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About Us

Welcome House Cat Productions

House Cat Productions is a Nashville, TN based web design, seo, and internet marketing company. We specialize in Wordpress SEO, but are available to work on any type of site.

This site serves as our home site, and blog where we discuss various SEO and web design topics. We have knowledge in a variety of areas. Please contact us to discuss any project.

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Web Design Internet Marketing Web Site Strategies

House Cat Productions is a Nashville Web Design company. We offer a wide array of services for businesses, organizations, and personal sites/projects.

  • Affordable Prices
  • Years of Experience
  • Standards Complaint

Some of the services we provide: Web Design, Graphic Design, Web Hosting, PHP, Javascript, Flash Design, SEO, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Submit, Standards Design, XHTML/CSS Design, MySQL Database Work


How to Handle Google Sandbox

Posted on March 5, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Internet Marketing, SEO | Comments Off

Everyone has heard of the Google sandbox, and some debate if it is real or not. I personally think is does, and have been effected by it first hand.

A while back, I posted about a site of mine that was sandboxed. It happened using Courtney Tuttle’s Keyword Sniping Theme.

Well Courtney wrote a post in reply to the concerns of people experiencing the Google sandbox when they target keywords. He gives great advice to beginners at SEO and keyword snipping. It is also a great read for those with a new site.

Check out Court’s post: What Do You Do If Your Site Gets Sandboxed?

I’ve noticed that I’ve had partial success with my site, even though it was sandboxed.

I’ve been continuing with my SEO and Internet Marketing strategy. I’ve been updating it at least once a week with keyword targeted posts. I research to find low competition long tail keywords that are related to my primary keyword. I then target the post at that long tail keyword. Even with the sandbox, I still rank well for the low competition keywords. My site is currently generating 200 visits a day from Google. My traffic should pick up significantly once my site gets out of the sandbox.

Starting a Video Blog - Part I

Posted on March 1, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Wordpress | Comments Off

This is the first part of a Video Blog Tutorial series. I hope this guide will help you enter the world of video blogging.

Video Blogging Part One Covers:

  • Blogging Software - Worpress
  • Domain Name Branding
  • Wordpres Plugins for Video Blogging
  • Tag Clouds
  • Video Management
    • Convert to flv
    • Rip flv
    • Compress videos on Windows and Mac
  • Wordpress Themes

There is a lot of traffic in video sites. You see the great success of sites like Youtube and, and old sites like ebaum. Yes, there is a lot of competition, but video media is here today, gone tomorrow. New viral videos spring up all the time. A video comes out, hits it big, is spread via IM, forums, websites, and social media sites. A few months latter, a whole new video comes out and repeats the process. You can capitalize on this disposable traffic.

You Need A Blog

This is pretty simple. I’m not going to cover every step of the process, because my focus here is how to set up a blog for videos. I will give you a few resources though.

First off, use Wordpress. There are other blogs out there, but I consider Wordpress the best, and this tutorial will be done using Wordpress.

You have two options:

Get Site Hosted with Wordpress

Go to wordpress.com and sign up for a wordpress blog

Host Your Own Blog

You’ll need hosting. I use dreamhost, but many hosts will work for this. Since this is a media site, bandwidth is a consideration.

Go to wordpress.org and download Wordpress

Then, you can follow their guide to install the software. It’s pretty simple.
Also, check out Courtney’s great article on starting a blog. Hell, read his entire blog. You can apply everything he teaches you to a video blog.

So, you should have your blog up and running now.

Domain Name /Branding

Although similar to keyword snipping, its actually good to brand this type of site. Video sites can keep traffic, and really benefit from branding. I wouldn’t consider it a “Flagship” blog, nor a keyword focused site, but its somewhere in the middle imo. At least mine will be.

So, when picking your domain name don’t get a keyword flooded name, or one that has hyphens. Get something catchy. Put some thought into. We’ll be building the entire site around this name. So get something solid. If you can include a keyword, that’s great, but don’t sacrifice a good name in exchange.

