I have a problem.

I want to rebuild my Halloween site, but I think I’ve left it too late for this year.

It’s currently just a hand-built site, which means it’s lightweight, runs quickly, and is really well optimised for SEO.

So good that its currently on page 1 at Google for halloween australia, halloween events, halloween costumes australia, and more.

It’s even translating into sales – I have links to affiliate companies on the site, and have referred a dozen sales for costumes and party goods in the last two weeks. So I really don’t want to mess things up.

But I wanted to make it more of a community.  Its pretty basic – you can’t upload PDFs of fliers, or have fancy fonts to advertise the halloween event. It needs more easy interaction.

Currently I have to manually approve all halloween events, to avoid spam. But if I make it better, people will be able to see straight away what their event looks like, and customise it on the spot.

I have a new Drupal version of the site ready on my laptop. I just have to upload it, and re-enter all the halloween events that people have already added. And there are more growing, every day.

If I do301 permanent redirects, so that people clicking on old indexed pages are automatically redirected to the new pages, that would fix things in the short term. But every seo forum I read, the experts admit that redirect are eventually followed by a drop in listings. It’s never smooth.

Do I want to risk my good rankings this close to halloween? Or do I upgrade the site to make it easier to use.

A conundrum.

gotta say bing is nice is some ways.

it’s shorter to type than google.
and it really loves my old-fashioned hyphenated domain names.

i was playing with my online shopping site – www.myonlineshops.com.au tonight, cos a couple of shops asked if they could be added.
then thought i’d see how it was ranking.

not for the title – myonlineshops. there’s not much competition for a single word like that, so it easily appears at number 1 on google, yahoo and bing.

but i had originally targetted “online shopping australia” – it’s the second half of the title on the home page.

so i went to bing.com to see how it ranks.

oops. i forgot that i had bought online-shopping-australia.com.au a while back, planning to experiment with a shopping comparison engine.
didn’t end up building it – just did an empty drupal install, and left it there, while i went ahead and built myonlineshops – with lots of drupal bells and whistles.

so purely based on the domain name, with one sentence added, it ranks number 4 at bing for a competitive keyword. the page title is still drupal, for goodness sakes.

mind you, even yahoo gives me a page three result for the empty site, so yahoo still has a little domain name slant.

it’s nowhere on google of course – there are no incoming links. Although why not add one: Online Shopping Australia

Also checked my old web design site from years ago. Yep, Bing likes web-design in the name – a nice position 5. I don’t use it anymore – just leave it there for the residual page rank.

And my healthy home business is number one for work from home in australia.

bing, i think i really like you.
even if you remind me of the irish terrier dog down the road, also named bing, with the horribly dribbly chin.

these shameless plugs will really have to stop soon.

lol. or as my kids say: L.

It’s faster to search for “keyword tool”, than to type in the address. Especially when I know Google will always display the result that I want in the first position. But the above result shows two similar results. Look closely.

Yes, there are slight differences – one url has .au, for Australia, so when the resulting page displays, the country is preselected. But everything else is the same – surely that would have been enough to trigger the duplicate filter, and only display one result.

Unless you’re Google, of course.

I’ve been revamping  Australian Flower Shops again lately.

I originally started the site back in late 2003, and it’s had 2 makeovers since.

It’s actually fun going on the Wayback Machine, to see how the layout and content has changed over the years. I’ve finally gone away from the green colour scheme that seemed to be a fallback for a few of my sites.

Surprisingly, there hasn’t been much change to the content. Back in 2003 I was teaching myself SEO, and the trend back then was hyphenated domain names and filenames and reciprocal link exchanges.  So I still have hyphenated domain and filenames – there’s no need to throw away the history, and if someone offered me a nice link that still remains, then I’ll keep it there, as you should.

And my keyword research back then showed that there was less competition for the long-tail phrases like “floral emblems of Australia“, than initial seaches like “flowers”.

It was easy to rank on Yahoo using hyphenated names, and I would get regular organic traffic from there and MSN. Google was always a hard nut to crack.

But despite the amount of time that I spend researching SEO and web development, with a normal job during the week, plus a couple of kids and dogs, I never really spent much time refining the site.

So recently I decided to try and vamp it up.

Being lazy, I bought Confession of a Lazy Internet Marketer, and was surprised to find that I was already doing 80% of the content and structure approach that he suggested.  Way back in 2003.

So as usual it comes down to SEO.  Some of his techniques I won’t use, in the link exchange area – I don’t feel like getting an ongoing paid membership to a linking site. But some of his other techniques for SEO are quite good. It’s interesting how they also overlap with some of the techniques used in 30 minute backlinks, which I also bought recently. So I will be using some of their techniques that they have in common. I think the 30 minute backlinks suggestions are easier for less technical people.

But I haven’t actually done any of their suggestions yet. I’m about halfway through preparing the groundwork.  So my Google rankings still need a lot of work.

And now I’m about to go out to a door shop, cos I really need to fix up the bottom room – it’s too crowded and dog oriented, and needs simplicity and lightening up.
Like a lot of websites I know.

One day the site will be finished. And then I can go on and revamp some more websites.

I had to drive into the city last night for a dance lesson.
Was pretty happy to find a generous parking spot across the road from the St James Hotel.

But unfortunately FailPerson – the St James Jerk was there.

It took me 5-6 attempts to get my car straight, with enough room not to get parked in (I got parked in once for 3 days). I heard some background noise, but ignored it until I got out to pay the parking meter.

It was FailPerson, at the St James Hotel, who decided he would impress his friends with his ability to hurl abuse at a single woman, having obvious troubles parking.

For about 5 minutes he shouted abuse, accusing me of taking up too much room, the economy, and anything else he could think of.  Really really loud yelling.

Assuming he was just a drunk, I was going to ignore him, but he continued to hurl abuse, getting everyone’s attention from the hotel, bus stop and the street.  Not wanting to be a pushover, I crossed the street to see what his problem was.

He wasn’t drunk. He was just a pathetic young jerk, who liked the sound of his own voice, trying to impress his friends, a  pack of guys and girls in their late 20s.

In a just world, the St James Hotel staff would have come outside to see why one of their patrons, sitting at their tables on the footpath, was creating a disturbance.

If his friends had any courage, they would have told him to shut up.

He looked soft and stupid.
He wouldn’t have wanted people to shout at his own mother.
He wouldn’t have had the guts to shout at a Hells Angel bikie.
But thought it was ok for him to yell at a woman alone.
He probably kicks dogs and small children.

I don’t like making mistakes. I even asked him if he wanted to help me park better, instead of just shouting abuse about it. He did.

But I was shaking and near tears when I got to the dance studio. I don’t like pubs, loud noise, or confrontation.

Is this really what young jerks think is ok these days?

Gotta say I wish I’d taken his photograph. The temptation to GoogleBomb his picture so that his face/Facebook page would be shown for the search “FailPerson” or “St James Jerk” would be hard to resist.

If you know who is is, feel welcome to tell me. I don’t always resist temptation.
Henceforth his name is FailPerson.