General News (2)

Gun and a Bullet

August 31st, 2007

In order to join the United States military you are required to produce proof of citizenship or legal immigrant status, you must meet certain age requirements, provide background information for screening, meet minimum education requirements, be within a certain ban of weight depending on your height, you must score well on academic testing and pass a regiment of tests during your processing physical. (more…)

Dr Jekyll - Mr Hyde SEO Test

July 16th, 2007

Considering the statement in the article “Inside the Blackbox”,

“The sites with the 10 highest scores win the coveted spots on the first search page, unless a final check shows that there is not enough “diversity” in the results. “If you have a lot of different perspectives on one page, often that is more helpful than if the page is dominated by one perspective,” Mr. Cutts says. “If someone types a product, for example, maybe you want a blog review of it, a manufacturer’s page, a place to buy it or a comparison shopping site.”

I will be starting a test to see if/how advantage can be gained if an established niche site can quickly penetrate a completely different competitive niche site.

The test I have planned is simple enough. I put a online slots flash game on NavyCS in the gallery. Currently NavyCS receives about 800 searches a day pertaining to military based questions. NavyCS does not currently rank for “online slots” and there are about 3,020,000 pages in Google “competing” for the term. I do not see any diversity of results on the first 3 pages for “online slots”.

I will update this blog with results as they happen. Discussion about this test will take place in the SEO Test and Experimentation section of SEOChat.

Over the Top

May 8th, 2007

The killings at Virginia Tech was an act of one very deranged person and the amount of grief the killer caused will place him deep in the depths of hell.

That being said it seems now hysteria has settled into the United States populace. A senior at Clements High School of Texas’ Fort Bend Independent School District created a Counter-Strike 1.6 map of the high school common area.

(more…)

Military Pay Charts

April 3rd, 2007

UPDATE - 3.5% Approved by the President on 13 November for inclusion into the 2008 Defense Budget. The Presidents VETO of the budget should have no effect on the 3.5% raise and all monies not received after Jan. 1, 2008 should be payed back retroactively. Gotta love politics! - See Chart at 2008 Military Pay Chart

One of the great things about working under contract is you have a pretty good idea that you will be drawing a pay check for it duration, well, as long as you don’t violate it :). (more…)

Memphis Sign Companies

March 28th, 2007

As you may have read in my blog my wife and I opened an ice cream and coffee shop. Things are going well and we just hit our 6 month anniversary! I am writing this blog as an unsolicited endorsement of a company we dealt with for our marque sign. Holland Signs of Memphis, Tennessee (more…)

Walter Reed Hypocrisy

March 22nd, 2007

Short entry today but a big question. I am about sick of our politicians. Just how is it during the recent political season each person running for congress mentioned in their campaign how they visited our troops at the various military hospitals, including Walter Reed, yet didn’t happen to notice things were not up to standards? They each mentioned how they “talked” to the Sailors, Soldiers, Airmen and Marines. Did they not get anybody mentioning the so called substandard care? Did they not see anything out of place? How can each of the politicians express “shock” when the Washington Post story broke? What a bunch of crap.

Image Optimization

February 18th, 2007

As we enter WEB 3.0 I think the image link may even be a better way to go. You are of course creating a link to your site with the image but if you are also hosting the image on the destination page and you have named the image with your keywords you will draw both text searches and image searches to the page. With the image search available making your graphic link impressive will boost your users.

Take selling cars as an example. Someone interested may search via the image option for “68 Camaro”. If you host a 68 Camaro pic on your site is it optimized so the shopper will see it? Did you name the picture or settle for the default the camera may have given it? Are you ensuring the alt text utilizes your keywords? The point of this post to to bring awareness to an area of search engine optimization I think has potential and is being over looked.

I receive an average of about 60,000 unique visitors a month to navycs.com, about 20% of that traffic is generated via an image search - the potential is clear!

Google Page Rank

January 26th, 2007

At this site pagerank10.co.uk the webmaster has a goal to achieve a Google Page Rank (PR) of 10 within 2 years. Google PR is obtained by links from other sites and the internal linking structure within your own site. PR is not a determining factor when it comes to how much traffic your site may receive but it does give an indication of the number of links, both quality and quantity, to a site. Achieving high PR does open your site to increased revenue. Why try for increased PR? Some sites are willing to pay to have a high PR site link to them which could increase their own PR. If at the same time you are building links from other sites you a using sound SEO practices and ensuring your anchor text is relevant to the keywords and phrases on your site you will start to see an increase in search engine traffic. Basically free advertising. Good luck on your PR-10 journey and increased SERPS.

Minimum Wage?

January 13th, 2007

I have to claim a certain amount of ignorance in this area. Who makes minimum wage? What business out there can actually find someone who will take minimum wage?
The more I think about this why do anything with the minimum wage? It is currently $5.15 an hour. Once you raise the minimum that it becomes the new floor no matter what the future state of the economy may be. You will never see a decrease in the minimum wage. Businesses pay a competitive wage based on requirements and talent available. If the United States economy enters real bad times compared to the rest of the world then the dollar will become devalued to a point we could not afford to import anything. I think the minimum wage has been taking care of itself for quite sometime and is only an issue of politics. Even McDonald’s, Walmart and other entry level type jobs pay more than minimum wage when you start and have increases based on performance. Hopefully those who are making wages which don’t meet their needs are doing something about it like furthering their education. Welfare reform from the Clinton administration proved many positive things and motivated many to focus on improving their situation. Only 2.5% make minimum wage and a number of them are from the service sector which also receive tips. Why put the entire economy at risk for what is really less than 2% of the population?

Mt Hood Climbers

December 16th, 2006

Seems to me the 3 adventurers who are currently lost somewhere on Mt Hood in Oregon ended up in this position of their own freewill. These hiker’s didn’t end up there as a result of a plane crash or taking a wrong turn. Why is this story getting so much play on national TV? Are these men going to have to pay for the search efforts? How come the national news is not covering the daily suffering of the children stricken with monstrous diseases the various hospitals around the world with the fervor of these men? I have said a prayer for their safe return but the money, airtime and resources spent trying to locate them would be better spent somewhere else.