Pinging you blog

I have found a great way to get blog search engines to take a notice in your blog. It is called pinging your blog. Here is a little information about pinging:

Pinging is a mechanism where a blog notifies a server that its content has been updated. Most blogging host only ping their own server. However, to get greater results you will want to ping as many as you can. There are a few sites that do multiple pings at once and they are free.

Here are a few that are pretty good:

Ping-o-matic http://pingomatic.com

Ping Your Blog http://pingyourblog.com

AutoPinger http://autopinger.com

Feed Ping Free Website http://www.feedping.com

Feed Shark http://feedshark.brainbliss.com

IPings http://ipings.com

Pingoat http://pingoat.com

I hope this helps you all out.

Designing a site to be Search Engine Friendly

The basic idea of owning a site is to have people visit your site to purchase whatever you are selling, promoting, or whatever. The best way to accomplish this is to design your site to be Search Engine Friendly.

Basic Methods for Make a Site Search Engine Friendly

Lets start off with some basic methods of making your site both visitor and search engine friendly.

* The site needs to be easy to use, easy to navigate and have what your visitors are looking for. Do not promise something that you do not have.
* The site should be visually attractive, do not use overly bright colors or colors that do not go together.
* Have ways for your visitors to navigate through your site. Provide navigation links in a consistent way throughout your site. For example, if on the first 3 pages, the navigation links are on the left hand side, ensure that the navigation links are on the left hand side throughout the rest of the site.
* Identify what your site is about on your homepage. Be honest!
* Keep the home page simple. Limit navigation links on the home page to major ideas or areas of your site.
* Keep keywords to a limited level on the home page. Search engines take this seriously and will penalize your website for key word spamming.
* Use an opening paragraph to explain what your site is doing or about, keep this to around 250 words (this should be as close to your HTML code as possible). Within this paragraph, use keywords in a way that makes sense to your visitor. Do not over due the keywords. If you use them correctly, search engines will see your site as a subject matter expert and give you a higher page ranking.
* Each page of your site should have a page title with roughly 60- 80 characters. This helps search engines to see and identify each page separately.
* Give each page a page tag with roughly 20 to 25 characters; this helps both your visitor and search engines to see what your page is about.
* Use anchor text links with caution. We recommend that you use text links only if they are help or necessary to your visitor for navigation or to find useful information. Excessive use of text links can reduce your page rank.
* Underline, bold, highlight, and italic keywords; however, this should be done where it make sense. Do not overdue it.
* Optimize your site for keywords prior to submitting your site to the search engines. We will explain later what search engines require.
* Always use correct English and grammar within your site. Both your visitors and search engines always appreciate a website with good grammar and proper English.

Designing your site to be search engine friendly is not hard; however, it takes time and effort. As long as you use patience, be methodical, do keyword research, create unique content, provide what your visitors are looking for, then both your traffic and your search engine ranking will improve.

Warning Signs

As most of you in the PTC industry know, sites disappear at an alarming rate. Most sites disappear after only 2 to 3 months. Today we are going to look at three fairly large sites that have disappeared or gone off-line recently to see if we can discover some warning signs that would help us evaluate other sites that may be in trouble.

Lets first start off with CrewBux.com. This was a very large and honest site for a long time. However, about 2 months ago they stopped paying their members. At first, the payments were pushed back, then back again and again. Finally the site just stopped making payments to almost all of their members. They continued to have post about a few members being paid; however, most members were NOT getting paid. Reviews of their forum showed that members were complaining about payments and no support. So, the warning sign here is if a site is pushing its payment time back then they are not bringing in enough funds to cover the members payment requests. In addition, check a sites forum, if members are complaining that they are not being paid, BEWARE!

For the second site, we will take a brief look at Clickin.me. This site came online around late July 08 and had tons of ads all over the industry. They grew at a great rate and where up to 60,000 members in roughly 2 months. At first they paid everyone quickly. However, at about the 2 month point, they came up with wire transfer payments instead of using the industry standard of paypal or alertpay. This required members to submit their bank account information which most people did not feel comfortable with. A clear sign that they were trying to get people to just cancel their accounts. In addition, the length of time to set up the wire transfer was quoted as from 4 to 16 weeks. Another clear method of stalling payments. During this time, the sites stats for payments sent did not go up by any noticeable amount. Then in Sept. they disappeared. The warning sign here is that if a site comes up with some strange payment method or with a lengthly set up time, beware!

Last of all let's look at 07bux.net. This was another large site that clearly went scam. At first, this site went off line and then came back with a new script. They told everyone that they could not upgrade the old database into the new script, so everyone lost their earnings, referrals, and accounts. They just riped people off. Several sites have tried this approach lately, for example clickptc.us used this method of scamming people only a month ago. This is a clear sign that the site is riping you off and is in trouble. Thankfully, the members on 07bux sent in tons of disputes to Alertpay. Alertpay has since blocked their account. They lost their account with paypal a few months ago for the same reason, members complained that they were not getting what they paid for. This has made it very hard for 07bux to operate; so, the site is currently down. There are two warning signs here, the site losing the right to use either paypal or alertpay and trying the new script scam.

If any site you are working with shows any of these warning signs, you should not invest in that site until you are sure they are legit.

Warning signs:
1. Pushing payments back
2. New strange payment methods or lengthly setup times.
3. Losing Paypal or Alertpay
4. New script so you need to start a new account because we can not use the old database.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Before we get much further in this series, it is important that you understand what Black Hat SEO is. While these techniques can get you short term results, they come with a very high proability that your site will get banned from search engines and they should be avoided.

Most black hat SEO techniques used to be legal, but poeple went overboard. As a result, Black hat techniques are frowned upon. Black hat SEO is a short term method of getting visitors to your site without looking at how to get a large volume of visitors to your site on a regular basis. These techniques are often used by people promising great results in a short time. They do not care if you get banned down the road, so be careful of people offering traffic using these techniques.

Black Hat SEO Techniques:

* Keyword stuffing: Placing a large number of keywords into your site. This includes long lists of keywords and nothing else. Search engines will eventually pick up on this and penalize your site. We will show you the correct way on how to place keywords into your site that will be helpful.
* Invisible Keywords: This involves placing key words within the site that are the same color as the background (making them invisible to humans but not to search engine spiders). Of course, in the long run, search engines will figure this out and penalize your site.
* Doorway Pages: A doorway page is basically a “fake” page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher.

Black Hat SEO techniques actually work in the short run; however, in time, sites using these techniques are banned for using unethical practices. It’s just not worth the risk.