Ok so I picked a site (spotlocal.net - they state that - “Spot Local helps you target consumers who are actively searching for your service or product” -we’ll see about that) at random online to check different webmaster SEO skills out. Spot Local is the site, and what a site it is. They claim to increase traffic to advertisers and what not, at least that’s what I got from this site. It’s rather simple really, they have some major no-no’s and I’m going to exploit them by ranking higher than them, or at least rank high enough for their keywords to bug them! Funny, they have a slogan that says “Spot the difference, with Spot Local” haha well let me spot your bloopers then so you can better satisfy your users!

No navigation - Learn from their mistake, the closest thing to your body tag and one of the first thing the search engines absorb are the navigation text based links. They help a great deal and also help spread the PR juice through your site to other important pages you want to have rank higher. Their navigation is crap, sorry to say it like that, but who on earth uses a nav like that anymore? If they were thinking creativity? Originality? Then someone please slap them with a couple pound of ‘reality check’ because it’s tacky, old fashioned, confusing, retarded and crap.

Validation/Code Compliant -  Spot Local’s home page has over 40 errors. With so little content (which poses another issue) that’s way too many errors, Java, Flash, just wrongness all round.

Meta Tags - No meta description or meta keywords, which just makes me want to slap their web developers. Yes it’s not a life or death issue but any web developer knows better.

MAIL TO??? now come on, why not create a simple contact form to make users lives simpler. Fill in a couple fields and hit send, Done!

Page URL’s : They have the strangest url structure I’ve seen in a long time, numbering their pages? That’s a red light right there.

Among other things, their blog for one is not even optimized to rank at all which is sad.

Just goes to show you the sort of mistakes other webmasters are making, learn from these sites i’ll post at random here guys, don’t make the same mistakes!

So, identity theft. It’s a huge deal online, more so than in real life, but then again ‘online’ is real life, right? Today I got a call from a long time client telling me ‘they accept my new terms’…what new terms? After talking to them for a bit, I am shocked to find out, someone with the email (rnichaelkane@yahoo.com - which I guess looks like michaelkane@yahoo.com - the r and n together trick one into believing it’s just an m)  claimed to be Michael Kane, me!! They went on to tell my client that an update on their site was necessary and that a bug was found and should be patched up before it gets exploited, they go on to giving my client wire details and stating payment should be made immediately (They even gave them a 30% discount on a fabricated fee as they were current clients) and that was that.

I told my client not to pay, obviously and have now sent these crooks an email, and one to Yahoo! Hopefully this will get resolved before something nasty comes of this. In the mean time, I have forwarded an official letter to all my clients noting that all emails from that said email address should be disregarded and deleted. Same goes to all my online contacts.

Be careful of online identity thieves!

So, we’re re-designing a home page for Shouting Zone, and not only that but we’ll also be setting up a personal blog for the site. The forum will get a face lift and we’ll give all our members (my friends) a friendly nudge to let them know we’re back, and for good this time.

Just to answer a couple peoples questions, I was recently asked, why bring SZ back to life, well, because it’s always been a place I could go to joke around and have some fun, I missed it.

Some asked what was going to be different this time, I personally hope not a lot, because it was great fun! There will be Design/Coding/SEO sections implemented nicely, and it wont look out of place I promise, but this is to help a lot of website owners, web developers, and regular web page designers, or users with profiles to spice things up a bit and rank higher in the search engines for more online exposure!

There will be a couple extra features, like a Shouting Zone  directory for all your favorite sites and such, also, SZ members will be able to create their own fully customized WordPress themed blogs for free and so on.

I’ve always believed in freedom of speech and self expression, if by creating a forum for people to join and freely commute in I aid in giving more people a voice to shout out and be heard, then i’ll do just that! A lot of people create forums these days and sensor a lot of peoples opinion in fear of being whip lashed by search engines, law and what not, as long as my members can be civil about it, I don’t see why I should stop anyone from saying what they have to say! ShoutingZone.com - Go check it out.

How many people out there love Yahoo!? The Yahoo search engine, in my honest opinion, is the ONLY search engine for me! Why? Well I go on and on about why Yahoo Search Engine is the best search engine in the world over at iheartyahoo where i talk about pretty much everything Yahoo related. How much I love yahoo and how I am probably the biggest Yahoo fan alive.

I hope you guys can go check it out, it’s a few days old and I’m really trying to do something new with it. Some say I’m on this one man crusade to convert all none yahoo believers, others say I’m just a Yahoo fan boy, one thing is for sure, on iheartyahoo.com I post crap worth reading, crap worth noticing. Crap you probably wont read anywhere else, so check it out. :)

Amanda is one of the few people I respect as an armature SEO. She really does think outside the box. It all started when a friend came and talked to me about giving him a hand in ranking high for a keyword, related to some seocontest2008 contest. Prize for ranking first (if all the rules were followed) would be $1,000. With a prize as small as that you would be right in thinking, what a waste of time, but for some, it’s all about Ego.

Anyway Amanda has been experimenting for the past year or so and she overheard me talking about helping this friend out. Next thing I know, she enters the contest with a unique blog post already late in the game, long after several hundred people had started over 2-3weeks before her. It was her unique post, and some of her enginuity that has now got her ranking higher than that friend that first asked for my help, having started weeks after him, she has skyrocketed from not being indexed, to ranking on the fifth page for that keyword, with only 1 real backlink to her site.

So Amanda, congrats, and show those link buying, spamming fools that it’s really not about all that, it’s about what the rest don’t really know ;)