WordPress SEO H1 Header Tags

wordpress seo

I can’t believe how many wordpress themes out their tag themselves as seo-friendly and some even have seo in their theme name and they don’t even do the #1 most important use of the h1 tag. Do yourself a favour if you’re a theme designer and use the following:

The h1 tag should be used for the blog title or blog description but only on the home page. On all other pages, we should relegate it to a h2 at most and put more relevance to the post titles by promoting them to a h1.

To do that, make use of the is_single and is_page wordpress functions in your header.php and alternate your h1 h2 blog title tags:

<?php if(is_single() OR is_page()) {
// On single post pages and static pages we use this code
?>
<h2><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h2>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
<?php }
else {
?>
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
<?php } ?>

Now in you single.php and page.php, update your the_title() to h1

<h1 class="single"><a rel="bookmark" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"></a></h1>

Now because we are using the h2 and h1 tag in the header interchangeably, make sure you style.css caters for both and they look the same

#header h1, #header h2 { font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 25px; font-weight: normal; padding: 0em 0 0.2em 0; }

do the same for the post title h2 tags in the home page if you need to.

The Rocky Story Behind Rocky

rocky balboaDid you know that Sylvester Stallone was dirt broke, with barely $100 to spare, and down for the count, before he rose to international stardom in Rocky?

March 1975, Sly watched the Mohammed Ali vs Chuck Wepner fight. Chuck was a nobody club fighter who went the distance with Ali – sound familiar? Sly spends the next 3 days and nights writing the screenplay that was Rocky I. He submits the script to United Artists who initially offered him $20,000 for the script only and apparentely Burt Reynolds was pinned for the lead Balboa role.

Sly instinctively knew that he was on a winner but for this to be his ticket, he had to be the lead actor. A few negiotiations later, United Artists up the stakes from $20k to $100k, and eventually $300,000 but didn’t want the risk of an unknown Sylvester Stallone playing such a crucial role. Sly didn’t give in, and eventually United Artists offered him the initial measly $20,000 and around $340 a week for the acting role (the minimum acting wage). Obviously, the rest is history. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing, grossing in more than $20 million, and propelling Sly to phenomenal success with Rocky I, II, III, IV, and V, and Rambo I, II, III, and IV.

The moral of the story? Listen to your gut, and hang in there.

Free Article Submission Sites

I never liked the idea of article marketing. Spending my limited time writing articles for other people’s sites just for one backlink. There are many quicker ways to get backlinks. This was until I started using Link Farm Evolution. Now with each backlink I get from these article sites, I max out their link juice by pumping hundreds of blog posts to them. Some of this filters through to my money site and those that do are worth gold! I wish I could pump the links to my own ‘third party’ sites but these articles directories are already established and have the trust factor that I need for the mass linking to stay under the radar.

The List in Alphabetical Order

1articleworld.com
4rum.info
a1-articledirectory.com
a1-optimization.com
a1articles.com
ad-matrix.net
adwords-articles.com
alternativeenergybase.com
amazines.com
article-buzz.com
article-idea.com
articlealley.com
articleammo.com
articlebase.com
articlebeach.com
articlebin.com
articleblast.com
articlecache.com
articlecity.com
articleclick.com
articledashboard.com
articledepot.co.uk
articledoctor.com
articlefeeder.com
articlefever.com
articlegeek.com
articleinsider.com
articlesender.com
articlesfactory.com
articleson.com
boconline.com
businessnation.com
buzzle.com
easyarticles.com
easyezinearticles.com
ezinearticles.com
free-articles-zone.com
goarticles.com
guidemegreen.com
healthguidance.org
iguides.org
my-articles.com
powerhomebiz.com
prolinkdirectory.com
site-reference.com
theallineed.com
thewhir.com
webpronews.com

Fisherman vs Businessman story

mexican fisherman

I read a great story some random blog that I can’t remember (I’ll insert link here if I find it again). I’ll summarise it anyway:

