Month of February , 2006

I found a really nice Keyword Difficulty Tool. You type in your keyword and it shows you a graphic of how difficult your chances are of ranking with those particular keywords. It ranges from very easy to very difficult.

The keyword difficulty tool will also suggest different keywords to try. This is a nice little tool. I wouldn’t depend on it 100% when deciding on keywords, but I did find it a helpful tool to add to my SEO toolbelt.

Google will occasionally ban sites who have duplicate or stolen content as well as questionable content matter such as gambling, adult content, etc. There are several reasons Google doesn’t want sites to be indexed.

My thoughts are don’t swear, don’t have adult content or gambling, and most of all write your own content. Make sure it is good, original content. Google will love you. Check Google’s Terms of Service, they spell everything out for you.

Check to see if you are banned by Google.
Thanks to Cached.It http://www.cached.it/

Some other bloggers and I have been trying to unlock the secret to the Google sandbox. The Google Sandbox is a phenomenon in which your new site sits for a period of time before it gets indexed by Google. Google does not offer any information about the sandbox, they act like it doesn’t even exist…area 51.

The strange thing is, I’ve seen sites get out of the Google Sandbox after a month, other sites taking up to six months. It is all very confusing. I’ve been trying to gather as much info as I can to try to better understand this.  read more »

Favicons are those little icons that appear next to the url (web address). Favicons used to be pretty tough to make. But I’ve just discovered Favicons from Pics. Which will let you make a favorite icon out of any picture! No more tweaking the pixels in photoshop to create a mediocre looking favicon.

Check out Favicons from pics. Sure makes things easy.

I just wrote a post about Blogflux and their Page Rank Checker. I was digging around more on their site. They have some sketchy tactics.

Matter of fact I thought of this trick a few months ago. I discussed it with my dad and we came to the conclusion that it was spammy and a bit sketchy.

The idea was to have dropdown menus above your adsense ads. So when you hover on the dropdowns, they cover your ads. The trick is to make them dissapear quickly so the user clicks on the ads instead of the drop down menu.  read more »

Did you know that you can check the page rank of every page by using the Google toolbar? If you haven’t tried it, make sure you do it is awesome. But what if you want to show your visitors, who aren’t using Google’s toolbar, your great page ranking?

Blogflux has a tool that will show visitors what your page is ranked. It is called the Page Rank Checker. You can check the rank of any of your pages. It also gives you a snippet of code that you can put on your page to proudly display your page rank.

There are several ways to get new visitors to your new blog. The most important factor is time. Let’s face it, you wont get much traffic at all until about the 6 month mark. It takes at least 90 days to get out of the Google sandbox.

Duncan Riley over at the Blog Herald has a great article titled Building Blog Traffic for Newbies. It covers most of the basic steps. There are also a lot of great comments that should help you further.

A great tool to use is WordTracker. With WordTracker you can find what keywords are being searched often. It will also tell you different variations of those keywords. WordTracker will also tell you how much competition is out there for your selected keywords.

I don’t usually trust the competition figures they give, I usually do a little research on my own to see how many pages are actually optimized for a specific set of keywords.  read more »

After you have your blog setup, and you have 20 to 30 articles written, you will need to submit your blog. There are numerous sites and blog directories that you can submit your blog to. These sights will usually help drive traffic to your site.

I found this great post, which lists a number of sites you can submit to. I highly recommend doing this.

When setting up your blog, don’t rule out these:

Blogads
Adbrite
Fast Click
Chitika
Click Bank
Link Synergy
Performics
Commission Junction
Azoogle

Don’t rely solely on Adsense. There are other good advertising programs out there, you just have to find the ones that are right for your site.

When you start blogging, you have several choices of content management systems to choose from. Not to mention, the endless amount of click and build blog networks.

Some of your blogging choices are:

Drupal - http://drupal.org
Word Press - http://wordpress.org
Expression Engine/PMachine - http://www.pmachine.com/
TextPattern - http://www.textpattern.com/
Subdreamer - http://www.subdreamer.com
MovableType - http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/
Nucleus CMS - http://nucleuscms.org  read more »

I found this site called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They claim they are “defending freedom in the digital world.” Quite a tagline.

Anyway, they have a lot of good information about blogger legal liability issues. If you are a blogger, this is definitely worth a quick look...maybe even a long look.

When you set up your WordPress blog, you will need a header image. You could go with default blue Kubrik, but I’d recommend designing something eye catching.

Think of your header as the cover to a book. Remember the old saying “You can’t judge a blog by it’s header” or something like that?

I found this article which covers everything about making great WordPress headers. I plan on implementing some of this stuff in the very near future.

When you first start blogging, the ideas will come fast and furious. It will seem fun, exciting and easy. Then 6 or 7 months into your blog…bam! writers block.

This has definitely happened to me. Then you think to yourself how the heck am I going to keep this up. Suddenly, your blog seems like a chore.  read more »

Google loves sites that have fresh content and are constantly changing. It’s important that you post to your site consistently and frequently. It’s amazing to watch the traffic on a stale blog plummet.

