Webmaster Pro Guide

Archive for January, 2008

 Andy and Aaron just put out an excellent guide of 101 link building tips, and it kicked me in the butt to get it done, so I could give their article the proper link love it deserved.

Types of links and how to get them

Using a arbitrary ficticious example of an informational site about real estate law. **I do not currently work with any sites of this type.

In this example, we have two specific themes to dive deeper into that are relevant to our search - real estate and law. Starting at this level gives us hundreds of thousands, if not millions of sites to start to filter from (not to mention the backlinks of THOSE sites), and sites that share similar themes.

1. Authority links
How to obtain them: Start with your related category in the Google Directory
What to look for:
-Top rankings for big terms - city or state + real estate, vertical category + lawyers
-Sites that currently offer links out
-Sites that would benefit from offering users your content
Examples: real estate law
Other Notes: Authority links are an absolute must for improving your trust score these days. This is a MUST for a new site, and should be where you start your efforts, and always be dedicating SOME time. Suck it up, and take the time it takes to get some quality, trusted links. The existence of trusted authority links will make or break your site. Find the 800 lb. gorillas in your field, and **find a way to get on a dozen or so of them. Failing that, hunt their backlinks, and find a way to get on some of those pages. Use some creative queries with the combination tool. Give the tattler a shot.

2. Directory links
How to obtain them: Pony up some cash
What to look for: Generally easy to find niche directories, don’t go overboard with more than a few directories per month, quarter, etc.
Examples:General directories, real estate directories
Other Notes: My gut feel is that too many directories triggers a filter. I wouldn’t go over 10 - 15% of my total link ratio on my own sites for my own sites at any given time. Start with a few highly trusted directories. (Yahoo dir, business.com, MSN SBD, BOTW), and add some others after you have many more links added to your profile. (more…)

 If you hate the look of Aero, click Start/Control Panel/Themes and you can choose a non-Aero theme, such as Windows Classic.

2. Windows Vista’s installer can detect serial-ATA (SATA) drives without the need to provide a driver diskette. Don’t bother creating a diskette for your SATA drives before you install Vista.

3. If, for some reason, the Vista installation gets interrupted due to an unintentional shutdown or reboot, start the computer without booting the Vista DVD. Windows Vista’s installer should pick up where it left off. If it does-n’t, then restart the installation over from scratch.

4. When you perform a search with Vista’s new, instant search feature, you can save the search in a special folder. This powerful feature allows you to create a virtual folder which, by default, is saved in your \\Searches\ folder. Every time you open such a folder, the search results are updated.

5. In Windows Vista, you can add additional clocks to the system tray. Click the clock, and then click Date and Time Settings. Click the Additional Clocks tab. You can add one or two additional clocks to the tray and select their time zones.

6. You can save your progress in most of the games included with Windows Vista—even the carry-overs from earlier versions of Windows.

7. You can create XML documents, which are more secure than regular text files or even word processor docs. Just create a document in a word processor, print it via the options menu, and select the XPS printer.

8. If you upgrade your graphics card in preparation for Windows Vista, be sure to get a new card with as much local memory as possible. Since Windows Vista renders everything—even the desktop and windows them-selves—as 3D surfaces, local 3D memory greatly improves performance…sometimes even more than a more powerful GPU.

9. Use the Ctrl + Alt + Del to open a window where you can access the common functions including the task manager, this will let you close programs even when the computer is sometimes frozen.

10. When you open new folder use the navigation items to be able to access more folders within the same window, moreover you can go back/forward to a folder/file you accessed earlier without closing the last window.

hope this will give you an enhanced experience

1. Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.

2. Google’s Home Page Has 63 Validation Errors. Don’t believe me?: Check Google Validation

3. The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day.

4. The infamous “I’m feeling lucky” button is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.

5. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

6. The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’.

7. Google has the largest network of translators in the world.

8. Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

9. Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.

10. Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.

11. Google is a mathematical term 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne.

12. Number of languages in which you can have the Google home page set up, including Urdu, Latin and Klingon: 88

13. Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices.

Many friends have asked me whether we can make money online from blogs or not. I told them you can make money even by selling lemonade at the corner of your school but the main problem is that you must have passion and time for what you will be blogging. Many people fail because they are starting blogs just to make money , they are writing 2 or 3 articles and they are using different affiliate links and other advertisement programs to catch any cents.

