Todd Herman's Internet Business Info & Tips Blog

“Don’t think. Just walk.” — a fellow hiker.

Last week I returned from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa. I’ll start with the bottom line: I made it to the top!

That’s three of us at sunrise on the sixth day. We took the Machame route, which takes seven days. In theory, you could march right up the mountain, but you need time for your body to acclimate to the altitude, so after ascending for a couple days, you spend several days hiking around below the main summit getting used to the altitude.

We did something that 95% of people don’t do: we hiked up to the crater at the top of Kilimanjaro (18,000+ feet) and camped there overnight. There are some pros and cons to this approach. One big advantage is that you do the 6+ hour slog up to the summit during the day instead of starting at midnight. Hiking during the day is leagues better than at night, in my opinion. The other big advantage is that you get to explore the crater. For example, this was the view out the front of our tent:

That glacier was just a five minute walk away, and then you could pet the glacier all you wanted. I gave this one a big hug:

There’s a disadvantage to camping in the crater though: you’re just below the summit, and so your body isn’t getting all the oxygen it wants. Most people hike to the top, stay for twenty minutes, and immediately descend. You’re spending most of a day at that altitude. We heard people throwing up in the morning, and later we recognized a couple people from Crater Camp going by us in a stretcher:

That’s a normal stretcher with a single all-terrain wheel mounted underneath, and it helps get people down faster. Our guide jokingly called it the “Kilimanjaro Express.”

Some people reading this post might wonder, “Can I climb Kilimanjaro?” I read that about 50% of people make it to the summit. Kilimanjaro isn’t like rock-climbing; it’s like walking 5-7 hours a day, mostly uphill. If you’re reasonably fit, you’ve got a decent chance. I did a couple triathlons last year and did similar stamina training before the climb. That meant the Kilimanjaro hiking was more of a grind than grueling or arduous.

But it’s not really the walking that gets people–it’s the altitude. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a headache that Aleve can solve or possibly other mild symptoms of Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS). If you’re unlucky, you might get High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE) or High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE). One book I read said that for climbers of Mt. McKinley, which is about 1,000 feet higher, 3% of climbers experienced symptoms of HAPE, e.g. extreme shortness of breath, while 0.5% of climbers experienced symptoms of HACE, such as ataxia–think poor coordination or the inability to walk a straight line. As long as you’re aware of the symptoms and descend if things get bad, you should be fine. But you’ll want to read up on altitude illness if you decide to climb. In my experience, the guides on Kilimanjaro are very well-trained to spot HAPE and HACE. Fitness training doesn’t really help with AMS, HAPE, or HACE, so I was lucky to be in the “only got a mild headache” set of folks.

A better question is “Do I want to climb Kilimanjaro?” And that depends. Do you like camping and hiking? You’ll be camping without a shower for several days. You’ll face some real difficulties–several people told me it was the hardest thing they’d ever done. And it can be expensive (besides the airfare and the trip itself, you’ll probably end up spending hundreds of dollars on various gear). But it can be immensely rewarding to test yourself and see what your limits are. I think maybe we don’t do that enough sometimes. No matter what, it’s definitely an adventure.

By the way, the best shower I ever took was the first shower after Kilimanjaro. After a week on the mountain, I looked like this:

During that first shower, I think the phone rang, someone knocked on the door, and at some point the power went out. I didn’t care. I just kept on showering.

A few tips in case you decide to go:
- I’ve read lots of Kilimanjaro books, and the best one to start with is the book by Henry Stedman.
- I never walk with hiking poles, so I almost didn’t bring poles. Trust me: you should bring hiking poles. I definitely recommend the FlickLock or thumb lock poles over the “twist to unlock” poles. These poles worked very well for me. I’d opt for black handles if you can, because the gray handles got pretty grubby-looking by the end of seven days.
- Get good hiking boots and wear them all over the place for a month or two.
- Take care of your lips with SPF 15 or SPF 30 lip balm or Chap Stick. I used regular Chap Stick, which is SPF 4, but the sun is much stronger at higher altitudes. My lips were pretty sunburnt by the end of the hike.
- We flew into Kilimanjaro International Airport (JRO, but sometimes written as KIA) from Amsterdam on KLM. But a lot of people flew into Dar Es Salaam (DAR) via Dubai on Emirates. The people we talked to said that the Emirates flights were very nice.
- You may the word “Mzungu.” Our guide told us that it means “guest,” but a more literal translation would be “white person.” As far as I could tell, people are saying it with affection though.
- Hike at your own pace–ideally a slow, steady pace that you can maintain for hours. It’s Kilimanjaro, not KilimaNascar.
- Throw in a safari at Tarangire National Park, Ngorongoro Crater, or the Serengeti National Park. As long as you’re in Africa, why wouldn’t you want to see stuff like this?

Or a sunset like this?

