• scissors
    July 4th, 2009PaulUncategorized

    Committee to Protect Bloggers reports that TinyURL has been blocked in Saudi Arabia. The URL shortener service is not the only option out there for your shortened URLs, but it is the default one for Twitter, so if you want to reach the Saudi followers you’d better use another service. I should also link the Facebook group that wants TinyURL unblocked, but I doubt it’ll do any good, at least not with a mere 19 members.

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  • scissors
    July 3rd, 2009PaulUncategorized

    Some media executives are bitching about Google ranking blogs and sites not controlled by the mainstream media. Of course Google has been tilting their algorithms in the direction of brands, and even includes trusted news partners directly in the search results for recent news items. But that is not enough to make bloated media companies profitable.

    “The original source, and the source with real access, should somehow be recognized as the most important in the delivery of results.”

    Google subsidizes these media companies with additional exposure by

    • weighting domain authority
    • giving them first mover advantage in the search rankings (through direct inclusion of recent news results in the organic search results)
    • featuring their content (yet again) in their news search product
    • favoring informational content over commercial content

    If a big business has “real access” and yet loses out to people rewriting the story, it means the original source did one (or more) of the following

    • did a pretty crummy job of reporting
    • did a pretty crummy job of SEO
    • erected barriers that made them not linkworthy
    • fought off niche brands with a generic brand that does not resonate as well with the market

    Google could give these media companies almost 100% of the search traffic and many would still go bankrupt because their business models simply do not fit the web. Online ad rates are lower, most of the media infrastructure is unneeded bloat, and individuals and brands are starting to create their own media.

    When I click the publish button, 10’s of thousands of people will read this post. Its not your fault or my fault that big media was too lazy to create niche brands offering relevant regularly updated content.

    Ironically, the quote from AdAge, begging for coverage of the original source, did not have a name on it. You can quote it, but there is no source. These clowns whine about something and are not willing to put their names behind their own words. Maybe that has something to do with why people would rather read elsewhere.

    This is the same media that pushed the bogus Iraq war, laughed and joked about those errors (while people were still dying), and missed the financial terrorism occurring back home. Why again is the original source more important than those who dig a bit deeper and add further context?

    If the relevancy algorithms are your enemy, then maybe your work is no longer relevant.

    Maybe they can work on stuff that matters.

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  • scissors
    July 2nd, 2009PaulUncategorized

    I have been working as a SEO Expert in the search engine optimization field in Phoenix Arizona for over 12 years, and unfortunately I am still learning. SEO consultants can teach you about a lot of things when it comes to the search engine optimization marketing of your website. However, one of the most important things that they are going to teach you about is linking. There are 2 forms of linking, Internal linking within your website and external linking; which is the process of obtaining links from other websites.

    If you have never worried about the marketing of your website online, then you may not know how important linking is. Sure, it helps to get the name of your website out there, because the more links to your website, the better. SEO experts will teach you that linking is used also for a totally different reason. They will obtain links to your web site for the purpose of improving search rankings in popular search engines. Internet crawlers are the bots that crawl the web for search engines to find updated information on the internet. Then they report back to the search engines and use an algorithm to determine where you belong on the internet search rankings. The more quality links you obtain to your site, the higher you should rank. The better spot you get in the search engines, the more traffic you will obtain.

    This is how it works; As search engines move around the internet, they come across tons of sites. When the search engines come across websites that link to your site, then it’s like you get a thumbs up towards improving your search rankings. As you can guess, the more points you get, the higher your ranking; and thus, this is what a lot of SEO experts build off of. SEO consultants usually use their services to better work on your web site as well as teach you how to improve your site on your own. They will teach you how to obtain quality from popular sites. Because there are a lot of tips and tricks to make it easier and more effective. Link building is what makes search engine optimization so hard!

    The truth of the matter is, you can not just throw your link out there anywhere and expect it to count towards your site. In fact, a lot of search engine crawlers look to make sure that the websites have something in common and that they are credible links and referring sites. For example, let’s say that your site is about cars, and you place a link on a flowers website. This is not going to help as much for your website rankings. If you do this sort of thing a lot, it can actually hurt your site. Many SEO experts are masters at getting links to your site that work for you. Their services are aimed at simplifying your online marketing with their professional services. SEO consultants can help teach you about the basics of search engine optimization, and how you can use it to get ahead.

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  • scissors
    July 1st, 2009PaulUncategorized

    New on the TotalPHP blog today is this article talking about reading RSS feeds with PHP (more specifically with SimpleXML).

    PHP 5’s ability to read XML files is fantastically easy to use. In the past it was possible but it required quite a bit of long winded code to get any where. PHP 5’s SimpleXmlElement function makes working with XML a breeze, and with much less code too!

    They include a script as an example - five lines to completely parse and pull the title and link information out of the remote RSS file. The example creates a SimpleXML object using the feed’s URL and makes each element inside accessible as an object (that can be looped through and properties can be checked on).

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