Webmaster Musings

8 Reasons Why Google Chrome Currently Sucks

September 3rd, 2008 by evpstud

Here’s my list of gripes about Google Chrome so far:

1. NO ADD-ONS! What?? Stick with Firefox for now.
2. No built-in gmail! I guess I keep using Yahoo.
3. No built-in Google Bookmarks! Stick with Digg.
4. Still crashes on common, basic, sites.
5. ~~No Ad-blocking! I’m drowning here!~~
6. ~~No proxy option. Keep running TOR in Firefox then.~~
7. High memory usage! I used to think Firefox ate up a lot but Chrome is draining my PC…
8. They get rights to anything you publish through their browser, check out this line from their TOS:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

UPDATE: There is proxy support and ad blocking, but here are two more much more serious concerns!! (therefore my 8 complaints remain consistent)

9. Chrome allows the automatic download of executables without prompting the user! Can you say Virus?
10. There is a carpet-bombing security hole as well. So the executable can run on its own and the user would never know! BAD BAD BAD!

No thank you Big Brother!

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Posted in google, product review, rant, sites

Best Wordpress Plugin Ever

August 28th, 2008 by evpstud

I love Wordpress. It’s my favorite open source (free) tool for the internet. It’s the most simple of content management systems and has so many capabilities that it’s an SEO’s dream come true.

I love how it comes with so many plugin options. It’s like customizing your car with all your favorite accessories, except most of these are free. Long time favorites of mine includes freebies such as the XML sitemap plugin, All-In-One SEO Pack, Akismet, and Auto Social Poster.

But recently I discover my new favorite WP plugin of all time.

Since I have a lot of WP blogs, it’s a huge pain in the rear to update them all every time Wordpress releases an upgrade.

The days of reuploading the entire script manually for each update are over though since I found the automatic wordpress updated plugin here. This plugin saves a ton of time. Each time there’s an update it just goes through 6-7 2-second steps and presto: the WP blog is updated.

Now I do have to run it by hand, but it’s much faster than having to reupload ALL of the files of the new version of WP. Hats off to the creators of this plugin. Thanks for feeling my pain and fixing it for FREE!!!

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Posted in evpstud, product review, sites

Jeremy Schoemaker Says SEO Sucks

August 22nd, 2008 by evpstud

I just read Jeremy’s post here and I gotta admit that it’s funny to go to a search engine optimization conference with a shirt that says “SEO SUCKS” and then made a couple of arguments to defend his shirt, basically just outlining some of the obstacles to SEO work.

One of Jeremy’s reasons that “SEO sucks” is actually important. He makes the point that there’s a great temptation to become idle once you’ve successfully made it to the top of the rankings. I can agree with this wholeheartedly. I’ve noticed myself that it’s easy to kiss away a site once it’s #1 only to come back 3 months later and see you’re no longer #1.

Which brings us to Jeremy’s #2 reason: SEO is hard work.

And it really is. Every day staying up to date. It reminds me of the robots in the Will Smith movie “I Robot” where every day the robots spend time in front of the TV downloading updates. Being an SEO is the same thing. The first thing I have to do is cruise the news making sure my methods are still up to date.

It sucks too because basically it puts your business, in some ways, at the mercy of another company. What would happen to a lot of businesses if tomorrow Google turned out to be another Enron? Massive bankruptcies and potentially a stock market CRASH.

The probability is pretty low (at least it seems) so right now there’s no need to prepare for that. But it’s just one more of the reasons that SEO sucks. Props to Jeremy for having the courage to be controversial and defend SEOs like me.

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Posted in evpstud, google, rant, research

Search Engine Optimization Crash Course

August 20th, 2008 by evpstud

To the many millions of people who are surfing the internet each and every day, major search engines like Yahoo and Google are mysterious tools that magically find exactly what they want from the countless trillions of pages currently online. Many small businesses recognize the power of appearing in the search engines, but don’t understand how pages are ranked. It’s amazing how precious little knowledge is really necessary to dominate popular searches.

Today you become part of the crowd that knows how to make websites available through the search engines with simple changes to the HTML. Let’s face reality: If your site doesn’t appear on the first page of search results, you likely won’t get any traffic from the free listings, also known as “organic” or “natural” results. There is always the option of paid search engine listings, but that’s a risky venture without testing and experience with the pay-per-click system.

First and foremost, you need to know what people are searching for. This enables you to know what your market wants before you throw all of your efforts into promotion. Go to the Google Adwords Keyword tool by clicking here. Enter any word or couple of words that your potential visitors might use, and the keyword tool will return results of exactly what phrases similar to those words were searched on and how many times.

Google owns the majority of searches. To estimate the amount of Yahoo searches just cut the Google results in half, and then cut that in half again to estimate the results on MSN. Pick one of best searched phrases as your main keyword phrase and you’re ready to begin.

Nothing beats making the keyword phrase your domain name. That is a major accomplishment and domain names that include popular keywords are very valuable. You can usually get one with keywords by including hyphens between the keywords, although these are usually viewed as less valuable if you intend to resell. If you plan to simply rank well in the search engines, however, it’ll work wonderfully.

