Archive for October, 2007

John Chow Reads Devtrench!

If it wasn’t for a ton of work that got dropped on me last week, I would have blogged about this sooner, but last week this site was graced by the presence of John Chow! As you can see, his MyBlogLog avatar is still in the sidebar (if it’s not you can see it here).

This is one of the reasons that MyBlogLog and services like it are so cool. Here are some more reasons why MyBlogLog is cool:

  • MyBlogLog provides stats for your blog
  • Your visitors can join your my blog log community
  • You can send messages to your members
  • You can add members as contacts, and see who has added you as a contact
  • You can tell people about yourself with a personal profile
  • Using the MyAvatars plugin for WordPress, your avatar along with others can show up in your comments.

Honestly, when I signed up for MyBlogLog I really didn’t get what it was for, and after using it for a while I can tell you that the main benefit is that you can get to know who is visiting your blog. It provides a way for you to visually make connections with others. For instance, I know a lot of people that visit John’s blog visit here because I see the same avatars on both sites. Pretty cool, huh?

If you like this blog then why not join my MyBlogLog community, or you can always subscribe to my rss feed. The End

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Category: Announcements | 539 views | Posted: October 15th 2007 07:00 am

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Fun With SEO - Ranking for Waxed Meat

I was kind of in an odd mood this week and I thought it would be a fun experiment to try to rank for an odd keyword. I’m pretty much an seo n00b, so I thought this experiment would help me bit to find out what works when trying to rank for a keyword. Well, I’d had the tagline “DEVTRENCH is not Waxed Meat” going around and around in my head for about a week, and decided to go with Waxed Meat for my keyword.

At this point you might be wondering what in the hell is waxed meat. Honestly, I didn’t know before doing this, and I have no clue where or why that phrase popped into my head. I’m just going to decide it was fate. If you want to know click here (warning this is kind of gross).

After setting my sites on my odd keyword, I did a Google search and was quite surprised that Google thinks there are 2,290,000 web pages about waxed meat. However the Overture Keyword tool reports that, surprise, surprise, no one searches for it. So we have a lot of indexed pages, and no competition, perfect for my experiment.

To be begin the experiment I used Shoemoney’s serps tool to see if I was in the top 100 already, which I wasn’t (no surprise there). Then I added the bold link in the footer of the page: NO WAXED MEAT. Then I added a link back to my site in my Digital Point forums with the text: DEVTRENCH is not WAXED MEAT.

That’s all I did, and in 2 days I was listed 7th in Google and 4th in MSN. Today, it has been 5 days and I’m 4th in Google and 2nd in MSN (yahoo and altavista apparently don’t like me). So, my experiment shows that this was apparently pretty easy to do :)

EDIT: I’ve made it to #2 so far!

So is there any practical application to this? Sure there is, a lot actually. If you want to build your search engine traffic, then one strategy would be to rank well for as many low competition keywords as you can. You’re probably not going to rank very high for the big keywords in your niche for a while, so why not knock of all of the smaller ones first? It’s good to build a list of low competition keywords and find out where you rank on them. A good place to start is the Google Analytics keyword section, or another web statistics program like Awstats. That will tell you what people are already searching for to get to your blog. Once you get your keyword list, the use Shoemoney’s serps tool to find where you are at. You should then target any keywords that you rank in the top 100 and get those up to the first page. Once you do that, you might be surprised to find out that you rank somewhere in the top 100 for that keyword you’ve been dreaming of. The End

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Category: Marketing | 694 views | Posted: October 10th 2007 08:39 am

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The Secret to Finding Out What Sites are on Your Shared Host

Have you ever wondered who your neighbors are on your shared host? I wondered this for quite some time before I found this useful site that will tell you all of the host names that are on your server.

By using the Whois and Reverse IP service offered at whois.webhosting.info, you can find this out. Simply enter your domain name into the search box and click ‘Go’. On the page that follows, either click on your ip address, or the link in the line that says “IP hosts n domains”. This brings up an alphabetized and paginated list of domain names on your server. Some things to remember when using this resource:

It is not complete considering that it won’t list domains on your server that have different IPs than yours. This would be any accounts that have been assigned a dedicated IP address.

It appears that it is not updated regularly. If you look at two domains that I own - ehlydesign.com and devtrench.com, you’ll see that ehlydesign.com is listed under 75.126.144.70, and devtrench.com is listed under 69.56.171.57. Both IPs are actually wrong. Ehlydesign.com has since been assigned a static IP address, and the IP address that devtrench.com is listed under is old — 2 months old.

So, while this might not be the most up-to-date picture of your current neighbors, it does paint a picture of who is/was on your server. I’ve spent hours on this site finding out interesting things about other famous sites. Just think of the sites that you frequent often…it can be pretty interesting to find out what other sites are on the same server as those.

Now if you can’t tell already by reading this, I’m no DNS expert, but I get by in the trenches with what I can. If you are going to be a good web developer then a working knowledge of DNS is really helpful. I’ve found out most of what I know from the forums at Dathorn and Digital Point and just by doing tons of Google Searches. If you don’t ask questions you’ll never find out what you need to know (and that’s the real secret). The End

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Category: Programming | 453 views | Posted: October 8th 2007 07:00 am

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