.lupomontero

Very often people ask me what can they do to improve their site’s search engine visibility, and I normally reply to them with a really long and boring email about how important and complex SEO can be. However, the most common mistakes have nothing to do with the complexity involved in optimising a site, copy writing, managing a link building strategy or advertising campaign; the most common mistake is picking the wrong keywords and key phrases, so I decided to publish this article in my blog in order to reuse the information the next time someone asks…

Some tips:

• Try to be as specific as you can. Most internet users search for combinations of keywords (key phrases) rather than isolated terms. Also the smaller the niche, the easier it will be to compete with other sites targeting the same keywords. The most common mistake when picking keywords is that people tend to make lists of very generic terms, which puts them in a position where they would need to compete with much larger (and better funded) sites.
• The more specific, the better the traffic. Unless you are a mainstream generic content provider what you are after is not traffic volume (which could potentially be very harmful and expensive) but manageable targeted visitors that actually want whatever it is that your website has to offer.
• Regionalise your keywords.
• Don’t forget common misspellings. A considerable amount of search queries are misspelled, and these common misspellings normally offer a cheaper and less saturated target. These are good when used as secondary keywords accompanying your “real” keywords.
• Don’t rely exclusively in paid advertising. More than 80% of internet traffic originates in “organic search“, which means that it normally pays off to concentrate in optimising your pages to perform well in the “non-paid for” organic search results. This is achieved by offering quality content, getting “unpaid” links in other relevant sites, keyword rich copy… and many other indirect tweaks. Paid advertising is normally used to complement this other optimisation efforts as it proves to be much less efficient and a lot more expensive in the mid-long term.
• Use available keyword research tools like Google AdWord’s free keyword tool. This will give you “real” information about what people actually search for (not what you think they might be searching for or what you would like them top search for), how they formulate search queries and how much competition there is for a given search string.
• Make (good) use of Meta Tags. Every web page has “meta data” (mainly a title and description) that is used by search systems in order to index these pages and display search results to their users. Making sure that each page in your site has a an appropriate, relevant and keyword rich title and description is the key to getting indexed and associated with the desired keywords.
• Avoid duplicate content at all costs as it can get you banned from search indexes and/or substantially reduce your page’s ranking.

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Today, after upgrading packages with apt-get on a server running Debian Lenny my PEAR installation seemed to be broken. PHP had been updated to 5.2.10 and PEAR version was now 1.8.0. So when I realised that PEAR wasn’t the latest stable I tried upgrading PEAR using the command I’ve always used: pear upgrade pear, where the first “pear” is the command we run, then the “upgrade” sub-command and finally the name of the package we want to work with, unsurprisingly “pear”.

So I type the following expecting a happy success message and get this instead:

# pear upgrade pear
Notice: Undefined variable: dorest in PEAR/Command/Install.php on line 1220
Notice: Undefined variable: latest in PEAR/Command/Install.php on line 1228
Notice: Undefined variable: latest in PEAR/Command/Install.php on line 1234
Warning: array_change_key_case(): The argument should be an array in PEAR/Command/Install.php on line 1234
Nothing to upgrade


After a quick look at the problem I figured out that it was a problem with the cached channel data that PEAR stores under a directory called ./channels in the PEAR installation directory. The problem is quickly solved by deleting the files in that directory. To find out where PEAR is installed you can use the “pear list-files” command as follows:

# pear list-files pear
Installed Files For pear
========================
Type Install Path
php /usr/local/zend/share/pear/OS/Guess.php
php /usr/local/zend/share/pear/PEAR/ChannelFile/Parser.php
...

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A very brief (5min) screencast based on the code used in my previous post “Fetching tweets with jQuery and the Twitter JSON API“. This screencast was made with screenr, so I was limited to 5min in length and no editing of the video…

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