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ON UPDATE: Here is the video.

I wanted to embed a video from YouTube called “STEVE’S BAD DAY”. It’s a funny video about a robot who just cannot seem to turn his luck around in one particular day.

However, although some people on this blog are able to embed YouTube videos, I appear to be UNable to do so. I’ll have to have a talk with someone about that.

However, since it’s a company holiday, it doesn’t seem like I’ll be able to keep to my Monday-Thursday posting schedule if I wait for the ability to embed a video.

I just didn’t want to write an SEO post today. I wanted to make people laugh. Or help them laugh. Or something.

In any event, check out the video. I think it’s worth a few minutes of your time. And when we all get back to work around here, I may come back and embed the video in an update. I’m SURE my inability to embed videos is due to an oversight or something.

Or maybe I’m just having a bad day….

++++++++++++ UPDATE! +++++++++++++

I couldn’t just standby and let your debut to the humor category be plagued by a technical hiccup! -Nic

How to get more youtube views

1. Get more YouTube views by allowing people to embed your videos on their Web pages
2. Get more YouTube views by creating a channel and uploading videos often
3. Get more YouTube views by using unique, descriptive titles for each video
4. Get more YouTube views by writing the longest possible description for each video
5. Get more YouTube views by resisting the urge to use videos as bait

How to get more customers

1. Get more customers by providing discount incentives for customer referrals
2. Get more customers by rewarding loyal, repeat customers with discounts and other incentives
3. Get more customers by asking customers for feedback on how to improve their experience with you (and acting on that feedback)
4. Get more customers by sharing your value proposition in new advertising venues
5. Get more customers by shaping a marketing message around the customer experience

How to get more comments

1. Get more comments on your blog by elaborating on what other people say on their blogs (name names and link out liberally)
2. Get more comments on your blog by surprising your readers
3. Get more comments on your blog by responding to people who blog about you

How to increase traffic

1. Increase website traffic by doing something different
2. Increase website traffic by expanding your content faster than others
3. Increase website traffic by being more consistent, punctual, and productive than others
4. Increase website traffic by leveraging new third-party promotional tools before they become popular

How to improve search ranking

1. Improve search ranking through reasonable repetition and emphasis
2. Improve search ranking through informative internal linking
3. Improve search ranking by leveraging outbound linking
4. Improve search ranking by creating relevant, informative, supporting content
5. Improve search ranking by creating interest in new expressions

In the time it takes you to create 1 link you can write 10 sentences.

In the time it takes you to explain why you would prefer to have the 1 link, 100 people could click through long tail query search results to read those 10 sentences.

In the time it takes you to realize that copy is more important than links for search engine optimization, billions of queries will have brought people to Web sites you don’t control.

In the time it takes you to realize that any rebuttal you write to these points will be about 10 sentences long, you can start learning how to really optimize for search.

Search is all about the content.

Search optimization is all about creating the content people search for.

Bot accessibility is about making sure that search agents known as spiders, robots or “bots” for short, have full accessibility to all the content that you want displayed to the public.

Creating a growing archive that remains accessible to both bots and the public can be instrumental to rapidly increasing the size, strength and overall value of your web property. Like most things in SEO, it is much easier to plan ahead for an effective archive rather than reorganizing one that has been indexed.

Rather than focusing on which database to use or how to build with one of the many excellent content management systems out there, I’m going to list a few key points to watch for.

Bot Accessible Archive Dos:

Each Document Should Have Its Own URL
Whether using pages, posts (or anything else) make sure that each article/press release/product has its own URL. Giving each subject its own URL is probably the most important aspect of proper archiving.

Persnickety Order
Create a logical hierarchy and categorize groupings of similar subject matter. Clean informative structure is as much about human accessibility as it is about bot accessibility.

Proper Labeling and Legible URLs
On the server side, convert all database generated URLs to descriptive URLs. The actual logistics of this have everything to do with your CMS and platform. Labeling the tags and content in your archive in a way that is human intuitive will allow indexing bots to serve your pages to the correct searchers.

Using legible URLs can convey on the SERP level what exactly is on a page and may even lend to your target keywords. Searchers will have to rely less on your descriptions and title tags to surmise what your page is about.

Example:

Bad Archive Structure

Good Archive Structure

Bot Accessible Archive Don’ts:

Flash Archives
Yes I have seen Flash archives that were pretty to look at but overall somewhat cumbersome to navigate and not necessarily bot accessible. Since my guess is that you aren’t trying to impress anyone with your creative prowess as they rummage through your archive, it’s best to apply KISS and focus on functionality.

Ajax Archives and iFrame Archives
Both Ajax and iFrames tend to have a single URL and display content through a window on the page. The problem is when you navigate to the press release or document that you are searching for there is virtually no way to share it without downloading or copy and pasting it.

PDF Archives
While it is possible for a bot to crawl and index a PDF document, people generally hate to see PDFs in search results unless they are searching specifically for a product manual or academic paper. PDFs make good product brochures and lousy product pages.

