Deverill

Scary! Their slogan says it all "You can win but you can't hide!" I'm beginning to thing that George Orwell was a prophet instead of a writer. Big brother can do so many things right now it's scary. Now they are making it commonplace and socially acceptable to track people. Devices like lojack and personal gps locators for families built into cell phones are everyday things now. How long before we get a national id card, number and a tracking chip? "But I don't have anything to hide, so what?" you say? Then why do we all use envelopes instead of postcards for our correspondence? I don't think we will have thought police or anything but it would be very upsetting to get a phone call saying "Hey, we noticed that you usually buy 3 6-packs of Coke every week but you have been buying Pepsi lately. Let us give you 2 $1.00 off coupons to get you back." Can it be done? Yes! Especially if you pay with debit or credit cards. There was a store in England that would have their security cameras take a snapshot of everyone leaving the store that had Gillette Mach3 razor blades. Why? They say it was an attempt to stop shoplifting of one of the most-stolen products. How? RFID tags inside the product, which are originally for inventory and warehouse management purposes, triggered the cameras. I'm not paranoid (ok, well sorta) but I am really interested in seeing where this kind of thing ends up.

I know Google can handle up to 3 variables just fine. After that the current spiders get lost. The Googlebar that has the PR on it can't handle any variables though. Your PageRank will be ok but the Googlebar won't show it properly. Also, anything that needs a SESSIONID to get to it will not be found by the Google spiders. I would think the others are the same or very close behind.

You're buying the wrong brands! Even my $79 cheapie has OCR. It's not spectacular but it would do well on a printed book. (Low end HP that's about 4 years old if you're interested)

Yes a holiday on Monday. It's called Memorial Day and it's a day to remember those who died in the service of our country. Here's an exerpt from a Whitehouse memo announcing the "National Moment of Remembrance" resolution. In a time that many people and nations are upset with the US Armed Forces I would like to remind them that it's not the Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine (I think that's all of them except special forces) who is making policy. They are merely following what they have been trained to do because those kinds of decisions are bigger than they as individuals are. At the same time, the sacrifices these men and women make to defend us and our values is tremendous and to each and every one of them I am grateful. Without them we would be a far less country than we are today - in fact, we would not be a country but merely a colony - if not of England than of some other nation. To them all I say sincerely, "Thank you for your sacrifice whether it be your life, time with your family or just running simulations in peace time so that those who come after you can be better prepared to defend."

The 301 permanent redirect is exactly the right thing, but you should contact at least the larger sites and have them change it anyway. It's always nice to make it easy for folks, spiders and others.

ASCII 45 is what you get when you hit the - key on an US-English mapped keyboard. I don't know which program you are using but it may be putting a full blown hyphen instead of the typical dash we normally see. You have the proper line to add to .htaccess. I don't know why it would prevent the index from opening though. Did you get any errors or just a blank screen? If you wanted to look through the log files you could see Googlebot but that's almost as complicated for a beginner because of the logs being in a compressed format. You could use AWStats to tell when Google came through. About half way down the page is a section "Robots/Spiders visitors (Top 25)" which will list how many times Googlebot came through, the last visit date/time and how much bandwidth it used. For a first attempt you are doing fine. Hang in there and ask away - there are folks here that can answer just about anything - even how to cook without lactose now!

Rank Eval: It is very important on Google, and for your human visitors, to have links from other sites. Google requires them if you want a shot at top 10 ranks and it will help your potential customers find you as well. While Google's not the only game in town, it is currently the biggest and links will help you in other ways. Try to get links from other lactose intolerant related sites such as nutritionists, doctors, products, sites with reference materials, etc. This will give the spiders from all search engines a way to find your site and get you listed. You can also use the signatures in forum posts and emails to draw people to your site. I would also download the Netscape and Firefox browsers, which are free, and have a look at your site in them, replacing any characters that don't show up properly. Even the apostrophe is a question mark in "You Can't Be Serious" which will drive the search engines and your visitors nuts. It's always a good idea to try your site in several browsers so you can maximize your customer potential. Your Googlebot detection program is not working because you have to make an adjustment to your .htaccess file in order for the server to process the PHP programming. Here's a link that tells how: Activating PHP You currently do not appear to be listed in any of the browsers that I checked. Once you get links from other established sites the bots and spiders will start visiting your site and you'll begin to appear on them. Just as a side note, I notice there is another cookbook called "Lactose Free Cookbook". If they can afford the lawyers they may ask you to change the name of your site, assuming they want to protect the copyright on their book's name. It could be seen as trying to confuse customers who think they are buying the other book into getting yours. Please realize, I'm not saying that's your intent at all... just that the courts are funny. If you would like to change your site name because of this then now is definitely the time to do it before you start to get links and a reputation. It's much harder to change later, but that's totally up to you. Best wishes!