If you design your site’s pages yourself, you should be familiar with meta tags. The most important meta tag is the “title” tag and that’s the first place you want to put your main keyword phrase. This alone will dramatically improve your rankings in all of the search engines. Title tags are the text that is displayed as the clickable link in the natural search results. More related keywords in your title makes your site appear more relevant to the search and therefore your page outranks pages that don’t include those keywords in the title.

The second most important meta tag is the “description.” This is the text that is displayed underneath the title in the organic search results and if it also includes the keyword phrase, it’s a match and your page is considered more relevant. The closer to the beginning of the description you include the keywords, the better. Don’t believe you can get away with simply filling the description with keywords senselessly, however, since this will be seen as spamming and your ranking will be poorer. You want the description to compel people to click the link to your site, yet include enough keywords to have several matches.

Making these simple changes to your website could easily be the difference between appearing on the first page of the search results or the tenth. The difference is very dramatic considering that most small businesses that advertise online are completely unaware of these simple tips to optimize their website. In today’s competitive marketplace, dominating the search engine results can be the golden ticket to growing from a small business, to a very big business. Well, perhaps just a small business with a very big bottom line.

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Posted in evpstud, google, research

5 Things I Hate About GoDaddy

August 13th, 2008 by evpstud

1) Slow Interface. GoDaddy’s site does only one thing well - advertise GoDaddy. From all practical standpoints, it’s slower and less user friendly than other registrars.

2) Spammy Register process. All throughout the transaction at GoDaddy, you’re constantly getting bombed with unnecessary offers for more services and auto-marked to be charged more with auto-renew etc. As you try to register the domain, they keep trying to sell you more extensions, like the .us or the .info that I really didn’t want.

3) Lousy Checkout. Oh wait, it wasn’t enough to keep bombarding you with advertisements to buy more GoDaddy crap and extensions before. Now that I’m just trying to pay for what I want I have to suffer more slowdowns and advertising. I can’t believe they have a captcha on the checkout. OH NO, I wouldn’t want a BOT to come and register my domain name.

4) Slow DNS changes. It takes GoDaddy about 24 hours to update nameserver changes. I guess that’s better than iPower which took two days, but that still sucks by comparison with Enom (Namecheap) who updates immediately with my hosting.

5) Illusion of Domains by Proxy. It isn’t really a protection at all. Domains by Proxy caves in at the first sign of any trouble and reveals your personal information. They are EXPENSIVE ($25 or more) to protect your WHOIS info. At Namecheap, you get whoisguard FREE for a year.

My personal rating of GoDaddy is only 7/10

GoDaddy is like a necessary evil, like politicians. The fact that they do SO MUCH and so many people like them forces you to have to do business with GoDaddy as well or else it holds you up.

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Posted in evpstud, product review, rant, sites

The Dark Knight and Doing Business

July 30th, 2008 by evpstud

I just went and saw The Dark Knight the other day and I personally loved it. Well, I guess I could say more honestly I loved 98% of it. I didn’t like the “new” rachel and I didn’t like that they brought in two villains in the same movie.

Other than those two factors, I can’t complain. The introduction of batman’s motorcycle and some sweet new gadgets was a lot of fun. Heath Ledger makes the best Joker ever - certainly the most believable. It was also more Batman-like to NOT kill the Joker in this movie like Batman does in the Tim Burton Batman movie.

Probably one of my favorite parts is near the end where the Joker tries to get people to blow each other up on a couple of boats. The movie makes a statement about the human race - which is that people are inherently good at heart and only a few wackos like the Joker are really evil. Even the Joker wasn’t killed, just imprisoned.

I believe the same things about people in business dealings. I believe people are inherently good and aren’t out to scam or exploit you. There are some really bad eggs out there but the majority are good and you don’t need to worry about it. As long as you play it straight, you can expect others to do the same.

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Posted in evpstud, rant

Webmaster Forums Reviewed

July 22nd, 2008 by evpstud

Here is my own personal experience with some of the most popular webmaster forums on the internet. This list is by no means intended to be comprehensive, so if I left out your favorite webmaster forum, I invite you to leave your own review in the comments section.

#1 - The Rich Jerk Private Forum

This forum get 9.5 out of 10 stars from me. This is the forum where there is no garbage whatsoever. What gets posted is awesome and the members are a very tight-knit group of people all determined to make money online. I don’t see the stuff posted there shared anywhere else, and it’s one of my favorite haunts. The $10 to get the program is definitely worthwhile JUST to get access to the forum. The contacts and deals I’ve made there have made me tens of thousands of dollars.

#2 - Sitepoint Forums

9 out of 10 rating from me for Sitepoint. Even though I don’t post very often there, I enjoy what I read and the site has a very strong technical background. The marketplace is totally unmatched. There is no better place to get a good deal on quality sites or to get a nice price for one of your own. This is a forum I visit very regularly and recommend others become familiar with as well.

