Advance warning - this post has absolutely nothing to do with search.

My wife is a gambling nut. She just loves to go play the slots, and lately she’s getting in to video poker.  She does well most times, and it makes her smile, so I don’t mind going to a casino now and then.

The new Lumiere Place casino in downtown Saint Louis is our latest hangout.  We are probably there 2-3 times a month, sometimes more.

Well we’ve been saving up for vacation so we’ve kinda laid off going, but last night I took her down there for a while.  I don’t mind going, particularly if there’s a Cardinals baseball game on.  I’ll sit in one of the bars, drink beer and watch the Cards.  I usually sit in a bar that’s right in the middle of the casino because it’s actually fairly quiet in there, surprisingly.  But last night I ventured over to another bar, dubbed the “Burger Bar” (how original!).  It’s a nice little place, and best of all its non smoking.

The wife wanted to play video poker, so I met her over at the Burger Bar and she went to it.  She has some crazy strategy which usually works to her advantage.  I just sit and stare at the TVs.  But last night I was starving, so I asked for a menu.  I ended up ordering the turkey burger with blue cheese and skinny fries.  Man oh man was it good!!

I was a little cautious about ordering turkey, but it was worth it.  I’d order that baby again today if I were there.  It had the normal tomato, lettuce and onion. I got a wheat bun and put some mustard on that bad boy.  Good stuff.

Oh - and the wife did well.  She hit four of a kind on about three or four different machines there, totaling about $300.  Not bad considering we walked in with about $140.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, this ‘bad economy’ is a great time for your business to grow.  The down times are causing people to scale back on necessities, and the government is hoping that their new stimulus package will help some small businesses continue to operate.

As part of the stimulus package, the government has also increased the amount that a business can expense (section 179).  This one-year exception means that if you buy business stuff (a van, a computer, some new software) you can write off a larger chunk of that up front, which will help come time that Uncle Sam visits you again in April.

I’m not a tax expert, so do some research on the section 179 details.

This is a great time for small businesses to get their fannies in gear in relation to online presence.  I’m not going to rehash what I said earlier, but man what an opportunity!  Cut back on those Yellow Pages ads and push that money into your Internet plans.  You won’t be sorry.

I have a friend who is a bona fide member of the YTB travel group.  She promotes her stuff, and claims to make a nice commission each month.  She is trying to get me to sign up, since she knows I’m already an Internet marketer and a good public speaker.

I first talked to her about YTB about a year ago, and today I stopped in and asked her how it was going.  She claimed that they (her and her husband do it together) were doing well and once again she urged me to check it out.

So I’ve done a little research online.  Some people call it a scam, others debunk the scam myth.

I’d like to hear from some people who have dealt with YTB before, both those who are currently working the system, and those who signed up and then quit.

For those currently promoting travel via YTB:
How are you doing?  Are you averaging, say, $300/month in commissions?  $500? $1000? More? Or are you finding out that bothering your friends and family to sign up through your website is a pain?

For those who were members and quit:
Why did you quit?  Big promise but no real money? You don’t know how to promote it beyond just friends and family? They screwed you?

Leave your comments and thoughts below.  I’d love to hear them.

In preparation for the family vacation, I realized that there are several things I’ll be doing differently than in years past.

I signed up for OnStar’s Three Months on Us Trial.  This will give me emergency contact info if my 15 year old wrecks the Denali on Highway 57.

My Mom just bought a new Garmin for her husband.  I’m going to see if I can’t borrow it for our trip, and if we like it, we may just buy one of our own.

I’ll also be using the Garmin for some geocaching fun.  The kids have been talking about this, so what better way to introduce ourselves to it than on vacation?

I’ll have Google Maps on my Treo for restaurant location and any other info I may need on the fly. I’ll also use it to find known wireless hotspots so that the wife and I can check email.  Unfortunately I’m not at the point in my business where I can trust the biz to someone else while I’m gone, or else I’d be avoiding the email altogether.

I’ll also use Google Reader on my Treo to keep up with the latest feeds (when I’m not driving).

We’re considering signing up for XM radio so we don’t have to change the radio station every 100 miles or so.  That gets old, particularly on an 1800 mile trek across the US.

We’re leaving for vacation on Friday, so as is my custom I’m preparing our little folder with the maps to each stop along the way.

Mapquest sends me the wrong way, and there’s no way to change the route. So I decide to use Google maps.

I get the map all finished and go to print it, only to get a blank page.

So I open IE (you know, last resort browser) and try to print it there, same thing.

So I email it to a coworker, and he gets a blank page too.

Can anyone print a map from Google maps today?

“Can I just pay a couple of months now? We can’t afford to do the whole year at once”

Sometimes my hosting business gets requests to extend a hosting account just a month or two.  I’ve always accommodated these requests, as I can understand money can be tight.

