icky rainy morning.
May. 1st, 2003 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I got Dave to drive me in. I'm a wuss. And a tubby one, at that. But it was really rainy this morning, and my route to work, now that I'm avoiding that one road, involves a very teetery descent down a steep incline, followed by a horizontal traverse across the middle of another steep incline. When it's so slippery, I really can't do it.
Plus I'm having cramps and stuff, so I'm just feeling icky.
Perhaps tonight we'll go to the Westchester. (Mall.) For some reason, it's not the Westchester Mall, it's just The Westchester. Which really goes along with the yuppie pretentiousness of the area. This morning as we drove by, the Food Emporium was emitting steam or smoke of some kind from one corner of its roof. Maybe it's burning down, we thought hopefully. Hey, maybe they'll replace it with a Mega-Wegs. Aww...
we immediately decided we had to write a fan letter to Danny Wegman begging him to put in a Wegman's in Westchester County and muscle Food Emporium right out. The A&P's all right, but the Foodium (so it's been dubbed) is... precisely the same thing only at twice the prices. Come on, folks! $4.99/lb. for 80% lean ground beef? Weggie's wouldn't even CARRY 80% lean; it's just not worth it. Most of it melts when you cook it, so you get half the meat at 3/4 the price. Never mind!
But the Foodium sucks. We want Weggie's! We want Weggie's!
Anyhow, enough of that.
This morning I'm doing extensive research into search engine optimization. The boss signed me up for a newsletter he gets, and I sent him back the URLs to the two or three newsletters I've been getting all along... I really like the one that arrived today, from High Rankings Dot Com-- It's full of common-sense, "Don't try to spam the search engines" advice, AND when I wrote in a question, the chick answered me within like five minutes, with a very thorough and knowledgeable answer and some extra helpful advice besides. (Her name's Jill Whelan, and while I can't afford to buy anything from her, she's damn good.)
So I'm pleased; today's newsletter had a couple of long checklists (in a guest article by Kim Krause called "Being Tops With Your Users And The Search Engines, Part 4") about whether your site was user-centered or not, full of features a website should contain both to optimize for search engine indexing and to make your site as useful to users as possible, and I had a majority of the items listed in each checklist. Hurrah! I'm so good!
It's in my boss' nature to want to spam the search engines. He's always looking for the best, the cheapest, the easiest way of getting things done. Which can't be faulted in and of itself. But if the three or four newsletters I get (and accompanying sites I've explored) are to be believed, your best bet nowadays is NOT spamming Google (Whelan refers to Google as She Who Must Be Obeyed or something similarly implying divinity)-- it changes so much, and once it discovers a dirty trick, not only makes it no longer effective, but punishes every practitioner it can find. So if you have stuffed meta-tags, you're at square one-- Google no longer reads meta tags. If you have invisible text full of repetitive keywords, you're at worse than square one-- you're dropped from Google's index. If you have superfluous links to totally irrelevant sites-- link farms-- you're dropped from the index as well.
So every tactic suggested to me by my helpful coworkers to improve our Google ranking would be worse than ineffective-- it would get us dropped totally.
The thing to keep in mind is that the long-term-care software industry is not that competitive. Especially not on the web. You're not going to order software for your facility online; it's tens, hundreds even, of thousands of dollars. And our competitors have lousy sites.
I bet, by the way, that even though i've never mentioned my company's name in this journal (at least I hope I haven't), you could find it in one or two Google searches for keywords like "software for nursing homes" or "long-term care software". We may not be at the top, but there aren't more than about four or five companies that do what we do in the same way. So...
Anyhow, I'm going to go put some of this into practice. I also have to find out how to do redirects on the server level-- my new site doesn't have pages in the same places as the old pages were, and I am not going to move the pages so they will be, and I am most definitely not making a redirect page for every one. Blechh.
I downloaded the old page to have a look, and I can't even find the pages!! I can't find the Home page! I can't find any of it!! This is why I hated NoF, really it is. Eeww.
