Important: Your Comments

Posted on July 11th, 2005 by Administrator

Hi, everybody! I’m very glad that you find UptimeNews useful and that it helps you (I hope). And thank you for interesting discussions we make here: your comments. However, due to that I receive a lot of spam comments, I want to give short guidelines on writing comments:

1. This guidelines are currently concern just few vistors, who flood comments that have no significance.
2. We allow posting your urls, signatures under posts like “Visit my cool site” and URL, but we don’t accept insignificant and senseless comments, that make no sense for visitors of this site and me. For instance, I have received 4 comments, which were as follows “Cool, keep goin”, “Thanks for good article”, “Heh, good”, “Yep”. Such comments are allowed in topics like “Attention, Webmasters!”, where I asked general opinion of visitors. Other topics are for discussion and I won’t approve any comments of such kind, unless it is a comment given by author, who had good posting history before. Please, make reading interesting, do not flood it and you will enjoy this site and facilitate my job. Thanks.

P.S. This guidelines are only for those who come to spam here. I beg pardon of everybody else, but I had to write this.

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Filed under: Uptimebot.com News

Platforms, Coding, Site Building

Posted on July 7th, 2005 by Administrator

What editors have you used when just started making first sites? Personally I have started with Macromedia Dreamweaver, but very soon I made sure that it ads a lot of bugs in HTML and started learning the language itslef. Since then I’m using Allaire Homesite and PsPad editors (Now there is Home Site 5 released by Macromedia after they’ve bought Allaire, but I don’t like it too). I”m telling this not just to discuss editors we use, but to stress your attention on importance of clean HTML. because the more bugs you make in code, the more corrupted it appears in serps and title “$#ajgd^&87″ or url “..php?gophp127jags7a…” don’t looks attractive, huh? However, after several years of practice, those webmasters, who work with lots of content and have less time to edit HTML are moving to various content management systems. So do I.

I have tried a lot of them. One I was using up to last year is PhpNuke available at http://www.phpnuke.org. It is convenient, includes a lot of useful tools for site management. However, it contains a couple of bugs that are unwanted for SEO. For instance it always builds ugly-looking urls and has problems with putting correct titles. When I have worked on PhpNuke I spent a lot of time by tuning and adjusting it to fit my needs. I found plugins that replace page title with title of first article on this page, modules that made permanent urls and so on, but it took a lot of time to make it rolling for each new site I’ve made and I started looking for something more easy and covenient. That is how blogs became platforms for the majority of my sites.

After trying several blog scripts I have finally chosen two of them, which, I think are useful for building good sites. The first one I have tried is MT, which is available from http://www.movabletype.org/. Powerfull platform for creating site. Rather easy installation and management. Good layout. Try it yourself to have your own opinion of convenience.

My second choice, which I consider to be the best choice for today is WordPress. Uptimebot is currently working on this platform and I am completely satisfied with it’s functional abilities. Of course it has lesser functions that MT and much less functions than PhpNuke, but ease of five minutes installation, attractive layout and amazingly clean code make WordPress to be the best script for building text sites, which I’d recommend for everybody, moreover that google loves blogs and this additionaly attracts me. Besides, there is a WordPress plugin that allows visitors to see when GoogleBot came for the last time - you can see it in footer of our page.

The only thing I’d like to be developed by WordPress is multi-site WordPress that would allow to build several blogs using one cpy of script (as it is possible with MT). They currently have only beta of multi-site script, but it is yet half-done and I wouldn’t recommend to use it.

Wordpress is available for download from http://www.wordpress.org/. Enjoy it!

I’d also want you to share your thoughts about site platforms you are using, their advantages and disadvantages and so on. Thanks!

Sincerely yours, Max.

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Filed under: HTML and Page Coding

Link Popularity, Relevancy and Link Text

Posted on July 7th, 2005 by Administrator

I want to discuss relationship of Link Popularity, relevancy and text links. As you surely know, link popularity is counted exactly by number of links pointing certain page, but these are just basics. Method of building certain value of Link Popularity that I have already described was working on Google few years ago, but it had changed and that is the point of interest - what changes occur and how can we improve our link popularity strategies?

Certainly, when relevancy became one of the most important criteria of appreciation of each page, it has also affected Link Popularity calculation. Due to my little investigation, a page that has ten inbound links with same keyword in link text will have better link popularity than a page that has the same ten inbound links, but with different keywords inside this link.

