Answer:

I was in the military and loathed the lifestyle. On the submarine you could go month(s) without daylight and basically every aspect of your life was managed in ways that were arbitrary, illogical, and flat out stupid. One such example would be how they would allow oxygen to run a bit low out of spec & then disallow you from exercising because they feared running the oxygen scrubbers a bit more would create too much noise. Then the next day would be “field day” – a 4-hour clean up day where they would crank up the oxygen level & instruct you to use an industrial strength vacuum cleaner which was shorting the sound to the hull.

There were tons of other such examples, like on one underway when they lost all my stuff in Puerto Rico (offloaded it with the SEALs) & forced me to re-buy a full set of uniforms. On that same underway I came back to get told that my car was towed off base (into a ghetto, where it was broke into & I had more stuff stolen). The people who told me my car got towed told me it happened a while ago and that it would cost me a lot, while laughing at me. If you have ever watched the movie “Falling Down” that really encapsulated how I felt at that point in time. On that underway my pre-tax income was less than what the military cost me in lost or stolen goods tied directly to their incompetence. So they charged me to steal a few months of my life & I really hated everything about the military lifestyle from that point onward. When I got out of the military my first website was an ugly looking rant site about my loathe of the navy…followed quickly by a low quality affiliate website (hey, when a person is new, naive, and ignorant they often think their stuff is more brilliant than it is).

I tried to hire a person to do SEO for that affiliate site & of course nobody who was of any quality would want to work for dirt-cheap on a crappy thin affiliate website (if they were smart they would have built a better one themselves). The person I hired failed & so that was no good. That company is still selling garbage SEO packages to this day.

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Just consider for example a good blog post by Aaron Wall on How To Make Easy Money On Google. This is a somewhat controversial topic as the following extract shows:

AdAge has a good post about how Google’s promotion of fraudulent advertising is undermining their brand… In a world of double-digit unemployment and old-line industries in mid-collapse, here’s a sales pitch tailor-made for the times: “Get Paid by Google.” It’s a pitch that’s compelling millions of people to visit sites such as Kevinlifeblog.com, Scottsmoneyblog.com, Maryslifeblog.com and Googlemoneytree.com, all promising some variation on one theme: Just buy our guide and we’ll teach you how to make thousands from Google, right in the privacy of your own home!

Despite the topic, at the time of writing some days later, this post has had only seven comments.

This post will explore blog comments and discuss what can be done to turn them into real conversations.
The Internet Can Support Communications

Via the Internet, you clearly have access to a huge inventory of information and knowledge. However that is not the most amazing aspect of the Internet. More importantly the Internet supports communications between different human beings. Having two people thinking about or discussing a topic is of much greater value than just one person’s opinion. That is why a number of people speak forcefully on how conversations can be supported on the web.

Sera Perez argues that blog comments still matter. Matthew Wingram points out that this view on conversations is supported by the New York Times. Louis Gray also suggests that blog comments are really conversations rather than just replies.

Along the same lines, you now have Disqus. This is a powerful comment system that strives to enhance the discussion on websites.

It is not just blogs that are involved here. Any online property where people may share with others or comment on what others have contributed can be enhanced in a similar way. Thus we see that the news feed aggregator, Google Reader, aims to start a conversation.

I’m a big fan of sharing (might be all those lessons I learned in kindergarten). And when I share something, it’s always nice to get a response like “Thanks!” or “That was the funniest thing I’ve ever read!” Whether you’re 5 or 50, you’re more likely to share other awesome things if you know people are excited to hear what you have to say.

That is certainly true. However other parts of Google may not feel exactly the same about these conversations.

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For example, John Chow, the infamous make money online blogger, openly exchanged links with his readers on his blog to rank for “make money online”. While it did work initially, Google quickly made an example of him and penalized him hard. John recently got his rankings back after cleaning up his act, but for over a year, he didn’t even rank for his own name.

Similarly, a very well-known SEO mentioned to his readers that his affiliate links were designed in a way to pass weight back to his site. For whatever reason, someone decided to report this to Google spam king Matt Cutts, and unsurprisingly, those links no longer pass any weight.

