Translator's Ravings

Discussions Concerning Search Engine Optimization

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How have you been? I imagine you stay pretty busy with everything you have going on. I had sent you a DUI Foundation article on the prevention of drunk driving. I had forgotten I sent it until earlier today when I was looking through some files. Any chance you posted that? Thanks for checking!

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Actually I’m researching the web right now for a script to help me automate the process of submitting webpages like yours. Not sure how long it will take me but I can contact you once I’m done if you like. I plan to make sure each webpage is a unique url, seo friendly, can be moderated to prevent spammers and so on. I want to make it quality. Feel free to post your article elsewhere if you like.

Wow, you are busy! Your plans for a new addition to your site sound interesting. It’s totally find with me that you haven’t posted it. After all, it is your site and you are doing me a favor by doing so. Therefore, I’m in no position to second guess the material you do and do not post. If you want to wait to post it, and the article script is something you definitely plan on doing, then that’s fine if you wait to post it. However, if the article script isn’t something you will definitely do, or if it’s going to be a few months before it’s up and running, then I would like to have the opportunity to submit the article somewhere else and then write you a new one when you do in fact have the script up.

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Basically, I try to keep the articles relatively shorter. I understand you put a lot of time and effort into your webpages and that creating a webpage for a short article may not be worth your time. Most websites don’t create pages as unique as yours so it is worth it for me to keep the articles simple and shorter in nature. It is also more beneficial for organizations like the DUI Foundation (and for the prevention of DUI incidents) if I write a hundred short articles and get them posted on 100 different sites than it is for me to write a few longer articles for only a few websites. The main objective for the DUI Foundation is to get the word out to as many people as possible that they are there to educate and help you. Once someone realizes they exist, they can always visit the website for more information if the article does not include it. Therefore, the article doesn’t have to be a masterpiece by any means.

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It’s totally fine if you decide it’s not worth it for you to post it. It happens every once in awhile so I’m used to it. I wouldn’t want to put you in a position where adding content I send you will ultimately hurt your website instead of help it. In most cases, adding article content helps a website. In your case, I can see where a short article might not fit in as well and could possibly work to the disadvantage of the site as far as design is concerned. There is no doubt in my mind that the information is valuable, however. It just might be better suited on a different website, and that’s totally understandable. I should also mention that while I do put time and effort into the articles, I do write a bunch of articles each week, so I tend to only take a few hours on each one. So, if it doesn’t get posted right away, it isn’t a huge deal. In this case, I know you have a good site and that it is put together well so when you said I could submit it, I jumped on the opportunity. That doesn’t mean you have to post it. I just hope it’s okay that you allow me to submit it someplace else if it’s going to be awhile before you post it. Naturally, it only helps prevent DUI’s if it’s posted somewhere for someone to read. I can always write you another one should you want to post one for the DUI Foundation in the future. Let me know what you feel is best for you and your website. Either decision is cool with me and totally understandable. You’ve already posted two of my articles. I am very thankful for that. Thanks again for your help.

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yes, quite busy. Recently I’ve started learning php and making dynamic webpages, and have a new project to put a database online, which I find quite enthrawling. I save many of my outgoing emails, because I type fast, and aLOT, and eventually put them up on the web as original content. Organise it by categories and usually about 20,000 characters per page. I have much content to put up and not gotten around to it, and find that the work involved in putting up your little webpages, with the little content it has, is not benefitting me so well, considering the relative investment of time for the small amount of text. But it did make me think I’d like to find a script whereby people can submit their own articles, and add their own pictures etc. How much time did you spend on your last article? Would it bother you to wait until I have the article script up and running?

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unfortunately, you’ll have to submit it yourself. I just don’t have the time to manually make pages for submitted articles. I will continue to study and promote this site, and try to make things as simple as possible, and write some instructions if necessary. I think that the most recent submissions get broadcast on the front page, no matter what category they are placed in. I am still learning it myself. The advantage of the categories, as I understand it, is that the names of the categories end up in the permalink, which should help with keywords. The title you choose will also become part of the address of the page you submit. Still learning and I will try to make everything clear in an instructions file, as I tweak it etc.

The blog looks like it’ll work great.

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The only suggestion I can think of (which you probably already thought about) is to create an archive list that organizes the articles by month once they start flowing in. That might be easier than separating the articles by category each time one gets posted. Although, I suppose you could create separate categories and an archive list under each category, but you might wind up with 500 categories. As far as adding the article, do I upload/add it myself? Or do you post it? If you post it, do you need me to resend the article?

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heydo, had an idea concerning the submission of articles to my site, as one person wanted to submit some and I just didn’t have time to deal with it, after uploading two of his articles. So I started hunting around the web for fancy script, seeing I’m becoming such a php guru, actually paid 10 bucks for one, but before I got that up and running I also installed WordPress, cause I thought I could use that for submitting articles. The dude already submitted his own article, and now I’m learning about wp plugins and themes and all that, and quite amazing. Once I’m done learning with all that I could give you my tweaks if you like. You could use it for the same purpose. The advantage of this is that others actually put up their original content on your site and do basically work for you for free, hee hee. Extra content helps your traffic, and of course you can moderate everything. I’m gonna set it up so that every submitted page will have links to my important pages. Can show it to you once its done. Just downloaded a shitload of plugins, so need to study and install them.

