Archive for 'August, 2007'

I write a lot about my blogging mistakes, but sometimes I forgot to write about good articles I’ve read on other sites. Today I came across The Ten most common SEO mistakes on the Dfinitive blog. This is a great article that everyone should read, and SEO should be foremost in your mind at all times – since it will be the single most important factor in driving traffic to your site. You can do SEO in blog setup, blog promotion, and when writing blog content.

You should really read the entire article, but here are some of the points that hit home with me the most:

• Using “click here” or “read more” for anchor text
• Not targeting the right keywords
• Not building enough links
• Having multipe URL’s for the same page

If you want to bone up on your SEO skills, and keep from unknowingly making mistakes that will hurt your site traffic or search result rankings – you should read, study, and implement the items listed in this article!

A lot of people monetize their blogs with Text Links Ads. I mean, why not? If you’re not making a pile of cash with adsense, your low traffic, better than PR2 blog or web site can make an extra hundred bucks per month using this service. Just list your site, and you can sell up to 8 text ads. Ad rates are based on your page rank and alexa rating, you could charge $5 – $30 per month per ad. You can hand select the advertisers you want to approve or deny if you choose.

So what what’s the problem – the service is just like adsense really – isn’t it? People are buying ads on your site, hoping for clicks back to their products or services aren’t they? Well, the first difference is adsense is a “contextual” ad service. Ads are placed on your site based on the keywords and phrases on your pages, trying to match up the most relevant ads to your content. Text link ads not only might not be relevant, the purchaser buys the link for an entire month on your site. Adsense only pays you if someone clicks on an ad, with text link ads you get paid the same amount if no one clicks, or if 1,000 people click.

The reason this issue came up for me was because I was (today) considering putting text links ads back on one of my sites. I did it once, and nobody bought any ads – and I thought I’d give it a try. I was reading a post by Gaman at Sabahan.com about How to make $500 per month or more from Text Links Ads. Gaman’s ideas was to get 10 running sites with PR2 or higher, and sell text link ads on all of them. If each blog makes $50/mo from TLA, then you are making $500 per month. I wasn’t thinking of putting the ads on 10 sites by any means, but it got me thinking about putting them on 2 or 3.

I went back to the text link ads web site, and logged into my (old) account. I enabled my site, and downloaded the WP plugin, and then added the code to my sidebar (on another site) to sell ads. While I was in the sidebar, I decided to add in a “most recent comments” block, and went to check out some plugins to get that done. The guy that writes the Most Recent Comments plugin just happenned to have a post (listed in the sidebar) entitled “Goodbye Text Link Ads. Well, give that I had just installed TLA in my site – I just HAD to read that, now didn’t I??

That post in the FreePress Blog talks about getting rid of text link ads on his site because he believes that it can (or will in the very near future) negatively impact your site. The crux of it is that while the site is called Text Link *ADS*, you are selling links (on a monthly basis) on your site. Google firmly states in their Quality Guidelines that you should not engage in the buying or selling of text links.

This is what they say:

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

In fact, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of web spam has blogged about this multiple times – including his post “How to Report Paid Links. That’s right – if you believe a site has engaged in buying links, you can report them to google.

So what can happen to you if google finds out you’ve bought (or sold) links? They can penalize you. They can penalize you in search results first, and if you use either Adwords or Adsense your account could be banned. If you don’t worry about traffic from google, or don’t use adsense or adwords – so what, right? Continue to use TLA or another similar service. But for most of us (since google is the largest search engine), we rely heavily on traffic from google search, and most of us would not want to jeapordize our adsense revenue (especially if you use it on multiple sites).

Now let me back peddle a bit and talk specifically about WHY Text Links Ads are bad. The TLA service is primarily selling links for the purpose of gaining google Pagerank (PR). Page Rank is a factor that google uses to score your site’s performance on a scale of 1 to 10. In fact, the way to get a better score is by getting other site to link to you with a higher pagerank. The thought of buying text links from half a dozen PR5 sites at $15/mo each is very appealing, if for that $90 per month you can essentially ‘buy’ a better spot in google search results. It might be far easier (and cheaper) to do that than use Adwords to pay for 10,000 clicks at 6 cents each. The way the google algorithm works, a hyperlink is a “vote”. Sites with higher pagerank that have a link carry more weight than one with a low or zero pagerank. Google feels that if you buy text links (directly or through a service) you are “buying votes” – or indirectly buying a higher rank in search results.