You must know that in order to make some money , at least you should know what you are talking about and not post just crap in order to increase number of posts in your blog.
Many newbies on the internet doesn’t even know how to get a free blog online so in this article I will explain step by step what you have to do in order to make some cash from your blog

There are 2 big blog providers online which are

• WordPress.com
• Blogger.com

- WordPress has a lot of templates and widgets so you can use for your blog , you can create categories and you can even purchase more space and other cool features if you upgrade
- Blogger was purchased by Google so the best part is that you can get accepted to Adsense through Blogger. The bad part is that you cannot create categories but you can give Labels to your posts as they were categories (Im doing it)

You must know that creating a blog is really simple but updating it everyday with new and unique content is really a hard work (its not so hard if you speak about your favorite niche like I’m doing) So content will be the judger whether you will be a successful blogger or not, if you will update it once a week chances will be very low but if you will post good and unique content every day then you will be in the right road

So ok so far , you have created the blog , you chose your template and you are posting some articles. You will ask how will you get the traffic ?

There are tons of ways to drive traffic to a blog , I will explain some of the techniques I’m also using

• Register at FeedBurner.com
• Register at TechnoRati.com
• If you are a member of DigitalPoint Forum add your RSS Feed to your profile (it will be shown under your username everytime you post a new reply or thread)
• Write some unique articles and upload them at Article Directories (See this post for more explanations)
• Register at MyBlogLog.com
• Add your blog url to your signatures in every forum you are (if possible add also an avatar with your blog’s address)
• Add your blog url to high pr directories

So with 7 easy and free ways you can start seeing some increases in your traffic (Note that if you dont post regularly your traffic may decrease again)

Now I know that all of you are thinking , how will we be making money from our blogs ? Its really simple but I would strongly recommend use just 2 or maximum 3 advertisments and do not put the advertisements from the beginning (wait until you have some traffic then you may add them) Make sure your advertisements and other widgets are like your template so you wont have a lot of contrast.

Here I’m listing the ways how you can make money from your blog once you have some decent traffic and some readers

• Adsense (CPM & PPC which pays differently for each niche)
• Text-Link-Ads (Get Money if someone buys a link to your site from TLA)
• ReviewMe (Get paid for different reviews you make , more traffic you have more you will earn)
• PayPerPost (same as ReviewMe but it has more advertisers in their network)
• Money4Banners (Doesn’t matter if you have a small or big blog , you get 10$ when you sign up and 5$ every month just to display their advertisment
• WidgetBucks (this seems to be most promising program which pays very high rates but nobody has received any payment so far as its a new company)

Recently, an advertising network known as WidgetBucks launched and began their quest to revolutionize the world of online marketing. In providing their pay-per-click shopping widget programs, WidgetBucks seeks to make advertising a much easier process for just about everyone involved. Traditional advertising is effective in some cases, but often times, it fails to meet the needs of companies. It just doesn’t reach customers in the right way. WidgetBucks is a different kind of online advertising, though.

Depending upon your role in the entire operation, WidgetBucks provides a different experience for various webmasters. The advertisements seem to reach customers in a different way. The latest marketing research has indicated that, on the whole, internet browsers are extremely fickle and they’re able to pick up on the tricks that marketing professionals bring. With WidgetBucks, the advertisements read more like content. Internet browsers see the WidgetBucks advertisements just like they do the articles on a webmaster’s site.

Webmasters have found that WidgetBucks can be very profitable when compared to other forms of affiliate marketing. Most website owners report a very high click through rate and from that, a solid CPM. What is the primary reason why this is happening? WidgetBucks serves the hot niches in the website industry. Among the popular niches are video games, sports, jewelry, health topics, and plenty of other things that are currently hot in the industry.

If you are a webmaster and you plan on making the big bucks using this advertising program, you better have a website in one of the popular niches. Otherwise, their advertising seems to fall short of the mark. Their advertisements are well written and are designed to make people really want to explore the product being advertised, but some webmasters find that their site is not one that benefits from such marketing.

The referral program is also very popular and is a good way to make some income using the program. At last check, WidgetBucks had an offer of $25 for any person who registers their high traffic site. From there, webmasters aren’t finished making money through WidgetBucks. You can earn 10% of the total lifetime earnings of all of the people you refer through your personal referral link. Depending upon who clicks on your site, this could end up being a very profitable aspect of the entire operation.

