Archive for February, 2009

I’ve had a few comments from the author of The Intelligent Workout on my fitness blog, the guy always posts some good comments, so I’ve decided to review his site. The site review will look it at the site both from a content point of view, but also from the point of view of search engine optimisation and potential for revenue generation.

My first impression of the site is that the theme he has chosen (or had designed) is very dark. This is clearly not a problem for search engines, but for readers of the site, it can be problematic. I don’t have a problem with black sites per se, but if the contrast between the writing (content) and the background colours is not great enough (as is the case with this site), I find it had to read. Incidentally, I find I have to read this site without the stylesheets - I must be getting old!

The content of the site is excellent. I’ve only really read the most recent few posts, but they have been very good. Well put together articles that provide a lot of value to the reader. My only slight comment would be that there is so much good content in “The Four Health Hoaxes That Are Destroying Society and How to Stop Them” that it could have been spread over four different posts, thus providing more pages to the search engines, and making it slightly easier for a reader to get a “quick fix” of content, and make them come back for each subsequent “hoax”, until they had completed the series of articles.

As the blog is using WordPress, it’s difficult to say too much that is wrong with it from an SEO point of view, though I do have some comments:

Firstly, the author hasn’t activated permalinks, this is where WordPress uses URL re-writing to convert a query string into a static URL, which helps search engine robots to crawl and subsequently rank the pages within their SERPS. The reason you want this is to ensure you get more valuable keywords into the URL for each post.

Secondly, the title tags on each page contain far too many keywords, to the point where it looks a little bit like keyword spam. It isn’t, it’s merely WordPress outputting the blog title, category and then post title in the title tag. It would be better for SEO purposes to just output the title of the post in the title of the page.

I believe that if these two issues were corrected, the site would see a boost in the search engines. It will depend on a few other factors whether this site becomes really successful in the search engines, but despite off-site factors, it’s still worthwhile making the best use of on-site factors before worrying too much about off-site factors.

A bunch of my posts and articles have been featured in the Athletic Alley Blog Carnival, please visit the site and read through the carnival for some great articles about health and fitness.

On Find Financial Freedom, John has posted a useful article about reducing your monthly outgoings by going down the gym, which gives you a few extra frugal reasons to get down the gym first thing besides improving your fitness and physique.

I’ve added a new article to my blog, Find Financial Freedom. The article is all about ways to earn extra money in your spare time, through either a part time job or starting up a part-time business.

Please read and feel free to leave a comment about the article, though nothing too rude!

I’ve been building a website for my ex-wife, some might say it’s a bit strange but thankfully we have a good relationship.

What I’ve done for her is simply install a WordPress installation onto her domain name, customise the theme slightly and help her by picking out the right pages to go on the site.

In addition, we’ve uploaded mp3’s to the site, as she is a female voiceover artist, which contain her demos so that any prospective producer will be able to listen to her and get an idea of what she sounds like. This can be very useful in her marketing efforts as she often picks up new clients that come across her via her website.

I’ve just written a new article on weight loss on bodyandfitnessblog.com. The article is my own thoughts on how to lose weight quickly, using a mixture of my own experiences of losing weight and getting back into shape again, and well known advice that has been studied and researched over many years.

The article is entitled How Can I Lose Weight Quickly, please feel free to have a read and leave a comment. I plan to write other similar articles about weight loss, weight gain (for aspiring body builders) and generic getting fitter articles on my blog in the future.

I’ve launched a new niche website today, clearly it’s not the best looking website and the content could be better, but for what I’m trying to achieve, it’s just the job.

The site is all about cheap fat burning pills and ways to lose weight quickly. I intend to target the traffic to a very narrow niche of visitors looking for fat burning pills and other related keywords, in the hope then of selling advertising or putting affiliate links on the site as a way of generating revenue.

It probably won’t make me much money each month, but given it’s taken a few hours to build - literally - if it can make me £100 a month, every month, I’ll be happy as a pig in sh*t.

I’ve decided to write a blog on this domain now, after having had it for years and done nothing with it, but leave up some random content that was no good to anyone.

In the future, I will post updates on what I’m doing with my life, hopefully they will be more interesting than simply “I had a shower today” or “I went to the pub”!

To give anyone out there a brief history of me (not that I’m sure anyone is actually that bothered, but I do need to fill this with something), I have during my time been a web developer, and had a business with my brother, Crickett Software Limited, which was successful for a few years, before we moved onto the more interesting world of internet marketing and search engine optimisation.

We had a number of websites that all generated revenues in the form of commissions payable on hotel bookings, car hire bookings, airport parking bookings, bed and breakfast bookings and one or two other things as well. Unfortunately, after a few years this business was scuppered by the search engines which deemed our websites no longer relevant and we lost the majority of our traffic (and therefore revenue) almost overnight.

It was at this point, at the age of 25, nearly 26 that I decided that it would be in my best interests, and my girlfriend-soon-to-be-fiancee at the time’s interests if I did something less risky and more stable. I opted to become a mortgage broker, I figured that with the regulation of the financial markets it should be a fairly stable place to conduct business, and though the returns would not be as good as can be found in the modern-day-goldrush that is internet marketing, at least I would have a stable income for life.

Yeah right! The credit crunch soon buggered that up, and so now I have gone full circle and am now back doing web development and internet marketing.

I write, along with my brother, a blog about financial freedom, which is growing nicely, and though is not currently making enough money for either of us to achieve financial freedom, our hopes are that in the not too distant future, it will be able to.

In addition, I have recently gotten back into weight training and fitness. I guess something about going through a breakup, pending divorce and soon to be thirty years of age, made me think I had better get myself back into shape. You can read about my exploits, and those of some of my friends on my body building and fitness blog.