I have been stressing a little of making some major changes to a very complicated site. This site is base for it's business and if I were to fuck it up, that could do some serious damage to their income. So no pressure, right? So far, I've managed to get it readable by Google (but still waiting for reindex) and modify the layout to be more user friendly. The site uses X-Cart which is not as flexible as I'd like a CMS to be. It looks like the last people in charge were some arrogant ignorant chums as well. Lots of mistakes that I'm having to go in and fix.

Its made me realize recently that my job is basically creative problem solving. Creative means you don't know what you're doing exactly. Otherwise you could hire any old monkey to do it and with a non standardized changing environment such as web development, web marketing, and SEO, to be successful it can only be done with creative problem solving.

On a recent project I found that the index page, along with a few other key pages were not indexed by Google. I logged into Google Webmaster Tools and verified the site. The crawl stats interestingly enough said that the it had been prohibited from reading these important files because of the robots.txt file. I checked the file and there was no sign of anything that could have cause that, but whatever, so i just cleared out everything. Better to let Google read all the non password protected files than to prohibit it from the index page. Now I've submitted a Google sitemap with the help of XML Sitemaps. This should clear everything up.

Tip: after you generate an XML sitemap file, make sure to modify the importance of the first 20 urls, especially if they are updated regularly or link to other important pages. Default importance is .5 and the highest is 1.

I've created over a dozen blog sites and there are a few things I've begun to notice. Blog sites are fun to do, it can help your business, get you search traffic, and even make you a little money. Here's a few tips I've been thinking about that will help you in making your blog site.

Start Simple: First and foremost you should be thinking about content. Often when I was starting out I would create blogs with multiple categories, of which I couldn't keep up with. Then there would not be enough content to actually keep people reading the blog so it would be hard to gain any subscribers. Start with one category and keep it updated regularly.

Give Credit, Especially When Everybody Knows It Already
Linking to trusted sites can help you gain trust with Google. When ever you're writing aboout a particular subject, just run a search in Google for a very short general related term, take one of the top results and link to it. For instance, if you're writing about underwear, link that word to the Victoria's Secret website; If you're writing about search placement then link to Google. Makes you at least look like you know what you're talking about.

Get Linked
The most important thing you can do if you want readers is to get linked. By any means except trading. You only want to link to important sites and they won't want to trade anyways. If you own a site already, great, link to your blog. If you have to, buy one.

I was just reading an article on SEOMoz on Google ad bidding which raises the costs of advertising simply by the nature of bidding. Companies with PPC agencies or bidding software are automating the increase of the clicks by trying to have the top placement.

This lead me to think about the possibility that companies might spring up that would specialize in getting the top cost in second place bidding. Why would one want that? Well if you have the maximum bid you can to maintain second place (meaning not gaining first place), then your competitor would be maxed out on their top bid, which would cutting into their profits a significant amount.

Just a thought.

You may notice that I try and do a lot of outbound links in my blogs. Yes it's nice to reference things and all that, but there are other reasons for my doing so. To rank well you need to be trusted. Inbound links to your site help a lot with this, but so do outbound links. I've seen on multiple occasions now that a site really dropped in ranking with Google in my linking to a couple of new, untrusted sites and one occasions where a site benefited from linking to trusted domains.

Today I was verifying my PayPal account for the new business and because I have a personal account with the same social security number I needed to verify my identity to them. In order to do this I needed to fax them some piece of paper they would have me print and a copy of my drivers license.

Ok, so this is an internet marketing firm and one that is just starting up. As if I'm going to have a fax machine. I have my home phone and Skype. I was amazed that there was no email option. Luckily I'm a freaking genius when it comes to the internet so all I had to do was do a Microsoft image print, take a picture of my drivers license, paste that in the file, convert it to a PDF and use FaxZero to fax it in to PayPal. Kinda complicated, but much more cost effective than going out and buying a fax machine.

As for the legitimacy of these techniques they are all gray hat SEO. They are listed from lightest to darkest but not quite reaching black hat (thats when you're run into real trouble with the search engines).

Links From Relevant Named Aged Domains
This is the only technique that does not require a high PageRank. All you need to do is put some content up on the aged domain and link to the targeted site.

Links From High PR Domains
Once you've acquired a new high PageRank domain, simply add new content and

301 Redirects To Sub Page
Once you've acquired a domain with high PR you'll want to create a relevant sub page on the targeted site. You will then 301 the newly acquired domain to this new page with relevant content. If people are still following the links to the domain then they won't be as confused with irrelevant content.

301 Redirects To Home Page
Very simple. You 301 the newly acquired domain to the targeted one and inherit all of the links, relevant or not.