However, I am confident that I can get her on page 1 for some pretty nice geo-targeted, violinist-related keywords. The most obvious one is “New York Violinist“. Apparently there is plenty of domain name real estate out there to grab in this niche, like this awesome domain name, newyorkviolinist.com.

Here are a few of the folks that I plan on seeing there:

• Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Services (Twitter @graywolf)
• Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Inc (Twitter @sugarrae)
• Michael Streko, Owner, Streko Media LLC (Twitter @streko)
• Chris Brogan, President, New Marketing Labs (Twitter @chrisbrogan)
• Brent Csutoras, Social Media Consultant, Brent Csutoras, Inc. (Twitter @brentcsutoras)
• Todd Malicoat, Owner, Meta4 Creations, LLC (Twitter @stuntdubl)
• Chris Winfield, President, 10e20 (Twitter @chriswinfield)
• Todd Friesen, Director, SEO, Position Tech (Twitter @oilman)
• Kate Morris, Co-Founding Demon, Marketing Demons (Twitter @katemorris)
• Carolyn Shelby, Owner, CShel (Twitter @cshel)
• David Snyder, Co-Founder, Search & Social, LLC
• Peter Shankman, Founder & CEO, The Geek Factory (Twitter @skydiver)

I am really into bikes. So when I go to pick out a lock, I am serious.  After pimping out my 1980’s Peugeot aluminum frame with new parts, I decided it was time for a new lock. My first thought was Kryptonite.

I Googled “kryptonite locks” just to get an idea for what my options were.

When the SERP loaded, I skipped right past the official Kryptonite website - which was the only website I had planned to visit. Instead, I visited the other, much more interesting results:

Wired article about how one can open Kryptonite locks with a Bic pen.

YouTube videos showing how to open Kryptonite locks.

…Not exactly what I was expecting from the lock brand I had come to trust. But even after watching about 5 different people pick open Kryptonite locks and reading the Wired article on the topic, I still had faith that this issue MUST have been dealt.

To find out the truth and get to the bottom of this, I went to the official Kryptonite website. There had to be swift response immediately on the homepage. Well, there wasn’t. I figured that since most of the negative videos and article were from a few years ago, that maybe the whole issue had been resolved and I was just ignorant. I clicked around looking for a response to the videos and article, but was unable to find anything. Read the blog a little bit. Didn’t find much there either.

I am sure that if I really wanted to get to the bottom of it, I could uncover information about how Kryptonite revolutionized their u-locks with innovative technology that defies even a Bic pen. Well sorry Kryptonite, but I don’t have that kind of patience on a hot Sunday afternoon. I want to get to the park so I can relax, not dig through your press release!

I am not certain whether or not Kryptonite has resolved this issue, but from the looks of it, I would have to say that that they feel like the issue has been resolved. Regardless of Kryptonite’s superior technology, I refuse purchasing something from a company conceited enough to think that consumers will systematically prioritize brand name over quality.

Here is what I did instead of buying a Kryptonite lock:

1.) Walked over to Home Depot

2.) Purchased a thick-ass heavy duty chain ($12) a heavy duty Master Lock ($25).

Are you happy Kryptonite? I was so going to pay for that. But this made me change my mind and I’m sure that I’m not alone.

The way I found this page was through a spammy comment on my company blog. What I also found out was that I could create my very own page on the Vanderbilt.edu domain. This appears to be common practice for viagra spammers. Below you can see both the spam page, and my very own page that I was easily able to create.

Spam page

Spam on Vanderbilt.edu subdomain. Click image to see full size.

My own test page

The page that I created as a test on Vanderbilt.edu. Click the image to see full size.

What is Surprise Industries?

They sell surprises.

What kind of surprises are we talking about?

The surprises can be anything from a ride on a ferris wheel, to an acrobatic yoga class, to a sessions of  hypnotherapy. The company does a good job of matching up surprise-seekers with the appropriate surprise.

How they can benefit you & your friends:

You tell them what time slots you are available for a surprise, and at any point you will be surprised with an interesting experience. You only pay for the cost of the activity. These surprises can also be gifted.

How they can benefit your business:

This is a great way to connect with potential clients. Come up with a good “surprise” that would interest someone: if you’re an SEO, that could be for example, creation of social media profiles and a blog. If you’re a web designer, why not create a mockup for a personal or family website? In the end, the point is that anyone who is surprised by your services will most likely talk about you to their friends as well. And we all know how effective word-of-mouth referrals are.

Imagine you are doing a redesign on a gigantic website and you may or may not be doing some SEO for later down the road. As a responsible web developer you probably want to ensure that the client does not start to question why, all of a sudden, their search engine traffic dropped off the side of a cliff.

If you can preserve URLs as they are, then fine, there’s probably is not too much to worry about. But when you create a whole new URL structure and you’ve got a lot of pages, Here are a few basic steps to ensure that the website launch goes well. It is probably not the BEST way, but it is the SAFE way.

1. Take a note of all indexed pages.

   To do so, simply check with Google, using the parameter, site:www.reallyridiculouslygoodlookingwebsite.com . Make sure to show all supplementary results as well so that you have a more complete list. If you are using the SEO plugin for Firefox (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html) then you’ll be able to download this list as a .csv file. Nice.

   You can also go through the website’s html or xml sitemap for a list of its URLs. Have fun doing that.

   Figure out what new pages to point the old pages to.

   Go through your new sitemap see what the list of new URLs is (hopefully you have control over the naming of these) and what each content is on each page. Match up each old page with a relevant, new page. Sometimes this can be easy if the general structure of a website is staying the same, and sometimes can be more tough if things are really being moved around.

   Create the necessary 301 redirects via your .htaccess file.

   This can be more or less easy depending on what you are working with.

   If you have regular pages, with not too much info, it will look something like this:

   Redirect 301 /oldpage.php http://www.website.com/prettynewpage

   If you have a ton of parameters at the ends of URLs, your rewrite might look something more like this:

   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^youroldcategory_id=223423&youroldsubcategory_id=52355$
   RewriteRule ^youroldpage.php$ http://www.website.com/yournewcategory/yournewsubcategory%1? [R=301,L]

   “Noindex, follow” your new pages for the time being.

   Upload the new pages along with your .htaccess file. Test your old pages by going through your list and making sure each page redirects correctly. Allow any URLs that are unaffected by the redesign to continue to be indexed as they will be the ones that will help notify SE’s that some of your old URLs are being redirected elsewhere. One such example is your homepage.

   Take off the noindex and let your new pages be crawled freely.

   Wait for the search engines to take into account your new URLs, then unleash them out into the wild. This will reduce the risk of “DUPLICATE CONTENT FAIL” to a minimum.

It is clearly visible that the fruits of our labor truly paid off after our work was done. R.A.G. was able to take full advantage of the holiday season search frenzy and many of those same visitors came back to the website early this year. Personalized search results had a big role to play here.

The ROI of SEO: Line graph showing number of visitors to RagNewYork.com from April 2008 to February 21, 2009.

The ROI of SEO: Line graph showing number of conversions on RagNewYork.com from April 2008 to February 21, 2009.

Obviously, overall visitors and conversions are not enough to judge the success of an SEO campaign, but in the case of R.A.G., it so happens that with a small budget - all of it allocated to SEO - long lasting effects can be seen for a fraction of what would have been paid for PPC during that same time frame to obtain similar results.

Me dressed up in the custom-made Blastor costume, photo taken by Jurgen.

Here is another photo taken of Blastor, alongside Halo.