Cranial Soup

How can you rank well on search engines, without fussing with SEO?

2010-07-02T16:07:00.002-04:00

If you want to rank well on search engines without fussing with SEO, then pretend it's 1995 and there are no search engines that will list you, because you can't afford the high fees for inclusion.

Now, how are you going to, in an ethical way, make people want to visit your site, stay awhile and explore, come back often, and share what they find with others?

Your site should work well and not be broken.

Make sure all links to pages on and off your site actually lead to where you want them to.
Make sure you don't have broken images.
Make sure the content loads correctly in all the major browsers.
Make sure your pages adhere to W3C standards and they validate.

Your site should be designed for people.

Make sure your template is pleasing to the eye and not painful to look at.
Make sure it has good navigation and is easy to discover and find the content your site has to offer. Good use of sidebar links to important stuff. Links to similar content pages on your site.
Make everything within 2-3 clicks of the main page.
Break up huge amounts of text with related images to help the eyes stay focused where they should be,
Your site should load fast. Use real thumbnails for your images and not just merely resizing with HTML.
Don't overwhelm people with ads.
Remove spam promptly.

Your site should invite people back.

Give your visitors multiple ways to be notified and access new content (RSS feeds, email subscription, follow on Twitter, a Facebook fan page.) Make sure new content reaches them wherever it's convenient to them.

Your site should encourage sharing.

Make sure you don't use frames. Every page should have its own unique URL that shows in the address bar.
Use Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Google Reader/Buzz buttons.

Your content should be unique and of high quality.

Don't copy other people's stuff, write your own.
Check your spelling and grammar.
Put thought into what you write.
If you post YouTube videos, add some unique commentary that doesn't exist anywhere else on the web.
For every sentence you quote from another source, write 3-5 of your own. So if you quote 3 sentences, you will have to write 9-15 to balance it. Don't quote in every article. Don't quote any more than what is necessary, less is much better than more.
If you are supplying information, make sure it is complete, accurate, and up to date.
Write about stuff people will care about enough to want read it. Don't write about what you had for lunch unless your a restaurant critic.
If your site is a blog, link out in every article to quality related content. Linking out to pages on other good blogs has the bonus in that it may earn you a trackback link on that page, or at the very least attract the eyes of the author of that blog who will stop by and check out who is linking to him.

Interact with your visitors and make them feel important.

Allow commenting and respond to comments as soon as humanly possible.
Give your visitors a means of contacting you privately, either by supplying an email address or a contact form.

Spread the word.

Become a highly respected member of a large community with similar content.. Put your link in your profile and signature. If people respect you, they will click the links.
Reach out to blogs by reading and participating in discussions. Never leave a "nice post" comment. Put some thought & work into your responses. You want to catch the attention of other readers and the bloggers themselves, and make them ask "Wow! Who is this guy?" so they will click your name and visit the site it links to. Always make your comments increase the value of that bloggers page.
Participate on social media sites and interact with people in a positive way. Get conversations going. Again, you want to make people ask "Who is that guy?" which will lead to them checking out who you are (your profile) and where you came from (your site).
Find an ad network that gives away free advertising. (I happen to really like Project Wonderful, personally)

If you do all of the above, quality inbound links will happen on their own and between the fact that others think high enough about you and your site to write about it and link to it, combined with having a great site, structurally, that makes it easy for spiders to find your content, you will get the ranking in the search engines that you deserve.

Above all, be patient, work hard, and don't engage in any "evil tricks". Good ranking does not happen overnight.

My #1 Reason for Hating Digg

2008-07-24T14:09:00.009-04:00

Aside from all that infects Digg and makes it such trash, such as the Super Digger cartels that bury the good stuff and digg the crappy stuff without even reading it, the fact anything with "Google", "Digg", "iPhone", or "Linux" in the headline automatically makes it to the front page (even if it isn't news worthy), and the comments that seem like they were written by a gang of uneducated pre-teen delinquents that live under a bridge...there is one thing above all that really aggrivates me to no end.

THE BLOAT!

The site is the most unusable piece of trash that has ever been coded. Worse than AOL webmail, the latest version of GMail, Yahoo webmail, Neopets, and FeedBurner, combined.

It should not take 20 minutes to log into a site. One should not receive a billion "unresponsive script" warnings per page. It should not take an hour to switch tabs. Someone needs to dig a hole and bury that site before I lose my mind. I am so aggrivated right now that all the Kitaro in the world could not calm me down.

Every time I think about giving Digg another chance, I end up regretting it and shaking with frustration. I am a very patient person, but I am not THAT patient.

I seriously hope that if Google does buy Digg, that they don't turn their search engine into a bloated mess while they add Digg buttons to all their search results. My poor little computer and I wouldn't be able to handle it, and in my opinion, we shouldn't have to.

