All posts in SEO & Promotion

Wordtracker – 7 Day Free Access

by Ades on June 10, 2008 in Online Tools, SEO & Promotion with 14 Comments

Popular keyword research tool Wordtracker is giving free 7 day full-access to its system.

I think 7 days is a plenty of time for me to research my keywords, I just have to remember to cancel my subscription within this period.

Please note that you will have to supply your Credit Card details when registering, so if you do not want your card to be charged, you will have to cancel your subscription within 7 days.

How to use Wordtracker? You can use Wordtracker to find keywords that are relevant to your products and services, how people are finding things that are similar to your products and services.

For example, let’s say you sell wordpress templates, so you optimize your site for this keyword – “wordpress templates“. But using Wordtracker you might find that equal number of people are finding your competitors’ sites, searching for keyword “blog themes“. So, Wordtracker will tell you what keyword you should target to attract more visitors to your website.

Below is the screenshot of one of the tools of Wordtracker. If you want to try it out for 7 days for free, you can register here.

Page: http://www.wordtracker.com/trial

Benefits of listing your software at Download.com

by Ades on May 30, 2008 in Personal, SEO & Promotion with 15 Comments

CNET’s Download.com is one of the most popular sites for downloading softwares. If you are a software developer, I strongly recommend listing your site on Download.com for the following reasons:

Firstly, from my own experience (listing my color picker) I noticed that this is a great way to reach wider audience. Because your software not only appears on Download.com but on their whole network of sites (see AdesClrPicker on ZDNet.com, ZDNet Australia, TechRepublic, The New York Times, CNET Asia, CNET UK…etc) over 20 sites.

Getting your software on Download.com is already great, but getting it on more than 20 popular sites is even better.

Secondly, listing your software on Download.com can save you bandwidth, especially if your software is big in size or if the download traffic is too high. Download.com can host your software on their server for unlimited amount of downloads.

It’s also the trusted source of download for your customers, unlike many free file hosting services that could hurt your reputation.

Thirdly, I see that other smaller download sites see Download.com as their source for new softwares and software updates. So, getting your software on Download.com means — getting your software on hundreds of other smaller sites for free.

How much it costs? Is it worth the money?

Uploading your software to Download.com is done through its other site Upload.com. They have two different listing packages; one costs $9/month and another $99/month (see details).

I took $9/month package, with what I have listed above I would say it totally worths the price!

P.S Consider listing your software on Snapfiles.com and Tucows.com too.

Twitter as a source of traffic

by Ades on May 22, 2008 in SEO & Promotion with 23 Comments

Are you a blogger but not a twitter user? I don’t think that statement is true to many bloggers. Because most of the bloggers are already twitter users. But just in case if you are the one who blogs but doesn’t use twitter (yet). Maybe you should start using it after all?

I will give you a very good reason why you should join Twitter. Twitter is increasingly becoming one of the top sources of traffic to many people’s blogs.

JasonCalacanis: Twitter is the #2 referrer of traffic to my blog… behind Google. Wow.

ShoeMoney: twitter has now become the 4th largest source of referral traffic to this blog so that in a round about way would I guess contribute to monetization. I have seen people spam affiliate links and stuff so I am guessing that works too…

Top Traffic Sources to ProBlogger:

1. google / organic – 42.89%
2. (direct) / (none) – 17.59%
3. google / referral – 5.10%
4. stumbleupon / referral – 2.54%
5. yahoo / organic – 2.05%
6. twitter.com / referral – 1.87%
7. lifehacker / referral – 1.74%
8. delicious / referral – 1.65%
9. bloglines / referral – 0.81%
10. technorati / referral – 0.79%

GuyKawasaki: Twitter increased traffic. Jim Long is a cameraman for NBC. He flys around the world on Air Force One covering whatever the president does. One day he tweeted that he saw Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical 2 eating and smooching in Cafe Sydney in Australia while George W. was at APEC/OPEC. Someone picked up this tweet and truemored it, and this brought Truemors tens of thousands of page views. By the way, if you think insipid celebrity sightings doesn’t create traffic, you’re very wrong.

So if you are not a twitter user yet, then head straight to twitter.com and get yourself an account. Don’t forget to follow me huh? http://www.twitter.com/ades

If you find it difficult to tweet, try using this plugin which will post your blog posts automatically to your twitter account.

.htaccess basics

by Ades on May 15, 2008 in SEO & Promotion, Tutorials with 18 Comments

Previously I have written articles on .htaccess, they are:

But since not all of you know how to use and modify .htaccess file on your server, I am writing this basic htaccess tutorial.

What is this (htaccess) file and what does it do?