As far as payments go, there is a little bit of a waiting period. This can be frustrating at first, but after a while, the cycle begins to catch up to itself and you’ll be receiving regular payments. Just 45 days after the end of the month, WidgetBucks will send payment through either the Paypal system or through a personal check.

On the whole, WidgetBucks is a pretty good new system and they stand to revolutionize the market some. The advertisements are well written, which is the main difference between these ads and some of the other ones that you might see online.

 NEW YORK (AP)–The online advertising leader Google Inc. (GOOG) said Friday it would help make it less lucrative for users to tie up millions of Internet addresses through a loophole, as the compnay wants to keep those domain names available for legitimate individuals and businesses.

Over the next few weeks, Google will start looking for names that are repeatedly registered and dropped within a five-day grace period for full refunds.

Google’s AdSense program would exclude those names so no one can generate advertising revenue from claiming them temporarily, a practice known as domain name tasting: the online equivalent of buying expensive clothes on a charge card only to return them for a full refund after wearing them to a party.

“We believe that this policy will have a positive impact for users and domain purchasers across the Web,” Google spokesman Brandon McCormick said.

The company said it notified participants via email Thursday.

Name tasting exploits a grace period originally designed to rectify legitimate mistakes, such as registrants mistyping the domain name they are about to buy. But with automation and a burgeoning online advertising market, entrepreneurs have generated big bucks exploiting the policy to test hoards of names, keeping just the ones that turn out to generate the most revenue.

The practice ties up millions of domain names at any given time, making it more difficult for legitimate individuals and businesses to get a desirable name.

Jay Westerdal, who earlier wrote about Google’s change on his DomainTools blog, said in an interview that the ban should make domain name tasting far less lucrative. He noted that Google’s chief rival, Yahoo Inc. (YHOO), already tries to ban tasted addresses that infringe on trademarks and account for much of the problem.

“If Google and Yahoo are not monetizing these types of sites, I think domain tasting as we know it will come to a screeching halt,” Westerdal said. “The alternative advertising is just not as effective.”

In October, Yahoo sued several domain name registration companies over tasting, accusing them of targeting trademarks owned by Yahoo and other leading brands. The lawsuit is pending in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Dell Inc. (DELL) and BMW (BMW.XE) have filed similar federal lawsuits in Florida.

The Internet’s key oversight agency, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, already is looking into name tasting and will soon ask a committee to review the issue and craft recommendations. A public comment period on draft procedures closes Monday.

The operators of the “.org” suffix already won approval to charge companies that make too many returns. The number of deletions dropped to 152,700 in June, compared with 2.4 million in May, after the new fee took effect.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

Google is not so good after all!! Here are a few reasons why!

1. For most of the searches wikipedia comes on top of the search results! Then why not go to wiki pedia directly rather than wasting my time on Google search.

2. You tube results: When a web search is made and not a video search then it is quite certain the person searching dose not wants to see video results. If he wanted you tube results then he can directly go to you tube or simply search the Google video search. This is pain stupid to show videos in web search.

3. Cashing contents like text, videos and images from websites without site owners written consent. But then Webmaster and bloggers, all including myself love to see Google cache all the datas from our site. We are more than happy and thankful. But we became extremely angry when we see our copyrighted things cached from our competitors sites which are illegally copied by our competitors from our website. I think it’s also illegal to cache illegally copied content.

4. Paid links: How are paid link bad and a non-paid link good. Every link should be treated on merit and not on the basis of paid and non-paid.

5. Too much importance on domain names: Rather than giving importance on the quality of the information, the importance is given to the relevancy of domain name and Meta description and title tags.

6. Stupid PR that dose not make any sense: The PR [page rank] is a useless way to rank sites, I don’t want pr, but the problem is PR n/a means am banned, and PR0 means less promoted site or new site. At least that’s how most people look at it. Removing the visual PR will solve many problems.

7. Google groups: The interface and working is really poor, with deep enough pockets if they can’t improve there discussion rooms then it is really sad.

8. Google dose not owns the results that it shows in the SERPS, so in other words the poor webmasters have made Google so huge, and the SEO companies who have helped Google and it’s bots to crawl those sites in a more efficient way.

