What is social bookmarking & how can it help me?

December 27th, 2009 by tidy 1 comment »

You have probably heard a lot about social bookmarking lately. Read on and learn this traffic building gem. Best thing is social bookmarking does not cost you anything, so as a traffic building tool is is great.

What is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is a public list of your favorites. Not all your favorites, just the favorites you want to share with others. You can add any website to your public list and retrieve it from any computer on the internet. The favorites are stored on a server so publicly accessible.

When you list a site in your bookmark list, anyone looking for similar information can do a search at the bookmark site and find the sites that you have bookmarked. It is like a search engine without all the trash.

When searching with a search engine, you get all the sites that have something to do with the keywords you typed into the search box. Trouble is it is easy to get a bunch of garbage sites that are loaded up with keywords but have poor content on the actual site. Many people simply optimize their website for un-related keywords to achieve a high ranking. The growth of bookmarking sites is an attempt by users to overcome this. The great thing about social bookmarking sites is sites listed are sites that other people have looked at and decided were worth saving for future reference. Real people have decided to bookmark the sites, not robots. Real people also monitor the sites so if trash does get added, it is soon deleted.

The more people who bookmark a site, the more popular it becomes. As an example, lets say you are selling widgets for a really great price. You bookmark your home page on many public bookmarking sites. When someone is looking for a widget, they do a search at the bookmarking site and your bookmark comes up. They go look at your site and decide your prices are so good, they might want to come back later when they need another widget. So they add your site to their bookmarks for future reference.
When someone goes to one of these sites and types widgets into the search box, your site listing will come up in the search. If many people have bookmarked your site, you will be listed high in the search results. It’s kind of like a voting system. If you site is good enough to bookmark, other people will want to see what all the fuss is about.

Unlike search engines where all you have to do is good seo, the sites you will find in the Social Bookmarking sites are quality sites that other people enjoyed enough to save. You don’t really have to have a good site to get listed in the search engines.

How do you get started?
Do a search for social bookmarking, many sites will come up. Go to each site and register for an account. It’s FREE! Once you have your account set up, start listing your site. Make sure you add proper tags to your listing.

Tags are the same as keywords with a twist. These sites will tell you what the most popular searches are on their site. You choose the tags that will work with your site or page and are also part of the popular list. Many of the sites will also offer a spot to write a small description of the site you are bookmarking. Add a description that uses some of your tag words for added benefit.

Building popularity
As with anything that is worth doing, this will take you a while to get it all set up and running smooth but the end result will be very well worth your effort.

Start with one bookmarking site and one page from your site. (Start with your squeeze page and build your newsletter list) Set up your account with the bookmarking site and add your page to the bookmarks. Make sure you use the best tags and description you can. (Check the popularity list on the site) Doing this in itself will help you get more traffic. Now you can go one step further and work both sides of the system.

Add a link to your site that will lead back to the bookmarking site that has your page bookmarked. Ask your visitors to bookmark your site on the social bookmarking site.

An example is below
Bookmark another of my sites at SpeedCameraPOI.com and access it from any computer, anytime. Create a link to the bookmarking site so your visitors only have to click.

You want to make sure the page opens in a new window so when your visitors are done setting up their account, they will still have your page handy to bookmark.

Next Page
Now move on to the next page. You will want to offer a different bookmarking site on each page. Why? So you can get as many bookmarks on as many sites as possible. Use the same information in the example above but change the social bookmarking site you are promoting.

Won’t this look odd to your visitors? No. Most people will ignore the suggestion once they have bookmarked your site. They won’t even notice that you have changed the name of the link. They will see, Bookmark my site, and think, “I already did that”, and they will move on.

Final Note:
Don’t SPAM the sites. Make sure what you are listing is relevant and useful. You don’t want to bring traffic to a page that has nothing but links, you will probably get banned form the bookmarking site. Only bookmark your pages that have actual content. Ask yourself if you would truly add this page to your own favorites list? If your answer is no then don’t list it.

Blog your way to more traffic

December 27th, 2009 by tidy No comments »

If you have a website then you likely interested in having it do as well as it possibly can in the search engine rankings. A higher ranking will mena more traffic. However, did you know that you have significant control over getting good rankings and increasing your traffic? You can gain a large amount of traffic by blogging and pinging. Don’t know what blogging and pinging are? Then read on to find out more!

