So People have been talking about using apache’s mod_rewrite capability in order to redirect their dynamic web URLs to something that looks static. In other words, instead of showing something like
example.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22044&page=3
example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26
you would show something like
example.com/forumname/title-of-thread-283.html
example.com/article/name-of-article.html
Apache calls mod_rewrite, the Swiss Army Knife of URL manipulation. If you are unfamiliar with what it does, or want to learn all the technical aspects of what it does, you can learn more from apache’s website.
Good or Bad Idea?
That all depends. It seems as though there are as many articles saying it’s a good idea as there are articles saying it’s a bad idea. So lets get technical for a minute and determine just what exactly you want to use mod_rewrite for in the first place and what you expect out of it.
Blogs
If you are using Wordpress as your blogging weapon of choice then there is no need to worry about using mod_rewrite seeing as how you can simply choose month and name from your permalinks option in your settings to modify your URL structure. I know what you are going to say next… “But I have already been blogging and I want all of my old articles to be redirected!” See, I told you. I’m psychic. You guys, girls and cats (I’m on to you felines) can just install the yoast permalink redirect plugin for wordpress.
I haven’t exactly looked at the code so I don’t know if it will be effective if you change your permalink structure from a custom one to another custom one. Though, Redirection seems to have many more features and much better functionality. If i were to choose to install one right now, I’d probably go with the Redirection purely for it’s power. The features look to be much better but it might take you longer to manage and get everything right, though, having not used it I can’t be completely sure. I like the idea of being able to track which URLs get redirected and how many times each URL gets redirected. The yoast plugin is very simple. Neither of them use mod_rewrite either.
So basically Wordpress is pretty SEO friendly out of the box. It’s has a simple structure format allowing bots to crawl and rank your site very easily. I bet I can guess what you are thinking now… “So if we shouldn’t use mod_rewrite for our blogs, why even write this post?” I bet you are really impressed at my psychic ability now aren’t you… I don’t blame you, I impress myself as well. Let’s go back to why one might be interested in using mod_rewrite for a minute. The answer is content management systems and forums!
Using mod_rewrite for Forums and CMS
So you run a forum and have no doubt run into a bunch of SEO mods for it. What are the real benefits of rewriting your URLs? Is it a good idea? Is it a bad idea? It’s a good thing you stopped by this blog because you obviously need my help (remember, I’m psychic).
Meh… There is no simple answer but in general it’s kind of a bad idea, kinda. In order to give you an idea of why, i’ll list some pros and cons of using mod_rewrite.
Cons
Google is fully capable of crawling dynamic web pages. There used to be a time where Google suggested you avoid using id=foo in your url because it would have trouble crawling your site. In that article, Google publicly states they have no problem crawling dynamic content and people shouldn’t be afraid to use them. Keep in mind that article is a few weeks from being two years old. Google has some of the best programmers and you can be sure they are fully aware of what type of websites they are ranking.
Server load. Depending on how much traffic you get to your forum or website, you can be sure there is going to be some sort of server load for all of your rewritten URLs.
There are also a few sources that suggest the benefit you receive from using keywords in your URL is minimal and that it’s more important to focus on your title, keyword density, meta description, meta keywords (aren’t extremely helpful anymore) and incoming links.
If you move a topic on your forum, you must realize that linked pages are going to get 404′d. Same thing with deleted topics. So you are going to have to take this into account when you moderate your website and over time, things can get dirty, real dirty.
Though, most believe keywords in URLs still do help to some degree… So, as you expected (no you aren’t as psychic as me) here are the…
Pros
They can cut down and simplify URLs with too many parameters. Having too many parameters in your URL makes it more difficult for bots to crawl.
They make your URL more human friendly, therefore generating more interest when you do show up in SERPs.
When utilized properly, they can take care of all duplicate content (yes, this can be done in robots.txt)
So is it a Good Idea or Bad Idea?
