Website Optimization and Promotion

Internet Scams show their ugly heads in all kinds of ways. This article addresses a scam that this developer ran into while working as a freelancer on scriptlance. I’m not just talking about the way they ripped me off and suspended my account without reason when I tried to withdraw my funds that I earned by working through their service. I’m also talking about the multitude of jobs posted asking for providers to supply scam websites openly and arrogantly. Apparently Scriptlance has done nothing to stop these projects from showing up on their website, and has done less to remove these criminal projects from their site.

After repeated attempts to report criminal listings to the Scriptlance crew (managed by r3n3.com), the HYIP projects and Cheating Google projects persist on being listed. Why do I say HYIP is criminal if they have an entire page of HYIP projects listed at Scriptlance website?

According to Fraud in the Corporate Context by the US Dept. of Justice…

S.E.C. v. Lauer, 52
F.3d 667, 670 (7th Cir. 1995), Chief Judge Posner declared Prime Bank Instruments do not exist. So even if [a co-schemer] had succeeded in raising money from additional investors, it would not have pooled their money to buy Prime Bank Instruments.

Therefore, according to this ruling, there is no such thing as HYIP that does not exist without the sole intention of scamming it’s supporters. If you support or use HYIP programs, you are either a victim or perpetrator of one of the scams that the Dept. of Justice is interested in bringing to court.

The one HYIP that is recommended by the the Securities and Exchange Commission, the North American Securities Administrators Association, the U.S. Treasury, and the Federal Trade Commission is at the HYIP site Before you jump me for posting that, check out their site…

So, if this is such a widespread problem and internet scam, why do these types of jobs proliferate on ScriptLance even after repeated attempts to notify them of this type of project? There are sites like Quatloos that point out all kinds of financial scams and list HYIP frequently as nothing more than a scam… EVER. The US Treasury Public Debt website lists HYIP as nothing but a scam. ScriptLance has not employed any sort of filter to restrict jobs that refer to HYIP and try to employ web designers to create these sites. Why does this type of site proliferate on ScriptLance more than others? What is it that they do to protect people from this growing scam? Anything?

Has anyone else had a problem with getting quick service from Scriptlance? They can suspend my membership there, but can’t tell me why it was suspended within nearly 48 hours. I asked why it was suspended within an hour of it being suspended. What kind of a service do they run at ScriptLance.com? Has anyone been scammed by Scriptlance before?

*** EDIT
It has been over 48 hours without a response from Scriptlance as to why my account was suspended. They did ask me why I was using two accounts, but after I informed them that I only have th eone account within 40 minutes of their ‘reply’ I haven’t heard from them in nearly 48 hours after the last communication.

Is this the kind of thing that others have had to endure when using Scriptlance?

** NEW EDIT
It has been 5 days…. I heard one more response where they asked me virtually the same worthless question as the first time and interestingly enough, the question they asked was answered in the first response I sent them. They waited over 48 hours to ask me a question that was answered in the first paragraph I had sent them more than 2 days prior. I need to inform the BBB of this… This is the worst customer service I have ever seen… ever!

Search engine submission is perhaps the strangest, most useless SEO tactic I can think of. The term itself only mentions submitting a site to the search engines. I recently moved to a new location. One of the first things I did was to ’submit’ my address change to the post office, but I only did it once. It never occured to me to repeatedly submit this information on where I could be found.

This is not to say that submission does not have it’s place. I could see where submitting my info to the postal service once would ensure that I have the best possible chance of my mail (traffic) getting to me in a hurry. But lets face it, if I’m not an interesting person and I have bad manners, I’m not going to get a lot of fan mail (visitors).

Instead of constantly informing the post office of where I live in an attempt to gain fan mail, I’d imagine that I would have to improve who I was, how many people I knew, and the quality of people I knew in order to increase my fan mail. Of course we all know that you can get tons of mail from applying for credit cards or entering to win a new car with that little box by the supermarket door, but loads of junkmail doesn’t help my need for quality fan mail.

