Today was a day of learning. I spent a few hours going through past posts by Brandy (Brad and Andy) at the Stompernet site.

Then after experimenting with Google Pages, I finally created a Squidoo page.

Squidoo has a noble goal. To raise a heck of a lot of money for charity, and make it easy for people to create free websites, with links to blogs, flickr, youtube, bookmark sites and more. There’s a lot of advertising on the site, to cover costs, and half of what remains is divided between charity and the publisher. And they make it easy for the publisher to give all their profits to charity too.

So my first Squidoo page was Rugby League Form, with the subheading “becoming a rugby league tipping mistress”. As with all Squidoo sites, it’s supposed to be an information (or authority) site, with all the information you need to fake being interested in NRL footy tipping competitions. Helpful for those male-dominated offices.

And then I created a second Squidoo page, at Dogs Australia. I had a lot of fun researching video content for this site. Check it out.
cheers

I created my first Google page today. A page about the Kokoda Track. And it was easy - kind of similar to setting up a new blog at blogger - it gives you a choice of layout, and specific areas to place your tite, subtitle, content and footer.

There are the standard basic editing functions - bold, italic, font, alignment. And you can add Google widgets to the bottom of the page.

But it’s basically just a one-page website. The equivalent of a single myspace, or spaces, page.

It’s still in Beta, and you access it via your Gmail account. The main reason I checked it out was because I had received a newsletter during the week from one of my least-favourite internet marketers (he always seems to be flogging stuff), that apparently creates heaps of Google pages for you, for the point of generating quickly indexed incoming web pages for SEO. I didn’t buy it, as I hate automatically-generated web pages, but I had forgotten all about googlepages. And so it was time to try it out.

Edited to say I just created another one for Rugby League Form . This time I tried adding a few widgets, as suggested by Google. The standard problems finding widgets that cater for Australia, as most are customised by zipcode, assuming that everyone lives in the US. Oh well.

Also noticed the option to edit the HTML, so I guess we can do more than is immediately obvious. Maybe next week.

I’m always on the lookout for free and cheap SEO resources. And I get all the SitePro News emails that sometimes have interesting articles, and sometimes just have ads.

Some ads are so freqently repeated I don’t even bother opening the emails. For example all their ads for Top Search Rankings that recommend IBP - which I already have.

So for once I clicked on a SitePro email that promised “Top Google Rankings Strategy”. It had a free resource, so I signed up. And then got passed to a page offering a paid SEO review. It mentioned one of their success sites, so I checked it out.

Guys, if you’re going to use a site as an example of your SEO work, next time make it a good one. There were H2 headings in comments. There were no alt image tags. There was way too much inline formatting that should have been in CSS files.

There was a lot of room for improvement. At that rate, I don’t think I’ll waste the time reading their free resources. I’ll save my time for the Stompernet trial.

good luck.

Today I was doing some search engine submissions for Rugby League Form. I use a few tools: WebCEO first, to produce reports on current rankings and listings, and then IBP to do the actual submissions.

It’s not completely automated - IBP has a list of search engines and directories, and once you’ve defined the settings, it automatically fills the fields for you, in each seach engine. So you have to hit the submit button a few times. And then later you get confirmation emails for each, that you have to confirm. But it’s better than manually entering details.

My annoyance came in one of the confirmation emails at Jayde - a well respected search engine.

The confirmation page had a big ad for free submission to 350 search engines. All it asked for was your URL. That seemed harmless, so I entered it. Then came another page - details for isubmit.com. It mentioned free trial, so I kept going. Then a page for keywords and meta tags. Again harmless, so keep going. Then a page of contact details. A little annoying, but I kept going. Then you discover that it’s only 1 month of free submission. Keep going, but the doubts have set in. And finally the killer - it asks for your credit card details - and $50/month after the first free trial.

You can bet I cancelled out after that.

No indication of which search engines were included. No upfront notification that credit card details were going to be collected. And any search engine that allows monthly submission is probably not one that’s going to contribute much. What a waste of time.

It doesn’t make me think much of Jayde, referring me to a site like that.

Bruce is our resident Fractal Lover.

When you see some of the images generated by Apophysis at Techrepublic , you’ll understand why.

There are lots of images on the post for you to click through.