New SEO class

OK it’s not literally a class. It’s  a set of videos and pdf files. So far I’m exceptionally impressed.

The techniques are all white hat and are quite easy to do. They do take a little time to setup but those can be outsourced (a young child could do most – we don’t have any children so I’m doing them myself).

I’m not quite up to recommending the course yet (of course I’m an affiliate and would make a little if I did recommend and someone bought) because I wish to make sure the techniques actually work in practice for me.

So this is a preview.

One way or other I’ll report back here or in another of my blogs on how the techniques work. I know they boost my visitors some but the question is by how much, and how long will it take to set up everything. The good part is that once the system is set up it works on autopilot.

It is comprehensive SEO and uses  on page/off page and web 2.0 methods combined to increase the number of visitors.

P.S. I, like having posts which start on one site and then the answer or result is given on another blog.

Why get a reseller hosting package

I wrote about having some challenges with my old hosting company and having to move my hosting company. That has been more of a challenge than I imagined and I ended up losing lots of data (basically a few websites and many posts).

It was my own carelessness and I take one hundred percent responsibility for it.

Recently I learned about the advantage of reseller hosting, even if you never plan to sell any hosting services.

The advantage is that rather than having each new site as an addon domain, the new sites end up with their own Cpanels, each as a main domain.

This may have many SEO (search engine optimization) effects as addon domains also end up as subdomains of the main domain. One problem I have with my new hosting company is that I cannot add subdomains to addon domains. Again for SEO purposes this may be useful at times.

I’m going to do some research on this issue and report about it later on.

Updating your video drivers

I have recently written about why you may wish to update your video drivers. One of the reasons may be that some new video intensive program like a game may not work correctly or your old drivers may leave security holes which hackers may exploit.

Here I wish to let you know how to update your drivers totally free (it’s a method I do not use – I’m afraid of messing my PCs – but supposedly they should work fine:

1. Go to your control panel.
2. Open the system properties.
3. Go to the hardware tab.
4. Click on the Device Manager button.
5. The Device Manager opens – select a device you want to update – you don’t know if the driver needs updating – use a free download from one of the above links (this one has two choices) to tell you which.
6. Next right click on the driver (most devices have more than one driver).  The windows hardware update wizard comes up and you ask it to search the Internet for the appropriate update. Then wait and wait and wait….

As I wrote I don’t really trust Microsoft enough to do that and use an automatic updater myself but the above method is the official way of updating your drivers.

Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket

Recently I had to change my hosting company because I was accidentally out of compliance with them and so had to hurry to transfer my hosted sites over to another hosting company. Unfortunately I had many domains registered with the same company. Many I wanted to not renew (even so it took time to undo the autorenew) and others I moved over to GoDaddy.com which I use for my domain registration.

I ended up transferring sixty five sites. This took quite a long time. In the meanwhile I had to save all my MySQL files as well as  all the html, php and other files. Moreover, I had to select a new hosting company. All these steps took time and so my main site life focus center and its associated blog were down for a few days and slowly I’m bringing the other sites up.

Most of the sites were based on WordPress 2.7.2 and now the new sites have been updated to 2.8.4. The upgrade is very easy. I only had to install the new system and import the old database. The DNS (domain name server) had to be changed to point to the new hosting company’s DNS. And of course the wp-config.php had to be changed appropriately.

I make it all sound very easy and trivial but that was partially because of problems I had earlier on when I had to move many WordPress blogs from some addon domains to subdomains. The reason for that had been that I had listened to a self described ebay guru and that had put me out of compliance with ebay. I had to move my hosting  company partially because of the same gentleman (I grew up in England at a time that all adults were ladies or gentlemen).

However, the warning to not register your domain with your hosting company as they may chuck you off without warning cane from the same person. So use information you get from people but think for yourself. Just because someone gives you a valid piece of information does not mean everything from that source is good and the opposite is true.

Study website development and SEO techniques from various sources and you’ll be better off. Most importantly be ready for anything as sooner or later you will make a mistake and lose some resource so have more than one hosting company, credit card merchant account company and so on.

Good luck.

Search engine optimization with content

We’ve all heard that content is king but that was not what people thought a long time ago – say ten years ago – a long time in the fast moving tech world – webmasters liked flashy sites looking more like Vegas Casinos with lights flashing and bells ringing. People would visit sites just because they wanted to see the bells and whistles.

People would put up a site, some animated gifs (graphic interchange format) and a silly idea and the venture capitalists would give them lots of startup capital, knowing they would recoup their funds and much more after IPO and the bubble grew until the dotcom bust in the year 2000.