You might say “just rel=nofollow the links”, but with TLA that’s not possible. Read this post about “Dropping Text Links Ads by h0bbel, where he talks about his recent experiences with TLA. He added the rel=nofollow tag in himself, and Text Link Ads told him to remove it. He references Ryan Jones at dotcult.com and his post “Text Link Ads A Scam“. Ryan had his account suspended when he added nofollow to the TLA on his site. Ryan pointed out that no where in TLA Terms of Service does it state you can’t do this. With h0bble, TLA put in his account that he was using ‘nofollow’ and all his advertisers that had been buying links with him (for months) didn’t renew – and then he closed his account.

Isn’t this all just a really tell tale sign that using TLA is definitely violating google’s TOS? If those advertisers weren’t buying the ads for the “link juice” alone – why didn’t any of them renew with h0bble? He points out that on the Text Links Ads web site home page it says

Improve your traffic and search engine rankings. Only TLA can deliver an ad that does both.

. So – they are actually in a way boasting that you can “improve (BUY) search engine rankings” – aren’t they?

Now let’s be clear – I’ve seen and read a lot of posts, stories, and comments on this subject. One thing that I see a lot of people misconstruing is the difference between “buying traffic” and “buying search engine rankings”. It is against Google’s TOS to buy rankings, but buying traffic is not. They are two completely different things. You can buy traffic in many ways, and there are dozens and dozens of services to do it from – including the big ones like Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter, and Yahoo! Sponsored Search. The easiest way to explain this to you, is to quote a comment from Matt Cutt’s himself:

“…there’s absolutely no problem with selling links for traffic (as opposed to PageRank). At http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hidden-links/ I mention a couple ways to sell links that Google would have no problem with.”

Many people think that is using TLA is bad – then similar services like AdBrite must be as well. Here’s what Matt had to say about that:

“…I believe AdBrite constructs their links with JavaScript so that links are being sold for traffic, not to affect search engines. Things like JavaScript, the nofollow attribute (or meta tag), or doing a link through a redirect that is robots.txt’ed out would be techniques to sell links for visitors/traffic, as opposed to trying to influence search engine rankings.”

When I really think about it, it’s surprising that TLA has gotten as far as it has. Read this article about Page Rank Penalties and see if you don’t think the company in question sounds exactly like TLA? I mean, this article was written back in 2002, and that company got a PR0, and about every site in the network of ads was affected negatively. I read this post on Sphinn about Text-Link-Ads.com hit by Google Penalty a month ago, and it appears that TLA doesn’t even rank for the term “text links ads” anymore – which means that they were hit with a google penalty. I see they had ‘bought’ the top spot (in adwords) in search results for those keywords, but they don’t rank in search results at all. Is the beginning of the end for TLA? If you use their service to sell ads on your site will you and your google pagerank be affected? If not now, you probably will be in the future. I don’t want any google penalties – so I for one will not be using Text Links Ads at all. It’s a definite Blogging Mistake to use Text Links Ads.

Here are some articles on the same subject:
Google’s Take on Text Links Ads
Matt Cutts on Hidden Links

Do you have comments on Text Links Ads, google pagerank, or buying links? Please comment now below, and share with everyone!

**Update 2011**

If you’re looking for a way to send SMS text messages from your WordPress web site, then look no further than our free WordPress Text Message Plugin. People can subscribe for text message updates via sidebar widget (or you can add them yourself. You can even set the plugin to auto-text updates out each time a post is published!

Old post below, information is most likely not valid anymore….

I noticed on one of my web sites that I was getting some hits from google with “sms send” and “(keyword) to cell”. It occurred to me that people wanted to send my content to a cell phone, probably a friend. So I set out to find what SMS tools were available for web sites. Honestly I thought that there would be more out there than what I found. Someone with a really cool plugin could really dominate in this area. One of the things I should mention though (if you already don’t know), is that SMS Text messages can only hold 140 characters or less. So whatever you or your visitors are sending – it’s got to be less than that (a few quick sentences).

After doing some research, this is what I found…

Send a Text Message to a Cell Phone from another site

One possibility is to just send users to a site with a free form to send a text message to any cellular phone. Not the best solution I admit – but probably the easiest.

