The Cheap Bastid» seo

Calculate the Value of your Website with Stimator

admin — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:56:30 +0000

I found this neat little calculator that will figure out what your website is worth. It goes through name recognition, social bookmarking sites, back links, SEO and other factors.

Check out my results for TheCheapBastid…

Oh well, I guess I won't be quitting my day job anytime soon...

If you click that red ‘View Report’ button it gives you a breakdown of your score. Personally I need to work on my social bookmarking for this site..

Anyway, I thought this was pretty cool, I hope y’all enjoy it.

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Marketing Articles | Where to get some powerful backlinks

admin — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:17:30 +0000

As promised here it is. My definitive list of 32 kickass sites that’ll give you some real backlink love (actually that doesn’t sound right…)

Each site is listed in PR order, I’ve also indicated if the site has a Firefox plugin and whether the site is also a paying site. If the site is subject specific I’ve noted that as well.

slashdot.org PR9 No Plugin This site is only for techie type stuff
Digg.com PR8 No Plugin This site will ban you for spamming, no more than one link a day is recommended
Technorati.org PR8 No Plugin Technically only for blogs, but you can get away with one or two article links a day
Furl.net PR7 No Plugin
Backflip.com PR7 Plugin Available
TreeHugger.com PR7 No Plugin This is only for GREEN posts, don’t link your article on How to Add a Supercharger to a Hummer
Mixx.com PR7 Plugin Available Limit of 5 posts per day
Connotea.org PR7 No Plugin This is ONLY for medical links, period!
Mystuff.ask.com PR7 Plugin Available
Reddit.com PR7 Plugin Available I LOVE this site, much traffic from here! One link every 10 minutes, there IS a timer
Dzone.com PR7 No Plugin This is only for software developers
Folkd.com PR7 Plugin Available Another traffic producer!
Multiply.com PR7 No Plugin
Searchles.com PR6 Plugin Available Money Maker if you have a site to post their widget
de.lirio.us PR6 No Plugin
DotNetKicks.com PR6 No Plugin Techie stuff only, for programmers
Plime.com PR6 No Plugin
ClipClip.org PR6 Plugin Available You can add pictures to your links with this site, nice!
LinkaGoGO.com PR6 Plugin Available
Spurl.net PR6 Plugin Available
Zlitt.com PR6 No Plugin Take care posting here, it’s 100% human edited and everything is read before approved
IndianPad.com PR6 Plugin Available
Tumblr.com PR6 No plugin
MyVmarks.com PR5 Plugin Available This one allows screenshots of the page to be posted, nice!
Bringr.com PR5 Plugin Available Women stuff only!
Faves.com PR5 Plugin Available
SpotBack.com PR5 Plugin Available
MyLinkVault PR5 Plugin Available
Linkatopia.com PR5 No Plugin
Bookmarktracker.com PR5 Plugin Available
A1-Webmarks.com PR4 No plugin
WireFan.com PR4 Plugin Available

That should keep you busy for a while, there’s actually about 2 dozen more I could post up, but they are getting into the PR3 and PR2 range and are barely worth the effort.

One additional site I recomend is Xomba, even though the links are No Follow, it is a PR4 site and they do pay, and I get some good traffic from them.

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Bukisa | Writing Articles for Money

admin — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:15:56 +0000

When it comes to writing articles for money eHow, in my opinion, is the king of the hill, with Bukisa being a poor second. I started publishing articles there around November last year but lost interest as it didn’t seem to be a good use of my time, in fact I was earning less than 10 cents a day.

When it comes to writing articles for money I think it’s important to have multiple streams of income. Putting all your eggs in one basket can be dangerous and ineffective.

With eHow earning slowing down, which, by the way, seems to be occurring for all eHow users according to the forums, I’ve decided to revisit Bukisa with a new direction.

Now that I know a lot more about keywords and article promotion I’ll be publishing articles over there again, at first just re-tooling my current eHow articles, but eventually submitting new ones.

As I said, I’ll be using a new keyword strategy over there since they pay on page views and not ad clicks. Bukisa, with it’s lower PageRank and Alexa rating requires a different keyword approach than eHow does.

I’ve decided on two strategies to try, and will be publishing articles over there to test them out. It should be interesting to see which one turns out to be more effective.

I’ve already done two new articles over there to go along with my 24 existing ones.

This is only an experiment, in the end I’ll need to gauge what’s a better use of my ‘writing articles for money’ time, a new eHow article or a re-tooled Bukisa one. It seems a new article takes about one hour to produce, while a re-tooled one takes about a 1/2 hour. Even if it doesn’t pan out I’ll still get some more backlinks to my blog

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Using the Search Engine Optimization Analysis Tool

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 02:07:23 +0000

The results are in!

I nearly fell off my chair when I found this tool. It’s my dream come true when it comes to SEO, keywords and writing articles.

I’m the kind of guy that loves to crunch numbers, I also don’t give up until I get it right. So when I found this tool I started analyzing my articles and made some startling discoveries, both about the mistakes I’ve been making and the interesting quirks about eHow articles.

With that being said, go to the tool here (make sure you bookmark it).

