Goatsmilktavern Studios Weblog

DesignAndPrintTShirts.com goes live!!!

murrydan — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:16:26 +0000

DesignAndPrintTShirts.com is now live. At DesignAndPrintTShirts.com you make your own t-shirt in the easy to use Flash based interface. Designandprinttshirts.com offers a wide variety of fully customizable apparel ready for print, from t-shirts, sweatshirts and hoodies, to hats, beanies and bags, Designandprinttshirts.com allows you to place your custom designs on anything. The online t-shirt design software allows the customer to choose the apparel they wish to customize, add artwork from the stock images library , or upload artwork and pictures from their custom computer, and add text to all designs. The customers can even save designs and have friends and family order shirts and apparel later.

What a difference a month can make

murrydan — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 09:03:10 +0000

It has been almost 2 months since I did any SEO work on the Goatsmilktavern Studios web site, and I have dropped off the face of the earth. I have been tied up with transferring the News On Wheels books to a new system for ad building and publication and other clients web sites and didn’t have much time for my own. I will have more updates later this week with new web sites and some new rankings.

First page results are back

murrydan — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 03:18:07 +0000

Goatsmilktavern Studios is back on the first page of the SERPs for “new orleans web design“, I am #9, but at least I am back. The PR update hit me hard, but I know with some work I could get back to the first page. I will begin my new strategy to move up in the top 10, but it may take a few months. Hopefully these new standings will begin to generate more traffic.

PR updates suck, but they aren’t the end of the world.

murrydan — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 03:38:02 +0000

Google issued their new page rank update this week and boy did it hit Goatsmilktavern hard for a few key phrases. My domain doesn’t have the almighty age factor working in my favor, so I have to really push my site to the top between PR updates. My spot in the SERPs for “new orleans web design” was pushed to page 4, which is not as bad as it was in the beginning of September, but that is a 3 page drop. I have a few strategies to pull it up quick, but I will need to do some serious link building to hold the spot next time Google hits us again. I don’t buy links, and most of the sites affected by the update were dropped because of purchased links. My PR is still a 3, which is +1,500 links with my keyword density, I am gonna shoot for a 5 before the next update which I calculate to be +3,000 after I increase the # of pages on my site and up the density.

Using the standard formula to calculate PR, PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))… In the equation ‘t1 – tn’ are pages linking to page A, ‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has and ‘d’ is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85. SEO is all about numbers and percentages, I hate numbers and percentages. I use the good old fashioned formula: links in the right places=traffic. Page Rank is just a number that slightly affects your position in the SERPs, so I will push hard this week and re-establish my crawl speed to twice a week and move up.

PR updates are something that all web sites have to deal with, they just hit harder when the site is young. Once my domain ages a bit I won’t have to worry about these things.

Medavantage.com live ahead of schedule, way ahead of schedule

murrydan — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 04:04:15 +0000

The Medavantage web site has important documentation that the sales reps need access to immediately, and the guys at Medavantage are the coolest guys, and I want to help them in any way I can. So as a web designer who wants to have only perfect sites live, I have to give them an unfinished site. Grant Cooper at Resupro will be providing the content for the site until we begin the SEO campaign. I hate to write, but I love SEO and I love optimizing content, strange. I look forward to the SEO aspect of this site, it will be one hell of a challenge. Medavantage is a national company selling every form of health insurance available. Health insurance web sites are HARD to top, and I am looking forward to getting Pat & Jack the traffic they need to make the site a success.

I was working on the web site tonight and it was really tough. FortuneCity’s servers are still propagating themselves with the site’s info, and every other time I would refresh my screen, I would get a coming soon page from Register.com. This was killing me, but I wanted to work out some of the kinks before they saw it tomorrow. I also need to buy the stock photography for the site and crop the images, jeez, I have a lot to do on this site.

New blog by to Goatsmilktavern Studios

murrydan — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:30:12 +0000

I work a lot, and my wife gets tired of hearing about my work, so I had to start another blog so I can get all the crap of the day out of my system. I spend all day trying to work-around web design problems and finding fixes for IE (no matter how bad it is, people still use it), and sometimes the fixes I find are worth sharing, or archiving. Anywho, the blog is primarily about web design, and web design related issues and can be seen here at New Orleans Web Design.That makes three blogs that I try to post on at least 3 times a week. I don’t think I have to go into why blogs are important for SEO and branding. Running multiple blogs is also helping me with my clients, I get more practice at writing impromptu blog posts and I don’t have to spend as much time researching as I used to.

