After nearly 10 years of being Str82u.net, the website was moved overnight to it's permenant home; STR82U.COM (http://str82u.com). The .com extention has been reserved for this purpose twice; inexperience and poor management caused the (.com) domain to fall into the hands of "squatters" who eventually profitted $500 from that mistake. After a period of parking, and a few ideas for different concepts being entertained, the decision to upgrade TLDs was only natural and fair to a faithful website and companion.

Str82u.net has been successful in a niche marketing based on the keyphrase "free people search", none as much as county jails and inmate search, which actually started out as a dispute due to more unwise decisions. The site itself has been a test subject for beta trials and experiments in search engine optimization before being placed on "Dont Screw This Up" status early in 2007. Design and layout upgrades were also considered but put on hold pending the transition; opting to keep differences to a minimum now and risk mistakes later.

As a goal, the site's growth and development as a narrow subject directory is a possibility, reaching a larger audience to share a resource that equally benefits the user and designer/developer . Other web properties spawned by the original str82u.net site includes our personal seo tools used in search engine optimization and a directory in progress that we hope to have as much pride in as we do STR82U, now with dot com goodness.

Keep it Str8!
reprinted by permission

Cleaning code is good SEO. Can it be bad? After doing terrible things to good domains just to see how it happens, I'm sure there's an "SEO Dossier" with "reseller rights" that describes this in technical detail. For now all we're working with is experience and the money saved. There's a key word method we'll share toward the end that compliments any housekeeping.

When trying to improve your page rank and placement, you would expect the only adverse effects of cleaning code might be the newness of the page on the server. That's a basic philosophy for our aged html. There aren't going to be specific references on this page, if you work with source and haven't experienced something like this, think about it. Humanizing searchbots while you're reading this might lend perspective to our conclusions which influences our intuitive design over basic programming priciples.

Reformatting and cleaning html from a 111kb file dropped it to 12kb. (short blip, read at the bottom) It was the first time to get a Google top ten homepage on purpose. What are you going to do now? Start cleaning up source on ALL your sites so you can go to Disney! But WAIT! There's more. Same site and an enormous in-page JavaScript for making banners slide down a page. Making money on this until an email from AdSense made us rethink/recode and that made another improvement. Speed, right? (CTR oddly improved too).

NOW we really had a plan. Remove the slider code from another popular site, reformat the html and make money. LOL, really loud! Sadly, this time the result so negative it was HEART CRUSHING, disappearing from hundreds of Google SERPs within the month. DEAD! Yahoo resurrected it later where it's successful today, but how can removing a large portion of JAVASCRIPT of all things cause that?

THERE'S THE POINT: The AdSense code was originally in a div at the bottom of the source where it was the last thing the spider saw. When the ad script was written to an adjoining cell of the "main attraction", the content had changed. Not visibly, but to the search engine's ability to assume what people see. Not going to try an make a theory out of this, we did this. Do what ever it takes to get the visible content as close to the head as possible. If you have an expanding menu, WE BELIEVE it's interpreted as being a solid object your users have to scroll through to get to what they came for. If you have in-line styles, nested anything or out of place scripts directly after your bodytag, get rid of it or reposition it with CSS. In regards to nested tables, too many sites were done with in this fashion when padding is all that's neccessary.

Summery: Make sure search engines get meat and potatoes first when they hit your plate, serve the sweet stuff once they fill up. Want an example. countyjailinmatesearch.net. Most any page, search bar and top float from the bottom. View source and you'll see content right away.

Here's that tip for writing the hyperlink. If it's a good phrase, hit the return/enter key to begin the text against the left margin. Doesn't work when we coded any page like that exclusively. It's not human/software interaction natural. Other times we'll break the text of a link to place the keyPARTS on the margin.

Keep it Str8!

PS From the top: Str82u.net was originally on a big messy php CMS but looked good to me and at the time, it jaust HAD to go back to .html format. "View Source", it became a really huge file. Eventually it came down to taking out all the redundant references to the database, css and all. The total added by automation was about 100kb and averaged around 50kb for most pages. Days after, one phrase went from page 10 to 4 and another appeared from nowhere at #4 and believe it or not, another site followed the same term when it got reformatted. This made more money than my three sons working in a lumber yard. Thanks for sticking with me down here.

Since the introduction of real time search we've been successful with getting pages indexed by Google faster, nearly instantly, by posting them on Twitter. No Cloaking. With sitemaps and submissions, from the time it's "live", it's normal for us to expect about 1-2 weeks before new content appears in results, longer before actually ranking if it's appealing. Spammers obviously have the right idea for their niche, blast links as fast as possible. For them it doesn't matter, it isn't their website that's over exposing itself in a negative way. For those of us wanting to take time and energy to create a unique experience for users with fresh content and used proper SEO, it's easy to get excited and overbearing like marketers, but moderation and patience has been key to getting exposed.

There are still performance differences between the pages and it's still being analyzed whether or not it's the content or "submission" method. We're leaning toward the idea that Twitter's a good tool when used properly because the content is useful and the short period of time between post and intial visitor click-through has been as fast as 15 minutes.

What We Did: Using TweetDeck and a small group of niche usernames, a combination of original and retweeted comments containing ONE backlink each was passed around with a mind toward SEO by alternating social and business submissions:

A.) This is fast and furious as soon as a set of related pages was close enough to live. One original comment followed 15 RTs including Facebook and LinkedIn without any in between posts to break them up. There were six sets of three pages each, exposing them at a rate of two urls per day, one morning and night then skipping one page allowing bots to find it a different kind of naturally. Those results took less than 4 hours to be picked up and looked good at first but traffic slacked off quickly, within a day. Some of this returned slowly after about 2 weeks. The best was under 15 minutes from click to SERP. This way covers more ground that googlebot could be treading on at that moment.

3 day twist off back in the saddle

B.) The other extreme was posting 1 address once then re-tweeting randomly between random tweets from each successive accounts over a days time. From this, the amount of exposure has been enough to cause a trickle, but it's steady and individually, the pages seem to gain appeal daily. This variation was too random, robots can easily miss it if you've sown your seeds too far apart. We're trying to get stepped on or picked up, it's attention that's needed, just not too much. This wasn't enough.

Acting On It: Looking at this from a scheduling and SEO standpoint, here's how this has been playing out. Keeping a 8-12 gap between indexed pages and what's in the sitemap, we keep the initial traffic flowing using a more relaxed version of "A" above., Trying to push the issue, two pages disappeared from Google for over a week. Thought it was time for a reinclusion request on a site less than 2 months old. And if you read this far, the site is also #3 at Bing already for it's EXACT key phrase, and yes, they check Twitter too.

Keep it Str8!

Our Truth About Cloaking: Using several shorteners, we noticed the domain used got the credit for the page and was indexed, NOT the actual site, but the redirection service address. That's fine for spammers but it isn't cool to give away material or run the risk of a duplicate content issue, especially against oneself.