As part of a larger SEO/SEM project, I’m working on optimizing a particular page for the phrase “trike kits”.

MTC Voyager builds motorcycle trike kits for Harley Davidson, Honda, Indian, Kawasaki, Suzuki, Yamaha, BMW and other motorcycles. A conversion kit lets you convert a motorcycle into a three-wheeled trike. The Voyager Standard kit is not permanently fixed to the bike, giving the owner the flexibility of going back and forth between two-wheels and a trike in a few minutes.

A Voyager kit offers a number of advantages over competitor’s products, including an independent suspension and a price point at half of a conventional trike conversion kit. When it comes time to replace the bike, the kit can be removed and used on the new bike.

More details about this project: http://www.ardamis.com/2010/10/02/a-friendly-seo-competition/

I’ve put up a blog at Blogger to play around with inbound links. Sometimes, I’ll want to link to pages that in turn link to Aleph Studios or Ardamis. I’m not really interested in throwing traffic at those pages, and my sites don’t really vouch for them, so I needed another location from which to create the outbound links. Aleph Studios at Blogger fits the bill. While Aleph Studios and Ardamis are intended for human visitors, the Blogger site is purely for search engines. At one point, shortly after Google acquired it in 2003, Blogger sites did very well in the search results.

For an example of the sort of linking that I’m using it for, check out the Links post.

Development began in earnest this week on Bass Fishing World Rankings. It’s early days and the client wants to keep things under wraps for now, but it’s going to be a pretty incredible site supported by a pretty formidable database. If you’re curious, stop by and leave your email address, and you’ll be contacted as it gets closer to a launch at the end of the year.

A friend who does a lot of selling on eBay asked me to develop a web application for generating HTML templates that could be copied and pasted into his auctions. He wanted to be able to add a title, a description, and some terms and conditions, and also to be able to upload images so the auction template would display thumbnails that could be clicked to display full-sized versions in a new window or tab. The more we talked, the more it sounded like something that would be both useful for a good number of people, and potentially a source of ad revenue for us. And so was born Simple Auction Wizard, an online HTML template generator for auction websites like eBay.

I was looking for just this kind of a project because I wanted a reason to play with TinyMCE, an Open Source, platform independent, web-based JavaScript HTML WYSIWYG editor control, and SWFUpload, a small JavaScript/Flash library that does very neat things with file uploads.

The most difficult part was actually getting the templates to look good in a variety of browsers. Because the template HTML appears inside of a larger page, I couldn’t rely on Doctype switching to place IE into standards mode. This meant the templates would have to be developed so that they would look approximately the same in standards-compliant browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, as well as horrible browsers like IE6 in quirks-mode. I tried very hard to minimize the use of tables, but they eventually crept in. I was able to use CSS, for the most part, though if any more issues come up, I’m going to throw in the towel and just do inline styles.

The web app is open to the public, but realize that it’s very early in its development and I intend to continue making changes.