For us, people in Australia, the big news online this week is the the Federal Government’s My School website (www.myschool.edu.au) which allows people – (concerned parents!) search and compare the profiles of about 10,000 Australian schools. It’s amazing how many people are outraged that this information (that no one new about before, not!) is now publicly available online. And not that it is, people can look up different school’s performance and compare it to other schools in Australia. I think it’s a good thing. I think, it’s useful and healthy to have all this info available to everyone. It is good.
Free Kids Games Website
22/01/2010 — GM22I came across a great WordPress “plugin” that creates a great games website. Here is one: http://www.boysgamezone.com/
They system downloads games and these can be previewed and uploaded to the website for all to play. And then, of course, there are ads.
This is a new site, let’s see how it behaves.
Most Popular Keywords
29/11/2009 — GM22What people are searching for? What are the most popular keywords? Often it’s a challenge to go either for popular keywords or find a niche and develop sites for the least popular but expensive keywords.
Google Zeitgeist http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/index.html is worth checking out.
What works best for you?
Let People Something To Click – Adsense Link Units!
28/11/2009 — GM22I’ve always been skeptical about Adsense Link Units. My thinking was… way waste people’s click? Why letting them click on an ad link and then hoping that will click on the other to get a few cents from them. I did experiment with link units in the past, but it never worked for me. People licked on the first link, but then disappeared from the radar, without clicking that the money making link that is on the second, very ugly Google page.
A few days ago, ok.. let me try again. And I did. Result? My daily earnings increased by 25%. This is not a joke. This time it works!
The trick it to put those link units in a place where people are actually looking for something to click and making a choice between hitting the “back” button or clicking on a link. Work out where that place is on your web site and put those link units there!
This time I also noticed that it’s possible to customize the colours of the second page (the one that people see when click on the link unit), to match the colours of the link unit itself. Who knows, maybe this helped too.
So, I’m eager to keep an eye on these link units and try it on some of my other sites, to see if them make the same effect.
When the bots come at night . . .
22/11/2009 — GM22I like stats. I like watching live raw log files and I like staring at graphs. Recently I discovered another killer plug in for WordPress – “Crawl Rate Tracker“. This is one of the best jewels that I’ve ever seen. For log addicts.
So, what does it do? Crawl Rate Tracker logs search engines data, recording details of their visit. When Yahoo or Google comes to your site, the plugin records what page they visit when etc. So, after a while, you can have a nice graph like this:
Also, if you’re logged on, there is a small icon under each blog post and if you click on it, it will show stats on when this page was visited by search engines. It is very cool and highly recommended.
I had to remove Technorati and add Yandex instead. For some reason, this particular site is under a close attention from Yandex – the Russian search engine.
Back to the library!
14/11/2009 — GM22Oh, away with all that crap posts that I did recently. It’s back to the library, back to the description of my new internet journey.
So, what happened so far? My main website got indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo very quick, and the first few months have actually been very good in terms of traffic. Then, disaster strikes. The web site went down in searches quite drastically, and stayed there for about two months. Then, it came back, and then, it went down again.
My suspicion was that some problems were due to a slow vps account that I had (and occasional downtimes that came with it). As you can see at Netcraft, I changed a website hosting provider to a shared host, now it’s their responsibility to maintain the uptime.
So, now I’m focusing on building more content and also have a couple of other sites in the pipeline. I want to try targeting specific keywords and try to sell some of those affiliated products, everybody is so sick about.
So, give me a couple of weeks, I’ll get back on track and will try to document my internet journey more precisely.
Looking for an Ideas Manager
15/05/2009 — GM22Since I started working on this project, I find myself writing down notes all over the place. I picked up Confluence and Jira for $5 last month. Tomorror I’m going to install them on Amazon Cloud storage and will use it as project management system, ideas and bug tracker.
GM
How to block Alexa from WordPress
14/05/2009 — GM22In my research I noticed that Alexa reveals too much confidential information, in my view, about web sites. Something I don’t think web site owners would like other keyword hugry people to see. So, I installed KB Robots.txt wordpress plugin to block Alexa and added these contents to robots.txt. It’s not much, but it should keep Alexa away.
User-agent: * Disallow: User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /
Joining Australia Affiliate Marketing Forum
10/05/2009 — GM22Today I joined Australian Affiliate Marketing Forum. Looking foward to exchanging ideas and borrowing from experience of other forum members.
WordPress SEO – keywords
08/05/2009 — GM22I’ve been looking for a light WordPress SEO – Search Engine friendly plugin, but nothing quite cut it for me. So, I decided to use the excerpt text to insert into meta keywords, using this line of code in the header:
<meta name="keywords" content="<?php $excerpt = strip_tags(get_the_excerpt()); echo $excerpt; ?>"/>
It works really well, and no plugins needed!
