User blog posts @ webdigity

SEDONA, Ariz. (AP) -- Sheriff's officials in Arizona say a man impersonated an elected justice of the peace and performed several weddings whose legality are now in doubt. Yavapai County Sheriff's spokesman Dwight D'Evelyn says 41-year-old Allen Elfman was arrested Tuesday on charges of fraud, forgery, criminal... [AP Top Strange News] [Read More]

The past few days have brought a flurry of small changes to my craft directory. Some were long over due and others were the result of recent submissions. Great Blogs By Crafters Today’s submissions to Crafty Tips brought a great blog, Lenox Knits that is maintained by a wonderful knitter. Problem is that along with knitting, she also talks about life, yarn, SEO, travel, chickens and a whole host of other things. Her posts are quite engaging and while the vast majority are relating to crafting as one of her other visitors said, perhaps we should classify similar blogs as “lives of crafters”. Buried over on Crafty Tips was a rarely visited category where I had intended to list blogs like that. Looking at the traffic stats, the blogs listed there were not receiving the traffic they truly desired. Changes were in order and while they took a little longer than I would have hoped (doesn’t everything anymore), I moved the existing listings and Lenox’s to a new Craft Blogs category that will be linked to from every page of the site. Hopefully, these multi-dimensional craft bloggers will now see my URL in their site logs more often. There does seem to be something about crafters that make us interesting people. I think it’s more than just about being creative - there’s just something different about our personalities too. We seem to have more interests than most people and family seems to be extra important to us. Jewelry Designers & Artisans Jewelry also seems to be very important to crafters; it is one of the busiest categories on Crafty tips and the jewelry websites category was the largest of the entire website. Submissions this week would have created the need for a 4th and 5th page in the category; something I did not want to do. After all, the poor folks on those last pages would be unlikely to see many visitors. I’ve been putting off a listing audit for months now and thought the jewelry category might be the perfect one to start with. So after visiting all of the sites and deleting any that were abandoned or discontinued, I was still left with 32 great sites - still too many to leave all in one grouping. Last fall I had asked other crafters what they thought would be a good classification for jewelry artists who made the components that they make jewelry from and most considered artisan jewelry as the best description. All these months later, Crafty Tips at last has an Artisan Jewelry category. There are currently three very talented jewelry artists that have shared their jewelry making tips and would love for folks to visit their sites. The other obvious category choice was Beaded Jewelry. Visiting all of these talented folks websites for a second time reminded me just how much I love beaded jewelry and am in awe of some of the bead artists out there. A number of jewelry designers create pieces that didn’t really fit in either of the new categories or could have been listed in both of them. Those great jewelry websites remain in the primary jewelry category. So, I’ve been deleting old non-working links and moving things around a bit. Hopefully, it will make things easier to find and will help more crafters promote their websites.

Yesterday, we launched WebDesignersAreSexy.com. Why? Just for fun. We got such a great response to the shirts at SXSW that we felt they deserved their own website. Check it out. Send us your photo As you'll see on the site, there's a photo gallery featuring pictures of people wearing their "Web Designers are Sexy" t-shirts. If you have a shirt, we'd love to add a photo of you to our gallery. Please fill out the form on the site to send us one. Extra bonus points are given for creative pictures and clever captions. Want a shirt? We've had a lot of people ask us about how to get a shirt. Well, here's your chance. Help us promote WebDesignersAreSexy.com on Twitter before the end of day tomorrow (Thursday, March 26th, 2009), and you'll have a chance at one of five shirts we'll be giving away. Just include a link to the site in your tweets. Thanks for the help!

I have just been reading up on this new canonical link tag that the three top search engines have started implementing. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have just announced a new tag, which we can use to tell the search engines which URL it should have for the current page. - yoast.com In short, this is a [...]

Twitter has become mainstream.  It was discussed on the Sky news this very morning in connection with Jennifer Aniston ending her relationship with John Mayer over his obsession with Twitter.  Everyone is talking about Twitter and what it is and what it isn't; but can it help your SEO campaign? Don't forget that SEO is the process required to improve rankings in search engines for certain relevant keywords. So to answer that question let's look at the two aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) - on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation (link-building, promotion, etc) - and see where Twitter fits. On-Page Optimisation One of the benefits of blogging is that you can add the blog to your own site (domain/sub-domain).  This means that each blog post is adding additional content to your own web site with the associated SEO benefits (freshness, expanding content, long tail, authority building etc). Twitter is sometimes referred to as "micro-blogging".  But each blog post or "tweet" is only 140 characters in length and not really worth its own page.  Furthermore, these posts generally only exists on the twitter network and its web pages.   Although you can add your twitter stream to your website using RSS or similar and get some content benefits, the impact you would receive would be minimal compared with other methods. So in terms of "on-page" optimisation - Twitter does not really deliver anything positive to your SEO campaign.   Off-page Optimisation Off-page factors are extremely important to SEO.   It has been said that with competitive keywords, off-page factors can account for more than 60% of the impact of an SEO campaign. Off-page is about promoting a site to build its credibility and its authority on specific topics.  Articles and press releases, links on relevant sites and in vertical directories - these are all elements of an effective off-page optimisation campaign. The goal of SEO is not purely to drive traffic to a site.  The goal is to improve the ranking results in search engines for primary, secondary and long-tail keywords that are relevant to the website.  Traffic generated from these results will be relevant and qualified. The main problem with using Twitter for off-page optimisation (in the context of search engine optimisation) is that all links in Twitter are "nofollowed". This means that every time someone tweets about your great blog post or your new product, you get no "link juice ".. no "SEO" benefit for it.  Having said that, Twitter posts seem to be indexed by Google quickly and although you do not get any "link juice", it has been reported that you can get your new web page indexed more quickly sometimes using Twitter. Furthermore, more and more people are adding their Twitter feed to their own website. It seems that links in the tweets from these feeds are NOT "nofollowed" and so you should get some link benefits if other people "retweet" your tweets that contain a link (now say that three times fast)..  but unfortunately these links will not have any anchor text, which diminishes their benefit somewhat. Also, you should chose the link shortening service carefully to ensure that it uses a 301 redirect (e.g. tinyURL does this) so that your site gets the benefit of the link and not the shortening service itself.  But a popular tweet with a good link could get additional linking benefits providing that   a) it gets to people who have their twitter feed on their site;   b) they choose to allow these links to be "followed"   c) you use the correct link/url shortening service So in terms of "off-page" optimisation - the results are less black and white.  Twitter does not benefit your site in the context of improving your rankings directly.. but it helps in getting new pages indexed and CAN help you if you get enough retweets.  It certainly will help in generating additional [non search engine] traffic to your site. The important thing to remember here is that not everything online has to do with search engines.  Internet Marketing is not just about search engine optimisation or search engine marketing.  Twitter is showing promise to be highly effective in marketing your company/web-site and drive some significant traffic your way.. but it's SMM (Social Media Marketing) and not SEO. Matt HopkinsManaging Director

