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WP SEO Sniper Released

By Dewald Pretorius | December 23, 2007

WP SEO Sniper Professional is a very comprehensive and powerful search engine optimization plugin for WordPress blogs.

It goes further and deeper than other SEO plugins in that it implements the most aggressive on-page search engine optimization methods that Dan Thies recommends in his SEO Fast Start manual.

Before you had to edit theme files like crazy and write your own code if you wanted to implement advanced SEO Fast Start techniques. Now you can do it with a few mouse clicks.

See for yourself what professional WordPress SEO with WP SEO Sniper is all about!

There’s also a scaled-down free WordPress SEO plugin called WP SEO Sniper Lite that you can download. It implements what Dan Thies calls the Third Level Push, which pushes more PageRank from your category pages down to the individual posts.

If you’re into affiliate marketing, check out the WP SEO Sniper affiliate program.

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Tags: blogs, plugin, search engine optimization, SEO, webmasters, wordpress

Topics: SEO | No Comments »

PHP Spinner - Released in the Wild

By Dewald Pretorius | November 20, 2007

PHP Spinner is an off-shoot of WP Spinner (the WordPress plugin).

PHP Spinner provides the same duplicate content killing functionality, just for PHP websites and static HTML websites, where the server can run HTML files as PHP.

See for yourself what PHP Spinner - Duplicate Content Eliminator software for PHP and HTML websites is all about!

If you’re into affiliate marketing, check out the PHP Spinner affiliate program and WP Spinner affiliate program. Both pay a whopping 50% commission.

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Tags: SEO

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WP Spinner - Released in the Wild

By Dewald Pretorius | November 12, 2007

For quite some time now I’ve been using a dynamic content rewriting and spinner plugin that I developed myself.

I’ve been toying with the idea to turn it into a product to sell, and the past few weeks I sat down and actually did it. (A heck of a lot of work, by the way.)

Today is the day for the official release. Quite exciting!

See for yourself what WP Spinner - Duplicate Content Eliminator plugin for WordPress is all about!

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Tags: SEO

Topics: SEO | 2 Comments »

Why Focus is Absolutely Vital

By Dewald Pretorius | October 17, 2007

Many of us in the Internet Marketing industry suffer from attention deficit disorder. It’s not the official disease, but we often lack the focus that is required to succeed.

Think back on your IM experience and tell me if this sounds familiar.

You’re busy building and promoting your websites according to a method that you read in a particular ebook. Suddenly, out of the blue, you hear about this new ebook that promises you extra quick indexing and fantastic AdSense revenues. So, you buy that ebook and read it.

Next thing you know, you’re building and promoting your web sites according to what the second ebook said.

You’re happily doing that, when suddenly you hear about this hot new ebook that tells you how to make millions with AdWords. So, you buy that ebook and read it.

Next thing you know, you’re all over AdWords and your web sites are silently idling in a forgotten alley.

Please pay close attention, because you’ve just identified your major obstacle to success, namely lack of focus.

Why is focus so vitally important? Let me tell you a story to illustrate why.

Once upon a time a king planted a fruit tree in the center of his garden. This wasn’t any old fruit tree. It possessed magic powers to decide what kind of fruit it wanted to bear.

When spring arrived, the tree considered all the possible kinds of fruits it could produce, and decided that it would produce rich juicy oranges.

It pushed out the buds, which opened and became beautiful orange tree blossoms. The insects pollinated the flowers and slowly tiny little oranges started to grow on the tree.

Just as the oranges were about halfway to being ready to pick, the tree suddenly had a change of heart. It decided that it didn’t want to produce oranges anymore, it wanted to produce apples.

It quickly shed all the oranges and started pushing out apple blossom buds. The buds started to turn into a rich apple harvest.

Just before the apples were ready to be picked, the tree changed its mind again and decided it wanted to produce peaches.

It shed the apples and started the process all over again with peaches.

At the end of the season, the king ordered his servants to cut down the tree because it never produced any fruit.

Now, do you realize that that’s exactly what you’re doing when you’re constantly changing your focus from the one hot thing to the next?

By changing your focus you’re robbing yourself of the opportunity to succeed at any of the things you’re doing.

It’s absolutely essential to focus on something, anything, and stick with it until it produces fruit.

It’s often said that success comes overnight after months or years of preparation and hard work.