The reason is that they are using ASCII 150 instead of the more traditonal ASCII 45 for the dashes. IE renders it a double-sized dash but Firefox makes it a question mark.

If it is just a snippet of HTML with links out then treat it as any other outgoing links on your site. If it is javascript or something that has to be interpreted by the browser then I believe that none of the major search engines are bothering to render that stuff so it will, in essence, be invisible to them, IMO.

Ok folks, there's too much productivity there. It's time for everyone to check out the Daffy Duck Skydive page. Have fun.

You may not have to! Check out gmailswap.com. There you can make offers of things to swap for a Gmail invitation. Everything from free webhosting for a year to eternal friendship. If someone with an invitation to give out likes your offer then you're in. (It's down right now. They just were wrote up in a popular site so it may be bandwidth issues... they shoulda got TCH hosting!)

Check out their FAQ page at www.link-builder.com/faq.html to see more about what they're about. It is a legitimate offer to exchange links, but they are spamming you in that it is UCE - Unsolicited Commercial Email. I have had 1 request and refused it but would be open to others... if I'm in a good mood.

Here's an interesting article about Gmail: cnnmoney.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=California+Senate+votes+to+restrict+Google%27s+Gmail+-+May.+27%2C+2004&expire=&urlID=10572515&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmoney.cnn.com%2F2004%2F05%2F27%2Ftechnology%2Fgoogle.reut%2F%3Fcnn%3Dyes&partnerID=2200

Rob, please re-read point #2 above.

The last point first, if a site is related to yours and links to you then that's a better link than a site that 's totally unrelated. For one thing, the visitors to the first site are more likely interested in yours and for another, some search engines give it more value too. Now, I don't know or want to know what forum you were reading but I'll say be careful of what you read and weigh it with common sense. If a link from a bad site would hurt your ranking, and if I was your competitor, what do you think I would do if I were dishonest? I'd submit your site to every fruitcake fly-by-night link farm I could find and *poof* you'd be out of my face and I'd be getting all the business. This is exactly why links from a bad site won't hurt you. You are personally responsible for what you link to, however, so if you link to junk then you'll suffer the consequences. Keep your eyes open and search for things like "high search engine rankings" "search engine forum" and the likes. Use common sense to evaluate what you read and not what they say their level of expertise is, question everything you hear, believe only a fraction of it, look for proof and you'll be where the rest of us are - not knowing what to believe Seriously, you can usually tell from the attitude of a person whether they know what they are talking about. Also consider the person's investment in the site. For example, Web Pro News accepts articles from guest writers. A couple lately have been a bit "out there" but considering the author's reputation is not really at stake they are less likely to worry about accuracy. Now the guys behind WPN, however, make mistakes and let these bozos slip through but they themselves are not as likely to start blathering about the latest rumor. If a person has their reputation on the line at a site then they MAY be more reliable than a guest author. Also look for folks with online forums where people can challeng their statements and see how they reply. You can say that Joe Host over there has a lousy service and we might believe it. If you say that about Head Guru the we just look at his reply and see what kind of person he is and decide you're goofy. Hope it helps!

Hmm, do you really want Google's search engines trapsing through your emails looking for stuff? There are a lot of folks concerned about the thought of it.

Hey, Diamond Dave made Van Halen! That newer Van Hagar stuff ain't so good!

