laptopmanpaul.co.uk

A word of warning over submitting to search engines

Short and sweet

This post is short and sweet, but could save you tens of pounds when making and launching websites.

When I started my website projects I received some basic start-up funding as part of the short business course that I’d been studying.

As it was someone else’s money I decided to try the hypersubmit service with namesco because I was building a website for someone at the time hosted by namesco and their service looked cheap, well-organised and easy to use.

I went for the £19.95 basic option which offers:

- Submission to over 100 search engines

- Monthly re-submissions to search engines

- Monthly reporting by email

- Personal control panel

- Meta tags generator

All my websites, with the exception of this blog, were added this hypersubmit service … and the interesting thing is that the most looked at website in my portfolio is … you guessed it, this blog.

Yet this blog has only been manually submitted to Google, Windows Live Search and Yahoo as well as various blog directories.

The other websites do fairly low levels of business, but in theory they’re available in over 100 search engine, so how can that be?

Well, here’s a basic SEO tip that everybody - and I mean everybody - that I’ve read so far suggests.

They all recommend submitting only to the following search engines because a) they represent a huge percentage of all internet searches b) they feed many of the other search engines anyway:

1) Google

2) Windows Live Search

3) Yahoo

4) Open Directory Project (or dmoz.org as it’s known)

5) Ask (just for good measure really, but not essential!)

I have the data from my Google adsense account - and my Awstats info - to confirm that the one website that I didn’t hypersubmit to gets the most business and the most traffic.

So, if it’s just submitting to search engines that you’re after, do it manually and make sure you submit to those key sites.

Incidentally, I do get some useful info from the hypersubmit service but in general it’s nothing I wouldn’t be able to obtain via Alexa.com, Google or Awstats.

The most useful and handy functions are:

- Google Page Rank indicator (though you can do it just as easily with a free online tool like this.)

- Meta tags generator (I don’t use this, but it would be very useful for the novice web designer)

So, take a tip from the SEO experts, and now from me, over £100 worse off for having submitted to these services … do it for free first and see how you get on before you part with any cash.

Feedback for this blog - more useful tips and notes

I’ve just had my first blog review published on untwistedvortex.com and it’s proved really useful for advice and tips.

I stumbled across the website by accident but found the reviews really interesting and rooted in giving practical indicators as to how sites can be improved.

As I’ve said before in my posts, it’s a real uphill struggle to get blogs seen when they’re new, so any kind of advice is helpful.

I’ll list the points made and outline what steps I’ve taken to remedy to the problems, as this may save you falling into the same traps.

1) Reviewer writes: This blog is using one of those themes that doesn’t use quite all of the available screen real estate the 1024×768 resolution (still the most widely-used resolution) has to offer. Most people don’t realize how much more scrolling is required when the theme is just an inch narrower than it could be.

My actions: None yet, as this one involves a lot of work searching out a new template.

It’s effectively a re-brand, but it’ll mean changing the entire look of the blog.

I hadn’t thought about the 1024×768 resolution issue but it’s a very fair point.

Over the next few months I’m intending to integrate this blog with some reseller functions, and I’ll also probably call it something more descriptive than laptopmanpaul.co.uk.

So this one goes on a very full pending tray!

2) Reviewer writes: I couldn’t find his list of categories anywhere. Besides being an almost a standard on blogs, categories count as additional pages.

My actions:Again, another good point. I’d left the categories off when I started the blog, because I had no content, but now I have I need to get those categories out there.

This one was easy to achieve, so you’ll now see on the RHS of this page my list of categories.

3) Reviewer writes: I found it odd that there’s only one article displayed on the front page. This is the first time I’ve seen that and I’m not sure what to make of it. Each of the archives pages only displays one article at time also. This makes looking for past articles very cumbersome.

My actions: I’m new to blogging and hadn’t realised this was standard convention.

I didn’t want my pages to look too cluttered at first, but now I know better you’ll see that you now get more posts to your page.

Now I’ve made the change I prefer it that way too!

4) Reviewer writes: I found most of the articles easy to read, except for one small detail: The justified text. On some lines it’s just excruciating to try and read the complete sentence naturally.

My actions: What a perceptive reviewer!

This same issue had been annoying me for some time, but having it pointed out in the review made me apply myself to sorting it out.

The problem?

It was in the style sheet of course, and all post text is now left-aligned.

