30 Day Challenge To Get Your Business Online

[workshop]

Treat those as beginners luck. The worlds a tough place and it shouldn't be this easy. I am not the person to speak to about design. But there are some things I like and some I don't. Keep the waffle to a minimum. Visual is good as long as it is quick and pertinent. A visitor wants to find what they are looking for in one, two at the most, clicks.

However to get back to SEO, you do want page after page after page of quality relevant content which adds value and depth to the title tags you use. Stuff you want to use to draw visitors to your site but which you don't necessarily want other visitors to waste their time with. So tuck it all away in a corner that is difficult to find. And there is no reason not to use a blog script.

Wordpress works with static pages on the one hand and Posts, News, Updates on the other. The problem here is the way they file and display Posts. Those that know about these things get all in a flutter over duplicate content and you are supposed to "no index" this and "no index" that. This is an area I have never really got to grips with. And it's important.

Short term it all works just fine. But when you are strategically placing links you want them to last for as long as possible. And the question I ask is what happens as the post gets pushed further and further into the archives? Part of me says minimise duplicate content. The other part says this could be a mistake. Rather leave it up to Google to filter it all out. I worry that by trying to double guess what Google wants, I might very well "no index" the one record I shouldn't.

[Dave A]

Wordpress works with static pages on the one hand and Posts, News, Updates on the other. The problem here is the way they file and display Posts. Those that know about these things get all in a flutter over duplicate content and you are supposed to "no index" this and "no index" that. This is an area I have never really got to grips with. And it's important.

I feel your pain.

I'd love to link to a study on Google crawling and indexing I presented on another site, but the owner has since initiated an IP block on huge chunks of the world that includes Africa. The study related to vBulletin sites specifically, but I'm very confident the findings apply to other significant mainstream content publishing platforms such as Wordpress too.

The major search engines had announced the creation of certain sitemap tags to improve webmaster reporting on their content - things like number of posts, number of authors etc. in a given thread. What I managed to prove was that Google was ignoring these additional information entries in sitemaps and were quite clearly using their own algorithm specifically tailored for that main stream content platform to extract and interpret this additional information.

A typical example would be something like a thread with 75 posts, but only 10 posts were shown per page.
The sitemap would report the correct post and author count, together with the last post date for the thread.
Google would show the post and author count and the last post date based on the first page only.

The consequences of this discovery are... complicated. Particularly if you start chasing down the rabbit hole to figure out what the best SEO strategy might be as a result of this discovery.

Personally, between recognising that stuff that was paying the bills were making new and important demands on my time, and that Google was pretty much doing things their own way anyway if they could recognise your platform, I abandoned the rabbit hole - and proceeded on the basis that the best way forward at that point was not to risk confusing Google with too many alterations to the default platform pattern. (Essentially leave the platform as close to default as you can and let the platform developers and Google figure things out between them.)

And I seriously suggest this is the way to go for the purposes of this 30 day challenge.

What is interesting on this front is in the Labs section of webmaster tools, there's a new tool to identify and classify your structured page content. I haven't had a gap to explore it properly yet, but it does look like an interesting option to tell Google more without the technical challenges of messing around with the actual code on your site. Might be worth a look if you're looking for a new challenge.

[workshop]

Dave you lost me there. I think what you were saying was that it is a mistake to try to second guess Google? This because it soaks up a whole lot of valuable time?



If so I couldn't agree more. I watch to see what works and that is what I focus on. Sometimes to the exclusion of things I should be paying attention to. Webmaster Tools I haven't ever looked at. What should I been doing there?

[Funkie]

Hi Jovana!
I have just joined the forum while I was browsing in the forum I came across your thread which I enjoyed very much.
I would like you to take me through the 30 day challenge for my newly website.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Kind Regards,
Patrick.

[Dave A]

Webmaster Tools I haven't ever looked at. What should I been doing there?

Register at Webmaster tools.
Add your website(s) to your profile.
Add your sitemaps or RSS feeds (or both).

Check in from time to time to get some useful information on crawl and indexing stats, search performance, associated keywords, internal and inbound links.

[lance71]

I think all these little tools have their place. I use the webmaster tools, analytics and the clever stat.

I haven't really played around with the webmaster tools enough to comment on it though besides it being useful to report errors etc on the site.

[workshop]

Lance's web site has moved from nowhere to somewhere for all the search terms we started with. And all it took were a few links with anchor text that points to page title tags. Simple stuff, nothing hair-raisingly complicated about SEO. Common sense mostly.

But he needs to keep doing it. He needs to keep placing links, fine tuning those title tags and adding new pages, new title tags and new content. Not every day. Just enough to keep Google interested and to spread the net he has cast. A little bit of effort on a regular basis.

He also needs to keep telling himself that there is a huge difference between what he does for SEO and what he does to draw and secure traffic to his site. He needs to network, to market and strategise or in simple terms to do stuff that is going to get him seen. And once again nothing he can't, anyone can't, do on their own in their spare time. I believe this last point is critically important. Most users still believe in Voodoo dolls and miracle cures. They believe they can achieve the impossible by throwing money they don't have, at someone who wants it.

Mistake!

Internet marketing takes time. And whilst you need to make mistakes to learn, you want to make sensible mistakes rather than expensive mistakes. You want to get your site working, to learn what makes it work and when you have some traffic to worry about, take it to a professional to spruce it up so you can start converting the traffic you are getting. Take it to an SEO expert who has the know how and resources to get around those stone walls you keep bumping into. Take it to someone who understands and who has an affinity for social media marketing. And make damned sure you get much more bounce for every ounce.

[workshop]

We have started work on a project to try and demonstrate that anyone can use the net. In this case unskilled work seekers who do not have access to or use of it themselves. We also make a very important point. Web sites have to be managed. And if our work seekers want their online CV to work they are going to have to knock on doors and make sure the employers click the right buttons http://thexchange.biz/projects/work-in-knysna

[workshop]

We want to set up a training centre and are going to be experimenting with a crowd funding project the Digital Drive. Has anyone had any experience with this?

[Dave A]

Has anyone had any experience with this?

With setting up a training centre, or with crowd funding?

[workshop]

The crowd funding. It is an interesting concept but like everything is not as simple as it first appears to be.

[workshop]

Crowd funding does work. But you have to be focused, you need to be slick and a step ahead. And it is the few rather than the many when it comes to success stories.The question we are asking is how we can reverse that, create opportunities and open doors?

In the interim we have set up a site www.onthecoals.co.za which is getting enquiries for firewood. But that is about it. It is merely a service that we offer. Firewood sellers do not advertise or should I rather say, they do not pay to advertise. So how can one turn this into an opportunity, how can one build a small business out of what we started? Is the concept of an online workshop and incubator practical? It is simple enough. But is it simple enough to work?

It is easy to set up a web site, to get it online. But it is a little more difficult to get a web site to pay. The devil is in the detail.

[NeilMadd23]

Quite an interesting topic this very important for small business

[workshop]

Google is the most cost effective advertising tool available to business, be they big or small. That is if you can cut through all the noise and get to grips with the basics. We are running a workshop where we are building small home run businesses from scratch and off the smell of an oil rag.

It is a lot more difficult than it should be.

[workshop]

I am working on a project to build a small home run business marketing spit braais. If anyone is rash enough to take up this challenge we could end up building something of value from nothing more than a song and a prayer. Anyone interested?