Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Back to the billable
True to my word of last night, I was back to the billable projects today. More SEO, this time on pages that for the most part hadn't made it into the top thirty for their keywords yet. Again, I found them not badly optimized, just not optimized enough to crack the top spots.

It's interesting, though, studying the pages that are on top. There's a profound shift going on the the search engine algorithms from what I remember when I first started, and I believe it's a shift that makes for better, more visitor-friendly pages.

Almost invariably, as I tweaked areas of the pages that I found slightly out of balance from an SEO standpoint, I found that changing them also made them better from a copywriting standpoint, too.

I know the algorithms don't recognize good writing, but they're getting pretty good at identifying the underlying structures that makes for good writing.

It's nice to see. I've always been a proponent of giving the search engines the kind of pages they're looking for—relevant content with an absence of what I call "stupid SEO tricks." It's gratifying to see that the more sophisticated the algorithms become in separating the spam from the genuine content, the more they encourage SEOs to give visitors better content.

Oh, sure, I still found some spammy pages in the top five positions, but it seems a lot better than I remember during the days when I first started out (back when I had to walk five miles every day, uphill both ways, through driving blizzards to optimize a webpage).

But I'm encouraged by what I see (even though I do have to work harder for good rankings than I used to).
Jeff

OUTTA HERE!
Yes! The taxes are filed and off my back for now. The last few things I needed to double-check fell into place... e-file turned out to be more time-counsuming than I remembered it from past years. But then, this is the first year that I relied strictly on the e-file and didn't first do the whole thing on paper first to check the e-file against.

So I guess I should have figured a little more time on the back end to replace the time I wasn't spending on the front end. But whatever end it comes on, the end that feels good is the ENDED, as in "tax preparation is ENDED."

I got two new articles up on One Stop today, so I feel good about that, too. And I swapped out all but one of the week old articles on the home page with those two and the two I had done earlier in the week. So I feel I accomplished a lot today (even if I barely touched the billable work). Well, that will be tomorrow.

You know, I see more and more the truth to what I talked about a while back—that bad days tend to be more productive than good ones. Bad ones I always come out with something I learned from the day. Good days like this, I just ramble on about trivialities.

Well, maybe I'll have a really, really terrible day tomorrow and have a great, insightful blog. Yeah, like I'm really hoping for that, huh? How about just a decent day and an above-average blog. Works for me!
Jeff

All fired up
I was grumpy pretty much all day today. I really wanted to work on my site, but I kept telling myself that I had to complete a couple of billable projects and an update of my church's website before I'd allow myself back onto my site (which had occupied most of my attention the past three weeks).

Finally, this evening, I had one hour before the time I had planned to knock things off for the night. I had finished one thing and needed to get started on another. I looked at the other things I had told myself I needed to do and then decided, "Nah, I'm doing something on my website."

It wasn't much—I added the next autoresponder message in my bonus tips for those who signed up for my newsletter—but it changed my outlook completely around.

Getting back into writing helpful tips was the tonic I needed. Or maybe it was just getting back to my site (I haven't added anything new to it in a couple of days and am beginning to feel I'm letting visitors down).

But it helped to take a break to do what I wanted to do instead of what I told myself I had to do. Maybe I need to get a couple of new articles up tomorrow before I get back into the billable work—just to keep my energy up.

It's always a learning process of finding out what you need to do to function at your highest level. Hey, there's no one looking over your shoulder when you work your own business, no big stick ready to come down on you when you don't meet deadlines. There's not even anyone setting deadlines for you (although the need to get billable work done for others has somewhat of a deadline feel to it).

But you've got to pay attention to your own internal rhythms and needs, and put them to work for you or you're right back in that box of feeling like someone else is controlling your life.

So, happy rhythm hunting, all!
Jeff

The thrill is gone
Remember my entry a few days back on Fun With SEO? The fun has gone away. Man, there's getting to be such a fine line between what it takes to get on the first page of search engine results and the third page (or lower). Today I focused on trying to boost some pages currently on the third page results up to the first.

Not easy to find changes that would make much of a difference. I think the days are pretty much over where sites get 1st page rankings just by luck (except for very, very infrequently searched terms). The number of sites helped by quality SEO work is getting pretty substantial.

Time will tell whether I tweaked MasterVisions' pages enough to move up those crucial two pages. I'll move on to some other ones tomorrow and see what I can do with them. But that's the ongoing challenge of SEO.
Jeff

A mental day off
It was another office day today. Seems like those days leave me lethargic once I get home. I basically majored in minors, getting a bunch of little things out of the way. I guess there have to be some days for that, too.

Some days the mind just doesn't want to tackle projects that require a lot of thinking. After a while, you start to recognize how your work cycle operates. Don't push too hard when you need to clear your head and you'll have a clear head the next day. But then I need to use that clear head and not let anything get in the way of productive work the next morning.

Everybody's cycles are different. My sons all seem to delight in working through the night and then catching up on sleep during the day. Not for me. But it works for them.

The important thing is to get to know your cycle and then use it to your best advantage.

Funny. As I look at tonight's blog, I feel like my lethargy has carried through into it. I came into writing this tonight with a lack of energy and no real idea of what to say and I feel like I'm really stretching to find something (cue the echo machine) significant -nificant -nificant -nificant to say.

Well, it's just not a night for that, so I'll pass on engaging in any further self-indulgent attempts to be brilliant and just get my rest.
Jeff

And miles to go...
The official unveiling of One Stop Web Support is now behind me, so now the real work begins. Sure, it's nice to see Google and Yahoo and MSN spidering the site like crazy, and it was nice to see the signups and downloads all weekend from people checking the site out, but—to no surprise—what's been happening this weekend is not nearly enough to make the site a viable business.

Next step: I work on syndicating some articles to bring in some traffic from other sites. I'm making no move so far toward setting up reciprocal links with other sites. I think this site, being more a content site than a product site, has potential for building incoming links strictly through syndication rather than link exchanges.

I never had a real chance to syndicate articles for the product sites I've worked on and I'd like to use this site to do a little testing. I'll let you know how things develop.
Jeff

Time to be pleased
Having gotten over the hump yesterday of officially unveiling the site, I got a chance to enjoy the results today as I watched the bookmarks of it and and newsletter signups grow.

Not that I now can sit back and get complacent. Far from it! But it's nice to see people responding positively to the site. As a matter of fact, I've been surprised to see the site growing in content without much effort. I added a couple of articles today and an RSS feed of interviews with top eBay sellers from The eBay Radio Show. Tons of good stuff in there.

And the neat thing about it is that it doesn't really seem like I spent that much time on it all. It all just fell into place from what I was doing.

I don't expect every day to be this simple, but it's nice to have one like this every once and a while. One of the neatest things about doing this is being able to find worthwhile things like the interviews and put them in the path of people who can use them. I love win-win-win situations!
Jeff