Something I have not mentioned, which does make a difference in gearing your website up to follow a specific niche is certain naming tricks. I have talked about key words, key phrases, titles and various other key elements of a website, all of which are vital with SEO, but when it comes down to the really small bits and pieces, there are a couple other little tricks of the trade.

I recently put a website up, purely for testing a few little concepts, I have been reading about. My results have been fairly good thus far; The website has only been running for two weeks, but I feel that two weeks is long enough for me to share this knowledge based on the yielded results.

Filenames do play a role in focusing a website around a specific niche. For this example, I will once again use a fishing website as my base. Instead of having files named: aboutus.htm, contactus.htm, why not label them: aboutfishing.htm and contactfishing.htm. These names appear in the source code of your website, and search engine spiders do see this. Use the keywords you have chosen to label your .htm/.html/.php files. It’s a simple task to do, and one which does make a difference, well my results show so at least. The second little trick is image files, which follow the same as above - name your images correctly. Let’s say, for example, that I went on a fishing trip, and took some wonderful pictures of the lake I was fishing in, and wanted to post these pictures on my website for my readers to take a look at. I download the photos from my digital camera, and uploaded them immediately. What I will find is that the images are named something along the lines of DSC1902 and DSC1903, and so on. Once again, take your time, and label the images correctly, and along your topic. The image names appear in the source code, and will be read by spiders.

Remember to always use alt and title tags when doing the above as well. Title and Alt tags are so often forgotten about, and they play a magor role in focusing your site around a niche. Here are examples of where you would use these tags:

<a href=”http://www.webtrepreneur.co.za/aboutwebtrepreneur.php” title=”About Webtrepreneur”>About Webtrepreneur</a>

and

<img src=”WebtrepreneurHeader.jpg” alt=”Webtrepreneur Header”>

I cannot stress how valuable it is to use these two tags when preparing your pages and posts. The website I put up, is a two page site, including everything I have mentioned above. I placed Adsense on the website, and submitted it to a couple search engines. I changed the content daily, followed my click throughs and statistics, and without over exaggerating, my traffic has almost doubling every two days. The Google adverts adapted perfectly to my topic, and the click through percentage increased as the adverts took onto the topic I chose. I have only made $40 in Adsense revenue on the website, but for two weeks, this is certainly not a bad effort at all. That’s almost $3/day for a two week old website, anyone who knows a bit about monetizing a website, will agree that that’s a good effort!

Give these little tricks a go, The Webtrepreneur would love to get some feedback from you, so I know that I am not the only one who has managed to make some extra dollars with a few simple tricks.

This is just a little something, which I have tested and it has worked, and has increased my traffic nicely. MyBlogLog, as most of you know, is a social network for website/blog authors. You are able to create a profile, and list the websites which you author for other people to visit and comment on. It has proven to be an amazing social network, and as much as I am against these things, MyBlogLog is one which I will happily stand by and congratulate on a very successful system.

When you create your profile, you are able to upload a picture of your website/blog. Once you have uploaded your picture, you can have it resized, so it appears as a thumb nail to represent your website/blog. You can view an example of my blog log here. Once you have visited this link, you will see exactly what I am talking about. I am not going to go into explain all about MyBlogLog, as it is very self explanitory, and the website provides plenty of information.

I have spent the last while watching my statistics on the website, and trying to figure out, whether updating the thumbnail image of your website/blog makes a difference to your traffic, and I can honestly report back to you saying that it does. Firstly, if your website does go through a redesign, then obviously you should update your thumbnail, it would be silly not to, but even if you have not updated the design, but have changed a few things on the site, or have made a number of posts, take another screen dump, and change your thumbnail. I think this must be something related to the human mind, perhaps people who have seen your list of websites/blogs before returns and sees a slight change, perhaps they are compelled to revisit the website. I do know that I have a couple peoples profiles, whcih I visit often, and I certainly would click through if I saw a change to the thumbnail.

Give it a go, I have has success with this, perhaps you can too. Join my Webtrepreneur network here.

It’s time for another little Wordpress plugin, which helps you spread the word about your website, but also spreading the word with the idea of show casing it with your best information.

