The Lady Programmer

I was offline yesterday. I decided to do put in some downtime and do preventive maintenance work. In the long run it does wonders.

What’s my preventive maintenance duty like?

• Recovering hard disk space
• deleting unneeded personal files (to make my files more manageable)
• deleting old installers, drivers and updates (they take too much space and I download new versions anyway with my fast internet connection)
• uninstalling all programs that I don’t use
• clearing out the temp files folder (which had grown to a gigabite of space) 
• clearing the trash bin
• Checking my firewall settings – making sure that it is set to optimum, just enough to let my torrents, downloads, file transfers work I still use the free Comodo personal firewall at its optimum defense setting.
• Switch to using a free antivirus program. I settled for Avira AntiVir Personal. I have a firewall anyway. It is also important to run a full scan once in a while.
• Defragmenting the hard disk. Very important. Diskeeper 2008 is still my favorite because it allows me to leave autodefragmentation on; it is also possible to defragment the page file too – which results to a faster performance that I experience myself. 
• TuneUp Utilities is an all-in-one nifty utility where I can do most tune ups like unchecking or removing programs that run on startup, optimizing my internet speed, repair, clean and reduce registry size and do check disk operations. What’s great is that I don’t need to hunt for separate programs to do each of those operations. I can even configure it to do automatic tuneups in the background.

Doing preventive maintenance regularly is one way to take care of the PC and detect any potential problems that can be seen.

Are you doing regular PC maintenance? Or do you wait for your PC to be broken? Share your thoughts.

I had mentioned previously that there are freelance SEO skills is always sought in many web design jobs. Many clients are now finding people who can optimize their sites for search engines.

Here are some job offers found in various freelance sites:

• Web designer and SEO optimization
  Need assistance updating current eCommerce website selling childrens products.  Need images optimized for website.  Need current webpages re-designed (using pappashop webhost interface) to new design parameters.  Need site optimized for search engine.
• Landing Page Specialist
  Create themed, siloed websites for specific keywords.
  Knowledge of creating landing pages that comply to Google Adwords Quality quality standards.
• Search Engine Optimization and Backlinking
  I am in need of SEO of my website. I am looking for someone to go through my website and update the PHP code with:
  1.  Keywords.  You can come up with a list and I can also give you the keywords.
  2.  Metatags.
  3.  Description.
  4. Create backlinks
  5.  Submit to search engines.
  6.  Link building

Not every trained programmer and web designer came out of school armed with an idea of what search engine optimization is. I met a lot of IT personnel who had no idea what good SEO can really do to their company websites.

UPDATE: Hoops! Almost forgot, thanks to Pastilan for emailing me a copy of SEO Optimization.

I’ve previously mentioned about my quest to learn SEO skills which is a growing demand in freelance jobs. Even before I put out that post, there are a number of people who had been asking me through email or through blog comments on any previous post that instructs them on how to do SEO. I am not really an expert on this one, and I’ve realized that SEO skills takes time – it can even take years to understand this stuff.

I keep a number of blogs that I follow all along to learn such skill. Here are some SEO sites that I keep in my Google reader:

• Tech At Hand Dot Net 
• Macuha.com
• Money and SEO
• Search Engine Guide 
• SEO Fast Start 
• The Ad Master

I only know Marghil Macuha through reading his Macuha.com blog regularly. It was from his site where I found the eBook in understanding SEO the easiest way. His blog deals more his SEO explorations though.

Dexter of Tech At Hand Dot Net is a blog that I visit regularly. This guy too, has his own SEO explorations. I find his posts useful in learning SEO. You might want to check out his SEO category – I’ve been digging through that archive a day ago and find his posts very helpful.

Engr. Cesar Noel was very helpful guy who is into this stuff for several years. He had been very helpful in giving me leads on where I could get the good SEO resources to start with.

All the remaining blogs are also worth reading. Check them out too.

Like Dexter had mentioned, on the previous post on freelance SEO skills, forums are a good way of learning SEO. Here are some good ones:

• DigitalPoint forums 
• SEO Chat forums
• Webmasterworld
• and even our own SEO Philippines Forum

Engr. Cesar Noel was also kind in mentioning SEO Guy forums. He also reminded me that the best SEO practice is producing good content.

I got out of doing web pages as a freelancer to discover what SEO is. Some of you may know that SEO simply stands for search engine optimization. Why did I do this? There is quite a growing demand for these skills in constructing new websites.

As I tried to scour the web to know more about SEO, I realized that it can actually be a separate skill apart from doing web design. In fact, this is a skill that is always practiced, experimented and even contested in many blogs. It is not some skill that is written in stone and taught in schools, unlike learning and mastering new programming languages.

This led me to discover that blogging can also be a fruitful career – there are a lot of ways to make money from it. I also made some mental notes:

• I’ve done a number of paid posts and got spanked by Google a number of times. Being spanked by Google lessens the chances of doing more paid opportunities. Hence, doing paid reviews alone are not a sustainable means of income.
• Affiliate marketing is also a good passive income.
• Social networks can also be a great way to promote a blog and is much easier to gain traffic and loyal readers. Always have time for it.
• Search engine traffic gives stable traffic in the long term, and are most likely to click on ads like Adsense. It is also possible to keep loyal readers, but I think not as loyal as those in social networks.
• Keeping loyal readers motivate me to blog more, not only doing reviews to get paid.
• Paid reviews on every post make a blog less interesting.
• Unlike learning a programming language, SEO is not a skill that is learned and mastered over a few days.
• I never stop at learning new things because there can be opportunities that are waiting to be discovered.

Am I leaving my blogs? No, not that I’ve discovered the prime benefit of blogging to my freelance career – to promote my work. I still hope to learn SEO too and this blog can be a good start to understanding it.

I am glad to extend help in fixing Joop’s Sailor’s Adventures and Opinions blog. For a week I could not the view blog through my feed reader. I can view the blog using the old blogspot domain, but not with their newly purchased “www.sailorsmusings.com” domain.

Joops is one regular visitor of this blog. His wife, Chubkulit, is the one actively seeking help in fixing this problem. She had managed to change the domain of her Rose’s Obstacles and Journey, but something had gone wrong with her hubby’s blog.

I have been visiting Iceah, Pastilan, and Berry’s blogs and I noticed Chubkulit’s distress call. Chubkulit followed Iceah’s post mentioning that Pinay Chicken Heart’s new domain by reaching out to me in this previous post on how to set up custom domains in blogger.

Since Chubkulit seemed to be up all week fixing the domain herself. I just contacted her and went into their domain manager account in Google Apps. I also checked their blogger account to see if the settings are right. Fixing that domain thing took me less than 10 minutes.

You can now view Joop’s blog and see their latest family adventure in Korea: Sailor’s Adventures and Opinions

To Joop’s and Chubskulit, thanks for featuring me in your blogs:
Lady Programmer
Goodies… Good Luck… Great Friends… Great People

Got a similar problem? Please contact me through this address gem [at] theladyprogrammer [dot] com