matty

Hi Jim, It's been about a week since I've got to the forum. I think I figured why my PR went to a grey box. The site got messed up pretty bad because my entire database was wiped out! The guy that does my programming is figuring that it happened at the server from an update or change that TC did, or someone hacked their way into my cpanel and did the damage! He was able to get it back up and running, but it still needs some repairs. While I'm on the subject, do you know of an udate or change that they made here at Total Choice within the last two or three weeks? It's got me baffled... I don't think I pissed off someone enough to have them wiping out my database. I'll be finished with my overhaul within about a week, so I'll worry about repairing the database then. I don't think I'm competing with your fishing friends in the Keys! I've fished Lake Okechobee for a straight week, and we had a blast! When I move back to the States with my wife and kids, We'll be settling in Maine, and I plan on getting re-aquainted with some large mouth bass when I get there! Thanks again for your advice, Matty

Hi Jim, That's good of you to mention Webmasterworld.com. I'm there just about every day! I go by "Hungry4seo". I pretty much rely on the forum here at Total Choice and also their forum. I've been working my tail off to get my site overhauled, and at the same time, I've been trying to absorb as much as I can from the forums and other articles. I thought of you lastnight because it looks like all of my PR mysteriously disappeared! I had a PR3 on my index (not so great), but now it's showing a grey bar. It made me think of your statement where you said that Google is broken. I hope that's the case. I have about 35 reciprocal links right now, and I doubt that they all fell off the earth all at once. I'm not sweating it though because I'll be republishing the site within another week or two. The thing that gets me excited, is that I was able to get (some) traffic (about 1000 unique visitors per month), and I was able to make a few sales per month, and my site's pages were optimized TOTALLY wrong! I wasn't even dedicating search terms to specific pages! I have an SEO friend from the UK. that helped me pull my head out of my butt, and made me realize that the pages had to built around the search terms. I'm real excited to see what the results will be.. Take care, thanks, Matty

I'm cool with that Jim, It's like the old saying goes, "opinions are like butt holes, all of us have one, and most of them stink".. I think that woman Jill got another seo expert a little ticked off, and that's why he was throwing shots at her. I'm ok with writing content that has about a 10% density without it sounding redundant, so I'll just keep it at that. It seems like there's more important things to focus on now a days anyway. Inbound links, semantics etc.. Thanks for your input and take care. Matty

Hi, Thanks for your responses to my question. I don't want to get my underwear all bunched up over the keyword density, but I guess I'm just a little paranoid with the way things are working after the whole Florida mess. I read that you could be penalized if the density was up over 10%. As far as that quote from Jill Whallen goes, I've heard a few stories that explain how badly she can contradict herself when it comes to her seo advice. But thanks anyway. Matty

Hello, I have a question that might sound over-simplified, but I'd like to make sure of it before I continue on optimizing my site. I'd like to know if a two word key phrase would count towards the total of words on a page as one word, or would the two words of the key phrase be counted seperately? Here's a basic example. I have a web page with 100 words on it, and I'm optimizing the search term "used cars" for that page. The search term "used cars" shows up 10 times on the page out of a total of 100 words. Would that give me a density of 10%, or would the words "used" and "cars" be counted seperately? If so, I'd end up with a density of 20%, and I'm pretty darn sure that the robots from Google wouldn't like that too much. I'm pretty concerned about trying to optimize my pages without over-optimizing them. If one of you experienced seo'ers could set me straight on this, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance, Matty

Hi Guys, I'd call myself a novice webmaster (at best), and I'm up against a problem that I'm hoping one of you guys or girls out there could help me with. I have a website that I've worked pretty hard at, and the present Page Rank on the site is a PR4. All of the other pages of the site are showing to be zero on the Google tool bar. I'm especially concerned with getting some of the page rank to disperse over to my links page so I can attract more sites to reciprocate links with. Is there something that I could do to the <head> section of the page's html to get Google to give rank to that particular page? I'd greatly appreciate any solid feedback. Thanks, Matty