However, there is some limit of quantity of same inbound links, and you risk to get your site filtered or banned for spamming if you cross this limit. I tried to guess what can I do in this situation and the only thought I had is to put synonims and associated words after each thenth ibound link to my sites. For instance if I’d had a site about gourmet food, I’d put 10 links with “gourmet”, ten links with “delicious” and ten links with “tasty” keywords. This will dilute keyword density, but prevent my site from loosing link popularity, because Google knows that
these keywords are synonyms.

The other way I think about is that Google considers two phrases to be same when they are identical by symbols. If you add some extra words like adding “gourmet food” to “gourmet” - you will lose relevancy of your general keyword “gourmet”, but popularity is lost because of dilusion by something meanful and I thought what will happen if I add something senseless to my keyword? For instance if I add “+” to “gourmet”, then “gourmet +” will be different to “gourmet”, but at the same time it won’t gain any additional meaning. I consider the same tactic, when choosing domain names. Google likes, when domain is corresponding site title and most frequent keywords on site, but the majority of good domains are already taken. At the same time if you buy a domain that contains extra words, it is loosing relevancy. That is why I oftenly buy domains like “gourmet1″ or “gourmet-1″ that are containing my general keyword and a meaningless symbol that won’t affect relevancy and popularity.

These are techniques I use, but I’m sure you have much interesting to tell too. Waiting for your opinions.

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Filed under: Dealing with Keywords, Google Optimization, Link Popularity FAQ

Protected: Other Top100-like resoures?

Posted on July 6th, 2005 by bro15360

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Filed under: Link Popularity FAQ, News

Ranking Opinion

Posted on July 4th, 2005 by Administrator

Jay G. Have written an interesting comment, so I have decided to put it in articles. Jay, you can write articles and submit your questions right here - it is more useful than submitting it in comments, because more people will see it and it is more likely that you will receive answers for your questions.

Jay G. Says:

I read a lot about how you should link your site with others of similar content. Of course we should all do this, not only because it is good for our site visitor, but it seems like it would make sense to the search engines.

I do have one question though…if it’s all about related content…how does DMOZ have such a high pagerank? And Yahoo? They are all scattered…linking to pages having little to do with one another and vice-versa. I know that shear volume counts, but there are many sites, such as general directories that have very high pagerank. Doesn’t make much sense to me.

Here is my theory…forget all about the algorithms for a minute. I think pagerank and good search engine results are achieved simply by how many times the search engine visits your site. Seems simple, but think about it. If you are linked to by many sites with low pagerank, you will be scanned by the search engines. You may not be scanned deeply and you may not be visited often, therefore giving you a low pagerank. If you are linked to by many sites with high pagerank, you will be scanned much more frequently and more deeply, giving you a higher pagerank.

So I think the volume of sites that link to you matters as well as the pagerank of the site. Fewer sites with higher pagerank would equal many sites with lower pagerank.

Perhaps I am way off, but from my observance over the years, this is the simplest way to figure it out, since none of us really “know.” I do love reading all of the crazy theories though.

Last example….I was just analyzing a motorcycle related website with a pagerank of 7. There are tons of links going to it…the majority from real estate websites, cooking websites, etc…what does that say about relevancy?

Makes you think…

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Filed under: Optimization News

Domain or subdomain? Sandbox question.

Posted on July 4th, 2005 by Administrator

Recently I have received an e-mail with the follwing question:

Is the whole domain, or just a page gets sandboxed?

Due to my research in this field whole domain and subdomains are sanboxed too, unless this is a “hilltop” domain like geocities.com, when single subdomain can get sandboxed, while other subdomains, domain, and domain’s children pages experience no affection of this filter.

Please, give your opinions concerning sandbox. I think that it is affecting pages, which gain a lot of backlinks in short period of time, but some of my friends have different opinions concerning this question. Well, what do you think?

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Filed under: Google Optimization

Increasing traffic conversion.

Posted on July 4th, 2005 by Administrator

Creating I site I don’t care details of each banner and text link, but when the traffic is already flowing through my site, I try to increase conversion ratio. You can earn additional 15-20% by making your text and graphic advertisement more attractive for surfer.

There is no definite how-to, but you can always look throug your pages and ask yourself - is this banner attractive? Would I click it if I’d be a surfer? I find some misleading graphic and text ads and try to change it time to time and study conversion ratio. As far as I find the best variant - I leave it working and enjoy increased ratio.

For instance: if you are advertising with help of banners, it is good to provide each banner with text description giving more detailed description of what banner is telling about. Make meanful stresses on advantages that surfer may receive if he will purchase the product.

