The common misconception about LA is that it’s sunny and temperate all year around, with majestic sunsets every evening. While these days are normally plentiful, the are periods during the year, mostly May and June, where the Marine Layer drifts in for weeks at a time blocking the sun with a dull hazy greyness. 2010 was one of the worst. We experienced “May Grey” and “June Gloom” all year, it seemed.

For this reason this video went from a simple timelapse to test to an epic that crossed several months. I kept my camera and Satechi intervalometer at the ready for evenings that burned the sky with gradients if red and gold, mixed with wispy clouds.

My timelapse package consists of my Canon 7D, Satechi intervalometer, old Bogen Tripod, slider, and ipod. (the iPod is used to keep the boredom at bay while I wanted for my setup to catch the action, which can take prolonged periods.)

At first I would set the shutter to whatever was a convenient setting to give me a clean exposure with plenty of Depth-of-Field. While I was reasonably pleased with the results, but it was not a smooth as the incredible work posted on Vimeo. My first mistake was not going full manual. You have to set up the camera on full manual to keep it either hunting for exposure, shutter speed and focus. Make sure you lens is on manual focus and the camera settings are on “Manual” so the camera takes in a consistent shot and let’s nature set the exposure. After all, the exposure changes are what timelapse is all about.

I try to keep the ISO settings around 160 to reduce grain, although this is less of problem on the newer camera’s like the Canon 7D and 5D.

This changes got my timelapse to look legit, but it when I discovered the secretes to dragging the shutter, my timelapse imagery moved to a whole different level. “Dragging the Shutter” is a photography term that means simply the exposure time is fired in relation to the shutter speed.

In motion picture film cameras the angle of the shutter can be adjusted to control motion blur. The Shutter angles controls the amount of time the film is exposed during each frame of the recording interval. Every frame is exposed for 1/24th of a second. But really only half the time it’s exposed to light (1/48th of a second). The other half the film is behind the shutter. Adjusting the shutter angle on a film camera (if its design allows) can add or reduce the amount of motion blur by changing the amount of time that the film frame is actually exposed to light. A “Tight” shutter create a stuttering effect, like the battle scenes from Saving Private Ryan, Where as a “Loose” shutter allows one frame to blue into the other creating a smooth action.

How does this translate to still photography?  Timelapse is created by sequencing a series of still images into a cohesive motion picture. The goal is to mimic the control of the cinema shutter angle through exposure compensation. Long exposures will approximate the effects of a “normal” shutter angle, providing a smooth transition from one frame to another when the sequence it built in post-production.

The “real world” translation of all of this is to simply shoot a slow shutter speed to get smooth movement. I found my polarizer worked well enough to allow me to slow the shutter to a 60th for a 1 second interval.

This video is composed of shots over the course of several months. As my skills improved I dropped previous sequences for new ones. I did leave some with a slight stutter because the range of movement looked interesting and added variety to the piece.  Ultimately, I completed the project and composed the finished video. It’s been well received on Vimeo which is cool and make the long wait times worth it.

My settings follow below:

• Manual focus
  50mm prime lens
  24-105 Zoom
  Single shot setting
  Manual ISO
  Manual Aperture.
  Large JPEG, only because I want cropping capability for 1080p.
  Standard picture style [try landscape next time]
  Auto light optimizer disabled
  1 second for fast moving clouds.
  1/60th of a second to slightly drag the shutter on a 1 second interval.

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are most common words people use when they search. The majority of people searching for credit cards, for example, are likely to use the keyword “Credit Cards” in their search. This makes the term “Credit Cards” highly valuable and very competitive. This is precisely why keywords are the such a huge factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Forget short keywords, go for Long-Tail Keywords.

Popularity of one keyword over another can differ dramatically and attract completely different types of users. The best keywords are ones that will convert highly qualified users by providing them with search results that meet their search request the closest.

