I’ve built hundreds of web sites and understand what goes into the development of them.  I’ve also discovered and learned what ingredients need to be present to properly garner any one of the types of traffic.

So where does your site stand? Are you getting the traffic you expected?  Is your site properly set up to put your best foot forward when Google comes to index your content?  Do you even know?

If you don’t, I’d say it’s time that you find out.  You could be leaving “money on the table” with each passing day that you cannot answer those questions.  So let’s find out!

I’m going to give you a special offer, an offer you are more than welcome to refuse, but I think you’d be mistaken not to take me up on this offer.

With my 15+ years of web development experience, I will take a good look at your web site or blog with a critical eye and pick it apart.  I’ll tell you what problems I find and where you can make changes to help improve your site.  With the list of problems that I’ll provide to you, you can take that list to any web developer and have them begin to make changes, or you can hire me to make those changes for you.

So what’s the cost?

How much does this service cost?  I would say anywhere from $5 to $50 (really, it depends on the site), but I’m going to do something a little different.  I’m going to let you donate an amount that you feel is fair, and with that, I’ll take a look at your site and make a list of problems that I see, or things that you should change to help improve your Google rankings, your SEO, your traffic and your overall appearance.  The more you donate, the more time I’ll spend digging into your site looking for problems or areas that can be improved.

Normally I’ll take about 24-48 hours to provide you my findings, and larger sites might take a little more time than that.  As a general rule though, you’ll have the product of my research a few days after payment.

Money Back Guarantee

You don’t have much to lose with this offer, and I know that you’ll find great value in the list that I’ll provide you.  I’m so convinced of it that I’ll also throw in a 100% money back guarantee.  If you are not completely happy with the service, I’ll refund your money.  Simply let me know what the problem might be, and if we cannot come to a resolution, I’ll give you all your money back.  Consider this my virtual handshake with you.

* You are responsible for all fees incurred during the refund process.

Get Started Today!

Take me up on this offer easily by donating an amount that you feel would be fair.  There is a $5 minimum as anything less really isn’t worth my time, or yours.

I look forward to helping you improve your site! If you have any questions about this service, please feel free to use the comment forms below, or contact me directly if you choose to work in private.

I’ve been using web hosts for a number of years, and each one I’ve found issues with at some point that have made me wish I wasn’t hosting with them.  But not with DreamHost.  DreamHost is completely different.

Since starting with DreamHost, I’ve had a chance to establish a number of sites for a low price without the need to pay any more than the base price.  Here’s what I’m taking advantage of right now and what you can also take advantage of:

• Unlimited storage – Store all the files you want.  Yes, you might run out of disk space eventually, after all, nothing is truly “unlimited” right?  But you do get so much space that I doubt you’d hit any limits.  In fact, I challenge you to try.
• Unlimited bandwidth – That’s right, want to set up that site that consumes an enormous amount of bandwidth, but don’t want to pay the extra fees that every other host will charge you?  DreamHost won’t do that to you.
• Unlimited hosting – You can host an unlimited number of web sites and/or an unlimited number of sub-domains without incurring extra fees.  You know what that means?  Your host has now become your playground where you can try those other ideas out if you want to.  Go ahead, there are no limits!
• Unlimited email accounts – DreamHost isn’t like the other hosts where they will charge you for each email address.  DreamHost gives you an unlimited number of email addresses instead which can easily help you grow your site.
• Unlimited databases – DreamHost uses MySQL for any backend storage needs your site might have.  It’s easy to set up, and you guessed it, you can create as many as you need.
• So much more!

So with all the “unlimited” items they are offering, where’s the catch you might ask?  I’m still asking the same thing and I have not found any catch yet, they really are that dreamy in my opinion.  It’s why I’m able to stand behind DreamHost and proudly say, “This is the host you need to be using!”.

