SEO Emperor

I finally updated this blog to the new Wordpress 2.5 version. I first installed it on my home server to check if all my plugins still work with this release. That’s always the biggest concern when upgrading your wp blog, making sure that all the plugins are compatible. I have only come across one problem, on one of my blogs I use the embedded video plugin, unfortunately it doesn’t work anymore with wordpress 2.5. I have checked the developers website but there hasn’t been an update for some time. So I’m sticking to Wordpress 2.3.3 for that blog. I’ve spent quite some time googling for a fix but haven’t find one. It’s a very popular plugin and a lot of people are waiting for an update so hopefully someone finds a fix fast.

I haven’t had much time to check out all the new features but the new admin panel looks very different, they have moved a lot of things around. For someone that has been using Worpress for a couple of years its quite a change. There are some cool things, it’s now possible to customize the admin panel with widgets. So you can see only the things you want and so on. Coolest new feature of all is the exif extraction, when you upload a picture that has exif data it will extract that data and put it in custom fields. This is really great for photo blogs.

I have been a long time linux user, to the point I don’t feel comfortable at all anymore working on a Windows workstation. The last Windows version I really used was Windows 2000. After playing with Mandrake, Debian and Slackware linux I finally found Gentoo linux and sticked with it. It’s a source based distribution which means I have to compile all programs myself, I don’t use binaries. Some people find this time consuming and a total waste of resources, I have been very happy with it. My enthusiasm for linux comes from the stability and high level of productivity it gives me. Combined with a very powerful 4 core dual opteron workstation and two 22inch LCD monitors I have a machine that can handle anything and is a pleasure to work with.

The webmaster tools I use:
1) Whois: To check if a domain is free or by who it is registered I don’t surf to some website, I just use the command line tool whois. You just type whois domain.tld and it gives you the whois details. Works much faster then any online whois service. I believe the whois tool is installed by default on every linux distribution.
2) Quanta plus: Quanta is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment. The most advanced and user friendly text editor I have used. It can handle all sorts of code, html php css and a lot more. I use it for all my webdesign needs.
3) NVU, pronounced “N-view” is a WYSIWYG editor similar to Frontpage and Dreamweaver. Ideal for people who don’t like editing code or for those who don’t know anything about writing html. I prefer to write code myself in Quanta but for some repetitive tasks a WYSIWYG editor can be handy.
4) Gimp, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It can almost rival Adobe Photoshop but Gimp lacks CMYK support. Most other features in Photoshop you can find in Gimp. A lot of people (mostly Photoshop users) dislike gimp because of it’s user interface. The gimp developers did not want to make a Photoshop clone, so the UI is hard to learn for someone used to Photoshop. I also had some trouble learning gimp, eventually I bought a couple of books to help me out.
5) Mozilla Firefox Firefox is my favorite browser, it’s fast secure and you can find a lot of plugins for it that are a webmasters best friend:
Seolinkanalysis This plugins shows you the pagerank of your backlinks in Yahoo and Google webmastertools. Ideal to see how your link building campaigns are doing.
Seoquake, Seoquake shows you the pagerank, indexed pages, backlinks and Alexa rank. It shows these statistics in a small bar on the top of every page you open, great do some investigative work.
Web developer The web developer plugin adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. I use it mostly to check if a link is dofollow or nofollow.

To upload files I don’t use a separate ftp program, I use the standard KDE file explorer Konqueror and copy paste the files to my websites. By right clicking on files and folders you can change the permissions. It works the same way as my local file systems.

When you start out trying to make some money online you may think it’s easier to buy an established website. This can be true, a site that has already been online for some time may be easier to get a higher rank with search engines and attract some good traffic. It’s a fact that Google gives more credit to older sites. A website that already has a lot of backlinks, is indexed by all search engines and already gets traffic will give you a chance to make money from the day you buy it. Some sites may be for sale just because the owner doesn’t have the time anymore or has lost interest. Maybe you don’t want to bother with designing a totally new website and want to concentrate on writing/making new content. Or you have found a nice website for sale with good content that hasn’t been marketed yet. It all depends on what you are good at.

There are hundreds of websites for sale on the big webmaster forums, just check out the for sale section on Sitepoint and Digitalpoint. There are some risks involved on buying a website on these forums. Not all sellers are honest people, there is a lot of scamming happening on these forums. Some people have no problem posting faked Adsense and traffic statistics screenshots. As with most online transactions try to find all possible information on the history of the website/domain you are interested in. Try to find posts from the seller on the forum the website is advertised, sometimes just by googling the nickname of the seller you can find loads of information.