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yes WordPress is the darling of web publishing. when I first looked at it last year there was too much I didn’t understand (php etc.) but I could see its value. people I know run their entire website as a blog, using WordPress. when they update their blog, the post appears on their home page in what looks like normal .html. its another very useful thing to learn, for sure. its largely agreed upon to be ‘the way of the future’ (not like other tools, that are already falling behind).

well, not sure the “way of the future” at all. I think it’s good for people who have poor or no html skills and who just want to copy in some text and press “upload picture”, but for real developers, who are behind most of the top streaming websites, something like wordpress is a bit ridiculous because you simply have too little control. The reason why I started using it is because I don’t have the time to upload people’s submitted web content for them, and I want to automate this process and step away from it, like I did with my link exchange site. Yes, I still have to moderate it, but that takes a lot less time than to have to moderate it AND create the webpages etc. For my own travel blog, I still prefer to make the webpages myself, because I can do it quickly, and control things a lot more. But it’s certainly cool learning this wordpress thing and I’m putting together a might nice automated article submission site. As I write this now

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I just finished writing up my Article Submission page, written to attract all those dudes out there wanting to submit their various articles to other domains so that they can link back to their own. Big industry in itself. Anyway, hats off to wordpress. Really cool shit. Just another open source thing, and the plugins and billions of geeks spending their free time developing it make it really robust. With free google docs, ubuntu and all that, I can see Microsoft eventually having a problem, because everything will be for free! They already admitted they totally fell asleep on the search engine thing. Google make 26 billion a year from advertising, which is catching up to Micro’s 42 billion, which is from software sales. Will be interesting to see how things develop over the next five years, but pirate me is certainly into free and open source!

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oh ya, and one thing just occurred to me. Once you put in that php code which forced the form page to be logged into and not openly available to the public, it will also block the google ads. You should still get money for it, but google wont be able to see the page, so it is possible that the ads will not relate properly to the content. Or if they do relate to the contents, it doesn’t have much useful contents to relate to, such as the postal address of some company. I would suggest you surf your site and look at the google ads and see if it is something interesting which the users might want to click onto. If it is not, then you wont make much money from it, with you? In this case I would suggest you do what I did for one of my pages. At an empty table at the bottom of your first page, with the first row set at a certain large height. This will push the following text well below and out of probably perusing by the user. Then you add a bunch of text pertinent to how you want to affect the google ads theme and to what you think the users will want to click on. Make the text long enough to overcome the dbase results data on the page, and don’t use any spam techniques on it, such as really really small text, or text which is the same colour of the background (hiding it). Google recognises these tactics and will probably penalise your pages in some way. For the first line or two of this text I usually explain to the user, if they happen to scroll down that far, what I am doing and that they can just ignore the text. Once you’re done with that and happy with the results, then go to you account (either its in your google ad section, or your google webmaster tools account) and go through the laborious and slightly painful procedure of telling google what your (some) login and password details are, hence giving it access so that it can read this text. Have fun!

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responding to your later email I havent downloaded yet, I’m going to try and make a major addition to my travel blob, concerning Cyprus after treeplanting. Want me to add you to the blob notification thing? Otherwise, for SEO, for a long time I’ve been saving my outgoing emails (since I write so many letters) and organising them into categories, so another option is to read my outgoing travel emails, some of which can be pretty interesting as I tell little tidbit stories here and there, but I’d say overall it won’t be as interesting as the travel blob itself cause you have to filter through less interesting stuff and I usually write it without proofreading. For SEO the more text the better and this has been turning out to be a good strategy. Considering the little amount of time I have to work on my pages they are doing half decently, and should take off once I’m making enough to hire someone fulltime, which I hope to do after I pay off enough debts and if the work keeps coming in as it is. The page I once showed you is pretty high up on google for “cheap travel europe” and “cheap Europe tour guide” and stuff like that, but only got one bite so far. Need to figure out a way how to hook up with travellers occasionally to make my own experience more interesting and to make a bit of cash on the side. Any ideas? I also want to make another php database site for caravanning share-a-ride Europe, which doesn’t seem to exist. Dynamic pages are good because other people add the content and the pages constantly get updated, which is great for seo. Recently been trying to move that direction and keep adding dynamic stuff, but too busy with translations. At least I’m making cash and I work on my projects in between. Recently decided that this will be a good new focus – an interesting strategy whereby I will not even have to deal with customers anymore, and apply my creativity to create webcontent which brings in its own revenues in different ways. Kinda like google or facebook etc. Want to get away from translating and apply my noodle more. Getting too old to still be doing grunt work. laterbro

The above concerns general correspondence on search engine optimization. If you’d like help with your own pages please feel free to contact me.