When I wrote about my intention to sell this blog, I certainly did not expect to still be it’s owner more than one month down the road. I would like to thank those offering feedback. Most of those providing the feedback agreed that when it comes to decidea price/value/worth of a website, the buyer will have a final say.

Exposing this website to as many potential buyers as possible may not be as easy as initially envisioned. Part of me sincerely hope that the future owner of this website will be one of the regular readers or subscribers. I understand, however that my hope may not realize. Meanwhile two website come to mind where I can sell this blog: eBay and Flippa.com. I am still uncertain which one to use.

Selling Website or Blog on eBay
Being the King of online auctions it is no wonder eBay attracts thousands of sellers who try to sell website or blog. Yesterday (July 6, 2010) for example 1,591 auctions ended in the category “Internet Businesses & Websites“. The bad news, however, is that only about 120 the those listings actually sold. Two highest auctions ended in $8,100.00 and $13,990.00 – one of these buyers did not get a good deal in my opinion. While eBay certainly can expose you “website or blog for sale” to a larger “audience”, there is good chance you may end up selling you website to some one with very little experience as far as websites and Internet business are concerned. This is certainly not my Intention. I do not want to sell this blog for more than it’s true value is. I was surprised however to see so many auctions ending not being sold for as little as $0.99- surely the domain name along should be worth more than that.

Selling Website or Blog on Flippa.com
Flippa.com is a relatively new website and unlike eBay is exclusively dedicated to buying and selling websites.
It of course attracts completely different kind of buyers and sellers – both buyers and sellers on Flippa.com know what they are doing. It appears that half of the websites listed at Flippa.com end up being sold. Take for example the listing from yesterday, July 6, 2010, out of 89 ended auctions 47 were sold. Even though Flippa.com has a slightly higher listing fee ($19+5% success fee)- it offers more flexibility when the length of the auction is concerned. If you list your website or domain at Flippa.com as public auction you can have it active up to 30 days and up to 6 months if you list your website as a “private sale”.

Since I have never sold a website or domain before, I created following poll to find out if you prefere Flippa over eBay:

As of today, I am leaning towards Flippa.com….

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

Soon after discussing the use of framesets by newly relaunched LeapFish I received a question from dozen of readers and visitors asking me how they can prevent their website from “being framed” by other websites.

To prevent your website from being from being viewable in a frame of another website you can add the piece of the following code just above </head> tag on your website:

Before you do it you need to really be sure it is what you want it. There are many good websites out there that use frames to view your website- StumbleUpon is one of those good sites.

The above code also relies on whether or not your visitors browser is configured to support Javascript, you would be surprise how many users out there do not enable Javascript support on their browsers.

The above Javascript code “forses” user’s browser to open your page in it’s own window. Before my previous post I have never considered using it on my website and still do not think there are any huge benefits from implementing it on yours.

I would like to hear what you have to say. What are the reasons for using the above code? If you don’t recommend to use it – why not?

Of course I would also love to hear about any other way to “kill frames” – please share them in the comments if you know any.

If you are interested to find out more about LeapFish I highly recommend LeapFish Review by Better Business Bureau.

A while back I wrote an article pointing out one of the features available to webmasters at Google Webmaster Central – ability to set a custom crawl rate. At the time I thought it was an outstanding idea. It is still is a good solution should googlebot visit your site too often causing issues with bandwidth (even though I have never heard of such scenario).

Webmasters however should exercise caution when increasing the crawl rate via Google Webmaster Central. A few weeks ago I was involved in an upgrade of a website with 2000+ pages. One of the side effects of the upgrade was that we ended up with 2000+ new urls. Unfortunately there was no easy way to implement 2000+ redirects on the website. But, since most of the traffic came from PPC campaigns, we decided to let Google re-index the website on it’s own. Exception was of course that we used Google Webmaster Central to implement request for a more frequent crawl by Google. We increased the crawl rate by some 3000% only to receive the following notice a few days later:

Dear Webmaster,

Google has algorithms that determine how much to crawl each site. Our goal is to crawl as many page from your site, http://www.xxxxx.com/, as we can without overwhelming your server’s bandwidth.