A businessman sees a fisherman at a small Mexican village coming in from sea with a small catch of fish.
The businessman asks, ‘Why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?’.
‘It’s enough to support my family. I sleep late, fish a little, take a siesta, play with my kids, catch up with friends… I have a full life’
The businessman gets agitated and brags about his Harvard MBA, ‘I can help you become more successful. Just spend more time fishing to get yourself enough for a bigger boat. Hire more people to catch fish for you. Start a business and eventually you could have an empire and expand the enterprise globally.’
The fisherman looks perplexed, ‘How long with that take?’
’15, maybe 20 years’
‘And then what?’
Continue reading

Link Farm Evolution (LFE) Review

link farm evolution

I don’t normally get excited about a product but Link Farm Evolution or L.F.E for shorts blows my mind. Commenting on Do Follow blogs is dead. Read that again. Commenting on Do Follow Blogs is dead. It was HUGE in 2008 and vandalised to oblivion in 2009. Google has caught on and now do not add much (if any) weighting to links in the comment section of blogs.

What’s the next best thing to blog commenting? Having your own BLOG FARM. No it’s not the next best thing. It always was the BEST thing. The only problem with your own army of blogs was that it took forever to manage. You could be good and carry 25, maybe 100 blogs but the time required was too much to justify the seo benefits. Especially if your farms get red flagged and sandboxed.

Enter Link Farm Evolution. This baby auto does just about everything except for writing the blog posts for you.

  • It finds, registers, and authenticates your blog registrations (WPMU blogs, WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger blogs)
  • It allows you to post to 1000s of blogs in one batch job
  • It supports article spinning
  • It has plugins to hook into Flickr, Associated Content, RSS Feeds, and Google Translator
  • It auto-solves captcha’s – I don’t know how they do this but it looks like a monkey on the other end actually reads and types the captcha code!
  • Submits news and comments to PLIGG sites
  • It has total control of your blogs. You can click on one link and it auto logs into your blog for you to let you do what you like in the admin interface
  • Auto deletes blogs that no longer work

Man, the list just goes on and on but you get the drift. This baby has the capabilities to register thousands of blogs for you with a press of a button. No more filling in forms and clicking authentication links in your emails. This baby keeps all your blogs in the database you so you keep track of and manage your blog farm with consummate ease.

All this may sound and look like black hat but it isn’t and doesn’t need to be. Think about it. Google actually wants you and instructs webmasters to go out and build more links to their websites. If you control all the websites and actively manage & keep them up to date, you will have control over thousands of juicy links that Google will absolutely love. Remember, these are real blogs on real sites – no footprint, no dodginess. Nothing to set it apart from the millions of blogs out there. That is because they ARE real blogs.

I’ve been using LFE since the new year and I now have 1803 blogs of which 229 have been marked as not working. The link juice going to my money sites have been awegasmic. My sites literally get crawled the instant I update it. I’ve NEVER seen that crawl rate before. I’m not kidding you, when I update my sites and then google for my own site, it has next to the serp – updated 26 seconds ago. How frickin sweet is that!

The only problem I have with LFE is that it is too fricken cheap. They should price this at way over $1000 so the newbs don’t come in and trash it.

Buy it through my aff link and hit me up if you’ve got probs with the software.

Next up, I’ll try and post some tips and tricks I’ve been using to manage your blog farm to keep it legit and passing juice long time. It automates a crap load for you but, yes, you still need to think and actually do work.

link farm evolution

How to make the Sitemap Plugin work for WordPress mu

I use wpmu (soon to be named wordpress multisite – wpms?) for most of my many mini niche sites. It makes it easy to install, backup, and whip up new sites.

Arne’s google sitemap generator is the best sitemap plugin period so rather than use anyone else’s custom wpmu sitemap solutions, I’ve opted to hack Arne’s.