SMS Text Message from Your Blog

Here’s a solution that’s a little better, this site offers free SMS text message service by placing some code for a form on your blog. Text messages are sent for free through their servers. They also have a myspace widget for SMS as well, but I sure couldn’t find the code.

SMS Everywhere also has a cool free widget that you can put on your site; people can send messages from anywhere in the USA or Canada. They have 3 or 4 versions, and the cool thing is you can get one where your visitors can send a message to anyone by entering their cell phone number, or you can have it setup to send an SMS text to the webmaster. Nice!

Bands – SMS Alert your fans when your next gig is

If you have a band Broadtexter.com has a sweet little widget you can add to your site or myspace which will allow fans to signup – and get text messages via cell phone from you. You can send updates, or the next time and place you play – it’s a free service that will allow you to build up a fan club you can communicate with instantly at any time.

Host Your own SMS Gateway on your web site or blog

You can always host your own form and send SMS messages directly from your site – you just need a script that can process the messages directly from your site. I thought that there would something available either open source or for free – but I sure couldn’t find anything out there at all.

Send Your SMS Messages through Google for FREE

*Update* – I believe this solution is now broken…

My last solution is to send your SMS messages through the most reliable place online – Google! All the major IM services have a feature to allow you to send a text message to cell phone through the IM client. But, the google toolbar also has that feature. Whether or not you have the google toolbar installed – you can still go to this URL directly and send an SMS to a cell. Why is this cool? With just a little code, you could just popup a new window from a link with this right from your blog to send a message to anyone quickly. Now one of the cool things that I found with the google SMS service is that if your text isn’t less than 140 characters – when you send the message google will break it down into multiples texts for you. Not bad, I don’t think any of the other scripts or services do that.

Do you have other SMS text web tools that I haven’t listed here? SMS Scripts? SMS myspace or blog widgets? SMS WordPress Plugins? Please comment now and share with everyone!

I use WordPress for nearly all of my web sites, but I still own two Drupal sites. As I posted previously, I moved all my sites to GoDaddy within the last month, and these two sites were no exception. I started up a premium account, and had a main domain, and then in their control panel I mapped domain names to sub-folders. This is very handy for me in ftp, all of my web sites are available to me in one place, separated only by folder.

At first my Drupal sites appeared to work fine when I migrated them. However, it was only the home page. Any link you clicked on came up server error – both Drupal sites. I knew GoDaddy allowed Drupal, they have an autoinstall available for it in Metropolis. I setup a test dir and installed Drupal there using the automated tool. It had the same problem. Now I knew that it wasn’t my site, it was a GoDaddy problem. I called GoDaddy tech support and they raised an elevated ticket to the an advanced tech. I explained the problem to him, and told him I thought it had something to do with the .htaccess files or server setup. His response was that they “don’t debug code”.

I was going to respond when I figured out what the problem was. My main domain had it’s own (wordpress) .htaccess file. I thought at first that was the problem. Then I remembered, when you have a shared host with domains mapped to sub-directories it’s setup in the apache httpd.conf file I believe (hardcoded). Essentially, when a request comes in to that IP address from a domain name, the web server knows which folder to forward it too. (Without some customization) I don’t think the web server could handle that redirect, on top of an .htaccess file rewriting the URL’s to ‘clean url’s’ (permalinks).

So – long story short, IF you have an GoDaddy hosting account, and IF you have multiple domain names (and you’re planning on using clean URL’s), you can only do it from the root of your account (or main domain name) only. I did fix the problem, but ended up buying two additional basic hosting accounts ($3.99 per month) for each domain, and then both sites worked flawlessly.

If you have some other fix (or comment) related to hosting Drupal or WordPress sites at GoDaddy – please comment now below!

I’m guilty of not posting as often as I should on my blog(s). Guilty because I have information to share, but I don’t write it up. Some people have a problem coming up with new content to blog about. Others create what I call “poof posts”, with little or meaningless content. Some just ramble on and on, unable to come to direct points and conclusions. Some (like me), often take days to write and or research a post – that will become on of your site’s “Pillar Articles”.

The Fomula for Creating Quality Content

1. First Step:What ideas do you have?
2. Second Step: How much time do you have?
3. Third Step: What kind of post will it be?

I have analyzed the problems I’ve had creating quality content, and I think I can focus myself using those three steps repeatedly. Let me explain (step by step)…

What Ideas Do You Have?

