Tel: 0113 2170419
www.littlefishwebdesign.com
Pay Per Post Pays More
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Well, I did try to craft a headline where all words started with 'P' but failed on the final word! Any suggestions?
I logged into Pay Per Post earlier and noticed that they've now got opportunities* worth up to $1000. That's crazy money to me, and shows that people really do pay bloggers to create a buzz. Obviously there are more restrictions on the higher paid opps - your blog has to have a higher pagerank (traffic) and has to blog about the same topics or themes, but why not use the link below to register and see what all the fuss is about? And if you do have a blog with a high pagerank and want to get paid to blog, there are several blog ad networks out there to choose from, but PPP does seem to give a higher proportion of their fee to bloggers - 65% compared with the average 50%. And they give opportunities to all blogs that fit the opportunity criteria - they don't freeze out younger blogs that haven't had time to build a huge reputation yet.
* An opportunity is your chance to blog on a particular topic / website etc... Each opportunity has its own criteria and will pay a defined amount of money for your post if approved.
Click on one of the Pay Per Post links to register and see for yourself (not the blog disclosure button - that won't help you!)
Consolidate your pagerank with .htaccess
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
If you look in the search engines, you may notice that some of the links to your site start with 'www' and others don't. The problem with this canonicalisation issue (despite the situation improving as the search engines become more sophisticated) is that some search engines will view this as two different domains and firstly, will split pagerank between the two and secondly, could push your pages into the supplemental results so your site won't be as easily found.
There is a simple solution to this if you use linux-based hosting and involves editing your .htaccess file. If you don't already have one of these files in the root directory of your hosting server, you'll have to create one. Note that whether you see this file may depend on your FTP program - set it to show all files including hidden ones. I use FileZilla which is an excellent open source FTP program and very simple to use.
The dot (period) in front of the htaccess means that it is a hidden system file. To create an htaccess file, open notepad and save a new file. Ignore the extension which is set to text file (*.txt) and in the filename box type ".htaccess", including the quote marks. You should now have a correctly named file.
Now type in:Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
At the end of the last line, press the enter key to add a newline to the file. This is really important or your htaccess won't work. Now save this and upload it to the root of your website. Some hosts take a short amount of time to update htaccess (GoDaddy for example) but it should work instantaneously on most hosts. This can be adapted for any domain:RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [NC] etc...
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Just remember to change 'yourdomain' to your actual domain name!
Labels: hosting, searchengines, webdesign
Don't get your site thrown out the Search Engines
Altering your website to increase its rankings in the search engine results is known as SEO or search engine optimisation. By doing this, you will increase the number of visitors to your site, which in turn will hopefully increase your website's revenue. The major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) all publish do's and don'ts for websites - failing to acknowledge these on your site could easily result in it being banned.
Whether you pay someone to do your SEO, or do it youself, ensure that your site adheres to the webmaster guidelines and doesn't engage in any black hat practices. These will get your site banned from the search engines, and once thrown out, it's difficult to get back in. Adhering to white hat practices and providing quality content is the best advice for getting high rankings.
Quick ways to get banned include keyword stuffing (using the same phrases or words repeatedly) or hiding text by having lots of keywords in the same colour as the background. The former renders your page unreadable, which defeats the purpose of having visitors to your site whilst the latter has been used by webmasters to get visitors there on false pretences - they think they're viewing a page on one topic and arrive to see something completely different.
Links from high quality or high ranking sites are much more important in helping your site rankings than just trying to get hundreds of links. Although this may take time, acquiring higher quality links really will help your site in the long run. To find higher authority sites, use Google's pagerank as a guide. The higher the pagerank out of 10, the harder it will be to get a link, but the more value it will pass to your site.
Don't be tempted into buying hundreds of links at a time - it's better to get a few links a week at a constant pace than getting a lot sporadically. And when you do link, ensure that you get links to both your homepage and other pages on your site. Link exchanges can be a good thing, but ensure that you are listed with similar sites rather than just a random selection.
Don't be tempted to fool Google or the other search engines - they will find you out. Practices they may not like and not mentioned above include meta tag stuffing, cloaking, duplicate content and multiple submissions. Meta tags can be useful to your site despite not all search engines using them, but don't be tempted to stuff them full of more keywords and phrases.