Way back in 2006, I used to hack the default InitOptions() function to use a manual file location. Nowadays, I find it much easier to just change what it thinks is the default location.


function GetHomePath() {
/* comment everything out and just have the following line */
return ABSPATH . UPLOADS;
}

Next, I need to make sure that the wordpress upload directory has already been created.

function BuildSitemap() {
global $wpdb, $posts, $wp_version;
$this->Initate();

//workout what the upload directory for this blog is
$upload_dir = ABSPATH . UPLOADS;
//create the directory if it does not already exist
wp_mkdir_p($upload_dir);

...

That’s it. Simple. Now just redirect all requests for the sitemap to the generated file location. Here I use .htaccess files

#sitemap
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml$ wp-content/blogs.php?file=sitemap.xml [L]
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml.gz$ wp-content/blogs.php?file=sitemap.xml.gz [L]

That’s it. Works for Google Sitemap Generator v3.2.2

Popular Polls and High Converting Zip / Email Submits

When I first started affiliate marketing, the first thing I noticed was all these freebie programs that paid out for giving free stuff to people. How easy’s that! All you need to do is enter an email or a zip code. I thought I’d be a gazillionaire a gazillion times over but being the newbie I was, I just had these on a few banners on some of my sites. Needless to say, the clickthrough and conversion rates sucked big time… so much so that I moved on to my next gazillionaire idea.

Well, months down the track, I finally gave it another go and stumbled on an idea. I’m sure this is not new but I’m also sure that not everyone’s thought of this.

Here’s what I did.

  1. Create a poll based on a contentious topic of the week. Use google trends or yahoo buzz for ideas.
  2. Find a nice one field submit campaign. MaxBounty has heaps of these, more so than any other network I’ve seen.
  3. Put the affliate link behind the poll buttons.
  4. Here’s the killer. Add the text, vote and enter your email to get XXX!!!
  5. Hit Adwords with as truck load of keywords related to the topic.
  6. Bank!

Here’s an example of one of these pages. This example uses the $250 Free Grocery Gift Card campaign from maxbounty.

Interview with Sam The Link Spammer

Here’s a really old article from The Register:

Interview with a Link Spammer

It’s from 2005 but it’s still really relevant. A few points of note:

  • ‘Sam’ is a link spammer. He spams websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC.
  • He’s not some 16 year old kid. He’s 32. That makes him 36 now.
  • He writes automated scripts to comment spam en-mass.
  • He uses open proxies to avoid detection
  • Apparently results 8,9,10 have better conversion rates than 1,2,3
  • He earns a 7 figure salary doing this. That’s a MILLION up!
  • It’s completely legal. Link spam is different from email spam. It’s hard to argue the difference between a person using a computer to post a comment, and a person using a computer to use a computer to post a comment

Me and ‘Sam’ share some similarities. We’re both in the SEO business. We’re both hunting for links back to our sites to increase their SERP. We both comment on blog posts. Here’s where this guy and myself differ tho. Sure it is legal, but ethically what ‘Sam’ does sux. The fact that it is all automated means that he leaves the same or similar comments on all blog posts.

  • I take the time to read the posts
  • I manually make my comments and try to add value. The way the blogger actually wants by allowing comments in the post.

Sure you can make a million bucks doing what he does, but I think he crosses the line between good and evil. Don’t be a bloody spammer that everyone hates. Be a commentor that everyone loves to have on their blog.

Make Money Online

There are so many ways to make money online, it’s like a bottomless pit. Every day millions of new people come online and the market just keeps growing. Whilst it isn’t for everybody, I recommend it to all my friends to give it a go and see if they like it. The best thing about making money online is that there is almost zero start up capital and more often than not, zero barriers to entry. Gone are the days where you need to spend thousands to get a shop front, physical inventory,.. and god forbid – staff! The only thing you spend is your time. If you fail at it, all you’ve lost is hours of sleep.

Do you fit the profile of a webpreneur?