Video Blog Plugins

This is how were going to transfer an ordinary blog into a video blog machine. Plugins are great, and can drastically transform a blog.

Viper’s Video Quicktags - This is a wonderful must have plugin and the core of your new video blog. This plugin adds buttons to quickly add a video to your post. It can easily handle 3rd party videos simply by taking the video’s URL as the input, or even play videos hosted from your server.

WP-PostRatings - Another wonderful plugin that will allow your visitors to rate videos 1 to 5. It has a nice ajax voting system that is clean and easy. Can also output the top videos. Works well with a widget WP theme. This is useful because it gets your users interacting with the site. It is a MUST.

Sociable (Anti-Social) - Another great plugin that adds quick and easy buttons to a post that allow your users to add the link to various social networking sites. The anti-social version adds no-follow to the links. if you’re concerned about SEO, go with anti-social.

Feedburner - This will handle and track all your subscriptions (RSS and Email). It provides visitors an easy way to keep up with updates to your site. Helps create visitor loyalty.

All in One SEO - A MUST. Install this. If you have the slightest concern for SEO, you need to install this. It has many SEO options for your site, and optimizes your page titles.

No-WWW - Often overlooked. You need to select a preferred domain. The point is that Google treats: www.domain.com, differently than domain.com. You need to pick one, and redirect the other to your preferred domain. Read my post on: Preferred Domains.

Google Sitemap - Create an xml sitemap for your blog quickly. Another MUST. Don’t skip this. Here is a great article on how to use the sitmap plugin.

HTML Sitemap - This has a two purposes. One is usability and navigation. This greats a list of all the pages on your site. Its readable to humans. But, it also provides a quick way for a bot to crawl your site.

Related Posts - Another plugin with two great reasons.One, it keeps your users on your site by linking them related content at the end of each post. Hopefully they’ll see something that interest them enough to click and stick around a little longer. Secondly, it helps deep link to old posts, it interlinks related posts, and keeps content from getting buried.

Show Top Commentors - An easy way to build activity on your site by encouraging people to comment more often.

Threaded Comments - Just a user friendly addon that allows users to reply directly to a comment.

Recent Posts - Help catch users right away, show them a list of your fresh new content right in your side bar.

Configurable Tag Cloud - I’ll mention tags and a tag cloud later, but this is a great plugin to make a tag cloud with a widgetized theme. [Uses built in Wordpress tagging]

Akismet - Comes installed with Wordpress. You just need to get a key. This is a must to stop spam.

Tag Cloud

You really should take advantage of tags. Tags are basically keywords you can “tag” a post with. They link to a tag page that shows other posts with the same tag. These tags can also show a tag cloud. Which is a list of text links that represent the tags used on the site.

My explanation doesn’t do them justice, so read this article: Tags, Tag Clouds and SEO.

I’d really suggest the use of a tag cloud for Usability and SEO.

Dealing With Videos

A lot of the videos I deal with are already in flv format, but if you need to convert them, there are a could of different ways I can suggest:

Convert Videos to FLV:

If you need help encoding various video video formats (avi,mpeg,etc) to FLV, here are some suggestions:

If you use DreamHost, they’ll convert videos to flv for you. Check your control panel. Under goodies I think. It’s just one more reason DH is awesome.

Take advantage of YouTube. When you upload a video to Youtube, they convert it to flv. You can then redownload it with the Firefox Add-on Download Helper.

Or use a program: Try out Riva FLV Encoder. I’ve personally have never used it, but you could give it a shot.

Rip FLV Videos:

If you want to rip videos from popular video sites, like Youtube, use the Firefox Add-on Download Helper. I use it personally, and it has been great.

I’m not an expert on videos, but the first two options usually take care of what I need.

