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).

How many times have you run across a great domain name, got all excited about what you could do with it, and then just dropped the ball?

This is definitely a problem that I see developing in myself lately.  It’s not really that I lose interest, but rather that I have (paying) clients who I’d prefer to give the attention to.  Since my kids continue to consume food, I have to continue to work.

So while I may get a project going 10% or even 75%, within a week or two I’ve forgotten all about it because of other pressing issues.

How many great domains and great ideas do you have ‘waiting in the wings’?

Many people stumble across SEM and think that it’s too hard, or too saturated to make any real money.  After a few months of pushing through something you’re probably not really interested in, you give up.  Small checks come, but it’s not the big payday you thought you’d get.

Well I’m here to tell you that hard work and persistence pays off.

In October 2004 when I stumbled across an Internet Marketing ebook, I started promoting timeshares, lemon laws, and teleconferencing.  None of them ever paid, but I kept at it.

In Feb 2005 I met Derek Chew, then a self employed (and single) SEO.  We hit it off, and I mentioned to him that I was averaging $5/day between Adsense and the few little things I was trying to promote.

Cutting to the chase, I’m now averaging over $3000 a month in side money.  That’s right, I’m still working part time on an Army web design contract, which provides me a nice steady income, and making that money on the side.  I recently bought my wife a nice GMC Denali and have my eye on a Cadillac STS.

If some country boy from Arnold MO can do it, so can you.

There’s a local tattoo shop in my town Arnold, MO.  There’s nothing special about the shop, it’s just like most other tattoo shops you’d visit across the country.  The artists are good, the ink flows plentiful, and the business appears to be doing well.

But they don’t have a website.

Interestingly, they do have quite a decent online following.  On Yahoo Local, they’ve got over 50 reviews. They aren’t listed on Yelp. CitySearch lists them, but with no reviews. And the Google Ten Box shows them with some weird Arizona thing going on, and only 1 review.

So how does a business which appears to have no online presence get over 50 reviews on Yahoo?  I’m not sure, but I’d be willing to bet they are simply asking their customers to post them.

People that get tattoos are a ‘unique bunch’.  They love the art, they love to share/show their tattoos, and they are mostly loyal to one artist/store for their artwork. So the fact that they have 50 reviews on Yahoo doesn’t necessarily surprise me.  But it bothers me how they got there.

Theory One: People just decided to write a review of their tattoo (very possible), so they searched out the company on Google or Yahoo.  They all ended up at Yahoo Local.  Since the business has no website (or if they do I couldn’t find it), the Yahoo Local result is the first one that shows up in a Google search.  So that’s where they posted their review.  Perhaps its that simple.

Theory Two: The store owners noticed that people coming into their store had read some reviews on Yahoo, and the owners keyed in to the fact that these reviews were driving foot traffic. So they started asking people to add their review, thus driving more (hopefully) walk-in traffic.  They saw the social potential and revenue increase from the reviews, but haven’t quite grasped the concept of the overall web as a revenue stream.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts and comments.  How do you think they got all those reviews? What did I miss?