One option is to stuff the title with all of these key phrases. This will make the title appear messy and will devalue the weight that the other keywords in the title holds.

The other option is to change the titles of the next index page to target the desired keywords. By this I mean pages like http://www.takemorerisks.com/pages/2/ which show older posts from my blog.

As an experiment I drafted up some rough code in PHP which I placed within the header.php file of another website and I then tested it out.

$request = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
if($request == "/blog/" || $request == "/blog/page/1/") {
$title = "Buy Widgets Online. Great Widgets and Pink Widgets For Sale";
}
elseif(strstr($request, "page/2")) {
$title = "Free Widgets, Widgets For Adults, Widgets For Children";
}
elseif(strstr($request, "page/3")) {
$title = "Blue Widgets, Widgets That Bark, Invisible Widgets";
}
else {
$title = the_title('','', false);
}

My question is, would this have any beneficial effect on SEO? We’re told repeatedly that key phrases placed within the title tag hold the greatest weight on a page, so surely we should at least rank for some of these keywords? What if we used a similar technique to automatically inject unique content onto these pages that was related to the keywords in the title?

Injecting a significant amount of content into these pages could help them bypass the most lenient of duplicate content filters but probably not Google. We could maybe combat this by limiting the number of posts that appear on each of the index pages but this could be overkill for such a potentially small reward.

It’s an interesting idea but one I haven’t much experience with yet. I’d appreciate your thoughts and or experiences with this!

Update : I’ve just found the SEO Title Tag Wordpress plugin which allows you to edit any of the titles on your blog, which might be useful for this.

I’d love to hear about your own responses to this too.

Hope

For me hope has lead to distraction in the past. I’ve become so excited about certain projects that I’ve lost focus entirely on them. Instead of writing any code I’ve been guilty of spending a lot of time simply planning and dreaming. Now there’s nothing wrong with planning if it serves to propel the project along. However my planning mainly revolved around how I planned to celebrate the success of the project, yet I’d barely written a line of code.

What the fuck? Talk about delusional!

Hope is meaningless unless you’re prepared to actualise the ideas you have. Ideas are delusions until they are realised or at the very least, mapped down on paper.

The biggest problem for me is that hope often casts the shadow of doubt when something fails. Instead of investigating WHY something didn’t work, I’d often just quit and return to scratching my balls and complaining about how retarded people are on reddit or digg for not upvoting my posts.

Envy

I’ve felt envious of other peoples success in the past which is ridiculous as the more time I spend focusing on other peoples success the less time I’ve spent working towards my own.

I’m now a firm believer that you should welcome success wherever you see it because by keeping such a positive mental attitude you’re more likely to attract success into your own life.

We’re all on our own individual paths, which is why trying to follow someone else is fucking stupid. You’ve gotta make your own mistakes and fashion your own way in the world. Reading blogs and forum posts should count for 10% max in terms of progressing. The rest must come from your own experience and that comes from trying shit out. No matter how insignificant it may seem.

Inconsistency / Laziness

When I’m working on a site I tend to pause once I’ve created 3 or 4 pages and then survey my work. This is when I become distracted and I start checking stats etcetera, thus disturbing any creative flow I originally had.

In all honesty I just haven’t worked hard enough to deserve success so I can have no complaints in that area, especially recently where I haven’t being doing any online stuff at all.

Much of my inconsistency stems from self doubt. I’m constantly over analysing things and putting my ideas down before I’ve fully worked them through. It’s good to be critical to an extent, we all need to have our bullshit detectors tuned to 10 at times, but it can impede productivity too much.

There comes a time when you must switch the inner critic off and just regain some focus on what you’re aiming towards.

This is why it’s so crucial to have goals, because then you have something to aim towards and the pull of the inner critic weakens. I’m aiming to be free of my own inner critic soon so that I can realise my aims of moving into my own apartment by the end of the year.

The idea of still living at home with my parents at the age of 25 is terrifying, which is why I’ve started blogging here again.

Here are a few tips that I’ve learnt the hard ways that should help you prolong the life of your blog or even make it a success. If anyone has any additional ideas about this please leave them in the comments section.

1. If you’re not entirely certain that you’ll update the blog anymore, then remove all traces of the date from your posts. In Wordpress his may involve altering your permalink structure so that it no longer includes the date in the URL, as well as removing <?php the_time(’M.d, Y’) ?> from both the index, single post and category templates in Wordpress.
2. Enable Akismet immediately. I don’t know how many times I’ve created a small blog and within a few months I’ve had 1,000’s of spam comments to moderate. A bad situation is made worse when there are legitimate comments from your readers mixed in there too. The screenshot below is taken from a blog I created only 4-5 months ago.

