SEO, marketing and programming

HTML_QuickForm - this is the package I’ve been looking for for the latest week :) It automates form management in PHP in a very nice manner. I’ve already tested a couple of third-party classes and they either contain bugs (and the project I intend to use it in is critical) or they don’t have the functions I need. I will test it (in particular, I was looking for such a package since I have a big project going on with lots of forms) and update this post with some experiences.

UPDATE: so, here comes some input.

QuickForm is easy to use and has all the functions I expected it to have. One possible bug/problem I found was that you can’t set the default value for a <select> using SetDefaults(…). Neither using indexes or the actual values works :( Other than that, everything is great: forms are constructed with a few lines of PHP, new validation rules are easy to add (one small disappointment was that it is impossible to provide a custom error message from within a validation rule), the form can be “frozen” and shown to the user. Another important thing is that the documentation is reasonably good for such a project (I never had to look at the source code, just dig deeeeep into the help file sometimes :) ).

I like the PEAR packages. Now that I’m pretty sure they work I think it’s worth to take the time to examine some of them. Particularly, these look nice to me: a progress bar, AJAX library (you can’t have enough of them! ;) )

I haven’t posted for a long time since I’m totally consumed by all the stuff that I’ve been doing lately. First thing, I’m working on a *smart* link exchange system. There is much work left, but I’ve started testing it already, so maybe 40% of the code is already written. Second, I got some clients that need attention, and last but not least I’m constructing a Carcasherdotcom Seocontest network, the last page can be seen above.

I’ll post updates on the link exchange system and CS when progress is made :)

When the PageRank algo was first invented, it was almost perfect: it used the semantic structure of the web, counting links as votes. Google was a small company that nobody knew of, and nobody cared about.

But now, when Google gives many sites 50-70% of their traffic, the incentives to cheat the algos are bigger than ever. It is very much like physics: you cannot measure a system without changing its state. Same thing happened here: now, every effort is not spent on linking to useful sites, but linking to sites that you have an interest in linking to.

Pragramtic webmasters put rel=”nofollow” on all “useful” links (that are intended for visitors), and only leave some sold or links to their own pages without the nofollow property. This works short-term, but in the long term it will destroy the semantic structure and, as a result, Google will have to invent a new way of ranking websites. So in the long term, this strategy won’t work.

Footnote: this should not be interpreted in any way that I dislike the “nofollow” param or that I don’t use it myself. These are just my reflections=)

Check my contest page for The Four Required Words seo contest.

Here, you can see a chart over how different people are performin in this contest.

This contest is small, so I’m doing this more for fun than for profit.

I’ve done some interesting observations on the IDN & filename fix that Google has applied to its Swedish version.

Until recent, Google could not handle IDN properly. It showed up something like “%c4pple.se” instead of äpple.se. You can see an example here on MSN.

There are still problems with the Toolbar PageRank.

Anther interesting thing is that we now can confirm that google treats o=ö, a=ä, å in filenames. You can see this by searching for a phrase that should contain any of the letters ö, ä, å, but contains their correspondents in english, e.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=sokmotoroptimering

A fynny side-effect of this is that if you search for a word that should not contain å, ä, ö; e.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=sokmötöröptimering

UPDATE: I won’t work on this one. I just hope that my image will be grabbed by the Google Images engine, that’d be interesting.

The Four Required Words is a small seo contest, but I entered it since I want to test wheather a page can win with only (well, we’ll see) internal links. Nobody seem to take it very seriously, neither do I. Strange keywords, The Four Required Words, moahahahaha. I’d say fourth required word instead. Hahaha. You have to have a link to them, but at least they allow to put nofollow on it, unlike som other contests. For obvious reasons, I’ve done so.

You can see the current positions here: The Four Required Words Contest Positions

The Million Dollar Screenshot

Since there are prizes for image search and I’ve been interested in how the Google Images ranking algo works, here is my “The Four Required Words” image:

Now, I’ve fixed some other carcasherdotcom dealings, I’m returning to the seocontest with a brand new Carcasherdotcom Seocontest domain. Feel free to visit link :)

And another new carcasherdotcom seocontest. I love carcasherdotcom seocontest!

I haven’t had time to work on this one for some time. I will return to the carcasherdotcom seocontest when I get som of my other carcasherdotcom fixed.

Carcasherdotcom Seocontest - doesn’t it sound magnificent? It is like poetry:

Car casher
dot com
Seo
contest

I personally love it. I think this masterpiece of “Carcasherdotcom Seocontest” should be visualized, so I asked a friend of mine to draw a piceture of carcasherdotcom seocontest. My frined is a really cool carcasherdotcom seocontest painter, so he did this:

carcasherdotcom seocontest image

I want to explain one thing to you. CCDCSC (carcasherdotcom seocontest) is a grand masterpiece of literature and is to be considered as that. Unfortunately, it is not yet famous enough to be compared to Sheakespeare or old carcasherdotcom writers. But the seocontest participants will certainly make it more popular and promote this masterpiece.

I’d love to tell you more about the carcasherdotcom seocontest but I’m very tired right now, so come back later for more!

The postiton chart has moved to the page gdymov.com/casherposition/

If you like the carcasherdotcom seocontest poem, please link to this carcasherdotcom seocontest page.

And yes, We support CarCasher.Com

And yes, you can email me at in fo ^at^ gd ymov.c om (think you’ll get that one)

Hey, do you know what? there is a another great carcasherdotcom seocontest page.

Carcasherdotcom seocontest MSN spaces entry by seo contest

carcasherdotcom seocontest

Please also consider visiting carcasherdotcom seocontest

Pages by Marcus:

carcasherdotcom seocontest

carcasherdotcom seocontest

So, here we have another SEO test, this time about keyword density.

http://seo1.info/density/densitemap.html

Results: Google - Yahoo - MSN.

The numbers in the filename indicate the density (keywords / total words).

A question that has bothered me for a while is if reciprocals are as good as one-way links and if they’re not, how much worse they are. So I’m performing this little SEO test.

gdseo testrecip

gdseo testrecip

gdseo testrecip

gdseo testrecip

gdseo testrecip.

To find out which is best, simply click this link: http://www.google.com/search?q=gdseo%20testrecip

Here is a chart over how the pages are connected:

The content is random lorem ipsum, the keyword density is exactly the same in all files.