Cloaking is where you show one page to the search engines and another to your site's visitors - again it gets them there through false pretences. Having the same website on several different domains sounds like a good idea, but the search engines do penalise duplicate content, whether by dropping you from the results or putting you on the 350th page of results which amounts to the same thing. Finally, if your site is linked to properly, the search engines will find your site without you having to submit your site to them. Submit only once then exercise patience until your site appears.
Google Webmaster Guidelines - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines - http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html
MSN Guidelines for successful indexing - http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm
Also see Google webmaster guidelines in plain English
Labels: searchengines, seo, webdesign
Get paid to build your own blog traffic?
Friday, February 16, 2007
PayPerPost have recently introduced a new scheme called 'Review My Post' where you actually get paid for people blogging about you. It's an interesting twist in the paid blogging arena - when someone signs up to PayPerPost through a 'get paid to review my post' button on your blog, they get an offer to blog about your post for $7.50 and you get paid $7.50 for each new signup. Whilst $7.50 in itself isn't much, a couple of new signups soon add up. If you integrate the button code into your blog template, it even gets added automatically to each and every post, so you don't even have to remember to edit the code.
As far as I know, the eligibility requirements still need to be met, so to review someone's post, you need a site that's at least 90 days old and has 20 or more posts (gaps of more than 30 days between posts are not allowed). Reviews tend to be between 100-300 words and you may be asked to include a picture. You choose which opportunities to take, so your blog can stay tightly niched and you don't have to compromise your blog integrity by posting about something you don't believe in.
It's a very clever solution - PPP get new 'posties' and you monetise your blog AND get new links and generate traffic to your site. It useful too for people who aren't interested in sponsored posts ? just adding the button means anyone with a blog can earn from the scheme.
Why not review this post - just click on the 'Get Paid to Review My Post' button below my name!!!
How to copy your laptop hard disk
Well, it may seem a slightly unusual post, but there's a good reason for it. Just before Christmas, my laptop starting hanging for no reason, and I had to reboot each time. There was no pattern to it, and sometimes the hang corrupted my data.
I decided to bite the bullet and buy a new hard drive, make a copy of my old drive and restore this to the new hard disk. The reason for this is that I had about 20Gb of data, including lots of utility programs and I had XP configured how I wanted it. I didn't want to have to reinstall the operating system and start again. Anyway how hard could it be?
So...much angst, sleeplessness etc. later I live to tell the tale, and thought I'd share the process in case anyone else needed the help! I am assuming a basic level of competence - knowing where programs are located etc., and also that your setup is similar to mine. There may be easier ways to do this process and if so, please contact me so I can simplify this process.
You will need:
- A couple of hours and plenty of patience
- A new 2.5" HDD
- Your old laptop hard disk drive
- Your laptop manual (for how to take out your old hard drive)
- A PC with at least as much free space as the amount of data on your laptop disk
- Your Windows XP disk
- 2.5" USB external caddy
- Bart PE
- Acronis True Image 10 Home - trial
- Download and install Acronis.
- Download and install BartPE.
- In the Acronis directory you will find a folder called 'BartPE' or similar. Rename this to Acronis. Copy it to the BartPE plugins folder.
- Put your XP disk in the CD/DVD drive and run BartPE. In the box for source, put the drive letter of where your XP disk is.
- Click 'plugins' and ensure that 'Acronis' is both present and enabled (highlight and click the enable/disable button).
- Close this, put a blank CD in your CD/DVD writer and in the media output box click 'Burn to CD/DVD'. If you only have one CD/DVD drive, copy the i386 folder to the BartPE directory on your PC and change the 'source' accordingly. Click build.
- Remove the new HDD from it's protective wrapper. If you're not used to handling hardware, be very careful, only touch the edges and make sure you aren't full of static electricity.
- Remove your old HDD from your laptop and put this in the protective wrapper.
- (Make sure you know which drive is which - to make the process easier don't worry, you won't harm anything!).
- Install the new hard drive in the laptop.
- Boot the laptop using your XP CD and make the largest partition possible without installing XP (press 'C').
