I just got done creating Geiger City. How? I went to MyMiniCity and entered Geiger. Geiger has a population of 1 but ZERO crime! What am I going to do, rob myself? Go to http://geiger.myminicity.com/ to have a look at how Geiger City is doing.

If you thought America’s anti-marijuana campaign was horrible, check out Canada’s anti-accident campaign.

These are Canadian Public Sevice Ads but ARE NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART.  You’ve been warned.

A few months ago I updated my theme for Jay Geiger.com.  I didn’t realize at the point that it had screwy title, keyword and description tags.  That definitely doesn’t help you rank in the search engines.  Here are my top tips for SEOing you theme wether you bought it or built it yourself.

1. TITLE TAG – The title is the most important thing other than links and content is the title tag.  For the most part, search engines will see each page with different title as a different page.  Open up your “header.php” that correlates to your theme.  This file should be in a subdirectory under ‘…\wp-content\themes\…’.

SIDENOTE: If you are using Windows/IIS as your web server you may need to open the file in wordpad, not notepad.

Look for the line(s) that begin with “<title>”.  It should look exactly or somewhat like this.

<title><?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { echo “-”; } ?> <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>

Note that it is “wp_title(‘ ‘)” not “wp_title()’.  If you use the second one you get a weird raquo character in your title like “…»”.  I don’t like that little raquo element.

So basically my title will be my blog’s name for the main page.  For all other page it will be <POST NAME> – <BLOG NAME>.  You always want your keywords first as you want to rank higher for whatever your post is all about.

2. DESCRIPTION TAG – Search engines generally show the page’s description as the description for search page results.   You want to make sure this is unique.  Ideally you would want to put a unique description for each post in here.  I don’t think that is really that easy in WordPress.  Here is the next best thing.

<meta name=”description” content=”<?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?> by Geiger” />

This basically puts the post title followed with ” by Geiger”.  Don’t use my name! use yours.  Feel free to add a little more text to this but keep in mind that you will want your title here.  You could put part of your post’s text as well but I just left it simpler.

3. KEYWORDS TAG – Some people don’t care about the keywords meta tag.  I think that it helps, just not as much as it used to.  As WordPress transitions more from categories to tags, this could be more useful.  It would be ideal to put your post’s title followed by your tags in here.  For now though I am just going to put in my title.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”<?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?>, Geiger” />

I also added the keyword “Geiger” as I want to be the number one Geiger in the world!  Feel free to add some generic keywords that apply to your entire blog.

Weird Contest over on Dax’s blog.  Maybe I’ll be the only contestant and will win!

Entries off the top of my head

Jim! She’s truly truly truly Outrageous!

Gabe Frohman – Sausage King of Chicago

Penelope Oakwood

Blanche Deverohmy!

Shera Princess of Power

BJ Femtop

Roe Nolookbelow

Diana Deepvoice

So I found out 2 days ago that you can specify a different url for each keyword you have in a Kontera campaign.  GREAT!  Now I can just parse that out and track which ones convert and which ones don’t.  I guess I would need a whole new campaign to test out a different ad.

I like Kontera but they need to improve their interface before somebody like Google comes along and takes their business.  I have contacted Vibrant Media a couple of times.  Vibrant Media has the same exact type of ads as Kontera.  However this is the only response that I have ever gotten from Kontera.

Hi Jason,
Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding advertising opportunities with Vibrant Media. With Vibrant In-Text Advertising, every word across the internet is an opportunity to engage.
Your request for more information is important to us and a sales associate will be following up with you shortly.
Alternatively you can reach us at 1 888 321 VIBRANT (8427).
Thanks again for your interest and we look forward to working with you!
Best Regards,
Vibrant Media Sales

Kind of krap on Vibrant’s part.

So I took a look at my Analytics and Log files for the traffic that has been coming my way since the 29th.  So far I have gotten 2,563 clicks.  1,466 clicks have come from 2 sites. That’s about 57.20%.

I took a look at the 2 sites.  The one is simply a directory of sponsored links.  The second is a “Made for Ad” site.  1466 clicks at $.25 a click equates to $366.50.  I will be calling my Kontera contact in a short bit.  I will not pass any judgment until I can speak with Kontera.  So far Will at Kontera has been very good to deal with.

This would have been much easier if Kontera’s reporting would have been closer to what AdWords has.

1,809 of those clicks have come from 2 keywords.  That is roughly 70.59%.  These 2 keywords are way to general.  If I continue with Kontera, these will definitely be removed.

Out in Buffalo, NY I found that I had misplaced my new digital camera.  (For the record it’s an Olympus Stylus 690).  I must have left it out in the car which really isn’t a good idea as it was very cold that night.  I went out in the next morning to get it and found it on the ground.

It seems as though my camera had dropped out of my pocket.  It was warm so it had melted the snow on the ground and made a little ice block on it.

I placed my frozen camera on the floor of a friend’s Jeep as went to Wal-Mart.

After letting it warm up I turned it on and it came right to life.  I took a picture of myself.

This is also the same camera I used to take photos of Me and Matt Cutts and Me and Craig Newmark.

Here’s a link to the Camera on Amazon if you’re interested in checking it out.  It already paid off for me.

Olympus Stylus (affiliate link)

Mine was the 790.  If you are going to do deep diving then look at the 770.  The 770 goes down to 55 feet in water.

For those of you "Normal" people who aren’t all into the technical aspect of Google, Matt Cutts is one of Google most popular engineers.  If you ever see him, he is one of the nicest and guys I’ve ever met.  Also he knows ALL about Google’s search.  He always answers everybody’s questions AND SMILES ABOUT IT!  Although he and I differ on the idea of paying for links, I give him kudos to his mindset behind his choices.

btw Matt, if you are reading this I suggest that Google starts treating paid links differently.  It should be similar to the way links from .edu are different from .com

Here is a photo from this morning of me and Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist.com

Craig said in a nutshell that he grew up a nerd with taped glasses that was excluded from a lot of things for being so dorky.  Now with the internet and world wide web everybody is included.

btw, yes I realize I look drunk but I was stone cold sober.