9. Adsense: A great way to make money, but has no answers to click bombs.

10. Indexing sites without consent. 99% of the webmasters including me, wants to be in google’s index, but there are still some that don’t want Google to crawl their sites. So why don’t Google ask people to upload a file that says Google crawl, and if that site is not available on the site, don’t index the site. It is better than asking webmasters to stop Google bot! I mean only index sites on invitation.

Article directories have been a great source of back-links and visibility. Am writing this article as am running an article directory myself for the last few years, and I do feel that this section of the web needs lots of improvement. The following tips will not only help the article directories but also it will help the article submitters. 1) Technorati Indexed: Get your directories indexed and claimed at Technorati, that way people submitting their articles will get Technorati votes and authority. 2) Do you accept those articles with links inside the article, this might be a risk, as Google might find this as a paid post and give your article directory a penalty. Even if it’s not your fault as the article if free so no paid links stuff but you still don’t want to get penalty due to poor and in-efficient google’s algo. 3) Is your site properly cashed? Check your last 50, 100 or 200 article, and see if they are even indexed by Google or not. When was the last time Google bot gave your site a visit. This problem is mainly because article directories don’t add unique content, so search engines don’t find anything useful in these sites and stop visiting frequently. So I suggest article directory owners to buy unique and high-quality articles from time to time, so that your sites get properly indexed. 4) Do you accept every article that is submitted? So far I have seen that many submitters use article-spinning software and submit those articles to directories, this is the reason why I say that at least read a few lines from the article before approving it. 5) Research on the keywords for the articles submitted. Then re-write or at least edit the title of the article with a good, low competitive keyword. That way you will have some occasional traffic coming from every article. 6) Get your article directory some quality back links; try social bookmarking if you want free back links. That way your site will gain authority and your over all traffic will increase, as you will be beating your competitors on competitive keywords. 7) Keep adding content yourself, not a bad idea. Just do some research for low competitive and high searched topics and add some small articles by yourself, this way your site will have unique content and your writing ability will develop which will help you in the long run. Promotion is the key. If you have a good site with good content, but it is not promoted then it won’t get traffic. Do social bookmarking, directory submissions; press release submission and distribution, forum signatures; blog posts etc. do it slowly and continuously. If you have a budget for promotions then things will become lot easier, else you will have to do the hard work.

The packages to include additional features with support for currently available custom templates.

A2 Hosting, a web hosting provider, announced the release of its brand new Virtual Private Server hosting packages with an array of new and innovative features. The announcement comes in conjunction with company’s continuing initiative of remaining on the leading edge of the web hosting industry by maintaining their developer friendly environment that offers the latest versions of the hosting software.

The company states that it’s VPS hosting is powered by OpenVZ, ensuring that all allocated hosting space will always be readily available. Each package is powered by HyperVM Control Panel for superior hosting control. Further it states that in addition to the range of features included, each VPS package is compatible with the most popular Linux distributions including Debian, CentOS, Fedora. Gentoo, Slackware, openSUSE, Ubuntu. Every VPS hosting customer also has the choice of custom OS templates.

According to CEO Bryan Muthig, “Our new VPS Hosting packages will enable us to attract hosting customers that need more space, power and flexibility than traditional shared hosting packages have to offer, but also need a more affordable alternative to managed dedicated hosting.”

The second facility to add an additional 7,600 sq. feet of raised floor space and provide solutions to customers located in Charlotte, South Carolina, and nationwide.

Hosted Solutions, a data center and managed services provider, today announced the addition of its second Enterprise Data Center in the Charlotte market to support the company’s continued growth. The new facility will add an additional 7,600 square feet of raised floor space, increasing Hosted Solutions’ data center capabilities to serve clients.

The new uptown facility will provide a full range of secure colocation, managed hosting, performance monitoring and management, data backup and storage, security, and disaster recovery solutions to customers located in Charlotte, South Carolina, and nationwide.  

“We are very excited to announce the opening of our second Charlotte data center,” said Rich Lee, founder and CEO of Hosted Solutions. “The Charlotte team has worked tirelessly to position Hosted Solutions as a leader in this marketplace, and we are proud of our continued success. The opening of Charlotte’s second data center is a testament of Hosted Solutions commitment to grow strategically in our current markets while giving our customers the personal relationship of a small company and the resources of an enterprise organization. Hosted Solutions is dedicated to delivering the highest standard of infrastructure, security, and performance to small, medium, and large businesses throughout the United States.”