The New Layout

It’s the end of another month and it was a productive one. Between finishing up the kitchen remodel and getting back out in to the work force I’ve been pretty busy. Here are just a few places you can read what I’ve been up to.

Dojo Radio is off and running. This month we’ve had several shows.
Episode 5: Interview with Local Search Expert Darren Shaw who talks about his new tool Local Citation Finder and Dave, Terry and I discuss issues like Google Social, Webmaster Tools, Reverse SEO and several other topics.

Episode 6: Interview with Richard Baxter who helps explain microformats and RDFa. The whole crew is here with David, Terry, Justin and me discussing other issues such as siloing, Yahoo! API updates and the always popular SEO Consumer Advocacy discussion.

Episode 7: Interview with Gabriella Saninno from Level 343 who discusses content strategy and development. David, Terry, Justine and I talk about Google’s patent for identifying search topics with limited content, Facebook Places, and aa host of other reasonably relevant topics.

I’ve recently started writing for BestCovery. My first article there is titled Best Northern Pike Lures and is obviously about one of my favorite subjects, fishing.

You’ll also find an article about the Best Saltwater Spinning Rods. A great list if I do say so myself.

Things have been starting to pop over at Metal Monster Marketing as well. I take a look at the drama surrounding Nestle and their miserable failure at using social media. And offer a few suggestions to anyone in a similar situation.

Over at the HuoMah SEO Dojo I’ve written an article about Cause Marketing. Cause Marketing is a way for for-profit companies to work hand in hand with non-profit organizations in an effort to promote both organizations and enable them to reach larger markets than they would alone.

Pet Photo Pendant

Over at Animal Charms we’ve launched a new product, Pet Photo Pendants. We can take nearly any photo of your favorite pet and imprint it on metal, in color. We have developed our own process to make these pendants far better than any that we have seen before.

Also over at Animal Charms I’ve written an article called 5 Ways You Can Help An Animal Rescue. Animal rescues and charities need all the help that they can get these days, this lists 5 ways that you can help without reaching too deep in to your own pocket.

And finally, I’ve been dusting off Metal Monster Marketing and exploring ways that we can help more businesses join forces with non-profits in a way that both benefit from the relationship.

Misfit Domains

I admit it, I collect things.. Comic books, swords, cars, domain names, whatever I feel like at the moment.. I always intend to do something grand with whatever I collect, but in most cases they just end up collecting dust and making my wife mad..  With me restarting everything  around here fresh I was going through my domains, wow, it’s amazing what you end up with  when you set things to auto-renew and forget about them..

My old company, that hasn’t been in operation for 6 years or so, NeoTek had a website. I saw that and thought, huh, been paying $12/year for 6 years so my wife can keep her email address that she used when she was publishing engineering papers. I thought I would just let it go. Then I realized, hey, that things has been mine for 11 years, why not “do something” with it.

But what to do?

Cheesy link directory? Nah, already have a few of those.

Porn site? That would be cool, but I like my stuff and I have a sneaky feeling the wife would take all my stuff and send me out in to the cold naked if I did that.

I could start another silly blog like this one.

Then I thought, hey! I haven’t been an affiliate, uh, specialist yet. I could do that. I could sell things like Slankets on it and then when the next big thing came along I could move on to that and eventually build up an As See On TV empire of useless crap! Everyone loves useless crap, that’s why it sells so well.

Yeah, that’s the ticket! I’ll be an affiliate Guru and just watch the money come pouring in. Or maybe not. Anyone have a great idea for an old, unused, domain?

Fortunately it wasn’t me that they found this time, they found my friend Dave Snyder. And his special buddy is none other than the SEO Champion. How cool is that?? An honest to goodness champion!!

If you want a good laugh at just how committed some people are to what they believe in, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, you’ll enjoy the post about the SEO Champion.

Just a quick note to let the loyal readership, all three of you, that I’ve decided to expand my company again and branch out from a single customer jeweler / web guy and hang out my developer shingle again..

Large Orange Pop is the name of my new internet marketing company and will be a sub division of SG Design Studio.. I’ll be offering internet market help, SEO, and web development as appropriate and needed.. While I have no real intention to stop “doing the jewelry thing” I find I miss the fun of helping build up a new business online and look forward to working 90 hours a week again.. Well, maybe not that last part so much..

I expect the marketing / SEO parts of this website to be absorbed in to LOP shortly, and hopefully this site will go back to being a little more fun with some geek stuff and generic weirdness..

I’m off to get my intravenous caffeine port hooked up –

I started a new directory of directories the way they should be done the other day at DirectoryRecap.. The directories are grouped by type and they have a rating system to allow people to rank them in a 5 star system.. Also included is the PR and Alexa rankings of each directory number of inbound links and more.. All updated roughly weekly, of course.. Between the listings and the ratings it can be a pretty straight forward process to find the good directories to submit to..

On top of that, we are also providing the entire directory listing, broken down in to niches and categories in a DigiXMas format.. You can download the list from us and dump it straight in to digi for doing your link submissions.. How much easier can we make it??

I also found a decent Deep Link Directory as well.. It’s run by a friend of mine so it wasn’t very hard to find.. It’s not much right now, but the deep links are cheap and I know that he is putting a lot of effort in to it to make it a useful resource.. For $2 it’s kind of hard to complain in either case..

If you know of any other good link building resources feel free to let me know without being a spam whore about it..

The SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress allows you to override the default titles for pages and posts, and allows you to have decent titles on your pages.. Best of all it can be used to strip the blog name from the individual posts and pages allowing for a much cleaner title..

SEO Title Tag for WordPress