I’d like to thank everyone who supported me with good wishes or a donation to charity:water to support clean water projects. If you’d like to donate, there’s still a few weeks left.

The good old question, “How do I increase my website in the search engines?”  The first time I heard that sentence it was in the early December 93 and that set off my quest for a top spot not to mention even a spot on JumpStation search engine, now if i could only get my website on there. lol. So my first question was ” how do I get my website listed in this website.”  I’m reading how many people are in this list and wow if someone would only notice  my website! (me)  lol. Which brings a quote to mind, for the time  “Specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial. Now a days, its not like that at all its sad but true one has to do what ever they must do to survive in the S/E’s as long as its white hat SEO »”>SEO your good to go.

Obtaining top 5 S/E listings has come down either two things, how much money you got or  free time you have, let me explain. This does not have to be rocket science and the below bullet points have become a reliable system of mine. I have narrowed it down some for you to focus more on whats needed to obtain a front page search engine listing.

A SEO should know that that on-page SEO is only the face of a stable high ranking project, we all shoot for the top spot (more on that later.)  The bottom line is, as long as your website has clean up to date code, and all your metatags, images tags, header tags, not bold its tacky and unprofessional (use italic same effect), and mention your key words (words you want to be found for) on average once every 150 words.  You only need to preform a few  core optimization actions.  From your home page main navigation,  link to a web page with your main keyword/s  in it (website_portfolio.html).  Also name a few images that are on the page the same as well.

What most people dont know is S/E’s spiders read everything, as much info as you can give them.  At this point in my career my philosophy is;  its not about how high your link is its the stability of it when you get it  there is what matters.  You must consider this as your doing your on-page optimization, including image tags and metatags are full, (title, description tags only needed but make sure you  have the open directory tag <meta name=”googlebot” content=”NOODP, follow” /> .  So The Open Directory doesn’t hijack your title is search listings. (Google search this critical issue as your ranking will drop by pages with in hours!)  So make sure your index page is optimized good before you start your offline campaign.

This I would suggest a professional SEO  doing,  it should not cost you any more than 150 – 200 CAD to get your index page optimized,  as not everyone can afford to have the whole website optimized as some site run over 100 pages.  I’ve ranked top 5 spots for over 35 keywords for one index page without keyword spamming and I’m going to tell you how I did this, in order:

• Implement keywords with image, meta, header and name tags
• Index (home) page passes WC3 Markup standards
• Search out the top 50 article directories on the internet (listed below)
• Write or outsource 20 articles about each keyword (main website  services)  this was added to my home page.
• Made sure that each article was no-less than 600 words
• Make sure all the articles have a 2% maximum keyword density ratio (Some will say this is unimportant but remember, the more info you can give the spider when hes/shes there, the better keyword ratio varies.
  
• Made sure my 3 article hyperlinks in my article signatures contained my main keywords (shoot for the most searched keywords for your website service)  most article directories accept 3 hyper links in the signature.
• Make sure whom over is doing my article submissions does NOT submit my articles to link farms (Google search needed here)
• Proceed to CanadaSEOPro (Google search here) and purchase 1000 one way back-links
• They include article writing and manual submissions, one stop critical SEO shopping (notice italic effect)
• Make sure I don’t use any automatic article submitters that the S/E’s can detect its automation and penalize such domains with the hyper links (in your article signatures) .
• Sit back and wait approximately 4 – 5 weeks maximum
• Receive a link report from CanadaSEOPro, do a search for my main keyword/s making sure I do a screen capture saving that image as this is my first front page search engine listing , which you will own for over a years time.

I do this campaign on average every one and a half years and do the campaign again for the same MAIN keywords with the same links,  just change your not so important keywords, you have up to 25 – 30 proven keywords to play with on your home page. Make sure you change the content on your home page preferably on a daily basis, add a keyword related news feed and widget to your website, S/E’s love new, informative content.

Without a doubt, one of the most critical areas used by the top search engines to attach importance to a web page is link popularity. Google, specifically, had devised its own method for arriving at this importance ranking. The name of this system is Google Pagerank. There are two major components that define the web page’s link popularity and they are:

- The volume of links directed to the do it yourself SEO web page in the form of in-bound links to the website.

- The specific quality the in bound links possess

In short, the more volume of in-bound links directed towards a website, the better the affect on the website’s search engine ranking. In a way, the search engines consider each inbound link a ranking of the popularity of the site. The more votes a website gets the more important the website will be considered. Inbound links have a specific meaning and value to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, and Ask Jeeves.

These meanings can include the number, duration of linking time, and overall quality remain a major component of the search engine algorithms. The aesthetic quality of in-bound link centers on the importance of the web page providing the in-bound link. As a result, acquiring a inbound link from a webpage on MSNBC would be considered of much higher worth than a link that is placed on an unknown website that has a low Google PageRank.

See you on top!  Todd