Compressing a Video:

If you need help compressing videos you make:

Wordpress Theme

Honestly, any theme will work, but not all theme are created equal. A trusted source is Court’s SEO themes. If you are targeting a keyword, check out his keyword snipping theme. I suggest getting a theme that can tag advantage of widgets. It makes your life very easy.

A few articles I’ve written you may want to check out:
Wordpress SEO
Mask Your Keyword Snipping Theme

Conclusion (for now):

That should be enough for now to help get you set up. In my next article, I will go further indepth, and help you get your video blog going.

Important SEO Ranking Factors

Posted on February 21, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Internet Marketing, SEO, Wordpress | Comments Off

We’re all trying to get an edge, and SEO provides us an ability to game the system a little bit, and give us a slight advantage. Many people are confused about SEO and struggle daily to improve their skills.

For you new guys, here is a list of some of the most important on and off site factors for basic SEO. This list is in no particular order, but they’re ALL important on some level. Any serious SEO plan should take advantage of each and every one of these factors effectively.

Title Tag - Use of Keywords in the Title Tag

Easily one of the MOST important factors in SEO. Have an optimized Title Tag is an absolute must. Take the time to get your keywords into your title.

A nice article to read about title tags is Courtney’s post: How to Create Rippin’ HTML Title Tags

Remember:

  • Include your keywords
  • A unique title tag on every page
  • Do not spam your keywords
  • Don’t get too long. Search engines only pay attention to a certain number of characters.
  • If using wordpress, use a plugin for “Title | Site Name”

Anchor Text of Inbound Links

This is all about building back links that contain your keywords! There are two factors, quality and quantity. Each link to a page counts as a “vote” for that page. The words used in the link gives a nod at what the page is about. An included keyword in these links is a HEAVY factor. You need to vary these links though. DO NOT GET SPAMMY!

Have multiple versions of phrases that include your keyword(s). Try to make the links look “natural”.

I use stuff like:

  • Nashville Web Design
  • Nashville Web Designer
  • Nashville Website Designer
  • Nashville Web Design Company
  • Web Design Nashville
  • House Cat Nashville Web Design
  • House Cat Web Design

There are/will be changes made to this aspect I believe.  Currently it is one of the heavily manipulated factors at this time (gbombing).

Also consider the text adjacent to the link.

Link Popularity

The quality and quantity of the links that point to your site.
Quality > quantity.

The more incoming links to your site, the great perceived importance.
Each link is a vote. The more trust the site linking to you is, the greater the vote!

Age of Site

I’ve seen some blogs that debate this, but it seems to be a significant factor. And it makes logical sense.

The older the site, the more seriously it is taken. It has proved that it’s around to stay.
Younger sites need to “prove” themselves. The rankings of younger sites tend to fluctuate more, and seem more likely to trip spam / blackhat detection.

Internal Linking

Just like the external passing of PR via a vote system, but applies to internal pages only. Proper internal linking is important, it determines value of pages within your site.

An often over looked factor. Don’t ignore this since its completely in your control.
A few suggestions:

  • Point links to home page with keyword anchor text
  • Sitemap - Improves Crawlability
  • Use no follows - Don’t pass authority to useless pages.

A site has a certain amount of authority (link juice) that you can spread around your pages. Controlling your internal link structure allows you to manage this authority. Don’t waste your juice by passing links to stupid pages that you do not care to have indexed.

On top of this, google only indexes a percentage of large sites. Take some control of what pages it does index. Don’t waste your listings with low value pages.

As with external links, use your keywords to give a page value for a specific keyword.

Subject Matter of Sites with Inbound Links to Your Site

The sites you’re getting back links from, what are they about? Are they related to your sites content and keywords?

Back link analysis may be more complicated than simply evaluating the anchor text. The text surrounding the link, as well as the pages theme/keywords/topic is a factor for the authority that link may pass to your site.

Back Links from Authority Sites for Your Keywords

Similar to the above point. If a site is about your niche, its holds more authority than a random link from a site about a random non-related topic.