So my answer is, it’s up to you depending on your application and setup. If you are running VBulletin, the major popular vbseo modification probably isn’t going to be worth the money and there are some tools you might want to use instead. For more information, you should check out this forum post.
On my basketball forum, I actually have opted to use mod_rewrite using phpbb-seo’s mods. I’ve decided to use it because I wanted to use the rest of the tools phpbb-seo had to offer. Most of them were pretty good. So I downloaded their pre-modded phpbb3 updated version and ran a diff merge to my custom phpbb3 and added all their code. I haven’t noticed a difference in the speed of my site and everything looks pretty clean. Though, I’ve had to tell my moderators to lock threads if possible instead of deleting them and to leave a shadow of the topic in the forum if they are going to move the topic.
I’ve also felt it was a good option because it completely takes care of duplicate content for me. I thought I had it taken care of with my custom robots.txt rules but this way, I can be completely sure. I’ve also noticed that my individual forums are getting ranked much better and google is showing me some love. I love that google shows me love and you should love it too.
To sum it all up, there are certain applications where I believe it makes sense to use mod_rewrite for SEO URLs and other times when it might not make a difference. Though, if you are interested in learning more on how to rewrite URLS for yourself in your .htaccess or httpd.conf file, check out the htmlist guide for using mod_rewrite.
Don’t forget to subscribe and/or comment!
Tags: Blogs, Forums, mod_rewrite, Redirect, SEO
As few of you may know right now, but many of you may be able to tell in the future, I’ve neglected to write any articles here for a while. It’s been about two weeks. Part of it is because of exhaustion from working elsewhere and part of it is because of another website I have.
That website has been increasing in popularity rather quickly. I have been working on it and doing so because the site is basketball related. The olympics have been going on and I needed to adjust accordingly. Sure I should have posted here a bit more and I wouldn’t exactly be “practicing what I preach” by taking the time off but there is a point. A method to the madness if you will.
You must prioritize your responsibilities.
For me, with this site, I’m still chilling in the Google Sandbox. I’ll discuss that in more detail later. The fact of the matter is i’m not going to be respected for a bit. For most websites, when they are in the sandbox, they work on their SEO.
I know there is a lot of potential to this blog and I know I can get there but really, it’s pretty tough knowing you need to work on a site and publish articles and you aren’t going to get google’s respect for a period of time. Though, the more often you write, the quicker you get out of the sandbox.
I guess I have just been prioritizing my other blog which has been growing pretty steadily so far. I also run a forum that I’m in the middle of optimizing and ohh boy. Optimizing a forum properly is much different than a blog.
Though, I must admit. The spiders have been crawling this site like crazy. Anyway, this is your update and I’ll keep you posted. Until I get out of this sandbox not many of you will even read this… 
Tags: new blog, prioritize, Sandbox, Time Management
For some reason, The Simpsons comes to mind when thinking about the 12 day since purchasing this domain. I’m picturing Bart and Lisa knocking on Burns’ giant mansion door and upon seeing kids after opening the door, Burns yells “Release the spiders!” Yep, instead of the hounds being released it appears as though Google has released the spiders. Well, to be accurate it’s not just Google. I’m getting a few. Here are my top 10.
| Visits |
|
| Java |
362 |
49.5%
|
| Google |
92 |
12.6%
|
| Yahoo! |
54 |
7.4%
|
| Twingly |
43 |
5.9%
|
| Moreover |
26 |
3.6%
|
| BlogPulse |
23 |
3.1%
|
| FeedBurner |
23 |
3.1%
|
| Technorati |
20 |
2.7%
|
| DoCoMo |
20 |
2.7%
|
| WordPress |
14 |
1.9%
|
On the 12th day, it seems I did something that really got them paying attention to this website. I’ll have to figure it out and keep you all updated. It may just be natural. Either way, spiders visits went from 5 to 96 and then to 238. In the past 5 days the site had anywhere between 10 and 40 unique visitors. Personally, I’m more happy about the dramatic increase in spiders because those directly lead to getting your page ranked.
