what NOT to do

SEO Website Rap

This video really speaks for itself, and I love it. My buddy showed this to me (thanks Three-J).

Lyrics:
Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry

easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration

a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation

if you have animation
use with moderation

cause search engines can’t index the information
display the logos of all your associations

highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration

but to try to prevent any client hesitation
every page that they click should provide and explanation

should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination

but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t Buy From StockScripts.com

Long time, no post.  Sorry that we had to meet again with these circumstances, but it needs to be said!

Reasons being:
- Poorly (notice the emphasis) made scripts.  Their SocialJenny (myspace clone) script is full of bugs that almost make the site unusable.  This is after making sure my server was compatible with the script, upgrading to their “Developer” version, and fixing some bugs myself.

- I was supposed to get 6 months of free “Support”.  I can only chuckle at that promise.  I was actually surprised that I got an email response by them though.  Oh but that was because I needed to pay another $50 to upgrade my script to the “DEVELOPER” version which you need to edit the files.  Why did you encrypt the files again?

- I only received responses back when it had to do with me paying them more money.  Silly isn’t it?

- I was banned on their forum for speaking up about their lack of support that was promised.  I understand that it may take a while to respond to an inquiry… but weeks at a time?  I can’t prove or show what I said to them because they deleted the posts (surprise surprise), but I did nothing to deserve a ban.

I was a bad boy.
I’ve dealt with FREE scripts that have been more reliable than these.

I’m not trying to be a nagging customer… in fact, it wasn’t even my money that was spent.  This post is to direct those users interested in buying a myspace or youtube clone script AWAY from StockScripts.com.  Just trying to help out all your smart consumers :)

Linking to Sites on the same Server – A Big No No

This is one of my first SEO mistakes that made a few years back, and its effects were nothing but detrimental (that means bad). If you have more than one website hosted on the same server and link to each one of those websites from each one of your websites, Google will pull a red flag up after seeing that each outbound link originates from the same server IP. You might say that if you assign a different IP to each account (assuming you have a reseller account), you’ll be in the clear. Google looks at the C-Block of your server IP. So if your reseller account has the IP address of 205.10.123.01, your C-Block is 123. These numbers cannot be individually assigned to your different sites on the server. Thus, impossible to avoid this penalty that Google scouts for.

So, what to do? Well, don’t do it ;) . Get each one of your site’s hosted on a completely unique server. I personally love using BlueHost’s shared accounts rather than operating my own Dedicated or VPS server. This way, you’re able to link to your other websites without holding a potential threat to your sites. You also don’t have the hassle of running and maintaining your own server.