Search engines were easily fooled by keyword stuffing and other blackhat techniques. Then came Google and the search engine algorithms became better and better. The function of a good search engine may be best understood by considering a few issues:

* People use a search engine to search for information.
* The information must be relevant.
* People want unique information, therefor Google has duplicate content penalty?
* Google is the top search engine because its indexing and search algorithms are the the best.

The best way to provide what the search engines want is to write god human readable content. The starting point of bringing many visitors to your site is good pages (that’s to say good content) on your website.

Well written article attract the spiders give good organic search positions and you will get a few visitors when you have good content – hence the idea that content is king.

Given that content is king and takes time to write it is best to reuse your content by rewriting it. Here are two different versions of this post:

• Why is content king?
• King Content.

How quickly do HubPages get spidred?

I wrote earlier about accepting the 100 HubPages in 30 days. So I’m writing lots of Hubs each day. Of course a major motivation was to get backlinks. Another was just to get better at writing fast and reusing content.

I have had to come up with ideas of what to write rapidly and that has been very useful. I even ended up remembering a most wonderful teaching story. It is the HubPage I prefer out of the seventeen I have written so far.

It is called The Tale of Two Software Engineer.

The other day (it seems so many days ago I started this challenge even though this is the fourth day) I searched Google for HubPages and doctorjay (my HubPages user ID) and I noticed that a Hub which I had writen about two hours earlier had already been spidered.

I also noticed that my websites that I was giving backlinks to had been visited by the googlebot more often than before.

So I don’t know how the experiment will go by the thirtieth day but so far it has been a fun ride. I’ll report more on the challenge on this and other blogs….

Don’t know what to write

Getting ideas on what to write may be difficult at times.  One way to get ideas is to ask relevant questions:

• What are people interested in?
• What are people searching for?
• What do I know about?
• What would I enjoy learning about?
• What would I like to write about?
• What do my friends know about that I could co-write with or I could interview.
• What have I heard of (aware off) which is not hot yet but is becoming a growing trend?
• What subjects did I enjoy at school?
• What makes me mad?
• What happened in my life today which may be interesting to others? For example I got a ticket yesterday for turning right on red where there was a no right on red. I had been at that junction hundreds of times and somehow never saw the sign.

If you are really stuck you could just randomly open a book (dictinary or encyclopedia may be good for this and start looking at words until something attracts your eyes). When I used to write film scripts ideas came from small newspaper stories, events in my own life, people I would meet…

More ideas here

Reusing content

We all know that content is king. At the same time anyone who has done much Internet marketing knows about duplicate content penalty. This is where search engines do their best to show only one copy of any given content and also may penalize you if they think you are using a black hat SEO technique or are trying to spam them.

The question is: how to get plenty and plenty of unique content?

The best way is to reuse content but make each reuse different from others so you are not penalized.

This is basically what god professional article writers have done offline for ages. The same content is rewritten with appropriate changes and submitted to different magazines.The writer knows the style of the magazine’s writing and the readership and so targets each of the articles for that specific market.

Another type of reuse comes when again the article is changed, brought up to date and resubmitted to the same magazine a few years later. It may be reused changed or unchanged in anthologies (equivalent to rss aggregation) and books.

There are two ways to reuse content on Internet:

1. Reuse your own content – this is the best method.
2. Reuse PLR (private label rights – this is content written by others that you have rights to reuse and change and claim authorship) content. This maybe the way to go if you are not a good writer.

In both cases it is best to do the rewrite yourself manually rather than using an article spinner. Change sentences and paragraphs (and like the pint counterpart get different angles on the content for different uses).

Today, I’m going to select a topic and write about it and then see how many different uses I can get out of it. I’ll write about this experiment later on.

I’m crazy enough for the hubpages challenge

I got an email about a challenge to do 100 hubpages in thirty days, and I’m crazu enough to do anything legal and within reason for a lark so:

Now many of the people who have accepted the challenge are going to write long hubpages and I’ll write short ones. I heard about the challenge about 10:30 p.m. Sunday 10th, May 2009 and the challenge starts in an hour.

I’ll keep you posted about how the challenge goes and if it increases the number of visitors who come to my sites.

Here’s the first HubPage in the series:

Dangers of self reference

Read any contract word by word before you sign

I lost my dispute with a company I bought a $4,000 piece of Internet software which was not tested and the company would deliver the $3,000 bonus they offered.

I disputed the charge with my credit company but lost because the company had written the contract so that after three days (you did not even get you password for three days) you lost all your rights.

You cannot sue (anyway it costs a lot to sue). So Ihave had to accept the loss and I’ll soon review the product and compare it with a $75 product I bought which does the same. In the meanwhile I started a new site don’t be scammed and don’t be scammed blog to write about some the experiences and help other so they would avoid being scammed.