Sitemaps Rule!

November 16, 2006 | 1 Comment

I recently started using GSiteCrawler to create my sitemaps for Google. This program creates XML sitemaps in the open configuration used by Google (Google released this XML protocol under a Creative Commons license).

Now, I’m really glad that I did.

I’ve seen a significant increase in my search engine traffic.
Plus, yesterday, Google, LiveSearch (formerly called MSN) and Yahoo announced that MSN and Yahoo would support the same protocol — one sitemap for all three!

Of course, you still have to validate your sites and register the sitemaps for the individual search engine, but that’s not a bad effort.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Blogs, Internet Marketing, Monetizing Your Site, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Traffic & Linking 

Powweb Sale Continues

November 1, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Powweb, my web host of choice, offered a special during October — 25% off of their regular $7.77/month price for one- and two-year web-hosting purchases.

Their web site announced that the sale is back by popular demand. New users can purchase the One Plan for only $5.77/month for their initial 1-year or 2-year purchase.

I’m hosting 10 active domains — and some subdomains, too — in one Powweb package. The One Plan package allows unlimited domains to be hosted in an account. That’s a huge benefit at this small price.

The Powweb One Plan features 20GB space, 13GB/day throughput, PHP, Perl, MySQL, FrontPage Extensions, Blog software, forum software, shopping cart packages, photo galleries and a lot more, all for that one price.

I thought the deal was great at $93.24 per year ($7.77 per month), but at $69.24, it’s a fantastic deal — plus, they’ve got a 30-day money-back guarantee.

All my sites are hosted at Powweb

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Apache Web Server, Blogs, CSS, HTML, PHP Scripting, Web Hosting 

Email Address on the Web?

October 30, 2006 | 2 Comments

Do you post your email address on your web site?

Almost all of us do — we almost have to do this — but that makes it easily harvestible by spammers’ spiders.

There are some tricks you can use to make your email address available to visitors but not for the robot spiders…

First, you can use one of several JavaScript encryption systems. These are designed to have your encrypted email address within the JavaScript, but to use the visitor’s web browser to decode and display the address.

This works fine when the user has JavaScript turned on… but doesn’t work at all if she has turned off JavaScript (ActiveScript in Internet Explorer) for security reasons.

The second method is the one that I normally use — it’s called Spam-me-not. Although the web page says that it uses JavaScript, it really doesn’. It simply encodes the individual characters of the email address into mixed decimal and hexadecimal HTML character codes.

For example, the character “t” can be coded as “t” or as “t” or as a “t” — and the web browser will understand, decode and display a “t” character.

Fortunately, for now, the spiders aren’t that smart…

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Blogs, HTML, Traffic & Linking, Usability, Visitor Experience 

The New Chitika ShopCloud$ Ad System

October 28, 2006 | 1 Comment

Chitika has a new advertising product for web site publishers to use. I just found out about it recently and wanted to become a beta tester — but, even better, it’s been released to eMiniMalls publishers for use on their sites. It’s called ShopCloud$, and it is a neat, new interactive tool for Chitika affiliate advertisers.

ShopCloud$ is an advertising system based on keyword “tags.” When a visitor clicks on a keyword, they are taken to a related set of merchant listings.

This is what a ShopCloud$ looks like:

It’s easy to pick from the many pre-defined sets of keywords. Want keywords that are PC Notebook related, pick the Category Hint “PC Laptops.” In addition to the predefined sets for specific categories of words,there’s another called “Seasonal Specials” for popular items.

Of course, we also have plenty of control over the colors used in the ads we display, so we can blend them into our sites.

The great thing about Chitika eMiniMalls (their other advertising system) is that, as publishers, we can define our own keywords for the ads. Well, we can do that for ShopCloud$, too!

I’m using them on my Computer for Christmas site to show tagged clouds for desktop computers, notebook computers, graphics cards, sound cards and software.

Sign up to become a Chitika publisher here

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Advertising, Blogs, Chitika, Monetizing Your Site, Visitor Experience 

Computer For Christmas BLOG

October 28, 2006 | Leave a Comment

In an earlier post, I wrote about my redesigned Computer for Christmas site.

Since then, I’ve added my Computer for Christmas Blog to the site. In the blog, I write about the current issues for new computer buyers - whether they are first-time computer buyers or long-time computer users.

Sometimes, these will be hardware-related. Others will be software related. This Christmas, they are Windows Vista-related, too!

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Blogs 

SEO - Google Link Analysis

October 28, 2006 | Leave a Comment

The “My SEO Tips” blog has a very interesting — and readable — SEO article about Google’s link analysis patent.

Rather than forcing you to read through a convoluted patent application, full of the esoteric gibberish of patent lawyers, this short article presents some basics from the article.

The most important point I picked up from the article is that Google doesn’t just look for inbound links, it looks for regular growth in inbound links…

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Blogs, SEO, Traffic & Linking 

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