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Tags: Building Websites, focus, internet marketing, success

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Comprehensive List of Affiliate Networks

By Dewald Pretorius | October 12, 2007

When people think “affiliate networks” they often stop at CJ and ClickBank.

As an affiliate marketer, your options are much, much wider than that! The most popular ones are all good affiliate networks, but there are many more networks that bring affiliate marketers and publisher together for a profitable relationship.

I compiled a list for you of more than fifty affiliate networks that you can join and promote their advertisers’ goods or services. Each one has an excellent selection of merchants to pick from.

Here goes…

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Tags: Affiliate Marketing

Topics: Affiliate Marketing | 4 Comments »

Brighten Up Content with Graphics

By Dewald Pretorius | October 9, 2007

They say that a picture speaks a thousand words.

A major drawback of written text is that it does not convey tone, inflexion, and emotion. That’s a very important part of human communication that’s missing when you read a block of text.

In affiliate marketing, or any marketing for that matter, you want to reach down to the emotional level of your target market. I’m sure you’ve heard before that people make a decision to buy based on their emotions and then they endorse their decision with logic.

Photos can help you set the overall theme of your content and dial in particular emotions with the reader.

It’s wise to use photos sparingly. Don’t overdo it. You just want to give the reader’s imagination an image to grab on to and then run with it.

Where do you get professional pictures to use on your web site?

Before I answer that question, let me issue this caution. If the only way to get a picture is to right-click on it and “save as…” then you’re probably stealing it. Never use stolen property on your web site.

It’s far better to use stock pictures that you buy from various online suppliers. BigStockPhoto is the service that I prefer. They have thousands upon thousands of pictures, and you pay only between $1 and $2 per photo. There’s also iStockPhoto. They’re very popular, but I just find it a lot easier to find the pictures I’m looking for at BigStockPhoto.

There are other web sites that make pictures and graphics available free of charge, but you have to be very careful and make sure that you can actually freely use those items. Laura Milligan published a list of 100 legal sources for free photos and graphics. If you’re happy with just every day life pictures, you’ll probably find them on the free resources.

Between free pictures and paid stock pictures, I definitely prefer the latter. You know you’re getting quality work and you know you’re given a license to use the material. I found that one has to spend too much time searching for professional quality pictures, such as a person depicting a specific mood where the person is set against a white background. Spending an hour searching for a free picture versus spending five minutes plus $1 - the second option makes far more business sense.

For ideas on how to use pictures, just look at this post. Also browse to the other sections of this site using the hyperlinks on the right.

I use the little golden men at the beginning of the content to illustrate the overall theme of the content. Then, deeper in the content I’ll sometimes include emoticons to set or illustrate a specific mood or emotion.

It’s important that the graphics don’t break the text into separate sections, which often results in huge chunks of white space inside the content.

To float the graphics like I’m doing on this site, use the following HTML:

I prefer using inline CSS styling for the graphics as opposed to styling it with a CSS stylesheet and assigning it a class.

With inline CSS styling the graphics float in the intended places in your RSS feed content, when someone reads the content with an RSS feed reader. That flexibility is lost when you style it with a stylesheet, and the graphics jump in between the paragraphs and create huge white spaces.

Let the pictures speak at least a thousand words to your readers! It’s so much less to type.

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Tags: Building Websites

Topics: Building Websites | 1 Comment »

How to Prepare to Sell a Web Site from Day One

By Dewald Pretorius | October 5, 2007

When you create a new revenue generating web site, it’s very important to create it as a “stand-alone” site that you can easily package and sell at some point in the future.

You could, of course, hang on to the site indefinitely, but if you have a successful site there’s probably going to be someone who’ll be interested in buying it. The price offer just might be too good to refuse.

To do that, there are a few things you must do right from the start. It will save you a ton of work and a lot of headaches later on.

Here is a list of the minimum actions and strategies to take and follow.

