SEO in The Desert

By Richard V. Burckhardt

The LG Optimus (photo from actual shipping box) is the phone available for the Republic Wireless beta program.

I’m an original iPhone user, grabbing one of the 2G iPhones when they first came out. And, I love my iPhone (currently on a 3GS) but what I don’t love is being forced into a data plan that costs more than my home broadband, especially when my data use is primarily over Wi-Fi. I have frequently wished I could get a good smartphone that didn’t require a data plan, but relied on Wi-Fi alone.

That’s where the idea of Republic Wireless comes in. Their plan, currently in beta, is basically opposite of what most mobile phone plans offer. Wi-Fi is the primary carrier with cellular the add-on. They expect their users (their “community”) to offload the majority of their phone use to Wi-Fi. When Wi-Fi isn’t available, cellular talk and data kick in. They call it “Hybrid Calling.”

For someone like me, who works from home and is covered by Wi-Fi something like 70% of the time, this is brilliant! I’m currently paying for two iPhones with rarely used data plans that cost more than my cable Internet (plus being slow and limited). With Republic Wireless, I pay $19 per month (plus tax) for each phone, covering talk and data. It’s so low because the majority of use is over Wi-Fi. If you go over your target offloading to Wi-Fi (expected to be 60% or more) you get notified of your overage and, if you continue, I’m guessing you are asked to leave the “community” nicely (this IS a beta, but I think that’s the idea). read more »

By Brendan Egan

Well, blogging has become the new pink in the internet world. Almost everyone has their own blogs and websites however some are more well known than others. Maybe the popular blogs have more flare, maybe they are more creative or maybe they are just easier to find. And that is exactly what you need to earn more viewers for your page, to create an SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimization) friendly blog. And here are five great tips to get you started.

1. SEO Plug-ins

The first step you need to do is to create a Uniform Resource Locater so others can find your blog easily. This is a very important thing because having plug-ins allows you to manage title, address, and other vital parts of a message. It is important that you make all information as clear as you can so they can fit with the keywords on your blog.
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By Charles Mburugu

No serious website can dare to ignore the significance of search engine rankings. Search engines provide more than 70% of the traffic for most websites. Therefore, if you rank high in search engines, you will receive more traffic.

However, getting and sustaining high rankings is not easy. It usually takes much hard word and effort to attain good search engine rankings. The following are three things you need to always keep in mind for better search engine rankings.

Content is king
Search engines love content. Without good and valuable content, you have little chance of success, no matter how great your website is or how much effort you have put into search engine optimization. It is important to have a lot of keyword rich content all through your site. Another great tip is to visit websites which are similar to yours. Read their articles and get ideas which you can make use of in your own site.

There are several reasons why content is vital for high search engine rankings. High search engine ranking will bring you a lot of traffic. However, to sustain the high traffic and retain a good number of return visitors, you need to have useful and well written content in your site. This volume of targeted traffic will be helpful in keeping your reciprocal links growing. read more »

By Richard V. Burckhardt

Made the 2½ hour drive over to San Diego after work yesterday for my partner’s chemo procedure at Sharp Hospital scheduled for Friday. Drove up to a dark hotel where we were told all of the San Diego area was without power, something like four million people. That meant no gas, no restaurants, no hotels, in some areas no water. It was like a really bad Syfy TV movie (of course, ALL Syfy TV flicks are bad). Kept waiting for the flying mutant Squidshark to appear…

Screen capture from a previous post about how a jailbroken original iPhone 2g works with a T-Mobile prepaid SIM card.

Went to the hospital to find out what to do. As we pulled up, we discovered a voice mail that all medical procedures for Friday were canceled (the phone never rang, the voice mail just appeared). Went into the hospital, which had emergency power, to see if anyone knew how far this thing went inland. Were told it went as far as some parts of Palm Springs. As usual, my AT&T iPhone was useless. Not even a signal. Pulled out a jailbroken original iPhone I stuck a T-Mobile prepaid sim into and, voila, it worked. (I am so canceling my AT&T when the contract expires).

Called the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, where Jim (my partner) works, and they had power. Since they are only a few minutes from where we live, we took a chance on our remaining half a tank of gas and headed towards Palm Springs and home, passing a lot of cars on the side of the road, obviously out of gas. Mercifully, we found gas an hour or so into the drive home. It took a 45 minute wait for a pump, but it was worth it as the remaining drive was through the mountains.

Got home at about 11 pm last night.

So, who wants to talk TV movie rights?

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

+Richard Burckhardt

By Philip Russell

Link building gets harder in every year. SEOs have to find a way to make their links work for their clients, and the type of links that will help your website are becoming harder and harder to achieve as Google finds different alternatives to their algorithms that they hope can help offset the totality of the weight of links (think Panda).

Many bold predictions were made in the beginning of the year in terms of where people thought link building would go in the year 2011. Not all of them came true. In fact, being an active link builder for the last year and a half, I found that the best results and money rely in one type of link building.

Forget the Link Directories

Unless you are willing to throw down some cash on some quality link directories, forget about them. Free link directories and “iffy” link directories will just prevent you from spending time on what you really should be doing with your day – which includes making your site more valuable by producing quality (the absolute best indirect way to build links) and taking care of all of your on-site SEO, which is often overlooked.

There is no better way to waste time than to spend countless hours filling out forms and submitting to free link directories. Their links hold very little weight, so little that even as many as 15 of them may not even guarantee that your website gets into the Google’s SERPs if your website is new and with zero links. read more »

By Charles Mburugu

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By Richard V. Burckhardt

Trying to see your way past all of the local search results? Here are some SEO tips.

This is a boon to local businesses as they now have the opportunity to appear on page one of the Google serps through their Google Places profiles. Of course, this is a big, fat middle finger pointed at non-local web-only sites without the local offices and locations that many of the big chains can leverage. read more »