Question: A HUGE THANK YOU!!! for your information on getting a website into the directories and registered with the search engines. I’m a total newby and don’t have any money to pay the big boys so I was really appreciative of your willingness to share the knowledge so I could do it
myself. Thanks so much. - C.

Answer: You are very welcome. I hope the registrations work for you. There’s a good little program available here: http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/

It costs less than $100, and will help you register your site in about 2500 different directories. About half of those are paid …

Re Keywords - specific vs general

Question: I’m just starting a network marketing biz. It’s about a solution to the problems of wireless connections. Do I focus on the problem words, cell phone and cancer, cell towers and electro pollution? etc.? Or do I go for the solution words, electro-pollution protection? Thanks, H.

Answer: The trick with keywords is to figure out *exactly* what people are searching for that, if they click on the link to come to your site, your site would be the answer to whatever they are looking for. So I always advise that people go *more* …

Occasionally I receive random questions through the form on my website, http://www.wordsinarow.com/contact.html. I am going to post these to my blog so that the answers may do some good, as they are of general interest to those designing or promoting websites:

Question: how should I promote links?

Answer: It’s best to get links from these two sources:

1. Directories. These will provide one-way links to your site. I
recommend you download and use the Directory Submitter software for $97.00
here: http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/

Then submit to ONLY the directories that do not charge for a submission, and that DO NOT require a
reciprocal …

This amazing video demonstrates the level of protection provided for skin by “Gloves in a Bottle” (one of my clients). I’ve been using their product for about 8 years, whenever dry skin becomes an issue for me, or when I work out where I might get some poison oak on my skin. First I put on Gloves in a Bottle, then I’m protected. The owner of the company is a friend and his site is doing well in the search engines for “dry skin” — usually at #4 at Google for that phrase, ahead of the giant pharmaceutical companies with unlimited budgets. …

As an owner of three horses, they own a big chunk of my time every day. One of them is even rideable, when I get the urge. There’s a new equine search engine (a marketing client of mine) that focuses on the various disciplines within the equine world, such as dressage, western, trail riding, etc. It’s an interesting concept and I’m watching it as it grows in popularity and Google ranking. It seems to be in the sandbox at Google at this time, but that shouldn’t last too much longer.

A large candy site which I’ve been optimizing for the last 3 or 4 years has had top natural placement in the search results for the keywords “bulk candy” and “candy warehouse” for most of that time, at Google and elsewhere. This client now has great rankings for hundreds of individual candies.

The site is undergoing an extensive re-design to handle back end problems, which re-design is scheduled to go live today.

We have moved the site from Windows IIS hosting, where the pages all ended in .asp or .aspx, over to a Linux Apache mySQL PHP (LAMP) platform, where …

I’ve been working on setting up several websites through Plesk on virtual private servers (VPS) at www.Data393.com While the Data393 tech support guys are always available 24/7 and helpful as can be, I have to say I don’t much care for Plesk. It’s not intuitive, the way cpanel on WHM is intuitive for setting up a website. I’ve set up 4 of these VPS now for several of my clients, and it’s a real chore compared to adding a site through WHM. And I never know what I’m missing when something doesn’t work. Call it a learning curve, call me a …

This post from Matt Cutts blog is worth reading. Matt Cutts Reviews Sites. It’s worth studying closely, actually., especially with regard to the duplicate content filter, and the bias that Google clearly has against someone who owns multiple websites. If you’re trying to rank many websites that have similar themes, is there a filter that will keep you from ranking more than one of them in the top 10? So it seems to me.

“Why re-invent the wheel since this works…”

Normally I don’t put a lot of credence in Jakob Nielsen’s studies and observations about the web. Most of them strike me as academic or utterly impractical. Today’s article, F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) however, has some useful info. People looking at web pages, according to this article, scan them in an F-shaped pattern, first two horizontal stripes, then one vertical stripe down left side. About what you’d expect. I’ll need to use this when designing sites, by putting the main info on the page in that pattern..