Search Engine Optimization as an applied art

Previously I considered SEO as a business.
I was wrong.

I am now disappointed by what other businesses thin about SEO.
It seems they just don't need it.

Another idea is to create real websites offering real services, move them onto the first pages of Google/Yahoo/Bing, and then sell customers to real offline services.

I see it the only way to apply SEO to real life.

No, I understand you can try to sell your service to someone else but that's the same rate race (more marketing job than SEO).
I'd prefer to concentrate on something but not doing everything at the same time.

So what I'm doing now:

1. Create a number websites advertising some services
2. Collect (in any way) the customers interested in those services
3. Find other businesses of this field and sell the customers to them

Will try.

Bingo!

Microsoft started new search engine.

Do you remember how strong was MS even 10 years ago?
It was a monster in the IT world and it seemed nobody could come even close to them.

Kind of the same Google is now, right? :)

Honestly, I like Google but at the same time I like MS Bing has an API with no limits.
At least for now.

Long live Microsoft.

Hi there

Google started to fight and filter websites which sell links.
The problem for google I think is that it's not easy to see a difference between paid and not-paid link.
Of course it's possible to check some signs related to some particular link-selling systems however I don't think google is going to fight with those. Obviously there should be some more clear ways to find such dependencies.

So that's nice to see google works on improving search results this way.
Does that mean the era of link-selling is either gone or close to?

Joomla 1.0.9 and Virtuemart 1.0.0 problems with MySQL 5

One of my clients just complained his Joomla/Virtuemart website stopped to work.
Joomla was pretty old, version 1.0.9, the same ancient version was Virtuemart.

The description was more meaningful: it looks working but the list of products is empty.
Admin panel however shows a lot of products and everything looks ok from that side.

The client was completely disappointed because nothing has been changed on the site since month ago when everything worked just fine.

The only major update on our server for that month was MySQL database upgrade from version 4.xx to MySQL 5.

And that was the answer:
Virtuemart's SQL statements just crashed on the new database.
I'm totally disappointed with both Virtuemart and MySQL and how they work with each other. :)

Here is the solution.

1. Find administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html/shop_browse_queries.php file and backup it.

2. Find the following line in the file

#__{vm}_product, #__{vm}_category, #__{vm}_product_category_xref,#__{vm}_shopper_group

and replace it with this one:
(#__{vm}_product, #__{vm}_category, #__{vm}_product_category_xref,#__{vm}_shopper_group)

There are 4 replacements required for the file.

3. Enjoy! or let me know if you have any problem...


So as I understand MySQL brought more restrictions on version 5 so your website might experience some problems with such upgrade.

Another problem with Google products

Found a problem with google products/services.

Google Chrome browser doesn't work well with Blogger service owned by Google now.
I already reported to Blogger support but no reply for the last two weeks, and the bug seems still here.

The problem is that I cannot upload a picture.
On a certain point Blogger complains about some strange error (some parameter missing) and refuses to go further.

So writing posts I do everything in Chrome,
then open Internet Explorer, login to Blogger.com, upload pictures, save the results, and then it works.

Other than that no problems with Chrome so far.
It works definitely much faster than other browsers.

The fall and crisis are here

Even "Google almighty" going down these days.

So that may mean market expectations regarding marketing budgets are not so high.
And earn something on advertisement may become a bit harder.

Following this idea we can find that doing something for advertisement may be not so attractive as before.

So the result can be a new direction for online investment and online business.

Market is not going down.
Market is looking for other ways to go.

Ebay payment gateway doesn't work with Google Chrome

Installed Google Chrome browser,
but couldn't use it on ebay.

Trying to pay there, ebay complains "Your Safari browser is bulls**t, please use another browser".

So nothing is perfect in this world I think...

Link exchange techniques

Sometimes I receive email messages that look like spam however it's not a spam.

Those are link exchange offers.

Like "Hi, let's do links exchange. Please place this link to your website and send us the URL, and we'll place the link too. Bye."

You know it looks like scam for me.
Some strange guys ask or even push me doing something promising to do something as well.
I don't even know you, why you think I should trust you?

But... what message may work in this situation?

I think if I receive something like this I would pay more attention to that.
"Dear Alex! I am so happy to find your website and I like it so much! I even placed a link to your lightseo.com (you can find it here....) And your link to my homepage would be very appreciated! Thank you!"

Do you think it should work better?
I do.