WDTalk

Reverse SEO? Does it mean – trying to get listed lower in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)? Of course not! Reverse SEO is interpreted in a couple of ways though.

Some say it’s about – researching your competitor’s SEO efforts – analyzing their title tags, meta description, PR, links to their domain and links to a URL found via a search query for specific keywords or keyword phrases. Does their site have quality, relevant and compelling content? Is it updated regularly? Are they using social media? In short, what separates their sites from your site? This method of SEO emcompasses attempting to emulate success. I use this method daily to analyze what others are doing to rank high in the search engines.

Others believe that – reverse SEO means trying to do damage control. What happens when a search query returns results that are not advantageous to your firm or organization (or you)? Believe it or not, there are companies that will perform online damage control – by attempting to push those unfavorable results down to page 2, 3 or 4 where they won’t be so readily noticed. How? By posting a ton of positive reviews to counter anything negative.

Another take on reverse SEO is – to just not do any SEO. The angle here is to design sites for the users and not for the search engines. This sounds great in theory, but viewing patterns very clearly indicate that you need to be on page one, and the closer to number one, the better.

It makes no difference  – what your background is, whether you have any technical skills or if you’re starting from scratch. The key is motivation. Your unique knowledge of sports, fashion, religion, psychology, vacation spots or whatever – can be converted into an online business.

That first step – is crucial. I always always recommend writing a business plan as that first step. Why? The majority of new businesses fail because they lack process, and your business plan is like a map – establishing direction and expectations. It spells out process.

One key ingredient – is research within your niche. Seek out the most profitable topics to monetize, then deliver relevant and compelling content. Put your personality into your site. Give it style. If you have quality, in-demand information, you will be pleasantly surprised how well your site performs.

Take something you know and love – and monetize it. It starts with passion, which is then converted into content on your site. There are a zillion ways to drive traffic to your site and a gazillion more ways to monetize that traffic.

Is it easy - NO. Will success happen overnight? NO. But the Internet has truly spawned it’s share of millionaires, many of them with ZERO brick and mortar presence.

Are information based sites sustainable – ABSOLUTELY. Diversification is crucial, establishing multiple streams of income. These could be via Google AdSense, affiliate programs, writing and selling e-books or simply lead generation.

“Venture nothing, and life is less than it should be.”
Malcolm Forbes (1919-1990)

I had to tackle result5.google this past weekend, and what I thought at first was a virus was actually a re-direct to Russia. One of my friends was having problems searching, as his results were constantly being re-directed to advertising pages. He was running a small three computer network in his home with a Linksys wireless router.

Trying to access or download any type of anti-virus program was fruitless and scans with Microsoft Security Essentials and StopZilla turned up other viruses, but didn’t kill off result5.google. Neither did Malwarebytes.

Searches on Bing and Google returned plenty of posts on how to eliminate this problem, but only one helped – and that was to log onto the router, correct the DNS and change the password, then empty his computers’ history, temp pages and cookies. Seems his router’s DNS had been changed to 213.109.67.169 and 213.109.73.170, which a traceroute revealed pointed to Eastern Europe. When he installed his network, he neglected to change the router’s password from the vendor’s default, leaving himself open to exploits.

Typically, routers are marked with their serial numbers and MAC addresses, and from there you can search the vendors online support pages to determine its IP and how to log on to the router to change its password and settings.

I hope this helps anyone out there who is experiencing this problem.

- Steve

Colors affect your mood – mentally and physically, and this varies by geographic location and culture, and even time. When you’re designing your website, what mood are you looking to portray – a call to action, a sense of loyalty, something safe or very professional?

As designers – we need to understand both color theory and the psychology of color, especially with ecommerce applications. Red has always been perceived as a mood stimulus invoking aggression or a call-to-action, but it can also be perceived as STOP. In China, it symbolizes celebration and luck.

Orange is actually the preferred color for increased click-through “ADD to Cart” or “Order Here” images. For an online business, combinations in shades of red, blue and brown work well. Blue lends a perception of loyalty, while brown provides overall balance. For professional sites, white is normally a great choice, but in eastern cultures, white symbolizes coldness and sterility.  

One of my favorite colors – is purple (very exotic), but purple doesn’t fit everywhere. Why do Kings, Queens and even priests wear purple robes – because purple implies royalty and sophistication. One place it does fit is in sites about interior design, accentuating wealth.

Everyone Is Going Green – because it represents nature. Its cool quality soothes, calms and has great healing powers, which is why it’s often worn in operating rooms by surgeons. If your target audience is China or France, green is not a great choice for packaging solutions. In China, green hats mean a man’s wife is cheating on him. In India, green is the color of Islam.

One of the factors that affect site speed is the size of the graphics/images on your website. I can remember using different utilities back in the 90’s that compressed images because the recommended page size at that time was around 27Kbytes.

You were lucky to get transfer speeds of 32K over dial up then, so slow page downloads meant the kiss of death. I sold a ton of ISDN in the day, but by today’s standard, not only is that solution pricey, but slow by comparison to DSL, cable and fiber. 

I’m seeing a lot of websites today that aren’t optimized for speed and that’s a huge mistake. While I have a 10MByte connection at home, much of rural America still connects via dial up. Add latency to that mix and site speed becomes more important than ever. Let’s face it, we’re competing in a world-wide market, so the faster your site loads, the better off you’ll be. 

Achieving the best image quality at a given bit or compression rate is the main goal of image compression, but you should also consider scalability. This could be combined with region of interest coding to further refine your images.

A recent query on Google for “image compression” returned over 40 million results. I only had time to read the first 16 million. LOL.

PS: Google has added site speed to their ranking algorithms (America only), so speeding up site speed could reap immense benefits in SERPS as well.