6 Things You Should Know When Exchange Links With Other Blogs or Sites
August 7, 2007 by Gaman · 7 Comments
There’s no question that having tons of links pointing to your blog will not only increase your traffic but also improve your search engine rankings. It helps users discover your blog from other places too.
However, before you begin exchanging links with other sites, there are several things you need to consider whether it will provide value that benefits you in the long run.
The following are six issues that could affect the effectiveness of your link exchange practice.
Installing Kontera WordPress Plugin Would Risk Getting Your Blog Penalised By Google
July 13, 2007 by Gaman · 17 Comments
I was reading JohnChow.com when I came across a post about a plugin for Kontera from Shupe.ca. The developer claims his plugin will help Kontera publishers install Kontera ContentLink on their blogs easily
As a Kontera publisher myself, I could see how this plugin facilitates Kontera ads integration into my blogs. Since I was planning to install Kontera on several of my blogs and didn’t fancy tinkering with the code, I had decided to give the plugin a try.
Once activated, I noticed that the plugin was installing extra code into my blogs footer in addition to Kontera ContentLink code. However, the extra code was hidden with Cascading Style Sheet (CSS).
Below was the extra code:
<div style="display:none;visibility:hidden;">
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://www.shupe.ca/articles/wordpress/plugins/kontera-dynamicontext/?version=2.0" title="Rodney’s Kontera DynamiContext Plugin">Rodney’s Kontera DynamiContext Plugin</a> plugged in.
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.rodneyshupe.ca/" title="RodneyShupe.ca">RodneyShupe.ca</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.rodneyshupe.com/" title="RodneyShupe.com">RodneyShupe.com</a></li>
<li>Check out Joomla Resources at Rodney Shupe’s<a href="http://joomla.rodneyshupe.com/" title="Rodney Shupes Joomla Resource">Rodney Shupes Joomla Resource</a>.</li>
<li>Check out WordPress Resources at Rodney Shupe’s<a href="http://wordpress.rodneyshupe.com/" title="Wordpress Resource">Wordpress Resource</a>.
</li></ul></div>
Search Engine Optimisation For MSN Search
Previously I’ve written a post where I points out how users coming from MSN are the best AdSense clickers. In response to that, one of my readers asks what’s the best way to attract traffic from MSN.
For a start, you can buy PPC traffic via Microsoft adCenter then direct the traffic to your pages with AdSense ads that offer higher payout than what you paid for your PPC. This is known as AdSense arbitrage where people make money by bidding on less expensive keywords to direct people to a page with AdSense.
However this is not what this article is all about. I am going to explain how you could use search engine optimisation for MSN to drive organic traffic to your blog.
Can Your Competitor Really Sabotage SEO Rankings?
July 2, 2007 by Gaman · 5 Comments
Philipp Lessen of Google Blogoscoped has pointed out an interesting article published by Forbes about ways your site can be sabotaged by your competitor.
Google’s help files mentioned that there’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed. Which also means it’s not impossible for a competitor to do something that could hurt your site’s rankings.
Due to the democratic nature of the web, your competitor could post a lot of spammy links from around the web pointing to your websites. A sudden increase in the backward links count to your website will certainly raise Google’s red flag which could result in immediate drop in your rankings, among others.
Philipp summarizes the main points from the Forbes article about ways how your competitor could potentially cause havoc to your rankings by doing any of the following.
SEO Quick Links: 27 Wednesday 2007
June 27, 2007 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
Here are some of the interesting SEO topics I came across today.
- SEO Tips: Increase Page Rank By Revitalizing Your Old Posts
Lorelle VanFossen give out some tips to help you revitalise your old posts for your readers as well as to help your search engine page ranking. - The Enormous Linkbait list
Cornwallsea.com has compiled a nice roundup of linkbaiting resources. It’s a strategy used by webmasters to generate incoming links to a website or blog from other sites. - Turning Off Google Personalized Results
If you are logged into any Google property (Gmail, AdWords, AdSense, Docs, etc.) while doing a Google search, your results may be personalized, without you really knowing it. Here’s how to turn this off.
68 Online SEO Tools and Resources
June 14, 2007 by Gaman · 3 Comments
If you are into Search Engine Optimization, here is a list of SEO tools to help you check your current website and help you in your marketing effort.
The keyword research tools in particular are useful if you are doing pay per click marketing. The problem with the services is that since they are free, your competitors are probably using most of them already and finding similar keywords.
While this somewhat reduce the competitive advantage you may enjoy, it’s still better than nothing.
Other tools include link checking tools, browser compatibility tools, speed tester, useful Firefox extensions and a few others.
There’s no need to try everything though, just identify the ones that could help you improve your websites and marketing effort and you should enjoy some ‘unfair’ advantage over your competitors that do not do anything.
Google Updates Algorithm
June 8, 2007 by Gaman · 6 Comments
People tend to think that Google update their search engine algorithm a few times every few months. However the New York Times article published recently reveals that changes are made more like a few times every week.
The recent algorithm updates have affected one of my sites significantly. I found that I am back on the first page of Google search result page for one single and rather competitive keyword.
I had previously been ranked on page 1 for a couple of years but it dropped to page 2 before being pushed further to page 3.
Lucky for me this trend reverted back to its initial condition.
The PR of the website dropped from 6 to 5 but I don’t really mind as this is offset by the improvement in ranking.
How to Properly Spend $100 dollars to Market Your Site
May 29, 2007 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
SEOish has a post up to help you market your website on a budget. If you got 100 dollars to spend, what would you do?
That’s the question he asked 7 experts in web marketing, branding and search engine optimization. The answer he received varies from one expert to another but all give you ideas on how to start off on the right foot.
On point that I noticed mentioned repeatedly is that you need good content and good links. Without good content, it’s harder to ‘entice’ people to link to you but without good links there’s no point having good content if nobody knows you exist.
These two should go hand in hand. You should concentrate on creating link worthy content and market it. Get the word out using email and social marketing, AdWords, contest and so on.
How to Attract Traffic and Get Some Activity Going In Your Blog
May 21, 2007 by Gaman · 19 Comments
I recently received an email from a reader asking me how to attract traffic and get some activity going in his blog.
This type of email actually gives me an idea about new posts I should write, so thank you for asking 
However, instead of writing another entirely new post to answer this question, let just point you the answers to the first part of the question I’ve written earlier
12 Tips to Increase Traffic to Your Blog
There are also several plugin to help you improve you search engine ranking. I’ve written about them here:
Optimize your wordpress blog search engine ranking with these plugins
Now if you want to learn more about search engine optimization strategies, check out the following post. While the article discusses SEO title strategies in general, they’re also applicable to blogs.
Is Your Site’s IP Address Affect Your SEO and PageRank?
May 21, 2007 by Gaman · 5 Comments
If you have been doing or reading about search engine optimization (SEO) for a while, you may have came across the idea that it’s beneficial to have your sites hosted across unique IP addresses. Some even suggested that having your sites hosted on different a continent will boost the benefit even further.
There are a lot of ads for directory submitters that claim all the directories are on unique IP addresses to ensure your site enjoys an advantage.
The premise is that having multiple sites hosted on the same IP address will in some way affect the PageRank of those sites negatively. Also, linking between your own domains hosted on the same class C IP addresses might be seen as a spamming attempt by the search engine.
As example if you have two sites hosted on 195.168.1.1 and 195.168.1.2, they are basically sharing the same Class C IP range. The Class C in this case refers to “195.168.1”