5) Reviewer writes: Due to the low publishing frequency, this blog should have feeds by email enabled (but doesn’t as far as I can tell).

My actions: And there’s me thinking I was doing alright and posting fairly regularly!

I’ve taken the point on board however, and now I’ve added a ’subscribe by email’ option on the Subscribe in a reader link on the top RHS of the page.

I’m pleased I’ve got that function actually, as ‘the more the merrier’ as far as I’m concerned.

6) Comment writer: Just had a quick look at the site; the justified text is a real eye killer! That right sidebar is overloaded as well.

My actions: I’ve sorted the justified text already and also pruned the right hand sidebar.

I think on reflection, I’d recommend a three column blog template in future, it gives you more scope for arranging your links, tag clouds, adverts and so on.

Take a look at my friend’s template at http://oldvarieties.com, that’s a really nice layout and uses more of the available screen area as suggested in my site feedback

And finally …

Brave enough to get your own blog reviewed?

Add yourself to the untwistedvortex.com list and see how you get on.

Being reviewed also gave me an additional Technorati ‘authority’.

And guess what?

We found out this week that every time I mention my mate’s blogs, he gets an additional Technorati authority of 1.

He’s got 3 blogs of his own and he’s managed to get a Technorati authority of 5 or 6 simply with his own links to his own sites and the mentions I make in my blog.

He’s managed to move up to 900,000 or so in the rankings.

There’s a lesson to be learned there for all Technorati authority obsessives … like me.

And my friend’s just got himself another Technorati authority!

Getting your new blog seen … change the rules!

Is there anybody there?

I agree with Hans de Ruiter in his blog The Technorati Visibility Game when he discusses how difficult it is to get a new blog seen.

As you can see from the right hand side of this blog, I’ve made lots of effort to get my posts seen, but it’s a bit of an uphill struggle.

For instance I now have an authority of two on Technorati, thanks to this review of my blog on untwistedvortex.com.

It was Hans who gave me my first authority, which moved my blog up from something like 4.5 million down in the rankings to 3.5 million down.

With this new authority from untwistedvortex.com I’ve now moved up to 1.9 million down the rankings.

As I said, it’s a slow process!

milliondollarhomepage.com revisted

I was looking at the code used by Alex Tew in his milliondollarhomepage.com website the other day, and decided to try it out for a project or two of my own.

It’s a really nice bit of code, and although I’m not going to attempt to replicate Alex’s success or strategy, it’s a very useful way of presenting paid-for or free ads on single themes.

Instead of getting out in the garden today, I’ve put together this website as a pro-active move for new bloggers … it’s called brand-new-blogs.com.

It works on a low cost ad basis, but gives your blog access to a dedicated homepage for as long as it takes to fill the grid, and then it sits in the archive for 12 months.

You’ll notice I’ve added my blog to the grid already to get things started.

So if you’re getting desperate for some blog visibility, give it a try, who knows if it catches on it might become a sort of ‘X-Factor’ for the blogging community!

You can get HTML links for your own site from this page.

brand-new-blogs.com … get your new blog noticed straight away!

My radical change in web strategy - due to SEO

All change!

I’ve mentioned before in my posts that I’ve got far too many website projects on the go at once and I really ought to have started one, finished one rather than nudging so many different projects along step-by-step.

Remember that TV detective Petrocelli, who started and finished each episode building a house that never got finished? Well, that’s me and my websites … though I really do intend to start finishing them off now.

I’m just about to start the process of some serious search engine optimisation work (SEO) and having flicked through my text of choice Search Engine Optimisation for Dummies I’ve realised that there’s a lot of detailed, slow and quite tedious work to be done.

For that reason I’m changing my strategy for a while, so I can finish and optimise my most important sites, then having learnt about the process, apply it to the remaining sites.

The strategy

1) To focus entirely on the two sites which I specifically want to do well

2) To run all other sites on ‘low energy’ in the meantime so my focus can remain absolute on SEO

3) To remove  all distractions that take up my time until a point at which the sites are doing good and steady business:

- Disable the newsletters function, including links in my auto responders, to reduce time dealing with spam
- Disable all messageboards which will only be reinstated if sites are performing steadily

And then there were two …

I will now be working on two sites only having reduced the remaining eight to basic services only.

