Search Engine Optimization - Good, Bad Or Both?

Don’t Just Use SEO Without Relevant References

For any entrepreneur who is serious about making money in this day and age, the Internet is a powerful, and some would argue indispensable, tool. A web presence enables you to reach customers wherever you want – and for companies with a mail order aspect this has been proven to drive orders up by allowing them to sell far and wide. In order to increase your web presence, there are many tools available. Some of these tools are more effective than others, but one which has proven to be immensely popular is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. SEO has become one of the ultimate buzzwords in Internet marketing – and is seen as being immensely desirable for the purposes of increasing presence.

Search engines are seen as being hugely important in increasing your web presence. Many people who are looking for something specific will, without even thinking, turn to the search engines, and most usually Google. By entering their required search term, they will turn up relevant results in the search engine and pick from the list that they see. Because people tend to read a page from top to bottom, having the result which ranks first in Google for a specific search term is considered very lucrative. Search Engine Optimization works by making a web page more “attractive” to the robots which search the Internet for relevant results. It does this by reading the keywords which people are searching for and judging by their volume on the page how apposite the site is for the searcher.

So far, so good, then. To create a page that will bring in the attention of someone who is looking for, say, tickets for a Justin Timberlake concert, the SEO user will make as many references as possible in the text of their web page to “justin timberlake tickets”, “justin timberlake concert”, “justin timberlake concert tickets”, and a range of other phrases which can include the venues at which Justin will be appearing, as well as eyecatching words like “cheap”, “cut price”, “front row” and so forth. Then when the potential customer searches for “cheap justin timberlake tickets Chicago” or a similar search term, the site with the most relevant references will appear high in the Google search results.

So what is the drawback to SEO, if it is bringing in traffic? The answer is that people know SEO works, and can occasionally be very indiscriminate in their use of search terms. Look at the two sentences that follow:

“I have found a fail-safe way to get cheap front row tickets for Justin Timberlake in Chicago – read on for more info!”

“Cheap Justin Timberlake tickets Chicago I have found Justin Timberlake concert tickets front row – CLICK HERE!!!”

The first sentence holds more promise for the questing Timberlake fan, as it reads like something a sentient person might write. The latter is stuffed with search terms and reads like gibberish – but at least initially will get into the search engines at a higher level due to its SEO volume. More and more people, conscious of the power of SEO, are using nothing but optimization to drive traffic, and it is becoming problematic for the person looking to find relevant information. Search engines are, however, developing to forestall this problem – but it is not, as yet, an exact science, and poor SEO is still slipping through the net.

First Published: EntrepreneurJourney.com Oct 5, 2009

PayPal Is One Of The Most Powerful Forces In E-commerce

What Is PayPal?

The way the world is at present marks a quite significant change from how things were even ten years ago. Here is a little exercise to do with Internet surfing habits. When you got on the ‘net, chances are that you used Google to find pages – but did you use it as exclusively as you do now? When you were looking for fast, detailed information on any one of a range of subjects, if you were on the Internet ten years ago you certainly didn’t use Wikipedia. It wasn’t invented, even in its most basic form, until the turn of the century. And as for financial transactions, it’s almost certain that you were using credit card details, because PayPal was in its absolute infancy.

The list goes on. Only programmers of a certain level of ability were setting up websites of any real intricacy, and maintaining them. The word “blog” would have led someone to look at you with barely concealed fear for your mental health – although LiveJournal did exist and Blogger.com was on its way. The very concept of “blogging”, though, was a very niche market and idea up until the middle of this decade – but is now at the fingertips of thousands upon thousands of people. All of the above concepts, and others, have become common currency only in recent years but, now they are in vogue, they are immensely powerful and shape a lot of our working life and everyday lifestyle.

Business is never slow to react to a trend. In all honesty, if you want to see what will be on everyone’s minds, desks and t-shirts two years from now, it is well worth looking at what the business community are doing now. This requires some amount of judgement on your behalf as well, of course – not least because large sections of the business community are busily ramming documents into shredders, crying and booking flights to countries that have no extradition policy. But if the business world decides thatsomething will be big, it is worth getting on board, because the likelihood is that it will play a big part in all of our lives in time to come. Of the above Internet concepts, one of the most powerful is PayPal.

There are few of us who have not sat in front of a monitor preparing to send payment for a service or an item and thought “Do I really want to send my card details over the Internet?”. It’s safe, ninety-nine point nine (recurring) times out of a hundred, but there is always that little jag of doubt. But for the entrepreneur who wants to sell online, the joy of PayPal is that people have far fewer qualms about using it. It is tried and tested, efficient and speedy, and it is becoming accepted by more and more companies. As time goes on this is set to increase, and the people who use PayPal now will be in a stronger position than the late adopters, as they will know how to run an account efficiently.

First Published: May 11, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com

I Am A WordPress Veteran and Moving to Squarespace

The Beginning of AhmedDawn.com

If you have been following my blogs, books, and YouTube channel, you know that I have several websites, with ADawnJournal being the most popular one. However, it is time for a change. I have secured a domain with my name and will build a new site from scratch.

This time I decided to go with a totally different platform for the new site and I have chosen Squarespace (SS) as my platform. All my other sites are WordPress sites, so it makes sense to try something different with my new site. WordPress may be the best platform out there and most of the big media and other big name sites run on the WordPress platform.

But it all comes with a price. If you are not a programmer or a web developer, it’s a lot of work and hassle to maintain WordPress sites. From my experience for the past 10 years, I have had lots of pain and agony running after programmers to update, change, or fix my sites. And there will be always problems you will have to deal with maintaining WP sites. I know little bit of coding to fix minor issues, but not I am not knowledgeable enough to write programming code, Mysql databases, FTP, etc. to build WP sites from scratch and fix major issues.

As SS does all these and it’s a drag and drop site builder with modern templates and features, I should be able to save lots of time and hassle. After all, I am a minimalist and live my life keeping things simple.

 I already started building my new site and expect to make it go live in 1 or 2 week (if you are reading this, it is live). My other WP sites will remain on WP for now, and I will decide on those (if I want to keep them on WP or move to SS) later. ADawnJournal will remain active for now. In the future, I will have to decide whether to leave ADawnJournal as it is or merge into AhmedDawn.com.