3. DietShui.
The Idea: Find reviews for diet books. a.k.a. MoneyShui for diet and health books.
The Problem: Same as MoneyShui. It needs content to be of use to people.
The Solution: Same as above.

2. NoteTrain.
The Idea: Take some prose writing and convert it into a “train” of sentences presented one line at a time.
The Probelm: Two fold here: (1) We haven’t been spreading the word on this one and (2) It’s kind of pointless.
The Solution: Let people know how fun this is and how useful it can be. I use it to send Kim love notes. It’s different.

1. SearchRascal.
The Idea: Keep track of search result rankings for keywords your tracking.
The Problem: Just launched and no one knows about it. We need some people using it to justify the server costs.
The Solution: Push on our SEO buddies to spread the word a bit. I’ve submitted the site to some blogs and stuff but no one is picking up on this. Perhaps the idea isn’t as awesome as I thought it was. Nah, I doubt that. We need a little bit of publicity to get this going. The site really is useful to SEO professionals and anyone who wants to track search rankings for a website or group of queries.

The site is built on top of WordPress, and when we were first installing WP we did not check the “I would like to include my website in search engines…” option. I didn’t really know what checking this did… I assumed some kind of submission to Google and Technorati. Since the site was still in development and I knew I was going to submit the site later, I left it unchecked so Google wouldn’t know about the dev version of the site until it was ready.

Well, it turns out that leaving that option unchecked actually adds a no-index and no-follow meta tags to the header of every page, asking Google and other crawlers to stay out. This is obviously a bad if you ever expect to get search engine traffic. We didn’t notice this until after we launched the site and a search for “inspirage” was returning a link to the website, but with no title or description.

You can go into the WP options and change this setting after installation… that’s what we did. Meta tags removed.

It’s been about a week and still no update on those search results though. My guess is that Google isn’t crawling the site. I’ve read that they won’t crawl the site for 180 days or so. Maybe our links in this blog post will put it back on the radar. I’m also going to submit the URL through Google’s quality form. And maybe installing Analytics on the site will wake Google up to the fact that Inspirage.com is crawlable. We can only hope.

If anyone out there has had the same problem and knows a good solution, let us know.