If you have an SEO blog or are involved in the Internet marketing community, be careful what you tell others – either privately or in public. It could come back to haunt you.

2. Your sites are all tied together = easy target
network targetLike it or not, the big G has a lot of information about you and your sites. Google runs the most popular contextual advertising platform, owns a free analytics package that’s better than most paid versions, has access to all WHOIS information and IP addresses, and can analyze sites that you interlink. Not only that, but Google has access to your email, documents, and browsing history. Sound scary? That’s what I thought.

If you can, it’s best to separate your sites as much as possible (e.g. different IP addresses, no interlinking, etc). Why? If Google suspects something about one of your sites, they’ll probably look into your network for other sites you’re involved with as well. That’s definitely not something you want. If I can find your network of sites using a free tool like SpyOnWeb.com, you can bet Google can easily do it too.

Unfortunately, completely separating your sites isn’t always possible especially with Google’s growing dominance in so many verticals. This makes avoiding the other red flags even more important.

3. Your site is over-optimized for certain keywords
yellow flag refereeOptimizing the content of a page for SEO has always been pretty simple – target 2 to 3 keywords per page and place them in title tags (preferable the beginning), header tags, URLs, and on-page body content. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy anymore as Google automatically filters and penalizes sites that it thinks are “over-optimized”. This isn’t an exact science, but Aaron Wall of SEO Book explains how he got a ranking filter removed by mixing up the keywords and being less aggressive.

If you’ve tried optimizing a page for a keyword without much success in rankings, try taking this approach. Shift the focus away from your targeted keywords and don’t be so overly aggressive in your on-page efforts (i.e. forget about things like keyword density). Google actively tries to neutralize SEO, so this sort of filter is no surprise. You just need to be able to adapt to improve your rankings.

4. Your link profile is unnatural
link to meIn the same way that you can over-optimize for on-page SEO, you can also over-optimize for off-page link building. I wrote about this topic in my article, The Secret to Making Every Link Count For Your SEO Rankings, so be sure to read it before you move on.

In a nutshell, Google filters out sites in the rankings when it thinks the sites’ link profiles seem unnatural. Some examples include:

* too many links too fast
* link anchor text too similar
* not enough deep links to other pages
* too many links from low quality or unrelated sites
* too many reciprocal links
* all links are from the sidebar or footer of a page

Again, it’s Google’s goal to neutralize any sort of manipulation. If you want to be a successful SEO, you have to take this into consideration and appear natural in everything you do. Ask yourself the following question – how would normal webmasters with big sites obtain links? Then seek to emulate their links.

More..

When the iPhone first hit the market in June 2007, those who paid the $499 entry price — and signed the two-year AT&T contract — owned a status symbol. A year later, we have the iPhone 3G, Apple’s speedier, sleeker and, most important, less expensive smart phone, which introduced a section for downloading third-party iPhone applications. Now that the phone is affordable enough for a wider audience, a new status symbol has emerged: a seemingly useless application called I Am Rich.

Its function is exactly what the name implies: to alert people that you have money in the bank. I Am Rich was available for purchase from the phone’s App Store for, get this, $999.99 — the highest amount a developer can charge through the digital retailer, said Armin Heinrich, the program’s developer. Once downloaded, it doesn’t do much — a red icon sits on the iPhone home screen like any other application, with the subtext “I Am Rich.” Once activated, it treats the user to a large, glowing gem (pictured above). That’s about it. For a thousand dollars.

Apple apparently had some problems with I Am Rich. After initially approving it for distribution, the company has since removed it from the store. Heinrich, a German software developer, has yet to hear back from Apple concerning the removal. “I have no idea why they did it and am not aware of any violation of the rules to sell software on the App Store,” Heinrich said in an e-mail with The Times today.

Now that the iPhone is in South Africa, we all stand a chance of making some extra bucks by coding up some innovative applications!

Read More or download iPhone Applications here..

