If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
This artist intrigued me from the beginning but not for his style of work. He’s obviously talented anyway but he was born blind and has never been able to see and understand colors as sighted people do. Watch the video at the bottom for more information.
Here’s a few of his pieces and you can find more of his work on his website.
Being an SEO expert brings everyday challenges and some are more interesting than others. Last week, after being introduced to a potential client as the SEO Expert, I was asked if they would find me at the top of Google if they searched for my name, Ash. I didn’t hesitate in my answer with “of course you will.”
Immediately following our meeting, I did a quick search for Ash to see how my rankings were holding up after not blogging much for about 8 months. I’m usually about #25 but to my surprise I came in at #126 for the keyword “Ash.” however, if you search for Ash Buckles, I come in at #1 and #2 and 16 more of the top 20 spots are my social media profiles, which I control; read my last post for more information.
Thus the challenge becomes ranking at the top of Google for the keyword “Ash” while competing against some pretty huge organizations of the same name.
Some of these huge names include:
I’m not sure I’ll ever make it to #1, nor stay there if I do, but I’d like to think I can make it into the top 10 results of Google and maybe Yahoo. Wish me luck.
Have you been the victim of having just one or two listings on page one of the SERPs for your [personal or business] name along side your competitors or other seemingly irrelevant listings? Maybe this is just annoying, in the case of your personal name (brand), and maybe it’s costing you money because your competitors are listed alongside you tempting your prospects to visit them as well.
Either way, you can quickly and easily fix this problem with the use of social media profiles, which have great reputations and when used properly will jump to the top of the search engines knocking out your competitors.
There are hundreds of social sites out there, and I don’t recommend creating profiles with the express purpose of abandoning the profile page after obtaining link. Find the social media sites that make sense for you and build them up as a means of spreading your name/brand across different networks of people; bringing more eyeballs to you, and as a result bringing more page one results for your name/brand.
Some social sites to consider:
This list is very short compared to what is really available out there and finding as many of these sites that you can maintain in a given month (or so) will provide you with traffic, links, and friends (who know people).
Make sure you complete your profile at each site with your name, url, preferences, likes/dislikes, etc. All of this information is used to pair you up with others in the network.
Within a few days of filling out these profiles you begin to see your profile pages showing up at the top of the SERPs knocking other top 10 pages off to page 2 thereby decreasing your competition.
I can’t stress enough the importance of maintaining each of these profiles. If you create a profile strictly for a free link, you may as well stop reading and forget everything I said. Otherwise you leave your profile page open to abuse from others flaming you for trying to gets links. You will effectively upset people and kill your reputation. Besides you only need a few of these profiles to knock out your competitors from page one.
I’ve discovered another artist, Joey M. Robinson, and I’ve fallen in love with his work. I met him in Seattle while I was out to eat with my brother in Pioneer Square and spent about 30 minutes learning a little about him.
This stuff is amazing!
Check out Joey’s website for updated information.
Have you seen Twellow.com? This is the new phone book (or Google) of Twitter brought to us by WebProNews.
You can update your bio to include keywords that will place your listing within several categories so you can get the most exposure possible.
You can also lookup people based on their city/state and find new friends or professionals.
Be forewarned: it’s addicting.
*Updated: props to Jason Alba of Jibber Jobber for the link
In writing my first Wordpress plugin this weekend I was doing research to learn the Wordpress way of doing things and I remembered a post from earlier this week that talked about the issues with TinyURL. To be fair, I’ve never much cared for TinyURL but I use it more with my Twitter account (since it’s the default for long urls). The above link provides instructions for a much better way to handle your links in Twitter.
Basically, you want to link to your posts using your dynamic url of:
which will redirect to:
Like others, I’m a little nervous about relying on a 3rd party url service to deliver visitors to my site - for as long as I decide to have my site published. I’m also nervous about redirecting links from other sites whereas a redirect from within my site can be controlled in the future, if required.
Not all comments are welcome on blogs but we all love to get more “better” comments. That’s why we spend so much time feeding our blog posts to our social networks through Twitter, Facebook and others. One more way to increase your comments is through a mobile theme for mobile users to view and comment on the go.
I spend more time reading blogs on my mobile than on my desktop [most days] and having a mobile theme allows me to comment. Otherwise it’s too difficult to read, let alone comment.
The most stripped down theme for Wordpress is at: http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
There are times during an art walk when you think to yourself, or share out loud, which artists should get another day job so they don’t become dependent on taxpayers.
These artists don’t belong in that crowd.
It’s always so hard watching the young ones suffer from medical issues. It just doesn’t seem fair.
Get involved in helping the Burn’s family. Visit Serenity’s new website (added to my blogroll) and please donate below.
(widget thanks to Jesse Stay)
Read the story from Phil801 about his daughter’s leukemia diagnosis this past weekend.
The bloggers here in Salt Lake City have been a tremendous support. We’re all sending the best of wishes and prayers for Serenity!
See what others are saying:
See pictures of Serenity in her hospital room at Phil801’s flickr photostream.
So I’m now officially all Wordpress. I agonized for months over moving my blog to Wordpress because of the hassle, dead links from others, moving of images, potential loss of information, and so on. You know what? It wasn’t that difficult. A slight modification to my feed and it imported without trouble.
This blog will still focus on the following:
Please update any links you have coming into pages other than my home page.