Work from home jobs are becoming more and more popular for just this reason, but finding the right work from home jobs you can start with no fees is not a simple task. Related posts:Finding No Fee Work From Home Jobs If you know where to look and do your research...Medical Transcription At Home Jobs Medical transcription at home jobs is another option for people...How To Find The Best Work From Home Jobs Work at home jobs is a way to control your...

We don’t often mention big marketers latest hype after all they get enough publicity but for a change I thought we should cover this one. a) because it’s the launch of Butterfly Marketing 2.0 but also because it’s FREE! Yep Free barring shipping, a thousand pound + course coming on dvd to your door Claim [...]

The BBC is currently running a report about Scareware websites using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to trick searchers into downloading malicious spyware and programs onto their computers. These rogue organisations are optimising sites that they have access to for popular and misspelt search terms and conning the people that visit their websites into thinking that they have viruses on their machines. These are pretty sophisticated criminals who are manipulating web pages that have rankings and stuffing these full of popular search terms in an effort to lever some traffic to these pages, and releasing pop ups on these pages letting users know that they have a virus on their computer. Tricks like this have been played out on the internet before - I can't remember the amount of times that I have had a pop-up telling me that my computer was infected - but clicking on a link and downloading that is almost certainly going to get you infected. However, I'm not sure that the people that have written this report have really grasped how SEO is being used to manipulate these searchers into downloading the scareware - as the concepts that they discuss being used to achieve these rankings are not likely alone to achieve the rankings on popular terms that they are saying are being used. Tactics like "seed pages with popular keywords such as "Obama" but others use terms associated with recent events" are not likely alone to achieve a ranking. Later in the article though it talks about redirecting visitors from a page they were expecting to the sites advertising this scareware suggests that they are intruding web pages that already have a ranking and the risks with this are greater, as a visitor may think that they are going to a trustworthy site and give more credence to the pop up telling them that their computer is infected. I would like to strongly re-iterate the security advice that they are suggesting here - "people should be very wary of any pop-up window claiming to find evidence of an infection" - "It's impossible to scan your local disk without installing software". So basically, don't believe a pop up window telling you that you are infected and stick to respected Anti-virus scanners, both free and paid for to run checks for these issues. Pete HandleyCampaign Delivery Manager

Effective lines of communication to customers is of vital important, we a well know! There are so many ways of doing this from e-mail to social networking sites such as MySPace and Facebook. The latest craze is Twitter, a constant pulse product that simply asks the question “What are you doing now?”. I am sure most [...]

Third part on how to get action out of a home page.

While roaming around the web and dropped in a certain blog (which I forgot already what’s the URL of the site), I found out about this new search engine optimization challenge from Netbuilders.org. The said competition targets for the key phrase “sulumits retsambew” which is the reverse for the phrase “webmaster stimulus.” The prizes at [...]

According to some articles in the press recently apparently these not so hot economic times are turning gift givers into ?make it yourselfers.? As many craft supply outlets have reported increased sales this quarter. So what does this mean for artisans like you and I on such venues as? Etsy, eBay, at craft shows or [...]

It's that time again. Time to announce some new designs that have been added to the system. This time there are two new designs with multiple color variations on each. Why all the design templates? What are they good for? Good questions. Some people use our templates as is for their websites, and we think that's great. Any one of our templates can provide you with a professional website design that's up and running instantly. But even more people use our design templates as starting points for their own custom designs. You can download the HTML/CSS source code (or access it via FTP) for any design and you have full freedom to change it up however you want. If you're not a coder, you can also order Design Xpress, and we'll do some customizations to any one of our templates for you. So, as you can see, the more templates the merrier. And here are five new looks that are ready to go right now on any website on our WaterCMS, SkyCMS or LightCMS systems. Just login and visit My Website --> Designs to view all of the available templates. Plus, stay tuned for more to come. Kingside Kingside - Bishop Porfolizer Porfolizer - BlueMoon Porfolizer - WhiteLight  

The Sales Evangelist The Sales Evangelist The Sales Evangelist The Sales Evangelist Only 10 .. http://snipurl.com/dwipl # I am going live on Sales Evangelist TV in 1 hour http://tv.salesevangelist.com # #sales20 I am going live on Sales Evangelist TV in 1 hour http://tv.salesevangelist.com # Broadcasting live now! See me at http://tinyurl.com/77hwnz # Cancelling my show and moving it to [...]

If you are unsure about how to go about networking online or how to build links then this post is for you. We highlight five different sites daily. No related posts.