Spiders, bots, webcrawlers, etc.. are essentially programs that go through massive amounts of websites and keep track of the information on them. So Google’s spider is going to crawl around and visit my site and go to each of the pages it can find and read all the content as well as the meta tags for the page it located. It takes the list of the important words I defined in my meta tags (using wordpress all-in-one seo) as well as the title of the page and compares it to the content. Then the Google bot analyzes the data and stores it in it’s database.
Eventually, when Google trusts my site enough, it will begin to show each one of my pages in it’s search results. Where I’m positioned in Google’s results is determined by many different factors and I’m sure I’ll get into that later. Since Google’s method for ranking is proprietary and only known by them, we have to get as much knowledge as possible on how they work. Google talks about it to the public and the general idea of what to do and how to do it is pretty much known.
Not all spiders are used to index your blog pages on search engines. Some are used to collect email addresses for spam. Some are used to determine if you have any copywrited content on your page. Some are used to gather your content and then publish them on their own websites. Some are used to scan for security vulnerabilities on your website.
This is why it’s important to have some sort of tool for your blog that allows you to analyze the traffic and the spiders that visit your website. I use statpress for wordpress to quickly analyze the traffic. I also have various other stat tools including one from my web host. Analyzing your traffic is important for many different reasons, the above is just one of them.
If you are using Google Adsense, one of the spiders that will visit your site will be used to determine what your blog is about in order to display relevant advertisements on your page.
Overall, the presence of an increase in spiders is important because it means your site is getting out there. It means that your internet presence is increasing and various search engines are aware of your site and are going to rank it in searches.
An increase in spiders directly leads to an increase in traffic.
Tags: Bots, google, SEO, Spiders, traffic
So after hearing the FeedBurner name get thrown around a few blogs I frequent, I decided to give it a try. So I registered for an account and was surprised that the “Pro” option was free. This put a smile to my face; the good. I also realized quickly (after clicking on a help topic) that Google bought FeedBurner out which is why and when they made the Pro features free.
For those not quite familiar with FeedBurner, It is essentially an RSS feed management service that was launched in 2004 and purchased by Google in 2007. As of the date of writing this article, FeedBurner has 1,057,910 publishers and have “burned” 1,879,482 different feeds. As you may be able to tell, most people seem to have more than 1 blog on average.
People use FeedBurner because of the features. It gives the user the option to subscribe using whichever aggregator they choose and can even allow users to subscribe by email which is an interesting option that many people may use. They also keep statistics of your feeds, give you an approximation of how many people are subscribed to your RSS (only aproximate because they don’t keep track of your subscribers that don’t use the FeedBurner service).
Is using FeedBurner really worth the features though? There have been many opponents to using FeedBurner as a means to analyze your traffic and data. Syndicating your feeds through FeedBurner comes at a cost. You will lose the link popularity that comes with managing your own RSS Feeds. mktgchelsea.com is one of those opponents and has written an inciteful article about the subject though, it seems a bit outdated.
What I think mktgchelsea has not yet discovered (probably for various reasons), is this article by FeedBurner about SEO. They recommend using a free product in addition to FeedBurner called mybrand. As quoted from their article:
“Our MyBrand service (one of our few paid services) allows you to map a subdomain so that your feed URL becomes “feeds.yourdomain.com” instead of “feeds.feedburner.com”. Either option gives you plenty of opportunity to rank well in search results, but publishers looking to have maximum consistency between their feed and site (not to mention publishers who are looking for maximum portability of feed URLs) might consider using MyBrand.”
Although they state that it is a paid service, it is now free. My guess is that the Google acquisition is responsible once again responsible. So, instead of directing users to feedburner.com/username for their feeds, you can now have them direction from a subdomain on your own URL. I’m sure Google is quite aware of the importance of inbound links, subscribers, and SEO in general and by using this method which is now provided by them, I think the SEO bugs have been fixed for the most part.
