FreshWebz Web Design & Affiliate Marketing Blog

In the last few days, I’ve set up 5 Tweet accounts, focusing on My Travel Extras, Cashback Shopper, Freshwebz, Love Your Pets & UK Shopping Spree. I’m going to follow relevant Tweets through each of these accounts and add blog entries from the relevant blogs. How does this help promote a website? Other than bringing your site to the attention of other people, I’m not sure, but it doesn’t take much to add posts, so we’ll see!

This video is a session by Joost De Valk on Wordpress Optimisation Strategies from 4uexpo London 2008. Please note, this is the full session and is 52 minutes long.

I plan to watch & then post my comments )

I’ve been researching how to increase the amount of visits to my blogs – bearing in mind I now have 5 – and hopefully increasing the take up of the offers on the 4 shopping ones:

• www.freshwebz.co.uk/blog/
• www.cashbackshopper.co.uk/blog/
• www.loveyourpets.co.uk/blog/
• www.ukshoppingspree.com/blog/
• www.mytravelextras.co.uk/blog/

The first step I’ve taken is to create a profile at Technorati & “claim” all my blogs.

Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation. As the leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, we index more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content.

Any updates to the blogs will be updated on Technorati automatically, so this will hopefully increase potential readership, provided I have something interesting to say!!! There are a number of other steps I am currently investigating, so I will add them to this post as I go along.

I’ve now set up feeds with Feedburner which can be subscribed to for RSS updates via Feedburner (which is now part of Google) rather than just directly from the blog itself:

• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ CashbackShopperOffersBlog
• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ MyTravelExtrasBlog
• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ LoveYourPetsBlog
• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ UkShoppingSpreeOffersBlog
• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ FreshwebzWebDesignAffiliateMarketingBlog

Feeds are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into “widgets,” “gadgets,” mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere.

As Feedburner has been taken over by Google, it’s also possible to incorporate Adsense ads in the feeds – whether this is a good idea depends on what you ae advertising….having ads for your rivals in your own feed doesn’t seem like a good idea to me!

However, Feedburner states that it can help promote blogs in the following four ways:

1. Publicize your content and make it easy for people to subscribe.
2. Optimize distribution so that your content is properly formatted for all of the major directories and can be consumed by subscribers wherever they are.
3. Analyze your traffic to learn how many subscribers you have, where they’re coming from and what they like best.
4. Make Moneyitize by participating in the FeedBurner Ad Network. Why not reward yourself for your effort?

I’ll be returning to Feedburner to work on these four features once my blogs are “settled”.

There’s been a lot going on recently including a new blog for My Travel Extras, transferring the travel related posts from this blog; a change of web host (followed by changing straight back again!) & trying to get some more web design business.

First of all the change of web host! I decided that I should move my sites to a hosting company with its servers based in the UK as Get to the Top on Google: Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of Google and Stay There suggests that Google.co.uk gives higher importance in the UK rankings to websites where the server is based in the UK. As I use 1and1 & their servers appear as being in Germany, this may be harming my .co.uk domains.

I chose Heart Internet as they offered web hosting at the same price, but with 100 mySQL databases as opposed to the 2 I have with 1and1. I transferred all my domains over to Heart, the .co.uk being free & the .com costing £5 each. Unfortunately, it was only when I had a number of the .co.uk domains transferred, that I realised that I was unable to apply more than one domain to the hosting account unless I paid a “domain mapping” charge of £20pa for each other domain!

With around 30 domains, there was no way it was worth doing that, so the only alternative was a reseller account, whereby I would also be selling web hosting! As this cost a minimum of £25 per month, with no guarantee of selling any hosting, I couldn’t consider doing this & was gutted that I’d spent loads transferring the domains over & now would end up paying through the nose for something I didn’t really need.

I have to say that this domain mapping was not something mentioned anywhere on the hosting section of the Heart site & now I will be very cautious about it if I ever consider changing my hosting again!!! It was only by going through the support database, that I found any reference to it!

I decided to bite the bullet, take the loss & transfer my domains back to 1and1 /  Luckily however, the .com transfers had not been completed and so they could be cancelled & the charges refunded. Because Heart also offers a 30 day money back guarantee, I got my hosting costs back too <phew>. I would like to say thanks to the support team at Heart Internet though, who responded to my enquiries within minutes & were very helpful in sorting this problem out, even though they were losing a customer. Excellent customer service – if only Tiscali could be like this, but that’s another story!

I decided to also set up a separate blog for My Travel Extras, removing all the travel related posts from this one. Whether it makes a difference or not I’m not sure, but I presume that travel related content on the travel site would be viewed better by Google, than travel related posts on a web design domain. Fingers crossed this may help bring some visitors to My Travel Extras which has not been setting the world on fire recently and may even benefit the Freshwebz rankings too!

Rather than post all the online shopping offers & deals for UK Shopping Spree here, I decided to set up a separate blog for the site, once again using Wordpress.

This can be found on the UK Shopping Spree domain & gives me a THIRD blog to keep up to date O alongside this one & the Cashback Shopper blog – are there enough hours in the day?!!!

