the Duke of URL

2005-07-25T23:16:00.000-07:00

I've worked for bad companies and good companies. Even had my own. What makes one company more successful than another? Well, here's a few tips: Answer the phone. Sounds silly doesn't it. Well regardless of how some might spin it or try to convince you otherwise with fancy graphs or stats or ROI statements, your customers want to speak to a human. They want to speak to a human who can help

2005-07-25T22:50:00.002-07:00

Stuff I've LearnedRead: The hard way... If you have a Linux box, install it alltm. Yes, when you do the install, just install EVERYTHING. Trust me on this. Your life will be so much easier. Otherwise you'll be trying to satisfy dependencies till the cows come home. Just spend a little time locking it down afterwards. Never, EVER, enter your main email address into online forms. Use a

2005-07-25T22:50:00.001-07:00

I turfed my robots.txt file, however thanks to the Belchfire.net member who emailed me and pointed out a formatting error. Why did I delete it? Because I was unable to confirm the precise formatting of the file. If it was written in stone, and I could be assured of 100% compliance by all search engines, I would have just made the necessary changes and left it in place. But since I couldn't, I

2005-07-25T22:50:00.000-07:00

You CAN make money on the internet.

2005-07-25T22:49:00.000-07:00

2004-09-12T03:28:00.000-07:00

Belchfire.net was recently featured on About.com. While Belchfire.net is not a wallpaper site specifically, they've rated us one of The Top 5 Very Best Computer Wallpaper site of 2004. Most excellent. Thanks guys! If you're new to the net or are looking for some great pointers and resources, drop by the About.com Beginners Guide to the Internet.

2004-08-21T19:05:00.000-07:00

I've moved my other site, Belchfire.net, from PHP-Nuke to Invision Power Board. In addition to changing the content system on the site, I also changed URLs from www.belchfire.net to themes.belchfire.net. Never having done this before, I have no idea how this will effect my search engine listings and rankings. Prior to the move (completed on August 4, 2004), www.belchfire.net had over 150,000

2004-07-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

I see it time and time again, and it's such a simple thing that many overlook. Search engines look at a number of things when deciding how to index your pages. One of which is the name of the page. Let's say you have you have a web gallery with artwork for sale. You might be tempted to name your gallery mainpage simply 'gallery.html'. This doesn't tell search engines the nature of your

2004-04-01T00:38:00.000-08:00

Well waddyaknow. Belchfire.net had it's biggest day ever yesterday. I've never been able to exceed 5000 unique visitors per day for any length of time, and since March 1st, my web traffic has doubled: 01-Sep-03 3728 49925 950119 7.95 GB ... 01-Mar-04 4910 49680 729579 7.44 GB 30-Mar-04 9171 113725 1584520 18.93 GB As you can see by this crude extract, things have been very consistent over the

2004-03-29T00:16:00.000-08:00

Belchfire.net | XP Themes Community, Windows XP Themes, XP Wallpaper, Boot Screens, Logon Screens and Icons.

2004-03-27T10:49:00.001-08:00

Few web sites have one but a sitemap can be a valuable tool to help search engines properly index your site. A sitemap is basically a single or multiple web page that contains links to your homepage and all the other pages on your site. While search engine spiders are generally quite efficient and finding and following links in a given web site, a sitemap gives them a map to go by and ensures

2004-03-27T10:49:00.000-08:00

What's got those in the know abuzz in the search engine world? Geo targeting, or rather, geographic location targeting. Here's the scenario and I'm sure you're familiar with it. You're traveling to Toronto and are looking for a restaurant or perhaps a theatre near your hotel. Search an search site for 'restaurants' and you'll the Subway homepage, restaurants in Atlanta and perhaps a few

2004-03-27T10:48:00.003-08:00

On February 18th, Yahoo replaced Google as it search engine provider in favour of Inktomi. Yahoo owns Inktomi and and it's new search engine seems to be a hybrid of technologies from both Inktomi and Overture (also owned by Yahoo). Note that this is separate from the legacy Yahoo Directory. According to comScore Media Metrix, Google and Yahoo's market share in January 2004 where: Google: 79%

2004-03-27T10:48:00.002-08:00

Found a very old script for PHP-Nuke that generates dynamic Meta tags and another for dynamic page titles. I've modified and updated both and put them live on Belchfire.net (these downloads are of the original files). It will be interesting to see if/how my page rankings are effected. Inktomi seems to weight more heavily on these than other search engines. Will keep you posted on the results.

2004-03-27T10:48:00.001-08:00

Just added a new SEO links section. Check out these invaluable search engine optimization tools. Some new and unknown to many, such as goRank. They've got some useful tracking tools but their recent research comparing Google and Yahoo stats is a great read.

2004-03-27T10:48:00.000-08:00

All the new technologies available in web site design (meaning, anything other than plain HTML) are great and really give web developers a lot of options for designing a web site. But, when designing your own web site, consider how the technologies you use will effect search engine placement and friendliness. STICK WITH ONE AND USE OTHERS SPARINGLY There's nothing worse than loading a web page

2004-03-27T10:47:00.000-08:00

Well you came here for something. Here's my number 1 recommendation. Everything else is secondary, short of actually submitting your URL to some search engines and getting a few people to link to you. USE STATIC URLS Sounds simple, but it isn't. With all the bloggers, content management systems and content frameworks, this is the most overlooked aspect of search engine optimization. Almost

2004-03-27T10:46:00.000-08:00

Google encourages it's employees to work on personal projects one day a week on company time. I found this quite interesting. While the company I work for doesn't encourage this, I figured what the hell. Time to jump into this Blog thing and say something... Anything... But mostly to talk about my search engine optimization adventures. I've quite accidentally developed one of the most