CrankyRants.com

The U.S. Commerce Department and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have renewed their contract for ICANN to operate the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) function for five more years.

This means that authority over the Web’s domain names will remain under U.S. control until 2011. Various non-U.S. countries and interests had campaigned to place the control with an international organization like the United Nations or with private corporate interests.

There are plenty of opinions about the U.S. pushing their views on the world through this authority. Look no further than the demise of the .xxx extensions… not that I would have taken part or admitted to doing so. But Cranky.xxx would have had a nice ring to it.

On the whole the decision isn’t a huge surprise. And the threats by some European Nations to simply host an alternate name server network are just plain dumb. But as the online economy continues to engulf larger chunks of the global economy, expect the issue to become more heated and much more difficult to resolve 5 years from now.

BIS provides background checks to employers globally.

As the search engine algorithms evolve, what was once… no longer is. All of the tried-and-true methods of pounding the importance of your page to the top now lie at the bottom of the webmaster’s tackle box like a half-barfed up Red Wiggler. (”The Cadillac of Worms!”)

Now more than ever, the quest for backlinks and 3-way links is tantamount. And what better way to get them than by offering up a service that doubles as a link to your site. File hosting sites do it. So do make-your-own emoticon and MySpace Sign Generator sites like TextOnImage.com. You’ve seen them: Pick a pic. Type your text. Copy and paste the code to your site or forum post or myspace account.

So let me get it straight. I get to walk around the net pimping YOUR site with a backlink… plus I get a novelty image with “CrankyRants Rules” or something on it? And this costs me nothing?

Sign me up, brother. Mind if I put your adsense code on my sites while I’m at it?

www.textonimage.com

Running an online magazine is a perfect venue for content-rich pages. There are plenty of opportunities to hit a wide audience with focused paid advertising, which is the main goal of any publication. But just because you’re a hack designer with a decent domain doesn’t mean you’ll rake in the readers. Designing and running an eZine takes a little more work than cranking out another free-script proxy site. 

Take a look at BrainBucketMagazine.com. Motorcycles, idiot… it’s got nothing to do with flesh-ripping zombies. That’s another name for a half-helmet. Here’s an eZine that provides daily content, reviews, tech tips, and most importantly… babes. When I finally perfect my “What they clicked first” algorithm, most sites will be able to document the fact. Guys will ignore all other content and click on any form of babe or babe-related item first. Plain and simple. If the “Daily Lutheran Ministry and Oatmeal Recipe” website had a link to hot Lutheran mamas posing with bowls of oatmeal? Yeah, their traffic would probably go up.

Motorcycles are a little easier, though. And this site is a good example of how to organize your information. Quick access to the articles. Plenty of fresh content to keep the spiders interested. They’ve even got a link to an accompanying mySpace account to hit up traffic on multiple fronts. Keep it simple and do it like this, and you’ll watch your subscriptions rise. And if you know your audience is looking for it, throw in babes. Everyone. Clicks. On. Babes. It’s an historical fact. That and oatmeal recipes.

There are volumes of information available online about digital marketing and website promotion. Hundreds of posts on hundreds of boards will give advice on which directory to post what request for a link exchange with which site relevant to what content without which no site will succeed.

“What?”

Exactly. Lost in the alpha-net soup of the hows and whatfors of internet marketing is the virtually forgotten realm of traditional marketing for websites. Obviously you don’t want to ignore the digital marketing aspect, because truth be known that is where most of your traffic will come from. But there is a certain satisfaction that goes along with the idea of “Wearing Your Site” to events and public gatherings.

If you travel or attend events that offer up a lot of eyes, five them something to look at by wearing something with your web address on it. I know plenty of people who make their own t-shirts, or use a button maker to create their own wearable artwork. In fact, the button machine comes in handy if you would like to advertise multiple sites. Just print a bunch of buttons and add plenty of web “flare” to your shirt, jacket, or in some cases, your giant over-sized novelty cat-in-the-hat poofy hat.

