Outer Spice Buzz

In an industry that is so often plug-and-play, to find exceptional customer service and dedication to a product is remarkable... I am beyond thrilled with the product we will end up with, due in large part to Brian's willingness to go above and beyond and ensure a successful product. Keep up the good work (and thanks for everything

- Stacey (The MMA Corner)

Amazing themes, and customer service was beyond great. We will purchase themes from you anytime.

- Lisa (Graphics N Jeneral)

You are a legend! It is all up and running great. This is the first time I have ever used WordPress and bought a theme. You have made the process very easy and you have one very happy customer!

- Danny (Men's Cover Model)

I wanted to thank you again for all the great work you did for my website. It has received a lot of great comments lately and I even had a great website review in our local paper.

- Suzanna (Seacoast Kids Calendar)

You ROCK! Thank you so much for being so responsive. That's highly unusual in this day and age, and I just want you to know how much I appreciate how quickly you responded to our needs. THANK YOU!.

- Lisa (Let My People Know)

I've downloaded, modified, used, and generally learned many themes, and I have to say that this one is a pleasure to work with compared to some of the others. The site is clean, and Outer Spice is quick to respond and very helpful. The colors are very well chosen, and the ads are placed well. This is a great buy if you like the theme. I'm sure you'll be happy.

- Marty (thebloggerspost via ThemeForest)

[Socket is] one of the best WP themes (I just love the Aluminum skin!). Great work and definitely my next purchase. This theme is close to perfect!

- Th30d0r3 (via ThemeForest)

Outer Spice did a great job on our web site! Everything works the way we envisioned it. They have been very responsive to our needs, developed great solutions to some of our unique challenges and were a pleasure to work with. The site works smoothly, looks great and never crashes. We will definitely continue to use them for our current web site as well as on future projects.

- Rodney (RTM Consultants, Inc.)

[Socket] is a damn good template and will have saved me days and days over writing my own site. I love this theme - it's great.

- TwistedKev (via ThemeForest)

Outer Spice has played an instrumental role in helping consult and bring our ideas to life. The newly rebuilt and updated site gets rave reviews and helps us continue to sell work and grow our company. Outer Spice listens well, has vision and talent, and does great work!

- Cory (True North Landscaping, LLC.)

Good job, guys!! Other developers should learn from you how to do dropdown animations - they are PERFECT. Good luck with sales. I'm a perfection hunter, so I've noticed your themes.

- _freshface (via ThemeForest)

The professionals at Outer Spice Web Company did a wonderful job designing our website. They were very knowledgeable, listened to our input and responded quickly, turning out a website that really reflects our products line.

- Karen (Knit Happy)

Great work on the theme! I use a lot of themeforest themes, and yours is by far one of my favorites... clients are going to love it.

- Stacey (Lawlis Creative)

Just wanted to tell you guys what a beautiful theme you have created! I have purchased several themes because I was not able to find the one that would fit my taste. Your theme has everything I need.

- Bill (via ThemeForest)

Blogs We Actually Read

Mar

Wear The Right Hat With SEO

by Jesse in SEO

We often get asked when gathering requirements if we can make sure the page shows up high on search rankings. Most of the time we politely state our company rule about SEO:

We will build your website according to best industry practices for search engine optimization. The code will validate and the content will be easily indexable. We agree with SEO industry leaders who preach ‘Content is king’ – and recommend producing consistently unique, interesting, content that centers around the search terms and subjects you want to score high with.

White hat (good) SEO techniques

Content is king.

Every so called SEO guru will tell you – the best possible way you can increase your SEO is to create consistent, quality, content. Now be very careful when you go down this road. Just because you put out content, doesn’t mean its good or that it will automatically be ranked better. For instance – take these 2 SEO related websites.

http://seo-tutorial.seoadministrator.com/ – Great collection of data centered around all things SEO

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/google-personalized-search/ – Very lazy article and thinly veiled attempt at linking. Below is the entire content of the post written by the author of the site:

David Harry of the SEO Dojo has pulled together an interesting study about Personalised Search (how Google changes rankings based on various metrics included being signed into a Google account) [enter article quote here] This is a very difficult area to monitor and draw conclusions from – and an area I’ve certainly neglected. Hence the link. Worth a read.

That’s it! The entire post. This is very lazy. Great content will bring more visitors than cross-linking every single time. Spend the extra time on extremely high quality articles and blog posts. You’ll quickly stand out over the regurgitating news linkers littering the Internet.

Related, incoming links

Notice I’m not talking about any types of links. Your goal should be to get your website URL as a link on sites that are directly related to what you’re doing. If you have a video game review blog, you want to try and get your website URL on the front page of a video game store, video game online magazine, etc. You do not want to have your website URL linked on the front page of a yarn wholesaler, or a recipe website. Search engines will see you are not contextually relevant.

Consequently, when you are choosing the links that you will publish on your front page, remember this same technique of contextual relevancy.

Communities

If your site is one that can attract and hold a community, having a forum is a wonderful way to engage your target market and score higher with search engines. Think of all the indexable content coming from multiple new posts every day! If you can manage them and keep them on topic, your own users can help you increase your search rank.

Black hat (bad) SEO techniques

These are techniques that are penalized when identified by search engines or administrators. They are unethical and lazy. They range from trying to game the system to flat out deception.

Hidden content – white text with a white background stuffing keywords in hopes that search engine crawlers index everything.
Meta crazy – in the meta tags of the header, people will stuff keywords here like crazy.
Link farms – groups of websites all linking back towards each other in order to spam the index of a search engine.
Gateway pages – content stuffed with keywords that auto-redirects when you go there to another page they want you to see.
Cloaking – a human reading the website would see different things than the search engine spider read.

Grey hat (shady) SEO techniques

Here’s the ‘grey’ area. They aren’t strictly forbidden among all circles, but they aren’t exactly on any white list.

Paid links – I pay to get my link on your website which has a ton of traffic. This high traffic value will increase your search rankings.
Duplicate content – micro-site interlinking or having links that link back to your own site, perhaps with duplicate or simple content. This technique is starting to slide into the black hat seo area.

There are many other techniques constantly being tested and refined by SEO’s every day. Just like nearly everything in life; consistent, hard work will pay off. Great content is truly the king of search engine optimization.