Today I needed to scan my credit card and send it to escrow.com in order to complete a domain name transfer. Having recently moved and being that I lost my printer cable in the process this could have been quite a challenge.

But then I realized my iPhone could probably handle everything I needed to do, so below is an outline on the process if, like most people you think faxes are stupid, pointless and redundant, but still a necessary part of conducting business these days.

You will need:

• An iPhone
• Internet Connection
• A credit card (though you can probably get around this)
• Zosh application for iPhone
• Image Editor (I use Fireworks but even MS Paint will probably work)
• Adobe Acrobat (or a way to edit PDF files)

Step 1 – Scanning Alternative

1. Using your iphone take a photo of what you need to scan. (Note: I needed to scan a credit card which came up clearly but if you need to clearly scan a document you might have some trouble.)
2. Email photo(s) to yourself.
3. Using an image editor position the photo’s where you need them to go, you may need to crop them first.

Now that you have the document you need to sign it and fax it.

Step 2 – Signing It

1. Open the image in your PDF editor, save it and send it to your email
2. Open your email and email the PDF to your Zosh account (mydocs@zosh.com) – you’ll need to create a Zosh account if you haven’t done this already.
3. Open the Zosh App on your iphone, click insert, signature, sign and then position your signature.
4. Now email the new, signed Zosh PDF back to yourself.

Finally you need to fax the document to it’s recipient.

Step 3 – Faxing

I used efax.com and started out on the free trial, I’m sure there are cheaper alternatives but I was in a hurry and since I will probably need this service again I’m happy to pay for it as long as it means I don’t need to have a fax machine lying around.

1. Create an efax account, login, click send fax, enter recipients details, and your done!

Note the entire process took me about 30 minutes, which is obviously considerably longer than if I had the right tools to begin with, but if you don’t have a fax or even a printer this could be a life saver.

No we’re not. Actually we rank website’s in Google. But this post is here to illustrate the shortfalls of the “Google this” approach to advertising.

Speaking of which if you have a website and you want promotion that’s affordable and actually works, check out our site. We rank small, medium and large websites in search engines, so if you’re chilling on page two you may want to get in touch with us.

If you’re still having trouble figuring out what’s going on this is a response to Auckland Drape Company advertising on Newstalk ZB and asking listeners to Google “Best Drape Company in Auckland”. You know the jingle “Auckland Drape Company…. do do doo dooo doooo.”

Only time will tell who Google thinks has the better drapes.

Oh and if this page does end up ranking and you happen to be from said company, you might want to tell your webmaster to at least use the word ‘best’ on your homepage. That ZB advertising’s doesn’t come cheap, and it would be a darned shame to let it go to waste simply because you omitted one word.

Update: It seems Michael Erickson’s found the best drape company in Auckland

Having multiple email addresses and websites (and having consulted for countless others) I’ve seen my fair share of  “We can rank you #1 on Google” emails.

Why though, do they continue to fill out the form on this website?

—-
From: jimmypalacios05@gmail.com
Subject: Increase traffic to your website

Message: We would like to get your website on first page of Google.

All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.
Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal.
—-

From: Jules Boven
Subject: Increase traffic to your website

Message: You do know what I do for a living right?

—-

What happens when you have a WordPress theme you like, but it doesn’t include a “Home” Link in the main top navigation?

Sure you can always click the blogs title, but I always feel that for usability purposes every website should have a prominent link called ‘Home” to the left of the main navigation.

And if you’re like me you do everything you can do avoid digging into those nasty php and css files.

The easy  3 step process:

1. Download the 301 Redirect Plugin, unzip it, upload it to /wp-content/plugins, and activate it in your WordPress plugins
2. Create a page called Home, and name the permalink/URL /home or /index or something like that. (www.exampleblog.com/home)
3. Scroll down the page your editing (in WordPress admin) and you’ll see an option called 301 redirect.
   
   Type your blogs homepage into this box, and set the date in the past, then publish the page. Now when you click that home link, your blog will automatically redirect your users from that blank page to your index page. No Coding!

Other uses for this plugin

• You can use this trick to link to external pages in your WordPress navigation.
• I use this plugin on my blogs to parse pagerank to pages that need it. For example when I bought this domain (seo.co.nz) it had previously had a website attached to it which had several links to its internal pages. I created duplicate pages that those links were pointing too, then redirected those pages to the homepage. Much simpler (for me at least) than mucking round with a .htaccess file.

I recently passed the Google AdWords exam which basically means this site is allowed to display a fancy Google Logo.

The exam is Google’s way of ensuring clients can trust the advice of the Pay Per Click Marketers that manage their campaigns.

I started studying a couple months ago but then got quite busy, then when I came back to the material it had all been changed and the program had been changed to the “Google AdWords Fundamentals Exam.”

I was a bit worried I’d need to learn everything again, but the word ‘fundamental’ sounded pretty easy so after a quick read over my notes I paid the nominal $50 fee and passed with 90%.

If any internet marketers are reading this post and thinking about taking the test you might find these the below notes helpful (or download here). They’re my personal study notes so don’t expect amazing spelling/grammar, but they should make your life a bit easier. Also as noted above you’ll need to brush up in the AdWords Learning Centre because the exam has changed slightly since these were written.

Click the continue reading link to read my full study guide online.

Continue reading »

Readers of this blog may have already seen my post about getting easy search engine traffic from public events.

