» Fringe Blog – Writing on Film, Culture, and Things on the Fringe

Total Search Engine Domination – Step One

jelewis8 — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:48:51 +0000

My work has been a series of experiments, ups and downs, successes, and failures. With search engine optimization, you’re always two steps behind the curve, because changes you made a month ago, or two months ago, are only now coming to fruition. Is that fruit rotten, or is it sweet? The trick is not to worry about what you do now. If you expect instant change, you’re going to be disappointed, and worse, you may be misled. Here’s why.
Let’s say you’re trying to raise your ranking by attacking your pages’ internal SEO. This means updating your title and meta tags, making sure you’ve got relevant content inside the page with keyword rich copy to help boost your page’s relevance, and tweaking, tweaking, tweaking the overall look and feel of the site to be search engine friendly. I don’t want to go into that because every other SEO article out there says the same damn things about optimizing your junk. Let’s say you’ve already done this, because if you haven’t, then you’re not in the same game as the rest of us.
So, you’ve made your changes, and uploaded them to your server. Now what?
You wait.
You wait some more.
Search engines come around every few days, to every few hours. It just depends on how often you’re updating and how often the spiders feel like dropping by. But you really don’t know when that’s going to be. And you also don’t know what cumulative effect your changes will have across the board.
If you expect to see your site move from page 10 to page 1 in a few days’ time, you’ll be disappointed for sure, but the real danger lies in not seeing instant results for your work. Do you panic? Redo all your internal SEO? Do you change some things and hope that you’ve gotten it right? In truth, you might not have gotten it right.
But you have to let the work you’ve done settle in and get picked up by the search engines. This happens over a series of weeks, even months in some cases.
In my case, many updates over the course of several months have netted positive upward flow of the site’s rankings. But I had to learn the biggest SEO lesson of all, which is why I put it at Step One for achieving total SEO optimization.
Patience, and patience, and more patience. You must have it in abundance to win the SEO game. You already know what you’re doing. You’re already doing the right things. So let it play. Let it do what it does on its own, and you’ll see your work bearing nice, tasty fruit.
Come back for Step 2 of Total SEO Domination.

Jeremiah Lewis is the Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) for Breast Implants 411, a marketing firm for plastic surgeons across the globe. He wishes he had the kind of income that Beverly Hills breast surgeons enjoy.

Fringecast 6

jelewis8 — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 10:27:11 +0000

Better late than on time. Or so the current theory goes. This week’s Fringecast underwent some serious editorial work, mostly because we ran over our allotted time budget on every segment by an average of two minutes. It was that good. Don’t worry though. The best parts have remained, including a marvelous movie trailer for a film called Sack Lunch. In case you were wondering, all our movie trailer titles come from “Seinfeld”, and do not exist in real life…yet. However, if some aspiring executive at Sony happens to catch the ‘cast and sees dramedy gold, he’d better do the right thing and contact us pronto. Remember, Sony, we live right next door. We know what you do in your offices late at night when you think no one is looking.
If you care to, you can catch the Fringecast on iTunes, which should update at a click of your mouse, or if you’re feeling adventurous and frisky, check out the XML feed. Otherwise, click to get the direct file. Previous episodes are on the sidebar, as usual.

Complaint Rolling

jelewis8 — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 16:47:39 +0000

It’s astonishing how quickly time passes when you don’t really want it to. You keep thinking it’s Wednesday, a perpetual moment of neither here nor there, comfortably situated mid-week to allow you that last burst of work output (if you’re behind) and not too far from Friday (if you’re finished and want the weekend). You want it to be Wednesday, but the clock advises you to consider getting with the times or face imminent loss of face when you show up for a Thursday meeting on Friday. It is Friday, isn’t it? And I didn’t even notice Thursday. Thursday was a blurry, out of focus, hazy mass of blur. When I snapped out of my cloudy fog, it was Friday, and I feared the worst.
Not to worry. I planned accordingly. Instead of scheduling a Thursday meeting to which I would either be late or completely absent, it was agreed that Friday would be ideal. Now at least I won’t be a no-show. But I still have 192 frames of three dimensional visual trickery to complete before 1:30. Aren’t I the lucky one?
If you thought I was depressed yesterday and about to ditch my writing career in favour of something more stable, like janitorial service, hopefully you first considered the fact that my “career” thus far consists of unpublished ephemera, ongoing literary projects, film scripts, and this blog, which runs the gamut from essay-like pages on the mundane and uneternal to horrible mutated Resident Evil creature-like writing, where you don’t know whether to laugh nervously or run away. If I had to abandon it, the happy-meter might decrease slightly, but it wouldn’t really affect my financial state. So I figure, why quit now?
I’m lucky in that I already know, and acknowledge that for every good word I write, I write a thousand bad ones, and someone else is writing three hundred good ones. And they have an agent. Most people take years to realize this truth, so in some ways, I’m ahead of the curve. It’s just a question of taking that acknowledgement and turning it into profit. And since I’m not so good at math (as demonstrated yesterday) I guess I’ll write. And edit feature films. And create film titles, and production logos. And direct short films. Basically everything that I love.
One can roll complaints like cigarettes. It takes a cheerfully optimistic person to unroll the cigarette and use the leaves in a salad. Or an idiot. Either way, I’m doing fine, thanks for asking. Have a great weekend, and look for a podcast sometime before Monday. Cheers.

