Google Maps Street View Fail

Andy Uncategorized

These days there are a lot of fake SEO experts and firms out there. SEO can be a very worthwhile investment with massive ROI potential if it is done right. When you look for SEO services it is crucial that you are able to spot the difference between a true expert and a phony. I’ve saved you some trouble and listed some simple ways to out a phony.

Ask them to name some industry leaders

If they don’t mention Matt Cutts, Aaron Wall, or Rand Fishkin it’s an obvious sign they are likely bogus.

Ask for verifiable examples of their work.

Request specific web sites that they can prove to own, either via a whois lookup or have them modify the page in some specific way to prove it is theirs when possible. Make sure that the term they are ranking for is actually fairly competitive and they were the ones responsible for achieving that rank. It’s understandable that they’d need to keep their client’s identities under wraps in most cases, but they should be able to provide you with something if not their own web site.

Get some statistics on their web site

Check the Google PageRank, the Alexa Rank, and the Compete Rank of the supposed SEO Expert’s web site. A good way to do this is using the FireFox plugin-in SearchStatus. They’re likely not much of an expert if they don’t have a Google PageRank or an Alexa Rank or a Compete Rank. I mean if they can’t optimize their own site, what’s to say they could optimize yours?

Google the supposed SEO Expert’s name

If they don’t have a very common name and they’re not in the top 10 results, it’s an obvious sign they either don’t really know their stuff, or they’re not serious about being an SEO expert.

Ask them if they can guarantee you a #1 spot in the search results for a competitive phrase

If they say yes they’re a phony. Obviously it is easy to be #1 for “the most ridiculously specific and completely worthless longtail keyword in the universe” – hell my blog is probably #1 for that now and it’s just in the body text of my blog post. You get the point.

Ask them how important keyword density is

If they try to tell you of a spurious magical ratio it’s time to consult a real expert/firm.

Ask them how important search engine submissions are

If they try to tell you you actually need to submit your site to search engines you’ve caught them in a lie. That or they just have no idea what they’re talking about.

See if they have gone to Google Webmaster Help to get answers on how to do basic SEO

Andy Search guides, methods, seo, tactics

1. The well replenishes your health and mana when you’re near it.
2. All the really good items are in the woods.
3. In order to make the best weapons you have to buy items that fulfill certain recipes.
4. Orb effects do not stack. That is, if any of your hero’s abilities say “orb effect” then you should not buy any items with orb effects or they will interfere with one another. For the same reason you should never buy more than one item with “orb effects”.
5. Avoid feeding or letting your hero die as much as possible.
6. Begin using strength heroes to get a feel for the game, then move to agility, and then to intelligence heroes once you really start to understand things.
7. Boots are always necessary fairly early in the game. Power treads are always a good call. The other types of advanced boot variations are not always practical.
8. In the beginning of the game melee heroes need to stay back a safe distance so they don’t lose so much health they have to run back, but they have to remain close enough to creep battle to get experience as well.
9. Know that the river contains runes in two places that appear randomly and are free. These runes include abilities like: double damage, invisibility, illusion, haste and regeneration.
10. It is important to deny opponents. You can deny creep kills, tower kills, and hero kills. Deny creeps by killing your own creeps when they’re about to die by attacking them with your hero, simultaneously try to prevent your opponents from doing the same to you. Deny towers in the same way. A good way to deny hero kills is either by using an ability to damage yourself to death if your hero has the option and you know you will be killed otherwise, or run into neutral creeps for the same reason.
11. There is a giant creep in the middle right side of the map named Roshan. Killing this creep is difficult, but when done results in more gold for your team and Roshan drops the item Aegis of Immortal. This item when carried will bring you back to life after you die in the same spot you died, as though you didn’t actually die in the first place.
12. Be careful whenever your by yourself and the entire opposing team is MIA or not shown anywhere on the mini map, they may be planning on ganking you or attacking you as a team. Make sure to warn teammates when the opponents in your lane are MIA so they are aware of the potential danger.
13. There are two building at both ends of each lane known as “rax” or “barracks” — destroying both of these buildings will make your creeps in that lanes more tough and give you a major advantage in the game.
14. Make sure to get the final blow on as many creeps, towers, and heroes as possible so that you retain the gold from the kill. When killing hereos, make sure to stay near them when they die so you get the experience from their death.
15. Whenever there is a new version go to http://www.getdota.com to download it, don’t try and download it from people who are hosting games. If you need training you might want to start off by playing computers, you can get AI versions of DotA from http://www.getdota.com as well.
16. Don’t leave a game until it’s officially done. It’s just not cool and there’s far too many people doing it these days ruining the game for everyone.
17. There are a ton of different game modes, start training in the -apem mode so you can choose your own hero and not get killed by towers easily. Look for games with n00b in the title, because this game has an insane learning curve.
18. Respect IceFrog, he is responsible for making the game as amazing as it is.

