So my Adsense data has been showing a declining readership directly, but an exploding RSS readership, but this seems a little fishy to me.

Page impressions	Clicks	Page CTR	Page eCPM [?]	Earnings
AdSense for Content top channels	164	1	0.61%	$6.70	$1.10
	Queries	Clicks	CTR	eCPM [?]	Earnings
AdSense for Search top channels	1	0	0.00%	$0.00	$0.00
	Ad Impressions	Clicks	Ad CTR	Ad eCPM [?]	Earnings
AdSense for Feeds top channels	895	1	0.11%	$1.00	$0.89
Total Earnings					$1.99

Yes, I am not making much, but that is not the point, right now I am getting HUGE RSS readership and I think I need to find out exactly what this is.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So my Canadian Personal Finance site continues to be crawled by many different bots and such and it is making for some very interesting statistics. 

That's a lot of Crawling

What the heck is causing all this crawling around, I have no idea, but holy cow that is a lot of crawling that is for sure.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Something odd is going on at Canadian Personal Finance the past few weeks, the Bots are attacking. It seems that MSN and Yahoo’s Bots have both taken a big liking to my site, and have been inundating the site with crawlers.

The past few days bot numbers are:

• January 21  MSN:  1713  Yahoo: 478  Google: 148
• January 20 MSN:  509 Yahoo:  484  Google:  498
• January 19  MSN:  1230  Yahoo:  467  Google:  416

Those are some impressive and weird numbers, not sure why MSN is so hot to trot about the site, but I am not complaining either.

Number of readers is up as well, given I was averaging about 150 a day, now I am somewhere near 300, which is a very good thing. Page Rank is also back up to 3/10 so that is a start too.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

SEO Bible from Amazon

SEO Bible by Jerri L. Ledford

(ISBN: 978-0-470-17500-2) As usual I have not purchased this book, I have, however, borrowed it from the Ottawa Public Library.

This is an excellent book for those who are beginners in the “Mug’s Game” of Search Engine Optimization.(SEO) It explains what the basic concepts of SEO are, and why they are important if you are trying to make money on the web.

The book starts sensibly talking about how you need a plan for how you are going to use SEO on your site (know what you want to achieve so you know whether you have succeeded or not). A good point made is that if you are going to do this, you should use Google Analytics to collect data (again, you need data to know whether you are succeeding or not).

The book then dives into different SEO techniques like the use of META tags on your site to get Search Engine Robots to find your site and be able to classify it, correctly. If you do a “View Page Source” on this page you’ll see which meta tags I have set up for this site too. The key to SEO is the use of Keywords, and the rest of the book outlines well how to get Search Engines to associate Keywords with your web site, and how to get your rank for that Keyword up the list (appearing on Page 10 on Google isn’t your goal).

Very good learning points about Keyword densities (don’t use them too little OR too much), and what techniques you should be using in a Pay Per Click (PPC) environment as well. Their explanation of PPC is useful for “newbies” as well, I learned 1 or 2 things I didn’t know as well. I skipped the section on Advertising keywords, since I was not very interested in that section (yet), but it seems quite detailed on tactics in that area as well.

Content is king, is my credo and the book outlines the importance of not simply putting out a bunch of retread information or some hack-kneed old information, you need to be interesting and fresh to attract and KEEP readers (don’t just do book reviews, as an example, unless your site is a book review site).

The books sections on Links and Robots is again very illustrative and important to understand if you want to play the SEO game. This site for example has very incoming links and whereas my financial site have hundreds of links in which helps it keep it’s popularity. How to deal with Robots is also quite important and the explanations in the book are very helpful. The author’s warnings about SEO SPAM should be heeded, unless you want to be a Black Hat SEO person (i.e. a bad guy).

Analysis of the data after you have implemented your plan is your final goal and deciding whether you have succeeded (and how you might change your plan to create more success), concludes the books content.

Rating:

I always feel that if I get three new ideas from any content it is of value, and I view this book as a useful resource and a good read. I will not be buying it, as I have already noted from it what I want to use, but I would recommend this book if you are starting out in the SEO game.