  1. you hate working 9-5 in the ofice
  2. you’re bubbling with ideas
  3. you work well in isolation
  4. you always thought you were destined for better things

The blueprint for making money online

Whilst there are endless ways to do it, it all boils down to variation of this

  1. have a product or service you want to promote
  2. have a medium to promote your chosen product/service
  3. have customers to promote to

Yep, it’s as simple as that. You might be saying ‘derr’? Tell me something I don’t already know. Well it’s the intricacies and understanding each of these three areas that set the newbies from the pros. How do you pick a winning product? What kind of a site should you build? How do you start an email list? How do you attract visitors? The best thing about making money online is that you don’t need to be a pro to start. The best advice I can give is simply just to dive straight in a start. You will probably fail a few times as I have but the key is that you will have learnt a whole heap and, like I said at the start, you will have lost nothing but sleep.

The reward for such little ‘capital’ investment is HUGE.

  • You get to work for yourself
  • You get passive income. Websites are 24/7 so your money should be rolling in when you sleep.
  • You grow a network of friends online
  • You actually achieve something. And in some cases, its something you can show off to friends :)
  • You will actually want to wake up and go to work

So how much can you actually make?

I’m not one to divulge on my own earning (there’s enough of those on the net already) but I will say that I make enough to pay my bills and more. To be honest, though, when I first started I was making less than $5 a week. But you know what, those were the best five bucks I have ever earned in my ‘real’ offline jobs.

Just to do it!

DoFollow Search Engine

Content may be the king, but links are the currency of the web. Over the years, I’ve made some good money by building up links to my websites. The easiest way to do this was with blog commenting. Blogs are naturally content rich and google loves content rich sites, especially ones with continually fresh updates. Following this strategy easily put my sites on the top of the SERPs. When google brought in the nofollow tag, my blog commenting strategy had to be tuned to only comment on those blogs that did not use this tag. This is about the time when I thought it would be neat to have a dedicated dofollow search engine. DoFollow blogs are rare (in comparison with the billions are total blogs in the bloggersphere) but they exist.

What is the dofollow search engine?
Basically, it is just like any other search engine except it only brings back results from a special index of sites I’ve deemed as dofollow. Using the search engine saves time by only bringing back blogs posts related to your specialty. So say you have a site about iPhone apps, you can do a search on ‘iPhone’ and read up on what other bloggers are saying. This will mean that you will have more to comment on since it is an area you know well and it will also add relevancy to your links as the content of the post will be related to your site’s niche.

My comment policy
People naturally think that I’m a comment spammer. Whilst I may have strayed from time to time, I try to add value to the post by voicing my opinion. If I do not have anything of value to say, I simply move on to the next article or blog. This is also what I encourage other people to do. Comment spamming will only push bloggers to rethink their dofollow policy. If you are able to add useful comments though, you will not only be rewarded with some link juice, you will have helped out a fellow webpreneur feel good about themselves – well I certainly do when I receive a comment :)

Why do people have a dofollow blog
Having a dofollow blog can be a good strategy for fresh blogs. I for one, only have dofollow blogs on my rss. Unless you’re techcrunch or gizmodo, I don’t bother keeping up to date with your blog unless you give me some link juice for my time :P .

Your search engine is crap. It’s littered with nofollow blogs!
Unfortunately, there are bloggers out there who opt out of the dofollow program and change their blog back to nofollow. Checking blogs is currently a labourious manual task and I have no doubt that their are blogs in my list need to be weeded out. Please take a moment of your time to help out and contact me about these nofollow blogs that should be removed from the index.

I have a dofollow blog, can you add me in?
Sure thing! Just use my contact me page and buzz me with your sites details and I’ll drop by to verify your blog before I update my index.

Okay, enough argy bargy, where is your search engine?
I’ve made a special page to house the search engine. It is powered by google and only brings back blogs from my specifically constructed dofollow blog index :)