Wordze – FREE 30-day trial
Just got an email from Wordze, announcing their next round of free 30-day trials.
The following link should work for the next 7 days, good chance for all of you who wanted to try keyword research with Wordze: Wordze – Free 30-day trial
Update the copyright year in footer sections of your blogs!
Now that we’re all in the new year of 2008, it is the perfect time for you to update the copyright year in footers of your blogs. This is something I used to neglect, but like any blogger, the more you write and the more you spend time maintaining and updating your posts, the better it is to have copyright years updated early into the new year.
I still remember the times when it took me almost half a year to notice that some of my blogs were still claiming the copyright period on them to cover everything up to the previous year, sometimes even the year before, but if you’re serious about protecting your intellectual property, better get into the habit of updating these copyright years early.
AdSense Wisdom From ProBlogger
Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) has posted two great articles summarizing some of the best reasons to use or not to use Google AdSense:
WebHostingChoice: Beginner’s Guide For Web Hosting
I’ve been asked to have a look at the WebHostingChoice.com, and think it’s a website worth your visit.
This web hosting directory aims to make your search for the hosting a most complete venture. Most of the big hosting companies are represented, and each of them has a separate page with additional info.
The general feeling is that it’s a comprehensive website with users of all technical levels in mind. For beginners, there is an extensive Learning Center section with a great web hosting FAQ. There are explanations and definitions of hosting-related terminology, this will certainly help you ensure you understand everything about a particular hosting offer.
I also liked the section about most typical hosting scams you could come across. The general rule here is to double-check anything that looks too good to be true, like unlimited hosting, unlimited mailboxes, etc. While it is understood that the common assumption is that an average customer will never want to use the unlimited amount of any resource, it’s always good to verify the exact meaning of the “unlimited” word. In my time, I’ve seen too many examples of hosters which claim to provide unlimited bandwidth, but then cut you off after you go over 10Gb a month.
I wish there was some coverage on VPS hosting, but I guess it’s a pretty unique niche – and many people would simply jump from shared hosting to a dedicated server of their own. Apart from this, I found webhosting listings quite comprehensive – should definitely save your time when comparing different hosting plans or even different hosting companies.
Great list of websites to submit your blog to
I’ve just come across a great list of 75 websites you can submit your blog to, created by Kevin Muldoon at Blogging Tips.
If you were waiting for a super-easy and extra-useful list of resources – your wait is over, because Kevin did an impressive job by not only compiling the list but also providing direct links to submit pages where possible.
The Blogger’s Guide To SEO
Aaron Wall has recently posted a great introduction to SEO for bloggers, which I think every blogger should check out. Beginners will find great steps to get started, and seasoned bloggers will make sure nothing in their SEO campaign had been accidentally left out.
Here’s a link: The Blogger’s Guide To SEO.
SEO Tip: Use Google Adwords for keyword suggestions
During my recent experiments with Google Adwords, I’ve learned a really cool way to explore new keywords relevant to my websites. No, it’s not the Keyword Tool you have available from your Adwords control panel. It’s the web access logs of your website.
How Google Adwords suggests you new keywords
When you start an Adwords campaign, you specify a list of keywords you think is relevant, and then perhaps use the provided keyword tool to expand this list. That’s the typical approach. But wait, there’s more.
Most often, users get to see your ad in a sidebar of Google ads added to the Google SERP (search results page). So people use certain words for their search, and then Google decides which ads are most relevant. Sometimes your ad is shown there as well. The search term used by a user doesn’t necessarily match any of the keywords from your Adwords campaign, and this is where the added value lies.
You see, every time such a user clicks on your ad, the keyword term will be specified in the request which goes to your website. In other words, in your logs it looks like the person searched for some keyword term and found your page as one of the results.
How can you benefit from this?
The beauty of this approach is this: you get suggestions for hundreds of very relevant keywords, some of them vastly different from the original idea you had behind your Adwords campaign. The reason these keywords are relevant is because people opted clicking on your ad, so it’s not a relevancy calculated by Google, but the human intelligence.
Simply start expanding your website by adding pages targeting the newly discovered keyword combinations, and over time this will bring you an increase in natural search engines traffic.
Why I Think Slicehost Is The Best
Two weeks ago I’ve upgraded my hosting plan with Slicehost, and it happened so easily and transparently that I doubt anyone would have notice if it wasn’t for my announcements posted on my Personal Development blog.
I’ve been with Slicehost for a bit more than half a year, and must say I’m really impressed with the service.
What is Slicehost?
Slicehost is a VPS hosting company. This means that you’re buying not a ready-made hosting package with control panel to manage your emails and websites, but instead get a slice – a virtual private server (VPS) which emulates a Linux server of your own. You get administrator’s access to this environment (root), and can install/deinstall anything you like in your virtual server.
Slices come in various sizes, specified mainly by the amount of RAM available to your virtual server. Each slice has an appropriate amount of disk space allocated too, so the bigger the slice, the more memory, CPU time, disk space and bandwidth you’re going to get.
Due to its phenomenal popularity, Slicehost is a limited service, in a way that you need to request a slice and then may have to wait for 1-3 weeks for it it become available for you.
Is Slicehost for you?