Register a domain with the primary keyword(s) in the domain name. It costs less than $10 a year to register a domain. Do not put your site on a subdomain of one of your existing sites (site.example.com). When you sell a subdomain site it’ll lose all its inbound links that you worked so hard to acquire, and it’ll seriously devalue the site. You’ll have to do a bunch of 301 redirects to ensure that the new owner does not end up with a dud.
Create a separate MySQL database for the site, especially if you’re initially locating it as an add-on domain in one of your existing hosting accounts. It’s all too easy and tempting to install the site’s database in an existing MySQL database. Once again, if you want to sell the site, it’s going to cause you serious pain.
Use only email addresses that you register on your domain name. It’s a five second job to create a new email address in CPanel on your domain. Use those email addresses for absolutely everything, from creating the site (for example, when you install WordPress on the domain), to creating social accounts, to submitting to directories, etc. That way you can easily transfer all the external accounts that accompany your site to the new owner.
Don’t use your real name on the site. Create an alias or pseudonym and operate the site using that name. If you create a “persona,” it too can be transferred to the new owner and the site can seamlessly continue to function.
Use some kind of affiliate link cloaking solution, even if it’s as simple as creating a subfolder for every link and doing a PHP 301 redirect to the actual affiliate link. If you hard-code your affiliate links in the content of the site, the new owner will have to edit every single link to change it over to his affiliate link. If you’re running a WordPress blog, using WordPress Affiliate Pro and a Google AdSense plugin will accomplish this goal.
Create a Google Analytics account specifically for the site. You can then transfer a history of the site’s traffic patterns to the new owner. To do this, also create a separate Google account and name it something like “yourdomain@gmail.com”.
Create a separate FeedBurner account for the site. You will have to give a deep price discount if your RSS subscribers can’t be transferred to the new owner.
If you’re planning on building a serious mailing list, create a separate mailing list account for the site. A large list that can be easily transferred to the new owner will skyrocket the value of the site.

I hope this advice helps you make a ton of money from your web site one day!

Feel free to add more guidelines and ideas in the comments.

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Tags: Building Websites

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Dynamically Follow and Nofollow Links in a WordPress Blog Footer and Sidebar

By Dewald Pretorius | October 1, 2007

One of the many guidelines that Dan Thies gives in his awesome SEO Fast Start book and in this Dynamic Linking & Nofollow blog post, is that one must “nofollow” links to your site map page (and other “overhead” pages) from all the other pages on your site, except from the home page. That way the search engine spiders can find your site map page, while the page does not dilute the internal link juice of the other site pages.

Implementing Dan’s guideline on a WordPress blog is not a simple exercise, but here’s how you do it.

The method I’m going to show you allows you to selectively nofollow hard-coded links in your WordPress blog’s footer and sidebar. It does not work for links that are dynamically generated by the WordPress system, such as the Blogroll.

The first to-do is to create a file called “functions.php” and save it in your WordPress theme folder. Some themes come with a functions.php file. If that’s the case, then you must edit that file.

If your blog is installed in the root folder of the domain (http://www.example.com/), then put the following code in the functions.php file:

<?php
function this_is_home() {
   $url = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
   $url_array = explode("/",$url);
   array_shift($url_array);

   if(empty($url_array) or $url_array[0] == "")
      return true;
   } else {
      return false;
   }
}
?>

If you’re editing an existing functions.php file, don’t copy the “<?php” and “?>” lines. They’ll be in the file already.

If the blog is installed in a subfolder of the domain (http://www.example.com/blog/), then put the following code in the functions.php file:

<?php
function this_is_home() {
   $url = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
   $url_array = explode("/",$url);
   array_shift($url_array);

   if($url_array[0] == "blog")
      return true;
   } else {
      return false;
   }
}
?>

Replace ‘blog’ with the subfolder name where your blog is installed.

At this point in time you might be asking, why don’t I use the built-in “is_home()” function of WordPress?

I’ve had all kinds of weird issues with is_home. Sometimes it would work, other times it wouldn’t work, especially when you have a WordPress static page as the home page of the blog. So, I wrote a function that will reliably determine if the current page is the home page of the blog.

The second to-do is to edit your WordPress theme’s “footer.php” file.

Insert the following code in footer.php where you want the sitemap link to appear.

<a href="/sitemap/"<?php if (!this_is_home()) echo " rel=\"nofollow\""; ?>>Sitemap</a>

You can repeat this second to-do for all the links that you want to have “followed” on the home page and “nofollowed” everywhere else.

This is the key part of the solution: <?php if (!this_is_home()) echo " rel=\"nofollow\""; ?>. Insert that in any hyperlink that you want to dynamically follow and nofollow.

In the end it’s not too difficult, and it will preserve a lot of internal link juice on the internal pages of your blog that can then flow to the pages you want to rank higher in the SERPs.