Ugh I need more time to update this site. Will likely turn this away from serious-ish things and combine this with MikeS.com since I at least have my name.blogspot.com. I keep forgetting about all the random sites I have out there - CateDunn (one of the RAWR folks) is ranking very well all over Google. argh!

Been a while since I posted on here as part of my little SEO experiment. Saw that my Twitter & Facebook (once opened up) actually ranked in the top 10 without any problems, especially with the crosslinking. I'm now working on an internal Excel course for colleagues and clients as, despite some comments, excel tends to be the tool most corporations can a) afford, and b) give access to their broad user-base - especially amongst marketing and sales folks (who don't need & shouldn't have to have experience in programming to accomplish their jobs). Was shocked to see it's been almost 3 years since I've updated this blog. Excel 2010 has been out now for a while and (finally) I've gotten access to it at work. They've made some basic changes - wont go into here - and upped the data capacity as well as the processing capability for it - hooray for Multi-core (4+) processing!

Anyways, might start updating this a bit more frequently. Might also repurpose this space and combine it with my WhoisMikeS tumblr so I only have one source to update.

Cheers.

Some SEO sites

So in my off/unemployed time I've been building up my SEO and online reputation skills - a friend recommended to me a few good sites, figured I'll post one here for future reference :)

http://www.woorank.com/ - Great site - for *free* it will scan your site's code and overall will tell you weak spots (alt texts are off, no meta tags or descriptors, etc.) - been using this to help speed up the site-optimization process :)

Obviously for a fee they'll dig into things like your individual pages, but still - a good site overall.

I'm working on a HTML/XML parser in excel that will allow me to dump the raw code in and pull out "problem" areas because while a site like woorank is helpful, often enough I need to compile documents detailing exactly what needs to be changed, and where. Anything to speed it up :)

Back in action!

Great articles on Search engines & their respective Bots (why Yahoo.com named theirs "Slurp" is completely beyond me):

http://ghita.org/search-engines-dynamic-content-issues.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

Posting these as I'm assisting in some SEO/online reputation work now :)

More to come!

Still finding that excel is the best top-level site-content parser, especially for search engines - they only have a few variable responses (probably tested and limited because they're trying to find the balance between stopping automated querying of their services (much like the old API they scrapped - by-passed ads and their revenue) and confusing their users with too many different cases.

Blog Updates

I'm aware this has basically completely dropped off. Good news:
1) My twitter is ranked naturally at #3
2) I actually got a promotion to Product Manager, which while great, is very time consuming

There's some thought as to taking this blog and merging it with my other site, where I can centrally manage content, as well as get some other people contributing.

Thought process around this is that a lot of the content that was supposed to drive my other site is actually generated from a program called Google Talk, which is a chat/IM program that allows you to archive AND search all chats you've ever had, via the Gmail interface. Since I've added more people in the last 3 months, conversations have increased as have the general content (pictures, links, recommendations, odd stories, etc.) and it's just too much to manage 2 sites.

I'm still interested in online reputation (it's a KEY and growing factor in business relations), my focus has just shifted elsewhere for now. I will keep this site up, but most of the content will be ported to the new site which will be decidedly less dry (or appropriate) but ultimately more interesting. And interesting is what drives content, and content is king!

Updates to site

I've made some updates to the site, as well as my Flickr account (some new photos, more on the way). I've mentioned StepRep a few times now. The widget on the right is a great ORM/SEO "tool" that uses queries you specify (such as the "Vincent Hayes Analyst" one) to generate a list of searchable results that's constantly updating. All you have to do is go into your StepRep "Reputation Management" profile, and approve/deny and "post to widget", and anywhere you have the widget uploaded will automatically create new relevant content. Currently all of my queries are oriented towards finding results for me, but I'm going to edit these shortly to start bringing up more content-related results :)

It's free, very easy to use, and uses your Google login.

I've been attempting to determine how their searches work, because it's not matching up with the Google results; for example, as proven, qualifying my name with 'Bridgeport' immediately brings up a lot of results (top 5!), but this tool cannot identify them for some reason - weird.

Just a quick note, updating my Flickr tonight, this is a placeholder post to track time of tags/content upload to ranking :)
I did update some of the tags on the pics I had up already.

Tried searching for my Facebook again, Google is definitely ranking it, but just cant find it in natural search (no qualifiers).