You are right, Dick, that anyone new to search engines focuses exclusively on Google and that's a big mistake. At the same time I wrote down my thoughts about keywords I also wrote an article about whether Google's the only game in town. Since you posted before I did I stole your title for it: Google Google Google To your other points: Content is indeed the stuff good sites are made of. It is content that sells your product, shares your opinions or gathers a community of like minded folks. As someone I know said "Has Google ever bought anything from you? Who cares what Google likes." Having links to your site can not hurt you - otherwise a competitor would just submit you to every link farm in existance to eliminate you. The sites you link to are the ones you must be careful with. If you link to trash the engines will think you are trash. A site map is important to get all of your pages looked at by the search engines and to help visitors find things. If you have one, link to it from your home page and make sure it links to all of your pages you want publicized. That way the spiders can follow it. Page titles are one thing that people get lazy and forget about a lot. If you have a site about blue widgets then my recommendation would be to put "Blue Widgets" in the title along with the company name if you are looking for branding. Many search engines look hard at titles and it's something most people don't even consciously see. Internal links are important for visitor navigation and spider travelling. It's not necessary to link every page to every other page but there should be a good solid internal structure that makes sense. Alt tags are important for spiders, but more importantly for visually imaired visitors that are using screen readers and people on slow links that have images turned off. Not only should meta tags be focused on your intended topic but the content as well. Don't recycle titles, headers, etc. unless it really makes sense. These are all good points, Dick! Your point that there's more to it than keywords and there's more to it than Google in "spot on" as our English folks would say. Above all, do things that make sense. If it makes sense to put your keyword phrase in your page 100 times then do it. If not (and it probably doesn't ) then don't do that. Aim for your customers/visitors and give them some meat to chew on instead of fluffy tags and headers that don't make sense and the rest will work itself out. You can always tweek a little here or there to help the search engine rankings but if it looks dumb people won't come back.

Is Google the be-all-end-all search engine? Some people focus so much on Google that they neglect other parts of their business marketing to the point of losing sales. Google currently has a little over half of the search engine market according to most estimates. There are still thousands of searches every day on Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and a myriad of other search engines and online services. Do you think that a grandmother who never had a computer before and just got AOL for her 90th birthday so she can see pictures of the grandkids in email will go to Google to look for something online when AOL has that nice handy search box at the top? Of course not. As any business advertisement, we must use every tool at our disposal to promote our businesses. How many cones would a Dairy Queen sell if they had no ads in the paper, on the radio or even signs on the store? A few, but not as many as if they put up that big sign with a cold delicious ice cream cone on it. How many serious and successful business people do you know that don't have business cards? What about letterhead with their business info at the top? Radio ads? TV ads? Newspaper ads? A listing in the Yellow Pages? Business cards tacked up at the local grocery store? Signs on the business, their car and even stitched into their clothing? We should be no different with our websites! If your site is personal interest then put it in your signature every time you send an email or post in an online forum. If it is for a business then use all of the above examples and more - and make sure you add your website URL to the cards, ads, bumperstickers, signs, etc. Another thing to consider is that for any given search engine you may be chasing a pipe dream trying to rank highly. For a real world example, I have a client that has a charter fishing business. On Google his site was #38. Not awesome but considering the competition it was a great start. Last November they made a change to their algorithms that calculate where your sites fall in their search results. My client's site was nowhere to be found! I looked through the first 500 results and nothing! With a great deal of work and help from other experts I have gotten back to #48 on one term but still in the hundred-somethings for the others. At the same time all of this is going on, I am going higher and higher in the other search engines. Here's the current status on just a few of the phrases (not counting paid advertising results): >Term Google Yahoo MSN Key West fishing 361 44 27 Key West fishing charter 129 3 4 Key West fishing charter boat 21 1 1 As you can see, the more precise I get the better my results. That is because other sites may not use the words "charter" or "boat" in such a way as I have. This speaks to guessing what people will be searching for. The important lesson here is that I could chase the star named Google and try to get the site below 361 or I can understand that "Google's a good thing but everyone else added together is a good thing too." Don't make yourself crazy chasing Google and miss out on the other great tools you have for marketing your site.

Annie, You are right that Google doesn't give any extra weight to meta keywords. The keywords of which I wrote, however, can be placed anywhere on the page. They can do a great deal of good in the page title, headers, boldfaced within the text, normally within the text, in alt attributes, etc. Remember also that Google has a nasty habit of making "new" pages rank higher for a short period of time and then dropping them back to "normal" later.

Both of Google's advertisements can be researched from this page: www.google.com/ads/index.html Adwords is for buying space on other people's sites and Adsense is if you want to show ads from other people on your site (and get a cut of their advertising dollar). I also found a bunch of sites by Googling "affiliate banner programs".