It is a file for managing directories on the web server (i.e your web hosting). the name htaccess comes from “hypertext access”. With htaccess, you can do many things, like:

Defining your error documents (eg. 404 errors)
Password protecting your directories
Blocking users by IP
Blocking traffic from certain sites
Blocking bad bots (eg. spammers)
Preventing hotlinking of your images
Redirecting pages to another
and many more

Where is this file?

.htaccess is a file that is usually found in your root directory. If your web-host allows you to see it, you can see the file together with your other files in your root folder (see below). However sometimes web-hosts do make them hidden (so that you don’t accidentally modify it or delete it).

You can also create different .htaccess files for different sub-folders on your website. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in the root folder. However htaccess directives in the root folder will apply automatically to all sub-folders, so you have to be careful of what you do with it. For example, blocking google.com will be a nightmare to most sites. Especially if you are an e-commerce site that rely on Google traffic.

How to create them?

htaccess files can be created by notepad. Here is a sample htaccess file from my adesdesign.net site.

You can see that in my htaccess file I have defined Error files, and also have redirected adesdesign.net to www. adesdesign,net (with www). As you know URL with and without “www” are considered two different websites to the search engines. Therefore redirecting one to another is very important. Here is how you can do that.

So, creating htaccess file is easy. Just open the notepad, type in your commands and save it as .htacess (yes with dot in front) for the file name and select “all files” for file type as shown in the screenshot to the right. Save.

I hope you find this article useful. Do let me know if you have any questions in the comments section.

Subscribe to RSS: click here.

MarketLeverage Team – smart advertisers

by Ades on April 11, 2008 in Advice to Businesses, Blogging Tips, Marketing, Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion with 15 Comments

Guys at MarketLeverage.com are quite creative. They have found a novel way to get mentioned on top blogs like problogger (46K+ readers) and shoemoney (16K+ readers) with a small investment that the team themselves will enjoy wearing. They purchased these two blogs’ t-shirts and wore them and sent a picture of the whole team wearing the t-shirts. Guess what? They got dedicated post on both blogs. That’s what we call a win-win situation. MarketLeverage (win), two blogs (win).

Shoemoney t-shirts are just $5.00 each for both men and women, and problogger t-shirts are $17.99 for women and $23.99 for men. So, LeverageMarket spent about $50 on shoemoney and $132 on problogger (unless they bought double logo t-shirts, which are more expensive). It’s a fraction of what you would actually spend to get publicity on these high-traffic blogs, if you were to go through normal conventional way of advertising.

Moral of the post: Be creative!

Yahoo Site Explorer, Crawl Rate Plugin, and SEOMeter’s tool

by Ades on March 25, 2008 in Blogging Tips, Search Engines, SEO & Promotion with 16 Comments

Do you use YahooSiteExplorer? If you don’t, you might be missing a lot. Because since I started using it (submitted my blog), Yahoo’s search bot started crawling more pages of my blog at a more frequent rate. As you can see to the right, Yahoo bot (green) crawls a lot more pages than Google and MSN bots.

This crawl rate graph was generated by this plugin.

What is Yahoo Site Explorer?

It is a tool that lets you access the information Yahoo has about a site’s online presence. You can see which sites and subpages are indexed by Yahoo Search, track sites that link into webpage, and view the most popular pages of your site (or any site for that matter).

With Yahoo Site Explorer, now everybody can submit their sites to Yahoo Search Engine for inclusion for free. Remember, before you had to pay to Yahoo if you wanted to include your site faster?

If you submit your site to Site Explorer and authenticate it, you will be able to tell Yahoo which pages to ignore and drop from the search index. This tool also allows you to enter your RSS url, it will automatically track the changes of your blog. (screenshot of Site Explorer below).

How to calculate Crawl Rate

SEOMeter.com has a great tool to calculate your site’s crawl rate. If your blog or site is already popular, SEOMeter might already have some stats for your site. But if it doesn’t, then you will have to add your site first. It took me about 2 weeks to get AdesBlog tracked by SEOMeter.

Using Scribd as a source of traffic for your blog

by Ades on March 14, 2008 in Blogging Tips, Marketing, Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion with 12 Comments

I am sure many of you know Scribd right? Scribe in their own words: “Scribd is a Silicon Valley startup creating technology that makes it easy to share documents online. You can think of Scribd as a big online library where everyone can publish original content, including you!”

Basically, you can upload your documents and it will be available to other members of scribd, as well as to anybody who searches for them online.

Scribd as a promotion tool

One thing you can use srcibd is – as a promotion tool. In fact, it can be a great promotion tool if you write great, useful articles. Before I wanted to post about this, I gave it a try and uploaded 14 documents of mine to scribd. Eleven of them were photoshop related tutorials and 3 were blog articles. Documents were uploaded on 10th and 11th of February, so has been roughly one month.