As always, I’ll keep you updated on anything new. Be sure to comment and Subscribe to my feed.
You can read a bit more from FeedBurner’s Wikipedia entry or from FeedBurner itself. For you new bloggers just getting started and are a bit lost, see my article on what RSS feeds are.
Tags: FeedBurner, RSS, SEO
Simply put, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The RSS document is often called feeds or web feeds and it allows people to subscribe to your blog. They will be notified whenever you write a new post in the software they choose to get their feeds. This software is often called an RSS reader, feed reader, or aggregator.
Subscribers can use various tools to see your new articles. As a publisher, you may allow your readers to get the title and the full article written or just a summary. The most important thing you need to know about RSS feeds is that they help your blog gain readership loyalty. They are going to be notified whenever you write a new article and if the title and intro interests them enough, they will go read your article.
This is another reason why it is important for your blog to have well written titles designed for not only SEO but with your subscribers in mind. I’ll write more on that later though.
As a publisher, you should be well informed about RSS and hopefully you use it yourself. It’s good for you to keep up to date with not only my blog (subscibe to blog4booty) but other blogs that are related to your blog. By subscribing to other blogs you can keep up to date with the community of bloggers which is an important community to belong to as a blog publisher. Getting involved is very important for you to create recognition for yourself and your blog, getting inbound links, and getting news that you yourself should be genuinely interested in reading.
Learn more about RSS feeds:
Some popular Aggregators:
Tags: RSS
Choosing what you want to blog about
I suppose I could have written about this a little bit sooner as it seems that the very first step for most people will be to purchase their domain name, host, and even more importantly what they are going to blog about. Well at least I got to it early right?
There are many things to take into consideration when you are determining what exactly you want your blog to be about. First and foremost, you need to consider your goals. How much money do you want to make? Are you trying to make a career out of your blog? If so, then you came to the right place. I’m sure by now, and especially if you are reading this article, you already have a topic in mind. Here are some things to ask yourself before you make the decision to buy a domain name.
1. How passionate are you about the subject?
Choosing what you are passionate about is absolutely critical to determining whether or not you are going to succeed in making money from your blog. If you are not able to go on and on and bore most people you know about your subject then how do you expect to spend enough time on your blog in order to make money? Here is an easy way to figure out whether or not you will be able to survive in the field or subject you have chosen.
Do you belong to any forums on the subject? If you don’t then you need to. Online forums are a vast source of knowledge and just being in the community will help increase your reputation and you will learn a ton of information as a result.
What do you find yourself researching the most on Google? Chances are, that’s whatever you should be writing about. Though, be sure you don’t pick too broad of a subject like I did unless you have the right work ethic to succeed in whichever idea you are interested. In that case, go with what you know and work your very hardest to achieve the best results on Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
2. How much money do you want to make?
This is a very important question to ask yourself. How much money do you really, truly want to make? If you are trying to earn the absolute most money that you can, then you should immediately avoid any subjects that do not have timeless content. Timeless content is essentially content that people are going to be interested in for a long time. If you are writing about anything that can fall in the category of news, realize that you must spend even more time aquiring a list of dedicated readers because nobody is going to search for your topic for very long. Most of your search results are going to be geared towards the most recent topics you have written about.
When you write timeless content, people are always going to be interested in every article you have written. If you are writing a blog about self-help, then you will realize that people are constantly going to be looking for articles on how to give up coffee or how to make more friends. You see, with these blogs, every single post is going to increase your traffic. With each and every post you write, more of your articles are going to show up on google. It’s as simple as this. If you have one article that can get 10 clicks a day, why not create 2 articles that can get 10 clicks a day? In enough time you are going to have hundreds of articles that are each generating a certain amount of clicks per day. The main people that succeed with news related links are those that can answer yes to question 3.