I’ve had a chance to interact with a few of the guys and gals behind the scenes at DreamHost.  I’ve had a few issues that I’ll call “end-user issues” (even I have my bonehead moments and need some help) and I’ll tell you that not only did they come back with a response quickly, but they did so professionally, but not to the point of being a corporate drone like the other companies I’ve used.  These guys are very knowledgeable and have helped me to complete satisfaction each and every time.

It wasn’t a one-off type thing where I just got lucky getting the one guy that is always helpful.  Each and every one of the guys on the other end were the same.  Knowledgeable, professional, friendly, and just like me.  A human being that I was able to communicate with effectively.  Not some corporate robot or someone from India who I couldn’t understand.

Sign up with DreamHost through me and get even more!

I’m an affiliate for DreamHost, and as such I get paid a little bit of money if you sign up.  Because of that, I’m able to extend an offer to you that I think you’ll enjoy.

When you sign up with DreamHost,  I’ll help you get set up and running with your first site.  I’ll install the software you need, and get things up and running for you.  I’ll also spend a few hours with you showing you around the administration panels or your new web site administration panels.

Want to run your own self-hosted install of WordPress?  No problem.

Want to set up a shopping cart site to sell products through?  No problem.

Want to be an affiliate for DreamHost and make some money too?  No problem.

With the excellent service and pricing that DreamHost is offering, coupled with my offer to help you get your site running and operational, and your ability to make extra money as a DreamHost affiliate too,  I don’t see how this offer could be any better.

Call to action: Start that web development project now with the best host I’ve found so far and sign up with DreamHost now!  I’ll help you get up and running if you would like the assistance, at no extra cost to you.

Learn more about the services I offer

I have been considering this costume for a few years, and it wasn’t until all the stars lined up correctly that I was able to see it become a reality.

What was the costume?  A flower.  More specifically, a daisy.

That’s right, I was a daisy for Halloween.  As you’ll see in the pictures below, it actually turned out really, really good.  It was also quite fun to wear as well.  It wasn’t uncomfortable at all, and each and every person I encountered had a big smile on their face after seeing it.

That made all the trouble of getting the costume built well worth it.

After completely destroying any normality at work, we all went to Harmony’s Halloween Haunt.  Harmony always throws a yearly party to help raise money for disadvantaged children and those with serious medical issues, so we are always more than willing to attend.  Besides,  we always have a great time hanging out with them.

This year the guest star was Jackie Beat, and she was simply incredible.  Nasty, funny and very entertaining.  It was a great time.

Here’s one of her best numbers:

And here are some of the photos other people took.  I was too busy drinking and making my way around the party acting like a wall-flower.  Our nephew didn’t care much for being a flower, and who could really blame him.  He was a victim in all this.  I am however very proud of him for putting any concerns of his manhood away for the evening and getting dressed up as a daisy.

It really does take a person that is secure with themselves to pull something like this off I guess, I never really gave it much thought actually.  It’s Halloween after all!  Lighten up and have some fun…even if it is at your own expense.

In any case, the costumes seemed to be a big hit.  I won first place at work, and we received “Most Original” at Harmony’s party.

Enjoy some of the pictures we took, and who knows what will happen next year.  I’m wide open for any ideas, as you might imagine.

I’m a big fan of movies.  I love going to the theater when a movie I’ve been waiting for is released and catch the show on the opening night.  There’s something special about opening night atmospheres that I really enjoy.  However as fate would have it, my girl feels quite the opposite as she’s stuck on the sound of people chewing, obnoxious kids and that one bastard that can’t seem to get that last Mike & Ike from the box.

Yes, I’m with her on the “kids in theaters” thing, but I can’t let that stop me from putting on my horse-blinders and becoming deeply engrossed in the white screen and the images they flash on there.  Nor the high-tech sound systems that theaters have these days.

So in response to a question from Roger Green who asked a multi-part question on my “Ask me anything” post, here’s a list of movies that have influenced me and my life, and have helped shape who I have become.

Also in response to Roger’s question, I’ve started a new page called favorites where this post will be linked to. I did this so anyone that might be interested in knowing more about the person behind the curtain can go and find out more about me, in fact I should make it a sub page to the About page, now that I think about it.

