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

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Essential Blogging [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="122" caption="Essential Blogging"][/caption] I took this book...
2. Book Review: Make Easy Money with Google Got this book out of the Ottawa Public Library...
3. More Search Traffic Interesting, that my analytics is now telling me that 24%...

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

I got approached by the folks over at Wikinvest a while ago to add them to Canadian Personal Finance Opinions and I wasn’t sure it was a good fit, but I decided to go ahead with the system anyhow, and boy am I glad I did. The amount of new traffic and also new links has given me 20% growth in my readership and it continues to grow. I have also been able to integrate their embedded graphics stuff to show off financial numbers as well, so it is very useful to me, and I would highly recommend using them if you are a Financial site.

I have been having a great deal of problems with Dreamhost this week , my server crashed twice and put my site(s) off line for over 6 hours during peek times for me. I have complained to Dreamhost, but I think I will be more formal when (and if) I decide to re-subscribed with them for the new year.

I have also been fiddling with my side advertising blocks to see if I can generate any kind of income from them, because right now, I have made Zero from them, and am starting to think that this is just a “fool’s game” when it comes to this kind of advertising.

Finally Kontera really upset me when I saw that their links are appearing on this site, however, they are not giving me any credit for it I have sent them a fairly nasty note asking what the problem is, since I have copied their code into this site’s template, and since the links are showing up the problem is most likely at their end (and they are not counting). Stay tuned, those links may disappear soon as well (since I am making pretty much nothing from them as well).

ShareThis

Related posts:

1. Wikinvest and Polls Tried out a poll from the new Polldaddy plug in...
2. Traffic Up, and Lousy Pay Back This site has had a busy week with a tremendous...
3. Another way to get traffic So the article in the Globe and Mail about me,...

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

This site has had a busy week with a tremendous day of over 300 hits on Sunday for no apparent reason, which is interesting, if not confusing. If I am to believe the statistics I have seen this is an interesting trend, but more likely than not an attack from a “scraper” or something like that. 

On the advertising front, Bidvertising will be bidding a fond adieu from my sites, as it has earned me next to nothing even with large page impression numbers, and as I have learned, no point in flogging a dead horse when it comes to advertising, move on to the next idea. I am adding more Market Leverage sponsors in my rotators to see if there is interest from my readers, but we shall see (on this site).

As for the Canadian Personal Finance web site, I feel a complete refurbish of that site coming soon as well, given the only thing that is paying for that site is Adsense.

This site continues to not be listed normally in Google as well, I must figure out what is going on there as well. More interesting articles from my past coming too, as I clean out my archives.

ShareThis

Related posts:

1. Another way to get traffic So the article in the Globe and Mail about me,...
2. Wikinvest Traffic Enhancer I got approached by the folks over at Wikinvest a...
3. Text Link Ads and Pay Per Post Oddities Text Link Ads for some reason doesn’t seem to want...

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

I wrote this post to myself on my personal blog in February while I was attempting to transition from my old site on Blogspot to my new site at Dreamhost. At the end of it, I over thought it, and should have simply shut down the Blogspot site after a month and not worried about redirection, but for those who wish to bash their heads against a wall, feel free to learn from this mistake. 

301 Redirect from Blogspot Blog

So while attempting to follow all the in’s and outs for the 301 redirect set up I made many blunders but I think I now have an 85% solution.

Using the Wordpress sitemap, I was able to get a list of most of the articles and the archives on the Wordpress side of things. I mistakenly thought that the article naming would be the same from Wordpress to Blogspot, however that was a huge error, but that is putting ahead of myself. Let’s see if I can remember each blunder as I made it.