If you haven’t posted to your blog in over a week…it’s stale. You have to remember that content is what is driving people to your site. You want it to be fresh and always changing.  read more »

Google gives rank to every site on the web. This is called a page rank. It usually takes a lot of time, traffic and link backs to ever get a good page rank. Google is ranked a 10. The highest you could probably ever hope to get to would a PR6 or PR7. Seven would really be pushing it.

You can download the Google toolbar which will tell you the ranking of every site you go to. Pretty cool little toolbar. I’d recommend it.  read more »

http://www.toprankresults.com/
http://www.toprankresults.com/blog-submit-list.htm

Every time I create a new blog, I consult my trusty blog submission list. This is a list of directories that except blogs and rss feeds. I submit my sites to hundreds of these sites, believe it or not it does help your traffic. But this last time, I noticed that most of my sites are outdated. Top Rank Results has a nice blog submission list here. I’m going to compare this with my current list and remove my old ones as well as adding these new ones to the list.  read more »

If you think that you are going to get rich quick because you have a blog with Adsense on it, you are sorely mistaken. Yes, there are people making money blogging. Yes, there are people making really good money blogging. Ask any of them if it came quickly, or easily. The answer is no.

It takes time to create a successful blog. Matter of fact it could take years, before you make anything worth talking about.  read more »

This is a great way to find out what sites are actually using your keywords as keywords or if they just happen to have the keywords on their site. Meaning, who has their site optimized for keywords and who doesn’t.

A search at Google for home studio brings back 127,000,000 results! At first glance, you would think that there is way to many pages that contain my keyword phrase home studio.  read more »

These are five of my favorite WordPress plugins. Matter of fact these are all I use.

Feed Copyrighter
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-plugins-provided-by...
This plugin puts a copyrighted message on all of your RSS feeds.

Recent Posts
http://www.coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/#customizablepostlistings
This puts a list of recent posts in your sidebar.

Google Sitemap Plugin
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-fina...
This creates a Google friendly sitemap for WordPress.  read more »

I use a hosting service that uses cpanel. I love it. It is the easiest thing to manage. Especially if you have multiple sites. Here’s the basic steps when creating a new subdomain.

Create a subdomain first newwebsite.yourdomain.com.
Change the nameservers for the domain www.newwebsite.com to the same as the domain yourdomain.com. You can change the nameservers via your Go-Daddy (or whoever you use) account. After you have changed the nameservers, it will take a period of 24-48 hrs for this info to propagate over the internet.  read more »

It is very important that you have a sitemap. It is even more important that you have a sitemap that is compatible with Google. A sitemap tells Google where all of your articles are.

I use this WordPress plugin that works really well:
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-f…
Create a blank page in notepad, save it as sitemap.xml. Upload it to the root directory of your blog. You might have to give write permission to other. If you don’t know how, Google CHMOD.  read more »

When you set up your WordPress blog, you will need to enter the following under Options, Writing, Update Services. Just cut and past this list right in there:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ 1470.net/api/ping www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b api.feedster.com/ping api.moreover.com/RPC2 api.moreover.com/ping api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping www.bitacoles.net/ping.php bitacoras.net/ping blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
www.blogdigger.com/RPC2 blogmatcher.com/u.php www.blogoole.com/ping/
www.blogoon.net/ping/  read more »

The idea behind putting Adsense ads on your site is to blend them in so they actually look like part of your site. It has been proven that blended ads do much better than ads that stick out.

Until now…

Why is it you always get the best ideas in the shower? I always get great ideas in the shower. This morning as I was washing (what’s left of) my hair, I thought to myself, links I’ve visited turn purple. So, why not put one ad block in purple? Down towards the bottom of the page.  read more »

Most blogs that make money are using Google Adsense. This is a great program! There are quite a bit of other advertising programs you can use on your site, but Adsense seems to pay the best.

When you apply for Google Adsense make sure you read their terms of service. There are a few rules that are CRITICAL that you follow. The first is, when they come to look at your site you cannot have any swearing, porn, gambling, violence, racism, etc.  read more »

I often get asked the question, how many articles should I have on my blog? The answer to that is, there is no answer. The more the better. I’ve heard a blog with 200 articles is pretty decent. But why would you ever stop?

You always want to post to your blog. Google loves sites that have fresh content. In a perfect world, one article per day would be ideal. But if you can’t do one a day, just remain consistent.

If you stop posting to your blog, it will get “stale” and the traffic will start to taper off.  read more »

It is very important to have the keywords in the proper place when writing for your blog. Keywords are the words that people will be using to find your article.

So for instance if I was writing an article on Blog Network. Blog Network would be my keywords.

So when I go to write my article there are 4 major places to put my keywords:

Title
First Sentence
Sprinkled throughout your article
Last Sentence  read more »