However recently I’ve had two instances where people have requested an extension (and they’ve paid their $9 bucks or whatever it is) just to move hosts.  They had planned all along to do so, and just needed a little more time to do so.

Well, no more extensions.  From now on you pay for a year or I terminate the account.

What is that saying, lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part?  Something like that…

As a followup to my first post Five Things You Can Do to Your Website Right Now to Achieve Higher Rankings I thought I’d give you another five. Hopefully you’ve already done those, and you’re ready for a few more. Here goes:

1. Add a meta description tag to your home page
   Really you should add a custom description to every page on your website, but at least you need one on your home page. Put in a few keywords, and remember that this description is what shows up in the ’summary’ area of a SERPS page. So you’ll want to make it something that encourages searchers to click, yet it needs to be accurate and informative as to what your website it about.

   <meta name=”description” content=”Find custom widgets in various colors. Build your widget online and have it in a week. We offer free shipping of widgets to all US locations.”>

2. Modify your .htaccess to avoid duplicate content penalties
   Many people don’t realize that yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com can be considered two separate websites to the search engines. So just publishing a website creates an instant duplicate content issue - one you can fix with .htaccess

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !^post$
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301]

   What? Don’t have the ability to modify or add a .htaccess file? You need to get a better host. May I suggest my company, Lighthouse Technologies? Very SEO friendly and customer support is awesome </plug> =)

3. Add text navigation
   Many businesses get caught with this one - they build a nice website with pretty navigation buttons along the top or left and don’t have any text versions of the navigation. This can cause problems - search engines can’t ’see’ graphics.
   While the page looks good, and it functions well, the search engines really need to assign a text name (or anchor) to each page of your site. It can do that if you have a text link to each page.
   If you have a site with the scenario above, consider simply adding a sitemap, a page with text links to every page on your website. Another easy way to fix this is to add text links to your main navigation pages along the bottom of your website. Not many people scroll that far down, it won’t look that bad, and the search engines will be happy with you.
4. Add (and verify) your site to the search engine’s “tools” programs
   This is an easy one. Submit your site to Google’s Webmaster Tools and Yahoo’s Site Explorer. They’ll give you a little snippet of code to add to your home page, or a file to FTP up, and then you’ll be verified as a ‘real human owner’ of your website.
5. Remove staging files/sites that are online
   Here’s a good one for web developers. Often we create subdomains or own entire domains that are particularly for staging/building new sites. We send these links to our clients and have them check out the site, submit changes, etc. Then when the real website launches, we forget to go back and delete the staging version. Suddenly, we’ve got more duplicate content issues.
   NOTE: A good developer will add a Disallow to their robots.txt file for the subdomain anyway, but I’d be willing to bet few do.

I know these aren’t the easiest 5 things you can do to help your site rank, but they aren’t all that hard either. Do some or all of these things and your site will continue to creep up the SERPS.

Sphinn this article

I’m a big fan of Google Alerts. I love letting Google scour the web for me and provide me with a nice little email that tells me about (and links me to ) new articles about a particular subject that I may be interested in.

For example, I run a very local website called Arnold Talk (ArnoldTalk.com) which I post news articles and events that are related to my little town. So I set up a few alerts such as “arnold mo” and “arnold missouri”. Any time someone posts an article that mentions that phrase, I’ll get an email about it.

It’s great because I can have information about upcoming events before anyone else does, including the local newspaper.

So how can you use Google Alerts for your business?

Let’s say, for this example, that you run a business selling football supplies. You stock and ship footballs, helmets, pads, even trophies around the country.

You notice that your ranking for “red helmets” is low and you want to get a few links for that phrase. So you log into Google Alerts and add a new alert for that phrase. Make sure you use the quotes, or else you’ll end up with results that just mention the word ‘red’ and the word ‘helmets’ on the same page. That won’t do you much good.

So a day or two goes by and then you get an email from the Alerts telling you that there is a blog with your phrase. You click the link and see that its a high schooler who is blogging about his day, and he mentions the new red helmets they got this year. You look around and find his email address and shoot off an email similar to this:

Dear Johnny Quarterback,

Today I noticed that you had mentioned that your team got some new helmets for this years football season. Congrats!

I am an Internet marketer, and I would like to know if you’d be interested in creating a link in your recent post where you mentioned the helmets. If so, I’d be happy to pay you $5 for the link.

I hope your team does a great job this year, and wish you the best of luck on your football career.

Joe Mama
SportsRus.com

Now, it may work better for you if you just mention that you are a sports store owner, or you may want to skip that part altogether. The point is to get the link, and cheap. Since the chances are this blog isn’t read by too many people, the value of the link is not going to be high. But it’s a permanent link. And Johnny Quarterback will be thrilled to get $5 bucks.

Do you use Google Alerts to help you with your link building strategy? If not, why not? What’s more fun than using Google to beat Google?

By the way, if it works out and you get the link, I’d also follow up with him asking him not to post the fact that he sold a link (for obvious reasons).