   

   I’ve 2 options now with this blog 1) Leave the comments as they are or 2) Study some of the contents of the spam addresses, look for common keywords within the messages and run an SQL DELETE query from phpMyAdmin on the wp_comments table using LIKE within WHERE e.g. “DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_content LIKE ‘%viagra%”. (There’s probably a less primitive way of doing this. If anyone knows of a better way please get in touch!)

3. Instead of creating and publishing 20 posts immediately, set the Publish Date to sometime within the future so that if you do try to sell it later on, potential buyers will think it’s been updated more recently and are more likely to make an offer.
4. Install Google Analytics immediately on your blog so that you have a complete history of the sites traffic.  There’s nothing worse than creating a blog that eventually receives  traffic but is forgotten about. Besides having all of the statistics will increase a buyers peace of mind when evaluating whether your website is worth buying.
5. In a similar vain to number 4 it can be helpful to monetize your site discreetly early on in order to tap into the earning potential in that particular market. However you risk harming your sites reputation especially if you go overboard with advertisements. From my own perspective if I see a website is making some money I’m motivated to work on it more. By having a clear indication of how much each of your sites are earning you can then use this as a factor into the projects you want to prioritize.
6. Never underestimate the possibility of your blog becoming an unexpected hit. For this reason I sometimes set up the blog in a seperate blog subfolder in the site, instead of installing it in the root directory if I anticpate that it will be popular amongst users. That way I can build a community around the blog without much hassle.
7. Create categories for your blog as early on as possible. When I’m starting a blog in a niche I start with the Google Adwords Sandbox where I search for the niche and use the suggestions to come up with names for the categories that will appear on the site. I normally then use each of these additional keyphrases to search for more specific topics using the same tool. It’s a great way to come up with ideas for posts.
8. Following on from 7, ensure that you target at least some key phrases related to your niche that appear in Wordtracker or the Google Adwords Sandbox.  This will help increase your chances of receiving search engine traffic early on which is often invaluable, especially when these visitors are targetted and contribute to your community.

SSHFS

SSHFS is a fantastic tool. It allows you to mount your remote server as part of your own local filesystem. In the screenshot below I have opened up the public_html folder for Take More Risks in a normal Explorer like window. This means that I can drag files over from my desktop into this folder and it’ll upload to that specific directory on my file system.

It doesn’t end here. I can open any file on my web server and it’ll open locally within the program associated with that file type. Need to edit the Wordpress wp-config.php file in a hurry?  Then simply double-click on the file and it’ll open automatically in your preferred application. You can now work on the file and any changes you make to it locally will be reflected remotely as well.

In the screenshot below wp-config.php is opened up with gedit which is one of Ubuntu’s default text editors which can double-up as an excellent code editor too. I’ve explained this in more depth below.

For easy access I’ve added in a shortcut on my Ubuntu taskbar that links to a script that mounts the root directory of my web server to the /server/ folder in my filesystem and then opens that folder up.

The script itself is quite simple. It checks to see if the server has been mounted to the local filesystem and if it hasn’t, it gets mounted, if not it does not. Then the folder is opened within nautilus file explorer.

#!/bin/bash
START=/server/
if [ $(ls -l $START | wc -l) = 1 ]; then
sshfs root@64.131.71.145:/ $START
fi
nautilus $START

GEdit

One of the main reasons why I never migrated to Linux for Web Development was that I could never find something that naturally replaced Dreamweaver.  Whilst many suggested that I should run Dreamweaver using the Windows Emulator (Wine), I couldn’t see the logic of this. Why not just stick with Windows and save myself a lot of hassle?

This all changed when I read this amazing article by Micah Carrick on how to customise gedit as a Web Development IDE.  It takes you step-by-step through everything you need to do to enable the functionality within gedit to make it a great IDE. Other developers like Adam Heckler and &PHP have managed to start using gedit with a deal of success too.

I’ll admit, it’s not perfect.  I miss the function name and parameters flashing up onscreen in Dreamweaver when I’ve started typing out the function reference. However this is my only real complaint, particularly since I no longer use Design View in WYSIWYG editors.  If you’re a web designer interested in moving to Ubuntu with a preference for WYSIWYG editors you should check out the related articles here,  here and here.

But yeah I think GEdit is a great IDE and I love the Oblivion skin!

Will It Last?

