Wordpress 2 is officially ready
Saturday, December 31st, 2005It seems like the Wordpress team considers that the Duke version is ready for the general public. I’ll try it on January, not to sure that the theme will support it.
Archive for December, 2005
SEO contest (trap)
Saturday, December 31st, 2005If you are working on the SEO field sometimes you feel the urge to know what dirty tricks others might have used or what competitive advantages they have on you. What to do then? Instead of scratching your head and hunting optimized pages start a litlle SEO contest and relax enjoying your new external links and all the new techniques you haven’t thought of 
Costs for this? Less than an Indian link building campaign 
Organic traffic for your blog
Saturday, December 31st, 2005Spotted via LifeHacker is this post on how to increase traffic to your blog.
The 3 techniques mentioned there are:
1. Technorati tags. Ok this one is good but not always a valid ideea. It depends on how you formulate your tags and your field of blogging. Not all subjects/tags receive the same traffic and you have to research a lot in order to have maximum profit. Why tags are important:
- some of them are closely monitored through RSS feeds by a lot of people and you get instant traffic after publishing a post.
- due to the fact that Technorati site is extremely SEF they score well on Google (some may argue that this is because of their partnership with Google Adsense but that’s another story).
- Technorati links are clean, without condoms. They might help you as external links. So choose carefully your post’s titles.
2. Feedburner headline animator. Blablabla. Not a bad ideea but for sure not a great one. Instead or complementary you can use personal content aggregators.
3. Trackbacks. A good point if used properly:
- When writing a post check Technorati for others that have approached the same subject. Look for those with many incoming links, they will get you the traffic you want. This is the technique that Techcrunch used on the early posts and now is on the A-List. Best way to do this: Write your post and at the end make a section like “Additional infos” where you put apx 3-5 external links. Don’t forget to send the trackbacks
- Look for those blogs that put trackbacks above regular comments or react fast to market trends.
- Don’t be an idiot. Don’t just write smthg like “X has said this” and send the trackback. Bring your personal view into the post
Beside those above you can use the following too:
- Comments. Comment as much as you can but again avoid being an idiot. Try developing a relationship with the bloggers you are commenting on. Identify valuable posts as on trackbacks
- Use social bookmarking sites for SEO and organic traffic. Barry Schwartz used to do that on Yahoo’s MyWeb but there are at least 5-10 valuable ones. Properly tag your posts of course.
- Inspired by the original post: Use a mischivieng title like “Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days” :). I say that because it may take longer than 30 days but what a hell we are the fast-food/fast-fuck generation and we want to believe is possible. And….it only applies to blogs not to all websites (static ones for examples). If you have a static website though, you can create a blogger account and you can deploy that blog on a directory or a subdomain of your main site.
- Use all the Google Publisher Tools available, especially Google Analytics.
links for 2005-12-31
Saturday, December 31st, 2005-
Useful firefox extension for creating whole page screenshots
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Wordpress 2.0 upgrade tutorial
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Excellent…simply EXCELLENT :))
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Just to see that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a freakin spammer to make 1 million in 4 months
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Words of wisdom from my favourite books…Dune
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Tags to better target your Adsense ads
Google Analytics adds more site profiles
Saturday, December 31st, 2005We have re-enabled the “Add Profile” feature for a limited number of Google Analytics customers. These customers will be able to add a limited number of profiles to their account. As we continue to expand capacity, the limit will gradually be increased up to the original limit of 50.
It was about time….
Pimp Your Search
Friday, December 30th, 2005
Pimp Your Search
Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.
Almost every user and especially peoples from the SEO field, make at least one daily visit to Google. In time all the power searchers feel the need to enhance their experience with useful addons. Fortunately Firefox users have the chance to tune their favourite search engine. Using an ego search, here is my personal list of Google steroids:
1. First of all get a Google account .
This will give you acess to Google Personalized Search. Using this you will get:
- View and manage your past searches.Browse and search over your past searches, including the web pages, images, and news headlines you’ve clicked on. You can remove items from your Search History at any time.
- Create bookmarks you can access anywhere.Bookmark your favorite websites and add labels and notes to them. Your labels and notes are searchable later, and you can access your bookmarks from any computer by signing in.
After you log in start tagging your search history, and the labels you use will show up on page results helping you to quick locate the results you have used before.
More details about this on:
- Google Help Center
- Google Personalized Search Leaves Google Labs
- Google My Search History Personalizes the Web
2. Install BetterSearch extension for Firefox.
This will enhance not only Google but also a few other search engines:
According to the official homepage, BetterSearch is :
An extension for Firefox which enhances Google (all international flavours, too), MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9, Answers.com (web results), AllTheWeb, del.icio.us and Simpy.com by adding previews (thumbnails) and Amazon product images and info (type, price, rating for US/DE/UK/CA/FR products), a quick preview feature as well as “Open in New Window”, “Site Info” and “Wayback Machine” links to the search results.
This extension will allow you to open search results in the same page for a quick overview using an iframe. See screenshot.
3. Install Bumble Search extension for Firefox.
This extension has just been released and it offers a lot of useful features like:
- Customise Google. Google is extended to include a diverse range of specialised search engines, optionally remove commercial results, and enable new methods for digging deeper into promising results.
- Sidebar: Notes & Searching. A discreet Firefox sidebar grants you rapid access to Google or MSN, and gives you space to make quick notes on interesting pages you’ve found. Notably, it also introduces two highly unique search techniques for finding additional worthwhile webpages - related to a group of pages you’ve already discovered. Thus letting you search confidently at your own pace, whilst locating pages you would not normally uncover.
This short description shows only a small part of the full functionalities it brings to the user. Check the screenshot for more in depth details.
