SEM/SEO

I made the color changing theme, which is mainly a design by a former co-worker of mine, Stephen Reinhardt who made the Light theme. and I decided to use the same theme with a color changing twist. So that it is quite unique to get more people interested in downloading this theme to generally increase the popularity on the site. The color changing theme uses body ID’s as a type of conditional statement and on every clicked color a cookie is stored on what color the site should be and this is read and placed in the body ID. But in order for it to display, a preliminary page is displayed to store the cookie, and returns to the referring page by a 301 redirect to avoid any issue of duplicate content for SEO, which I believe is fine. But this website is also doing it’s own experiments in the Isulong SEOph SEO Keyword Ranking Contest. And in this contest, time is already an issue since the Isulong SEOph contest ends on September 30, 2006. And I did notice, that Googlebot was crawling each and every color of my site. Although there should not be a problem SEOwise since they all 301 redirect to the pages to avoid duplicate content, there is a time-factor involved in giving Googlebot more pages to crawl that are not really necessary. Spending more time to checking each color just to be redirected to the same content. Thus only in this specific case, I have removed the clickable color changing of this theme on the upper right, but instead, I still made it cool by having each color change depending on the day of the week. That gives you a reason to check out my site everyday. Better yet, why not link to me, bookmark me, digg me, whatever and check my theme color change everyday.

A common SEO question I get from people I know who are also aware of this Isulong SEOph SEO Contest, is how to get started in SEO. If you want to talk about the basic, I sometimes even don’t answer basic questions in the SEOPhilippines mailing list to give opportunities for others to talk too. And a common reply by others would also give sites with basic stuff and there just seems to be no one place that SEO information is complete. You will have to check blogs, forums and listen to podcast as well. Here are some basic SEO stuff on Mike Lopez’ blog on SEO. Check his basic SEO Checklist.

I was going through my regular reading of blogs, here and there, and I came across a blog of web designer who was contracted to work on a design of a website selling a book entitled 10 Sikreto ng Mayayaman, which translates to 10 Secrets of the Rich. The designer made a design concept. The client must have said he did not like the design and got a full refund. Then the client still uses the same design with only small modifications. Sounds to me like he got a free design and did not pay for it. And in one of the comments on the page, one wrote a comment suggesting to Google Bomb 10 Sikreto ng Mayayaman, and have it go to the original designer’s blog. She posted updates from sueing threats through text messages. Currently the SERPs show zero for the keyphrase, maybe only 5 blog post from various places will already put it on the number 1 spot.