SEO Spam: The Nigerian Prince Model of Organic Search
Some of the most common spam landing in my mailbox these days starts with the subject line, "Rank Your Site Number 1 in Google." These are always from fly-by-night optimization companies promising that their SEO techniques will catapult my site to the top of the search engine charts. These are easily as annoying as emails from Nigerian Princes, and they might as well be coming from the same offices.
Sure, it's possible to rank number one on Google, but for what term? How long will it it take? What will it cost? Will it be for paid search or for organic search? Will it be specific to a single landing page or to the whole site? Will it be qualified traffic that wants to buy a product, or traffic from some link farm in Uzbekistan?
If you're starting out with SEO, the first thing you should realize is that it's not all that difficult to get your site to the first page of Google for "a" term. But it can be a long road to get your site well ranked for the term of your choice. (Even this may not be what you really need because ultimately, the most important SEO term isn't necessarily the one you want, it's the one your visitors are searching for right now. This can often be a term that you haven't even considered and can change over time.)
What spam SEO emails wont tell you about optimizing is that it's not magic: It's a collection of techniques starting with analytic research, creating relevant content, implementing solid site architecture, generating reciprocal links and establishing ongoing engagement with your visitors.
Using these best practices as a foundation, it's then best to focus on specific actions you'd like your visitors to take. If you want to push a certain product, focus on that. Build landing pages with clear calls to action. Follow your visitors throughout your site. And when you're done doing that, it's time to lather, rinse and repeat. It's not necessarily a quick road, but then again, did you really think you were going to get rich overnight from a Nigerian Prince?
Building Web Site Performance: Real World Techniques For Higher Rankings And Better Conversions
Every site owner wants one thing: a better return on their web site investment. In return for their time and money, they want more traffic, higher conversions, higher sales, and a greater audience share. They want their site to come up first on every search engine. They want eyeballs scanning their site 24 hours a day. In short, everyone wants to be a rock star.
But the online world can be a frustrating place, especially for small businesses that don't have a full time staff or large advertising budget to devote to web marketing. And to be fair, it is a bit overwhelming: There are so many variables, so much jargon, so much obscure information that the average web site owner doesn't have the first idea where to start. Should a small business invest in an Search Engine Optimization program? Should it buy advertising? Complete a redesign? And what about Facebook, Twitter feeds and other social networking options? In short, what are the keys to getting a better return on a small business website?
I'm going to spend the next several weeks trying to clarify some of these issues and whenever possible, use real world examples -- sometimes this site -- to show the theory, execution and results or a highly focused performance project. Read more »
When Twitter Makes Sense
The answer to that question depends on the type of information you present, the demographics of your followers and your overall commitment to making it work. This extra effort—along with some signs suggesting that Twitter is nearing the end of its growth phase—is almost enough to recommend skipping the whole thing. But hold on: Like any other marketing program it's value is all in your hands... Read more »
Using the Mollom PHP class on ordinary forms
Mollom is a highly effective spam filtering service that can protect almost any web form from spam with a sophisticated image and audio captcha. It's quite useful, in large because it's a centralized service that constantly monitors and learns from spam attacks, making it responsive even when spam bots change their tactics. It also provides an interesting set of results so that you can monitor the spam attacks (and defenses) employed on your website.
While the service is generally found on Drupal-based web sites–one of the principals of Mollom is Drupal's founder Dries Buytaert– it can be used on almost any other system, including Wordpress, Joomla and several others. It can even be used with generic PHP forms.
But while activating Mollom on other CMS systems is generally just a matter of installing a module or plug-in, getting it to work on a in straight PHP form is a little (but not much) more complicated. Here's how to make it work with regular PHP/HTML forms. Read more »
Formatting the Date Popup
Once in awhile, you'll work on a Drupal problem that takes forever to figure out, then find the answer hidden in plain sight. (Sitting right there. Laughing at you.) Oh look: Here's one now. I was using the date popup widget in a module form field and wanted the fancy calendar pop up, but just needed the month, day and year, not the time, etc.
Of course, I was too sophisticated and lazy to look it up, so I struggled with it for way too long. To save anyone else some time, here's how it's done: Explicitly set the date format in PHP syntax, then assign that within the element array. Couldn't. Be. Simpler. (Take a look at http://drupal.org/node/292667 It's right there in the comments in the sample code.):
// Provide a format using regular PHP format parts (see documentation on php.net). // If you're using a date_select, the format will control the order of the date parts in the selector, // rearrange them any way you like. Parts left out of the format will not be displayed to the user. $format = 'Y-m-d H:i'; $form['date2'] = array( '#type' => 'date_select', '#title' => 'select a date', '#default_value' => $date, '#date_format' => $format ... (etc)
Read that again: Parts left out of the format will not be displayed to the user.
So, basically, all you have to do is remember to set the format. In my case, the format would just read, 'm-d-Y'. That drops the time format field.