These eight sites can quite happily sit on the web, getting the occasional hit and bringing in the odd bit of ad revenue, but they’re going to have to wait until I’ve done my SEO work on my key sites.

laptopmanpaul.co.uk

For a site that’s only been going for three months, this has instantly become my most successful project.

Blogs really are the business, they’re much easier to get an audience for and generate an almost instant response.

I want to work on building this site and making it more successful, because it drives web users into all of my other projects.

However, I’ve realised that I should probably have given given it a more descriptive title, but at the time of starting it I didn’t really expect it to do anything or for me to stick with it.

So I’ll be building on this project, but possibly re-working it entirely to:

- give it a better title (’Website tips’, ‘Making websites’ or something similar)

- integrate it better with webcumbria.co.uk so I have one destination for all my web guides and site building info

- integrating it with an excellent domain/sitebuilder reseller package which I’ve just discovered and will cover in a future post

big-group-cottages.co.uk

This is likely to be my post profitable site if  I can make it make an impact in search engines.

At the moment, it’s doing nothing, it’s barely being found.

However, I took an £11 commission the other day simply for a click through to an affiliate website … that’s the equivalent of an awful lot of Google Adsense clicks … so I need to make sure people are finding this site and it has the potential to become a good revenue generator.

It really needs a good dose of SEO.

It will be very easy to maintain once people are finding it and should hopefully provide a steady source of ad revenue.

What happens to the rest?

My stats info tells me that scrap-yard.co.uk is getting a steady flow of business, but it’s caught in a ‘chicken and egg’ situation, as I am with your-local-shop.co.uk and doorstep-delivery.co.uk.

These sites need people to register for them to be useful, but until people find them they won’t register.

When people come across them in searches hoping to get information, they find there’s nothing there yet.

So, all these sites will need a bit of SEO eventually.

In the meantime, to allow them to offer at least a basic and useful function, I’ve ‘parked’ them by integrating a yell.com search box so they can find the information they’re looking for, and I take a small commission at least.

I’ve signed up to a new affiliate scheme which deals with yell.com, AffiliateWindow, which is a great source of some good advertisers if you want to add another to your list of affiliate schemes.

My other sites, castle-visits.co.uk, expatchat.co.uk and 80spoplover.co.uk were always intended to be low maintenance, low content ‘pass-through-and-click-on-an-ad’ sites, so all I’ve done with these is to remove newsletters and messageboards for the time being.

All these features will be reinstated to offer a comprehensive service if the sites respond well to SEO.

If they don’t, I’ll just let them sit there as they’re parked on multi-domain hosting and don’t directly cost me anything.

If they were individually hosted, I’d kill them off if they weren’t paying their way.

So expect to read much on SEO in these pages over the next few weeks and let’s hope I can start moving those two key websites higher up the search engines.

Selling your blog for $10k - surely not?

Not quite there yet

I found some random online tool the other day that promised to tell you the value of your blog.

I tried it just of of interest and I seem to recall that this blog is currently worth a cup of tea, an apple and a half-chewed toothbrush … still, it’s early days!

On one of my random clicking explorations recently, I followed an online trail of crumbs, like you do, and found out how people build, then sell blogs for large amounts of money.

It began with a simple click-on a link at the bottom of this very page, right at the very bottom where it says ‘Design by Bob’.

Clicking on that link takes you to blogohblog.com … I’m sure that until pretty recently it used to take you a different website.

Intrigued, I read on to see:

I purchased Blogohblog.com on November 05, 2007 from its previous owner & founder, Bob Jiwakacau for $10K at a Sitepoint auction. By profession, I am a Web Developer based in New Delhi, India, and also maintain several websites of my own. I will continue to do the good work that Bob did so far and of course, take BOB to the next level as blogging is my passion too!

This is gretting interesting.

$10k for a blog at an online auction, how does that work then?

So it’s off to sitepoint.com or, to be specific, http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/

On that page you’ll see all sorts of people and companies buying and selling links, templates, blogs, websites, projects, you name it it’ll probably be there.

It’s a real insight into an online world I was unaware of.

I’ve nothing more profound to say about it other than ‘check it out and expand your knowledge’.

Oh, and I did download the free Sitepoint sampler ‘The Web Site Revenue Maximizer’ which was pretty interesting even in the ’short version’ form.

Unfortunately I’ll have to wait until I’m in a position to be flogging my own sites for $10k+ before I can frivolously start buying products like this … and by the time I get to that stage, I suspect I might be writing and selling them!