If it’s fan mail that I want I could even find a pen-pal service and get connected to many others who are looking for someone to write back and forth. This gives much better quality than the junkmail, but reciprocal links … umm, writing… takes quite a bit of effort and a whole lot of background checking or you’ll wind up writing to people who will get you in trouble! Next thing you know, I’m being investigated for consorting with known felons and two beats of the heart later, my mailing address is banned and I can never receive mail at that address again… not good.

Nope, the best way to get loads of high quality fan mail specifically addressed to me is to become an optimized website… umm, a better person. Add new qualities and pursue interests that appeal to the people I want to write me. Providing community service may give me a chance to get my picture in the spotlight and stir up some interest in who I am. Before you know it, I have friends coming out all over and powerful opportunities start opening up for me. Meanwhile, the guy down the block keeps checking an empty mailbox, stomping his feet, and paying someone else a fortune to fill out the submission form for the local post office. Maybe someone should tell him to wash his hair and wear clean clothes. nah, there’s someone now offering to fill out 20,000 forms for the post office… ooh, and they’ll do it every month…. must be worth it. Good luck, buddy.

Comptrio.com is announcing the release of it’s in-page “PR checker”. Click the image below and cut out the code snippet on the next page. Add it to your website and it will show your PR to all of your visitors as well as let you know how well your pages are ranking.

I am releasing this tool absolutely free for you to use. As a website optimization and promotion specialist, I am always being asked by people what their PageRank is. With this tool, you too can know where each page of your site stands in the eyes of Google.

If you are a WordPress user, I have a WordPress Plugin available for you to download, unzip, and upload to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder. Turning it on is easy as can be using the admin features of that blog.

Google keeps tabs on every page of your site, so be sure to use this tool throughout your website to see how they stack up against your competition. In the near future I plan to release an Alexa toolbar for your site which will reveal how much traffic your site receives compared to other websites. Stay tuned for updates to this and other website optimization tools from Comptrio.

MaxLocate will be an awesome starter script for websites using advanced location and search features. Geo ip functions make finding a restaurant close to you a cinch! Build national directories of listings by category then search for the closest restaurants, hotels, or car repair.

While actual coding of this project has not begun, plans are in place to deliver a script that is both friendly to programmers and Admins as well as users of the site. Plans are in place to make this work with several templating systems and that it provides absolutely 100% standards compliant code.

My intention is to make this so that the only requirement is PHP. If all goes as planned, it will be independent of any database management system. The goal is a work of Zen in the PHP world with a being that exists all on it’s own. The success of this project will be the ability for any designer to interface the script in any way they feel comfortable. Give it your own look or choose one of the beautiful designs we include with the download.

MaxLocate will be a revolutionary new product for an underserved niche of the web. Stay tuned to find out more as this project moves forward. I expect the first official release by December 2005.

There are many sitemap formats that all have ways to help your site get spidered by various means. 4 different formats for your sitemap spring to mind. Google, HTML, OPML, and Yahoo offer different ways for you to map out your site and get noticed. Sitemap generator services like AutoMapIt.com can create these sitemap files and keep them updated for you to make your life easier.

Google Sitemap uses an XML format to allow you to list the URL, date last modified, how frequently Google should spider your pages, and relative importance to the other pages on your site. The first time you submit a sitemap, you should go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps and sign up for an account. Google will decide whether or not they will crawl your site and how much of it they will, but for any quality site, this should direct them to all of your pages

HTML sitemaps tie directly into your site and are viewable by users of your site and Search Engine spiders alike. It is common practice that every page on your site links to the sitemap and that the sitemap links to every page on your site. Every Search engine no matter how simple can access your HTML sitemap and process it’s contents. It is no more than a webpage with links on it as far as spiders are concerned.

OPML sitemap is another XML format that predates the Google sitemap and helps browsers and some SE spiders to navigate your site. You may want to begin your search for OPML info at http://www.opml.org/. There are some good resources to research the exact format for OPML on the web in your favorite search engine so I won’t go into the ugly details here, but OPML is still a useful sitemap to have. There are a few implementations that exist using it and the potential is there for this to be bigger than Google sitemaps… if it wasn’t for the name. One of the benefits of OPML is that it works at the site level… as long as you have access to the pages, you can add an OPML sitemap and all spiders have an equal chance of finding your sitemap without the need for a special submissions process like Google uses.

