Search Engine Panel’s New Theme

As alluded to in Sunday’s “Hectic Easter Weekend” post, I’ve been on the lookout for a fresh new template for SEP. This new theme, Bozzeny’s SIMSEK3C, was released just a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been busy customizing it for the past few days.

The main objective I sought to achieve revolved around more user-friendly sidebars. By editing the CSS file, some PHP modification (more on this below) and a 3-column design base, SEP now has flanking sidebars with nice section headings that really stand out.

Many changes were made to the original SIMSEC3C, but most notable are the fonts and colour. I’ve changed the fonts from the theme’s default “Trebuchet MS” to more readable Arials and Verdanas throughout the blog. The text in the top bar that lists SEP pages (Home, About, Lexi… - whoops, almost gave away our secret project) is now legible, instead of the tiny text in SIMSEC3C. Blues and a little bit of green was added to liven the theme up.

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Tags: SEP

Advice From CMO of Newsforce, Dana Todd

Here are five great search engine marketing tips inspired by the Chief Marketing Officer of Newsforce, Dana Todd. With respect to building a solid search marketing campaign, you should have:

1. Good tracking software along with good Key Performance Indicators.
2. Establishing baseline metrics for measuring campaign performance.
3. Various methods of keyword generation.
4. Good solid copywriting.
5. Continuous tweaking and updating.

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Tags: SEM

A Rather Hectic Easter Weekend for SEP

I’ve learned over the weekend that migrating a blog to a new hosting service while being away from your computer is a recipe for disaster. You might have noticed some downtime here at SEP along with some strange error messages, and even non-existent RSS feeds! Not to worry though, as I’m now back at my computer and things are slowly returning to normal.

The downtime and strange error messages were a result of DNS propagation coupled with trying to add/modify new themes. I’ve browsed themes to the point where the Lorem Ipsum monster haunted me, but have yet to find a theme that fits just right. Chances are that I will be using a ready-made template and customizing it to my heart’s delight in the weeks ahead.

I hadn’t realized that my hungry subscribers were no longer being fed until I noticed a dramatic decrease in subscribers, or rather, until FeedBurner had issues grabbing my feed. It turns out that my .htaccess file disappeared while I transfered the blog over, which resulted in 404 error because www.SearchEnginePanel.com/feed/ didn’t exist. With any luck, this post will reach your favourite feed readers and inboxes shortly.

Tags: SEP

AOL Acquires Bebo for $850 Million

AOL’s $850 million (cash) acquisition of the Bebo social networking site comes to surprise for many, despite rumours that Bebo was looking for a buyer. After all, rumours of mergers and acquisitions fly around the Internet everyday. Bebo had however already partnered with AOL in integrating the AIM messenger client with its service.

Although Bebo doesn’t have that much brand recognition in North America (at least compared to MySpace and Facebook), it boasts over 40 million members worldwide. Bebo is particularly well-known around the United Kingdom. According to Alexa, 39.1% of its visitors are from the U.K., with 11.4% and 8.3% of its traffic coming from the U.S. and Ireland, respectively.

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Tags: AOL, social media marketing, Yahoo

HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect Codes

Every now and again you’ll find yourself in a situation where the naming structure of your pages will change, and even changes in the domain itself. If those changes are occurring to high authority pages, then it’s vital that you properly redirect the old domain/pages such that the new website receives and carries the same authority and PageRank.

For permanent redirection, an HTTP 301 redirect needs to be used. The 301 redirect will properly pass any link juice (authority) as well as instantly redirect user agents to the new website. Visitors, spiders and the like won’t need to click any link or wait for the redirect at all.

The other benefit to a permanent 301 redirect is its ability to keep your site’s search engine rankings. Usually, a 301 redirect will (relatively) instantly have the new domain/website indexed and ranked, while still displaying any old URLs in the main index. These old URLs normally get dropped in under a year, and the time-frame has been getting shorter and shorter.

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Tags: code, PageRank, SEO « Older Entries