For your site, http://www.xxxxx.com/, you have set a very low crawl rate which is preventing us from accessing your great content. We recommend you set the crawl rate option to “Let Google determine my default”, or, if you prefer to maintain a custom setting, increasing the rate.

Thanks,

The Google Web Crawling Team

In fact the Google had not indexed a single URL from the new sitemap. Not even the home page (which is/was the strongest page of the website) was re-indexed. So we followed Google’s instruction and within 24 hours our new pages began to appear in the index.

So if you are thinking of increasing the crawl rate in Google Webmaster Central – exercise caution or you may run the risk of not increasing the the crawl rate enough for Google to do it’s job.

Have you ever considered allowing your client to schedule appointments with you right on your website? In search for such solution for my and for my friends and clients websites I came across Appointy, a Florida based startup. You can see the implementation of Appointy scheduling feature on my other website where I allow clients to reserve my interpreting and translating services online.

While Appointy offers an easy integration for WordPress websites via a plugin, their system can be implemented just on about any website through an “ifame” code.

Appointy comes “PayPal ready” allowing you to charge a fee for the appointment at the time of scheduling- either full amount or partial. You are of course free to not charge your clients for appointments, as it would be the case with most real estate agents I know. But if you would like to prevent “no shows”, you might want to implement a minimal fee refundable at the time of the appointment.

Currently Appointy offers four different plans:

• FREE plan- this basic plan has some limits and you have no option to charge your clients for the appointment at the time of scheduling. Appointy also will inject some ads into your calendar – hey they need to pay their engineers and developers.
• PLUS plan comes at $9.99 per moth and is ad free but it does not allow you for branding nor accepting pre-payments.
• PRO plan will set you back about $19.99 per month- the plan I am looking forward to use. You can brand your calendar and accept pre-payments with this plan. This plan includes e-mail marketing tool that allows you to send different e-mails to confirm, remind or even cancel the appointments. The best thing of course that when you sing up for Appointy, you get to try this plan absolutely free for 30 days.
• Finally the BUSINESS plan wich comes at $39.99 is the top level plan from Appointy. I would recommend this plan for businesses that have several staff members accepting appointments, the plan allows a separate logins for administrator and for the staff.

If you are looking for a solution that would allow your clients to book an appointment with you right on your website, Appointy should be given frist consideration.

As I have pointed out, I am using Appointy myself, although I am only beginning to test many of it’s features and probably have not seen yet what Appointy can really do for my business. I will report on the results about one month from now, so stay tuned.

Guest Blogger: Cole Pannell

Website: The Banson Pro

Title tags are arguably the most important on-page SEO factor for any web page. When utilized properly, they can really help to boost your site in the SERPs. But when they are abused or used wrongfully, the impact could be fatal.

For those of you who don’t know, a title tag is the actual title of a document or web page. It is the text content contained within the section of the HTML code. You can always tell the title tag of a webpage by looking at the upper-most bar of your web browser window, as the title of the document will always be shown there.

Also, title tags give the actual “name” of any web page that is displayed in the search engine results pages or SERPs. Not only are they read by the human reader, they are also read by the search engines as well.

As a general rule, you want to use no more than 70 characters for the entire length of your title tag (spaces included). And you will want to use no more than 2 keywords in any title tag. It is very important not to keyword-stuff your title, like many webmasters do. But we will get to that in a minute.

Using too many words can actually dilute the keyword effect of your title. So try to keep the “filler” words down to a minimum. Try to use basic symbols (dash, underscore, comma, or the pipe symbol “|”) to break-up your title, instead of words like “the, and, of, by,” etc.

A good title tag should follow a similar format to this: “keyword1 | keyword2 | company name” or “company name – keyword1 – keyword2”. If you have more than 2 keywords you are targeting (as well do) then you should create separate pages and implement unique title tags for those pages and keywords.