Why bother with copyrights?

One thing I want to point out is that even though every single image on this page might be copyrighted, I can still use them due to the Amazon Associates program.  Get it?  If you are an Amazon Associate, you can then use any image you want from their catalog in your posts and pages.

So the next time you want to use an image in your post, but are concerned about copyrights, perhaps you can find one on Amazon and use it due to your being an Amazon Associate!

I also want to point out that it isn’t my intent to use the Amazon items here in some attempt to make money, in fact I don’t expect to make anything with this post at all.  However, the images are links that will take you to Amazon should you want to learn more about the movie.

Do you agree or disagree?

I didn’t bother writing a reason why I chose any given movie, that would take just too darn long.  But, what do you think?  Anything in here that you agree with or disagree with?  I think each one of these should be given an award if they weren’t already.

Star Wars (Episodes I-VI)

Rocky Horror Picture Show

Love Story

Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

Harry Potter Series

Lord of the Rings

Caddyshack

The Shawshank Redemption

Pulp Fiction

Raiders of the Lost Ark

The Matrix

Se7en

American Beauty

A Clockwork Orange

The Shining

Monty Python – The Meaning of Life

Amadeus

Braveheart

300

Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2

Gandhi

The Princess Bride

The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen

The Exorcist

Rocky

Fear and loathing in Las Vegas

Labyrinth

Nightmare Before Christmas

The Fifth Element

Young Frankenstein

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

National Lampoon’s Animal House

The Blues Brothers

Trading Places

A Christmas Story

The Usual Suspects

Conan the Barbarian

Pink Floyd – The Wall

This post will attempt to demystify what meta-tags are, how they’re used, and if you should even care about them.

Switcher had asked me on my Ask me anything post:

LOL,

I don’t count myself as a spammer, I’ll ask anyway.

What’s your thoughts on “Meta Tags” for blogger/blogspot.com?

The reason I ask is, from an SEO point of view I’ve had the idea for a while to write some code, that will write dynamic content for each & every blog page on my Blogger blog.

I have the code up & running, & actually showing up in the Google SERP, I really don’t have any answers for a long term results. Do you think this would be something that would benefit Blogger hosted blogs?
Ok, let’s hear your thoughts, don’t hold back! LOL

Thanks for asking the question Switcher! I’ll try my best to help you out here.

So what is a meta-tag anyway?

Meta-tags are HTML elements that reside in the header of any given HTML document.  They help describe a page by providing extended information about the page they are found on.  For instance, if you look at the HTML that makes this page, you’ll see a mess of meta-tags in the header area.

For instance, on my recent post where I asked everyone if they had a question, the meta-tags found on that particular page look like this:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.8.7" />
<meta name="description" content="I'll answer any questions etc..." />
<meta name="keywords" content="anything" />

So as you can see here, I have only four tags working for me on this post. I believe that each and every blog system will provide the first meta-tag by default. I don’t believe you need to even worry if it’s there or not. If you can read your blog posts, and no one else is complaining that some characters look like question marks, you’re probably fine. If you do want to read more about that particular line, a good resource can be found here and here.
The generator meta-tag is completely unnecessary, and could expose you to problems in some cases. I recommend removing it entirely as it does you as a web site owner no good, but it could help others determine how to exploit your site and find vulnerabilities.

Keywords and Description meta-tags

Perhaps the two most well known meta-tags are the keywords and description meta-tags.  These two meta-tags were intended to provide search engines and spiders a quick idea of what the page is about, but after a few years people began to realize that they could manipulate these items to increase their search engine ranking.

The best search engines have realized this and have changed the way they determine what a page is about, and how it gets ranked, that the keywords meta-tag is darn close to pointless.  Google no longer uses the keyword meta-tag, so should you worry about including it if you aren’t already? Should you try to optimize your keywords with each post you write even though Google doesn’t do anything with this tag?

Yes, you should.

