Home Improvement Blog

This article is a good transition from mostly speaking about websites to getting back to blogging about home projects. As part of my website development I’ve recently installed a WebCam on one of my sites. This process was quick simple and fun. Luckily when I first got started on this I found a great reference website, www.cowboy Frank.net. Frankie has been doing web cams for a long time and has an incredible reference site based on his advice I selected a Logitech Pro 9000 WebCam. I’m currently running Windows XP so the key is to install the software before you plug in the WebCam. Once I installed this camera, I found it has superior optics which allow for high quality imaging. I use the camera to take pictures both inside and out. For inside photos, it did a good job at adjusting for backlighting for the windows in my office. It also does good job of auto adjusting the contrast and capturing realistic colors. As with all web cams, the biggest drawback is a slow refresh rate. Any motion becomes a blur to a WebCam.

Primarily I will be using the WebCam to take outdoor pictures I have installed it temporarily overlooking open space in my backyard. I have not corrected for glare on the window yet but in general the picture quality is excellent. I had high expectations of the camera but realized after I bought it that web cams are sensitive to sun damage so I cannot take pictures of the dramatic Colorado sunrises I that I see every morning. In order to avoid ever pointing a camera directly at the sun, I must aim it east which does not get pictures of my best view. This camera is installed on a laptop, which is attached to my network. Based on Frank’s advice I also am using aftermarket software to capture and upload the photos. The software is called TinCam. This software costs $19 and has a 30-day free trial. Although I have not purchased it yet I am sure that I will because it has worked extremely well during the past two weeks. Within the software I have set up to FTP to my site. The software will even create a web page for the WebCam. I let the TinCam create this page and then I cut and paste the JavaScript into my page where I wanted the final WebCam image to be. With TimCam, you simply enter an FTP address with a password and username. Then you must set up a auto capture interval and you are done. I am still in the process of building a list of websites that will display or link to your WebCam. Currently I am uploading my images to www.wunderground.com. I am listed in the Colorado section. My current challenge is to determine how to upload images to multiple sites.

Although most web cams are sold for showing images of people’s faces (and bodies if you know what I mean) there are also a great option for showing outdoor scenes.

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I’m finally getting back to HelpinaFlash and home improvement. I have not touched the site for about 6 months. During that period I purchased a wedding related site. This site immediately started making more money that HelpinaFlash so I have totally ignored this site. Now I am about finished with the development for that site and hope to be getting back to more manly work. I have completed several home renovation project during this time so I have some new material. If anyone has requests for information, I am looking for new subject matter. Up to this point in time, my article on GFI circuits has been the only article that Google has liked. Most the other articles are not significant enough to merit any significant traffic.

In general, it seems that there are more spammers (trying to get links) visiting this blog than guests.

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Wow,

I have been busy. This site was having some technical difficulties so I took a short break to work on my other sites. Now that they are all in order, I have big plans for this site. We will be working on changing over to Fusebox in the next week. Immediately following that implementation, I will be putting a CRUD on the site so users (both contractors and customer looking for help) can sign in and get more information. Once the CRUD is done, we will start releasing our estimating tools.

These tools will allow users to estimate all kinds of home repair and renovation projects. I may also experiment with using Google sketchup to create some 3D model of building components.

If there is anyone out there in the construction industry that wants to volunteer as a test site from some of my new tools, please contact me. The tools will be totally free and should help contractors pre-qualify potential customers.

If someone gets a complete instant estimate on line and then asks for written estimate, they are serious about the project. That customer is worth the effort.

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Today, helpinaflash went from a PR3 to PR1. I have been weeding out some potential duplicate content page but this is insane. I thought this could be a good opportunity to discuss PR. The PR or page rank can be obtained for any page using the Google toolbar. Google says that PR is an indication of the relative importance of a page. In some Google documents, PR sound like it could be tied to search ranking. In may internet users group, the most experienced guy says that PR is an indicator of crawl rate but it does not seem to track well with search engine ranking. In general PR is passed from one page to another with a minus one value. A link from a PR 8 site will should make you a PR7. This does seem to be true as far as I can see.

This would explain why PR is not directly associated with higher search engine rankings. Google search rank is based on number, age and PR of the back links so a single back link has little effect on the overall ranking of a site. Some older sites have tens of thousands of back links so one high PR does make much difference in the total equation.

I am currently running experiments on the high PR back links and will share them when they are complete.

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I almost stumped. I use Adobe Premier to create videos. It does not com with a codec to make mpeg movies so I usually output to avi. After about 6 hours of downloading, compiling and checking, I still have not found a freeware package that can convert AVI to MPEG 2 or MPEG 4. Google says they accept avi format but I still have not been able to upload my revolutionary plumbing video.

If anyone has advice on how to convert a standard avi to something that google will like, please let me know.