• I had a list of links that all were of the form http://canajunfinances.com/????/??/??/<article title> which needed to have the site stripped off them and then the date stripped off before the title name so that it became /YEAR/MN/<article title> .
• I installed VIM (vi for windows) to do a lot of this.
• First I imported .xml sitemap file into Excel and then stripped out the unusable columns, leaving a single column of the format in the first bullet. I then duplicated that column so I had two columns and then saved the file in tab separated format.
• The error with using excel which then saved it, is that it broke a bunch of the longer lines into TWO lines, but I only figured that one out later.
• I opened the text file in VIM, and replaced the http://canajunfinances.com with what was needed to make Redirect 301 old-page-trail new-page-full-URL.
• So now I had a file with two columns with all of these 301 redirects which I then saved as .htaccess.
• On my web site I saved the existing .htaccess file in a BACKUP directory and then noted it had stuff in it already, so I appended all my redirects onto the end and tried it on my site. SERVER FAILURE messages came up. I put back the old .htaccess and the site came back.
• I then shot myself in the foot by accidently deleting a bunch of the files in my blog’s directory, spent 1/2 an hour piecing it back together. Don’t do that!
• Tried a few iterations of the .htaccess file, the first one with just the Month archives, which worked fine.
  • To test it you have to go to the BLOGSPOT publish section and point the BLOGSPOT blog to the new site. It is also easy to undo.

  I got bold and tried a bigger file and it failed.

• After trying that a few times, I then decided to test my .htaccess file on my home wordpress config on my local pc (no ftp involved and no danger of screwing up my real site).
• Tried full .htaccess file again, Server failure.
  • Removed most of the list, and the server was fine.
  • Added month at a time, and waited to get a failure, which I then found, after a few additions.
  • This is where I figured out that the command lines were getting broken into two lines with a ^M in them. Had to fix all of those (about 100 of them) by hand.
  • Once they were all fixed I had a complete file that did not cause my server to crash. Notice I didn’t say that worked right.

  Now that I had a .htaccess file that didn’t cause my server to crash I uploaded it to my Wordpress site via FTP.

• Moved blogspot to point at my new site, month archives worked fine, so then I tried out some of my individual postings, and started getting Error 404 (article not found).
• Learned that Blogspot removes many common words from their posting addresses on line, such as “A”, “THE” and a few other, so by hand I removed those from a plethora (over 300) postings.
• Oh I also had to remove the DAY date from the postings earlier on as well (on EVERY posting, over 750).

I now have a working .htaccess that I sure does not work for every single posting, but should point most of the posts over from my old site. I need to create entries for categories, and other things as well.

Epilogue

It all worked eventually but I must have spent over 30 hours elapsed time on this, and at the end of it, I still ended up with a ZERO Page Rank for a while because Google thought I was attempting to double post the same content. 

I would suggest doing what I have done now, which is blow away the old blogspot site after a grace period, recreate it and have it have 1 post which points to your new site, and then use various tools to find all the links to your OLD site and ask the owners of the linking site to update their links to your new site. Might take a little less time, too!

ShareThis

Related posts:

1. Moving from Blogspot to Hosted Wordpress? Simply use a 301 redirect with some devilishly ingenious code...
2. How to: Move from Blogspot to Hosted Wordpress — Internal Links The more I learn, the more I realize how much...
3. Brilliant Blog Marketing I read about this trick to drive traffic to your...

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

Comment relish turned out to be a bit of a non-helpful plug in, as it continued to send thank you e-mails to folks it had already thanked, and I actually got a couple of complaints about it, so I have removed it from the Finance Site.

I have added Comment Luv to the systems to see if anyone appreciates adding their own posts to my comments, we shall see whether it turns out to be of any value either.  This allows commenters to include links back to articles in their comments, to show some luv for the comment. I’ll see what this causes (my guess is a fair amount of SPAM, so I will be keeping my audit’ing on as well).

Text Link Ads are really pissing me off, as this is the second month where they have allowed “advertisers” to have ads up on my web site for an entire month, withdraw on the last day, and I don’t get any money for it? WTF? That is seriously bad karma, and I may remove it from my site, if this keeps up.

I have also removed Pingcrawl from this site, as it kept causing my posts to screw up and I never really got any valuable links out of it, so I have deactivated it for now as well.

Had some air-head from a “Pay Day Loan” company ask me about Advertising, and I normally don’t even answer those, but they were asking to advertise on my Blogspot site (you know the one that has 1 post and it points back to my normal site), so I played along and they were going to pay $250 for the whole year, until I pointed out I was not going to update the site, then they asked to advertise on my real site. The Karmic part of this mess is that this is the same group that said my advertising rates were too high and that I had no right to charge that much for advertising. You can guess my response.