3. Are you respected as an authority in your field?
If you are respected as an authority in your field for one reason or another or you already have people interested in your opinion on current events then you may as well increase your already existing reader base by a blog. A good example of building up a base like this a site like drunkenstepfather.com which is currently ranked 3,295 on alexa wheras a site with timeless content like http://www.problogger.net is ranked just 22,056. The difference? Well, authority. People want to know the gossip from drunkenstepfather. It has a massive audience and he ranks highly as a result. So if you are in the position to monetize your blog successfully with content that isn’t timeless, go ahead.
4. What is the difference between your blog and the other blogs out there?
Yet another important question. If you aren’t providing anything different, then how do you expect to get at the top of Google? Google relies on inbound links in order for it to respect a site the most. This will essentially rank your website and articles higher in their search engine. It’s a tough thing to do. It is essentially why I am trying harder to provide my readers with good, meaningful content. If people find what I write meaningful, they will link their friends. They will link in their blogs. They will do it naturally. There is no way I’m going to do it all myself.
If your blog is exactly like any other blog with the same subject and you don’t do anything different then why should people link to your article or look you up or even read you? How would expect to earn your traffic? If you are just spewing out the same stuff that another site has and using their articles to recreate your own, then why should people link to you?
Tags: Blog Topic, New Blogs, SEO
Time management is one of the most important things to consider for creating and maintaining a popular blog. Scratch that. It is the most important thing. It is one of the reasons most people aren’t capable of making decent money. Those that utilize their time wisest are the only people that will make good money. It doesn’t have to be with a blog or anything on the internet. Those that effectively manage their time will make more than those that don’t. It’s that simple. Why do you think they coined the “phrase time is money”?
If you are not sold with this idea or are unwilling to commit to it fully then you should just quit now. Do not pass go, do not collect that chest of pirates booty waiting for you. Here are some tips on efficiently using your time.
1. Keep your distractions to a minimum
If you are like me at all you can easily justify to yourself that having those extra tabs in your browser open is really important. You may also have the TV on your favorite show. Others may be talking on an instant messaging client, sitting with their family, letting your mind wander, checking that email that just popped up. When you are trying to accomplish anything in the religion of money, distractions are the devil. You must think of money as your god and serve it the best way you know how. For those of you that are religious and get offended, leave all the comments you want. It’s not blasphemy it’s the truth. Simple. For how offended you might be from that comment is how offended you should be at your distractions. When you do get distracted, realize what is happening and change your actions. Get back on track.
2. Make a list of your goals and make sure you work toward them.
Write down your goals and respect these goals. Set short term goals for yourself. Do not create goals about your expected earnings, traffic, or anything that is related to results. The reason for this is because you are likely to set yourself up for disappointment. Here are some examples of goals you should be setting for yourself:
- Write 5 good articles for the week
- Comment on 20 other articles from blogs that relate to yours
- Research for 20 hours during the week
- Write 1 article, comment 5 articles I’ve read, Join a respected forum in the field (daily goals)
Goals should be clear and concise. You should have both weekly goals and daily goals. You should have a specific day that you sit down and write up your goals for the week. I haven’t done this yet but I have been doing daily goals. Today, I had three different goals:
- write an article for blog4booty.
- sign up for linkshare
- write an article on my other blog including a linkshare recommendation
- Install 4 SEO modifications to my basketball forum
Well, that all didn’t happen. Instead of adding the 4 SEO modifications to the forum, I added one and upgraded the forum. During the upgrade though, I ran into an error that I had to fix which took up a bit of time. All in all, I’m happy with the effort I have put forth today and that is what you should be looking for when you create your goals. Not accomplishing your goals does not mean that you shouldn’t congratulate yourself at the end of the day but it certainly does not give you excuses. In other words, If you took too long writing because you sat and thought about what you were going to write too often, you were probably wasting your time.
