I needed to create a blank page using anyone’s theme to fit my indexing tool into a blog.

I couldn’t find a universal one that would work, but this one just requires that you copy your 404 page (the simplest one I could find) and add a couple of lines to it to create a standalone page.

Read the rest of this entry

Today I have a dilemma!

Those of you who are Alex Jeffreys coaching students will already know that he will be running competition where the person who drives the most traffic to their blog wins a prize of $1000.

My issue is I that I am just completing a product (I intend to release it by the end of the week) that is related to pulling
traffic into websites or blogs.  It is a viral product and creates trafic for me too.  That’s the problem.
If other students use it they will get traffic themselves but they will also send some to me. (They can choose not to use it but that isn’t a good thing when it could help everyone)

Should I still enter?  I feel I will have a conflict of interest.
It’s not that I think I’m going to win – I would have a chance the same as everyone else does but there are many students already way ahead of me with blog traffic.

I think that trying to win could draw me in two opposing directions.

Would it be best for me to opt out and concentrate on helping all the other students to get traffic?

Please post your answers below !

I checked out one of my newer sites and found it had 3 backlinks I hadn’t created.

On closer investigation they were from 3 related forums.

Someone had posted a link, but it went to a page I haven’t got!
Read the rest of this entry

This post is by special request – if you would like to ask for a post on a related topic please make a comment below.

I use several tools to analysis my sites.

One of the best ones is the Quirk addon for Firefox, available here:

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

Quirk will appear as a Q at the bottom of your screen.

If you right click on it you will be given a range of options.

Show Keyword Density allows you to enter a keyword and have the page analysed. It will highlight any occurrences of that keyword and give you a set of statistics.

If you look at the top few pages in the search results for your keyword and check there figures you will see if there are any improvements you can do.

If you select backlinks>domain external>yahoo site explorer you will get a list of backlinks.

You can go directly to yahoo site explorer but Quirk is handy because of the other features it has eg it displays Page Rank, Alexa rank and mozRank.

I record my total ‘inlinks’ show at the top of the screen to see how they grow over time. You can flip through them to see where you are getting links form, and more importantly you can do the same for your competitors’ sites to see if you can obtain any of their’s.

See you in again tomorrow. My posts are scheduled for 1.00AM GMT which is 8.00PM EST.

In this post I’m going to give my reasons why I think you should not just post on blogs that don’t use the no follow attribute, or just pick the forums with high PR to make posts in.

1) No follow links do count for something – see my previous blog post

2) Sites may change from using no follow to not using it and vice versa.

3) You should have natural linking – it should not look like you only went after the best links, so do not only use links without no follow.

Also use a mixture of sites to links from blogs, forums etc and a mixture of PR.

Apart from creating a more natural mixture of links a site that is PR0 today could be much higher in the months to come.

4) Using a mixture of links is easier – you don’t have to check for no follow or PR just a mixture of quality relevant sites (at least some sites should be about a related topic to yours – another much debated point.)

Don’t forget to come back for more posts about linking.