PDFs appear to pass value such as anchor text, but from a user intuitive standpoint can make awkward link placement. A user clicks on a PDF, it downloads, a link is visible so they click it and the browser opens a new window. Ick!

If your archive happens to be of product manuals or academic papers you might want to consider creating a database driven archive of pages containing an abstract, author and a way to download the PDF.

Happy archiving!

For several years I have used an email address for Eudoramail.com (now mail.lycos.com) as a backup to my own personal email addresses. I’ve changed ISP providers every time I have moved between states so I’ve never had a stable email address outside of those I provided myself through Xenite.Org (which I’ve had to change twice due to spam).

In other words, at any given time I usually have two active email addresses: my Xenite address that I use for almost everything and my Eudoramail address that I’ve used for only a very few things, as well as a backup in case Xenite had problems.

For several months last year, Xenite had email problems and I found myself relying on the Lycos account more and more.

This weekend, however, I could not reach Lycos.com. None of their services seemed to be online. I searched for news and blog articles about problems at Lycos and found nothing except stories from last month about Lycos Europe going out of business. Lycos Europe is supposed to be different from Lycos in the United States, but Lycos Europe had told all its Web hosting clients to find new providers before their sites went offline early this year.

As I write this Lycos.com is back online but the outage came at a most inconvenient time, as several domains which I had registered using the Eudoramail account were about to expire. In the process of moving those domains to a new registrar I found I could not approve the transfer requests because I could not log in to Lycos.

The quick resolution was to change the administrative email so that I could finish the transfers. But given the current state of the economy, I have been wondering if we’re not about to see another dot-com meltdown. I’ve already seen many AdSense publishers complaining about a decline in revenues. I have to admit that the decline has affected me, too. The Xenite network has other sources of revenue so we’ve still got money in the bank but the downturn in revenues has come at an inconvenient time.

Which leads me to the object lesson for today: not always do you want to have a backup plan, you want to make sure your backup plan is current and relevant. I’ve had to rely on two backup plans this month: one for email and one for revenue. If I actually lose either the Lycos account or if AdSense just stops being a useful source of income, I’m going to have to develop one or two more backup plans.

As for email, there are still some alternatives out there but none of them seem palatable. Gmail, for example, is rife with system problems if all the complaints people post are to be believed — and people like me have begun blocking Gmail because of all its spam issues (Spamhaus currently lists Gmail as the third most active source of spam).

Remonetizing a network is not so easy. Advertisers are cutting back on expenses just as consumers are cutting back on purchases. I’m exploring some options before it’s too late. If you’re monetizing Web sites and you’re not sure of what’s going on, trust me: there is a HUGE contraction in process. I’ve seen discussions in many forums and concerned posts on many blogs since the beginning of December.

The majority of gung ho “everything is okay” commentary I’ve seen has come from people pushing yet another “get rich quick” affiliate program on their blogs. I got through the last dot-com meltdown by not relying on Web revenues. I expanded my content network and experimented with new monetization schemes. But truth be told, I went through a 2-year spell where everything I tried failed to pay off. I never thought AdSense would last forever but I have been hoping something else would come along before AdSense began sputtering out.

Rand Fishkin just published the results of an internal link anchor text test on SEOmoz. He doesn’t provide much information so we cannot judge the validity of the test (although his selected keyword, “SEO”, is highly competitive).

As I have said many times, SEOs put way too much emphasis on links and link anchor text. The SEO community follows a self-fulfilling prophecy about links: “I believe I need links to rank, therefore I will only try to rank on the basis of links, therefore links matter more for rankings than anything else.”

So let’s take our SEO tin foil hats off for a moment and look at link anchor text the way we should when we’re not trying to improve our search rankings. When you arrive on a Web site through an entry page and you don’t know what the site is about, do you want a clue or not?

Link anchor text can provide very helpful visual cues. So can the text preceding link anchor text.

Ian McAnerin suggested a way for people to organize links that incorporates context-setting text. Instead of simply providing three links for “Gray Widgets”, “Blue Widgets”, and “Brown Widgets” in a hypothetical navbar, he suggests the navbar could look more like this:

I am looking for a: Gray Widget | Blue Widget | Brown Widget

Regardless of whether the link anchor text is going to help the destination pages in search results, it’s definitely going to help the visitor. And I submit to you that whatever you call your pages internally, as long as it is meaningful and relevant to the page content, will influence how your visitors link to those pages, too.

Some people will use inexpressive descriptors in their anchor text to avoid passing value, but most people will refer to your page the same way you do (or very closely to the way you do) if you use concise, useful, descriptive anchors or meaningful page titles.

The link anchor text can also help make the linking page more relevant to its own topic if it is linking out to similar pages. I’ve often used lists of links to make pages more relevant in elite directory pages. Just because you embed keywords in link anchor text doesn’t mean those keywords won’t help the page on which they are found.

Search engines may or may not care about how your internal link anchor text appears. I can think of many situations where it doesn’t matter to a search engine. But if you place a link on a page it needs to be useful, helpful, and informative.