3. Recognize when you are wasting your time and change your actions upon the realization.
One of the most important time management tools is realizing when you are wasting your time. You ever see those rich successful business men in movies that are short and to the point? Think Andy Garcia’s character in all three Ocean’s (11, 12, 13) movies. He played Terry Benedict who owned a casino and in perhaps every scene they showed his character, Benedict would act with a precise intent. If he was distracted and had to take care of another issue, he took care of that issue quickly then went on too what he was working on. In other words, If you are thirsty and get up to go grab a beverage from the fridge, go do so and get back to what you were doing. If you are taking a break because you need to get some time away from the computer, give yourself a certain amount of time. When you are done, get back and continue with what you were doing before.
4. Prioritize your life
You need to take some time for this one. Before you decide that you are going to get yourself rich through your blog you must realize what it takes. Get some private time together and organize all of your goals. Put them in order. If getting rich is your first priority then you must truly make it your first priority. If you have other commitments in your life, you must make sure that you have enough time to make money one of them. If you aren’t willing to put forth the effort or the time and you aren’t getting enough site traffic to make decent money from your blog, then don’t expect to get rich. If you accept that you aren’t going to get rich and don’t even make decent money, then don’t say I didn’t warn you. For me, it’s an all or nothing game and I treat it as such.
5. Know why you are here and what you are doing
This one is my personal favorite. I think it is the single most important factor to success and the single most important tool for time management. You need to ask yourself what you are doing this for. Why are you even here reading this article? Some of you may be entirely in it for the money. Good. Some of you may want to help others. Great. You want to retire at 35? Fine. You want to prove to your parents that you are not a loser? Fantastic. You want to make sure you are able to send your child through college? Excellent. You want to buy the original Spiderman Comic Book? lol, Awesome. Steve Pavlina already discussed how to make money from your blog and it was great!
Me? What am I here for? You see, my family has always wanted the best education for me. They have always wanted me to grow up in the right environment. When I was still in elementary school they had saved up enough money to buy a new house in a nice neighborhood. This was the time of change in my life. This was a time where I grew up around people who’s parents made a decent amount more than mine. They had the nicer toys. They had the bigger televisions. They had the brand new game consoles with all the new games. They had all the nicer clothes. We were a small fish in a big pond.
Eventually, years after graduating high school, I decided to go to college. I sold my car to afford being there and was forced to ride my bike or skateboard everywhere. That took me a lot of time and exhausted me because I wasn’t in ideal shape for riding uphill every day. I was broke as can possibly be and my lifestyle changed. I was donating plasma for money. At times, I ate Top Ramen for days straight. I lived in a competitive area for jobs because 25% of the population were students. My point is that living that lifestyle didn’t make me happy. Eventually I had to leave school and move back home because of financial reasons. So I got a full time job, moved into my own place and started anew. I worked as hard as I could and was doing very well, but just like the times before, I wasn’t happy working for somebody else because I realized that my efficiency was just making somebody else rich. I realized that all my hard work was futile. My supervisors rewarded me very little because when you work for somebody else and those above you realize your potential, they realize it is their job that is in trouble.
Eventually that job didn’t work out and I was forced to find new work. Debts increased and eventually I moved back in with my parents. I’m working now but it’s part to full time work. I’m going to stay with them until I can make enough money to get out. You see, that’s my motivation.
I want to live wealthy. I want to be comfortable. Whenever I get off work from I’m filled with the motivation to progress myself and increase my position. I’m fueled with ambition backed my discontent from my current status. Whenever I get home and begin work and hear the distractions all around me, I throw on my headphones, turn on some nice background music and start work. I’m driven by everything around me to get out of a situation that goes against everywhere I want to be. I’m driven by everything I despise around me. I’m driven by an unhappy situation that I turn into anger. Anger is one of the most powerful motivators I can think of. Use it. Embrace it. Realize exactly why you are here and exactly what you are doing.