Because it’s a VPS solution, Slicehost is very good for developers and Unix administrators, but not so friendly for an average user. If you don’t know how to install and configure a Linux system yourself, you will have to buy services from someone like me. The prices for slices start at 20$/month, so paying a few hundred dollars on top of it for someone to configure it all before you can start exchanging emails and serving pages from your new hosting may not be what you expect.
VPS isn’t a basic service for the general market, but it’s a niche solution with quite a set of unique features.
Here are just a few reasons why you might consider VPS solution over a standard (shared) hosting:
Full access to your hosting environment
You get root access and can create as many users with various levels of access to your virtual server as you like. Full access means you can change any file in your hosting environment, change any permission, and install/configure practically any software – all these simple actions can be quite troublesome on shared hosting when you are on a shared hosting with a single assigned userid to access your environment.
Full customization of any service
You are free to install whatever software you like, so there’s no limitation by the pre-installed and pre-configured solutions offered by your hosting company. You can use a specific kind or version of a web server, and configure it to work exactly the way you like.
For example, to serve HTTPS traffic, you need to have an SSL certificate. It’s quite a common practice to self-sign such certificates for not-so-critical websites – you will see a warning every time you access such a website, but your traffic will be encrypted nevertheless. For shared hosting, you can’t use self-signed certificates and are required to buy them from a well-known online authority.
Predictability and reliability
That’s what I like most about Slicehost. My VPS is predictable and reliable. This means that, with proper planning, I can survive any kind of traffic. People have been known to go through successful diggs on the lowest slice available. Your website can cope with thousands of visitors an hour, and even if you go over the bandwidth limit of yours, Slicehost will not cut you off immediately, thus allowing you to fully enjoy the moments of high traffic.
Predictability comes from the idea of always having your resources pre-allocated for you. When you buy a slice with 256Mb of RAM, this means that it’s a virtual server running on a much bigger and better physical server. It could be a server with 4, 8 or even 16Gb of RAM, and many slices hosted on it. The idea is that each slice gets its share of the memory reserved. This isn’t always true for all the hosting providers, but on Slicehost you always have your resources reserved. This means that you can’t use more memory than what you paid for, but also ensures that even if all the other slices on the same physical server max their resources out, your slice will stay as happy as usual, with all the memory intact and free for its own use only.
Great support
I’ve only had a few questions (not even issues) in my time with Slicehost, and have always received almost instant support. I’ve also appreciated the announcements on Slice Blog, plenty of useful how-tos on Slice Wiki, found very helpful people on Slice Forum, and got all the help I needed from Slice Chat.
There’s one of the most advanced and friendliest ever communities around Slicehost, which means anything you’re thinking of implemented has probably been tried and excelled by knowledgeable individuals before.
Give Slicehost a try!
Like any other hosting, slices at Slicehost can be bought on a monthly basis. If you think VPS is for you, please feel free to request a slice and play with it. If you have any specific questions – don’t hesitate to ask me, and if you need help deciding whether VPS is the right solution, you’re more than welcome to contact me as well. Naturally, I’ll be able to do a full install/configuration/support of your slice should you choose to use my services.
Free Keywords from Wordze @ DigitalPoint
For all of you interested in using Wordze keyword research service, here’s a chance to give them a try. On DigitalPoint, there’s a thread where you can give one keyword (and possibly a keyword pair) a day, and have a chance to get a 10,000 keyword file on it posted in the same thread as a file.
I’ve been a happy customer of Wordze for the past month and a half, and so I think you should go and give it a try. Who knows, you might like it!
As this month gets started, we are nearing the official year anniversary of Wordze’s launch date. So for a limited time, we are going to do something crazy that we have never done before. For the next 30 days if you post in this thread the keyword list you would like to have, you may just wakeup the following day to find out that we have picked your request and posted a 10,000 keyword file on this forum for you to download for free.
The only rule is that you can request one keyword per day!
Here’s a link to the DP forum thread: 30 days of free keywords from Wordze
WordPress 2.3 is released!
Finally, the new release of WordPress is here. WordPress 2.3, codenamed “Dexter”, brings many long-awaited features and fixes 350+ issues found in previous versions.
Most interesting features in WordPress 2.3
- Tags - now with native support. Strangely enough, you’ll need to download separate plugins to manage the tags.
- Canonical URLs – will allow you to change slugs of any post and have WordPress automatically redirect old slug URL to the new URL of your post. Brilliant idea, great for SEO! Mark Jaquith has a great post explaining how it all works: Canonical URLs in WordPress 2.3
- Advanced editing options in WYSIWYG editor for posts and pages are finally accessible via a special button. The trusty Shift+Alt+V combination for doing the same still works, of course.
- Update notification functionality will let you know when there’s a new version of the WordPress engine or any of the plugins you use. Must save us all tons of time we usually spend tracking the updates, downloading new versions and troubleshooting the upgrades of all the plugins.
If you want to learn more, there’s a traditional 10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.3 review posted at Technosailor. As always, a highly recommended post!
Before you rush it to download the latest WordPress and get your upgrade started, please be sure to verify all your plugins are up to date and will be supported in the 2.3 release. I’ve done this for all the plugins on Perfect Blogger, and so my upgrade happened in a matter of seconds and without a single problem.
If you think you need help upgrading your WordPress – feel free to contact me and we’ll see what can be done.
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