Here’s the key, though. Don’t go nuts with it. I don’t mind seeing someone’s product or site on their shirt or hat, as long as it’s tasteful. Which I guess the poofy hat is not. But I can’t stand people who wear crap that just screams “I’m desperate. Visit My Pathetic Site”. God knows we’re all desperate to get traffic. But you don’t have to whine about it in t-shirt form. Show a little dignity and tone it down somewhat. The last thing you want to do is drive people away from your site just because you had to be obnoxious and use giant unicorns dancing around your URL in bright neon green. Does not make me want to go. 

You’ll find entry level jobs at CollegeRecruiter.com.

For every drop of rain that falls, a web directory grows. Everyone has one, everyone lists on one. They will soon outnumber Starbucks in the “Most Things in the Universe” category… which is likely it’s own category on some web directory somewhere.

The web directory is a popular site to build because there are lot’s of scripts out there to maintain a web directory, and there are plenty of potential customers in the millions of webmasters who want to drive more traffic to their sites. Perfect match, right?

And there’s the problem. So many link directories, so few good one’s that will actually help your site. There’s little point in listing on a directory that has no traffic and no chance of being properly spidered by a decent search engine. If one doesn’t already exist, someone should create a web directory of web directories so we can keep them all straight.

In the case of CrankyRants.com, I’ve chosen to list with an SEO Friendly web directory that is also highly ranked with the search engines. This solves the problems above. Lot’s of happy text-based directory structure to provide additional content to the spiders. And hopefully plenty of traffic from those simply searching around.

Listing with a directory is of course just the first step in marketing a site. The more listings with quality directories the better, so don’t stop at one. But with hundreds of them out there, definitely stop at around 20. If you can list with the top 20 web directories at first, you should feel confident that your site is on it’s way to stardom, then concentrate your efforts on other methods of promotion. Like link exchanges, tattoos of your logo, and poorly written web addresses painted on the side of your car. Classy!

As we wallow through the age of “Dot Com Is Already Taken”… you have to marvel at the creativity of some web site owners. For those with deep pockets, it’s no problem at all to drop a few figures at Sedo and get what you really want. For those without the means, i.e… the rest of us… we’re left to fend for ourselves.

Take Dogs for instance. Hundreds of thousands of sites out there currently sling their dog collars and dog chains and little doggie dinners at us from just about every pet site name under the sun. After the obvious names are gone, how is an honest person supposed to manage their pet product sales and get a name out there that will float to the top of people’s hearts and minds? Simple… you make it cute, catchy, and long-lasting. You make it PoopyPuppies.com. 

Love this name! I was very pleased a few months back with an unusual and catchy name for a pet site tailored towards crazy pet people, which wouldn’t take a combo rocket scientist/veterinarian to figure out. But PoopyPuppies beats me out hands down. Practically markets itself, though runs the risk of attracting a somewhat “unwanted” crowd looking for actual photos of the topic. You know who you are.

Need to start a new section here simply calling attention to “out there but brilliant” domain names. Everyone has one they’re proud of. Send ‘em if ya got ‘em.

So you just bought a new PR2 domain name from someone and it’s sitting in your account. No site, no content, nothing but the name. Now what. There are some quality links to the domain right now, and some pages exist in the search engine databases. But it’s only a matter of time before you get found out. Like the sentries in Minority Report, the spiders are always scrabbling about, looking for good content. Or in your case, dead content.

If you want to keep the page rank you just paid for as well as the physical links, you need to act quickly. Google may be slow to index, but they’re quick to drop if they find bad info. Within the first week of ownership, if possible, get started building the basics of the site, focusing on the pages with an existing page rank. Even if the content that you’re putting up is different from what the engines expect, it’s better than a dead link.

Now for the patchwork. Find out what sites currently link to these pages by performing a “link search” on Google. Identify the referring pages, and try to match the content that the page is expecting. You might even contact the owner’s of the site to strike up a relationship with them. More happy links make for a happy spider.