In case if you are using PPC (Pay per click) strategy - add text description to the top of the page that, for instance, you suggest to click through search results because various companies offer discounts, wholesales and so on and it is necessary to see a couple of sites to find the best offer fitting surfer’s needs.

Just think about it and interesting ideas of increasing ads productivity will definitely appear. Same traffic + optimized ads are really increasing your income - just work on it.

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Filed under: Optimization News

Great work is just ahead!

Posted on July 4th, 2005 by Administrator

Tired figting with Google? In view of Yahoo! and MSN updates it seems that we are going to have really serious work ahead.

If Yahoo! successfully attracts their 15% of users and MSN will attract even more after Microsoft will release Windows Longhorn with installed search linked with MSN search, then we all will have to learn optimization strategies for all three engines.

How do you think, does Yahoo! and MSN have chances of taking at least 30-40% of total quantity of searches?

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Filed under: Optimization News

To purchase or not to purchase?

Posted on July 4th, 2005 by Administrator

This is the question I have every time I find a promissing optimization guide. There are a lot of SEO professionals that release guides based on their experience and their research.

Unfortunatelly, since Google has made a great shade over it’s algorythm, the majority of articles and guides of this sort became worthless. I’ve seen a hundred of them and all were talking about same things in different words - “make good content”, “stay in good company”, “build link startegies”, etc. I mean that each and every guide tells us about already known facts and each of them say that it’s a pack of unique and brilliant ides.

Of course its up to you whether to purchase such guides or not, but in my opinion they are really worthless, because a lot of same ideas and guides are available for free - for instance see my previous post - many of my suggestions are sold in variety of “brilliant” guides for huge price.

Anyway. If you are going to buy such a thing - discuss it on forums. If the guide is worth purchasing, then you will definitely hear a lot of positive testimonials concerning it. If not - consider to avoid it.

That’s all IMHO, but I really haven’t seen any worthy guide for over a year.

P.S. This all is about optimization in general. Some interesting articles about, for instance, usage of SEO services, maintaining hosting to meet google’s demands and so on are still useful, but I repeat, discuss such things to save your time and money.

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Filed under: Optimization News

Getting displayed in SERPs.

Posted on July 4th, 2005 by Administrator

I think that each of us dreams about getting displayed on the first page of Google SERPs and each of us is using his own strategy to make site ranking better. Now I’m going to share my strategy and my vision of how good site have to develop in order to get ranked on the first page.

1. The first step in creation of a site is choosing keywords. Be accurate doing it and choose just few of them for each site. It is much better if chosen keywords are synonyms or different words meaning the same object, for instance “apple” and “fruit” suggest us to say “tree”. So, it should be excellent if you find not more than 5 closely related keywords for one site. Why few and why related? Mixing a lot of keywords on one single site is loosing relevancy. The same situation is with their relationship – the more keywords are close by meaning – the better relevancy of inner site linking you achieve.
2. Writing good texts. Good texts suppose that you create articles for each keyword you have chosen. For instance if you have chosen 5 keywords for your site, it is better to create five separate pages that will be narrative for only one keyword and maybe a couple of it’s synonyms to keep normal rate of keyword density.
3. Site structure. Your main page must contain all five keywords linking to inner keyword pages with appropriate (it is very important) description in anchor of a link. It is also good to provide each link with short description containing keyword of a page to which it links. Your inner pages may be linked with each other or maybe not – it depends of how you have decided to distribute page rank over your site (further explanation of page rank distribution will be given in separate article soon). Regardless of what strategy you choose, it is very important to avoid “blind” pages. Each and every page of your site must have at least one outbound link back to your site (no matter where), because when you link to a blind page for instance from index page from your site – you give it page rank and if there is no link back – page rank doesn’t returns – it gets wasted on the “blind” page. In my humble opinion the best navigation is well-known “bread crumbs”, when surfer is able to understand where he is (level and branch) and where he can go. For instance if your site is about fruit trees and surfer gets to the apple tree seeds page he can see the following “Fruit trees>>Apple Trees>>Apple tree seeds” – thus surfer understands that he is on apple tree seeds page which is subordinate to apple trees directory, which is the child directory of Fruit trees site. It facilitates both search engine’s indexing and surfer’s life J
4. Choosing a domain name. It is extremely good if you knew that you are going to make site about fruit trees two years ago and purchased the domain having put some short excerpt about fruit trees there. If you didn’t than your job with a new domain name will be much harder – see 5th paragraph. If you have that good old domain – upload your site there and start purchasing or exchanging relevant links. Don’t be too fast – linking must be “wise”, I mean that if a search engine knew that you had 2 links linking to the domain and the very next day it spots hundred links – it is more likely that you will get banned for certain period of time or sandboxed.
5. Those who are purchasing new domains will have a bit harder job in comparison with those, who had purchased it in advance. Having uploaded your site to server forget about it for a week or two. You can just surf it time to time using explorer or firefox browsers with installed Google toolbar to tip a search robot to it. Then after two weeks put one relevant link to your site and continue waiting. Add no more than one link per week during first six months and it is more like that you will get ranked very good. And remember… it is better to purchase domains in advance. Think about what sites you may going to create in a year and purchase appropriate domains. Then put one single page with short excerpt containing one or two keywords related to what will the site be about and put one link pointing that domain. Its like manure a field before sowing something.
6. Choosing link partners. It is very important too. Exchange links with and purchase links from only relevant sites, e.g. sites related to subject of your site. Before you buy a link check whether the site is cached and properly indexed by Google. Check links on this site - where they link, are those sites good and so on. To be short – check whole site to be good - Google says they pay much attention to the “company” of a site. The same situation is with sites you link. Don’t be afraid to loose a bit of page rank by linking to other sites – on the contrary, it may increase your relevancy. Link to one or two good sites about fruit trees and Google will see that you are really creating a good, informative site about fruit trees, not an over optimized project.
7. That is probably everything I was willing to tell you about. Keep on going with your unique text and graphic content, your good links and your luck ;)