Link building is one of the most important search engine optimisation steps. Without good inbound links, your website cannot get high rankings. Although it is very important that your website has optimised content, without the links to your website, search engines won’t consider that content to be relevant.

It’s important to get the right links to your website. Link spamming doesn’t work. You must make sure that you get high quality links that Google and other search engines like.

Make your website linkworthy

You must make your website linkworthy. You cannot expect that other websites will link to your website if your site is basically a collection of affiliate links, or an online shop that looks like a thousand other online shops.

Your website must be different & unique in some way. Try the following:

* Add articles about your products or services to your website.
* Add tutorials and how-to articles about the topic of your website.
* If you have a lot to say, add a blog to your website & update it regularly.
* Add a directory with links to valuable resources on your website.

Check your competitors

The best way to start link building is to duplicate the links that your competitors have. Find all websites that link to your competitors and then try to convince them to link to your website. I use a couple of tools to find links to competitor sites, IBP & SEO Elite. The good thing about SEO Elite is that you can select to include the Page Rank of sites as a parameter, so that you can choose to apply for links only on sites with a higher Page Rank than your own. IBP shows the Page Rank of sites, but there is no setting not to include low Page Rank sites in the results. However, it is worth using as many tools as possible & IBP is very easy to use!

Get links from blogs

There are millions of blogs on the Internet and they all need something to write about.
Bloggers give out millions of free links each month & getting links from blogs is a good way to get links from related websites. For example, you could enter “real estate blog” or “music blog”, depending on what you sell on your website.

Using IBP to find these blogs also allows you to contact the blog owners quickly and easily and it automatically keeps track of the websites that you’ve already contacted so that you don’t contact the same person twice.

Get links from Internet directories

Submitting your website to Internet directories can be a good way to show Google that you have a reputable website. Low quality & fly by night websites usually don’t invest the time and money that is needed to be listed in Internet directories.

Inbound links are very important if you want to get high rankings on search engines. You should optimise your web page content first to make sure that search engines find your website relevant to your targeted keywords & then submit to directories & blogs.

If more than one website has been optimised for the same keywords (and that’s usually the case) then the website with the best links will get the best rankings.

If you want permanent backlinks for your website, then consider using the FreshBidz Bidding Directory! Newly launched, you can buy links in your chosen category and then bid your way to the top of the list from just £1. Increase your bid to take a top position, & get listed higher on the directory homepage.

I did say I would be writing about the ups AND downs of affiliate marketing & today is the turn of a considerable down followed by a slight up!

I wrote previously about how well Cashback Shopper was doing in the rankings, but within days of that post, my rankings took a big hit from both Google & Yahoo ( With drops of up to 60 places on Google, I was astounded & quite disappointed.

I have read a recent rumour that there is a new -60 penalty that Google applies to websites in which it has lost trust; defined as sites that are guilty of spamming! However, the definition of spamming in this case seems to be that many of the websites that seem to have been penalised, had many inbound links from websites that linked to them from every single page of their website (so-called site-wide links). Sitewide links are an indicator of paid links, which Google sees as an unwanted way to artificially inflate search engine rankings.

Although I have not carried out such a campaign, I recently had Cashback Shopper added to a large number of directories and although all of these were free directories & spread over a few months, I believe it is possible that the number of new links may have grown too fast & Google has become suspicious. But, although I have taken a big hit, now is a time not to panic & give the rankings time to recover.

It is interesting how the different search engines look at websites….for example, for the phrase “cash back shopping”, on Google my ranking has plummeted from 14th to 65th, but on Yahoo it has risen back to 1st! In general, my rankings have improved in Yahoo, but deteriorated in Google. I’m sure that this is because Google looks at the relevancy of the inbound links & the directory entries, while valued by Yahoo, are deemed irrelevant & possibly even negatively by Google.

So, the idea now is to find linking partners that are relevant to cashback & work on recovering my Google rankings, which seem to have stabilised now.

I have also been adding linked key phrases from the Cashback Shopper blog, which may also be classed as site-wide links, so I will remove some of these & see if this makes any difference over the next few weeks.

But, if this penalty for paid links really exists then even websites that follow Google’s rules can get in trouble. Your competitors could harm your website simply by buying links or by creating mini-net websites with site wide links to your website. Instead of penalising seemingly “bad” links, Google should simply ignore them. That way, people could not harm competitor websites.

Admittedly this is not my first attempt at a blog!

I originally created a similar blog at Wordpress.com & spent about a month adding items to it. All of a sudden the account was suspended and I was completely at a loss as to why.

After posting on the Affiliates4U forum, I realised that I had made a BIG mistake! Wordpress.com allows you to create a blog which is hosted on their own servers & in their terms & conditions they state that this cannot be a commercial blog. Therefore. my blog broke their t&c’s and was suspended.

I then visited Wordpress.org, downloaded the latest version of the blogging software & uploaded it to my own webspace. But despite a number of begging mails to Wordpress.com, I have been unable to get any of the posts back that I had done previously and now have had to start over /

So, a word of warning about Wordpress……if you intend to operate a commercial blog, or promote money making opportunities through it, then ensure that you get the software from Wordpress.org & use your own webspace to host it!