Before Google, when you build a new website, you needed to do a lot of marketing outside of your domain, so people will notice its existence. Ironically, those were the days when internet advertising wasn’t a proven method. You’d buy a banner here and there, spam a few friends, and hope for the best. There was a direct correlation between your time spent promoting your website, to the number of unique visitors arriving at your URL. To anyone who has ever built a Geocities site back in the day, you know exactly what I mean. Remember relying on those “rings”, hoping to get new visitors?
Then Google came along, with the beautifully written PageRank algorithm. In the beginning, it just worked. We all took the search results for granted. Then a few months later, some people started questioning the logic of how things were done. Why does my shrine for Snoop Dogg rank lower than my friends? Who determines what site shows up on top for “Nike Shoes”? If there is a system, the geeks and the opportunists were determined to out-smart it.
Like almost all things in life, there was the white hat, and the black hat. Black hat Search Engine experts seek flaws in the system, and abused it. Meta tags were flooded with unrelated keywords, sites were littered with invisible text, etc. Meanwhile the white hat SEO guys looked at how the search engine robot crawls the sites, and started optimizing the way sites are created.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to learn under a SEO expert, and from that day on building websites have been a methodical process. It’s an amazing feeling seeing your site rank among the first page for certain keywords, and seeing the traffic increase as a result. So here’s a quick summary for you bloggers out there, and people making basic websites.
- Prepare your structure
Before you begin drafting the content, it’s very important for the content to be viewed favorably by the search engines. Prepare you blog or site with the necessary structure.- Pick your keywords, 2-3 per page. The keywords that sum up your page.
- Title, structured KW1, KW2 – site title.
- Meta data, despite the ongoing argument on whether Google looks at this at all, it doesn’t hurt. Look at popular websites on how they do their Meta tags. Meta-Descrip is what shows up on Google search results, so make it look good.
- H1 tags are important, use them.
- Use Plug-ins, tags.
There are many SEO plugins for blogs, such as AllInOneSEO that really makes life easier. Then install WordPress Stats or similar statistical apps to track the results of your efforts. Tag your entries, they’re links. Links are good. - Create content, useful content for your readers. Pick keywords that are a good balance of “What sums up your entry”, and “What people will be searching for”. After all you want your post to be read. Try to use keywords throughout your post that are popular search keywords. Keep in mind some keywords are more competitive than others, so pick your battles.
- Back links are one thing you cannot control too much. Each link to your site is similar to a vote of importance. However, if you have other sites, don’t forget to link to your own site. No cross linking though, that’s a big no-no for Google.
- Use free tools such as Google’s Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics to check the progress of your SEO work.
That’s it for now. Feed your site with good content, and you’d be surprised by your rise in the engines. If you build it, with proper SEO, they will come. More later, time for me to put some SEO touches to this entry.
Trading stocks online in the year 2009, you’d expect everything to be real-time. That’s why most investors are stunned when they find out that stock trades take 3 days to “clear”. Here’s what it means for the average investor, and how it can be avoided.
In the good old days, nothing was real time. When a trade is made, shares are either physically transferred between parties, or between the parties’ brokerage firms. The process took 3 days. Because of this, when you went to make a trade at your local brokerage firm, they often allowed you to make the trade first, then bring the funds in within 3 days. This was known as T+3.
What many people do not know is that the system is still around today. Surely it doesn’t take 3 days for one brokerage firm or clearing firm to transfer the electronic data of stock ownership, and most online brokerage firms now verify that you have sufficient funds before allowing you to trade. However, the T+3 remains.
What this means is that when you buy a stock in a cash account, you don’t own the stock (fully settled) until 3 days after the trade date. If you sell, then you are selling unsettled stock. Most firms will allow it, but your account will be tagged with a “good faith strike”.
Same thing on the sell side. When you sell a stock, you see the money in your account. However, that fund is still considered unsettled until 3 days later. If you attempt to use that money, yep, another “good faith strike”.
If you accumulate 3 strikes (yet another baseball cultural reference transferred into securities trading), then your account is placed into 90 day restriction. Yikes.
One way to avoid this is to open a margin account. Stocks still settle in T+3, but you do not risk running into these good faith strikes.
Will we ever see the day when stocks go from T+3 to T+1, or actually have things occur in real time? We’re certainly moving in the right direction, but needless to say we worry about the ancient servers running the banking and investing industry, and how this fundamental change will affect its functions.
Just because I work at a brokerage firm, I frequently get asked this question, what stocks should I buy. This is especially true when it comes to younger investors who might not fully understand the intricacies of the market. After deflating their expectations telling them I’m not a broker (though I do have a series 7), this is what I tell them.
First of all, I’m a fundamentalist. I think chartists are nuts, but that’s just me. Sure human patterns are predictable, but with so many black-boxes trading based on algorithm, it’s too much risk to trade just by guessing which way the lines are going.
I trade on the fundamental health of a company. For new investors, if you do not know how to read figures, here’s a way to get started: Invest in what you know. For example:
- If you think Coach has the next great trend in handbags, COH
- If you’re confident Palm Pre will be the “iPhone Killer”, PALM
- You’re a PC and have faith in Windows 7? MSFT
- Mac Addict, AAPL
- Uggs always sells out, think it’s good for one more holiday season? Parent company is DECK
In the long term, buying what you know will always be better than buying based on news trends or peer speculation.
Case and point. We all know the Crocs shoes, the hideously ugly sandals popular 2 years ago. People were calling it the next great shoe, but people who knew fashion know it’s really too ugly to be a trend. The stock soared to over $60 based on frenzy. I know shoes, I know what looks good, I know what sells, and therefore I stayed away. Today it’s trading at $2.24. In hindsight I probably should have SHORTED!
More Investment Guides to Come! In the meantime, please visit my Social Software Debugging venture Pay4Bugs.com.