This is something I hope turns into a series of posts about search engine optimization and web site marketing. I want to start with the disclaimer that I am not an expert on these topics but I do spend a great deal of time and occasionally money investigating such things. Everyone has a point of view and I daresay that none are totally right. I am no different. Please take this for what it is along with my hopes that it will help you bring additional visitors to your web sites. Keyword phrases should be chosen based on what you think others will be looking for when they should find your site. Single keywords are almost totally ineffective and should be replaced with keyword phrases of two or three words related to your topic. For instance, a site that sells blue widgets in Portland Oregon at very affordable prices should not use simply "widgets" as a keyword. Instead, better keyword phrases may be: Portland widgets affordable widgets Portland Oregon affordable blue widgets etc. If you go overboard you may become less effective at drawing traffic because the keywords have been dilluted by the others. Additionally you may run the risk of a search engine seeing it as an attempt to spam them and they may rank you very low or not at all. If you don't choose enough words you may restrict visitors as well. If you use "affordable widgets" and someone enters "affordable blue widgets" then you may not show as highly or at all in the results. Another consideration is what words would people use to search? You may think that "Fishing Key West" would be a great phrase but currently there are an estimated 9 searches per day versus 412 searches a day for "Key West Fishing". The bottom line is that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a whole science based on a guessing game. The factors that affect your successfulness are guaging the terms searchers are using, finding terms that are searched for but not so competitive you would be a needle in a haystack, placing the terms in the right places on your page to draw the attention of the search engines and I'd add a good bit of luck. Remember, the search engines are always changing the rules so don't follow the latest fad you hear about - it will probably be different tomorrow. If you put good solid content in your site that people will use and benefit from then the search engines will like you automatically. Then all you have to do is a little tweeking and you should be able to get consistent high ranking. There will always be ups and downs in the search engine results, but they are temporary.

Here are some suggestions for your site, Boojum: Choose some keyword phrases people would use when looking for a site like yours. You currently have politics, propaganda, bush which do tightly relate to your site but they also relate to millions of other sites. Try to narrow it down a bit. Perhaps some more appropriate keyphrases might be: Corrupt government governmental complacency restoring our nation Common Sense Alliance I'll leave it to you to choose these phrases for yourself since you will know your desired audience better than I. Any javascript in your page will distract and sometimes derail a spider so move them to an external file you can call with a line like: ><script LANGUAGE="javascript" TYPE="text/javascript" SRC="/Scripts/mailto.js"></SCRIPT> In this case the subfolder is Scripts under my main site and the script is in a file named mailto.js in that folder. The same is true of CSS style instructions. Use: ><link rel="stylesheet" href="Styles/mystyle.css" type="text/css"> for example in the <head> section of your page to include them. The description is what shows up under your site on many search engines. Fashion it accordingly but remember that it is another opportunity to add keyword phrases and attract visitors' attention. Incoming links will help bring spiders to your site as well as your rankings in some cases (mostly Google). The more links to your site the easier it will be for everyone to find you so work on getting as many of those as you can in the most relevant places possible. No human visits link-farms (hundreds of links on one page) and the spiders pretty much ignore them so try to get onto similar sites or directories for your specific niche. This will get you started. Remember our forums are here to help and ask any time if you have a particular question... we'll try to find you the answer if we don't know it.

Someone will be along to add you to the Family index soon. We're doing some restructuring and reassigning duties to fill in the gaps. Page Rank eval: If you move your javascript to an external file and use just a call to it the Search Engines (SE) will have an easier time sorting through your page. Concentrate on keyword phrases you want to rank highly for such as "Wisconsin website design" or whatever you feel is the term people will use when looking for a service such as yours. If you concentrate on these phrases in your meta keywords, headers, title, etc you will do better than a shotgun approach to single words. "Waukesha web design" is probably going to be a good phrase for you and it's good that you have that phrase in your title and bolded in the text as well. Take advantage of the meta description. It is the text many search engines will place with your link and is a good place to really make your site shine. Use it to sell yourself. Links from established sites will be vital to getting listed and with Google it's important to get high ranking. You should submit to free directories and other sites and work on getting as many links back to you as you can. The SE's send out programs called spiders to find new pages and they follow links from pages they already know about. That is the fastest and best way to get listed. Hang in there, nothing changes quickly in the search engine world except the rules.

Pagerank of 0 is just an unpopular site, in Google's view. If it's penalized the PR bar in Google's toolbar would be grey which is different than zero. I'm not sure how the online pagerank tools rate them though.