This principal is the guiding law of Googles search results. The only service Google really provides is the ability for someone to quickly find exactly what they are looking for. Google will examine the content on your site and determine the best placement for your pages depending on how they perceive the value match between that content and the search keywords.

Googles method presents an excellent opportunity for the use of “Long-Tail” keywords. Long-Tail keywords are keyword phrases that define the search as closely as possible

Returning to the example of “Credit Cards”. If a student with poor credit is looking for a credit card, they are most likely will simply type “credit cards” into search box. It’s far more likely they’ll use a Long-Tail keyword phrase, such as “student credit cards” or even “poor credit student credit cards”, or some variation of that long-tail keyword phrase.

Because this is focused search the amount of traffic searching for “ poor credit student credit cards” will be much less than Credit Cards.

For example, the amount of sites listed in google for the term “credit cards” is 124 million.  “Poor credit student credit cards” are only 2.3 million. So the chances of getting your site on the first page of “Poor credit student credit cards” is far more doable than the first page of Credit Cards.

Long-Tails can be used to even dig deeper, such as “poor credit student credit cards in Los Angeles” has only 293,000 sites competing.
Not only do the long-tails enhance the changes of getting a site on the first search results page, they attract pre-qualified customers. So the conversions from a highly
keyword selection are much higher than tons of worthless traffic from too general of a keyword.

How to find Long-Tail Keyword phrases.

Even though it’s a manual approach, I’m all for sitting in front of an empty spreadsheet and trying different combinations of keywords and phrases. Nobody and no automated system knows your business better than you. You’re also a consumer, who uses the search engines every day. This makes you an expert, so don’t be afraid to put that expertise to use.

After an initial list as created, or you burn out on making your long-tail keyword list, it’s time to go to Google. Set up a google adwords account and use the Keyword search tool. The results of this will largely be they keyword terms you’ve already thought of, but there will be others that you have not thought of in the list as well. Some of those could be very valuable. The Google keyword search tool only generates keyword phrases that have been actually searched on. This can help you edit you master list.

I’ve used paid tools like WordTracker, and a few others. So far the results were less than impressive. I found WordTracker hard to use and clunky. I am planning to use Keyword Elite soon and am hoping it works as well as the video promos suggest.

Using Long-Tail Keywords in your content

The final keyword list should consist of both short-tail and long-tail keywords. The next step is to convert these keywords to content by creating focused articles for each keyword. The game-plan is to built high-quality article content on your site that will find its way into the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) for your keywords.

The longest of the long-tail keyword pages should find there way to the first page for their keywords and start to deliver trickles of traffic within the first few weeks of the page going live. Sometimes is takes less time depending on the popularity of the topic.

The idea is that those long-long-tails will start to traffic and help the more competitive terms rank as Google recognizes the overall authority of your site.

The article content is important in that is has to be human readable and provide interesting and accurate information for the person reading it. This approach will take the page much farther than poorly written keyword laden content that is obviously slapped together to game the search engine results. There are several auto-article writing applications available- stay away. I’ve tried a few and they are all horrible.

I’ve had the most success from hiring writers to produce unique keyword rich content for me. This takes the burden of developing quality content off my back, and enables a different voice to talk about my topic.

When an article is written, either by me or a writer, there are a few standards I put in place to ensure the articles are maximized for the SERPS.

Use the exact keyword phase as the title- If the article keyword is “Poor Credit Student Credit Cards” then I title it “Poor Credit Student Credit Cards.” Don’t get cute with titles. Keep it exact.

Don’t abuse the keywords it the articles- Work them into the content where appropriate, and don’t repeat them more than 3 times per 500-750 word article.

Keep articles between 500-750 words- This is enough to make them legit, and short enough so that a writer can quickly finish them.

Keyword Research tools:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

Definitions

One-Way Links: When a website links to you but you don’t link to them. One-way links are the most valuable as they carry more “link juice” weight in terms of Google Ranking.

