Fully agree with the message!

Don’t worry, it’s not your average hip hop is dead propaganda.

Just watch it – it’s quite brilliant.

Seven year old Shane Bernier is a brave cancer patient at CHEO and he is asking people to send him a card for his birthday on May 30th. Shane wants to set a world record for the most number of cards received!

You don’t have to wait for his birthday to send your card. Start sending them today to:

Shane Bernier
Box 484
Lancaster Ontario
CANADA
K0C 1N0

Come on guys and help this little fella :)
I’m going to send him one from the Netherlands….

There are more pics, don’t forget to view the rest of the article!

Site Architecture

1. Utilize search engine friendly URL links which have hyphens instead of underscores, dynamic or session URLs which often confuse crawlers.

2. Rewrite dynamic URLs via .htaccess into URL friendly ones.

3. Use robots.txt to control access to which pages crawlers analyze and index. Restrict robots from “print” html pages for example to control duplicate content issues.

4. Put each domain on a separate IP address. Sharing IP addresses with other sites that could potentially be spamming or using black hat techniques isn’t smart, and at $3-5 a month for a unique IP it’s worth it.

5. If you’re running Linux as your web hosting server then read about creating an .htaccess file to avoid canonicalization.

6. If you’re running Windows as your web hosting server then learn about how to do the equivalent of .htaccess.

7. Invest in quality web hosting service. Most sites aren’t setup to handle the incoming traffic from hitting the top of Digg but you should be able to handle a steadily increasing amount of traffic from your SEO efforts. If your site goes down and the search engines try to index the site you will be penalized, and the results can be dramatic.

8. Validate your HTML to W3C standards. Although there is no evidence that this is required Google it provides a clean experience to visitors.

9. Keep the number of trailing slashes to less than four to avoid crawling and other issues. If you have a blog just the post name is optimal, the date and other information is unnecessary.

10. When considering launching a new site consider purchasing a domain name that has been registered for quite some time. This avoids any perils of the “Google Sandbox” as well as having the advantage of already having established back links, and other SEO benefits.

11. If no domain names are available that suit your company consider purchasing a domain name that has your specific keywords in it. Limit the hyphens to a maximum of two.

12. When creating pages ensure that no page is beyond two pages from the home page. This helps ensure that your pages will become indexed.

13. Check for dead/broken links in Google Webmaster Tools, and then utilize a 301 redirect to the correct location or to the home page to clean up that aspect.

14. Register your domain name for the maximum amount of time. This instills trust among the search engines that you don’t have a one year hosting plan and then you’re done. This is a cheap solution, and lets them know that you plan to be around for a long time.

15. Ensure that outgoing links from your site are going to quality on topic sites. Linking to poker/porn/Viagra, etc sites from a health site for example will hurt not help you.

Keyword Research

1. Determine the keywords that you would like to target by doing some research at Google Adwords or alternatives such as Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery.

2. Place your keywords in your body text. Don’t worry about keyword density as much as making it functional for both the user while targeting your specific keywords for the search engines.

3. Use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags that are relevant to your site.

4. Place your targeted keywords in the page URL, separated by a dash between keywords.

5. Target keywords above and beyond just the ones with the most traffic. Misspellings, alternative words, and lower traffic keywords could potentially still are lucrative by driving targeted traffic to your site.

On Page Optimization

1. Add a unique title to each page that targets your specific keywords. Typically this occurs with having your targeted keywords followed by – company name. If your brand is strong enough you can switch this around and have your company first.

2. Add a unique Meta description to each page that again targets your specific keywords. This is limited to 160 characters in Google, 165 in Yahoo, and slightly over 200 for MSN. Make the description unique for each page so that you don’t fall into any duplicate content issues.

3. Add a unique Meta keyword tag for each page that only lists keywords that are relevant and appear on the page. Although Meta keyword is not used by Google it still has some importance for Yahoo.

4. Make sure that all images have alt tags associated with them to ensure that your site is accessible for everyone.

5. Develop content that is unique and different for all pages. Having similar content on multiple pages could throw up duplicate content filters and your pages could go supplemental.

Link Building

1. Download WebCEO and submit your site to the various search engines and directories through the automatic process.

2. Download DigiXMAS and semi-auto submit your site to several hundred directories.

3. Don’t worry about incoming directory links, and whether you are submitting too quickly. You will be denied from some, others will take months to approve you, and the resulting links will appear natural.

