October, 2008

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Not as PHP Geeky as I Thought I Was

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

I want to get some info from an organic visitor, such as the HTTP_REFERER and such.  I know how to get that and turn it into a variable, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to keep that referer variable static.  In other words, as the visitor bounces around the website, I don’t want it to change at every page.  I want to keep just their original referer (ie google, yahoo, etc).

Now, once they end up at the contact_us page and fill out a form, I want to email that original referer information to myself as a hidden input item.

How can I save a variable and keep it from changing as they bounce through the site?  I’m sure it has something to do with PHP sessions but I can’t get it to work no matter what I try.

Posted in programming | No Responses »

Link Building is the RAM of SEO

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

It has long been said that one of the best upgrades you can do to your computer is to increase the RAM.  This memory increase is immediately noticeable in processing speed, bootup and when starting a new program.  It’s a cheap upgrade, and is well worth the investment.

Building links to your website is one of the ‘best upgrades’ you can do to your website.  If you can’t afford an all-out SEO campaign (especially in today’s economy), a link building campaign should be the way to go.  It’s an affordable way to increase the overall “value” of your website, both in monetary terms and more importantly – in organic search results.  A well executed link building campaign can help you rank quickly for terms that you thought were out of reach.

I’ve recently helped several small businesses who, like many, had reduced their marketing budget to near zero with a link building campaign.  The results, much like a RAM upgrade, are noticeable within a short amount of time.  Their brand awareness is growing, and more targeted traffic means more customers.

Posted in Marketing | 2 Responses »

Highly Targeted Niche Website for Sale (Saint Louis Area)

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

For nearly 5 years I’ve run a website called Arnold Talk here in my home town of Arnold, Missouri.  The website has gone from a forum to a complete community website that promotes local events and has a very active forum.  The site gets well over a half million hits every month, all from very targeted traffic (Arnold residents).

I’ve had a horribly difficult time getting advertisers, therefore I’ve financed the entire thing (minus a scattered donation here and there) and now I must stop.  As my business continues to grow, I’ve got to start cutting out some of the things that are not part of my core focus.

Therefore I’m going to shut down this hugely popular website.  That is, if no one offers me some buck$ to buy it.

Hyperlocal websites are getting really popular nowadays.  This is probably the entirely wrong time to close down this site, especially with the amount of traffic that it gets month after month.  But I’m no ad salesman and can’t even generate a decent income to make the site worth keeping.  Traffic or not.

Interested in buying it? Here’s the link.  Make me an offer (by Oct 31).

Posted in St Louis, domain names, local marketing, traffic | 1 Response »

The Epic Dash vs Underscore Battle

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

For a long time I’ve read that there is a difference in how search engines see and index filenames and URLs that contain dashes or underscores. For a long time the general concensus has been that the search engines consider a dash to be simliar to a space, whereas they consider an underscore as no space. If that’s true, then your new page called will_hanke_wins_lottery.htm is going to rank as willhankewinslottery. Had you named it will-hanke-wins-lottery.htm then you’d theoretically have a better chance at ranking for a mixture of those individual words.

But c’mon, do you really believe that with all those algorithm nerds in California can’t figure out how to differentiate between a dash and an underscore?

Posted in Marketing, SEO, beginner sem, content, site ranking | 1 Response »

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