Tags: Distractions, Goals, Motivation, Time Management, Work Ethic
Work Ethic
Making money from your blog takes a large amount of commitment. Half-ass effort will get you nowhere. Take a second and think about all the blogs you have been to and the articles you have read. Forget how you found them or what your expectations were when you clicked on the link. Just reading the article and how it is written, most people can come to some conclusion about how successful the blog is as a whole.
Readers can and will read between the lines of each and every article you produce. This is why you must do your best to provide your readers content with confidence and authority. If you don’t know exactly what you are talking about then people will recognize it and judge accordingly. They aren’t likely to subscribe to your RSS or support your website through links, respect, or your recommendations if you are just quickly paraphrasing a subject other people have written about. Sure, many different people can cover a specific topic as I am doing right now. But to cover a topic well and unique at the same time is a talent you must embrace.
It’s not always easy to be unique. Some subjects like celebrity gossip require your time to be managed differently. You must report all the current gossip you can find and make sure to be one of the very first sources of your content. If you have a blog about your favorite sports team, you probably need to write intelligent analysis of every game, trade, and rumor. Even though these types of blogs aren’t ideal to create because they don’t feature timeless content, you can still pull a decent income from them. Though, with these blog subjects you may need to focus your energy on content quantity even more than normal and you must work even harder to cover every important subject because you become more of a source of news than actual content.
Why most people will never make a living from blogging and why it’s the most simple obstacle to overcome
If you want to make serious money by blogging then pay attention because I am practically handing over the key to making all sorts of pirate’s booty. It all comes down to your personal work ethic. First off, realize you aren’t the only one trying to make money on the internet by monetizing a blog. If your goal is dominate your respective market by becoming a top 10 authority of the subject, then you must realize you have some work ahead of you. Me, I’m trying to dominate. I’m trying to take over. The most fierce competitors in my game have made at least six figures or more. While it’s often difficult to ascertain who is making the most money and exactly how much they are making, it’s clear that Darren of problogger.net is getting that serious pirate booty.
For those of you that are still here, my goal is take him over. I’m sure those of you who have subscribed to this site in it’s absolute infancy may have laughed upon reading that. I guarantee you one thing though, at some point, Darren Rowse decided to dominate. At some point, he told himself that he was going to become very successful and in more or less words, dominate. My point is that you must come to a position where you ask yourself, what your goals are. If your goal is to make as much money as possible from your blog great. If your goal is to become the number 1 authority or source, then you must acknowledge that there are other people out there that are attempting the same goal as you.
I haven’t mentioned this before, but I’m a big fan of basketball. During one of the games last season or during Sportscenter or something, I distinctively remember them talking about how hard basketball players work to get to where they are. As they began discussing the subject, they described how every kid that is a basketball fan wants to grow up and become a professional NBA player. Then they brought up an interesting point. They mentioned that few of these kids took the proper procedures in order to get to where they were. How many of them went to basketball camps every summer? How many of them went on to play for their school? How many of them took that scholarship to that school on the other side of the country in the middle of nowhere just to get a chance? How many of them worked on their footwork, shooting, dribbling or passing during times they didn’t have team practice? How many of them watched instructional videos or did any of the workouts that increase your verticle leap?
You see, making good money from your blog is easy. The instructions and procedures are out there and it’s not rocket science. But just like becoming a basketball player, you must take each and every step in order to make it. and you are going to have to work through it. You are going to have to ignore those countless people that don’t think you will do it. They may say you don’t have what it takes and maybe you don’t, yet.
The only true obstacle that is working against you is time. If you are just starting out and have a full time job, you are already sacrificing 40 hours of your week. Your spouse or significant other will demand time. Your hobbies are going to demand time. Your friends are going to demand time. Shopping, cleaning, eating, sleeping, family, friends and hobbies all demand time and as a result, it will take longer for you to go through the necessary steps. Seeing as how writing content is only a small portion of what it takes to make money with your blog and how consistently writing content is absolutely necessary, it is of utmost importance for you manage your time properly.