Have a great weekend

ShareThis

Related posts:

1. Comments Are Really Important Yes, there are a couple of ways to tell whether...
2. Answer your comments Comments are a funny thing, at first when I started...
3. Moral Question So I have thus far held off letting any of...

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

Dell Vostro and the Corrupt Vista BCD

This post is mostly a note page for me on how I fixed my wife’s DELL Vostro  1400.

This morning I woke up and tried to boot my wife’s Vostro and got a “Screen of Death” of sorts.

File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc0000034
Info: The Windows Boot Configuration Data file is missing required information

In hindsight I suspect that Norton Anti-virus did something to the system, because the previous night Norton Anti-virus put up a note saying, “Doing stuff in the background”, and this morning the system was dead? Interesting coincidence at least.

Naturally I go to google and type in “Vista BCD Boot Fail” and found the following link:

Corrupt \Boot\BCD in Windows Vista

Which made me feel better, because at least someone was posting something about this issue. First thing it said I needed was a Vista Boot DVD, luckily I had my upgrade DVD (to Home Premium) so I was able to boot from it (after hitting F12 and choosing the DVD as the boot media).

The post above talked about recovering the boot track using a backup utility which I didn’t have, however it pointed to:

This useful Microsoft help page

Which outlined three fix procedures, all 3 of which failed miserably for me, but taught me a lot about how to debug windows, boot areas.

Frustrated I went back to Google and typed in: “Dell Vostro BCD Boot Fail” and found this:

The Real Answer from Microsoft Help

Which in fact outlines how to use bootrec, which fixes the boot record for the Windows Vista operating system.

The following steps are what I did exactly, after booting from the Vista boot DVD and choosing the command prompt:

Note If rebuilding the BCD does not resolve the startup issue, you can export and delete the BCD, and then run this option again. By doing this, you make sure that the BCD is completely rebuilt. To do this, type the following commands at the Windows RE command prompt:

• bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
• c:
• cd boot
• attrib bcd -s -h -r
• ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
• bootrec /RebuildBcd

I rebooted after each command returned correctly and voila the system was back up.

Epilogue

Given I did a bunch of crap, including trying old restore points, I assume I have buggered up the system in some fashion or another, but we shall see there.

Norton came up and complained about being corrupted so I have reloaded it as well, and hopefully it will not do whatever it did last night to corrupt the BCD? Or whatever..

Sorry folks, needed to write this down, a little off topic, but useful to me.

ShareThis

Related posts:

1. Damn You Dell! You stole my idea! I was going to relaunch DEVO’s...

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

Simply use a 301 redirect with some devilishly ingenious code from TechCounter:

301 Permanent Redirect from Blogger Beta to WordPress

11. May 2007, 10:51 By Ryan Ferone

Most Bloggers start out with free blog hosting with the most popular of the free services being Google’s blogger where you get a yoursite.blogspot.com address. Now you want to move from Blogger to your own domain. One of the best publishing software is provided by WordPress and the best part is it is free. Importing to WordPress from Blogger used to be a breeze using WordPress’s import posts feature. However when Google moved from Blogger to the new Blogger or Blogger Beta, it became impossible to use WordPress’s import utility.

However, you can now do so with the steps outlined here about Importing Blogger Beta Posts to WordPress

Many users were able to implement this method successfully. Now, we move to the next step. Lets deal with some questions I had so far …

1. What happens to my old blogger blog? Should I just delete it after importing to WordPress?

2. I heard Google penalizes duplicate content. I now have my posts at both my old blogger blog and my new Wordpress blog hosted on my domain. What should I do?

3. You mentioned using the 301 permanent redirect from blogger to wordpress. Can i do it?

Okay … lets deal with these questions first.

1. No, you should not delete your Blogger blog. I am sure you worked hard at it. You might have many subscribers to that blog. The search engines have content indexed to that blog. What happens if you delete your blogger blog is simple … you end up LOSING ALL YOUR TRAFFIC, all your loyal subscribers and visitors simply because they dont know your new address.