Good read!

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So after completing the upgrade to WordPress 2.6 I had to clean up some things, so I decided to add some more affiliates to my UBD theme advertising rotor, unfortunately it now no longer seems to work. I have reported the issue to UBD, but for now, as you can see I have no ads in my rotor, and I can’t seem to add any more either!

WordPress Plug Ins of the Week

This week I added two plug ins that are making life a lot simpler for me on Canadian Financial Opinions.

The first plug is No Self Pings by Michael D. Adams which stops comments appearing in your comment queue from internal links done in your own blog. This is useful to me right now as I only have about 300 more posts to clear up on the site which still point back to the old site on BLOGSPOT.  I found a reference to this on a site which talked about the best 5 WordPress plug ins to have, and I must admit, this one is brilliant, I just wish I found it sooner (if you look at my comment list in my sidebar it is chocked full of internal link repair messages).

The second plug ins is Broken Link Checker by Janis Elsts, this tool is also brilliant. I haven’t turned it ON on the Financial site, but I did turn it on, on this site and it found 35 broken links after I had already cleaned up this sites old references to BLOGSPOT as well. Again, a highly recommended plug in to use, to keep your site clean so that when ROBOTS wander through it, they don’t get lost!

All I need now is for UBD or me to figure out what is wrong with my advertising rotor. I don’t dare touch it on my financial site. I also did use the WordPress 2.6 checkpoint facility too, so thank you WordPress for that as well!

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I am attempting to banish my blogspot version of Canadian Financial Opinions from the Google Index.

First I added the all important META tag into the header for the site

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”

That should stop the Googlebot from wandering through the site and getting any data on the content that is in there. How long stuff festers in the Google search indexes I have no idea, but this is a start.

I also submitted a “Remove URL” request for the old site as well, that might help speed things up too. Right now my old site has a Page Rank of 3 whereas the new site has a Page Rank of ZERO (still or again).

Thanks to “Google Advertising Tools” by Harold Davis (O’Reilly) for ideas!

Hope this finally works!

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Project: Canadian Financial Rants
—————————————-

URL: http://canajunfinances.com/2007_02_01_archive.html
Error: HTTP-Error 999 Page too large, check settings
Linked from: http://www.canajunfinances.com/2007/03/18/sunday-lent-continued/

My tool is now telling me that my archive for February is too large? Hmmm… More stuff to look into, along with that whole “back log thang” as well.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So I think my site is actually being checked by the Google “bots” now, and when I look at the indexed pages, I see most entries, but what is interesting is that only some of my postings are individual, most are lumped into the Blogspot archive for that month. Is that a bad thing? I don’t know? My guess is that the individual entries have links to them from the outside world, whereas the rest of them, are simply lumped together for ease of storage? Don’t know, but need to figure this out more, because right now, my “micro” business has a real chance of becoming a “dead” business, I need more income, to justify this amount of work, for the $2 a day I seem to be making. Stay tuned.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Well after running SOFTPlus GsiteCrawler on all of my sites (including this one), I have found that my only site with problems now is Canadian Financial Opinions, which continues to come up with a bunch of problems like this one:

URL: http://canajunfinances.com/2007/03/<$BlogBacklinkURL$ Error: HTTP-Error 404 Not Found Linked from: http://canajunfinances.com/2007/03/new-budget-coming-or-electioncan-you/

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

OK, so now after having run the SOFTPlus GSiteCrawler and seen all the crap that all the Robots of the search engines have run into on my site, I am now sure that I am an idiot, or a bad businessman (or both). I ran it on my finance site Canadian Financial Opinions and found SO many screw ups that I am amazed that anyone finds my site, I think it is going to take all weekend to clean up that mess.

I ran it on my family web site and cleaned up a couple of issues there as well, and will run it tonight on this site just to make sure I have not screwed up too much here either. It’s a tool I would highly recommend, even if you don’t plan on saving a Sitemap (which I am not planning on doing, I just want to see what a Robot runs into going through my sites).

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.