Now if a high ranking authority site for your niche/keyword/community links to you, it is very important.

Make some friends in your community. Build relationships. Get some links.
(Try to get in with the big boys)

Content and Keyword Usage in Your Site’s Content.

Important! Use your keyword in your site’s text. Using the words in your text lets the search engine know your site is ACTUALLY about what someone linked to you with.

Include the Keywords from Your Title in Your Body Text.

DO NOT SPAM KEYWORDS. Yeah, use them a few times but mix it up, just like your backlink anchor text. Use variations of your keywords. Use similar or related keywords. Use a thesaurus. Do some keyword research.

I think the weight may be changing. The Bush Google bomb probably increased its importance. That way sites don’t get artificially inflated just by backlinks. This is one way the more recent gbomb may have worked (Dangerous Cult / COS one). The word dangerous was included in the site content, so it was easier to pull off, even with google’s alg changes. With this new bomb, they probably re-evaluated this factor’s weight.

Inbound Link Authority

Basically mentioned this one a few times. Links from important pages count more. Period.

Its better to have a few hundred 3-5+ PR inbound links, than a few thousand 0-2 PR links.

Get good sites to link to you!

Keyword Usage in Heading Tags

Use the site structure given to you with HTML. Use the headings!

<h1>
<h2>
<h3>

With H1 being the MOST important. It states the overall heading/topic of the page. You need to have your keyword included in the H1 tag on ever page. You also need a unique H1 on every page.

H1 on each page should include a:

  • Unique Text/Heading for that page.
  • Overall Site Keyword Included
  • Keywords relevant to that page included

Again, this should go without saying, do not spam keywords.

Keyword Use in Domain Name

Not a must. But helps.

  • A keyword domain may do better in SERPS, but may make branding harder.
  • Keywords in domains gets bold in search results. Must mean something.
  • Also, people may link to you with your address as the anchor text.
    • If you don’t get that right off… your keyword will be in your anchor text… which is a very good thing.

External Links / Outgoing Links

Now, you cannot control internal links, so Google won’t slap you around for incoming links from naughty sites, but they will for bad external links. Links from your page to bad pages are a vote from your site for them. This associates you with them. Since this IS a factor you can control, it is something you are responsible for.

If you MUST link to a bad site, slap a nofollow on it at least.

Do your best to only link to good quality and trusted sites.

The Growth Rate of Inbound Links

Not only is the number of links important, but also the rate at which you gain new links. The higher the rate (links/day), the more it will affect your site’s ranking. A new site can pass a older site with more links if its number of back links are growing at a significant rate.

Duplicate Content

Avoid duplicate content. Google can penalize you for it. Also, they will only pick one version. They may not pick the version your want.

Take this in consideration when submitting to social networking sites. May times these social sites have more authority than your original article, and they will place higher than you.

Wordpress especially has problems with duplicate content because it provides various ways to access your posts. (categories, archive, tags). You may want to consider blocking some of this duplicate content.
I wrote an article about preventing duplicate content on Wordpress.

Also,

Duplicate content inside of Title and Meta tags on many pages across your site.

Repeated use of the same content/keywords in SEO factors like title and meta data may result in pages being placed into the supplemental index. Try to vary your keywords. Use similar or related phrases. Don’t use “make money online” or “internet marketing” in almost every post you make.

EVERY PAGE NEEDS A UNIQUE TITLE TAG

Server Stability / Accessiblity

Bots need to be able to get to your site. They need to generate a a description for your site and look at your content. Your site needs a stable host.

Thats my list

So there you have it. Some of the most important and basic, MUST know, SEO factors. I suggest researching each of these points further on your own to improve you knowledge in each of the factors.

I hope this helps some of you guys out.

If you’re using Wordpress, check out my: Quick & Dirty Wordpress SEO Checklist

And if you’re using Court Keyword Snipping Theme, read:

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