- Exit and reboot the laptop using the BartPE disk.
- When loaded, choose the A43 file manager and right-click the C-drive. Choose format (NOT quick format).
- Switch the laptop off when done.
- Put the old hard disk into the 2.5" USB caddy.
- Attach it to your PC and ensure that you can see your data on the drive.
- Run Acronis and make a copy of your entire old hard drive. Save it to a location on your PC and ensure you verify the backup. (For my 20Gb this process took less than 30 minutes).
- Once this is done find the 'tib' file Acronis created and copy this to your old hard drive.
- Double-click on the 'safely remove hardware' icon in the system tray and remove your USB caddy. (If you don't do this, you could corrupt your data - this applies to any USB device).
- With your old HDD still in the USB enclosure, plug it into your laptop. It's important to do this whilst the laptop isn't on.
- Switch the laptop on and boot using BartPE.
- Ensure you can view your old hard drive files.
- When booted, go to system > storage > Acronis.
- Choose restore and select the 'tib' file that you copied onto your old hard drive.
- Select both the drive (in my case F:) and MBR and track 0.
- Select the new drive to restore to, and again ensure that you have both the drive (should be C:) and MBR and track 0 selected.
- Restore.
- When done turn off your laptop, disconnect the USB hard drive and boot the laptop normally (take out the BartPE CD).
Any other advice?
When buying a new hard drive, it only has to be as large as the amount of data you have on your old hard drive. My old one was 60Gb and my new one 40Gb - this was fine as I only had about 20Gb of data. Don't go for one that is slower (fewer RPM) than your existing drive. Buy it locally - it's much easier to take it back under warranty than if you've bought it over the Internet.
Try cleaning up your disk before transferring - uninstall unused programs, use a freeware program like CCleaner to remove unused files and do a general cleanup. Defragment your disk if it needs it.
My caddy/enclosure only seems to be recognised just after installation - I go to control panel > system properties > device manager > Universal Serial Bus Controllers and delete the entry for my caddy. Next time I boot my PC, it sees the caddy and installs it so I can see the files. Slightly irritating but not the end of the world.
Good luck!
Google webmaster guidelines in plain English
Monday, February 05, 2007
If you are confused as to what the Google Webmaster Guidelines mean, you could do a lot worse than going to feedthebot.com. This is a very clearly laid out website, which uses CSS and keeps images to a minimum which results in fast-loading effective site.
Each of the guidelines has its own page - first the guideline is laid out, followed by definitions of any terms used and followed by further explanation and examples. Diagrams are used where necessary.
Definitely one to add to your bookmarks!
Labels: searchengines, seo, webdesign
Fight global warming for free with your PC
Sunday, February 04, 2007
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you'll notice a new button in the sidebar, and some new banners at the foot of every post which promote Local Cooling. This is an initiative aimed at getting 100 million people to download and use their software in order to help fight against global warming.
The Local Cooling Website states "...it [the software] automatically optimizes your PC's power consumption by using a more effective power save mode."
The software itself is a quick download and when installed sits in your system tray (that's the one in bottom right hand corner of your desktop with the clock and other icons). Right-clicking on the icon brings up a small window telling you in realtime how much energy your computer has saved by using the software. To enable you to understand this more easily, you are given the amount of energy in the equivalent of trees, gallons of oil and in kilowatt hours.
You can then use the software to easily edit your power settings - how many minutes of inactivity before switching down the monitor, spinning down the hard disk(s) and finally, to switch off the PC. Changing the settings is no more difficult than one click, or you can choose a custom profile to better suit your computing habits. You will then see the estimated saving in energy you are making.
As well as doing your bit to save the planet, think of the money that you'll save over a month, year or even decade!
Links
Previous Posts
- How linkable is your blog?
- Stop Yahoo! tracking your every move
- Grab your free copy of Lucid SEO
- Wordtracker coupon code - 15% discount
- Free Wordpress theme generator
- Comprehensive list of CSS techniques
- Web 2.0 online generators
- Tracking your e-mail marketing campaigns
- The Internet Marketing Myth - A Review
- Review: MyBlogLog and its marketing potential