Tags: New Blogs, Work Ethic
Your robots.txt file is a text file that you put in the root directory of your website that gives directions to robots that search engines like google use to search your site for content. It lets them know exactly where they can go to look for the content. Without customizing or adding a robots.txt file on your website, a spider will crawl everything it can.
The problem with this, is duplicate content. Google will see the same content in
http://blog4booty.com/
http://blog4booty.com/category/new-blogs/
Optimizing your robots.txt file to dissallow robots from going to the category directory will prevent duplicate content. Ideally, search engines should find one version of your content to rank. Other urls are mainly used as features for humans to easily navigate through your blog.
Creating a robots.txt file
This is the first four lines of my robots.txt file
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
The first line addresses all spiders and tells them to avoid crawling into the wp- directories… you can use Disallow: /wp- as well but I’m avoiding any possible issues in the future by putting the 3 directories I am concerned with. wp-admin should be avoided for obvious reasons, while the wp-content and wp-includes folders are less obvious. wp-content does include images that you are using and google images does bring in a lot of traffic to blogs but they are already viewing your images when you insert them into your articles.
Every blog is going to be a little different but the main idea is to avoid duplicate content. So be careful when limiting too many directories and locations because in trying to tell spiders to avoid duplicate content, you may end up telling a spider to avoid the content you really wish to be indexed.
Currently, this is my full robots.txt file
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /rss/
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /tag
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*?
User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /
User-Agent: MediaPartners-Google
Allow: /
I have allowed certain spiders complete access to the site for various reasons. MediaPartners and Adsbot are used for advertisements. MediaPartners, shows google advertisments for the free version of Opera and Adsbot is being added now because even though I don’t yet have advertisements on my blog, I will add that feature soon and will have to do it anyway. This just allows adsense to come up with the best advertisements to show on every webpage. IE, the pages that do have duplicate content will still be showing advertisements and we need to make sure that appropriate ads are shown on those pages.
Tags: Bots, New Blogs, Robots, robots.txt, SEO, Spiders
These are my favorite Wordpress plugins to use that add the best functionality that every blogger should install on their Wordpress blog. This list is short but these are my babies.
Statpress: This plugin is very nice because along with publishing how many unique visitors, site visits, spiders, and feeds per day your site is getting, it breaks it down pretty nice and easy. It is no replacement for Google Analytics but it does provide a quick and easy location to check your recent stats. It has it’s flaws, no doubt, but for being a quick and easy plugin for a new blog, definitely worthy of being installed.
Akismet: This is a plugin that comes with your default Wordpress installation. Essentially, it’s a feature that decreases the amount of spam comments on your blog. It does it’s best work by limiting automated comments and comments that have too many links posted. You can change the number of links you allow per comment in it’s configuration. In order to set up Akismet, you need to get a Wordpress API key, which requires you to sign up for a wordpress account. Now, for those of you that are trying to monetize you blog, you should do so with a blog on your own domain.
All In One SEO Pack: This plugin is an absolute must. It allows you to edit your meta tags with each article. You can customize your title, description, and keywords. It’s quick and easy to set up, and if you neglect to add them yourself, it will do it for you. I’ve found that with each article you post, it’s best to do it yourself though because as with any sort of artificial intelligence for a plugin, it’s probably not as optimized as you can do it yourself.
As of right now, these are my favorite plugins that everybody needs. There are plugins for adsense and google analytics but when you run a blog on your own domain/host and have access to all of your files via FTP, sometimes having plugins such as these are flawed in that they don’t provide for complete customization. In other words, having the ability to manually insert your code exactly where you want it is more important than relying on another program to manage it for you. Monetizing your blog requires a lot of effort and requires you to learn as much as you can. Being able to customize any and all of your files will only help you out in the long run.
Tags: New Blogs, Plugins