Blogging
A blog is just the short way of saying web log, online journal or diary. However, blogs don’t have to be solely personal information. They can include news, thoughts, opinions, reviews, tips, tricks, hints, challenges, history, and anything the blogger wants. The most important aspect of a blog is that it is updated on a regular basis with fresh new content. Some bloggers add new content once a week while others blog daily or multiple times per day. The more active your blog, increased search engine rankings will become to come into play. Since there is always fresh new content the site is given heavier weight than if no new content were provided. This results in higher search engine rankings and ultimately increased traffic.

Pinging
A ping is simply a program that sends out a message to another server or computer in order to get a response. When you update your blog you want to ping the search engines so that your pages are indexed and your site is ranked higher.

Why Blog and Ping?
You probably know that if your website does not show up in the search engines you are not going to get any traffic, and if you have a website you want traffic. Therefore, the best thing to do is write a regular blog, ping the search engines, and your site will get indexed significantly faster than it would otherwise. By putting in a little bit of extra work you will get your site and content pages indexed with the search engines and inevitably get more traffic.

There is a lot of free blog software out on the Internet that you can simply link to your site and start blogging, like blogger.com. If you are wanting to install a script on your server and host the blog yourself the more popular is wordpress, which i use on my site here. Including RSS feeds, which are the pings, means the search engines are going to know you are out there and as a result start indexing your site. So, if you want to increase your traffic start blogging and pinging and you will see a difference in traffic in a hurry.

Best of Luck!!

What Is Black Hat SEO?

December 14th, 2009 by tidy 1 comment »

SEO has been very useful and famous in internet marketing. There are many techniques that make boosting your site a success through different SEO strategies. But despite the success of SEO, there are some black practitioners who tend to see the field of search engine optimization as war, and the search engines are doing anything to beat the competition whether it is fair or foul. Those white hatters market with the other search engines as associates or partners who can help them drive links and business to their client’s sites.

Cloaking happens when a website or a web page displays different content for a certain search engine spider in opposition to a human user. Cloaking is the one that delivers a version of a page to an Internet user and a different description to a search engine. You will notice a cloaked page is filled with keywords and phrases that the site wants to make them rank high.

This is done by cloaking the programs that weigh the IP address of the other party to a database of the known IP address which comes from a definite search engine spider. If there is a match in the IP address on the list, it serves a page which is particularly written for the search engines.

Cloaking has several good reasons which include increasing advertising and promotion. If you are trying to control your rankings in the different search engines, it might result to penalize your site or it might be banned.

Spamming or the keyword stuffing is a long list of keywords placed in the content and also the code on the page which makes it unreadable. Have you seen a page that repeatedly displays an ad with certain words? It is obvious that the site is trying to rank its page. This is known as keyword spamming but it is just one tip that most SEO companies are trying to do to increase page rank.

You might not notice the page may have invisible text, title tags, meta tags and comment tags. If a page repeats a certain keyword repeatedly, Google might place a filter to lessen the ranking or much worse, ban the site. Keyword density can be quite tricky but following the general rule, 3% t0 12 % is the percentage to which a site can use the targeted keywords.

You will notice there are some hidden texts in SEO strategies. This happens when a text or link is invisible to the website visitor but can still be seen by the search engines. If this happens it is considered hidden. Before, people used small fonts to hide the text or they would even use the same color for the background.

This makes them able to put some links which are unseen, but has long been noticed by the search engines that is why they have come up with another strategy this time. Spammers are using the cascading style sheets in order to hide the text. Some are also using tags which are set to hide the text on the page. These strategies are considered hidden if they are left unseen but search engines have their own technique of spotting invisible links so better not do it at all.

The doorway pages are those that exclusively exist to rank well in the different search engines. You may notice some of the pages being ugly and some contain paragraphs which do not have any relation to the topic. Most of the time these doorway pages are not part of the regular navigation of the site which are called orphaned pages.

A black hat SEO can use very good software to filter or generate the doorway pages. This happens when they plug a few keywords and search the page.

You may notice some sites linking to other sites which are have no relation at all. Some sites just link to other sites which is part of their strategy. Now, you will find this truly spamming.

If you are going to put up your own website, make sure that you will avoid these things and keep SEO marketing fair and do not think of competition. Think of how you can increase your site ranking fairly.

A Guide To Organic SEO And Its Benefits

December 14th, 2009 by tidy 7 comments »

What Is Organic SEO?

