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!

WordPress

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.

Join the BlogRush generation!

BlogRush

BlogRush has finally arrived and is quickly picking up the pace! Looks like it’s developing rapidly, with many features promised to be released in the coming days.

If you’ve been waiting for increasing the amount of relevant traffic to your blog, then I suggest you join the BlogRush and start enjoying its benefits.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, I’ve compiled a very quick how-to on BlogRush.

What is BlogRush?

It’s a traffic attraction tool which helps you get relevant traffic. All the members of the BlogRush service place their blogs into certain categories, and by showing links to blogs in your category, you automatically earn points which will make other blogs show links to you.

There’s a lot of hype around BlogRush, and while some people absolutely love it, others have learned to hate it in a matter of just few days since the release. Visit the BlogRush website, watch the introductory video, and it will hopefully suggest how useful it will be for your blog. My opinion is that it’s worth a try. But whether it will be a huge success or not is still to be found out.

It’s been reported that some categories of BlogRush consist mostly of splogs, but it’s only a matter of time before BlogRush guys get rid of them – looks like they’re moving to a manual submission reviews pretty soon, which will rule out the possibility to abuse the service.

How does it work?

After your sign up to BlogRush, you’ll be asked to provide basic information about your blog – it’s name, main page link and the blog feed link. Then you’ll need to confirm the interest group your blog fits into most. The last step is for you to integrate a piece of BlogRush code into your sidebar, and it will result in looking something like this (browser-based readers of this blog can find the live BlogRush widget in my sidebar):

BlogRush widget

It’s currently a fixed design, but works on BlogRush flavours are already in progress – so pretty soon we’ll be able to customize the look of this widget to better suit our blogs.

Every time someone opens your blog, they’ll see the BlogRush widget with updated links to other blogs in the same interest group. By showing links to them, you earn points so that the BlogRush widgets on their pages will show links back to your blog.

Why use BlogRush?

Here is my personal list of the best reasons to join BlogRush:

  1. It’s an absolutely FREE service
  2. It’s (really) easy to get started – feel free to contact me and ask for help if you’re stuck
  3. The traffic you get is targeted – so you’re more likely to get really interested visitors
  4. It’s a smart way to grow readership – one more thing is that new BlogRush users who sign up using your referral link will bring you more and more traffic
  5. It’s a fun way to explore new websites in your niche

How to get started

Simply follow this BlogRush registration link, and answer all the questions (there won’t be many). You can add as many blogs as you like, and pick a relevant niche for each of them.

The next few days will definitely bring useful advices on optimizing your experience, and I’ll be sure to post the highlights up on this blog.

That’s it. Not sure how successful BlogRush will turn out, but seems to me it’s definitely worth a try! Let me know how you find it once you sign up.

A Chance to Win Great Prizes @ DavidAirey.com

I’ve just realised that some of you may have never heard about the great blog anniversary at David Airey’s blog, which is accompanied by a fantastic prize draw.

David Airey is a logo designer well known as the creator of some of the best logos on the web. To celebrate his blog’s anniversary, he’s got more than $4,000 worth in free prizes for all of us to win!

As always, there’s a number of ways to participate – subscribing to his RSS or email list is one option, and blogging about it (that’s right, just the way I’m doing now) is another.

There’s still 2 weeks left for you to make up your mind on participating, and the quality and number of prizes is so impressive that I think everyone should give it a try. Let me know if you win anything, and you’re always welcome to thank me for sharing the link to David’s website too :)

Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs @ 45n5.com

Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs

Mark Wielgus from 45n5.com has built a great Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs, a manually populated list which is automatically updated with Google PareRank, Technorati and Alexa ranks.

For one, it’s a great source for new blogs to read. Being rather dynamic, this list serves as a benchmark and helps owners of such blogs see how they rank along (don’t want to use against here) each other!

Have a look at the Top 100, you’ll probably want to bookmark it!

Proud Member of the Digital Folders Network

Digital Folders Network

I’d like to announce that as of this week, Perfect Blogger is a proud member of the Digital Folders Network.

Digital Folders is a very young project, and that’s part of the challenge that I like about it – being so close to the beginning of the network is always exciting as all the approaches and methods, changes and interactions are actively discussed and reworked to ensure the maximum usefulness of the participating blogs which keeping visitors and advertisers interested and happy.

If you’re interested in joining the network, please have a look at the current team. Both new bloggers (a new blog will be created and hosted for you) and established blogs are welcome.

For advertisement, read more on the advertise with us page.

Google Reader Finally Gets A Search Feature!

Great news! Google Reader – the best RSS reader ever, has finally got the long-awaited search functionality! This means that you can now search through all the feeds you’re subscribed to, either a particular folder or all of them.

For me, the most useful search would be finding the good articles among the ones you have starred in the past. If there was one feature I could add to Google Reader, this would be the one. So I’m really glad it’s finally arrived.

For the official announcement, go read the post on Google Reader blog, otherwise have a quick look at the screenshot, and go on – give it a try yourself!

Google Reader - Search

Make Akismet Automatically Discard Old Spam

I love the Akismet spam blocking plugin functionality. It makes my life so much easier! However, not many people remember that it has a very useful feature on top of its basic setup: an option to make Akismet automatically discard all the spam older than 2 weeks.

Now, instead of carefully clicking through the list of spam, I simply glance through it to mark the non-spam messages off, and then forget about the rest. Akismet takes care of it and makes sure that my spam comments page is never too crowded.

To activate this option, first go to the Plugins section of your WordPress admin panel…

WP Plugins

… and then click Akismet Configuration:

WP Akismet Options

After ticking the option on and clicking the button, you’ll have this great feature enabled and your future peace of mind guaranteed. Enjoy!