|
24 Dec
|
Posted by Greg Nicholl
|
The standard literature on Search Engine
Optimization says that you can get some good SEO for your site and get possible traffic if you write some articles and post them on the Internet. A site called Squidoo was one of the two mentioned as being a good place to post articles. Squidoo is an easy and effective platform for publishing interesting articles which can give you SEO advantages and increased traffic to your sites. I joined Squidoo a month ago and have enjoyed it a good deal.
Squidoo claims to have millions of pages of content written by their guests. They call these pages lenses. The lens, web page, gets its name from the idea that your article gives people a lens to look in on a new topic that you might want to learn more about. Lenses can be about anything but are restricted by a few normal rules and codes on decency and safe web content. Click to continue »
Pursuing All Things Web
| Category: Content Writing | Tag: article writing, backlinks, SEO, social networking, Squidoo |
|
4 Dec
|
Posted by Greg Nicholl
|
In my search to begin blogging I decided to try out Google's Blogger two weeks ago. It was quick and easy and seemed to be a powerful platform. It is connected to Google and so I believed that a Blogger blog would give me a better chance at good SEO. In a short time I began to read articles that stated that SEO and link building would be better on a self hosted blog. One reason is that you are not building any Search Engine love for your own site by having your blog on Blogger. Secondly, if you decide to move it Google will not give you the credit for the links that you have attached to your Blogger. Since I was so new at it I decided I would do the best thing and make a clean break from the start.
I had heard of WordPress for a long time. I knew that WordPress had a huge following and It was clear that there were an abundance of nice free themes. I set up WordPress on my site in a folder named blog. True to the claim it was an easy 5 minute setup. I have installed plenty of scripts which require one to set permissions on a myriad of folders and files. Nothing like that with WordPress. It was nice and seemed to be very stable and full featured. I like it. Click to continue »
Pursuing All Things Web
| Category: blog software | Tag: blog website integration, blogging, blogging software, WordPress, WordPress Integration |
|
3 Dec
|
Posted by Greg Nicholl
|
Comments Off
|
Focused Light Today I read the blog of a man that I look up to, Ron Hutchcraft. He told of a friend who needed glasses but didn't want to wear glasses. He found out about Lasik surgery and found that he would be a good candidate for it. As he went through his surgery the Dr. aimed a bright light into his eye. The focused light was aimed at the parts of his eye which limited his vision. The result was that the focused light changed the man's life. No longer did he need to wear the glasses; he felt free. This leads to the conclusion, that in many things, focus is good.
Focus Is Good A long time ago I found out that a lot of people didn't do much or receive much SEO work on their website. This was especially true of those sites created as a hobby or by FrontPage or other HTML generators. And the people who did take care of it seemed to add a whole load of keywords to their Meta Keywords tag. A whole load turned into a huge figure, in some cases, maybe even a google Click to continue »
Pursuing All Things Web
| Category: Code Writing | Tag: Home Page Focus, Home Page Focused On Mission Statement, Main Key Word, SEO, SEO Tips |
|
3 Dec
|
Posted by Greg Nicholl
|
Comments Off
|
In my last blog I talked about the online stores that I recently set up. Many Shopping Carts use PayPal's IPN feature which sends customers back to the proper page on your site to receive instructions. I had a Hosting Business set up already so that meant that I needed to use IPN three separate times. PayPal accounts are set up to allow for using IPN only once. This is a serious limitation and a serious issue for people who want to own several online stores and use PayPal for the payment gateway with them on the one account. I couldn't find any good solutions by reading the documentation so I contacted PayPal support. A man responded to me, quickly, with a suggestion that I include some code in my buttons. It didn't look that easy and I didn't want to delve into it. Another unappealing solution is to have two different PayPal Business accounts.
I began searching and I found a simple PHP script which would allow me to work around the limitation. Scriptomart.com offers a great little script called Paypal IPN Multiple Email Accounts. By setting up this script on any domain that you own, you can give a redirect to PayPal's IPN so that it deals with any email address you want to use with each particular store that you have. It will work with stores that are on different domains (other than the originating). You configure it to your primary PayPal email address, or in some instances, a different email may be used if your Store script allows.. The Scriptomart company claims to have had 6 different sites running from one script. I have 3 stores linked to one instance. Paypal IPN Multiple Email Accounts is simple, powerful and effective. I verified that it works properly through my sites. The price is right at $14.99. However, due to the registration process, it will be locked to the domain where it is installed. This is no big deal to me to obtain such a useful script for such a low price.
Pursuing All Things Web
| Category: Ecommerce | Tag: ecommerce, Payment Gateway, PayPal, PayPal Integration, PayPal IPN |
|
3 Dec
|
Posted by Greg Nicholl
|
When I began my search for a shopping cart I first looked at Zen Cart since I had had a little experience with it before. I find that Zen Cart looks a little bit stale by modern standards. It is noted as a very respectable and stable PHP shopping cart. However, there are few free templates available in the Zen Cart community. Most of what I’ve seen didn’t seem to meet the style demands that I was looking for. Granted, I could adjust templates and CSS in order to make it look better. I was not in the mood for that sort of work at the time. Zen Cart has a lot of nice features but the back end and catalog system seems overly complicated. In my opinion, it could take the newbie quite a bit of time to get used to the features of the Zen Cart back end. I decided not to go any further with Zen Cart.
I began to do some research and I came across a newer offering called Magento. Magento is starting to get a lot of acclaim. It is a very full featured Shopping Cart, Click to continue »
Pursuing All Things Web
| Category: Ecommerce | Tag: ecommerce, ecommerce shopping carts, Open Source Shopping Carts, PHP Shopping Carts, PrestaShop |
|
2 Dec
|
Posted by Greg Nicholl
|
Comments Off
|
I go out into the community a couple of times a year to pass out printed calendars or cards with discounts for the businesses in the area. I’m fully aware of the financial crunch that we are all having. It seems to me, that there was an intensity this year that was not there last year; an intensity of, I guess you would say, impolite behavior. Last year certain merchants took my handout and were pleasant. This year several of them were not polite, and even a little irate. I got a number of the expected, “cousin Stan is doing our website”. You come to expect these things.
I and fully up on the fact that a certain number of people will use cousin Stan and that cousin Stan will be using FrontPage or some other Web Page generator that is not quality producing. And I know that in the end, they will have a website with giant images which are heavy and not optimized for page loading speed. They will probably not have meta tags and will not have a site map which will help them with the search engines. Recognizing the desire of some people for discount stuff, I offer a series of site packages done by template and they understand that going in. In the end they will get attention to the details that will make or break their site. These things are done as a matter of choice; they fit my small community that I live in.
One thing that I don’t understand, though, is the friction and animosity of some people behind the counter when I come in. Why should anyone do that? I guess I, the salesman, was bothering them; taking up their time. But the question comes to mind, if I am a salesman, what are they?
I guess that I can go home and comfort myself with the fact that my site will go higher than cousin Stan’s!
Pursuing All Things Web
| Category: Sales And Customer Relations | Tag: |