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Filed under: Optimization News

Opinions Wanted!

Posted on July 1st, 2005 by Administrator

You know that three years ago, Page Rank was probably the general and most important criteria for site ranking. However, it’s importance has decreased and currently we probably don’t know how PR affects rankings. What is your opinion concerning this question? And if you think that PR affects rankings, how is it important?

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Filed under: Optimization News

ATTENTION! Webmasters!

Posted on July 1st, 2005 by Administrator

We are posting our articles for over a week, but there is no comments, no artices added by you, no mail concerning this articles. We have a question to You - are you actually reading this? Do you find this articles useful or not? We need your opinion to plan further development of Uptimebot.com!

Post your thoughts and suggestions in comments of this topic.

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Filed under: Optimization News

Useful Keyword Density Tool

Posted on June 30th, 2005 by Administrator

If you are looking for a keyword density tool, do you know what technical characteristics it should contain? Are you sure that tool you are currently using is good enough?

I had such questions looking for a keyword density tool for the first time. The answer has been found rather easy - dynamically developed service that includes keyword density tool muts be probably updating keyword density tool too. That’s why I referred to free SeoChat Seo Tools keyword density analyzer.

Easy and reliable, this keyword density analyzer will become a good companion in your page building job. You can start using this tool right here: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

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Filed under: Dealing with Keywords

Get Google Maps API

Posted on June 30th, 2005 by Administrator

Google maps API is now available for use - get ‘em here: http://www.google.com/apis/maps/

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Filed under: Optimization News

Interesting: Yahoo is Researching “Intelligent” Ads

Posted on June 29th, 2005 by Administrator

Yahoo! is currently working on a research of “intelligent” ads that will appear on site according to surfers’ behavior. This research is performed with help of Revenue Science corp and targeted to make even more sense of targeted ads than current Google page context ads do.

This means that Yahoo! ads will be displayed according to user searching behavior - user searches and site visits. This will combine powers of contextual and targeted advertisement and can make really good results.

If Yahoo! will be successive in their research, this may create even more profitable service than Google offers today.

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Filed under: Yahoo and MSN

Google Says They Are Building Not a PayPal Killer

Posted on June 29th, 2005 by Administrator

They say that Google Wallet is not targeted for person to person payments, but to extend current projects of corporation. This service is going to be both a payment system and a “research lab” for further investigation of online marketing. For instance, people using adwords to advertise their products will be able to tracks what leads to sales, and at what cost with help of Google Wallet.

This may also help webmasters in choosing pay-per-click or pay-per-sale model of Google Adsense.

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Filed under: Google AdWords and PPC

Google Started Offering Google Video

Posted on June 29th, 2005 by Administrator

Google starts a VLC-based playback. It has began accepting video uploads which will be available for both playback and download and searcheable with help of Google Search and keywords provided by those, who upload videos to Google.

Enter here: http://video.google.com/ to start using Google Video. To view streaming video download player here: http://video.google.com/video_download.html

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Filed under: Optimization News

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