Please remember to include the company name or actual website name inside of your title tag. This is for the benefit of the human reader, whereas the keywords are more for the search engines. You can place you company name either before or after the keywords, as shown in the above format, just as long as it is included.

So let’s take a look at a couple examples of what good title tags should like. Instead of giving you examples base on theory, I’m going to base this entirely from real-world, cold-hard facts and evidence.

Look at the site: bransoncanyon.com.

The title tag reads “Branson Real Estate – Branson Missouri Homes for Sale – Branson Canyon”. Obviously, the primary keyword for this website is “Branson Real Estate” and the secondary keyword is “Branson Missouri Homes for Sale”. Branson Canyon is the actual name of the company.

This is a perfect example of an effective title tag – for both SEO purposes and for the human reader. It has good keyword placement and also clearly shows the website for the human readers.

Also notice how it keeps the filler words down to a minimum. Using something like “Branson real estate and Branson Missouri homes for sale here at Branson Canyon” is not as effective as the existing format using the “|” symbol to break apart the words. It also would have been just as effective to use “Branson Real Estate, Branson Missouri Homes for Sale – Branson Canyon” (or any other variation that utilizes a symbolic naming convention).

What evidence do I have to back this up? I was actually hired by Branson Canyon to do the SEO work for them. Before I started, they were at position #53 for Branson Real Estate and position #26 for Branson Missouri Homes for Sale (both in Google). They now show up at position #19 and #17 for the same keywords, respectively. And at the time of this writing, it’s only been 3 weeks! And they will continue to rise as the SEO campaign progresses.

Granted, I also built about 50 in-bound back-links for their site and used the same keywords for the anchor text. But that’s a different topic for a different day .

Now let’s turn to a good example of how NOT to use a title tag.

Check out: bransonwestrealty.com. This lame is using exactly 471 characters in his title tag. And it’s definitely one of the worst cases of keyword-stuffing I’ve seen yet.

His title tag reads “Branson West Realty | BRANSON + REALTY + BRANSON MISSOURI REAL ESTATE + Branson West Real Estate + BRANSON + MISSOURI + VACATION + INFORMATION + PACKAGES + Tri-Lakes Area-Reserve Branson Vacation Packages-Cabins, Condos, Motels, Hotels, Music Shows, Area Attractions and Information-BRANSON MO Nightly Rentals-Branson Missouri Attractions-Vacations + Golf, Lodging, Show Tickets – Branson West, Missouri -Branson Real Estate Locator–A Service of Branson 1 Realty-Welcome”.

If you visit his site, you can clearly see that there is something wrong with this dude. There is no real content on his site. It’s just a bunch of junk links. Also, if you view the source, you can see that he is using 5349 characters for his description tag (it’s recommended to use only 150) and he has 332 keywords in the keywords tag (out of a recommended 10).

This is blatant and disgusting abuse of meta tags in general. Not only is he harming himself in the eyes of the search engines (his SERPs suck) but he is also being unfair to his visitors.

This type of “SEO” can have seriously detrimental effects. The search engines can penalize you or even ban you from the index for pulling stunts like this. And it will NOT help you in the least bit.

To summarize, let’s go over the key points again:

• Use short, descriptive title tags (less than 70 characters).
• Always include your company name or the official name of the website – you are not only writing for the search engines but for humans as well.
• Use no more than 2 keywords for each page’s title.
• Title tags should be unique for each page in your site.
• Use common symbols instead of filler words.
• Do not keyword-stuff
• Don’t be a lame

Remember that effective usage of title tags is only 1 piece to the SEO puzzle. But when properly implemented, you will be well on your way to seeing your site rise to the top.

Thanks for reading!

-Cole Pannell

www.thebransonpro.com

If you enjoyed this post by Cole here are few more you might enjoy The Power Of Backlinks and Finding The Right Keywords For Your Niche.