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After producing my first video yesterday, I have spent 2 days trying to get google to upload it. They seem to be overwhelmed with uploads of people doing really stupid things so there is no bandwidth left for uploading educational videos. So today, I tried something different.
I spent hours trying to find good DIY videos on Google-video so I could add them to my site. The majority of DIY videos on Google video are by expertvillage. I don’t know who qualifies as an expert in that village but it must be anyone (even the village idiot). Some of their videos are down right wrong and the comment reflect that. I found a couple good ones but the bulk are a waste of bandwidth.
There are also 114 videos from askthebuilder. These are high quality videos, informative and professional. You can’t go wrong with one of these videos. I hope that my videos are as good as askthebuilder.
I found a handful of other instructional videos but that is about it. I have added a video section to the website that shows the better videos. I hope this will save my readers the time required reviewing hundred of worthless un-educational video with the hope of finding a good one. If you want to see gag video like exploding toilets then go directly to Google video, they have an unlimited supply.

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Google has now made it so easy to add video to your website. I have been wanting to add select videos to Helpinflash for months. Today I started the project by looking at several options. One option was to use Google video. Within an hour of starting I had a test video working on my site. Here is all it takes:

Go to Google video and download the video uploader.

Install it and then go back to Google video. Click on the upload video link.

They will accept both AVI and MPEGs.

Once the video is uploaded, view it to confirm it works.

Then click on the link to add this video to your site. Click on the code and insert it into the page where you want it.

That’s it.

Now the big question is – will adding videos get me more traffic?

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Search engines have developed sophisticated algorithms to process the mass amount of information on the web. Originally these algorithms used only the tags given to organize the paged on the web. Since then, they have become much more complex. As they have developed, they have become more secret. This secrecy is a pain for white-hat web developer that just want to know the rules, follow the rules and get good rankings. Of course, this secrecy must be maintained since there are just as many black-hat web developers that would cheat the systems if they understood it.

That is why experimentation is the key to success in SEO. No one really knows the algorithms and they are very complex. What works for one market may not work for another. Most good developers run experiments to see if they have positive or negative effect on their ratings. I am currently running several key experiments and I will share the result when they are done.

If you have any insider information, please feel to post it here and rock the world.

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Much of what I have read on SEO is about site or page structure. After running many experiments, I have not found this to make much difference. Content and back links are 85% of the secret to success. 3 years ago, optimized structure was a key but today you just need to have a reasonable structure.

Here are some basics:

· Make sure that your internal linking is consistent. Always use absolute links (http://www.mysite.com/file.htm) and not relative links (../file.htm).

· Make your URL as simple as possible. Avoid the question mark if you can and never pass more than two variables in the URL. Avoid excessively long URLs.

· Use Dashes and not underscores in URL.

· Directory names are just as good as File names in the URL.

· Always have a descriptive, unique title tag and description.

· Some sites now leave the keywords blank and let the search engines pick them based on content so keywords are not critical.

· Photos help with rankings since search engines can’t rate photos yet so you get the benefit of the doubt that they are good. Use the alt and title tag on your photo.

· Keyword stuffing over 10% of the page content is a waste of time and could hurt

· Pages should contain at least 400 word of original content. I see lots of huge pages that rank well so there seems to be no cap on the maximum size of a page.

· Page file size is important so try to make your files small. Using CSS makes the user experience better and makes your page files smaller.

· Don’t use frames.

· Avoid cloaking.

· Use 301 redirects if you no longer want to use a page or site.

· Avoid misspellings and errors as much as possible.

That’s it, now focus on your content and back links.

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Many people think that quality back links are the single biggest factor getting good organic rankings with the search engines. Although they are not as important for Yahoo and MSN, they seem to be critical to Google (70% of the SEO market) and getting out of the Google sandbox. At Pubcom, the experts said that the search engines consider a back link like a vote for a site. The more votes you get, the better the site is and the more referral you should get from the search engines.

Back links have been a basis for ranking for many years and so back linking has become an industry. Back link farms (who sell bulk back links) and Web rings were created to try and cheat the system. Now the search engines are smarter and they rate back links in addition to logging them. This makes links from farms and rings essentially worthless. Many older sites have purchased links. I don’t think these links negatively affect rankings but they just don’t help and are a waste of time and money.

The best back link is a one-way link from a high PR website. A few link exchanges (reciprocal links) are OK but they won’t give you a huge boost.

Back links for dot-gov and dot-org sites may have more value than a link from a dot-com because of their high trust factor.

Logically, this makes sense to me. A non-reciprocal back link for a well trusted site is an indicator of a quality site. When well-established sites (with limited out links) link to a site, it is usually because the site is an important one that people should know about. The more out links on the site or page, the less value for each link.

Some experts say that you must have a link signature (Ex: 60% .com in your market with 4 .edu links and 10 reciprocal links, and 25 blog links) that is similar to your competitors. I don’t see the logic here. This would essentially ban any revolutionary sites and force everyone to follow the leader. I hope this is not true.

Type into the Google or Yahoo search bar

Link:http://www.sitename.com

To find out how many back links you or your competitors have.

My biggest competitor has 7,993 inlinks on Yahoo (wow) and 425 on Google. Google only shows a sampling of the back links for some reason

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