#3 - Black Hat World Forums

8 out of 10 rating from me. These guys don’t talk B.S. - They are a mastermind group of folks on a mission to make money by beating the system. It shouldn’t be confused with illegal activity since there isn’t anything illegal sponsored by the owners. The only thing keeping BHW out of probably the highest position is the fact that there is free access to the forum and it has a tendency to attract “bad eggs” and some members who promote illegal activities. A forum can only take so much action though, so judging the forum on the quality of it’s legal content and it’s most legitimate leaders and information, it gets a very high rating from me.

#4 - Syndk8.net Forums

7.9 out of 10 rating from me. This forum is on the verge of eclipsing BHW in my opinion even though it’s an older, more established forum. I’m a newer member there than the other forums I regularly participate at but so far the reception there has been very friendly and welcoming. I expect this forum will shortly surpass BHW in my personal ratings since there aren’t the same problems at Syndk8 as there are at BHW. It was a tough call but since most topics at Syndk8 are more technical than BHW, I gave one tenth of a point more to BHW. Syndk8 is by far a more sophisticated forum without some of the clowns who ruin BHW, but since I’m new there I may be mistaken so I’m leaving space for things to develop natually.

#5 - The Warrior Forum

I only give the Warrior Forum a 7 out of 10 rating. I don’t see eye to eye with most of the members at the forum. It deserves praise because there is some really good webmaster information there, but I’ve gotten the most benefit from buying really good Warrior Special Offers on software and scripts. The moderators at the Warrior Forum are kind of “Big Brother”-ish and have a little too much power for some things in my opinion. They act quickly when they think something is negative but act really slow to do positive things. Allen Says, the owner, is a stud though. Can’t say anything bad about him - but I don’t like some of the mods and I think a lot of so-called leaders at that forum are fakes and hypocrites.

WORST:

Digital Point Forums

1 out of 10 rating. The only thing that kept this forum from a zero was that I made some good business contacts there, but find the posts worthless and the moderators are worse than the Warrior Forum (just in my personal experience) The marketplace is poorly structured, falling far behind SitePoint and the Warrior Forum. The forum is full of scammers as well, and members are banned for stupid reasons. I don’t recommend hanging out at Digital Point at all…

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Wealthy Affiliate University Forums

Pretty good information at the WA forums. The biggest drawback is that topics are pretty limited to the content of the site and that the forum isn’t very unique in it’s design. It gets a positive from me though.

Wicked Fire Forums

This forum has a rough crowd but they know what they’re doing. If you can get in there and not blow it with that group, you stand to gain a lot.

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Posted in product review, rant, sites

R.I.P WordTracker - Google Keyword Tool is King

July 9th, 2008 by evpstud

I’ve been using wordtracker ever since the overture keyword tool died, but now that Google’s keyword tool is showing absolute numbers for search volume, I expect Wordtracker is toast. Everybody wants to win on Google and WT was just a way of trying to get numbers on things, but now that Google has lightened up, I see no value in remaining with Wordtracker.

Here’s the world’s best keyword tool, and it’s free:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

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Posted in google, research

Equity Millions Goes Live for Site Flipping

July 8th, 2008 by evpstud

So there’s a big product launch today, called Google Nemesis. Frankly I don’t know how this kind of crap escapes trademark lawyers because if I was in charge of Google, I’d sue whoever used my trademark as the base for their product.

What’s totally original today is the Equity Millions is now open to the masses. “Site Flipping” is a really hot market right now and Brian and myself have been making money with it for a long time. We’ve finally revealed our system and made it a membership site available through Clickbank.

We’re providing unbeatable bonuses too, and we’re training people to become our new partners so EVERYBODY can make more money with the system.

Check it out: Click Here to Visit Equity Millions

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Posted in evpstud, sites

John Reese’s Traffic Secrets Video

July 4th, 2008 by evpstud

I just watched John Reese’s first video to build up for the release of Traffic Secrets 2.0. John talks about the strategy of results detection - which is simply to research what’s working and adapt it to your own site.

It was very professionally produced and presented. John looked a bit tired, but knows his stuff and when he talks - everybody listens. John developed the BlogRush tool you see on the right hand side of this blog. It’s totally free and it’s brought some very targeted traffic to this blog.

John will always be seen as the internet traffic guru. Nobody can touch him because he’s so well branded. The guy makes millions and makes it look easy. I’m not butt-kissing here, it’s just a fact. When traffic secrets 2.0 is released, every internet marketer is going to want it.

Check out his video here if you haven’t seen it yet: Traffic Secrets

Also, the Equity Millions system is going to be released next week. There won’t be a lot of hype and fanfare like Google Nemesis or Traffic Secrets, but I can promise that the members there will get a lot of personal help from myself and my partner Brian. We’ve been preparing for over and year now and we’re excited to let other people in on our system.

Stay tuned for more details. I suggest you watch the videos at Equity Millions Blog so you can see what it’s all about.