You may not know it, but you are already full of content. The problem is (if you’re like me), you’re not capturing it. You probably surf the web every day. You read email every day. You talk to people, maybe you go to the store, watch television, or listen to the radio. Your mood changes day to day – happy, sad, glad, mad, etc. No matter what your site is about, I’m sure some aspect of your life deals with that subject every day. When an idea of any kind (no matter how rediculous) comes in your head, write it down!! Either on paper or your computer. Get a running list of ideas going – so you always have something to choose from.

Here are some ideas to get you started on that list…

• Did something make you very angry or very happy lately?
• Is a life changing event coming up?
• Have you bought something you really liked or hated?
• Did you see something new or interesting in email, on the web, on tv, or the radio?
• Is there something you want to know how to do really bad, but haven’t researched yet?
• Are you going to buy something and want to get the best quality or price?
• Do you need people to help you with a project or issue you are dealing with?
• Are you an expert in something other people would want to know about?
• Have you had an in-depth conversation of interviewed anyone lately?
• Was there something broken you had to fix (or couldn’t fix!)?
• What’s the biggest success or failure you’ve had in the last year?
• Can you make a list of something? Top, Worst, Best, Like, Dislike…
• Do you have older posts that could now use an update, part two, or part three?
• Do you have post comments that could’ve turned into a whole new article?
• Have you viewed any forums lately to see what’s being talked about?
• Have you written any lengthy emails helping people – that could have made a great post?
• What are the best posts you’ve read on other sites – and how did they help you?

I could go on and on, but by now you should have a start on some ideas for a list. A list you should maintain regularly…I wish WordPress had a “to-do” section for things like this (hello plugin developers!).

How Much Time Do You Have

OK – now you have some ideas. There’s nothing worse than having an idea that you don’t do because you know you can’t finish it. Or doing something easy (like a ‘poof post’) just because it’s all you think you can fit in. PLAN YOUR WORK, AND WORK YOUR PLAN! This is time management people. I don’t mean just sit down and say “well, I’ve got the next hour free” – NO, YOU MUST COMMIT! You want to plan your time out, probably on a weekly basis. Make it part of your calendar. On Monday, I’m going to work from 1pm – 4pm on this blog. I will do research from 11pm – midnight. The next morning from 7am-8am I will comment on other people’s blogs I read. You get it…write down the actual times you intend to work throughout the week. DO IT! Once you know how much time you have, you can move onto the next step.

What Kind of Post Will It Be?

Now we’re at the last step – here is where you’re going to put it all together. You’re going to take your best ideas from step one, and categorize them as types of posts. Here are types of blog posts to choose from:

• Pillar Article. A Pillar Article can take many hours to write and could involve lots of research. It has lots of keywords, sections, points, and links. Sometimes Pillar Articles are a big post with literally “everything you could ever want to know about” something. Read more about Pillar Articles using the link above.
• Interview. This is simple, an interview is usually question and answer with some commentary. Time involved is time it takes to do the Interview, write it up, and do some editing
• A list of…this type of post is usually a list of something. My best of, worst of, top 10. Length of time depends on how much research is involved. The top 150 SEO sites could take a month, but the Top 10 reasons I hate spam could be 20 minutes.
• Links post. This is basically a quick – here’s some links on blah I found today or this week. Pretty quick post
• Stats or factual based post. Timing on this depends on research. It could be product value of x vs. y, or results of split testing 5 ads on adsense over 30 days, etc.
• Diary or journal based post. This is what happenned to me or my business, etc. Length of time depends on how much of your guts you have to spill (lol)…
• How-To or Tutorial. These can be a Pillar article (or not). Depends on the subject and how in-depth you are going to be. Also, it could be text based, pictures, audio, or video involved as well
• Editorial. This type of post is usually opinion based…you don’t want to ramble on these too much (but some do). It’s best to state your case, be direct, and ask for comments
• Category or Sub-Category Page. In the old days of web sites, you had a “Home” page, and then also a “Home” page for each sub-section of the site (like products, services, contact, etc). In a blog you have the home page, and a bunch of “posts” in “categories”. What you don’t have probably is a static type “page” that rounds certain subjects up. Unlike a post (that comes and goes) a “page” is continually in your navigation and people can refer to it as a reference again and again

Ok, so there are many ways to generate ideas. There are many ways to manage your time. And there are surely way more types of posts than I just listed. My entire point in writing this article was to get you more organized than ever before when thinking about creating content for your site. There is no ‘secret formula’ for creating quality content. The secret is to use what you have, have a plan, and work it out consistently. You will get better, and better, and better. That’s why the three steps are so simple, it’s pretty basic. What separates you from Darren Rowse, or ShoeMoney is diligence and consistency. Get to work!