I have had it! Enough is enough! I will never load another page from Digg in any browser, on any PC, for as long as I live...unless someone can direct me to a Digg Lite that isn't loaded with all the bloated crap.

I don't care if I can vote or comment on stuff, or not. I really am not feeling in a very social mood right now, any way.

I just want a list of the headlines, descriptions, and direct links to all the articles that have been submitted in the upcoming stories section. I would like to find some interesting stuff to read that isn't already plastered all over every blog & splog in creation.

I don't want the front page crap. I would rather have all the hidden gems that never have a fair shot of making it to the front page.

Does such a thing even exist?

If it does, give me a link, please!

UPDATE 08-04-2008: I have found not one, but two alternatives to the main bloated Digg site. Please see my article titled "Digg, Digg Lite, Digg Ultra Lite" on my Snailware blog.

Bloggers With Comment Forms That Suck a Chunk of Your Life Into a Black Hole

2008-07-15T01:57:00.006-04:00

Listen up, John Chow, Jack Humphrey, Matthew Henrickson, Andy Beard, and the rest of you lazy and/or inept bloggers out there:

I am tired of wasting my time on broken comment forms, screwball captchas, lazy moderation, and bad site design.

Too many times in the past 2 weeks, I have tried to make comments on blogs that ended up sucked into cyberspace and never making it to its destination, which is the post in which I was commenting on.

On three blogs, after taking the time to formulate an informative, relevant, quality comment (one of them was at least an hour of work), it was just sucked away after clicking the submit button, with no indication that it made it to where it was supposed to go, or it being held for moderation, or anything else. Will I ever grace those blogs with another comment again? No!

On another blog, after almost the same amount of work and hitting the submit button, I was informed that commenting on that post was closed. Why was there a comment form then? And why was there no visible indication that commenting was closed that I could see, before I wasted my time putting together a comment? Will I ever grace that blog with another comment? No!

On another blog, after I took the time to make a comment thanking the blogger for his post and tell him how useful it was to me and why, and how I was going to send him some traffic because it was that damn good, his captcha informs me that I must have flunked math in school because 4+3 does not equal 7. Don't insult me like that. I try to compliment you and thank you, and this is the thanks I get? A screwball captcha that calls me an idiot? Will I ever comment on your blog again? No!

On another two blogs, my comment was being held for moderation. Now I can understand the need to do that in order to keep spammers at bay, but don't you think you should check your queue to see if any comments were made, at least once a week, if not more often? Maybe even check it when you are making a new post, at least. Will I be commenting on those blogs again? No!

I am tired of wasting chunks of my life trying to comment unsucessfully on your blogs.

So to all you bloggers out there, please check to make sure your comment forms and captchas work, when commenting is closed that it is visibly closed to your visitors before they waste their time (remove the form if possible), if comments are being held for moderation that commentors are told this, and process your comment moderation queues on a regular basis!

And if you have no clue what you are doing or how to fix things, ask someone to help you!

Online HTML Editor

2007-10-11T14:19:00.004-04:00

Sometimes you have the need to create a quick page for a specific purpose. And it would seem a bit silly to purchase an expensive HTML editor for just the occasional page. And you really don't feel like downloading & installing an application that you won't get much use from.

That's where this nice little editor comes in. It's simple to use and packed with tons of nifty features that you would expect to find in a desktop application.

This is the best free online HTML editor I have found that wasn't associated with some sort of web hosting.

Features:

Page Properties:
Interface allows you specify page title, background color, foreground (text) color, upload a background image from your computer and apply a watermark to the image so that it doesn't scroll, and upload a background sound file.
Find & Replace:
Search your page for text, tags, and images and automatically replace all with something else.
Highlight
Use this tool to "highlight" (specify a background color for) selected text.
Hyperlinks
Click to easily convert text to a hyperlink and apply hyperlinks to images.
Insert Images
Browse to locate an image file on your computer and upload it to your page.
Table Wizard
Easily insert and customize your tables. Specify number of rows and columns, alignment, border size, cell padding, and cell spacing. Tables aid in the layout of your page.
Insert Bulleted Lists
Insert Numbered Lists
Insert Horizontal Lines
Form Wizard
Step-by-step wizard helps you to create and insert simple forms into your web page.
Insert Text Fields and Text Boxes
Easy Text Formatting
Format your text by selecting font face, size, color, bold, italic, and underlined via familiar word processor type buttons.
Paragraph Formatting
One click aligns all left, right, or center.
Button Wizard
Easily insert buttons anywhere on your page!
MORE

Whatever isn't covered by the features in this editor will most likely be covered by their other online tools, listed on the right side of their page.

So no more excuses...go make that web page you have been procrastinating about!

http://www.creatingonline.com/webmaster/html_generator.htm