Continue reading »]]> Everyday thousands of blogs appear on the net, giving each writer a voice and a platform for readers to share their opinions.

The fundamental difference between a blog and a static website is the interaction. Blog commenting gives readers the ability to continue a topic of discussion while simultaneously promote their own links.

Proper and respectful blog commenting is a very simple and effective way to drive traffic to your website.

With millions of niche websites and blogs on the net, becoming an authority and being active with blog commenting will put you right in front of the same rabid visitors that are eager to learn more – by directing them to your own website.

The following is a few ways you can use blog commenting as a way to increase your search engine optimization and drive wild amounts of traffic to your website.

1. Use Correct Etiquette

Blog owners use their precious time to write articles for their readers. Commenting is a natural way for readers to extend the topic but there are certain guidelines you should obey when leaving your own comment.

First off, you should never spam comments. Comment spam is detrimental to both the blog owner and blog reader. Spamming links will place a negative image within the minds of people interested in your niche while being promptly deleted by the blog owner.

Second, you should try to keep the topic flowing. Derailing the topic with hateful speech or drama is a quick way to break proper blog comment etiquette – don’t do it.

Lastly, don’t leave a comment that doesn’t fit within the scope of the blog. If a blog is talking about tech news, it doesn’t make a bit of sense to leave a comment and link about a diet product, it comes across as spam and is very rude.

2. Provide Helpful Insight

Blog commenting is utilized to keep a discussion going. Although a writer will do the best to their ability to cover the topic of the post, blog commentors will be able to pick up from where it left off, lending helpful and insightful information.

To drive traffic to your website, comment on blogs within your expertise, continue the discussion and give more than you take. When users come to know how helpful you are, they will follow through your provided link, landing on your page.

Likewise, a reader which provides excellent comments can sometimes be highlighted by the blog owner. As appreciation for your interaction on the blog, they may talk about you in later posts, giving you additional links and spotlight to drive traffic to your website.

3. It’s All In The URL

Common blog format calls for:

•    Name
•    Email
•    URL

The URL is your opportunity to share additional websites that fit within the scope of the blog or blog post. Readers will be eager to seek out additional information and when you are on the forefront with your link, they will follow through, driving free traffic to your blog.

Why Blog Commenting Matters Most

When you provide helpful, respectful and informational comments, you capture readers that are already hot on topic.

These “hot” readers are now emotionally driven to find additional information or products. Being active on blogs within your niche will help add authority, branding and traffic to your website.

Not just random traffic, but highly motivated readers that will devour your content.

Continue reading »]]> Regular readers of this blog will know that I wrote a bit of software that monitored your sites google page rank and recorded the results in a database, presenting them to the user…

Unfortunately this is the only big thing that I lost in the recent Server Failure that I do not have a backup of.

If anyone out there downloaded it (I know that several thousand did) still has a copy and would nto mind emailing it to me I would be very greatful.

Continue reading »]]> The 3 monthly Google page rank updates are scheduled for sometime over the Christmas period. Although Google tracks your site continually in terms of back links and other SEO, they make the changes to the Page Rank every 3 Months.

Although it maybe a bit late to start working on your SEO for this review, it may not be too late to do some simple things. Ensure that you have some up-to-date content, remove yourself from some things such as Text-Link-Ads and paid blog post services.

Having said that I earn quite allot of money on this blog from Text Link Ads and as such I will be retaining them on the site and taking any page rank hit that Google give me.

I am hoping that this review will see the page rank of some of my sites improve as I have put quite a bit of work into the SEO of the sites.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I wrote some software to keep a track of my Google page rank and other rankings over time so that I can see the affect of my efforts. Each week I record the page rank for each site in a data base, if it goes down I mark it in red, if it goes up I mark it green. I am therefore hoping that sometime soon after Christmas I will see a line on my report with a lot of green numbers in it.

If you are interested in getting a free copy of this software you can download it here

Continue reading »]]> Following on from my post about consistency in your link back strategy which was a brief post looking at what URL you give you when asking for a link to your site, and suggesting that the best thing it to be consistent.

Our discussions have moved on and have highlighted an error, perhaps a fundamental error I am making with this very site.

When I originally installed wordpress way back in those early days of learning Linux hosting etc, I installed wordpress in a folder. Therefore as you will see from the address bar, the blog is actually located at http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com/wp/ I then redirect traffic with Apache from http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com to the /wp directory.

Although I still maintain that I am correct in giving out just the domain name as the address and being consistent in what I give out i.e. http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com and not http://earningfromaffiliates.com etc. I am probably suffering from Google not liking the fact that this is redirected to the /wp/ directory.

I am now in a quandary, do I change this and thus breaking any links that are linking directly to a post? Can I write something into Apache to catch these old addresses and route them to the post without the /wp/ folder? indeed will this have any affect what so ever and is it worth the effort?

I think I will ponder this for a little while and do some research to find what others think. If you have any opinion please do post a comment.

Continue reading »]]> I have released a new version of the Google Rank Monitor Software to correct a bug in the addSite.php file. The location of the script file was wrong meaning that you could not add sites. I have now corrected this.

If you have already downloaded the software and are using it you must have either corrected this yourself or are getting round it some other way. Either way all you need to do is download a new copy of the zip file and extract the addSite.php and use it to replace the one on your server.

Progress on the next release of the software is currently well under development. I have included monitors for Alexa and BackLinks in Google and Yahoo. I am struggling with the speed of these new scripts at the moment, although this might be a function of how many sites I monitor with it so I am working on that before I release.

Continue reading »]]> I have packaged up the scripts that I have put together, modified and written that check an record the Google Ranking of a list of sites in a database. It then presents you with the results in a table view allowing you to monitor then changes occur. I have uploaded them and they are available now for Free download.

The script is not perfect, I know there are style issues in Firefox and there are probably better ways of doing things but I thought I would release it so that you can all try it out and see if it is of any use to you. Please do email me or post a comment and tell me what you think. If you have any ways to improve it please also let me know either with your ideas or with code improvements.

Future improvements

I do intend to do some more work on the software and the following enhancements would be nice if I can get the working.

1. Highlight changes to ranking on the results view
2. Send an email alert when there is a change
3. CSS improvements
4. Add Alexa and other ranking systems to the monitor tool
5. Add a total page rank for all entered sites (useful as an overall performance monitor)

Please do let me know what you think and if you can offer any improvements or find any bugs ect. then please let me know.

Download

Download the Free Google Page Rank Monitor Software

Continue reading »]]> I have just written some software (with some help from a friend!) which goes away and checks Google ranking for a given URL and records this ranking in a database. I have set this system up to run each week and loop through a table of urls meaning that each week I can record the Google ranking for each of my sites.

I then have a html view in a table and each week the results are emailed to me.

I can then see progress of ranking changes over time for each page I am monitoring.

Its a useful little script and one that i hope will help me monitor performance, admittedly only in one small discrete area of performance but useful none-the-less.

What I now want to do is publish a sum of all my page ranks on this site somewhere… now how would I go about doing that?

Continue reading »]]> The Alexa rank of this site has improved this month from 1003979 to 810467 dropping 200,000. Looking at the weekly average it is set to drop at least the same again, if not more. This proves the work that has been put in to network and market the site is working and also reflects the increasing number of visitors to the site.

Still awaiting Googles page rank updates but very positive about the way it is going.

More hard work to be done! So back to it!