Goatsmilktavern SERP result: Dramatic changes

murrydan — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 02:55:15 +0000

My SERP results for Goatsmilktavern Studios have changed dramatically in the past few days. I have been fighting with the “new orleans web design” results, and trying to compete with sites that have age and links over me. I began my SEO campaign in June of this year, and I am almost to the 6 month mark where I had set a goal to be on the first page for all of my target keyterms, and I am happy to say I have met this goal. For the past few days www.goatsmilktavern.com has been showing up at #7 for “new orleans web design”, I am not sure how stable this result is, but I will continue to work this phrase since my others don’t seem to have any competition. My home page is showing up for “new orleans web design” because of the amount of links leading to it, I would like to get my web design page on the first page as well, and I already have the strategy in motion. I just feel more comfortable when I have multiple landing pages on the first page of the SERPs. Now that I have the base positions I want, I can begin to expand into broader keyterms and really drum-up some traffic.

Now that I have the results I wanted from my first 6 months of SEO, I can begin expanding my web site and concentrate more on generating revenue from it. That’s what web sites are all about, giving useful information, providing products and services, and makin’ money.

Blatant Black Hat SEO on Craigslist

murrydan — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 06:59:42 +0000

I was having a good day and posting an ad on Craigslist yesterday when I came across an ad for a New Orleans SEO provider that offers “Deindexing methods applied against competing websites“, and boy did it alter my mood. What this SEO hack is doing is getting short term contracts, showing “great” results and bailing on the campaign. To me, SEO is a competition, fair, long and tough, not a simple kick to the groin and over. Simply throwing sand in the eyes of a solid site will set it back, for a while, but it will come back and beat the damn blood out of you!

They also say they use “custom tools I have programmed, as well as a few professional SEO tools I am privy to“, (“privy“, god what an ass) any one in the SEO field knows that most of those “tools” are for hacks and can’t beat quality content, clean semantics, and strategic web design. Sure, I like scrapers, link bombs and some keyword fluffing in my PHP here and there, but I have never been “f’n privy” to anything.

I suppose they will build links to the competitors sites from “bad neighbors”, which is a pain to undo, but can be done. Maybe a well timed DOS, some spammy comments in the name of the competitors site, or duplicating content or sites, or 301/302 hijacking (I doubt this privy turd knows how to do this).

However these methods are explicitly illegal under US law. Those that aren’t still fall under the umbrella of bad faith or deceptive trade practices, both of which will provide you with legal recourse.

This is the kind of stuff that makes people think SEO is a scam, by providing quick, shaky results. If a site isn’t optimized to stand on it’s own feet, it will fall just as fast as it rose.

I (naively) believe the blatant lack of integrity and the possible repercussions of de-indexing (at least I spelled mine right) a competitor is enough to scare away any potential clients. And I hope people realize this is a no-tallent hack that will not provide a strong base for your SEO campaign, and may get your site penalized in the process, then the poor bloke will be sued by to many people for anyone to recover any damages.

Link Bombs Still Work

murrydan — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 05:58:20 +0000

Link bombing is an old SEO technique that still works like a charm, be it articles or comments, they work. I don’t suggest using the old method of sponsored link bomb campaigns due to Google’s new paid links rule (I don’t think it is working), but aggressive link building through quality content can still be achieved with a few strategic, syndicated submissions.

Press releases make great bombs, if done right. Many people rush their press release and drop the ball on effective link building with an uninteresting, marketing concentrated press releases. Any time you write for the web make sure it is interesting and worth linking to. When authoring a press release, throw in more useful information than cheesy marketing lines, and more personality than boring facts (but keep it professional enough to pass the proofers).

SEO tip: Activity is #1

murrydan — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 06:20:01 +0000

In the world of search engine optimization activity and fresh content on your web site is the most important aspect of ascending up the ranks. Fresh content brings the spiders back, and fills your site with rich useful content. I have worked with many businesses that did not have blogs and didn’t see the advantages of taking a few minutes a day to write a few sentences about their business or industry, but after a few weeks of plugging away, they saw dramatic results.

Case Study: Goatsmilktavern Studios

2 weeks ago- keyterm:”New Orleans Web Design”; rank-#79
SEO strategy: Very aggressive blogging, but I stopped on Friday, October 5
Sunday, October 7- keyterm:”New Orleans Web Design”; rank-#13
I have not posted since Friday.
Monday, October 8- keyterm:”New Orleans Web Design”; rank:#33

As you can see these are exaggerated result because my domain is not very old, but blogging did make and insane difference.

If your domain does not have a good age rank, don’t get scared if your rankings fluctuate dramatically. Dramatic fluctuations show your potential in the SERPS that can be solidified with links. It is my job to gain ranking without the use of paid inclusions, buying links or PPC (yuck!), and good link bait will build quality links naturally. Web site owners should always accompany their sites with regularly updated blogs.