Online Shopping hints, joys, pitfalls

This is one of those buyer beware posts. On 03/07/2007 I was shopping for satellite TV and looked over the deals on the internet, and wound up on the DIRECTV web site. Here is a screen shot of part of what caught my eye. Now take a good look at the light grey text at the bottom. That’s the part I failed to see, and so did others that I showed it to.    Here is where the ad is now, but it was up toward the front of the site when I first saw it.

Now I am thinking that the deal me and the sales lady are discussing was for a $39.99 package. She tells me at the end that I’ll get a $10.00 discount for 12 months and I’m thinking my bill would be $29.99. Continue Here…

I’m trying to optimize Search Engine visibility for everything we are doing on the web. Tags help you to be found in the social bookmarking services, and for meta tags a good TITLE and description may help you with SE placement.

Some say that duplicate titles and descriptions lean Google toward calling your content duplicate which is a negative. WordPress and TypePad give you a title that is the name of your blog with the post name added after. It makes all your titles look the same and if the name of your blog is long Google’s search results all have the same title line. Check by searching for site:yoursite.com in Google or the other two major engines. Continue Here…

This is just a little experiment to see what an embedded video would be like here. Most of YouTube is not my kind of stuff, but it’s a phenomenon that’s hard to ignore if the online world is important to you.

I have edited here to try a new WordPress Plugin.

YouTube Link to Hypnotize yourself

Referer Spam (Referrer Spam) is a form of spam that few will be concerned with unless they have a web site or blog. It involves making hits on a site with fake referers to gain a line entry in the servers log file. This then becomes a part of the data generated by the log analyzer such as AWStats.

Now you say big deal what did that do for the spammer creep? Nothing if you don’t give the world access to your analytics data like so many hapless webmasters do. When the search engines pick it up it looks like your are giving a link to the spammer and gives them a chance at more Page Rank. Continue Here…

For the longest I have preached to clients to get their site looking like it’s not a hold over from the 90′s. Maybe I’ll eat a little crow after reading The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites. The author makes some good observations about the “trust factor” and how it is sometimes enhanced by a site that looks like it was done by the owner. A real person verses a big design team in their eyes.

A while back I was talking with the owner of Louisiana Crawfish-Man telling him how much better his site could sell if only he would modernize it. He insisted that it needed that down home touch to fit with his theme. He wasn’t budging, and now I see more clearly where he was coming from.