Family Ties and Writing Updates

jelewis8 — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 10:42:45 +0000

I got a phone call on my cell yesterday. My brother James has come back from his six months in Iraq. It was totally worth the minutes used to hear the news. I haven’t been worried about him–I don’t really worry about much. But I was just a bit unnerved at times knowing he was close to battle zones. It’s a scary situation to be in, I’m sure. It’s somewhat so for those who are waiting back home. I feel as if a weight has been lifted from me. Now that he’s back, bad things can happen to me and somehow it will all be okay.
Today (Friday) is the big day. I came close to finishing Book 1 yesterday, but I decided to hold off and writing the finishing touches tomorrow. It seems more fitting to end on a Friday, as if there’s a bit more magical juju in the end of the week flourish. I somehow hit my stride Wednesday evening, and I ended up writing around 7,000 words in under three and a half hours. That’s probably a record for me.
I’ll let you know how I feel when it’s all done. Naturally, even once I’m finished writing, the work isn’t done. I have to format it and make sure I haven’t made any major errors in logic, especially in timelines, since I do a bit of switching back and forth between stories, I want to make sure I haven’t misplaced someone in the wrong time, or given someone a vital piece of information before they’re supposed to have it. Mostly it will be minor editing. Then there’s formatting for printing, which I’ll explain more about in another post.
For now, I feel like hitting the hay now and waking up early to complete this sucker. I’m feeling good. How about you?

Blogging In the Time of Cholera

jelewis8 — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 17:26:29 +0000

Please excuse the lack of original posting of late. In my spare time I’ve been pumping out a feature script which I started Sunday afternoon and which I am hoping to finish by Thursday evening. That’s 90-120 pages in five days, which for me is unprecedented. It’s more important for me to write uninterupted than to break the flow I’ve got going with blogging. Sorry.
I know it’s a cardinal sin to inform readers that they’re being given the shaft, but at least it’s only temporary.
I’ll be gone all day Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday…basically, I’m pretty strapped for time, and blogging just got moved down the priority list for this week. Don’t worry, I’ve still got some good stuff on the way.
I saw Million Dollar Baby the other night, and will try and post a review before the weekend. In addition, I’m nearly done seeing what Oscar nominated pictures I can get to, though I don’t think I’ll be able to view all of them before the 27th. With that in mind, I’ll be doing my Oscar predictions, with the usual colour commentary you’ve come to expect and hopefully love.
Like I said, sorry for the insubstantial posting of late, but I will get back into the groove after this week. In the meantime, I’ve got a few links for you to check out below.
The Christian Carnival is up at Wittenberg Gate.
Carnival of the Vanities #124 is now up at Ken Sain’s place. Bloggy goodness therein.
I got an odd email from Justin Katz, who I haven’t heard from in a while, not since our last online tete a tete, which was more civil and respectable than the word tete a tete implies. Not that we were ever bosom buddies or anything…anyway, it concerned an article of his that I first read back in December in the National Review, that attempts to explain the rationale of Andrew Sullivan, a man who can’t quite define or pinpoint his own political, cultural, social, and theological beliefs. I’ve stopped reading Sullivan since he started lacking focus with the war issue, and since then have kept up only loosely with his politics since going all blue state over the gay marriage issue.
Justin has now posted his article online at Dust In The Light. It’s long, detailed, but worth a read if you’ve ever, like me, tried to figure Andrew Sullivan out and simply failed after a long bout in the ring.
Greg Piper has a good writeup of the launch of the new DC paper, the Washington Examiner. He notes copious copy errors (no stranger here!), but a launch party filled with champagne and an editorial page note to readers that seems to echo his own alt paper’s (PUNCH) philosophy.
Protein Wisdom (a blog I need to read more) has a McSweeney-like list of 9 names the UN would PREFER we give to the “not genocide” in Darfur. (Via Instapundit)
Lauren is travel blogging. Lots of airport and hotel troubles, so you can probably relate.
Philip Johnson, noted American architect, has died. He founded the US international style of glass towers architecture, and compared corporations to Renaissance figures such as the Medicis and the popes of old.
Languagehat links to an article on the future of the modern Irish language. Speaking of the UK, LH also has a BBC article linked that discusses the ways Londoners speak. Cool stuff.
Okay, I really do have to start my day now, so ta ta for now.

A Flame!

jelewis8 — Sun, 02 Mar 2003 08:03:07 +0000

I’m not absolutely certain, but I think I have just gotten my first “flame” from this blog! Here is an email I received Friday the 28th of February:

The author of this issue is a real american dirty rascal ! This person is shit and what he writes is bullshit! I hate him and wish that stupid hog died!

This is probably referring to the article I wrote about Iraqi oil. How exciting!
Back when I was a wee freshman in college, I prided myself on my ability to flame people who persisted in showing their stupidity on various listserves. So I was a little flametard. Don’t worry. I stopped that infantile pedantry long ago, but it gives me a thrill to recall those heady days of receiving a reply email back from the person I just totally lit up, feeling that heartbeat quicken, and then giving yourself the luxury of firing back a witty and devastating retort.