Andy Uncategorized

Co-Worker SEO

After ranking third in Google for “Stephen Fluin” simply by mentioning his name once in only one of my blog posts…I’m curious where I’ll rank for these other co-worker’s names with more significant on-page SEO real estate dedicated to them. I’m also curious if I’ll move up even higher in the results for “Stephen Fluin”

Stephen Fluin

Project Manager

Jacob Larson

Project Manager

Joey Lunders

Graphic Designer

Doug Reeves

Business Analyst

Andy Uncategorized

Cuil results for my name "andy forsberg"

Cuil is Cool

• Cuil’s interface is cool & sexy.
• My blog is ranked #2 for my own name, rather than #6 in Google.
• Ad Free (so far).
• More thorough description of each web site w/ screenshots, rather than just first 155 characters like in Google and most other search engines.
• Supposedly searches 3x as many pages on the web as Google. Interestingly enough Cuil shows 9,149 results for my own name and Google shows 173,000. Cuil may only show more relevant results however.
• The text renders like any web page when you view it in Safari and/or Chrome, but does so even while you’re in FireFox and that is a beautiful thing.
• Switching between results pages is far faster than the popular search engines.
• Tabbed search results for popular search terms like my last name only “forsberg” = sweeet. Between me, the popular race car driver, and the guy from Brown, we still haven’t made the list unfortunately =(
• Timelines for popular people like “peter forsberg”
• Relevant category searches

Wolfram Alpha is Intuitive

• Launches sometime this month
• Hoping it doesn’t become subscription-based and will remain free
• A whole new species of search, even makes Google look immature
• Searching for “uncle’s uncle’s brother’s son” results in this:

Results of a search for “uncle’s uncle’s brother’s son”

• Searching for “bob” results in this:

• ReadWriteWeb did a full story on it, check out more about Wolfram|Alpha here.

Andy Search comparison, engine, new, Search

1. Require a form submission with a captcha, to get to any page on your web site.
2. Don’t use a page title or use the same page title for every page of your web site.
3. Link to as many shady spyware/virus-prone web sites as you possibly can.
4. Put loads of text that appears to be stuffed spam keywords in a text color the same as your web site’s background color.
5. Use a meta description on every web page on your site that reads “The requested URL was not found on this server.”
6. Make a text file named “robots.txt”, put this in it:

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /
   
   Then save it and upload it to the root directory of your web site.

7. Set all of your web pages to 301-redirect to new URLs, on new domains, every minute. Do the same only with 302-redirects every 30 seconds.
8. Sabotage all web sites that attempt to link to you.
9. Install a script that automatically creates 1,000 one-character variations of each one of your web pages, then links to all variations on each variation’s page.
10. Pull a John Chow.

Andy Uncategorized epic, fail, list, seo

So I was checking my stats today and was pleasantly surprised when I noticed a big spike in traffic. Upon further investigation all the extra traffic I received was from porn site style searches from Google and Yahoo! This made me feel less pleasant as you could imagine. I then checked out my Clicky account and it showed no sign of this extra porn traffic. Suffice to say I was a little bit confused.

Here are what each of the trends look like in Google Analytics versus Clicky for today:

Google Analytics shows traffic spike

Clicky reports no such traffic spike

Here are the top 15 keywords reported used to find my site in Google Analytics versus Clicky for today:

Google Analytics reports porn-related searches brought people to my blog

Clicky reports no such porn-related searches

Has anyone else had this happen to their site recently?

Andy Miscellaneous analytics, google, stats

People frequently spend money on crap software that a lot of the time has a better open source (free) alternative version available. This is a list of applications that most people should use not only because they’re the best of their breed, but because they are simultaneously free!

7-Zip

Ever encountered a compressed/zipped file that you were unable to extract/unzip? Never again.

Audacity

Ever been annoyed trying to use the Sound Recorder in Windows for longer than 60 seconds? I know I have. It’s possible but not optimal. In any case, Audacity records for as long as you want it to and allows for a plethora of different ways to edit your recording.

Foxit Reader

Sick of the Adobe PDF Reader freezing all the time? I know I am. Foxit Reader never freezes because it is lightweight and is therefore ridiculously fast!

GIMP

Can’t afford Adobe Photoshop? This is the best image editing software you can get that won’t cost you a penny. I’m not going to pretend that it is as good as Adobe Photoshop or even close, but it is constantly getting closer.

KeePass Password Safe

You have two options these days. Use the same password for everything and risk your personal security or use KeePass to make extremely unique and complex passwords for everything. You just need to make sure that you have backups of your password database, your master password is secure, and that you remember your master password.

Mozilla FireFox

The best web browser there is. All the plug-ins available make this browser immensely powerful for anyone. Great for anyone from the average web user to the professional web developer.

Mozilla ThunderBird

If you’re not into the whole web mail gig, this is the best email client there is by far. It doesn’t constantly freeze like Microsoft Outlook, it’s lightweight and very smooth. Nothing else compares.

NotePad++

This is essentially the default Windows Notepad only on steroids. It has lots of useful tools helpful to anyone. It has particularly useful features for developers.