Recommend It is a simple to install wordpress plugin, which gives users the ability to recommend your website to other people. This sounds rather normal and straight forward, but the beauty of it, is that you can recommend them to your best articles. A lot of the time, you latest article might not be your best article, and therefore you might lose new readers through this - so with Recommend It, your new readers will arrive at posts, which are your best ones. The installation process is fairly straight forward, take a look:

1. Download recommendit.rar, extract the .php file and upload
it to the /plugins/ folder in Wordpress.

2. Activate the Plugin in Wordpress, as per usual.

3. index.php - add the following code before any other code:

<?php
if(!isset($_SESSION[’recpost’]))
{
		session_start();
	    session_register(’recpost);
     $_SESSION[’recpost’][0] = -1;
}
?>

4. Add the following code where you want the "Recommend this Article"
button in your single.php:

<?php RecommenditPlugin(); ?>

5. To add it to your sidebar, add this code to the sidebar.php:

<li><h2>Recommended</h2>
<ul>
<?php get_recommends(); ?>
</ul>
</li>

You can use get_recommends(5); or get_recommends(5, 60); for limitation purposes.

6. If you would like to style the button, add div#recommendit,
form#recommenditform and input#recommenditbutton into your css file.

These six simple steps can lead to a nice increase in reader loyalty and traffic. Play around, style your button/link appropriately, and enjoy the sharing of your information!

Today I am going to show you a pretty decent way to make some extra cash, or to at least increase your website traffic.

Everyone has used a screensaver, and there are plenty of people who still do. A screen saver is not just a collection of pretty picture moving around on your screen, they actually do play a role in saving your screen! Screen savers are one of the easiest ways to attract people to your website. When a screen saver is made, you are able to put a footer message, for example, on the screen saver, perhaps saying, “Created by Webtrepreneur.co.za”.

Before we start making a screen saver, we need to things:

• Screensaver creation software
• Stock photographs

A program which I have used to create screensavers is called Saver Forge. It is freeware, and is downloadable here. The download is small, and the program installs in a few seconds, and allows you to create a screen saver in a few minutes. Stock photographs - A stock photograph is a photograph with no royalties, which basically means that the photographer took the photograph and has not claimed it as his own property, and is therefore legal to use and distribute how you wish. Finding websites which offer free stock photos is not a simple task, so I have included a few links below for you to start with:

• http://www.free-photographs.net/index.html
• http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php
• http://freestockphotos.com/
• http://www.freeimages.co.uk/

There are actually plenty of resources online, which offer free stock photographs, you just need to spend some time googling for them. But for now, just take a look at the ones I have listed above.

I am not going to go into explaining how to create a screensaver with Saver Forge, as the process is extremely easy, and once you have installed it, I don’t think you will have any problems, of you do, leave me a comment here, and I will help you out. Below are two screen savers I made, which you may download and look at if you want an example:

• Ferrari Screensaver
• Audi Screensaver

Right, let’s talk a little more about monetizing these screen savers. This is where things will get a little more technical, but if you can take your time reading through this, I’m sure you will be able to follow.

There are a number of affiliate companies online, which pay for installations, one easy example, which most of us know by now is Google Toolbar. Each time someone clicks your referal link and installs the toolbar, Google pays you out a referal fee. What does this have to do with a screensaver? Well, read this next paragraph and hopefully feel inspired.

When you create a screensaver, you can compile it into an install file, which is effectively an .exe file. Most people know that an .exe file cannot be edited, even with some fancy software you will struggle. So, what we want to do, is rename this screensaver.exe file to perhaps images.db. Now we need to create something to link us between installing software and installing the screensaver, so what we are going to do is create a batch file. At this point we will have three files:

1. Images.db - the actual screensaver.exe file renamed
2. Tempfiles.db - this is actually an .exe file to install the google toolbar, for example.
3. Screensaver.bat - the linking file, which can be renamed to .exe as far as I know.

The batch file will contain commands to rename Images.db to screensaver.exe, and rename Tempfiles.db to googleinstall.exe and then run both of these programs at the same time. We will first execute the screensaver.exe file, which will ask the user if he/she would like to install the screensaver, and then it will run the googleinstall program, which will ask the user if he/she would like to install Google Toolbar. I’m sure that you can now put two and two together and successfully arrive at the beauty of this idea. You can get information on the various commands required for the batch file here or here.

Once you have created the three files above, you will need to zip them up together, and then distribute however you choose to do so. Perhaps on freeware websites, perhaps on your own website, or even via email to your friends. Beware of install programs which install spyware or adware, you don’t want people downloading your screensaver and finding out that they suddenly have spyware running on their computers, as this is just not fair!

Give it a bash, perhaps you will land up with some nice extra revenue, and if you use your mind here, I’m sure you can think of many other ways of incorporating interesting things into your screensaver install file. *hint* launching a website while they are installing, leading them to your website, which contains Google Adsense or other information

The Webtrepreneur wishes you luck!