Even though Google states they don’t look at the keyword meta-tag or even use it, they might one day.  Besides, there are plenty of other search engines out there that might use the keyword meta-tag, so for those reasons, yes you should continue to use it as if it were an effective part of your SEO.  I just wouldn’t put a great amount of importance into the keyword tag as I would the description meta-tag.

The importance of the Description meta-tag

The description meta-tag is used frequently as part of search engine results.  Google uses the page description as part of the search results (in case you haven’t noticed, it’s the little blurb under the search result links) and it also carries a little weight in SEO as well.  A well crafted description can also help drive more traffic from search engines by providing a concise description of the page offerings to the user.

Some blogging tools will provide an area for you to provide a description, whereas others might take the “excerpt” you provide, or the first hundred or so characters from your first paragraph of text.

There might be other uses of the description meta-tag by robots, spiders and search engines, and you should consider this tag very important.  After all, it very well may be the first impression given to a new visitor.  Make it the best one you can.

Are there any other meta-tags?

Yes, there are several.  There are select set of meta-tags that Google understands and uses as part of it’s indexing process.  Here’s a list of those tags along with a quick description of each.

Title – While not really a meta-tag, the <title> tag is found in the header along with all the other meta-tags.  Google uses this tag to create the text of the hyperlink in the search engines search results.  Including keywords into your title tag will help you rank in search engines for those keywords.

There is plenty more that goes into a well-done SEO page, and the title tag is perhaps the most important part of that equation.

Robots or Googlebot – This tag helps you control how often your page is indexed, if it is even available for indexing and what options might be available to an end user on Google.  More info on this tag and the variety of options that Google accepts can be found here.

Refresh – Including this tag will redirect a user to another page after a certain amount of time has passed.  Ever hit one of those pages that state “Redirecting you to your page.  If the page does not refresh after 5 seconds, click here”?  If so, they very well may have used this tag to perform the redirection.

An unending supply of meta-tags

These are just a few of the many tags that are available to use on your web pages. Have you taken a look at your source and analyzed what your software is doing to your meta-tags? You really should if you haven’t. Take a little time to understand them and refine them. The little bit of effort will pay dividends to you later on by helping you craft better pages, target keywords better, and present your site the best it can be in search engine results.

This post will fall into the latter category as I really don’t have much to say this month other than to impart a little advice that I feel is perhaps the most important thing I can ever tell those that are hoping to get rich over the Internet.

Don’t put all your eggs in a single basket!

That’s right, diversification is the online money makers best friend.  It really hits home when you realize just how little control you have over changes to any program implemented by any given service.  Google could easily change their program so that would earn more or less.  Ebay has changed their program to utilize some mysterious and veiled algorithm to produce their affiliates daily earnings.  Amazon, and any other affiliate program you might be using can do the very same, with the impact to you being a big fat question mark.

I know that I prefer to live in a world with a little more certainty and understanding of what I’m doing, but the new Ebay Quality Click Pricing (QCP) model they’ve migrated everyone to has me completely confused.  I don’t know what this current month will look like, and it really dashed some plans I had for December, but that’s just the way it goes.

Which leads me to diversification.  It would be foolish of me to focus solely on Ebay and promoting their auctions and sales, so I’m branching out a little.  I’m going to start doing more with Amazon.  I’ve just started up with Chitika as well, which looks promising.  You might see an ad for Chitika in my sidebar now, and if you have a good number of page views from search engines, you could very well be leaving money on the table.

I’ll write more about Chitika when I get my head around their programs, but I know there are some out there that could take advantage of their program right now and begin earning some extra money.

Lesson here is diversification.  If one program begins to fail, or changes the game suddenly, you don’t want to find yourself without options.  If Ebay begins to tank on my, then I might swing over to Amazon and do more there.

It leaves me with more options, and personally, I like that.  You probably do to.

So what are my numbers this month?

