at-the-water-cooler.com

University of Iowa Hawkeye Poll shows Obama a few points away from Clinton with the undecided able to decide the outcome. Huckabee up from 6th to trailing by .3% for second with the error estimated at 1%. Romney is still in front, but is well short of a majority.

The methodology used for this poll is different from other polls, details at Pollster.com, but is consistent with Septembers University of Iowa Hawkeye poll which it is being compared with.

Popularity: 11% [?]

There is not a single person running as a conservative, faith based, family values choice for the Republican nomination; there are several: Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and Mike Huckabee ( an ordained Southern Baptist Minister). It may or may not come down to the early caucuses to narrow down the field. At the caucuses if a candidate is deemed as not viable those people at the caucus get to make a choice based on who is left (after discussions). The winner will take all (of the Republican delegates - Democrats will give a portion but will likely vote for the same person at their convention) so if the first round is 40% for Rudy and 20% for these three, after everything is said and done one of these three may have 60% with Rudy at 40%. At the end of January the field is likely going to narrow.

Politico.com has a good post on Huckabee he is not currently in front but not out of the race by a long shot. The question for Iowa is if not Rudy then who.

He states this very well:

“I do not believe in amnesty, I don’t believe in sanctuary cities, I believe [illegal aliens] who commit crimes ought to be deported, and I believe we ought to go after the employers,” Huckabee said.

“But do I have a seething anger toward immigrants?” he went on. “No. I definitely have anger toward the incompetence of our government; I am just livid over it. But immigrants just love our country like we do.”

Popularity: 9% [?]

A good number of very good blogs operate a lot like talk radio … they post stories which they hope will get dialog going. Good posts by this standard would be controversial.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Two people tortured each other several times to determine if water boarding is torture. hot air offers A possible alternative standard: If it is torture, you probably wouldn’t be willing to have it done to you. In this posting: Too good to check: DUers “prove” waterboarding is torture — by waterboarding each other - They (DUs) must of been asleep when their teacher discussed Logical Fallacies - strawman which is what they seem to have become.

Break down the straw man’s argument and you win your argument. I can not resist pointing out they did not test if thumb screws are torture - do they draw the line at things that cause pain as something not to test? As they seem to have defined torture as something that you want to stop doing after 20 seconds … that is about all the rap music I can take! So we need to make sure nobody plays rap music to prisoners as well.

My feeling on waterboarding is if there are other methods such as the sword of damocles of being locked up and called a number instead of a name, being denied contact with people that like you to talk with, being in isolation, being moved from place to place, not knowing what will eventually happen, ect — that could be used they should … if other methods are as effective then water boarding is sadistic.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Don’t get involved in gimmicks to increase the number of links to your site - this is a red flag.

A minor effort to get links to your site that are natural and normal would carry as much weight as any gimmick. Gimmicks wont last, search engines that use links to rate sites will catch on to any gimmick. They can very quickly see 1,000 sites that link together (or to the same sites) sitting as an island on the web,

Natural links would be links from sites that could actually bring you traffic.You may get 10 times as much traffic from the search engines than the link but consider that a natural effect of a good link. Buying links is generally not a good idea; sites that sell links are subject to getting their authority reduced, so consider only the actual traffic you would get from that site do not consider it as a way to more traffic from search engines.

If research is done online while building content, naturally sites will be located with similar content. Some of these sites may have blogs and collaboration opportunities or discussions become possible - some have link pages to more information that exists online.

Do not stuff keywords into places that visitors can not see - this is a red flag.

Stuffing keywords is a clear indication that you are trying to game the search engine. They have programmers who write programs specifically to spot and remove these sites or reduce there positions in the search engines. White letters on a white background is a big red flag - It will not work. If you do find a method to hide keywords from visitors and get a good position on a search engine your site will be above the radar and be reported as spam.

Use the alt=”" for images to describe the image for browsers that don’t display the image, but do not abuse the tag and make all the image tags a list of keywords.

Do not create special pages for just search engines to see - Red Flags.

Pages that exist only to be indexed by search engines and then send the visitor to a different page is not what the search engines are interested in having in their databases. The search engines want to send the visitor to the same page as the search engine reads. The methods to send a browser to another page are well know to developers of search engines and create red flags.

Use of delivering a different page to a different client may have some legitimate uses: sending a page designed to fit a cell phone screen to a cell phone makes perfect sense. Google provides users with a cache of your page, you can add code to the page so Google will not do so. Search engines do from time to time index pages looking like a standard browser, there is generally no reason to serve a different page to a spider as you would to a browser.

Use headlines for headlines

Putting everything in really big letters does not make your page more relevant, and there should be some relevant text on the page as well: If everything is a headline there is no text - I suspect what the search engine algo actually determines is the headline is the text and there is no headlines. Create a relevant headline by making some of the text larger than the other text on the page, the headline tag was created specifically for this purpose; But, if you try, selecting a larger font size or separating some text in bold lettering, you may find this works as well.

The best practice is to use the headline tag then change its style to suit the page. It should of course be larger and come first - Gaming the search engine by trying to tag keywords in the text as headlines is asking for trouble.

Do not create spammy titles

Creating spammy titles is working against you in many ways. Most sites that discover your page and link to it tend to use your title for the link text. The link text is important to improving your rating, but other sites are not going to use as link text something that looks spammy; they may decide not to link to your site after all. People don’t actually search for a bunch of synoims as keywords, all the different ways to say the same word is just diluting from your title. Titles that go on and on will end up just being cut off.

It is not so much a red flag as it is a method that does not work and is counter productive.

Do not create spammy meta tag descriptions

The meta tags are nearly useless for the major search engines; last time I ran a spider some where between .1 and 1% of sites meta tags where excessively spammy. Small search engines can still pick up the meta description to use as the description for the site: the reality is if they do this they will need to check the results to remove spammy descriptions - think they are going to replace a spammy description with a well thought out couple of sentences? I don’t. The site is going to go into a bin to be worked on later, if the bin is full maybe just discarded. Nothing good comes out of filling a description tag with a bunch of synonyms.

I’ve seen pages that repeat the title several times in the description and again in the keyword tag. It does not work and is counter productive. It is the first thing that somebody who creates a search engine that uses the tag needs to deal with correcting … that and every page on a site with the same title and description - not only spam but spammy looking flooding.

Popularity: 29% [?]