4. Submit your site to DMOZ. Although DMOZ has had problems recently it is still a highly trusted source, and is the premier free directory to submit your site to. It may take months or even years to get added but it is still worth the 10 minutes to submit to.

5. Pay to submit your site to Yahoo directory. Along with DMOZ Yahoo directory is one of the most trusted directories out there. The $299 fee is nominal and instills trust among Yahoo and the other search engines.

6. Create “link bait” content for submission to the social websites such as Digg, Reddit, etc. Getting an article to the top of a social website can result in thousands of additional back links almost overnight.

7. Manual link building is a highly effective way to increase your rankings in the SERPs. Use WebCEO to find link partners who are related to your respective field, and would be willing to link to you.

8. Often times the best links are the links that your competitors have. Go to yahoo and type in “link:www.competitor.com” and look for links that they have that you should look into.

9. Edu and Gov links are typically more respected and trusted than Com links as they have built up thousands of back links, produce quality content, and are unlikely to engage in questionable techniques. If you can get these links get them.

10. If you want to buy links do so in a manner that is not obvious. Purchase links from relevant sites and don’t publish details in forums or other locations which could be seen.

11. When linking out or posting links surround the link with text so that it does not appear to be a generic links page, and instead flows nicely with relevant information.

12. Post your link in forums that you frequent with the anchor text that you are targeting.

13. Comment on blogs, again with the same anchor text and link that you’re targeting.

14. Although Wikipedia utilizes “NOFOLLOW” attributes on links adding your relevant links to Wikipedia can generate a significant amount of targeted traffic to your website.

15. Create a Squidoo lens to generate back links as well as hopefully generate traffic to your website.

Miscellaneous

1. Create a sitemap of your site using GSite Crawler or a free online sitemap tool like XML-Sitemaps.

2. Submit your site Google Webmaster Tools, and then verify it.

3. Inside Google Webmaster Tools choose Preferred Domain and pick www.yoursite.com or yoursite.com to avoid canonicalization issues.

4. Submit your site to Yahoo! Site Explorer, and then verify it.

5. Download Firefox and then head over to SEOBook to download Aaron Wall’s SEO Tools for Firefox. This neat utility allows you to check back links, Edu links, Wikipedia entries, cache date, and other SEO info that is crucial for analyzing data.

6. Use page analysis to look at the anchor text of incoming links to your site to analyze what is working, how spread out your anchors are, and how to solidify under a few anchor texts if possible.

7. Develop articles that visitors may want to link to. Interviews with industry leaders and others are a quick way to develop links.

8. Submit your article to article submission services only after your article has been indexed by the search engines to avoid any duplicate filters.

9. Ignore Page Rank. Although it may be important to those who aren’t as familiar to the SEO process it does not determine your rankings, and is only updated visually every 3-4 months. Actual Page Rank is constantly being updated by Google on a daily basis.

10. Ignore Alexa data. Alexa is calculated by users who install their toolbar and is thus a very narrow segment of the population. Companies who browse their own sites with the toolbar thus rank unnaturally high in Alexa.

Source: http://www.sonicko.com/blog/2007/04/12/top-50-seo-tips-tricks-and-suggestions/

Above you can see the amount of traffic for Amsterdamn for the last 4 months. Somewhere 3 months ago I decided that it was time to check out how much SEO can mean for our website. Therefore I didn’t see the value of SEO for Amsterdamn. I really did not care about visitors and exposure. This was just a place where I could post about one of the things that I love to do in my free time: WordPress themes. But it turned out that a lot of people were interested in my work. And what’s the best way to reach the rest of the world? Search Engine Optimization!

Everything that you need to know about SEO is available online. It’s easier than you think. You could think about buying a book about SEO, but that’s only if you are too lazy to do some research for yourself. But it’s always ok to check out different sources. It will take you a while to master SEO. There is A LOT of information online about it. And you will need to read a lot in order to get an overview about the different techniques. But in essence it’s really easy.

You first check out what the search engines like…..and then you take a look at which keywords you want to rank high. And don’t forget to check out what your competition is doing. Why do they rank so high? Take a look and copy what they do, and try to do it even better. That’s basically what I did. I do have to admit that I already had experience with SEO and using it. Therefore it wasn’t that difficult. But as you can see: the result is good. The search engines seem to love Amsterdamn. Compared to 3/4 months ago the traffic will double, at least. I’ll give you some quick and easy tips: seo plugins , good hosting, incoming links and lots of content!