AdSense - $117.64
Ebay - $368.14
LinkListings - $24.00
Client Work - $237.50
DiggityHost.com – $1.72

That brings the total for the month of September to $749.00.  Things are getting better each month, except for  DiggityHost.  After more than two years of trying to make GoDaddy’s reseller program work, I’ve decided to throw in the towel.  I will no longer promote DiggityHost and ultimately allow it to die off.

All the existing clients on DiggityHost will be transitioned to GoDaddy, where they will experience the same level of service that they have come to enjoy (or despise, let’s be honest here) on DiggityHost.

They can’t all be winners, and it’s time to drop some dead weight and focus my attention on those services and clients that are bringing in the money.

What about you?

What are you doing to make money online?  What’s working for you, what isn’t?

And part 2:

I find these things from time to time on YouTube, so if you have an account there, why not friend me up.  I don’t post everything I find there, just the really good ones like a full Pink Floyd concert! You can find me here.

I’m opening myself and my blog up to my readers to see if there are any questions that you’d might like to ask me.  It can be anything, really.

Want to know my thoughts on politics, religion, sex, drugs, music, women, ask!

Want to know my thoughts about other bloggers?  Ask.

Want to know how I feel about one programming language over another?  Ask.

Want to know what I think of your site?  Ask at your own peril.

I’ll answer everything with brutal honesty, so if you don’t like my response, don’t be offended, I’m just being honest.  How could you fault someone over that?

So as you can see, I’m leaving myself wide open for you to ask me anything.  Anything at all.  Since I don’t have the inspiration to write something technical or helpful, perhaps if I opened myself up to readers and random strangers (and of course, the spammers, you know they’ll comment with some absurdity), perhaps I would find my voice again through this effort.

Here’s what you do, leave a comment below, and if there is a question in there that is an honest question, and not some spammy type of question  just because I’m asking you to leave a question, I’ll answer it in a post.

I’ll continue to draw upon the questions you leave here for future posts.

I intend on approving each and every comment on this post here, instead of being a comment Nazi like I have been for every other post.

I’m expecting spammers to comment, and in fact I intend on using the comments left by spammers for another purpose entirely.  So comment away spammers…this is your post.

But I do hope that the spammers are out-numbered by actual people that have a “good” question.  We’ll see what happens.

Before you get all excited and run over to Ebay to sign up if your not already, wait a second.  Ebay has changed the game on everyone with a surprise announcement last month that they will change the way that affiliates are paid.

Affiliates are no longer paid a certain percentage on each sales transaction, which was basically half of what Ebay’s portion of the sales fees to the sellers.  Affiliates are now paid based on the number of clicks that you drive to Ebay, and the amount you get per click is based on the “quality” of those clicks.

What constitutes quality?  That’s the big question for everyone.  If you look at the Ebay forum you’ll see that there are varying thoughts on the new program, some good, mostly bad.  At least from the affiliate point of view.

So much for keeping it simple eh?

I can no longer apply any level of strategy to increase my earnings at Ebay now that some “quality” aspect of the  calculation determines how much I am paid, so I’m sitting in a holding pattern until I’m able to determine exactly how much I can effect “quality”, when all I do is gather search traffic and direct them over to Ebay.

On top of all the changes, it becomes distressing when you see that for a single day, under the old pay structure you would have made $50, but the new QCP program is only paying you $2.50.  The disparity is hardly motivating.

During the preview period over the last month and a half, I’ve seen days where I’m paid $0.01 per click, and the next day it jumps to $0.50, and the day after that, $1 per click, only to plummet to $0.05 the following day!  If this was the only means of income I had, my heart would stop beating, or I’d wish it would.

However, not to be a complete slam against the new program, there were days where I would not have made a cent, yet came away with $50 under the new program.  There are the up days, and it’s seemingly left to chance that the up days outnumber the down days.

Like I said, the actual calculation is a complete mystery, and I’ve been unable to make heads or tails of it so far.

So as I sit, watch and wait for days to pass while I analyze what the hell is going on, I’ll be getting my head in order and back to blogging more frequently.