Caydel’s SEO Blog

I just read an interesting post by Brian Clark on the Performancing blog giving three reasons why Del.icio.us bookmarks beat Digg traffic. His reasons are logical, and I can’t find anything there to disagree with - perhaps I should start paying more attention to Del.icio.us. Lately, I have been aiming my posts more at the Digg crowd, hoping to get some attention and promotion that way.

That said, I don’t plan to Digg-spam or Delicious-spam my way to fame…

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I just heard about this a few minutes ago, by way of Cartoon Barry. Alaska Jewelry will soon be producing a ring with a very cool feature. From their page:

The Remember Ring™ utilizes patent pending Hot Spot™ technology to deliver a reminder that it’s “That time of the year again!” 24 hours before your special day, the Hot Spot™ on the interior surface of your Remember Ring™ will warm to 120º F for approximately 10 seconds, and continue to warm up every hour, on the hour, all day long!

Hot enough to cause discomfort but not hot enough to burn-the Remember Ring™ is impossible to ignore!

This ring is everything a married tech-nerd could ever want - stylish, cool features. They show a design on their page which is quite similar to my current wedding ring. The only problem is the price tag is a little to steep for my blood at $760USD a piece! Plus, in my limited intuition aboout women, I’m sure our wives would much prefer us to ‘just remember’ without knowing that we’ve purchased an expensive gadget to tell us…

At any rate, it’s a very cool device - find out more at Alaska Jewelry.

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Over the last two months or so, I have been having a relatively bad experience w/ Technorati. As you can see on the right, I have a Technorati link. My blog is affiliated with Technorati; you can view it’s page here.

Over the last, well, 64 days now, Technorati has not been updating this blog within their index. Prior to this, I had been getting a number of daily uniques from Technorati to my site via their searches etc. I quickly noticed once referral traffic from Technorati dropped off, and within 5-6 days of the last ping/update by them, I submitted a support ticket (#46432) indicating the problem. A week and a half later, I submitted another ticket (#46842) to them, again relating my problem. I never heard back on either support request. Since then, I have tried submitting support tickets, but have had major issues with the support form timing out, etc., and I do not think I ever managed to get more tickets through.

This is unacceptable for a company as large as Technorati. If you can’t keep up on your support, you will not succeed in business. The only other reason I can think of for this poor experience is simply that my blog is small enough that it isn’t important enough to them in the grand scheme of things to rate proper support. If this is the case, once again, they cannot succeed since they are guaranteeing themselves some bad press.

Technorati - step it up a notch. Deal with my support requests. I have come across other people who are experiencing the same problems I am - take care of them. You are creating for yourself a reputation of poor service - this may be your death knell.

When Technorati is handling your site properly, it is amazing in terms of traffic, and is a genuinely useful service. But they can’t continue like this!

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So, you may have noticed a few things about this blog.

1. Post volume has dropped considerably over the last two months.
2. A great new theme

I guess I have a bit of explaining to do - the last month and a half, I have been back in school, finishing up my last year of my B.Sc in Computer Science with a Math minor, things have gotten busy, and I have had less and less time. And, well, I’ve gotten involved in more and more online projects, and the blog has begun to take a bit of a back seat compared to the rest.

Well, I have decided to make it a bit more of a priority again. To this end, I have set it up with a new, somewhat professional looking theme, and am going to be making more of an effort to post regularily again, hopefully a few times per week, hopefully more!

To some extent, this is like slapping new paint on a house to make it look better…

I do have some large-scale plans for this blog, though. I definately plan to put it on it’s own, dedicated domain soon. I am soon going to register a ‘professional’ domain to hold my blog, resume, and generally be a more professional way to promote my SEO/SEM services.

Thanks to all my current subscribers for hanging on through the dry spell - I promise to put a better effort in!

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So, as some regular visitors may have noticed, I have placed a Performancing Partners ad spot in the left sidebar. I have been long-resisting the urge to try to monetize this blog; upon reading about Performancing, I’ve finally caved. I’ll give it a try for a couple of months or so; if the return is good, I ‘ll leave it up. If it is poor, then I will get rid of the ads, and make this blog ad-free once again.

That said, the Performancing Partner Network looks like a decent setup. They target only blogs, but seem to have an ‘Adbrite’-style mentality in that the ads are purchased specifically on a blog-by-blog basis by companies. This means you only earn if an advertiser chooses to run his ad on your site. At other times, you have a relatively non-intrusive block as can be seen currently in the sidebar to the left.

Also cool, you receive 5% of the income generated by any bloggers you refer to their site. This is kind of nice, especially if you only have low-traffic blogs - refer a few high-traffic users, and you are making more than you otherwise would.

For advertisers, this is a nice system - it wouldn’t be hard for an advertiser to buy up a variety of advertising on low-traffic sites - there wouldn’t be nearly as much competition as their would be for more high-profile sites, hence lower costs. The traffic difference can be easily made up by purchasing multiple small blogs.

At any rate, we’ll see how this works out - this looks encouraging so far, so here’s hoping!

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This morning, a friend pointed out that super-affiliate Jeremy ‘Shoemoney’ Schoemaker had his blog at http://www.shoemoney.com hacked. It’s a bit of a shame, but somewhat interesting to see… Don’t visit the actual site as after 10 seconds or so it redirects to a page that tries to run some Java code on you. I don’t know what the code does, but I didn’t want to find out myself.
anthonycea at the Shoemoney forums posts,

‘Well you better have a good AV because that hacker wants to run a script on your computer when you hit SM.com.

Don’t click on the program or script that pops up because you will be toast! ‘

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