I finally did it. I placed my primary domain on Wordpress. It's simply been my experience that Wordpress handles SEO better than anything else other than the most carefully crafted and SEO tuned website, and then some. Why? Because, let's face it. Google loves Wordpress- really loves it. Sittin' in a tree, k i s s i n g loves it. Ultimately I think, because Wordpress is a platform that is usually associated with fresh content and your static page is not. If you need your static page to be on the web (like if you have integrated custom IDX into it) then supplement it with a Wordpress site or subdomain. No, not Wordpress.com oh no, you need plugins like Google XML sitemaps and All In One SEO Pack and other handy features that you can't get on free Wordpress.com.
So if you don't have it, then get it. Find any hosting company (I recommend and receive a referral fee from Bluehost which is excellent) that includes Wordpress and buy a $10 domain (Bluehost gives you a free domain on signup) and set up a Wordpress blog 
and see if it doesn't actually give your static site a big boost.
So my new DaveKeys.com website doesn't look nearly as nice as my old Dave Keys site but it's already been indexed and updated by Google (in about 2 hours from launch) and I expect it will perform better as I contribute to it. I also followed my own advice (and Bart's) and removed the social network links. They'll end up on another page. My site should end up back on first page.
I built a website on the Wordpress for a client but then, I didn't remember to "enable" a plugin, All In One SEO Pack, in its settings. Usually, you simply Activate a plugin in Wordpress and away you go... Not so with All-in-one-SEO-pack. It has its own secondary switch in its settings panel. If you don't click to "enable" this plugin here, it has the same result as creating a "noindex" order for Google. If you don't know what that is, it means when the Google Bot comes along and reads your site, it reads a file (sometimes virtually created by software like Wordpress and the All In One SEO Pack) called robots.txt which contains the instructions for what Google should index and what it should ignore (like a contact form page).
Of course, having made the new site ready, I went straight to Google's Webmaster Tools, verified the site and submitted its sitemaps. Google was nice enough to go to the site within a very short time and then recorded the result in my Webmaster Tools panel, "Restricted by Robots.txt."
I'm still waiting for the damage to be undone. Google reports the last sweep where it picked up the noindex order that it's still following like a new cult inductee, was November 5.
Dear Google, I'm still waiting for you to re-read and index!
Sigh... Don't make this mistake, folks. If you use Wordpress and choose to use All in One SEO Pack (which works very well, btw) be sure to select "enabled" in the settings before you get visited by the ever fickle Googlebot!
Yorba Linda Homes (yep that's my client site)
Many people know that there is no better SEO friendly blogging platform than Wordpress but No matter how good a new Wordpress blog is, it won't likely get indexed if the sitemap is restricted by robots.txt! I meandered by Google Webmaster Tools to check on a client's indexing progress, then decided to check the status of the sitemap where I saw a dreaded red X! and the message "restricted by robots.txt" meaning Google wasn't allowed to look at my sitemap, and perhaps not the entire website. Robots.txt is a file that asks that some content such as contact forms or other pages intended to serve as modules on main pages not be indexed by Google. It is also a choice in Wordpress to block the entire site. It's important to use this feature when building a new site so that Google doesn't come along before you're ready and index "Hello World!" as the primary keywords of your site.
I'm not saying when or who but I once knew of a website that got indexed during the build phase and for a month, the phone number was displayed in Google search results as 000-000-0000! Not good, so keeping Google at bay is a good option under certain circumstances.
On the other hand, it doesn't pay to be asleep at the switch like I was, waiting for Google to finally do it's thing while I hadn't done mine.
For those who use Wordpress.
In the Dashboard:
1. Choose Privace under the Settings menu tab.
2. Choose your option. This sets up robots.txt to open or close the gateway to search engines.
As Darwin once said, loosely quoted, "It's not the ones with the most strength or the most intelligence that survive but those who are most able to adapt." I just read Coach Katerina's blog on conversion to the Mac for Real Estate agents. Actually, I couldn't think of a better group of people to consider abandoning the PC and working with a Mac with one of the Windows flavors of PC, whether Bootcamp, Parallels, Fusion or Crossover. Most Real Estate agents I know are just trying to get their work done and move on to managing their business and interacting with clients. So often, I see them struggling with some computer program or website and then having their PC freeze up or lock down to creepy-crawly slo-mo mode when the last thing they have is time and patience for such grief. Maybe Windows 7 will improve on that experience and maybe the horde of virus writers and hackers that follow the MS OS brand will find ways to make life miserable for the new converts just like they have in the past. Yes, the Mac OS enjoys less attention from the script kiddies and that's one more reason I use it. That said, the Linux OS (the underbelly of OS-X) is inherently better secured than the MS OS for the present (even though those using the root account are risking it all on the Mac). None of that argument is the basis of my comment on Katarina's post. The basis is a pragmatic approach to computing. What does the best job right now in the context of what I'm trying to do? Here's the rest of what I said: ========================= One of your commenters, John?, compared "Mac converts" to ex-smokers but I'm pragmatic in my approach to computers- what works is what works. I have several things that I do on Windows, especially in the hosting of MS SQL databases & MS SQL programming. That said, I do my day to day work on my Mac. That includes web development, and even some of the SQL stuff. Further, there are some things I will never do on the PC again. Why? Workflow and stability. Why deal with, for example, producing a video montage on the PC when the Mac is twice as easy and nearly twice as fast just by virtue of not crashing in a render or transition? Besides that, often the basic tools of a Mac produce more visually pleasing products right out of the box, but then that's always been the focus of Apple, you know, design and innovation. My Mac gets the job done faster with less stress- that's an observation with 20 years and counting on PCs of all flavors. The time I save from those inevitable freeze-ups in IE, especially on database-driven, application type sites (like the MLS or Amazon, etc.) Safari, Google Chrome and Firefox are all better alternatives and, in my experience, are even better and more stable on OSX. Yes, I'm still using my PC, actually 3 of them including the virtual one that runs on my Mac, and I'm also using a Linux machine for a phone system because that's what works best for that application. The fact that the Mac works better than its competition for many and even most tasks seems to irritate a lot of people. This isn't an election, it's just what's working out. As Darwin once said, loosely quoted, "It's not the ones with the most strength or the most intelligence that survive but those who are most able to adapt." Geez I just blew a whole blog entry here!
Well, it was a mystery to me anyway. I'm not really a expert level photoshop user even though I've been using it for around 10 years. For me, it was always just a high powered retouching tool with some cool effects but I never really had time to get that concerned with it. As I became a little more serious about my photography, I learned that nearly every serious photographer retouches their work. I started using layers in photoshop to do a little more but the idea of masks was something my slightly ADHD self just didn't want to take on.
Enter the eyes. Yes the eyes. I noticed a lot of photographers put out portraits where the eyes just seemed real. I always thought, "It must be nice to have such expensive lenses to work with.", knowing that the good lenses range from $1,200 to $6,000! But then I noticed that even when I rented expensive lenses, my shots lacked that clarity. I finally asked one photographer her secret- turns out it's photoshop layers and masks with a high pass filter effect. It's hard to explain and maybe that's why I always avoided masks when reading about them because the written versions of tutorials complicated the actual use which isn't that complex after all.
Here's my video tutorial, mistakes and all (I think that actually helps to see the process visually with corrections) The picture I chose is actually one I figured was a nice "captured moment" but with too many flaws for it to be shared. This technique made the picture "sharable".
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