The prizes are as follows:

* 1st SERP result - R2500
* 2nd SERP result - R1000
* 3rd SERP result - R500

It’s a clever idea, as most people will be linking back to Springleap inside their posts, therefore securing the keyword for Springleap.com ultimately

I do see that the following domains are open:

* springleap.info ($2.99)
* springleap.net ($9.99)
* springleap.org ($8.99)
* springleap.mobi ($7.99)

The actual Springleap website is rather badly SEO’d, so if you go ahead and register one of these domains and SEO it up correctly, you could easily easily win - Unfortunately I just don’t have the time to do it, otherwise I would! Me thinks..

1. Register domain
2. Install wordpress
3. Write 3 posts
4. Simple metatag usage
5. Inbound link structuring

.. and you could probably win 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize! Someone do it, I want to see someone win doing this!

There are a number of different strategies available on the net and some unique ones that I use myself, so I’ve had a think about it and here’s a strategy, which I know works extremely well.

The easiest and most important step is getting Technorati to recognise all the links over the Internet which are associated with your website and which links are available on your website. Technorati often over looks hundreds of potential links and this will naturally damage your ranking. So let’s get started.

First off we need some software, something like Xenu will work. Xenu is a wonderful piece of software, which will crawl your site for links pointing towards it and links available on it. Download the software, enter in your website address and fire away.

Once the program is finished doing its thing, a website will popup - Scroll down to just over half way and look for ‘List of valid URLs you can submit to a search ening’. Once we have that list, we need to copy it to notepad. The next step is to use the technorati pinger, to ping all these URLs, you might want to remove all the external links from the list before you start pinging (http://technorati.com/ping). For sites with lots of links, obviously pinging each link seperately would take forever, so you can try Autopinger (http://autopinger.com/). Another way to submit multiple links is to use (http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping)Â with your blog to automatically ping on page loads - let’s take a look at auto pinging with Wordpress:

• Log in to your WordPress weblog.
• Select “Options” from the top menu.
• Select “Writing” from the sub-menu.
• The last option on the page is “Update Services.” Add Technorati’s ping server (see address above) as a new line within the Update Services text box.

Applying this method to your website should see a lovely increase in recognised incoming links and therefore a stronger technorati ranking.

Give it a bash, let me know how it goes

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!

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…)

I have been working with TrafficSynergy for over a year now as far as I know and honestly, TrafficSynergy puts their publishers ahead. Shelly and Gavin are linked up to me on MSN Messenger and are always willing to share ideas and give me guidance. When I started working with Shelly and accepting her advice, I saw my earnings start to grow very nicely as the weeks went by. Learning how to do affiliate marketing and learning how to do search engine optimization is one thing, but finding a system which works for you is the most important thing ever. Google Adsense is a wonderful system, but when you get stuck, there’s no way you can just pop a message over to a Google Representative and this hinders your learning and progress. The minute I have an idea, I message Shelly and she gives me advice on the topic. Obviously, it takes a bit of time getting to a position where you can just message and expect an answer, but you will have someone on your Instant Messenger from the get go.

A few days ago, I received some lovely news from TrafficSynergy and that was that I am owed a fantastic R12,600.00! I could have never got to this position without the help from Shelly and Gavin and as much of an informative post this is, it’s also a big thank you to the team over at TrafficSynergy for all the help I’ve received.

If you are interested in signing up for TrafficSynergy, feel free to use the link below.

Affiliate Program @ TrafficSynergy Click Here

For example, Technorati has a manual pinging service, which allows you to type in the address of a website and queue the ping. Once the queue has reached your query, Technorati will ping the address you entered and collect your latest information - this is great for increasing traffic and increasing your blogs awareness.

Wordpress offers a service under ‘Options’ -> ‘Writing’ in your Wordpress Admin Dashboard, where it automatically pings services. This means that each time you publish a new blog post, Wordpress will keep places such as Technorati up to date with your latest information. For example, if you go to ‘Options’ -> ‘Writing’ and you enter in ‘http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping’ in the text box right at the bottom of the page, Wordpress will ping Technorati each time you publish an article!

Now, as I mentioned above, there are tons of services similar to Technorati out there, how would you ping them all and how would you find out about all of them? With trouble to say the least, and that’s why I have put together a decent list of ping places for you.

Get this list..