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First Attempts at SEO

I've had this past week off of work as part of my annual holiday leave and decided to spend the time doing things that I just didn't while I was at work. With the best of intentions I managed to get only half of what I wanted done, and got sidetracked on another tangent. One such tangent led me to put some more effort into getting visitors to my site. The first part of this involved writing a couple of new articles for Google to index, and the second part had me sign up to a forum and a mailing list. I've tried to be take a very proactive approach with this last part, as it is an extremely efficient way of driving traffic to my website without resorting to 'tactics'. Like I've detailed in one new article: How to Optimise Your Site for Search Engines , the whole point is to answer questions accurately, as this means that people are more likely to value the content on my site. The whole process has been a bit of an eye-opener however, as it really does make you understand that just when you thought you knew most of what there is to know on a subject, there is always so much more to know. Wasn't it Socrates who said The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing?

The SEO process hasn't been without its problems though. I was happily signed up to the PHP general mailing list at www.php.net when on Friday, all my replies were being sent back undelivered, as if the domain did not exist. After a little digging, it turns out that my hosting provider, which deals with my email, has somehow found itself onto a blacklist, and ironically enough, one of the blacklists it found itself on was its own! This has caused a few problems, as I am now only able to reply to individuals, not the mailing list, so the SEO value has been completely shot to pieces. A suggestion by one of the other mailing list members prompted me to sign up for a Google Mail email address, which should solve the problem. It seems that the effects of spamming are more than just clogged bandwidth and inboxes.

I've been on the receiving end of a lot more spam recently, most of them containg a popular current news story as the subject line, and videos of various celebrities or hilarious circumstances. Of course, being a Linux user and having no fear of viruses, I had to click at least one link just out of curiosity. I did find it funny that the site claimed my ActiveX control was out of date (Linux with ActiveX controls, excuse me?!) and popped up a layer which was very similar to a Windows XP dialogue box. Seconds later, a file download appeared, for an exe file no less. Now, call me skeptical, but I don't think that was a codec. I'm of the opinion that it was probably software to turn a Windows machine into a spamming machine, which seems to be happening more and more these days.

Another spam medium which seems to be getting some more use these days is Live Messenger. Again, being a Linux user, I don't have to worry about what I click on, although this is probably a bad attitude to have. Spammers are even infiltrating wikis, which is a shame, but there isn't really all that much that can be done without destroying everything a wiki is about.