John M Weaver

There really seems to be a huge misunderstanding these days about what SEO really is. There are too many web design companies that list SEO as an avalible service and if you look closely you will see that it says, “we will submit your site to the major search engines.” Sorry to disappoint you…but that’s not SEO…its total BS!

Any non genius can submit their site to Google, Yahoo, or MSN and even with a view tweaks here and there they will be able to rank for the company name or a few other phrases. Folks, SEO takes place when you are able to rank for a large list of keywords that will actually generate traffic to your website. Keyword research and implementation on the site takes a lot of time and expertise…the cost is worth it when the visitors stuff pouring in.

Lesson: You know you need your site to rank in Google when someone searches for “Florist in Kansas City” and don’t know who to go to. Make sure you do NOT go with a web design company, ad agency, or random joe that will “submit your site to the search engines so you will rank.” You need to acquire the services of a team or a single SEO Specialist. Best of luck to your site if it has only been submitted to Google.

I had a great opportunity to see the IVC Grey Ghosts baseball team arrive at the high school this weekend. The team was awarded the state runner up title this year. Along with their many fans they were escorted by the local fire and police department.It is really neat to see such a great community gather so quickly to show their support for these kids. I unfortunately did not get to see this team play this year, but look forwarding to seeing a game in the future.

Congratulations to the 2008 State Runner-Up Grey Ghosts!

As of late it really seems like great SEO advice is really hard to find. Sure you can find search engine tips just about everywhere, look in your Google Reader, but I’m talking about GOOD SEO advice!

SearchEngineGuide.com has always been a great source for on and off page SEO strategies, but for the last few months they have been focusing on social media and other industry related gadgets. Quite disappointed with them actually.

Matt Cutts always has an interesting post about the latest news or industry concern surrounding Google, but lately no major findings.

The best SEO guru that is still providing researched advice and strategy is Aaron Wall. I’m not a huge fan of this secret sharing fellow, however his current tips are legit. On top of that his book is well worth the read.

Props to SEOBook.com for being the best SEO resource for on and off page tips in the present time.

As some of you already know I purchased NikeShirts.com a little over a year ago in hopes to sell shirts through the Amazon affiliate program. I never did much with the site accept getting it up partially and making some decent scratch with Google Adsense. I made the decision to offer the domain name to Nike, Inc. before selling it to someone with unknown intentions. Read Nike’s official response below.

 ”Hi John,

It was very nice of you to take the time to contact us!

John, at this time we will not be interested in purchasing your domain.  We already have our online business in place with websites such as Nikestore.com, Nikeid.com, Nikegolf.com, Nikewomen.com and Nikerunning.com.  However, I really appreciate that you thought of us and wish you much success in selling this domain quickly!

Please let me know if you have any other questions and have a great night.

Sincerely,

Larry
Nike”

I decided to take the next highest offer. NikeShirts.com sold this weekend for $1,500. Godspeed Nike Shirts!

I recently decided to run a test to prove a few people wrong of course. I heard about http://www.me.tv/ from the SEO conference a few months ago and want to prove to a few folks that the pages could still be worth while even though they were on a .tv domain name.

The challenge was to build the site using the Me.tv setup, which is very similar to myspace. My goal was to successfully establish pagerank. Well the results are in and the Profile page is a PR3 and the main domain is a PR2. So my thoughts were legit!

So now what do I do with the site? Well as far as I’m concerned it belongs to the folks over at http://www.searchengineguide.com/. I’m not sure if the trademarked the name or not, but it is certainly their name.

So why did I choose it if it was their name? Well because if it ended up being a success and having pagerank I would hope they would consider the site a thank you for all of their tips and advice over the years! If not I will simply pull the site down and expire the ownership so I do not damage my relationship with SearchEngineGuide.com! I love those guys & gals! Read my other posts about them if you haven’t already.

So a shout out to Robert and The Jenn… SearchEngineGuide.tv is all yours if you want it! Just let me know.

For the last 2-3 weeks I have been testing how Google displays my blog in the search results. Every 4 days I completely change my blog. My top 5 posts are no longer about SEO they are about fat loss, my title tags change, and all of my links change as well. Once I made the change and Google had recached my site it was not clearly distributed across all of the search results.

I would rank for my name again, but I would also rank for the fat loss terms that I was now targeting as well…eventhough there was no longer any fat loss content on my site. A perfect test to show that you can manipulate the search results by bouncing your site around before it gets indexed by all of the data centers! Beware as this is not exactly a white hat strategy…it’s cool though.

This week Google finally started showing major signs that it likes my blog again after my cross-linking project…Four months later. After the John M Weaver blog got punted from the search results for the main and sub pages it soon got kicked out of the Google Blog Search as well. After killing all of my other blogs and working hard to get to know other bloggers and build links to this blog again, it is finally back in pretty good standings. I may even note the importance of cleaning up old blogs that or urls that pointed to this one was a task as well. I had experimented with blogger custom domain and after the issues with the connonical domains I scratched it. Unfortunately that left me with a lot of duplicate content and mislead links. Fixed now!

Future goals = Obtaining pagerank again. The John M Weaver blog use to be a PR2 before the cross-linking.

I finished reading the Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing and wanted to give great credit to Jennifer Laycock and her team over at SearchEngineGuide.com. I do read their posts regularly and have followed Jennifer’s projects, such as the TheLactivist.com, very closely. Her research has lead me to many of my own techniques and projects for the search marketing field.

Including but not limited to issues like, is there a Google sandbox?Should you buy her book? Absolutely! If you are just starting to learn SEO or have been researching it for a short time and need clarity then this is well worth the $79 the book costs. There are many tips, examples, and resources that should answer any logical SEO question you may have. If not let them know, I’m sure they will be glad to help you.

Blogger is giving us the option of using their new feature, custom domain. This allows you to host your blogspot blog on your own .com domain name. Pretty cool! Oh and did I mention that this is all FREE…Even cooler! Right? Yes, I gave it a try with the help of a friendly blogger, Andy at Mathpoints.com, I was able to get a new project up and running on the custom domain. This project will be introduced to you hopefully very soon.

Be sure to check out Mathpoints.com, this is a really good blog with a lot of useful info for your blogs. Thanks again Andy!