2. Yes, Google penalizes duplicate content. How do you deal with this.. well read on

3. When people move from their old website to a new one they use a 301 permanent redirect method without being penalized by the search engines. However, you cannot do this straight up with Blogger because you do not have access to your .htaccess file. So its not a simple plug and play unfortunately because of this.

How to redirect your old Blogger posts to your New wordpress blog posts using a permanent redirect

I wanted to thank Owen Barder for his excellent code to redirect your individual posts from blogger to wordpress. Also, thanks to Tom Sherman. I will try to stick to what these two guys have to tell.

Using the method outlined here, you will be able to

1. Redirect your visitors from your old Blogger blog to your WordPress Blog on your domain

2. Redirect your old posts to new posts on your wordpress blog instead of redirecting them just to your home page of your wordpress blog

3. Do all this in such a way that Google does not penalize you. You also get to transfer your Google Page Rank too. How about that ….. !

Step # 1: Import from Blogger Beta to your WordPress domain

I am assuming that you backed up your blog and Imported to your WordPress domain from the new Blogger or Blogger Beta. If you didn’t do, check out my article on Import from Blogger Beta to WordPress

Step # 2: Modify your Blogger Template to include redirects

Log into your Blogger account. Go to Template and then Edit HTML. Paste the code shown below where you replace http://www.yoursite.com with the root URL of your Wordpress Blog

a. Add the code below after <Blogger> in your template

<MainOrArchivePage>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
var blog_root=http://www.yoursite.com/;
document.location.href=blog_root;
//–></script>
</MainOrArchivePage>

<ItemPage>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
var process_page=”http://www.yoursite.com/bloggerposts.php”;
var newpage=process_page;
var oldlink=”<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>”;

newpage+=”?p=”+oldlink;
newpage=newpage.toLowerCase();
document.location.href=newpage;
//–></script>
</ItemPage>

b. Add the line shown here somewhere in between the <head> ..</head> tags of your blog

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.yoursite.com/” />

Notice the space between /” and the />

somewhere in between the <head></head> tags like this:

<head>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.yoursite.com”>
</head>

Step # 3: Prepare your WordPress blog for Redirects

a. Open Notepad. Copy and paste the code given below. Save it as bloggerposts.php or anything else you want and put it in the root location of your wordpress blog. By root, I mean not in any wp-admin or any other folder, but in the root and the link should be something like http://www.yoursite.com/bloggerposts.php

<?php

require($_SERVER[’DOCUMENT_ROOT’].’/blog/wp-blog-header.php’);
$search_link = $_GET[’p'];
$vars = explode(’/’, $search_link);
$num = count($vars) - 1;
$filename = $vars[$num];
$slug = str_replace(”.html”, “”, $filename);

$SQL = “SELECT posts.* FROM $wpdb->posts AS posts WHERE posts.post_name = ‘$slug’ LIMIT 1″;
$posts = $wpdb->get_results(”$SQL”);

if ($posts) {
foreach ($posts as $post) {
$found_link = get_permalink($post->ID);
}
}
else
{
$found_link = “http://www.yoursite.com/”;
}

?>

<html>
<head>
<title>Redirecting…</title>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
document.location.href=”<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”;
//–></script>

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2;url=<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”>

</head>
<body>
<h1>Redirecting…</h1>
<p>You can also proceed immediately to <a href=”<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”><?php echo ($found_link); ?></a>.</p>
<p>The main blog URL is <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/” mce_href=”http://www.yoursite.com/”>www.yoursite.com</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

All you need to do in the above code is wherever you see http://www.yoursite.com , change it to the root location of your WordPress blog. What this code is doing is taking the URL from Step # 2 and redirect the user to the corresponding entry in your wordpress blog. In case it does not find the corresponding entry, it redirects to the homepage of your blog.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on Wordpress
• Brian Gardner Launches Revolution Two Open-Source WordPress Theme
• WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress 2.7 Soon, Security Upgrade …

ShareThis

Related posts:

1. How To: Redirect Blogspot to Point at Wordpress Hosted Blog I wrote this post to myself on my personal blog...
2. How to: Move from Blogspot to Hosted Wordpress — Internal Links The more I learn, the more I realize how much...
3. One Last Shot at Bannishing Blogspot I am attempting to banish my blogspot version of Canadian...

