Namecheap Coupon Code

Just a heads up to anyone who is thinking about buying a new domain name anytime soon – Namecheap currently has a coupon code for $7.95 domain name for one year ($0.93 savings), $15.90 for two years ($1.86 savings), and $23.85 for three years ($2.79 savings). The code is INTERFACE. Enter it in under “Coupon Code” right before checkout.

Update: GoDaddy currently has a coupon code out that is worth $2 off .com domain names.  Use OYH3.

Posted in Industry Watch | 3 Comments »

Where Does 7Search Traffic Come From?

7Search is a third-tier search engine that you probably have not heard about unless you do arbitrage (if you don’t know what arbitrage is, stick around, future posts will go in depth). Their site has a small search box, making it obvious that it’s not really the main point. If you use it you will see that the results that come up are all sponsored ads. As a webmaster, if you’ve used them, you like them because you can buy real cheap traffic from them – usually no more than $0.05/click. But there is a downside to this – the traffic sucks. Hard to convert. But for some purposes (like arbitrage) it fits the bill.< !–adsense–>

So where does all this traffic come from if it is not from the 7Search site? A member at WickedFire recently did some research into this, and here are the referrers that he found: (read more) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Question / Answer | 2 Comments »

Don’t Forget Image Searches!

It is easy to become lost in the quest to rank well on search engines for standard text searches. However, let us not forget a relatively new but increasingly popular form of searching – image searching. Google and many other search engines now also index images extracted from the sites that they crawl. A smart webmaster can take advantage of this feature to drive even more traffic to his or her website. But first, you must know how these search engines decide which images to display for a certain search phrase.

There are basically three aspects of an image that search engines look for to categorize them.

1. Image name. This is pretty self-explanatory. If you have an image of, say, Bruce Springsteen, you should name it something along the lines of “Bruce_Springsteen.jpg”. Unrelated image names will be far less likely to appear on search results.
2. Image alt tag. This functions pretty much the same as the image name. When inserting an image into your website, you should always include the alt tag, making it a short but descriptive blurb about your image. For example, for the Bruce_Springsteen.jpg image mentioned above, a good alt tag might be “Bruce Springsteen performing at Nissan.” If you do not know how to use alt tags, they go like this:
   • <img src=”bruce_springsteen.jpg” alt=”Bruce Springsteen performing at Nissan.” />
3. Image context. This is the topic of the page the image is nested in. If you have a Bruce Springsteen image displayed in a page that talks about how The Beatles are the best band ever, you are putting that image in bad context, and hurting its ranking. However, if a search engine comes to your page that is talking about how Bruce Springsteen came to Nissan Pavilion last May and wowed the crowd with songs from his new CD “Dust and Devils”, that will put your image in favorable context and help its ranking.

Remember these three pointers when including images in your website and you should be able to obtain even more search traffic.

Posted in Promotion Techniques | 7 Comments »

Are Reciprocal Link Exchanges Good for SEO?

This is my first post in my category “Question / Answer” – these posts are meant to be short answers to simple questions, not requiring much explanation.

So, question: are reciprocal link exchanges good for SEO?

Answer: No. Reciprocal link exchanges (RLE) have no positive affect on SEO anymore. A while ago in the past you might have had some success in doing RLE, and you will often still see new webmasters posting in forums for link exchanges. However, it is a good idea to stay away from these. First of all, you want your incoming and outgoing links to be relevant to your website’s topic. Nine times out of ten, reciprocal links are not. Now, however, if you are interested in performing a RLE with a topic-related website, that can’t hurt. Google won’t reward you with PR or better search rankings from off-topic links, and, without diving into the design theory behind page rank, having too many outbound unrelated links will just hurt the PR that you have.

But most importantly, remember this: Linking to unrelated sites is of no use to your user and just serves as another potential exit point from your site.

Posted in Question / Answer, SEO | 7 Comments »

Have a Blog? Than You Need Sociable.

More specifically, if you have a WordPress blog. However, if you have another type of blog or any article-driven site, you should look into a different way of implementing this.

Anyways, what is the “this” that I am talking about? It’s Sociable, a plugin for WordPress. From their site:

Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.

Social bookmarking sites have become huge recently, and their importance to webmasters should not be underestimated. Sites like Digg.com, Technorati.com, del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon.com are used by thousands of users every day to view updates on their favorite sites or share particularly good links with others. Right now you should be thinking jackpot. This is a very easy way to get your site out to thousands of users and generate lots of backlinks through the user – but you have to make it easy for the user to do. They are not going to want to manually go into their social bookmarking sites of choice and tediously paste and submit the URLs of sites / articles that they like.

This is where Sociable comes in. Install the plugin into WordPress and viola! You immediately have the option of adding over 60 buttons that link to all the popular social bookmarking site’s “save/publish this” option, like “Digg This” or saving a blog post on Technorati. Easy as pie! As you can see, AbstractPromotion.com uses Sociable.

The moral of this post: make it as easy as you can for your readers to do promotion for you.

Posted in Promotion Techniques | 4 Comments »

Google found your hidden site?

Sometimes when you make a site you’ll have in mind to keep it “hidden” for a while – meaning not linking to it from any other site or submitting it to the search engines. I usually do this when I want some time to play around with it, test different ideas out, or error check it before it goes “live.” But sometimes Google finds your site anyways – how does this happen? Here are the most common ways that Google can use to find your supposedly isolated site:

1. Your blog is automatically pinging
2. You use Adsense on your site, even if just for a quick test
3. You use Google Analytics
4. Google found your site through a drop list, whois list, or a recently registered domain name list
5. You have the Google Toolbar installed
6. You are using a domain name that was previously registered before it expired

While these are not all the ways that Google can find your site, they are by far the most common. Out of the list, having the Google Toolbar installed is probably the primary reason that your sites are being discovered. So how can you stop this from happening? You have two choices: first, you can develop your site locally. This means installing software on your computer that turns it into a virtual server – Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc – and creating your site independent of the internet. This is not as hard as it seems, since you can download various all-in-one programs that will create this set up in a matter of minutes. Two of the most popular are WampServer and ApacheFriends.

Second, you can use robots.txt in your root directory to prevent robots from indexing certain sections (or all) of your site, like so:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /directory // OR * for all

Again, this would go in robots.txt in your root directory.

Posted in Promotion Techniques | 1 Comment »