I think that’s a key term: search presence. Don’t get hung up on ranking specifically. So you show up at #1 for a general keyword search. So what? Is that really what your users (or potential users) are searching for? Think about why people would be coming to your site, and focus on those ideas. Blasting your users with empty content that’s full of keyword spam or irrelevant fluff will only hurt your site as a whole, and contribute to a loss of users. Yes, you may see your site rocket to the top for a little bit by doing these things, but it is deceptive and dishonest. Don’t be surprised when your site suddenly disappears from the search engines altogether, and you find out you’ve been blacklisted for trying to spoof the system.

Unfortunately, this happens all the time. Companies promise to get your site to the top of the rankings in short order, and with little-to-no work from you. How great is that? Just sign on the dotted line and you’re magically boosted to the top of the results! If it was that easy, everyone would be at the top. These things simply to not work as promised. What good is being at the top of the search results for a few days, only to disappear entirely after that? Not exactly a strategic business move!

The truth is, improved search engine ranking takes time, and it takes constant work. It can be weeks before a search engine even crawls your site again, so you can’t give up after one week just because you’re not seeing results. Again, it’s something you have to nurture over the life of your site. Keep the content flowing, and, more importantly, keep it relevant. Don’t spam the search engines with false content just to try and rank better; remember, your users see that very same content, and the search engines are smart. They will figure out you’re trying to deceive the rankings and you will be penalized.

There is no magic bullet solution. Don’t fall into that trap.

One of the things that I dislike about WordPress installations across different sites is that there’s no shared user base, so I’d either have to register with each to save my info across sessions, or re-type my name, e-mail, and URL each time I wanted to leave a comment. That’s the key selling point for me with Disqus: users can have one login that they use across all the sites they frequent that use Disqus. What’s even better, they can tie an existing login (such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter) to their Disqus account, thereby removing the need to remember their Disqus credentials at all.

Having installed the Disqus WordPress plug-in – which nicely took care of importing all existing comments – I started making some adjustments and poking around with it, as I haven’t used Disqus from a moderation standpoint in quite some time. One of the first things I noticed is that the plug-in can keep your Disqus comments synced with your WordPress database, so you not only have a local back-up, but it should make reverting to native WordPress comments even easier. This is a smart move on Disqus’ part as it really helps ease the fear of trying their service by giving users an easy out should they decide to switch back.

Another big selling point is that Disqus now allows server-side rendering of comments, which means they’re visible to search engines and other non-JavaScript-enabled user agents.

Those two things are pretty huge, I think, but that’s not to say there aren’t things that need to be fixed. The first is that the comments themselves are kind of ugly and just plain hard to read. The second is that, although it works on the home page, the comments link is broken on individual post pages. You can still comment, but you have to scroll down to the comments section first. For some reason it’s not getting switched from #comments to #disqus_thread. However, both of these issues are very possibly related to the theme I’m currently using, so it might just need some tweaking.

Either way, I think this is a good move, and a great indication of how things are trending towards and will be in the future: centralized user bases, integration across networks, and an easier, smoother user experience all around.

On top of full post writing and editing, you can open up your del.icio.us bookmarks in the pane and add the current page or search your existing bookmarks. Now, I never get hooked into del.icio.us, preferring ma.gnolia, but there are still so few tools and add-ons available for it that I may go back to my old del.icio.us account. Then again I don’t really use either all that much, so maybe not. ma.gnolia just looks so much nicer.

Busy things in store for this spring:

• Updates to my No Spam plugin (and one or two new ones, too!)
• Launch of wedding photography business
• Personal photography portfolio site
• Possible migration of this blog to Left Right Designs as posts lean more towards a technical nature
• …and much more!

Let me know if anyone notices anything out of whack with the new update.

Note that the old feed will now redirect to the Feed Burner one, so if you’ve subscribed, please update your link to the following:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/shatteredreality