laptopmanpaul.co.uk

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!

Creating your own social network for free

Being sociable online

Social networks are all the rage these days, and the chances are you probably already belong to at least one among Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn and so on.

Take a look at this list from Wikipedia if you’re struggling to think of any more, you’ll be surprised at the number.

What if you’d rather create your own social network rather than belong to an existing one - where do you start?

And what if you’re trying to build your own community around your own website and you want to be the one who sets the social networking rules?

That’s where ning.com comes in!

Ning is a website which allows you to create a social network on any topic you please, and it gives you the option of photo galleries, video galleries, forums and blogs.

It has a distinctive web 2.0 feel to it, which basically means it’s easy to use and navigate for non-teccies.

Digging deeper

Firstly, here are a few examples of existing social networks on ning.com:

http://bookmarket.ning.com … ‘The network for book authors and publishers’ (1949 members)

http://community.shoottheday.com … ‘Where thousands of photographers will gather to Shoot! The Day’ (3217 members)

http://mombloggers.ning.com … ‘Where mom bloggers converge’ (membership not given)

I’ve selected three of the more accessible sites - there are some weird social networks out there - but look at the difference in appearance between each of the three sites, they certainly don’t look like ‘off the shelf’ websites.

I think that’s a pretty impressive look, and one worth exploring further.

The one thing I would say - and I was surprised that these social networks haven’t done this yet - is that they should create a redirect on a sexier URL, rather than using the ning.com extension.

So for instance, http://mombloggers.ning.com really ought to be a redirect from http://mombloggersclub.com/, but if you click on the second link, you’ll see it’s parked with GoDaddy, but not yet redirected.

Having said that, look how well the site is doing without it, so who am I to speak?!*

(* I found out the solution to this as I explored the site a little further. Having a custom URL is a Premium service … which means you have to pay extra for it.)

Registering and setting up a social network

Once you’ve registered, which is a quick and painless process, you just have to do a few basic things to set up your social network:

1) Pick a name: Great web design tips

2) Pick a web address: greatwebtips.ning.com

3) Public or private social network: Public (but note you could have a ‘family only’ network for photos, news and blogs)

4) Tagline/Description/Keywords/Language

5) Select preferred layout … there are loads of really good themes to choose from and you can customise each one.

You can also create customised CSS to determine the overall appearance of your website.

6) Select features from Photos, Videos, Forum, Events, Text box, Music, Groups, Notes, Blog, RSS, Gadgets.

Having made those basic selections, you create your new social network … it’s as easy as that.

Here’s the network I created in about 10 minutes:

http://greatwebtips.ning.com/

I think that’s a really impressive bit of kit … it makes me think that no-one really needs to bother building their own websites from scratch anymore, especially if all they’re after is a basic website.

The built-in forum and photo and video handling is excellent … and you don’t have to pay for the bandwidth (though note that your basic account comes with limited bandwidth and excessive use is a premium service).

Also, if you want to use your own Google ads on the site ie ones that you get paid for, you also have to pay for that service as well.

If you just want to run a small, niche site this is well worth a look.

Even if you’re aiming for something a little more ambitious, this is still worth a thorough exploration, just read the small print about what additional services are going to cost you.

One more thing I’d like to see on the site is the ability to bolt in existing blogs to the site, rather than having to write posts within ning.com.

Is your site hot or not? 50 useful tools to help you decide …

Useful tools for website success

I’m just about to start reading the book on the left hand side of this page, so brace yourselves for lots of features on search engine optimisation as I seriously set about getting my websites placed better in the search engines.

In the meantime, there are loads of great SEO ‘how to’ and ‘top tips’ articles out in cyberspace, and every time I find a new one that I like I try to give it an outing in this blog.

My latest discovery is from internetservicedeals.com in a feature that’s buried deep on the website.

Many of the recommendations will probably be familiar to you already, like Google webmaster tools and Technorati, but I’ve picked out five for review here which were new to me and will prove particularly useful.

I wish they’d got the links to open in new windows in this article as it gets a bit wearing having to navigate back to the original page every time.