I’ve been developing in Ubuntu more and more over the last few months and since the discovery of SSHFS and GEdit a move back to Windows is almost inconceivable now. The final nail in the coffin was my discovery of Linux’s native support for SSH. In the past I’ve used PUTTY as my main SSH client on the Windows platform, so naturally when I first migrated to Linux I checked to see if there was a version for it.

After locating and installing PUTTY for Linux it took me another 2 months to realise that I could SSH into my server by typing ssh takemorerisks.com -l username.  Head meet hand.

It seems stupid now but it’s easy to miss these things when you’re relatively new to the platform.

Anyway at the minute I’m enjoying developing with Ubuntu. It’d be great to hear about your own experiences with development on the platform.

A screenshot of the new blog layout. Beats the old piece of shit!

First impressions…..wow! It’s improved so much over a short period of time. The Dashboard is well laid out. The ‘Add New Post’ screen is uncluttered and good to use. I’ll toy about with it more later and report on what else I find.

It’s great having shell access to my server, especially when I’m using Ubuntu. I love how I can just use the wget command to download the Wordpress installation file directly to my host. Before I would have had to download the installation file to my PC and then upload it with an FTP client. Waaayyy before I had shell access if I wanted to update I’d have to upload the extracted installation folders and it would take forever because there were so many god damn files.

Now that I’m unemployed I’m gonna spend some time improving my knowledge of the shell. I’ve got a decent grasp on it at the moment but you can never know enough about these things. Fortunately I have the Linux Administration Handbook with me right here!

Anyway Wordpress 2.7 seems to rule the school. I’ll update later on in the week with some more thoughts on it.

Anyway onto something useful. I highly recommend you all check out WinSCP if you haven’t already. What it allows you to do is to access your webspace with an Windows Explorer like interface making editing webpages on your server easy. This is especially handy if you’re managing multiple sites like myself.

The best bit is that you can associate files to open with certain programs within WinSCP. In the screenshot below I’ve illustrated how I’ve set up WinSCP to open html, php and css files within Dreamweaver.

With this association created everytime I double click on a file within WinSCP it will automatically open up in Dreamweaver and the best bit is that any changes that I make to that file whilst Dreamweaver is open are saved. This is a much more flexible approach than simply defining a site for every website you create within Dreamweaver itself. You can associate any file type to open with any application on your computer too so you could have images open within Photoshop or text files within Notepad.

Many thanks to the Vitty for introducing me to this app. It’ll hopefully change the way you work for the better if it hasn’t already done so.

I thought it was all over until today when I received a cancellation of service notice from 1and1 dated from the 18th of December saying that if I didn’t pay £12 within 10 days they’d refer me to arvato again. Well holy shit. I wouldn’t have minded this so much if I hadn’t recently become unemployed. Or been subjected to this bullshit on a number of occasions before. Have these fuckers never heard of customer service?

I wish there was a God who would strike these bastards down. Seriously. But sadly there isn’t so I’m gonna have to channel my impotent rage into this dead piece of crap and just call them again to try to resolve this. This will not be the end of it.

Don’t use 1and1 unless you want a life sentence of being threatened by the biggest bunch of bastards on the planet. I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. It’d sit there with a burger laughing wishing that someone would come along with some petrol to really spark up a show.

Merryyyy fucking Christmas.

Whilst I realise that this is entirely my own fault for not reading the contract I entered into before registering domains I can’t help but think this practice is slightly dubious. How many other registrars set domains on auto renewal?

I’ve since tried to cancel the contract (after I received another email saying that I’d be charged again in 40 days for domains I haven’t used in 2 years) but I’m getting nowhere. I initated the cancellation process through the 1and1 contracts control panel and the system said that I’d receive an email with a confirmation link that would make the cancellation final. 4 days later - and I’m still waiting. I’ve since contacted the 1and1.co.uk and they’ve been largely unhelpful, recommending that I contact a different department.

It’s been a frustrating experience and I won’t be using 1and1.co.uk again. In future I’ll be more careful and actually read the terms and conditions before registering domains. Or I might just stick with companies that I know and trust.

The key now is to continue to update the website regularly. Failing that you might want to target more SEO keywords on each of your pages to generate additional traffic to your website. You can use a tool like the Wordtracker Free Keywords facility for such a purpose. By targetting additional SEO terms you are likely to encourage more unique visitors to your website and subsequently increase the chances that someone will link to your site.

Just because you have not updated a website in a while is not an excuse to leave it to die. In fact during the period of inactivity the site may have gained additional link authority from the search engines. On the flip side, other sites may have started removing their links to your site. If this is the case you can simply emailing the site owners and inform them that your pages are back on the internet.