Yahoo sitemap uses a format that allows you to place all of your links in a plain text file with each new URL on it’s own line. You can submit this file through the Yahoo Search submission page at http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request before you go to that page, compile a list of all of your pages with one URL per line and store it on your server as a .txt file. When you go to the Yahoo submission page, enter the URL of your txt file and they will be able to search your list as Google does. This format must be specially made for Yahoo and must be submitted directly through their form on their site. That makes this the least attractive solution, but why pass it up?

All of these sitemap formats have their strengths and weaknesses and all should be utilized for what they have to offer. Using all of the sitemaps available to you is one sure way to open your most hidden pages and ensure that all spiders can find your site and all it has to offer.

An excellent means of increasing ‘perceived’ load times is to use source ordering. This method places the flash code at the bottom of the HTML document, then sets it in place on the page using CSS code.

The HTML is simple to change by removing the Flash code and placing it in a DIV box

< div id="fla_movie"> Flash code < /div>

The CSS is fairly straightforward as well…

div#fla_movie {position: relative|absolute; top: XXpx; left: XXpx;}

I’ll leave the details of how to properly write the code to any number of sites dedicated to teaching basic HTML and CSS such as W3C Schools. I have used them often and still refer back to them at times.

What effect does this have on the page? Placing the HTML for the Flash Movie at the bottom of the file allows the all-important main content to load first. As a matter of fact, this method can be used to separate content from presentation to the point where you can alter your code structure entirely. You will be able to move the blocks around the page visually until it looks the way you want, then sort out each block of code in order of importance to your page. Place your relevant ‘Main Content’ section up top, followed by your navigation, footer, then your header at the bottom of the HTML file. You will have to experiment to find out how drastically you want to alter your pages, but I would suggest to start out by moving your largest images and flash files to the bottom of the page first.

If you clear your browser cache and visit your site for the first time again, you’ll see that it appears to load so much faster than before! I should point out that this offers no real increase in speed because the filesize never changes. It’s just the order of the parts on the HTML page that fools humans into thinking the page loads quicker. Humans are, after all, the goal of the Flash website afficianado.

There are two methods of rewriting URL’s. I mean besides the right way and the wrong way… URL’s can be rewritten to mimic files or directories. While directory rewrites may seem like a good way to handle very long strings of info, it may cause problems with many sites that use indirect links. Linking without using a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) is not a good way to handle linking in my opinion, but many commercial and open source CMS systems use it. The really sad thing is those are the most likely to need their URL’s rewritten.

The problem is when the two come together at the point where your pages URL looks like a directory and you have an indirect link to file in your main directory. Suddenly your http://www.domain.com/rss.xml is relocated to /news/rss.xml, and /news/Sep/05/2005/BlogTopic/rss.xml, and every other page of your blog. All of your pages using the directory style rewrites and indirect addressing on your links will generate a 404 error when being spidered or clicked by visitors.

To avoid this, use an FQDN in the source code for all of your links. This ensures that no matter where the link is shown, it will always point to the correct page. Using a directory style rewrite on the URL’s in the first place. Using a file-style rewrite will still cause problems with indirect addressing, so be sure to go through and find those indirect links and change them.

Source ordering is the practice of placing the most relevant page code at the top of your HTML file and using CSS to lay it out according to where you visually want to see the code.

< div id="nav">
nav code
< /div>

Placing blocks of code into named DIV containers will allow you to place the div on the page where you want to see it and place it in the code according to importance. We all know that the first text of an HTML file is the most crucial to spiders and that placing keywords at the top of your text is very important. Using this method the most important text, the main body of your page, is placed first in the HTML file. Your header may look nice, but it doesn’t help you rank well.

Ever notice how some help sites tell you to move your nav to the right of the screen to improve SEO? Why confuse all of your users who are used to nav on the left just to please the Search Engine spiders? What if I told you that you can keep your nav on the left and still get the same SEO benefits as placing it on the right? For that matter, how about placing your header code below your main content in the HTML of the page? And what about placing large flash files and images at the bottom of your page to allow the text to load first. The main text of the page is why your visitors came to that page… why make them wait for it?

