Small business marketing

Backlinks from good websites are hugely valuable.

This morning I received a link request from an SEO firm in Atlanta, GA.  Lately I've seen more requests coming in that do not include an offer to link back to my site.

At first  thought this technique was rather silly. I mean, I have a PR3 website he wants to get a link from – Domain Country. 

I visited his SEO website which I think was very good.

And then it hit me. You may not get the one-way link, but you might get a trageted visitor for asking for a link!

What do you think?

Greg Cryns

Work At Home Profiles – $3.77/mo for a full page ad and membership

Wordpress website design and site promotion

I searched for "suspended Wordpress account" for about 10 minutes and came up with these.

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/my-accounts-been-suspended

http://redstaplerchronicles.com/completely-free-from-wordpress/

http://techpp.com/2008/12/09/sequence-of-events-leading-to-account-suspension-after/

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/blog-suspension-without-notice

http://versatile1.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/two-months-later-life-after-the-third-wordpress-suspension/

Contact me to help get your blog moved to your own domain name.

Greg Cryns

Phone: 805-226-8354

Twitter: @calgreg

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First, thanks to our new customers who took advantage of our special offer to move their Wordpress blog to a new domain server. This is smart business.

If you want to be sure to be in control of your blog, you really need to move it to your own domain, especially if you do ANY business on your blog. This is not to diss on Wordpress which is a platform I love to work with. Just the facts.

Wordpress has a very strict policy about putting business links on your website. You can read it here:

http://en.support.wordpress.com/advertising/ 

If you don't think you can lose your Wordpress account overnight, think again.Here are just a few suspension stories I found in about 10 minutes of searching.
http://www.gregcryns.com/2009/11/10/some-suspended-wordpress-accounts/

I personally know someone who lost their Wordpress account. His had PR4 and hundreds of visitors a day. That's a goldmine lost for no good reason.

Through January 1st, the cost to put your Wordpress blog on a new domain owned by you is $250. After that the price goes to $500.

If you want to redesign your blog, discuss pricing with us on the phone. The time to protect yourself is now, before an ugly surprise happens.

Hope to hear from you!

Greg Cryns
http://www.themightymo.com
Phone: 805-226-835
Twitter: @calgreg

I think this might be useful to some people.

Here is a web page that lists all of the StumbleUpon groups. There are many.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/groups.php?supertopic=&sort=alphabetical

Greg Cryns

The Mighty Mo Wordpress Design and Promotion

Many people ask about the conflict of Wordpress guidelines relating to using Adsense, Amazon ads, CPA (cost per action) and others.

There is no conflict if you host Wordpress on your own website, like I do here. That is accomplished thorugh Wordpress.org. If Wordpress hosts the site, you need to do set it up through Wordpress.com.

I recommend that everyone host their blog on their own website. Mainly, this is to prevent Wordpress from dropping a blog where you have hundreds of hours of time put into it.

Call me for oui special offer to help you cross the bridge to hosting your blog on your website.

Greg Cryns

The Mighty Mo Website Design
Phone: 805-226-8354
Email: gregcryns@charter.net

You may already know this, but if you receive a Letter from "Domain Registry of America" that your website domain name will renew soon, shred it. These people are simply out to get you to pay them an exorbitant price for your domain renewal. In my opinion, they are total slimebags.

These jerks try to get you to renew your domain them through them instead of the registrar you chose. The method is to send you a notice about five months before the actual renewal. In big bold letters they say:

Domain name:  (your domain name)

Reply Requested by:  (about a month from the date you receive the notice)

To add insult to injury they are charging about three times the norm – $30 for one year. They must be making money as they have been doing this for many years.

Do a search for "domain registry of america scam" if you want to see what other people are saying about these scabs. Then complain to the authorities.

This fellow has some creative ways to fight back.

Greg Cryns

Guerrilla Advertising: Sometimes you must think outside the box to get noticed

 Greg Cryns

Wordpress website creation and promotion

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Wordcamp San Francisco – Matt Cutts talks about Wordpress and SEO

Here is a link to the video if you would like to watch it:
http://wordpress.tv/2009/05/30/matt-cutts-google-sf09/ 

Here are my notes and comments on the video.

1. Matt said uses WordPress, not Google’s Blogger. That is interesting from two aspects: 1) he works for Google; if there was the least problem he would side with his company; 2) he feels confident about WordPress ability to get good Google juice. "Wordpress built in SEO is pretty good"

2. Security Tip:  ADD .HTACESS in WP/admin – done correctly then only the admin can get into the blog, not hackers.

3. Wordpress takes care of 80% of the SEO said Matt, but there is still more we can do to optimize.

4. Highly recommended Plug-Ins: cookies for comments, feedburner, word cache

5. What Page Rank does to help your blog: 1. increases bot activity. The higher the rank the deeper the bots will go into your blog. Page rank is "the number of people that link to you and how important those linkd are". If you have high quality content then you are likely to get more incoming links and higher Page Rank. Matt cautioned not to obsess about Page Rank.
         
6. The best way to create a successful blog is to talk about stuff that you are passionate about, things you care about. Write often (daily?- he did not say that but implied it IMO). The more you write the better will be your copy.