As you can see, so far they have been viewed 2053 times. That translates to average 146 views per document. Most viewed article was 356 times, and the least viewed was 27 times. You can view list of all articles here.

Ways to promote your blog on scribd

First of all, if you write good articles people will click on the author link on that particular article and view your profile. Therefore, you must have a proper profile page. What I mean is, try to put some info about yourself, your picture, and most importantly your blog URL. Start building your brand from your profile page.
Secondly, end the articles that you published with your blog URL. You can have a one line sentence like “for more articles go to yoursite dot com“.

Thirdly, try to join groups and communities that are relevant to your niche. If there is no group available in your topic, you can create yourself one.

But most importantly do not spam! Just share your best articles with other scribers and start building your repuation in scribd. start here scribd.com.

I hope you found this article useful. Subscribe to RSS to read upcoming useful articles. click here.

ReviewBack – you blog about me, I blog about you

by Ades on March 8, 2008 in Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion with 19 Comments

Don’t want to spend money on ReviewMe and similar networks purchasing paid reviews? How about exchanging free reviews with other fellow bloggers then?

Well, ReviewBack does exactly that. You browse among 1,659 blogs in the ReviewBack network, choose a blog that you want your review to appear on, send the owner of the blog a request and if he/she accepts, you write a review about that particular blog on your blog, and he will write a review of your blog on his. Sounds good? Check it out http://www.reviewback.com

WordPress: Increase your SERP using Post Slug feature

by Ades on January 17, 2008 in Blogging Tips, SEO & Promotion with 33 Comments

Do you use post slug feature in WordPress? If yes, then great! If not, then you should really start using it. Post Slug feature is located among one of those boxes at the right side: Categories, Post Status, Discussion… etc.

SEO Advtantage of Using Post Slug

When you use it, you greatly improve your blog’s SEO. In WordPress, if you enable permalinks and if you use Post Title in the URL structure, then you know that the post title becomes part of the URL for each individual post page.

Below is a screenshot of Permalink’s preferences in WordPress:

enabling permalinks

As you can see, I have set Date (Year/Month/Date) followed by Post Title for the URL structure.

Feed Search Engines with Different Important Keywords

As you know Search Engines pay more attention to page’s Title, URL, and Headings (or the content in general). So it’s always better if you input important keywords in page’s Title and URL in particular, and to repeat the keywords in the content of the page. Therefore, using Post Slug gives you this advantage of putting different words in the URL of the page.

As you can see from the screenshot below, words that you enter in the Post Slug becomes part of the URL (instead of the Post Title, that is set by default).

post slug as the page url

So, if I hadn’t used Post Slug, my page URL would be http://www.adesblog.com/2008/01/12/write-pillar-articles-but-dont-overdo-it-please/ instead of http://www.adesblog.com/2008/01/12/what-is-pillar-articles/

So what’s the benefit?

Why did I choose “what is pillar articles” for the URL and not use the post title that was set by default? Because I know that people won’t be searching Google using “Write Pillar Articles but Don’t Overdo It” phrase. I am pretty sure that people will be going for searches like “What is Pillar Articles”, “How to write Pillar Articles”, “Pillar Article Structure” etc. Among these alternatives, I have chosen the first one.

Was it the correct choice? I am quite confident that it was, because if you search Google for “What is Pillar Article“, you will see that my post comes up on No.4 position (at this point in time, it might climb up or go down).

So as you can see, when you use it correctly, the results are very encouraging.

Don’t abuse it

When using this feature you should only use keywords that are directly related and mentioned in your post. Idea here is to let the users find your blog, find the article useful, and become your regular reader. Therefore putting not related keywords in the Post Slug won’t bring you any good. You will just destroy your reputation and credibility.

Do you have to use it for every post? If you can do that, then why not? Personally I do not use it all the time, I only use it on some articles that I think important.

I hope you find this post useful, look forward to read your thoughts.

Subscribe to RSS to receive more SEO tips click here

EntreCard performance after 12 days

by Ades on December 23, 2007 in Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion with 10 Comments

It’s been 12 days since I have joined Entrecard. Within this period, Entrecard brough 162 visitors, that’s about 13 visitors per day. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. I also noticed that entrecard stats people are not really clicking on the banners. I have purchased 2 ads so far (2 more in queue), from these two ads, one was from a high traffic blog that has 13K+ readers (not JohnChow dot com, I don’t want to mention the URL because people might avoid advertising on that blog). Clicks from these two ads were only 7 clicks, that’s about 1 click in every 8 hours.

Due to long waiting period and limited credits, I was not able test my ad performances that well.

