Kyle Ritter

I was screwing around today looking at ways I could bring in old posts I made on my livejournal account, and came across this great utility that exported xml files that I could then use with Wordpress. I wasn’t to hip to the livejournal thing, but it was a great way to stay in touch with old friends. Needless to say, I’m going to try to post here more often.

What a wild weekend. Most of my sites enjoy some very good rankings in MSN search, and I recieve good traffic from it. However, it looks like they were doing some algo tweaks over the weekend. I was nowhere to be found in the SERPs, while previously unlisted sites were appearing at the top. I suspected it would go back to normal today, and it looks like it has. Good thing all my eggs are not in that basket, that would just be stupid.

Here is a discussion on Webmaster World about it.

That would be sweet. Google toolbar must be having some problems today.

This is hilarious.

Jen Lane, Sarah X Dylan, and myself will also be hosting a Portland PubCrawl this Thursday. This comes on the heels of a re-design of our Portland Bar Review site.

The gable vent business is doing really well. I have taken over another site that our carpenter used to use and turned it into another promotion avenue for our cedar vent store.

I got tired of installing toolbars, or flipping between Firefox tabs to check positioning in the search engine results pages, so I made myself a little tool that I could see my positioning in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

It uses frames, which kind of sucks since you end up with side scroll, but it definitely makes things easier for me.

Anyway, here it is

I have finally merged pdxbars.com with BarFly. Barfly has been covering bars in the Portland and northwest areas for over 6 years, I’m quite excited about what will happen with this site.

I also have finished up a site for a Portland plastic surgeon.
He specializes in quite a few cosmetic surgerical enhancements, as well as non-invasive procedures such as thermage, botox, and microdermabrasion.

Hopefully I’ll be able to generate them some new clients, otherwise, I just ain’t doing my job.

It was about that time…I needed to refinish the concrete floor in my basement, so I called up my friend “Your Floor Guy” and had him do a little work. It was too nice of a day yesterday for either of us to be inside, but it was nice knowing that I could sit in my house and work while he was doing stuff downstairs. Next week, I may have him do the old ass hardwood floors.

Sometimes these mundane blog posts are so nonsensical, but trust me, their is value in them for someone, somewhere.

I received a very heartening email from one of my past clients today. She had forwarded my information on to a friend praising the work that I had done for her, and was very pleased now that her site is showing signs of performance. Lately, I’ve been in a client slump, so it really brightened my day to receive this.

If you are looking to buy a home in the Portland area, especially Beaverton, then you must talk to Carla Muss Jacobs. Carla is an exclusive buyer’s agent. In a very competitive marketplace, it made me happy to see that my client is achieving some online success. Her website includes a handy listing search tool for you to find available homes in Portland.

I learned a valuable new lesson in keyphrase targeting today as well. There are terms that you will never think of that can generate significant results and interest. One of my clients mentioned that his customer was referencing the term “antique wood” when describing reclaimed lumber.

A great deal of searches were done for “antique wood flooring”. Since a large portion of my client’s customers are looking for reclaimed wood for flooring projects, it only makes sense that it also be considered antique. Unfortunately, this had occured to neither of us.

I took a look at the Overture Search Suggestion results, and found very significant searches using “antique” in place of “reclaimed.” I’d love see how generating additional traffic for these terms will help sales to this audience.