The premise is simple, build a page around a massive event like a big sports match or in this case the Melbourne Cup. I decided to repeat the Melbourne Cup strategy as I consult for a website in the racing industry.

This time I took it a little further and put up three pages, one based around keywords for Melbourne Cup Streaming, one for Melbourne Cup Replay and one for Melbourne Cup Results. Each page had minimal text content but each did have precisly the content users were searching for.

Only the title tag was really optimised, if I hadn’t been more concerned with the horse I had money on I would have:

• Linked to the new posts from the old Melbourne Cup page
• Looked at the keywords people used to find the old page and integrated them into the new pages
• Actually made the effort to write decent textual content

In any event it worked pretty well, here are the results:

As you can imagine it went on like that for a while, in fact there were a total of 533 unique keywords for that 5 day period with 99% being related to the Melbourne Cup.

There are events like this going on every day, and although the traffic is fickle and not worth very much, it’s interesting that nobody is really trying to profit from this strategy. A website with a little authority could dominate the SERPS for public events like this every day. All you need is a little keyword research and a ‘fairly’ authoritative website.

Digg recently announced that they’re changing the way links are handled on their site. They didn’t go into much detail but what that basically means is that links within comments and profile pages, and links from stories below a certain threshold of trust won’t parse any PageRank (ignored by Google).

This is definitely a good thing, as I’ve often come across spam Digg profiles ranking for fairly competitive terms.

My problem is the way in which they announced it:

We’ve made a few changes to the way Digg links to external sites that may impact some folks in the SEO community.

SEO community sounds like a lovely phrase, but shouldn’t be (and generally isn’t) associated with the type of behavior Digg is trying to prevent. White Hat SEO’s like SEO.co.nz would never dream of setting dummy digg profiles, or spamming Digg with low quality content or comments.

Yet every person that reads that post sees the words SEO Community next to spam prevention.

Another problem is that site owners are swarmed with spam emails from so called SEO’s promising all sorts of golden rankings in generally broken English. Real SEO’s don’t need to spam, our clients come to us. But again the term SEO is associated with spamming. Maybe we need a new job title?

Sometimes SEO is too easy.

Here are the traffic stats from a newly launched horse racing blog:

Why the increase? All I did was wait until the big Melbourne Cup race was over, wait for it to appear on YouTube (about 100 refreshes ) and then I had the video posted within about 30 minutes.

The key was having the title and a little bit of content optimized around the phrase “Melbourne Cup replay.”

Here are the actual Keywords people were searching for to find the post:

My theory was that right after the race people would be searching for the most recent Melbourne Cup, but because it was so recent no authoritative websites would have the content up that quick – so Google would be ranking the outdated stuff. I through in the “2008″ to pick up some more searches as people refined their searches by using “2008″.

The blog wasn’t too closely related to the Melbourne Cup – but close enough so that regular readers wouldn’t feel the post was out of place.

In any niche there are big events that can be exploited like this. And if you don’t have much to say on the subject, a YouTube video is the easiest content you can get.

The NZ elections are coming up on Saturday the 8th of November, and while both major campaigns are marketing themselves fairly well offline, their online search engine optimisation strategies leave a little to be desired.

This post takes a quick look at the Labour and National Party’s websites.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is usually my first port of call when undertaking a website’s SEO. This is the file where the webmaster (or SEO) can dictate what the search engines can see, and what they can’t on any website.

Unfortunately, neither Labour nor National have seem to have heard of a robots.txt file:

National offers all their policies in HTML and PDF format. By not disallowing these PDFs, they’re splitting up their link juice, as some external sites will link to the two different pages. Adding the PDF’s to robots.txt is a clear indication to search engines that the HTML version of the page is the one they should rank. National should also put the nofollow tag on each internal link to these PDF.

Authority

Sitelinks are a clear sign that Google thinks a website is authoritative in it’s niche. Labour has them for the keyphrase “labour party,” but also for the more ambiguous keyword “labour.”

National on the other hand, gets no such love. One reason for this is that the sitelink algorithm favours an exact match on the title tag. By putting “NZ” in front of the keyphrase “National Party” they’re diluting the exact matches effect.

Backlinks

Labour’s website shows a total of 558 backlinks according to Yahoo’s Site Explorer. National shows 12,100. Here’s where Labour really messes up. They have redirected www.labour.co.nz, and www.labour.org.nz using a non search engine friendly 302 temporary redirect instead of the search engine friendly 301 permanent redirect. Not only that but going to http://labour.co.nz (without the www) gives a big “Bad Request (Invalid Hostname).” These failed redirections are likely the reason the Labour Party website shows so few backlinks.

Both sites offer some relatively good content to link at, such as tax calculators, but there has clearly been no concise strategy to develop links. They could do a lot better with conversational content… how about a quiz called “Are you a National or Labour voter?”

Title Tags

National has pretty straightforward title tags, generally opting for “$page name – NZ National Party.”

But again Labour is making some serious SEO errors. All of Labour’s policy pages – the main topics people will be searching for when deciding how to vote – have the exact same title tag for every page within the that section.

Next to backlinks, title tags are the most important things search engines look at when deciding where to rank a page.

Final Thoughts

I could go on as there are a few more minor issues that should be given some attention, but judging from the analysis so far the effort would be largley accademic. Both the Labour and National party have some serious SEO problems that could be fixed very easily by a knowledgeable person.

Political bloggers are saying that the internet has only played a minor role in this years election. But if the political spectrum in the US is anything to go by, getting it right is going to be far more important in the years to come.