Some basic things you should always check:
1) Lookup the Itrader, reputation of the seller, read old posts from the seller and see if he has already done successful business. Ask for his/her email, MSN and have a chat to get an idea if he/she is a serious person.
2) Do a whois on the domain name to find out the age, where it is registered, when the domain expires.
3) Check out the history of the domain on Archive.org, by using the wayback machine you can see older versions of websites, sometimes from many years ago.
4) Check pagerank, indexed pages by all search engines. You don’t want to buy a website that’s banned by Google.
5) Don’t put much trust in traffic or Adsense screenshots, they may be fake. To get an idea of the traffic compare the screenshots with the Alexa rating. Ask for more traffic screenshots, it’s always interesting to know where the traffic comes from. Ask for specific screenshots to get an idea of the visitors geographical location, what keywords the site ranks for, if the seller doesn’t respond to these questions he may be a scammer.
5) Stay away from sites that are banned by Adsense. The problem is that there is no way to check this. If a site has no Adsense check with the seller why this is so, maybe he just doesn’t have an Adsense account. But the domain can also be banned by Adsense, it might be possible to put Adsense on it after buying it but it will take a long time for Google to approve the domain. There are of course other ways to monetize a website, but I prefer Adsense.
6) The price… there are no magic formulas to determine the price of a website. I have seen websites sell for 6 times the monthly revenue and others for 2 times the yearly revenue. This depends on the niche, age, traffic. A fair price for an established website with steady traffic is about 1 to 1,5 times the yearly revenue, don’t pay this for sites younger then a year. With an established website I mean a site that has been around for more then a year has some pagerank and that gets steady traffic from search engines.

This is a nice example of a website for sale that’s obviously a scam. Luckily the seller was quickly busted and got banned before he was able to sell his site. So please look out when buying a website.

What happens when you write a payed review on some product and people start to comment on it that it’s actually a bad product. Or even worse a scam… I stumbled on this real estate blog, the owner wrote an honest paid review on an online real estate service, then people started commenting about their bad experiences. Finally he gets a nice letter from a lawyer to take down the post and comments. I understand the webmaster that he doesn’t want to risk an expensive lawsuit against some big company with enough cash to sue anyone they don’t like. But what happened to freedom of speech?
Think twice when you are going to write some paid review, certainly do a background check and try to find all possible information online so you know what you are writing about.

After you have done your wordpress installation and set up the basic configuration I always install some plugins. These plugins can really make the difference for your blog and I find them essential for all my blogs. First of all I activate the akismet plugin which is installed by default, you just need to fill in the Wordpress API key and your done. This protects your blog against spam comments. Another plugin I always install is Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam that also helps against spam. With these 2 plugins you should be protected against all automated spam. This is of course wishfull thinking, spammers get smarter by the day. If you look around on the internet you will have no trouble finding scripts that can bypass them. The next two plugins are very important seo wise. They will help to get your blog indexed and let search engines know what your blog is about. The “Google-xml-sitemaps-generator” doesn’t need much explanation. After activating and configuring (which is very simple), the plugin generates a sitemap every time you update your blog. This sitemap is compatible with Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and Ask.com. I have had no trouble getting a blog indexed by Google just by adding a sitemap to Google webmaster tools, even for a blog which had zero backlinks.
By default a wordpress blog doesn’t have any metadata. The value of metadata isn’t that important anymore to search engines. Many years ago it was possible to get listed high in Yahoo by using metadata and spamming your keywords all over your frontpage. Unfortunately those days are long over. I still think a correct set of metadata tags helps seo wise. The All-in-one-seo-pack adds metadata tags to all your posts. When writing a post you will have the option to fill in title, description and keywords. It’s not much work and helps search engines indexing your posts, certainly on short posts with little or no text, for example when you post a funny Youtube video.
Now that I am talking about Youtube, when embedding a Youtube video on your blog and you just copy paste the embed code from the Youtube sit. The code you are generating is not XHTML valid. It’s not that much of a problem, but if you want to keep your blod strictly XHTML valid it’s not a bad idea to install the “Embed-video-with-link” plugin. It ads a button to the “write post” section, when clicking it you get a pop up box asking you the video ID and video site. The plugin supports a lot of video sites and gives you clean XHTML valid code. To check if your website is XHTML valid just surf to World Wide Web Consortium, these are the guys that make up all the web standards. You can easily check your code and it will give you some tips and guides on how to improve your code.