I also have to note that, the poor click-through-rates might be due to my button design. I am sure design of the button affects the CTR (click-through-rate) a lot. Therefore, I will need to test it with different button designs after this.

Entrecard Improvements

Since Entrecard is still new (launched 8th Nov), it’s improving almost daily. Recently they have introduced an Entrecard shop where you can purchase “Featured Status”, “Fast Pass” and “Entrecard Stickers”. Featured status costs you 200 credits, and will make your button stand out from the crowd, with gold borders (see screenshot).

Fast pass costs you 300 credits, and it allows you to jump the queue. Fast pass can only be used once. The question is in a life-time? or in a year, month, week?

Entrecard is also in discussion with its members on how to monetize it without annoying them. I think they are taking a very good approach, consulting with its members. So far they have suggested 3 possibilities:

Option 1: Upgrade to â€œproâ€ account
Option 2: Sitewide advertising via â€œSponsored Inboxâ€
Option 3: Take a slice of the impressions

I had proposed making money through selling credits (to its members) instead, but let’s see what they will decide as the final monetization option.

Conclusion

In summary, Entrecard is doing quite good. I would say it’s a must tool for new blogs. Because unlike other services (like BlogRush) it does work, and it does bring traffic every day. Even if it is not much, but there is a constant traffic flow to your blog from Entrecard.

I will still be using it for the next few weeks and then decide if I want to continue. Have you joined Entrecard yet? If yes, how is it performing? How is your ad’s click-through-rates?

Testing Entrecard, my views on it

by Ades on December 11, 2007 in Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion with 8 Comments

I decided to test Entrecard. I have integrated the button beside the Top Commentators section at the sidebar.

If you do not know what Entrecard is, it’s simply a banner exchange program. You display others’ banners on your blog and in return you get to advertise on others’ blogs. Everytime someone advertises on your blog, you earn credits. These credits later can be used to buy advertisements from other blogs. Actually the system is more complex than that (you can earn credits in many ways), but in simple terms it’s a banner exchange program. You can read more on how it works here.

After I signed up and put up the code on my blog, the advertisers started to flood in. After 20 minutes all 10 spots (for 10 days) were full (sold out). You know why people flood the new blogs? Because in the beginning it is very cheap (only 1 credit) to advertise on the new blogs. Later, the system will start to adjust the price depending on the demand and the number of people drop their cards on your blog. As you can see below, the price has changed to 3 credits (it’s just changed to 5 credits).

Does it bring any traffic?

It’s too early to tell, but if I were to state the stats only, then so far within half an hour it brought 19 clicks. I will have to see at least few days before I can say anything on the performance. Also as you can see these clicks are from entrecard and not from other blogs.

As you can see below 19 clicks, I have not bought any advertisements from other blogs. So, actually the performance of the system would also be based on the blogs that you are advertising. Some blogs bring tons of clicks, and some not. So you have to know where to advertise. In the beginning you don’t have credits, so you won’t be able to buy any advertisements until you have accumulated some credits.

Even after you have accumulated tens of credits, you will need hundreds of credits more if you want to advertise on popular blogs like JohnChow.com. So it might take you some time, before you get your banner on those popular blogs.

My Recommendations to Entrecard

Based on my limited usage, I would like to suggest few features to Entrecard.

Introduce “buy credits” feature – this would allow new members to buy credits if they want. Otherwise it might take few days to weeks for someone to accumulate 200+ credits.
Allow members to convert their credits into $$ – if user has too much credits, he/she might simply remove the code from his blog (i.e stop using the buttons). After all, he/she will have enough credits to spend on buying ads from other blogs. But if the user have the option to make money, he/she will want to use it even more effectively. Because the more you use it, the more money you will make.
When the spot is full, allow people to advertise anyway – currently if the spot is full, you cannot advertise on that particular blog. You can only check back the next day, most probably to find that the spot has been filled again. I think it’s better to let people at least to get in the queue. So if the spot is full (all 10 of them), let the interested person to queue and be the 11th. This way, next day, he can automatically become the 10th. Why loose advertisers when it’s difficult to get them in the first place?
Rotate multiple ads in one day – this would allow to clear the bottleneck that the system is having at the moment. Also, I think having 2-3 buttons rotating in one day will be more interesting to the blog visitors.
Introduce referral system – this would encourage members to promote entrecard, as a result entrecard’s number of users would increase. More users means, more banner exchange, and that is good for everybody.

I will update you guys again on its performance after 1-2 weeks. Till then you can join Entrecard and advertise your blog on AdesBlog (while it’s still cheap, only 5 credits). You can also read Entrecard blog here – http://entrecard.com/blog