November 2011 • Page 2 of 3 • Identity Developments

November 17, 2011August 29, 2021

Link Stalking the Web Piecat Way [LOLcat SEO]

OK, so this isn’t link stalking, it’s a battle over a box. Cats love boxes. Cricket controls the box, but Mittens is definitely interested in acquiring the box for his own uses. And because he’s aggressive, Mittens does indeed become king of the box.

Link stalking is much the same. It’s about determining which links your competitors have that you might fancy having yourself. Unlike Mittens, your reign will not usually be supreme — the typical successful result is that both you and your competitor now have similar links. If this is the only tactic in your link building arsenal, you’ll likely get closer to your competitors’ results but this alone will not beat your competitor. That’s not surprising since there is no single SEO tactic that will beat your competitor, but it’s worth repeating anyway.

Learn more about the link stalking by reading “Link Stalking with Link Diagnosis.”

Like this LOL? Vote it up at http://cheezburger.com/jillkocher/lolz/View/5447259648.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

November 13, 2011August 29, 2021

Our Geeky Engagement

On Friday 11-11-11, my geeky love Brian R. Brown proposed, the digital way. The Web Pierat well soon have a most seaworthy First Mate.

We were having a casual diner at one of our favorite local restaurants, Williams Street Public House, the first place we ate when we moved to Crystal Lake, IL. At the end of our meal, Brian took a picture of me and daughter Hazel with our gorgeous dessert to post to Facebook, and asked me to check my phone to make sure that it had uploaded to Facebook OK.

Instead of the photo, he had posted this amazingly eloquent and moving note asking me to marry him. Naturally, after reading with some slight disbelief and happy shock, I said yes. Emphatically. Of course we didn’t get a photo of ourselves in all the hubbub, so a photo of the ring will have to do. It’s beautifully simple and classic with a squared-off bottom so it won’t spin. He did very well.

Even better than the quality of the gorgeous ring, which he built himself online from scads of loose stones and settings on BlueNile.com, is that it is 1.01 carats. And guess what a 101 server header status signifies?

101 Switching Protocols
The server understands and is willing to comply with the client’s request, via the Upgrade message header field for a change in the application protocol being used on this connection. The server will switch protocols to those defined by the response’s Upgrade header field immediately after the empty line which terminates the 101 response.
— http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

So basically, our engagement is a change in protocol. Perfect!

I had been hoping for a geeky proposal some day, and Brian delivered in spades. I’m the luckiest woman, to have found my geeky soul mate and to know that I am his. He’s my knight in shining armor and the smile on my face.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

November 12, 2011August 29, 2021

Competitive Research, the Web Piecat Way [LOLcat SEO]

Cricket, the most neurotic of the Web Piecats, is not hiding. No, she’s spying, and was none too pleased that I was jeopardizing her cover. I tried to tell her that there are much more effective ways to conduct competitive research for organic search, but she wanted to do it her way.

Here are a couple of effective and free ways to spy on your competitors’ SEO tactics, all of which work much better than hiding under paper packing paper:

How about looking at their site for starters, silly kitty. What keywords are they targeting in the title tags and navigation?
Crawl their site to collect all the title tags and linking patterns quickly. See 8 SEO Reasons to Crawl Your Sites for more on using crawlers for SEO.
Check out SpyFu.com to see what terms they’re bidding on and winning in paid and organic search.
Scope their link portfolio with tools like Link Diagnosis or Open Site Explorer.

Like this LOL? Vote it up at http://cheezburger.com/jillkocher/lolz/View/5423868928.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

November 11, 2011August 29, 2021

8 SEO Reasons to Crawl Your Sites

My latest article at Ecommerce Developer, read it in full here.

The first thing I do when working with a new site is set my favorite crawler on it. This gets me acquainted with all the URLs, site sections, interlinkings, forgotten pockets, scars and warts. A good crawler offers a wealth of data useful not just to search engine optimization, but also to site maintenance in general.

Luckily, some great crawlers are free. You’ll find pages of options just by Googling “web crawler” or a similar term. Xenu Link Sleuth is my favorite for the price — it’s free — and for the broad assortment of data collected on every URL it crawls. GSite Crawler is another good, free alternative. It’s focused mainly on creating XML sitemaps and feeds, but it’s good for other uses as well.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.

November 3, 2011August 29, 2021

Does SEO Conflict with User-Friendly Websites?

My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

Google’s so-called “Farmer/Panda” algorithm update rewards original, high-quality site content. Aggregators suffer under Panda, as do ecommerce merchants who rely on generic product descriptions that are not unique to their sites, or who offer poor content generally. We’ve addressed the Farmer/Panda update here previously, at “Google’s ‘Farmer’ Algorithm and What It Means for Ecommerce SEO,” and with my three-part case study on one store’s struggles with that algorithm change.

The importance of the Farmer/Panda update has spawned discussions on structuring a site for search engine bots, versus making it accessible for human consumers. That discussion is the focus of a session — “Panda vs. Human: Advance eCommerce SEO & UX” — at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago on Nov. 14 – 18. The session is potentially interesting, as it reminds us that products are purchased by humans, not search engine robots. But without the search engines, humans likely wouldn’t find a retailer’s products to begin with.

Originally posted on Web PieRat.