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

So after figuring it was long enough wait I have destroyed and recreated both original entries of my Blogs.

Originally this site was Not How To Do It on Blogspot and it held pretty much an exact duplicate of a lot of the entries in this site, however, I did the following steps:

1. Log onto the Blogspot web site
2. Go to the Template section and save the HTML that is the template for this site (I copied it into Notepad)
3. Go into the Settings area for the blog, at the bottom select DELETE this blog from Blogspot (be very sure when you do this because it will disappear completely).
4. Wait about 5 minutes for Blogspot to settle down
5. Go back and CREATE the exact same blog, with the exact same domain name (change the title to say OLD Version of site, or something like that).
6. Once creation is complete, copy back the Template from the site you saved.
7. Turn off all Comment capabilities.
8. Create an entry that says We Have Moved that points to your new site

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on How To
• Dummies Guide to Blogger

ShareThis

Related posts:

1. How To: Redirect Blogspot to Point at Wordpress Hosted Blog I wrote this post to myself on my personal blog...
2. Moving from Blogspot to Hosted Wordpress? Simply use a 301 redirect with some devilishly ingenious code...
3. How to: Move from Blogspot to Hosted Wordpress — Internal Links The more I learn, the more I realize how much...

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

Essential Blogging

I took this book out of the Ottawa Public library just to see what interesting tid bits I might pick up, as I usually find all books by O’Reilly and Associates very informative.

The book itself is an excellent resource for beginner bloggers who want to start out and figure out how to set up their blog (using Blogspot as their hosting software). It does a step by step set up procedure and then starts adding in more and more details for the beginner to “tweak” and enhance their content to get more readers and more interest in what they write (unless you are writing a blog you don’t want anybody to read, very useful advice).

When I first started blogging I think I would have appreciated this book a lot more because it talks about changing the default templates from Blogspot and how to use all the variables that blogspot gives you access to.  Lots of information on how to customize the default blogroll for the blogspot set up would have helped me a lot as well.

Some information about Movable type work, that I skimmed, since I wasn’t really interested in it.

Review:Overall a very useful book for the beginner blogger who wants to get started quickly and wants to learn the ins and outs of blogging and get up and running quickly. If you use blogspot I would also recommend this book (although hopefully there is a newer version that elaborates on the Widgets in the new Blogspot configuration). 

I did not buy this book, I borrowed it from the Ottawa Public Library and would not buy it myself, but it was a useful read for me.

ISBN: 0-596-0038-9

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on Book Review
• Book Review
• Book Review: The Islamist by Ed Husain
• Alan Gratz
• Comedy

• Related Blogs on How To
• How to get great client insights

ShareThis

Related posts:

1. Book Review: SEO Search Engine Optimization Bible [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="SEO Bible from Amazon"][/caption] SEO Bible...
2. Book Review: Make Easy Money with Google Got this book out of the Ottawa Public Library...
3. Scheduling Blogging Time So one of my biggest issues with my writing is...

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

I have been trying to find a smart way to clean up my old blog on blog spot Canadian Financial Rants, but I finally bit the bullet and deleted it and then recreated it.  That purged all of the entries on the site, and now it has a single entry telling whoever trips over the site to go to Canadian Personal Finance Opinions, instead. My concern is with the old site still around if Google’s bots found it and went through it my page rank would get set back to zero (again), as it stands now, the only official copies of my content are now on Canadian Financial Opinions, so I am happy with that.

I also noticed that Alexa has 82 sites that link into Canadian Financial Rants, so I used Alexa to point out these sites and then started sending the Blog owners where the links are that the blog they are pointing at has moved to Canadian Financial Opinions. Where it was not possible, I simply left a comment on the site that also pointed to Canadian Financial Opinions, so hopefully this will add to my Alexa IN-Link count and this might help my Page Rank as well, we shall see on that part, but a useful way to find messed up links too.

ShareThis

Related posts:

1. Alexa Ranking So my Alexa Ranking for Canadian Financial Stuff is dismal,...
2. Alexa Rank Change My Alexa rank dropped (i.e. got bigger) a couple of...
3. Alexa Toolbar is Helping My Ranking So adding the Alexa toolbar to my Firefox seems to...

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