OpenOffice

If you can’t afford Microsoft Office’s Suite, this is the next best thing. It can accomplish many of the same tasks, with a few bonus features that Microsoft Office doesn’t have to offer. Microsoft Office however is still far superior in most ways.

uTorrent

This is the fastest, easiest, and most powerful BitTorrent client I have ever had the pleasure of using.

VLC Media Player

Have you ever tried to play a video file and it didn’t work? It said you didn’t have the proper codec or the file has been corrupted perhaps. VLC Media Player can repair damaged files and has almost any codec you can find. If you can’t play a video in VLC Media Player it is very likely you won’t be able to play it with anything.

Andy Software free, open source, Software, tools

These scores are better than what I thought they would be considering I just put the site online like a week ago. For some reason the Grader badge doesn’t seem to be working. I’ll be sure to scan the site again in a month or so and do a comparison. Grader seems to think more highly of my site than SpyderMate. I was hoping SpyderMate would have more love for my site.

Andy Miscellaneous analytics, seo, stats, tools

I am currently 23-years old and I’ve been making web sites since I was only 12. Suffice to say I’ve created a lot of web sites over the years. I’ve gone through phases where I was working real hard and then slacking off for months. I’ve experienced a lot and I’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way. I’ve created this site to express myself and share my experiences over the years with the world. So to give you an idea of where I am now and where I’ve been, I thought I’d list of all the web site projects I’ve had over the years. At least the ones that are significant enough for me to remember.

I’ll explain each using the following format:

Web Site | My Age | Year

Summary of web site.

The List

South Park Fan Site | 12 | 1998

I began by creating a pathetic web site hosted on Geocities about South Park

PokeMart 2000 | 13 | 1999

I hopped on the Pokemon fad and scored lots of traffic. The people at ConsoleGaming.com were kind enough to provide my site with free hosting. I was contacted by Advertising.com and discovered I could make money from doing this stuff. I made around $250-500/month for a while there. It was great, I saved up the money and bought my first computer. Before this I used my family’s computer to do my work.

The Music Network RMP3.Net | 15 | 2001

I created an online music network, which hosted several large fan sites for various bands. It was essentially a music fan site network. This is when I began getting interviews with bands to post on the site, in addition to concert photos, fan art, forums, etc.

NeeHa | 15 | 2002

This was a private forum community I made for my friends that was password protected from the world. Definitely the best online community I’ve ever been in, because it was friends only.

AndyForsberg.com | 16 | 2002

This was essentially a community site for my friends. I would create pages about topics like: LAN Parties, Jack Handey Quotes, Fighting Salmon soccer team,  etc. I would also host sub-domain web sites for my friends to create whatever they wanted with.

Get Some Noise | 17 | 2003

Some Australian guy contacted me about running a full-blown online music community web site for him. He made it sound like he had some cash he was going to invest. He paid for the server and the domain fees, so I was on board. RMP3.Net essentially moved to Get Some Noise with a new design and new name. Eventually all the fan sites left and Get Some Noise became its own. Then randomly I completely lost contact with the Australian guy (who’s name I can’t remember) and I ended up buying up the domain and making it on my own.

Digital Fluency | 18 | 2004

I joined forces with Stephen Fluin (a friend from high school) and created a web development company called Digital Fluency. This was our company’s official web site. Stephen maintains a personal web site of his own he called Mortal Powers.

Gamble Wisely | 18 | 2004

This was a gambling web site I always wanted to make, but never put enough effort into it. It sat on the web doing nothing for years before someone bought the domain name from us for a sweeet price. This was the only time purchasing a domain and reselling it has proved lucrative for me.

Get Some Lyrics | 19 | 2005

This was the first site Stephen and I developed from scratch together. It was a lyrics search engine.

Get Some Tabs | 19 | 2005

This was the second site Stephen and I developed from scratch together. It was a tablature search engine. We were forced to shut it down in 2006 due to a “DMCA violation”

Publisher Aid | 19 | 2005

This was the third site Stephen and I developed from scratch together. It was a web development tutorials, articles, and tips web site. We’d post lots of random useful advice for web publishers. It had the following categories: site strategy, promotion, generating revenue, hosting and developer tools.

Get Some Videos | 21 | 2007

This was the fourth site Stephen and I developed from scratch together. It was a music video search engine. We did not host any videos, just returned results from popular video sites like YouTube and MetaCafe.

Nowadays

These days I am working at MentorMate as a web marketing specialist, which is a software company based in Saint Paul, MN. I am currently working on the following two projects for MentorMate:

SpyderMate

SpyderMate is a free web-based SEO analysis tool. Just type in your web site’s URL and it will give you a good idea of how well your web marketing efforts are going.

TicketsFTW

TicketsFTW is a ticket comparison search engine. It reports all the most sought-after tickets for sale in the secondary ticket market and spits out the cheapest prices. There are no additional fees for using this service and it does not require registration to use.

In Summary

As you can see I have worked on a lot of web projects in a lot of different areas for the majority of my life. This is by no means a complete list of all the projects I have worked on. It is enjoyable to reminisce once in a while.

Andy Miscellaneous about