Web development, design, and site optimization

This past weekend I was out with some friends at a house party and we were rocking away on Rock Band 2, which by the way is amazing. As we were going through the songs I saw Spoonman by Soundgarden. I was all over that, but two of the guys were like WTF is Spoonman. One of them is even a big rock fan who listens to the likes of Tool.

Once I picked my jaw off the ground I convinced them to give it a try. I could not believe they had not ever heard the song. Am I really that old? LOL. Anyway we rocked it out. It was amazing.

So for all of you who have never enjoyed the greatness that is Spoonman, enjoy. Also check out some of the other great Soundgarden tunes.

Pretty Noose

Jesus Christ Pose

Rusty Cage

Black Hole Sun

Tucows (AMEX:TCX, TSX: TC) has just announced the launch of their YummyNames site, which lists domains from their portfolio of names for sale online. The company has before sold individual and groups of names directly and via various brokers and is now formalizing some of their offering under a new brand.

“YummyNames, the public face of our domain portfolio service group, provides an additional means by which to realize the value of our domain portfolio assets to drive continued growth for the Company,” said Elliot Noss, President and CEO, Tucows.

There are “ten thousands of names” listed on the site; Tucows’ portfolio is estimated to contain more than 70,000 domain names. Sample names listed for sale are countryrock.com, divorced.com, lemons.com, listener.com, mygarden.com, thepub.com, tool.com and veggies.com. While the site stats that “These premium domains are priced starting at $500 USD”, it appears that none of the names has actually listed a fixed price at this point. Names are being offered for purchase or lease. The site lists previous clients such as: Bell Mobility, CanWest Global Communications, EMI Music, General Motors, Grand & Toy, Harlequin Enterprises, Johnson & Johnson,  Microsoft, Nestle and RBC Royal Bank.

The Tucows domain portfolio mostly consists of names that were not renewed by registrants, as well as domain names that were purchased as part of the Netidentity acquisition. S

[via Press Release]

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Here is a new Wordpress plugin that DropTheMike.com is testing out. Enjoy!

SEO Friendly Images is a Wordpress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images in your posts with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is over the image.

Download

• Download: SEO Friendly Images

Installation & Usage

1. Upload the whole plugin folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder.
2. Go to the Plugins page and activate the plugin.
3. Use the Options page to modify ALT and TITLE options.
4. You are done, SEO Image does everything else

SEO Friendly Images options recognize two tags %title (post title) and %name (filename of the picture). By combining these two tags and additional words (photo, picture etc..) you can create relevant alt and title tags automatically for all images.

Here is a live example of the plugin (active on my blog). The image that has title and alt replaced with “%title” and “%name %title” respectively resulting in “SEO Friendly Image” for title and “example SEO Friendly Images” for alt.

So are you always toying with new things to try and boost your traffic with little if any results? I don’t even know why I ask you this question, because I already know the answer for 95% of you.  Myself I have tried many, many tactics. Many were dumb ideas in hindsight and saw no return. A few though have in fact succeeded. Which falls right in line with some advice which appears to be universally shared amongst knowledgeable SEO professionals I have met over the years. If you stay persistent and toss up as many ideas as possible, your bound to hit one or two that work once and a while. Much like a baseball player who is considered good at what he does if he succeeds only 1/3 of the time.

Without much doubt, the most successful method of increasing traffic to my blog has been through the use of Social Media. I have been using a combination of Twitter.com, Facebook.com, and most recently EzineArticles.com.

*A word of caution, I strongly recommend you have a solid site content wise before you head down this path. Driving traffic to your site is useless unless you have compelling content to keep them there and keep them coming back.

1. Twitter.com - When I first started using twitter I simply followed people whom I already knew. This worked ok for a while. However I then got an idea on how I could leverage this as more of a tool to drive traffic. I did two things. First I used Twitterfeed.com to automatically post headlines of my latest blog posts to Twitter. Second I went out and scoped some famous “techie” twitter folk with lots of followers, I then started to add myself as a follower of as many of these followers as possible. The direct result is that I got many, many reciprocal follows. Best of all these are people who enjoy the type of material that I blog about.

Now on a daily basis my followers increase. Today I have 687 followers. I engage in conversation with them, I comment on their blogs if they have them, I also have setup link exchanges with some of them. all in all this is the biggest driver of traffic to my website.

2. Facebook.com - Within Facebook I have setup an RSS application that automatically shows my blog feed in my profile. That way anyone who visits my profile, can see my latest posts. This is limited to my immediate Facebook friends, about 334 in total.

In addition to this I have just setup a Facebook Fan Page where users can become a fan of DropTheMike and also can view the RSS feed there and meet other fans.

3. EzineArticles.com - This was recommended to me by a friend in the SEO business. I write and submit articles (minimum 250 words) which are posted to the site in an appropriate category. Site visitors can then read and re-distribute. The great thing is that you can embed links back to your site or blog.

Since doing these 3 items My traffic has been consistently going up and up. One benchmark I like to use is Alexa.com. Before starting these tree tactics I was around the 1 million traffic rank mark. As of today I am nearing 600,000.

Previous notable post on social media:

building-personal-brand-within-the-social-media-landscape/

online-marketing-budgeting-what-next/

entrecardcom/ (I am testing this again)

You don’t have to be real technical these days to get started on creating a pretty elaborate Web project. I say web project because I am trying to be as broad as possible. I am talking about creating a blog, a website, a community portal, a classified listings page, an ecommerce site, etc., etc. You don’t have to do a thing these days to install some of the more popular Open Source web scripts that exist. All you have to do is login to your Web Hosting Control Panel, find and launch Fantastico, and click on the scripts you want it to automatically install for you.

Fantastico is a commercial script library that automates the installation of web applications to a website. Fantastico scripts are executed from the administration area of a website control panel such as cPanel. Fantastico’s web site claims that they are installed on ten thousand servers, with a million users worldwide, which would make it the leading product of its type.

No need for you to configure databases, just worry about setting the admin usernames and passwords. Easy stuff.

Now if your web hosting company does not provide you with Fantastico, shame on them. Most hosts these days make it a standard part of their offering. Netenberg.com, the company behind Fantastico, lists the following as official partners of theirs. Though there are many more providers who, though don’t have a direct partnership, do provide Fatastico.

For a complete listing of the web scripts Fantastico is currently offering click here.