For the last several weeks, I’ve been trying my hand at some amateur SEO (or, Search Engine Optimisation) with my rankings for Fore Score on the term “golf stats” and I’ve had a bit of success. People don’t search for “golf stats” quite a whole lot, and the competition is pretty stiff at the top of the rankings, but I thought I’d give it a shot anyway just to see how I could do.

When I started this, Fore Score was the 10th result on the first page for a “golf stats” search on Google. Occasionally, it was dipping to the top of the 2nd page as well. After working on some of the code and putting extra effort into getting targeted backlinks with the right anchor text I’ve seen Fore Score rise to the #4 or #5 position depending on when you run the search. I’d say that’s a step in the right direction. I’ve managed to outrank some pretty large competitors: Sports Illustrated, Golf.com and USA Today to name three of the biggest.

This has been an interesting little experiment. In the world of Internet marketing, SEO and monitoring and tracking keywords and search engine results is a part of daily life. Internet marketers usually have a much better understanding of these things than someone like myself, who is mainly focused full-time on web development.

I’m probably going to switch my focus to another keyword or keyphrase here as the summer wraps up. I’ll keep everyone posted on the results.

It’s been a really long time since I had a post with a coding solution here. So today I thought I’d throw up something I needed earlier this summer for anyone else looking for similar code.

On an older site, still running Classic ASP, I needed to redirect anyone visiting a page with standard HTTP to the same page using HTTPS. Here’s the solution which I included at the very top of the page before any other code is called:

<%
	if Request.ServerVariables("HTTPS") = "off" then
		srvname = Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME")
		scrname = Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")
		response.redirect("https://" & srvname & scrname)
	end if
%>

Basically, whenever someone visits the page it checks to see if they came from http://www.example.com/page and then redirects them straight to https://www.example.com/page to ensure they’re visiting the page on a secure connection.

There are probably much better ways to do this but since this is what worked for me I thought I’d share.

UPDATE: GrabUp has been sold at the “Buy It Now” price of $20,000 USD. That’s actually half of what the initial buyout price was, but the seller cut it in half to speed up the sale.

When is it too soon to sell a site? A lot of people worry about waiting too long to sell their websites. They’re concerned if they don’t strike while the iron is hot, and cash in on recent revenue stats, that they might not make the most possible from the sale of their sites.

An Example of Selling Too Soon?

There’s a great Mac-only piece of software out there called GrabUp that lets you quickly take snapshots of your screen and upload them to the web for you to share with others. The program is snappy and the system for uploading is extremely fast and efficient. It’s a great product that just recently launched an extended version that, for a small cost, lets you get even more out of the software. The future looks bright for GrabUp.

That future, unfortunately, is going to belong to someone other than the program’s creator.

GrabUp is currently up for sale over at SitePoint. This sale comes only one week after the “pro” version of the software has been available. In that week the profit has been $1,060. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at and the owner is using that figure to justify their “Buy It Now” price.

It feels to me like the seller might be rushing into this one a bit. I obviously don’t know, or pretend to know, their financial situation of course. But with sales figures like that so early in the game, with little promotion from what the seller is claiming, it seems like they’d be better served holding on for at least a few more months.

Here’s the other problem with selling so fast. It makes potential buyers skeptical. You immediately ask yourself, when first seeing this sale, “Why is he selling already? What’s the problem?” If you do a little research, you find out GrabUp has actually been up for sale before and then the deal was cancelled. That’s going to raise concern as well.

Software is a tricky game to play. I know that from experience working at the enterprise level. It’s just as hard at the consumer level, of course. But when you have an apparent hit on your hands it might be best to stick to it and see where it leads you. As opposed to jumping ship for your next project at the first sight of a payday.

Our friends in Boston have launched the public beta of their new startup, TicketStumbler, this week. Anyone who loves to see live sporting events will find this site useful. As an aggregator for the lucrative secondary ticket market, TicketStumbler allows users to search all of the ticket listings on the various third-party ticket sites in one place.

TicketStumbler has a really nice look and interface with cool slider widgets and an easy to navigate listing of the tickets for each event. Their search runs on natural language and they have geolocation features as well to show you upcoming events near your location. I don’t know how many tickets or events they’re currently storing but it has to be a pretty large figure; over 1 million tickets at least.

Right now, the site only lists tickets for the current seasonal sports in the United States: NFL, MLB, NCAA Football and the NHL. I’d assume the NBA is coming soon once we get closer to the start of the season.

For all of us in northern Ohio, on the edge of our seats for the upcoming football season, TicketStumbler has a great Cleveland Browns section with seats to all of the games this year.

In between client work I’ve been getting more and more involved in various “make money online” ventures to help supplement my income.

Unfortunately, most of these projects require lots of unique and well-written content. I don’t have the time or motivation to sit down and write all of this content on my own so I’ve been going with third-party service providers to lend me a hand. I think I’ve finally found a service I can rely on for all of my writing and content needs called Textbroker.

At Textbroker, you create an account and then build orders for pieces of content you’d like written. Your orders contain the individual topics you want written about, the expected word count and the quality of the writing you’re looking for. The pricing is based on price per word so higher quality content will be more expensive but have better style and grammar.

When you’re done entering in your specifics, the order is then submitted to the site moderators to be verified and added to the system. Once verified, your order is presented to all of the site’s registered writers who can then pick and choose what pieces of content they would like to write. When a writer is finished with one of your articles, Textbroker’s system emails you and then asks you to login to either approve the content or ask for revisions. It’s that simple.

In the interest of full disclosure, here’s a site I recently had built using content from Textbroker’s members: Vegas Casinos Direct