Day 18: Incubator – Number 1 Ranking

November 3, 2009 · Posted in 90 Days of StomperNet, Diary: StomperNet Incubator

The Halloween weekend yielded mixed results. Let’s start with some funny but good news…

number-1 As of tonight, I am Rank 1 on Page 1 on Yahoo for the keyword phrase, “stompernet incubator”. This is higher than the actual StomperNet Incubator website which is at rank 2. On Google, I am rank 4.

For the keyword phrase, “business diaries” I am rank 3 out of 54 million results on Yahoo. Admittedly, I’m nowhere near Page 1 on Google for this. For other keyword phrases like “stompernet incubator review”, I’m respectably on page 1 for both Yahoo and Google. The kind where you don’t have to scroll down to see me.

The funny part is I have only applied the StomperNet concepts on Content Creation and Site Building for this. The SEO lessons are yet to be applied after I finish the website. I guess this proves that often used phrase that “Content is King”.

The website is still not done. Well visually, all the elements are there but its functionalities have to pass at least my testing first. Let me share to you the best of what I’ve learned over the weekend on Joomla and SEO:

Using a free SEF (Search Engine Friendly) plugin is a waste of time. At least 2 days wasted to be exact. I would painstakingly get it to work. Then when I need to add another plugin like an FAQ or Registration plugin, I would have to painstakingly get the SEF plugin to work again. I finally decided to buy a $35 yearly subscription for this highly reviewed SEF plugin called sh404SEF. Boom! No more painstaking work every time I add some other plugin.
Going through template files to modify a specific feature such as border-less text boxes was increasing the amount of facial wrinkles I had. To this day, I can never understand how a registration form with no borders around their text boxes could be deemed more user-friendly. It becomes a guessing game where you will click the mouse to enter your details without the borders to guide you. I did hit the jackpot on this one though. I found this FREE FireFox Add-on called Firebug where you simply click any part of the website and it will visually point you to the template file that does the formatting for whatever you clicked on. Boom! Making the text box borders visible again was done in a minute.
Another must have FREE plug-in that saved me lots of hours or re-work is one that backs up your Joomla website. It’s called JoomlaPack. Because it is FREE, you should not have any excuse not to back up. Pretty nifty when you suddenly find yourself clueless why your website died. Just restore and your website is alive again.

Sorry folks. The website’s not done yet. But did you notice how technical I was in the above paragraphs? I’m comparing what I wrote back in Day 0 – 3 versus the 4 most recent days of this Incubator course and I’m glad something is coming out of this adventure.

I am tempted to show what the website looks like even though there are still some bugs. But I remember this gaming company called Blizzard, they tend to just put off a planned launching just so they can fix the bugs and make their games polished and playable. This creed led them to release World of Warcraft which grosses about half a billion dollars in monthly subscriptions.

Speaking of which, I can’t wait to finish building my website and get back to focusing on Internet Marketing and making even 1% of 1% of half a billion per month.

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