Reciprocal Links: Links shared between sites. A logical link between two sites retains value. A link from sites that share not common interests carries the least weight.

How to Build High Quality Links:

Create Authoritative Content

Creating valuable, helpful content is the first step to getting other sites to link to your site.  If a webmaster or blogger finds information of value to their users then they might place a link to your site on theirs.

Ask for Links

Find web sites that have complimentary content to yours and email them with a link request. For example, a poker site might find your information of value to their users. This exchange will require a reciprocal link exchange.

Join Social Networks

Stumbleupon.com is a good resource for meeting like minded people that are interested in your product or service. As you make “friends” they will “stumble” your content which helps to build traffic. “Stumble” means that they post a recommendation on their Stumbleupon account and others see it and check it out.

Often people on Stumbleupon have sites they want to promote. I’ve gotten some good links to my travel site, Croatiatravelblog.com, using this method.

Article Marketing

There are Over 100 article publishing sites that accept articles from expert writers and post them either for readers or other publishers to post them on their websites. The terms are that the author retains links back to his site.

If you submit an article that gets picked up 50 times by different publishers, then that creates 50 highly valuable one-way links to your site. Over time this can pay off.

You can not use the same articles that you use on your site. This would create duplicate content, which Google hates. Doing this risks your main site. It’s much better to get a writer to produce content strictly for article marketing.

There are services that will submit your articles to all of the publishers for you. I have not tested these yet, so I can’t offer any confirmed successes from using them.

http://www.articlemarketer.com is a good example of these services.

Buying Links

There are webmaster that sell links and companies that will place links on sites for a fee.

http://www.textlinkads.com is one of the largest.

I’m not a big fan of this method because links have gotten very expensive. As much as $40 per month for one link. In my opinion there are other ways to spend money for more effective results.

Forums and Social Book Marking Sites

Find forums that have topics on your niche and post in them with a link back to your site. Most use “No-Follow” links which means they purposely eliminate the search bots from treating the link as a legitimate resource. However, forums can attract visitors who might link to you from their blogs.

Social bookmarking sites enable a blog owner to post updates to their blog for others to see. This requires having a blog configured site, and can be quite effective if done correctly.

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff!

Getting backlinks is the only goal a website owner should have. A successful linking campaign will get focused traffic that should translate into conversions and sales.

To there requires diligence in producing compelling content, technological knowhow in building the site in a framework that complies with what Google likes, and reaching out to other sites in order to build inbound links.

The admin showed the orders were being processed, so the data was hitting the database. I had no where to go, and was looking at either systematically going through each template file and each database table to see if I could find any evidence of what was causing the errors.

The more I thought about doing this the reality of the tedious hours it would take to just find it began to sink in. I did research and found other developers that had encountered this issue, but none seemed to offer any clear path that would fix my issue. Basically they were even more lost than I was on the blank page horror.

Finally I found the Zen Cart Error-Logging Utility. This little app saved the day and boosted my confidence for future Zen Cart installs. First, the download page explains that the blank page effect is the result of PHP syntax errors. This can happen by tinkering around in the template files and mistyping an operator. Ok, that sounded good. However, I had purposely set my customizations from the admin just for this reason.

Apparently Zen Cart version 1.3.8 has this bug. It’s recommended to upgrade to 1.3.8a, which I had already done. I was still getting the error.

I proceeded to download and install the Debugging Tool per their instructions.

I ran the transaction again and returned this error in the log file

I replaced these files and thought I got it working until the confirmation page came up blank. After more research I discovered that functions_general.php is not the correct file to swap, it’s english.php in the languages file. At this point I just uploaded the whole damn languages folder from a fresh download of Zen Cart 1.3.8a. Boom! it all worked. It tested and retested with no errors.

If you run into this issue, or any other Zen Cart weirdness, please download this file. It will save tons of time and frustration, when you need to squash little pain-in-the-ass bugs like this.