Put in the simplest manner possible, organic SEO is search engine optimization done manually using no black hat methods, no underhand methods and no automated scripting. It is the purest form of optimizing your website for the benefit of search engines, while still retaining interest for your site visitors, and done well it is exactly the thing that search engines are looking for in a website. Once they find it they will reward your site with better rankings and improved positions within the search engine results pages. Throughout the course of this article it will be referred to as simply SEO.

Understanding The Search Engines

Understanding Search Engines and their general concept is vital to the use of effective SEO methods. Search engines enable their visitors to enter a specific word or term, known as keywords. Once submitted, all pages containing those keywords that can be found in the search engine’s directory are listed on the search engine result pages. Each page is “ranked” according to relevancy, popularity and a few other factors. Therefore, in theory, the more relevant a page is to a given keyword the more likely it will appear at the top of the listings.

Introducing The Search Engine Spiders

Another important factor to remember about search engines is that they don’t use real people to crawl the billions of websites and judge how relevant they are. Instead they use automated software called a “spider” or a “bot” that does this work much quicker. The calculations that the search engine uses to determine the ranking of a website are called algorithms and in the case of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN these algorithms are changed on a regular basis. The changes and the specifics of the algorithms are not released to the public in order to prevent black hat SEOs from manipulating their sites to reach the top of the pile despite containing to information relevant to the search query or keyword.

Optimizing For Search Engines – Optimizing For Visitors

Of course to some extent, all of us reading this article are probably guilty of altering our web pages to meet the whims of search engines but it must be done in a positive and organic way. We understand that optimizing a page purely for the benefit of search engines spiders may massively detract from the actual value of the site to your visitors. Search engines understand this too, hence the evolution of the algorithms. With each new algorithm created and usually patented by search engines like Google, we are getting closer to a structure whereby sites are genuinely judged on their value to visitors. It may sound like an Isaac Asimov novel but the algorithms and the spiders are basically becoming more human like.

Basic Components Of SEO

The actual methods of optimizing your website are saved for another article, but the basic components of an SEO campaign are broken down into on page and off page optimization techniques. On page SEO includes factors like keyword inclusion, content optimization, page structure etc… whereas the main contributing factor of off page optimization is inbound links. There are many different factors to each of these areas and different SEOs will give you varying information on which factors are the most relevant to gain higher rankings. These extensive differences in opinion occur because nobody is certain of the algorithm criteria.

The Benefits Of SEO

SEO is probably the most beneficial way to conduct Internet promotion. It is highly cost effective, can yield long term results and the leads it generates are opt in and targeted. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider trying out alternative methods of advertising your site. For many, banner advertisements, press releases (can actually be used as part of an SEO campaign as well), PPC campaigns and sponsored listings prove to highly beneficial and including these will help your site’s popularity.

To Cost Effectiveness And To Life

The cost effectiveness is easily determined when you look at the potential of an SEO campaign compared to the method that many consider to be the next best thing – PPC. A PPC campaign will usually cost you anywhere upward of 5 cents per visitor generated. This means that for every thousand visitors you receive you will have paid $50. Some fairly basic SEO work on a web site containing ten pages will generate this kind of traffic on a monthly basis relatively quickly.

$50 doesn’t sound much but consider that you pay this in one month to receive the desired one thousand visitors. Over the space of a year you will have paid $600, and so on. Now consider that you are competing for a relatively competitive keyword and you find that you need to be paying a minimum of 50 cents per click to generate just the one thousand clicks in a month. All of a sudden you’re paying $6000 per year and you are still only getting one thousand clicks every month. $6000 will buy you an awful lot of SEO work and you should find that within a few months you are generating a lot more traffic using SEO.

Targeted Leads

Targeted leads are the best type of leads you can generate. It means that the visitors to your site are already predisposed to the basic topic of your site and are interested in what you have to say. It means that they will be more likely to purchase goods or services from your site, click on affiliate links or click Google ads to earn you revenue. Because SEO leads are physically searching for the topic that your site relates to you are guaranteed that they are interested in whatever you’re offering. First of all they search using keywords relevant to your site. They then read the description and name of your site and this further compounds their interest in the page in question and click on the link. Already they have become highly susceptible to the message of your web page.

So Remember…

SEO is a webmaster’s greatest tool but treated badly it can quickly blow up in your face. By ensuring you stick to the very letter of the law and do not use any underhand methods you should soon benefit from powerful leads that will frequent your site and earn you revenue.

ddclient + zoneedit.com in Ubuntu

October 29th, 2009 by tidy 1 comment »

This guide shows how to install and setup the dynamic dns client (ddclient) in Ubuntu to update your dynamic IP address with the dynamic DNS service provided by Zoneedit.com. This is useful for anyone who is running a home server using an internet connection which has a dynamic IP. I am using Ubuntu in this example, but I suspect the setup would be similar using any linux server.