The rest is up to you…..good luck with getting more traffic! It’s not rocket science…..

A TRADITIONAL CORPORATION: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead.

A FRENCH CORPORATION: You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon(tm) and market them world-wide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

A BRITISH CORPORATION: You have two cows. Both are mad.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are. You break for lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 12 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION: You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them.

A HINDU CORPORATION: You have two cows. You worship them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported the numbers.

ENRON CORPORATION — You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.

ARTHUR ANDERSON, LLC CORPORATION: You have 2 cows. You shred all documents that Enron has any cows, take 2 cows from Enron for payment for consulting the cows, and attest that Enron has 9 cows.

To quote someone else: “Worthy of at least headtime, if not more”

Although the Technorati is just an indicator we are happy to see that we have continued to grow in 2007.

Amsterdamn in 2007 will be this:

- Search Engine optimization
I have been reading a lot about SEO optimization lately. And I am going to implement the knowledge that I have gathered in my new themes.
Every theme from now on will be equipped with Search Engine Optimization. Hopefully your weblog will get more exposure thanks to this.

- Options page
Some of you already noticed that I started to use the WordPress Admin more and more. Every new theme in 2007 will get it’s own options page in the WP admin.
This way the users are able to edit basic things without having to edit the code. I have noticed that there a lot of novice users who use WordPress.
With this small effort I am able to make our themes (even more) user friendly.

- Neutral themes
At least 5 of our new themes this year will be “neutral”.It will be easy to edit them and give them your own personal touch to it.
With the options page it will be also possible to choose what you want to use. In other words more whitespace!

- At least 15 new themes
Last year we managed to release 15 themes. This year I am planning to release at least the same amount.

- WordPress
I will continue to release themes for WordPress. There is a chance that I will port our themes to other blog platforms.
If you are eager to do the job: e-mail me!

- Widgets Support
I haven’t paid much attention to widgets. Basically because I never use them.
But there seems to be a demand for them. Therefore every new theme will compatible with widgets.

- Amsterdamn
And some goals for my own website:
- By then end of 2007 Amsterdamn.org will be at least a PR6 (and maybe a PR7)
- I will enter the Technorati Top 1000 (now 16xx)
- Amsterdamn themes will have 35K downloads at the WordPress theme repository
- Our Alexa Rank will be lower than 150K

I’m looking forward to what 2007 will bring on the interwebs!

And here’s a new theme that I made last year:

Download | Test run

Don’t forget to leave a comment!

So what’s the A-list blogger list all about?
“The Very High Authority Group [A-List Bloggers]

In the final group we see what might be considered the blogging elite. This group, which represents more than 4,000 blogs, exhibits a radical shift in post frequency as well as blog age. Bloggers of this type have been at it longer – a year and a half on average – and post nearly twice a day, an increase in posting volume of over 100% from the previous group. Many of the blogs in this category, in fact, are about as old as Technorati and we’ve grown up together. Some of these are full-fledge professional enterprises that post many, many times per day and behave increasingly like our friends in the mainstream media. As has been widely reported, the impact of these bloggers on our cultures and democracies is increasingly dramatic. ”

One of the most powerful politic advertisements that I have ever seen.

Two sources have confirmed that the rapidly growing StumbleUpon recently approached at least one large Internet company to be acquired. The asking price was $50 million.

The deal doesn’t appear to have been widely shopped – one potential acquiror said that they met with the company recently, but only to explore possible business development deals, and that an acquisition was not discussed. I spoke briefly with StumbleUpon CEO Garret Camp this afternoon but he refused to comment, saying “we do not comment on rumors.” Fair enough.

The real story may be a disconnect between the company’s executives and investors. StumbleUpon has only raised a single seed round of financing – $1.5 million – and angel investors often informally shop a company, with or without the company’s permission, in the hope of an early cash out.

Whatever is going on, StumbleUpon certainly isn’t stumbling in its growth. It is now a significant source of traffic for many startups (an entrepreneur recently told me that 15% of his traffic last week came from StumbleUpon). Garret told me today that the company has 1.5 million registered users and an average of 3.5 million page views per day. They expect to be cash flow positive within the next few months.

I found an easy way to change it back to the way it was.

1. Type about:config in your address bar and hit the enter button

2. Look up browser.tabs.closeButtons , as you can see the value right now is 1

3. You’ve got to double click on the 1 and change the value to 3

That’s it!