If you have ideas than can be added to this, please help me help others and comment now below!

As I said in my last post – I use www.GoDaddy.com for all of my web site hosting now. Some may say that they are a ‘budget web host’, but I’ve been developing an designing web sites for 10 years now, and I have no problems with them at all. In fact they are one of the best web hosts I’ve ever had. I don’t know where else I would be able to host 50 sites with mySQL databases for just $14.99! One of the things I like is the unique set of tools they have available (like podcasting accounts)…and when I was doing some administration in my hosting control panel the other day I noticed an option to “use my $25 credit for opening up a new Microsoft AdCenter account”.

I recently opened up a Google adWords account due to some of the postings over at Sabahan.com about Gaman’s recent experiences with adWords. I haven’t started a campaign in adWords just yet, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the money. Something about MS AdCenter intrigued me though, probably because I thought that less people would be competing for keywords in this newer service than in google adWords. So I signed up for a free account and used my coupon code for a free $25 credit – why not?

I found AdCenter very easy to use and intuitive. I setup a new campaign, and typed in some keywords I thought would work, and it came back with how many times those words were searched in the last month (very handy). It asked me for a maximum “per click” I would pay each time my ad was clicked – so I put in 5 cents. I figured at this rate that I should get about 500 visits for my free $25.00 credit. I have a joke web site Top Jokes that isn’t getting much activity just yet, so it was perfect for the test!

Out of the keywords I looked at, the phrase “funny stuff” seemed to get about 5,000 searches per month through the Microsoft Live search engine. When I signed up – it said that MS Live gets about 99 million hits per month. I setup the campaign to end when my $25.00 was spent. For some reason, I thought in my head that the money would be used up anywhere from 3 or 4 days to a week. I should’ve gotten the calculator out, because 5,000 searches is only about 166 per day, and even with a click through rate of 5% (which is very high), I would only get about 32 clicks per day visiting my site.

Now, normally this joke site only gets like a dozen visits per day. The first day of my ad campaign I only got like 3 clicks, but I did get like 25 visits to my site. The second day I got 7 clicks, but 50 visits to my site. The third day was about 12 clicks and 100 visits to my site. This is the fourth day of the campaign and we’ll probably surpass that. because I’ve already had about 150 visits.

In the past, all my of site traffic (for all my sites) has always been purely organic. I’ve never used paid advertising of any kind. When I set this ad up, since I hadn’t done this before, it didn’t occur to me that the traditional rules of advertising totally apply in the online world in many ways.

Let’s reflect for a minute here:

• The ad campaign started out slow, but every day the number of clicks have grown
• The number of paid clicks vs. the number of new visitors is nearly double

On the web during the last so many years there has been much talk about “the long tail”. I think that’s just a very old marketing concept rehashed for the web, but this is definitely the long tail at work.

• I’ve received 30 paid clicks, but 425 new visits to the site
• I half a half dozen new rss subscribers (there were none)
• bsuite reports show new visitors arriving from email sent from our feedburner “email to a friend” links
• bsuite reports also show incoming searches from social sites like sphereIt and stumbleUpon

That is truly the long tail at work, and I’m now exited that my 500 paid clicks may turn into 1,500+ new visitors, new subscribers, and more “social” visitor activity. In addition there is the “name recognition” value of having an ad – even when people don’t click it. I don’t have the numbers (I wasn’t a marketing major), but it seems that I read years ago the average person has to see a billboard at least 3-4 times before they pay attention to what it says. If that’s the case, someone may have to see the ad for my site 3-4 times before they click.

Exposure is good! My latest report I just ran in AdCenter says I’ve had 806 impressions and 34 clicks. Evertime someone sees your ad (whether they click or not) is a good thing. I’ll post a follow up article once this campaign has finished to see if this trend (of the long tail) continues – and we’ll see what value I really got for my $25.00 credit! So in this post we learned that my latest blogging mistake was not to use any paid promotion for my web sites. I never would have dreamed I could have gotten this much activity for such a low price! If I’d just paid $25.00 – $50.00 per month who knows how many subscribers I could have by now!