If your header and other images on your page are unusually large, you may have a slow loading page. Placing these images and flash files toward the bottom of your page gives it a fast-loading appearance. Your customers can begin to read about why your product or service is so great before they finish waiting for the picture of it to load. This helps not only the SEO of your site, it helps customers on your site stay in a steady flow towards the conversion (sale, signup, newsletter). In many cases, moving a single flash animation or large graphic toward the bottom of the file will result in an increase in sales or membership. Using CSS, you’ll never notice a difference once the page is loaded. What you will notice instantly is that your page seems to load quicker!

The header that I refer to is a part of the site that pretty much everyone has in common. It’s the pretty graphics across the top of the page that goes from side to side and covers the top section of the page. Enclosing the header in a DIV and dropping it to the bottom of the code on each page allows the text on the page to load first. By the time the header loads, the visitor has already found the beginning of the text and has begun reading through it. The alternative would be to move on to another site while waiting for your images to load up on their page before they can find out about it.

As well as mathematically helping SEO, source ordering also helps to bring a perceived increase in load time which helps your conversion rate increase. Source ordering is the ultimate way to separate content from presentation and get all of the benefits you seek in one solution.

So why doesn’t everyone use it? While the benefits of CSS and standards compliant design are still being discovered and are becoming more mainstream, there is still an undying clutch on the old ways of doing things. Source ordering takes a higher degree of skill than klunky old table-based layouts which most wysiwyg programs like FrontPage put out. Source ordering can be confusing for non-programmers to look at because it does not mimic human logic… that the top of the page should be at the top of the file used to display that page. Source ordering will likely result in higher overall costs for your website as the code must be intelligently designed before the page begins to have it’s own look. This is another thing that scares most people off at first.

I have used source ordering on several websites with large pages and increased the perception of loading speed to enhance a users visit. This has also helped the search engines to rank the pages higher as their content is more readily accessible to a spider. Between getting better ranking and being able to keep visitors longer and improve your conversion rate, any additional expense of time and resources spent on proper source ordering has the potential to pay itself off and work out better for the website owner over time.

I was recently called in to stop a server attack in progress. The perpetrators were bombing a phpBB forum with a really bad setup in place. Simple tweaks like requiring users to have an account before posting messages and requiring them to verify email before they could post quieted the rebellion.

Another useful method to quiet the attack was catching IPs through the admin features of phpBB and then blocking IPs through the .htaccess file. I was also able to use the .htaccess to redirect 403-UnAuthorized server errors to a script that logs a whole load of information about every future attempt of this sort of server access. This log keeps a record of each attempt to access the server and includes information on the IP address, the page requested, date/time stamp, and any information the perpetrator may have been trying to pass to the server in order to ’sneak’ access into the site. There is some other info stored here, but I don’t want to give away all of my secrets on this topic

Back to phpBB: it has some great security features to make sure that when people try to bomb your forums with badwords and slanderous text, that you have some recourse in finding out “whodunnit” and helping your attempts to stop it. There is a badwords filter in phpBB that can be used to replace lists of badwords with text of your choice… this can be anything from weird ascii (!#@%$&*#!) to ‘pretty’ words. Imagine the next arguement in your forum when someone explodes and calls somone a ‘nice’ ‘person’ instead of … well, you can guess.

Needless to say, there are many ways to help prevent your forum from being attacked by malicious users. Comptrio has dealt with this in the past and I look forward to helping your prevent or stop an attack in progress. Contact Comptrio today to help secure your forums and your entire website today, before they get you.

URL Rewriting is the act of changing dynamic pages which include ?’s in the URL (such as index.php?uid=234&article=829) into search friendly URLs that help people understand what the page is about, and which allow Search Engines to spider all of your pages.

If you store lots of good search engine fodder on your forums and bulletin boards, chances are search engines have problems picking your pages or are slow to spider them all. Unfortunately, lots of shopping cart systems that use large product databases also suffer from poor URLs on some of their most important pages… the product pages!

Rewriting your URL will help you get your pages into the engines so they can be found by your customers. This is an excellent first step to higher rankings in the Search Engines for sites with lots of ‘ugly’ URLs (ones that use a ? in the URL). Contact Comptrio today and get a quote on URL Rewriting for your site today!