KEYWORDS

7. "jargon mismatch" – if you don’t have the right keywords on your site, the ones people are using to find information, then it is "very difficult for Google to find your site"

8. Google looks at 200 different things to rank your page (things in the URL, TITLE, H1 tags, he did not specify more nor did he comment on which was most important but he did sound to me that these three rank high in the algorithm in my opinion)
 
9. Matt likes a "custom structure" on his URLs ( %postname% ) I am not really sure what he means by this but it seemed important to Matt so I pass it on.

10. Put keywords in the URLs you create on your site. For example, don’t use mygreatsite.com/p=123. Use mygreatsite.com/wordpress-tips/

11. another URL TIP:  Use a different keyword in the URL phrase mygreatsite.com/wordpress-tips/ than you use in the Title tag. The Title tag might be "Great Wordpress ideas"

12. WRITE THE BLOG POST, THEN CHECK GOOGLE’S KEYWORD TOOL AND ADD THEM TO YOUR POST – stressed strongly

13.   BETTER TO USE DASHES IN THE KEY PHRASES – don’t run words together in the interior URL pages (I’ve never seen this addressed until now)

14. DON’T OVERDO THE KEYWORDS – use the keyword maybe 3 times and you don’t have to BOLD it either – have someone read your post back to you. If it sounds stilted, change it.

GAIN A REPUTATION

14. BE INTERESTING!  – IS IT FUN? – ADD NEW INSIGHTS – the more you write, the better you get at writing. Makes sense to me!

15. The deep secret of blogging – KATAMARI – start small, build up, build up – if someone tells you there is a shortcut to bloggging success, don’t listen to him (Matt stressed this strongly)
 
 
     WAYS TO GET INCOMING LINKS

16. Provide a useful service
      exsample: Eric Goldman, blawger about legal issues and search

17.  Do original research or reporting -HUGE!!!
       example:  Danny Sullivan – compared spam between GMail and Yahoo
       example:  Lewis Gray – watched his referrers – your search engine log – unearthed REBURNER and two others

18. Give great information
        example: Lifehacker – high quality tutorials and guides 

18.  Find a creative niche
        example: Icanhascheezeburger.com – One Sentence Penny Arcade – xkcd

20.  Write some CODE – Wordpress Open Source is beckoning you

21.   Live blogging! – people are blogging while they watch Matt speak – getting links because the news is so new and people crave – go to your favorite conferences (think Wordcamp LA on Sep 13, 2009)

22.   Post lists (11 reasons why WordCamp ruled)

23.   Create controversy – but not too often

24.   Meet people on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed (note: he did not include LinkedIn)

25.  Podcast or Video? – Matt likes videos because it’s really easy to do and ten to rank well on Google. He said if you rank high on AmIHotorNot.com then do podcasts (his joke)

26.  ADSENSE – use these tags so Google will target the meat of your blog post in results instead of including everything else on the page
      <!–google_ad_section_start–>
      <!–google_ad_section_end–>

27. google.com/webmasters – "Free Links"  will show you who linked to the 404 on your site – gives all kinds of CRAWL STATS – can set to have "www" or not

28. Google analytics – you can see which blog POSTS get the most visitors
        – Bounce rate – idea: show related posts gives the visitor something else to do other than just leave your blog

THINGS NOT TO DO

29.  If something looks to good to be true, it probably is -don’t be spammy
       example: Google Money Tree (filling out forms) he called "incredibly spammy"

30.  Keep your blog updated

Greg Cryns

Wordpress design and SEO promotion

Today, 8.17.09,At 10:00 AM Pacific time,  I noticed that I could not reach most of the websites I usually visit. They include Yahoo!, WarriorForum, my own websites. Curiously, I had no problem with Google and any of its products.

Since I’ve experienced outages a few times in the past, I called my ISP company since I could not get them online. Waited a few minutes listening to music before I hung up. I wanted to know if the problem was on my end or much bigger than that. It would be good to know it wasn’t something wrong with my hardware.

I went out to my health club to workout and do some other chores. When I got home at 2:15 I could get through to Twitter.com. I posted "Anyone else in CA having a problem with internet connections?"

Then I check Twitter Search to see if other people were posting about this problem. The first message was this from the Charter rep on Twitter:

Umatter2ChtrG: @calgreg There is a nationwide outage affecting multiple ISPs – not just us. Backbone fiber issue. Sorry

RT @Umatter2ChtrG We are currently experiencing routing issues in numerous areas. We do have engineers working on the issue./Thx frustrating

@jasonmatheny Charter Twitter Support Reps. Faster than Phone

Please pardon my dust. This place is my new Wordpress blog home. I am still fixing the place up, not even a grand opening yet.

I still have my other business blog going at Blogger. I want to concentrate on Wordpress, website design and small business SEO here. Frankly, I do like the Blogger setup but Wordpress offers many more possibilities especially for people who want a business website and who want to be able to make changes to their text quickly without calling a webmaster for help.

In any case, I am happy to say that I will be attending Wordcamp LA 2009 on September 12th. If you are attending, please send me an email. Maybe we can meetup at Wordcamp LA for a few minutes or more.

If you live in or near Minneapolis, give my parther, Toby Cryns, a call. He is also my son.

Greg Cryns

The Mighty Mo Website Design and SEO Promotion