Hey peeps,

Everyone knows that one of the first things to do with your blog is index it with Google via Google Webmasters tools and the second thing is to create a sitemap.

Creating your sitemap isn’t a hard task when wonderful sites like xml-sitemaps exists. Simply type in your URL, punch the button and their program will create an .xml file for you. This is the file you submit to Google Sitemaps.

All done? Nope.

So many people run along, submit their sites, grab the .xml file and upload it, but honestly, this isn’t the most ideal way of doing things. Once you have your .xml file, rather open the file up and have a look at all the URLs inside that file. Google has to download this file from your site and then proceed to index the various pages - what happens if you have hundreds of URLs inside the text file? Google will take a while to download the file and on top of that, Google won’t have the time to crawl all the URLs as he is a busy chap.

Open the .xml file in a text editor and remove useless URLs, as well as that, spend some time arranging the most important links towards the top of the file. The smaller the file and the higher the important links, the better your site will get indexed.

I always do this and trust me, it makes a big difference!

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Let’s take a look

Locate the edit-link-form.php stored in your wp-admin folder. Download it and open it in a text editor. Locate the following code: <th scope=”row”> <?php _e(’friendship’) ?> </th>, under this code you will see <td></td> tags, roughly on line 123 or so. See the image below. Where you see the pink rectangle, you will be adding the following code:

<label for=”nofollow”>
<input class=”valinp” type=”radio” name=”friendship” value=”nofollow” id=”nofollow” <?php xfn_check(’friendship’, ‘nofollow’, ‘radio’); ?> /> <?php _e(’nofollow’) ?>
</label>

Once you have added the new lines of code to the edit-link-form.php file, save it and upload it replacing the old file.

Navigate yourself (more…)

Directory Submitter is some fantastic software, which submits your website to directories.

• Quickly submit your website to tons of directories
• Instantly get quality, 1 way links, in as little as 1 mouse click
• Submit an unlimited number of websites
• Add unlimited anchor text and description variations
• Easy to add new features

This software is great for increasing your search engine rankings, and in term increasing your targetted traffic.

From the point of view with regards to making money online, Directory Submitter has an affiliate system, which pays out 75% commission per sale. The link to read more about being an affiliate is viewable by clicking here. In order to download this great software, give this link a click.

I’m off to try it out!

When looking into relationships between websites, there are three types of links.

One-way incoming links

Also known as ‘inbound link’ are links leading in to your site from other sites. Incoming links are the best types of link to get, from a marketing point of view, since they’re offering you something for nothing in the form of free traffic and a boost in the search engines! Sites with a large number of relevant, on-topic incoming links are sometimes referred to as hub sites.

One-way outgoing links

Also known as ‘outbound links’ are links on your own site which connect to other sites i.e. links that will lead your visitors away from your own site. From a marketing perspective, outgoing links may be considered the weakest type of link as you are effectively giving away your traffic. On the other hand, if your site is very useful, your visitors may well come back again - and they will appreciate your site even more for its willingness to point them to other relevant resources. Sites with a lot of on-topic outgoing links are sometimes referred to as authority sites.

Two-way reciprocal links

These are circular link relationships, i.e. your site links out to a 3rd party site, and that site links back to yours. The links might be homepage to homepage, linkpage to homepage or linkpage to linkpage, depending on the arrangement, but they’re essentially a link swap. Reciprocal links can be beneficial when you’re trying to market your site, especially if they are set up between complementary sites, but their value is dropping as the search engines tend to discount such "mutual admiration" relationships.