Next, try to preserve the existing page links in the major search engines. This can be tricky, especially if you are using a different scripting language than the previous owner. Try to find a cache of the pages on Google, Yahoo, or http://www.archives.org/ and grab as much of the original content as possible. If it even remotely relates to your new site, throw it up there and do what you can to make the links point to your new page.

Matching the links is the toughest part of the job. Copy and paste the links from Google or Yahoo into Excel, and be prepared to do a lot of string manipulation. Ideally you can take all of the existing search results, such as http://www.crankyrants.com/?p=194 and tie them with the critical information from the original page, such as title, tags, or content itself. If you’re site is database driven, you can then format the spreadsheet accordingly and push all of the information into a table. Now when any of the search engines come looking for an article or page, you at least have some of the familiar information waiting for them. Given enough time, you can then go in to backfill any content if you would like, further strengthening the pages.

The final step has already been mentioned, but it’s worth bringing up again. Outside links to the site. Very important. It’s hard enough to acquire backlinks these days, so if at one time a site had a quality link to your new domain, try your best to re-establish the relationship. If the link to your site is still present, just make a note of the location. If the link is now gone, email the webmaster and offer services or minor links to keep the link going. These are all key elements that went into the building of the page rank for your new domain, and everything you can do to maintain it will only help in the long run.

When you first launch a website, you naturally want all the content crammed into it that you can lay hands on. But if it’s real traffic you’re looking for, consider taking a more patient approach.Anyone involved in SEO can tell you that organic growth of relevant content is the most successful long term strategy for search engine placement. When people read that, however, their brains toss the part they don’t understand or want to deal with: “organic.” What they see is “successful long term strategy” and “search engine placement.” And that’s where the trouble starts, because it’s the organic growth that does the work.

What do people mean when they talk about organic growth?

Organic growth means slow, steady, continual growth - the way plants and animals grow. When Google ranks your site they look for this pattern of growth to help determine whether your site is “for real.” Think of an informational site you visit a lot, a forum perhaps, or a site like Wikipedia. Those sites did not spring into being overnight, chock full of content and with a hundred links pointing to them. They started as miniatures of themselves, and as people posted messages and articles they got bigger and bigger.

How can this be harnessed to help promote a website?

Timing of updates can be more important than size of updates. A lot of webmasters have a hard time updating their site regularly. They have day jobs, families, and other websites to run. This can lead to a tendency to update sites in large infrequent chunks.

To get the maximum benefit from your updates, do this instead: When you get time to update your site, prepare and arrange your new content so that it can be uploaded in small pieces. Get everything ready to go so that the only task remaining is the actual publish. Then upload each small piece separately, allowing a day or two to pass between each upload.

By doing this your website ends up with the same content, but search engines monitoring how frequently you update will see a pattern of steady growth. You can still write or gather all your content in one fell swoop, just dole it out to your webserver slowly instead of as a single publish. You won’t see immediate results, but give this a month or two and search engines will take notice, to your benefit.

Oaseo spiders the Internet in order to bring its users the largest number of SEO jobs in the country.

Web 2.0 is a term that describes the second generation of functions accessible on the World Wide Web, the largest server in the world. With the new technology users are capable of sharing information in a way they were never able to before. With Web 2.0 a user’s Internet experience is much more like that of desktop applications than the original stagnant Web sites.

A popular feature available with Web 2.0 that is commonly used is blogs. These interactive components are a keystone characteristic of Web 2.0. Using Web 2.0 allows more people to find usage on the Internet because now shopping online is available. This has widened the market for multifarious companies. Some of the visual components of Web 2.0 sites are the use of three-dimensional aspects, large and sometimes highlighted text, and colorful displays. Along with the visual features, most Web 2.0 sites use meaningful URLs that convey what the website offers.

Unfortunately, there are not set standards for Web 2.0, which means that to some Web 2.0 means using HTML to a degree where everyone with a browser can access their site, but to others it means that anyone that is not using JavaScript, their site will be completely unusable.