I use zoneedit.com because it allows the use of your own domain name for free. It seems most people use dyndns.com, however you must pay for that service if you want to use your own custom domain, which kind of suks.

First you need your own custom domain (mydomain.com), an account with Zoneedit with an (A) record already setup. I will not cover details of setting up the records in this guide, however you can find more details of using Zoneedit here.

This guide will also assume you have your Ubuntu server up and running already.

1.) First you need to install some packages on your Ubuntu server which you want syncing with Zoneedit. I will use apt but you can also use synaptic or apptitude. To use apt, type the following command line:
:~$ sudo apt-get install ddclient ssh libio-socket-ssl-perl

At the prompts you will be asked to select your DNS provider. You should select Zoneedit and then input the appropriate values, for example:

  • Fully qualified domain names: mydomain.com
  • Username for dynamic DNS service: your-zoneedit-username
  • Password: your-zoneedit-password
  • Enter the interface which is used for using dynamic DNS service: web

2.) After the installation is complete, you need to manually configure /etc/ddclient.conf. Edit this file with your favorite text editor, myself I like to download locally and use Uedit, so i have a backup copy in case anything goes wrong later. If you have gEdit installed, you can type the following command line:
:~$ gksu gedit /etc/ddclient.conf

You need to modify the /etc/ddclient.conf file and add entries for “daemon”, “ssl” and replace “use=if, if=web” with “use=web, web=’http://www.zoneedit.com/checkip.html/’, web-skip=’IP Address’” to match the following example:
# Configuration file for ddclient generated by debconf
#
# /etc/ddclient.conf

daemon=300
pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid
ssl=yes
protocol=zoneedit1
## use=if, if=web
use=web, web='http://www.zoneedit.com/checkip.html/', web-skip='IP Address'
## server=www.zoneedit.com
server=dynamic.zoneedit.com
login=your-zoneedit-username
password='your-zoneedit-password'
mydomain.com

3.) Now open /etc/default/ddclient:
:~$ gksu gedit /etc/default/ddclient

Check that /etc/default/ddclient contains the following lines:
run_ipup=”false”
run_daemon=”true”
daemon_interval=”300″

Note: You can set the interval shorter or longer in /etc/default/ddclient, but if you do, also correct your /etc/ddclient.conf to match.

4) You can now restart ddclient with your new configurations.
:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/ddclient restart

To check the status of the ddclient daemon:
:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/ddclient status

If you do not get an error similar to the following, the ddclient deamon has probably restarted without any issues:
WARNING: file /etc/ddclient.conf, line x

5.) Now a word of warning. Just because ddclient restarted correctly does NOT mean that it is syncing your IP address correctly with Zoneedit. You can check the Syslog to see if the syncing of your IP is successful by looking through /var/log/syslog. A simple method is to use tail to do this:
:~$ tail -f /var/log/syslog

If you see something at the end of Syslog that looks similar to this:
Feb 5 21:16:36 ddclient[12034]: SUCCESS: updating mydomain.com: IP address set to (200: Update succeeded.)
then ddclient should be working fine. However, if you get something similar to the following, you should check your /etc/ddclient.conf and /etc/default/ddclient configurations:
Feb 5 21:13:44 tux ddclient[11788]: WARNING: caught SIGTERM; exiting
Feb 5 21:13:45 tux ddclient[11894]: FATAL: Error loading the Perl module IO::Socket::SSL needed for SSL connect.

Install PhpMyAdmin in Ubuntu

September 3rd, 2009 by tidy No comments »

For database management and administration I like PhpMyAdmin, it is easy to install it, but many people seem to have problems getting it to work under apache/ubuntu. To install and configure using the command line is very easy, below is a short guide. I presume you already have LAMP installed and configured on your machine.

Just in case you haven’t installed phpMyAdmin yet, type the following line in the Terminal:

apt-get install phpmyadmin

To set up under Apache all you need to do is include the following line in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf, first type the following command to open up this file:

gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Add the following line of code inside apache2.conf:
Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf

Now restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Point your browser to: http://domain/phpmyadmin, you should be able to see the phpMyAdmin login page now!