Anyhow, I'm going to go and do, do, do all these things I've been thinking about.
Plus I'm having cramps and stuff, so I'm just feeling icky.
Perhaps tonight we'll go to the Westchester. (Mall.) For some reason, it's not the Westchester Mall, it's just The Westchester. Which really goes along with the yuppie pretentiousness of the area. This morning as we drove by, the Food Emporium was emitting steam or smoke of some kind from one corner of its roof. Maybe it's burning down, we thought hopefully. Hey, maybe they'll replace it with a Mega-Wegs. Aww...
we immediately decided we had to write a fan letter to Danny Wegman begging him to put in a Wegman's in Westchester County and muscle Food Emporium right out. The A&P's all right, but the Foodium (so it's been dubbed) is... precisely the same thing only at twice the prices. Come on, folks! $4.99/lb. for 80% lean ground beef? Weggie's wouldn't even CARRY 80% lean; it's just not worth it. Most of it melts when you cook it, so you get half the meat at 3/4 the price. Never mind!
But the Foodium sucks. We want Weggie's! We want Weggie's!
Anyhow, enough of that.
This morning I'm doing extensive research into search engine optimization. The boss signed me up for a newsletter he gets, and I sent him back the URLs to the two or three newsletters I've been getting all along... I really like the one that arrived today, from High Rankings Dot Com-- It's full of common-sense, "Don't try to spam the search engines" advice, AND when I wrote in a question, the chick answered me within like five minutes, with a very thorough and knowledgeable answer and some extra helpful advice besides. (Her name's Jill Whelan, and while I can't afford to buy anything from her, she's damn good.)
So I'm pleased; today's newsletter had a couple of long checklists (in a guest article by Kim Krause called "Being Tops With Your Users And The Search Engines, Part 4") about whether your site was user-centered or not, full of features a website should contain both to optimize for search engine indexing and to make your site as useful to users as possible, and I had a majority of the items listed in each checklist. Hurrah! I'm so good!
It's in my boss' nature to want to spam the search engines. He's always looking for the best, the cheapest, the easiest way of getting things done. Which can't be faulted in and of itself. But if the three or four newsletters I get (and accompanying sites I've explored) are to be believed, your best bet nowadays is NOT spamming Google (Whelan refers to Google as She Who Must Be Obeyed or something similarly implying divinity)-- it changes so much, and once it discovers a dirty trick, not only makes it no longer effective, but punishes every practitioner it can find. So if you have stuffed meta-tags, you're at square one-- Google no longer reads meta tags. If you have invisible text full of repetitive keywords, you're at worse than square one-- you're dropped from Google's index. If you have superfluous links to totally irrelevant sites-- link farms-- you're dropped from the index as well.
So every tactic suggested to me by my helpful coworkers to improve our Google ranking would be worse than ineffective-- it would get us dropped totally.
The thing to keep in mind is that the long-term-care software industry is not that competitive. Especially not on the web. You're not going to order software for your facility online; it's tens, hundreds even, of thousands of dollars. And our competitors have lousy sites.
I bet, by the way, that even though i've never mentioned my company's name in this journal (at least I hope I haven't), you could find it in one or two Google searches for keywords like "software for nursing homes" or "long-term care software". We may not be at the top, but there aren't more than about four or five companies that do what we do in the same way. So...
Anyhow, I'm going to go put some of this into practice. I also have to find out how to do redirects on the server level-- my new site doesn't have pages in the same places as the old pages were, and I am not going to move the pages so they will be, and I am most definitely not making a redirect page for every one. Blechh.
I downloaded the old page to have a look, and I can't even find the pages!! I can't find the Home page! I can't find any of it!! This is why I hated NoF, really it is. Eeww.
Anyhow, I'm going to go and do, do, do all these things I've been thinking about.
this is from kat
Re: this is from kat
Date: 2003-05-01 11:19 am (UTC)Unless we've been slipping more than I thought. Oh well. My new site isn't up yet. When it is, we'll be back up top.
this is from kat