Safari-Guy’s Posterous

Just discovered a new blogging platform, called Posterous and it is interesting because to add a new entry all you have to do is email your account and the post gets created for you. Now I know that you have been able to do this on other blogging platforms for a while, but to be honest I never really bothered to set it up. With posterous, it is easier to do it this way than use their fiddly interface.

Anyway foe SEO purposes, I have created a new account, that you may want to check out: Safari-Guy’s Posterous, where I plan to post most safari related stuff.

Build Free Websites

For SEO purposes, I am always on the lookout for "places" to add content on the web, get it ranked and then point it towards my main sites. If these "places" are free, so much the better.

There are a number of sites that offer you the chance to build and Create a free website, some of the better ones include:

• http://www.yola.com/
• http://www.webs.com/
• http://www.weebly.com/
• http://www.wix.com/

Of these, wix is my least favourite as it builds the site in "flash" which looks nice, but is pretty rubbish in regards to getting high rankings on the search engines.

Free Web Hosting

If I have an idea for a site, it is great to be able to test the concept without having to spend too much cash. I have used a number of Free Web Hosts, many are terrible, but there are a few good ones out there as well.

Good ones to look out for offer more than just hosting, with extras like Php functionality as well as at least one MySql database, per account.

My favourites are:

• http://www.000webhost.com/ - I haven't been using it for long, but so far so good. One of my test sites, Zambezi Safari is hosted with them.
• http://www.awardspace.com/ - This is another very popular free webhost. I have often used them in the past and indeed have upgraded on of my free acounts to a paid for version.

My Love Hate Relationship wih Google

Recently Google decided that it no longer liked my Best Binoculars & Binocular Reviews website and keywords that I was previously ranking in the first 5 places for, were now down to the tenth page or worse.

I was totally gutted, because I have been doing a lot of work on this website for many months now and it was slowly starting to pay off with the traffic to it, steadily increasing and as such so has to has my income

So what I had done to incur the wrath of Google?

In my opinion nothing, because I am looking at this site as a long term project I am purposely keeping away from any shady ways to improve my search engine rankings and producing quality unique contenet that I feel is genuinely useful should you be looking for advice on binoculars.

I did wonder if I may have too many internal links on the homepage, Google's own Webmaster Guidelines recommend that you keep it to less than a hundred and mine is pretty close to that, but surely this is not the worst crime in SEO?

After racking my brains and not coming up with anything and as a last resort, I submitted a Reconsideration Request from my Google Webmaster Tools account. This was done in frustration more than anything else as I have written to 'Big Brother' in the past and never received a reply and so was not expecting much.

Five days later
Yeagh \o/ - all my rankings have now returned and I even have a very generic reply from Google that says:


----------------------------

We've processed your reconsideration request for http://www.bestbinocularsreviews.com/ July 30, 2009

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: www.bestbinocularsreviews.com.

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.
-----------------------------

I still do not know what (if anything) I did was wrong, but at least now I now once again have people visiting my website although I have a horrible feeling it may happen again.

So if someone in the reads this from the Google Search team reads this, thanks guys, but to improve it, why not tell us why it happened, this would help people who are genuinely not trying to trick you to to produce better websites for your search engine and for the billions of people who use it.

Bark at the Moon - Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt

I just love the way unplanned marketing works sometimes, sales of this Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt went up by 2,300% after a spate of ironic reviews went viral. The t-shirt is listed on Amazon.com, where the general public can write reviews on any product being sold.

The first review gave the shirt five stars, saying it "Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women" but "cannot see wolves with arms crossed".

This then prompted hundreds of others to write ironic reviews and as of today there are now 449 customer reviews of this T-shirt.

One of the most popular review which 5720 have found helpful was written by B. Govern "Bee-Dot-Govern" of New Jersey:

"This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that's when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to 'howl at the moon' from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn't have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn't settle for the first thing that comes to him.

I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the 'guns'), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark."

Other classics include:

"Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather. "

"WON'T PLAY ON MY CD PLAYER & WHEN I EMAILED THE DUDE HE SAID I WAS A NUT. I"M LIKE, WTF MAN EVERYONE ALWAYS SAYS THAT EVEN GRANDMA & MR CHRISTIE FROM UP THE STREET WHO LOOKS OVER THE FENCE BUT IT CAME WITH A PRETTY COOL SHIRT"

"Look, you can find a bunch of different wolf T-shirts on the market, but this is THE one to get. You get three wolves plus one moon. More realistic than the three moons plus one wolf model. Just thinking about this T-shirt and its wolves-howling-at-the-moon motif makes me want to ... well ... go outside and holler at the moon! It's THAT good."

Check out the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt on Amazon.

One reason Why Firefox is better than IE

Gspace Firefox Add-On

Here is just one of the many good reasons to use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer:

Gapace is Firefox extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (4.1 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system. The interface will make your Gmail account look like a FTP host.
After the installation, you'll get an option called "Gspace" in your "Tools" menu, which opens the GSpace window.

It's great for storing/sharing files with your friends. Also very good to backup photos and music files (as you can view/listen to them from Gspace).

For more information go to G.Space and to install the plugin: Gspace Add-on