Gripe over!

However you should check out the full article yourself, as it’s packed with juicy online goodness - there’s a lot in here that was unfamilar to me and very useful.

My ‘top five’ discoveries

1) http://www.seomoz.org

This is a great site with lots of useful free tools and a few tantalising ‘paid for’ services.

It’s well organised, easy to use and gives some great data.

For instance you can check the following things for free:

- Strongest pages on your domain

- Whether your site has been indexed by the ‘big three’, Google, MSN and Yahoo!

- Check backlinks to your site

- Check page rank

Well worth giving this site the ‘once over’, it groups a lot of useful tools in one place and is extremely easy to use and navigate.

2) http://www.compete.com/

I really like this site, but it’s very much one to use when you’ve been around for a bit.

It will allow you to compare the performance of different sites free for a period of one year.

That’s no use to me yet with my recently created sites, but after a time, once established, this would be incredibly useful for comparing your performance with those who you’re competing with.

However, there are all sorts of useful keyword tools to use as well - like ‘Find out how two sites compare for competing keywords’ and ‘Find out which keywords are sending traffic to a website or catagory’ … frankly the sort of data that’ll send you mad eventually, but it is free, it is useful and if you like it a lot you can upgrade to ‘Pro’ status and get even more data to analyse.

3) http://www.nichewatch.com/

My approach to this site is to suggest you explore it for yourself and try a few of the links that you’ll find.

I downloaded the free .pdf on building links with other sites and found some useful information on it.

When I went to investigate the place it tries to send you to to get you to buy the inevitable product, AVG gave me a ‘Do you trust this site’ warning and I was out of there.

The niche keyword tool is also extremely interesting to try out as well, so give it a look but prepare to meet a couple of dead ends.

4) http://measuremap.com/

Here’s one you’re going to have to wait a little while to use (at the time of writing, August 2008) as it’s just been taken over by Google.

You can leave your email (I have) and they’ll get back in touch once the site is up-and-running once again.

Here’s how the site itself describes its services:

Measure Map helps you understand what people do at your blog, and what influence you are having on the world.

• Easily navigate the numbers that matter
• Track links to see who sends you traffic
• Find out what people do at your site
• Setup is a breeze — it only takes a minute

You can read more about what’s happening with the site at:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/here-comes-measure-map.html

5) http://awstats.sourceforge.net/ (seems to prefer a Mozilla Firefox browser)

I’ve recommended Awstats elsewhere in this blog and as I’m using it regularly now, I’m finding its data superb.

It’s relevant, clear, useful and practical … and not overwhelming.

The link above is how you get hold of it if you don’t host your websites on a cPanel account.

It’s a great analytics tool … two things I’d find really useful as addon features though:

1) Email or download your monthly reports

2) Screen out analytics information that you’re not interested in

If you can already do these things in Awstats, please let me know, as I obviously haven’t read the instructions carefully enough!

The full 50 …

Here’s the link to the full list of 50 ‘hot or not’ website tools.

Some of them involve parting with cash, others I wasn’t very impressed with (I’m always wary of a terribly designed websites preaching to me about web success!) and the best 5 I’ve listed above.

If you disagree, or think I’ve missed any gems, please use the comments form below.

4 things I wish I’d done when I started my Wordpress blog

3 months in and all is not well

Darn!

You know what it’s like when you get hold of a new bit of online kit, jump right in, then a couple of months later realise you should have done it differently?

Well, I’ve just realised that with this blog.

There are things I should have done from the outset, but didn’t … and now I either have a lot of work on my hands to put it right, or I just have to accept that I’ve missed the boat.

Not all things are irretrievable, but I’ll pass on what I’ve learnt here in case it helps other new bloggers.

Three small ones that I can put right

1) Using Akismet to stop spam

At first look, Akismet didn’t look like a sexy enough spam blocker to me.

I like spam blockers with macho titles like ‘Spam Terminator’, ‘Leave no spam alive’ and ‘Even the cute spam gets killed’.

