This month I, along with thousands of other eBay affiliates, have been busy little bees converting all of our eBay affiliate links to use the new eBay IDs and format, thanks to eBay’s announcement that they were leaving Commission Junction and taking their affiliate program in-house.

I’ve been seeing great commissions since switching my eBay affiliate links to ePN (eBay Partner Network), but unfortunately eBay’s reporting isn’t much better than Commission Junction’s. If you want to see what item sold on eBay for any particular transaction, you still have to download the report, open it, scroll over to the column with the item numbers, copy the item number, go to ebay.com, paste the item number in the search field, and hit “Go.”

What a PITA! I’m pretty good with php, so I decided to roll my own script. I started out with just the basic info that eBay provides in the downloadable report, and wrote a script that outputs the report contents with the item id as a clickable link so that I could go directly to that item on eBay.

Then I added code to use eBay’s developer API to pull in the item name, thumbnail image, number of bids, buyer name, seller name, and category name.

Now I have a really cool script that shows me exactly what items sold in eBay, their prices, pictures, and extra info.

I’m such a nice person, I decided to give this script away to any eBay affiliate who wants to use it. I’m not forcing you to upload your transaction report to my server; oh no…. I’m offering the script as a free download that you can download, put on your own server, and run from within your own hosting account.

I’m doing this because I’m such a nice person. And because I think it just might get me a few nice backlinks.

You can get the script here:

TWW’s eBay Report Tracker

Check out a screenshot: (click to enlarge)

It’s very satisfying to spend a great deal of time developing a new site from scratch for a client, taking pains to ensure that the site is search-engine friendly, and then to see that site do well in the search engines after launch.

But it’s also surprisingly satisfying to spend a few hours optimizing a small site for a new client, and then to see, almost immediately, improvements in that site’s performance in the search engines. (Read on: Minor SEO Changes, Major SEO Effect on a Minor Site)

Apparently I’m part of a small minority of web developers who believe that the developer has a level of professional responsibility toward the client, regardless of whether the client knows, understands, or requests same. (Read on: Ethics and Web Design - The Professional Responsibility of the Web Designer)

A page that’s about everything isn’t about anything.

Read my explanation here.

I recently subscribed to a satellite tv package when I upgraded my DSL account — and I instantly got hooked on that adorable Animal Planet show “Meerkat Manor.” Just in time for the season ending. Then I started watching Orangutan Island, and while watching the 2nd episode I idly checked the whois for orangutanisland.com. That domain was taken, but orangutanisland.org was available, and I thought to myself, I wonder if I should register that and set up a forum for people to talk about these cute critters? So I did. I used the free phpBB forum software for the forum, and also created a small collection of static informational pages so that the site would have some content to rank for.

(Read on: Forums (or Fora, for you Latin geeks))

The amount of misinformation out there on the web is almost enough to make a person crazy. I ran across a few statements today that were so baldly wrong that I have to correct them here.

(Read on: Correcting Bad Information)

So I got a gentle tweak from Zack Katkin at Unique ID Web Design because I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been busy working on projects for clients, but I know that’s no excuse. I’m breaking the Golden Rule of Blogging, which I drill into my clients when they want to start a blog, to wit: You must blog regularly! Thanks, Zack, for the nudge.

Okay, enough of that. Today I’m going to talk about crawlability and web design. I got to browsing the Unique ID blog and read Zack’s post “Straight From Google, The Four Biggest Search Rank Factors,” in which “crawlability” is listed as the very top, highest priority, most important search engine ranking ractor for a web site. This week I’ve also been following a discussion at the High Rankings forums about whether web designers have any SEO responsibility when designing a web site. (Read on: “Crawlability,” Web Design, and SEO)

I noticed that my web site development site got a visit by someone who found it in a search for “hank hill quotations.” I haven’t put any effort at all into optimizing the site for that search term, so naturally I got curious and had to check it out. It turns out my site is #66 in Google and #32 in Yahoo for that search.

(Read on: A Search Engine Experiment)

Many, many computer users use “search” exclusively as their primary means of navigation. What I mean by this is that a user, let’s call her Pam, wants to go to a particular web site that she knows of and is familiar with. Pamela knows the domain of the site. But instead of typing, say, example.com into the address bar of her browser, or even better, bookmarking the site so that she can go to it with a single click, Pamela types the domain into the search field of her Google toolbar, or into the search field of her Yahoo home page.

(Read on: Do you own the #1 SERP for your domain name?)

Many of my clients already have an existing web site when they contact me. Often they’re unhappy with their site’s visual design, or its functionality, or its performance in the search engines. I hate — I really hate — telling a potential client that their site needs to be completely re-developed from the ground up in order achieve the level of performance they’re looking for. Yes, I can charge more for a complete redevelopment, and I like that part, but it always feels sort of “snake oil salesman” to me. I’d rather tell the client, “Yes, we can work with your existing site. We can make these changes, and add this functionality, and we can do this, that and the other thing.”

But sometimes that’s simply not possible. Particularly when the potential client is looking for improved search engine performance or better usability.

(Read on: Can your site be tweaked?)

Difficult as it may be to believe, but by January of 2007, Google is still unable to recognize when URLs that obviously lead to the same page are in fact the same page. So what’s a URL, and what’s the problem here?

(Read on: The Infamous Canonical URL Issue)

1. A unique, custom title tag on every page in the site

(Read on: Top Ten Easiest Code Tweaks To Improve Your Site’s Search Engine Performance)

Is there a sandbox or is there not? Is the question purely one of semantics? Let’s see what Googler Matt Cutts actually had to say:

(Read on: Boxing the Sandbox)

Timing is everything. I launched this blog on Jan. 11. On about the 15th, some crazy hacker started hitting SEO-related blogs, using a security vulnerability discovered in the WordPress blog software. Just my luck. The story of my life.

(Read on: SEO Hacking for Fun and Profit)

Web sites need inbound links to do well in search engines. One-way, unpaid-for links are clearly the types of links the search engines prefer. How does one go about getting such links? (Read on: Linkbait: What is it?)

My quick rundown:

Title tag: Yes, this one’s a biggie. All indications are that the title of the page matters a lot to Google and the other SEs. Every page on a web site should have well-written title that accurately summarizes the page’s main focus. (Read on: On-page SEO: What matters, what doesn’t)

The keywords meta tag seems to get a lot of attention, but the description meta tag (meta content=”This is the description” name=”description” /) is one that actually matters.

Not for search engine optimization in the sense of helping a page appear higher in the search results.

(Read on: META Description Tags)

I develop web sites for a living. One of my priorities is building search-engine-friendly sites that follow best practices for making sure that sites are easily spiderable by the search engine bots, and that the key on-page elements are present and used appropriately.

(Read on: META Keyword Tags and Search Engines)

What do web site development, search engine optimization and Hippocrates have in common? A line from the Hippocratic Oath comes to mind: First, do no harm. In a previous post, I touched on how the technological factors underlying a web site are important to the site’s search engine optimization.

These factors aren’t important so much for their ability to rank a site highly, as they are for avoiding problems that can harm a site’s ranking.

(Read on: Web site development, SEO, and Hippocrates)

I was just browsing the referral keywords for my company’s site, TropicalWebWorks.com, and I discovered that TWW shows up in Google at the #4 spot for a search on web works. Out of 683 million results. Just wow.

I don’t imagine that phrase will bring much (if any!) paying work my way, but still…..