 — Posted in Bad SEO Practices
Search engine technologies are amongst the fastest evolving arenas on the Internet. Unfortunately, many webmasters are not keeping pace with this explosive medium. Outdated techniques are still being used with the best of intentions, and unfortunately often produce the worst of results. Webmasters must retool thinking and core SEO competencies to keep pace with the times.
The olden golden days of the Internet are over. The shortcuts we all used to take in order to get artificial SEO results are now not only frowned upon, but considered to be highly unethical. Negative impacts from outdated and improper SEO practices can result in dramatically lowered organic rankings to even being dropped from the search engines entirely.
A practice area around SEO is emerging and many webmasters should consider consulting with a colleague engaged in this specialty, rather than attempting to become the master of all.
Search engine ranking algorithms contain some 200 variables and over 5% of those algorithms change on a weekly basis. How much extra time do you have Mr. Webmaster?
Check out our top ten worst search engine optimization techniques. Find out if you are a blessing or a curse to your websites SEO viability and organic rankings:
TOP TEN OUTDATED SEO PRACTICES
Bad Practice One - Keyword Stuffing – defined as stuffing an extreme amount of the same keyword throughout the web page. This would include putting the same keywords in your keyword Meta tag over and over again, using the same keyword within the content so much it loses all since of credibility and seems to be redundant.
Bad Practice Two - Cloaking - A technique in which the content presented to the search engine spiders is different from that presented to the users’ browser. Cloaking is often used as a spam technique, to try to trick the search engines into giving the relevant site a higher ranking. This could ultimately be used to trick search engine users into visiting a site based on the search engine result pages (SERPS). For this, the search engines have deemed cloaking to be a deceptive technique and have ruled it a violation of their guidelines.
Bad Practice Three - Elongated URL’s – The length of a URL is a factor when determining your placement organically. Using URL’s which pass too many variables or extremely long can have a negative impact. In some cases, can prevent the search engine spiders from effectively crawling the particular page. Be sure to keep the URL’s short and to the point, but more importantly using the primary key phrase for the page within the URL. As a rule of thumb, you should be able to identify the main point of any web page just by viewing the URL for the page.
Bad Practice Four - Aggressive Link Building - Building high quality and relevant links is a very great way of increasing the amount of exposure your website receives. It’s when you are building link for the sole purpose of achieving higher organic rankings is where you will find yourself in trouble. The search engines don’t want you building links for the sole purpose of rankings. You want to build links in a naturally occurring fashion. For example, if your website has been active for 2 years and has a total of 50 inbound links, then the next month you’re up to 4,000, something’s wrong. The engines are going to pick up on this and you can be looking at a potential ban from the engines.
Bad Practice Five - Improper Re-directs – Redirecting one page to another can be a process which can have negative effects on your organic rankings. This can be prevented by ensuring the proper re-directs are in place. There are many redirects which can be used, however the only search engine friendly re-direct is a 301 re-direct. A 301 re-direct is a permanent re-direct from one page to the other, so this tells the search engines to re-assign the traction acquired for the old page to the new page. Any other form of re-direct will result in no transfer in weight and could actually cause duplicate content issues to appear.
Bad Practice Six - Page Title Abuse – The title of a web page plays a major role in determining how the page is going to be placed organically. Stay away from creating page titles which are extremely long or the same throughout the website. The page title should typically consist of 5 – 7 words with the primary key phrase for the page present and preferably towards the beginning of the page title. Stay away from starting your page titles off with your company name as the space can be more productively used to showcase the theme of the page. If you wish to have your company name within the page title, place it at the end of the title. The reason for this is the search engines read page titles in a linear fashion, so the most important part of the page title is at the beginning.
Bad Practice Seven - Frame Sets – Using frames to display multiple web pages within one on browser window can cause serious issues with having each of the web pages crawled by the search engines. In many cases the crawlers will only index one of the pages, leaving other out of the index. This would mean that the content which is housed within the other web pages will not be seen by the search engines.
Bad Practice Eight - Code Bloat – Lets start by defining what code bloat actually is. It’s the amount of code it takes to build a web page. Now there are a couple reasons why this plays an important role in the organic success of your web page. There are over 200 known factors to determine where a web page gets placed organically; one of those factors is what’s known as the “Code to Content Ratio”.
This would mean the search engines look at how much code it takes to build the page versus how much content resides on the page. The less amount of code you have the better. One way to reduce the amount of code would be to look at places where you can reference code from external files such as Java script or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Bad Practice Nine - Hindering Navigation – The navigation of your website plays a tremendous role in the success of your website for your organic search efforts. It is crucial that the search engines be able to understand and find all the pages of your website. Technologies such as Java script and Flash can hinder the search engine spiders from effectively finding the pages throughout your website.
Bad Practice Ten – Hidden Text– Content on a web page is one of the most crucial factors when it comes to having that particular page being found for the key phrases you wish. One outdated and unethical technique is to develop content for the sole purpose of manipulating organic search listings which was hidden to the visitor but seen by the search engines. Most of the time this was achieved by ensuring the content was the same color as the background of the page, or by allowing the font size to be so small you visitor was unable to see it.
The most dangerous course of action you can take would be to properly implement the wrong strategy. Be sure to fully understand how your website is being built to ensure it doesn’t have a negative impact on your organic rankings.
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Posted by Darrell Long on September 10th, 2007 — Posted in Link Building
One of the more important things you can do when optimizing your website for natural search is to acquire relevant links. Consider a link to your website as a vote of endorsement. The more credible and relevant endorsements you acquire, the better position you will be. So the ultimate question is, how do I acquire credible and relevant links?
Introduction to link building
There are a number of link building strategies, each tactic requiring different efforts and providing different results. The effort and effectiveness of link building strategies depends on the value you provide during the link building process. One of the most efficient ways to provide value is to create quality content.
Quality content for link building
Develop quality content by:
• Developing educational, entertaining or interesting articles on your site or blog.
• Offering quality articles for publication to established industries, newsletters or informational websites within your given industry.
• Taking part in the community by posts commentary on blog sites within your industry.
• Issuing monthly or quarterly press releases, about newsworthy events in your company.
• Participating in established industry forums.
• Elaborating on key services or products you offer.
• Offer resources on products or services within your website.
Though the list isn’t huge, it doesn’t mean the results are as small. You simply need to create a lot of quality content, interesting to your readers. If you publish it on your site, you’ll be recognized as a quality resource. If you offer it for publication, you’ll be viewed upon as an industry expert. Press releases above all allow you to spread the word about your content as well.
The benefits of quality content link building is that you attract targeted audience to your website, position yourself as an expert in the field and obtain natural, relevant links. Of course, this course of action requires some work, but it is well worth it.
As a rule of thumb, a good way to build links is to forget you are building links and to start building relationships with your peers, customers, vendors, affiliates, industry journal editors and journalists. This will keep you focused on providing value and you’ll simply get traffic and links as a bonus for getting known in the field, which may be worthwhile, as reputation is one of the most valuable assets on the Web.
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