Akismet just didn’t sound like it was what I was after, so I went for WP-SpamFree which is a notch up at least on the machometer.

The problem with WP-SpamFree, although it certainly stopped the spam dead in its tracks, was that I couldn’t actually work out how you check the spam to make sure I hadn’t missed any proper comments.

A friend who runs his own blog via Wordpress called ablogfrommydog.com happened to mention that he was very happy with the basic Akismet, so I decided to give it a try.

He was right, I was wrong, Akismet is now my spam tool of choice.

It gives me decent spam statistics and I can easily check that it hasn’t caught any legitimate messages.

Maybe they could change the name to ‘Akisment blasts spam’?

2) Using Google XML Sitemaps

Okay, how to create a sitemap for something as organic as a blog.

For more static websites I’ve used something called sitemapspal which I’ve been very happy with - see my post about it here.

I wasn’t really sure what to do with a blog, as it’s being updated constantly.

In the end - and don’t laugh - I created a sitemap using sitemapspal, then manually updated it every few days … at least it had got me started and Google wasn’t knocking me back via its fussy sitemaps dashboard.

My pal who runs ablogfrommydog.com came to the rescue once again … it’s amazing what you learn via a bit of nerdy chit-chat in the office.

If we were proper men we’d be talking about women, motor cars and how big our salaries are … we prefer website tips and passing on interesting websites.

Now I use Google XML Sitemaps because it’s extremely straightforward, it automatically submits your sitemap to Google, Ask.com, MSN Search and Yahoo and you can create a new map instantly by clicking on one link.

Here’s one I prepared earlier … how useful is that?

So don’t struggle with your sitemap, just get the Google XML Sitemaps plugin and take the 5 minutes required to set it up.

3) Backing up your blog

It quickly became apparent to me that I was writing a lot of stuff and it would be a disaster if it got lost - to me at least!

So, how to backup your blog?

Initially I used the built-in ‘Export’ function, but I was craving something more substantial.

I looked around and found BackUpWordPress which I’m very happy with.

I like it mainly because I can administrate it from within Wordpress rather than, say, having to backup via PHPAdmin.

I get a visual display on my main Wordpress dashboard showing me when I made my last backup, so as I’m writing my next batch of ‘words of wisdom’ (or otherwise!) I can rest assured that they’re going to be available to mankind for evermore. How delighted mankind will be to hear the news!

One big one that I can’t put right

4) Getting your Permalinks right

This is the big one, and I only ‘got it’ when I was writing my last post on Tim Ferriss.

I was trying to work out how he’d got his blog links to look so good with his blog titles becoming part of his blog URLs.

Take this URL by way of an example:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/05/19/
5-tips-for-e-mailing-busy-people/

That’s a lovely descriptive URL, much better than a load of numbers like I’ve got.

So I go to the Permalinks section in my Wordpress dashboard and change from ‘Numeric’ option to ‘Month and name’ and get the following wonderful and descriptive URL just like Tim:

http://laptopmanpaul.co.uk/it_chat/2008/07/becoming-an-ebay
-affiliate-using-the-ebay-partner-network/ (this link no longer works as I’ve changed my settings back)

The only trouble is any cached search engine pages now throw up errors and all the links I’ve distributed to this blog don’t work properly anymore.

Arrrrrrggghhhhhhhh!

I either have to start again or leave things how they are.

I can’t face starting again, but it’s niggling me now leaving things as they are.

So learn from me, when you’re setting up your Wordpress blog, in the Permalinks section select either ‘Month and name’ or ‘Day and name’ and then you too can have cool URLs like Tim Ferriss and not rubbish ones like me.

A question about Wordpress

I’m struggling to use iframes in Wordpress.

I use iframes to insert the Amazon book ads that I use from time-to-time.

Wordpress keeps losing the iframe code, so I have to insert it as the very last item in any post.

If I go into a post to edit, even though it has successfully saved, the iframe code spontaneously combusts when I try to edit again.

Any ideas why that is and how I can stop it?

If so, please use the comments form below.

Thanks.