Blog About Crafts

Many of us spend a great deal of time seeking ways to advertise our websites and businesses to stand out from the crowd.

How much time is spent actively reacting to what others are saying about us?

Some time ago I was subcontracted to do some marketing research for a company. Their products sold in the $100k+ range and they wanted to know what their primary competitor was doing online. The results surprised me and are something we could all learn from…

I don’t know about you but it’s always exciting when someone new visits my blog and joins the conversation by leaving a comment on one of my posts. It is a tangible way of knowing someone out there actually thought enough of the post to add their own. Of course, not all blog comments are made to simply join in on the conversation.

Sure, we all do it; leave comments in hope of gaining links for our sites and to get that blog’s author and readers to visit our sites. When those comments are laced with X-rated filth or simply a laundry list of links, most blog owners simply delete them. Some comments are clearly a one-sized fits all bit of meaninglessness that usually adds no value to the conversation. For example, the genius who left a comment on a post about link building like “link building is always a good strategy.” Those inspired comments also get the boot.

But, I recently came across a much more savvy spammer - the one who leaves a fairly decent to great comment but drops a link to a site that is far from being family friendly and is probably illegal in some parts of the world. It was a clever ruse that I almost fell for. (Hmm, upon reflection, I guess I did actually fall for it. I just realized my mistake and took corrective action.)

Among the search engine industry is the relatively new concept of negative SEO. I don’t see the techniques associated with negative SEO as anything new; now they just have a name. Most of the conversations about negative SEO discuss a third party interfering with your SEO efforts but is not damaging your own SEO efforts also a form of negative SEO?

Negative SEO Through Frames

I had been taught that using frames to create webpages would hurt search engine optimization before I even learned how to program a site using frames. Why learn how to do something that was bad?

I was introduced to programming with frames as part of the one HTML class I have taken and I quickly saw why so many people were/are using them - they make managing a site quick and easy. But, are the benefits of using frames worth the negative SEO results?

Now let’s look at the SEO questions you should ask before using frames.

There seems to be almost a science to determining what makes people click on Adsense ads and how that relates to the quality and length of the content on the page. I have been working on a new site as something of an experiment in both Adsense optimization and conducting research that combines web materials, library books, and pieces found on Gutenberg.org.

The research has been fun and quite interesting. But, despite some well-placed incoming links, the site is not being indexed as quickly as I would like. Yahoo and Google are sending me traffic but neither has even half of the site indexed after over 3 weeks. Hate when that happens. lol

No this isn’t another rant on a site taking too long to be indexed. I am wanting to explore content quality and length to see how it can impact click through rates on a new site of mine.

There have been numerous studies that claim a website has only a scant few seconds to grab the surfer’s attention and keep them on your site. I have unfortunately noticed a trend with many crafting websites that use shop software to run the site - the sites take forever, I mean like 5 minutes or more to load.

I ran into this once again the other day. You know when you use a digital camera and the photographs are like 1100 pixels wide? Well this site owner used those original pictures on her site! No wonder it took around 8 minutes for her site to load on my stupid dial-up connection (yes, there are some of us still using those things).

I have brought this issue up on crafting forums and have even emailed some website owners when they have submitted to Crafty Tips and have made this mistake.

I think I finally have come up with an analogy for this…