I also liked a particular line from the extension’s homepage:
Respecting Websites
Bumble Search is in the relatively unchartered area of modifying websites (such as Google).
We recognise that utmost care must be taken to respect the needs and intentions of the original authors.
In the case of Google:
- The modifications benefit everyone.
- Google does not lose visitors to competing search engines; and people can see Google’s benefits in comparison.
This ethic side is something that another popular firefox extension should learn. You cannot base your business on screwing those that feed you. Especially by giving users a broken condom (blocking Google Analytics will not protect web users privacy).
4. Get the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox.
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.
After you have installed it, go get some scripts to enhance your browsing from UserScripts.org. You can find all the Google Scripts here. One of the most useful scripts and which is used in th the screenshot is Google Counter. This script will put a number near all the results allowing you to quickly determine a website position in SERPs. To get the full use of this you can tweak Google to show more than 10 results per page.
After 4 simple steps you can consider yourself now a power searcher.
Enjoy your searching!
Note:
All the Firefox Extensions mentioned above fully work on Firefox 1.5 but haven’t been tested on previous versions.
Looking for a personal content aggregator?
Friday, December 30th, 2005Sometimes using analytics tools on this blog (Awstats, Google Analytics, Measure Map), I discover that some small on the run made posts generate a lot of traffic by being on first page on Google for certain keywords.
When this is the case I add more infos in order to make them more usefull and enhace others search experience.
Considering that this post is curently no.1 for “personal content aggregator” here is a round up of the services I am aware:
1. Suprglu
This is the first service I tried and I really like it. Here is my aggregator and the reasons I like it are:
- Custom Templates / Template Customization
- Multiple sources. It has a default of popular sources but you can also add any service that has an RSS feed
- Global Tag Cloud
- Comments on each entry
- Clean Links to the user content (doesn’t use “nofollow” or any other techniques )
- Global RSS feed
- Update:Now it counts as backlink in technorati rank
Dislikes:
- Slow reaction time
- Template customization doesn’t allow advertising insertion. Somehow understandable, if they would then setting up a splog would be a piece a cake for any wanna be outhere
Aditional infos:
2. People Feeds
Mentioned by Bosko in a comment to the original post, People Feeds is a an overall good service. Here is my page and why I like the service:
- Global page for all content and sections for general services (photos, bookmarks, blogs, others)
- Global and section tag clouds
- Global and section RSS feed
- Clean Links to the user content (doesn’t use “nofollow” or any other techniques )
- Good reaction time
- Blog Tools - like global search script
Dislikes:
- No templates
- Rough avatar handling
- If a custom feed is not automatically asigned to a category it goes to others section without the posibility to change that. For example I cannot put my 360 page in blogs
- No password recovery (that one really sucks)
- No user advertisment allowed
Additional resources:
3. Yahoo 360
Not a real personal content aggregator but has some basic functions:
- Flickr badge
- Yahoo photos
- Up to 3 custom feeds
Dislikes:
- No global RSS feed
- Doesn’t allow other Yahoo services (movies, myweb and so on) but they seem to be working on that
- No tag cloud
- No SEF URLs
Additional resources:
4. Feedburner
Again another not real personal content aggregator but allows integration of multiple feeds under a single one
Using personal content aggregators for SEO purposes
Everyone that has done SEO knows that links coming from same theme sites are more valuable than random ones. Using the power of custom content aggregators, you can setup in a few minutes thematic sites and include your target site among the feeds (or in the template - like on SuprGlu - a few targeted links). This is somehow a gray SEO technique and depending on it’s (ab)use can be moral or imoral. But this is up to each individual
Happy Hollydays
Friday, December 23rd, 2005
christmas wishes
Originally uploaded by FreeMySoul.
Happy Hollydays for all the regular and ocasional readers. It has been a fun year and Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and all the other new comers have done their best in providing us with nice services and fun gossips.
I wish for 2006 for the web to stay the same fun and creative place
See you in January
WebmasterWorld back as spider food
Friday, December 23rd, 2005I spotted via Search Engine Watch Blog that Webmaster World has open its doors gain for the search engine spiders. Brett Tabke has started an quite original Web 1.0 alpha blog in the robots.txt file. And he seems quite pissed off at Google:
Lets be crystal clear - the G Toolbar is spyware at it’s finest. The cool thing is they actually get people to download it, install it, and agree to use it. I have no doubt, that the majority of people that use the toolbar in advanced mode, do NOT know that their urls are being tracked. I also belive that the majority of people that turn on “Advanced” mode, do NOT know what it is about and turn it on to be one of the cool advanced people.
Yeah….I have the slight ideea that for some people that is NEWS
Also he has a plan (most of the steps are very logic) on how Yahoo and MSN could win the search game. Number one tip is the most important but unfortuantely very unlikely to be put in practice
1 Grab a quality, short domain name. (say http://www.av.com)
All in one that’s a very nice TXT file worth reading
Search engines wars (part…N)
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005
Yahoo "forcing" default on Firefox
Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.
Spotted via this post about Yahoo pushing Firefox users to switch the default engine from Google to Yahoo.
First reaction: “whatever another dumb Yahoo joke”.
Second reaction few seconds later was much accurate.
- Google is doing the same crap on Internet Explorer 7. See this screenshot to see what I am talking about
- Yahoo doesn’t modify anything on your browser, registry and so on. The only thing it does is too suggest to try the Yahoo engine and if you don’t like it you can switch easily back
- Yahoo doesn’t install a thing…it’s a matter of choice
- You can make the Yahoo “tip” go away for ever
Conclusion…in some matters Yahoo’s strategies are more user friendly and competition friendly. In other matters they can be….Childish