Open up a new window, go to one of your articles and cut and past the URL into the box on the Analyzer page, you’ll also need to answer (the amazingly weak) security question below it.

There’s only two things we need to look at once the results page comes up. We aren’t building a website, just a one page article. I’ll touch upon the relevant sections.

On the results menu, click on ‘Meta tag analysis’ Here the tool will tell you how well you did with your article in terms of relevancy and making it robot friendly.

Check out the results above for one of my best paying articles.

As you can see for title I did very good, probably didn’t get 100% because I didn’t use the phrase ‘best price’ in my article. Description was at 98% which is excellent. I want to point out something VERY IMPORTANT here, it says robots generally don’t read past the 200th character in the description. So, you eHow’ers who write novels for your description keep in mind any keywords you put in after the 200th character will NOT be seen by the search engines. Keep it short, even better put your keywords as early as possible in your description! I also want to point out where it says ‘No Keyword Meta Data Found!’

Now, here are two quirks about ehow.

Even though the eHow article writing page has an area to enter keywords, it DOES not show up for search engine robots!! This is an error with how the page was programmed, maybe they’ll fix it one day so make sure you use it, but don’t rely on it to get odd keywords onto your page, use the photo trick here.
Further analyses of an eHow article page shows the h2 and h3 tags are NOT being used properly. The h1 tag is the article title and that works OK. h2 is always where it says ‘Instructions’ on the article page. h3 is, amazingly the comments section!!, specifically the first comment written. Once again, you can’t rely on these for page ranking.

Hit the back button to get back to the menu, then click on ‘Keywords found on the page’. Here’s the sweet part.

On the list that comes up scroll past the one word keywords, you certainly didn’t use those, go to the two and three word sections and look for your intended keywords. Hopefully you were able to get to 2% on your targeted keywords. If not, edit your article and improve it. Here’s my results for my article on electric space heater.

1.9% not bad at all

This is an amazing tool, use it after you publish your article to make it as robot friendly as possible as well as to adjust your keyword density.

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What Makes People Click? – I found it!!

admin — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:47:23 +0000

Your reader is here for coffee, give him a link to click so he gets it!

This is a simple one. If somebody lands on your article page, website or blog to get some information and there’s an ad for something that they need, whether a product or more information it’s likely they’ll click on it.

I have to say that this is key to making money when writing articles, if the reader lands on your page looking for something and can’t find it, you won’t make money, simple as that. So AFTER you publish an article go back and look at it and make sure there are ads there that are relevant, if not, adjust your keyword density.

Fist off, make sure your article title is relevant to the content of the article, which it should be if you care about getting high ranking on the search engines.

So, if your article is titled “How to Make a Great Cup of Coffee with a French Press” you should make sure that the article actually tells the reader how to do that.

Now, where does the clicking come in?

Easy, in the article in this example the reader obviously is at your page because he wants to make a great cup of coffee. We need to make sure there are french press ads on the page, as well as other coffee making ads.

Use french press, coffee maker, coffee grinder etc in your article, maybe one per step or perhaps in the first paragraph.

The reader, who wants to make good coffee will see these ads, be tempted by your text and might possibly click an ad. Whether he wants to buy a french press, or coffee grinder, or just wants to see what they cost, we don’t care.

This part is simple enough, keep the title relevant to the text, and mention some products or even review sites in your steps to get ads targeted at the reader.

Next up we’ll talk about the boredom/excitement factor of ad clicking.

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My Immediate Plan for Additional Income

admin — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:56:05 +0000

As i’ve mentioned in an earlier post I have about 11 domain names currently parked. For the most part they have been earning very little, I think in total in December they made about $1.12

I’ve been looking to make real websites out of them and monetize them for some profit, let’s face it, at about .10 per month per site it would be pretty hard to do worse.

Since I have a (legal) copy of Microsoft Office I went out and purchased Microsoft Expression Web 2. At first the program looked quite intimidating, but after buying a book (which i’ll link below) I’m beginning to understand it more and more.

In addition, many of my articles on ehow have links to these parked domains, and I see improvement in the number of hits they are getting.

So, starting this month I will begin to develop my domains into full websites complete with real content!

11 sites, 12 months left in the year. So by years end I should have all of them complete.

I know one site per month is bordering on the pathetic, in fact i’ve read on one persons blog about their 28 sites in 28 days challenge (quite extroardinary actually)

So, starting this weekeng my puppy site will go live, the content won’t be complete for a while, but again, this site only earned about .18 cents in December so with even just one adsense click I should exceed that.

My ultimate goal is to get each site to about $50 per month, which from what i’ve been reading should be attainable.

To make this happen I will step up my site specific articles during the month the site goes live, i’m also going to start publishing different versions of each article on other sites to get more backlinks.

I’m really excited about about learning how to make websites, learning about ‘bull marketing’ and getting some additional income streams going.

Oh, btw, ‘bull marketing’ is when you make a bunch of articles, spin them off (different versions of each) and publishing them on many popular article sites. It’s a way to get some ranking and hits without spending money on advertising and backlinks. I hope it works because I am not in a position to buy backlinks right now.

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eHow December earnings

admin — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:33:58 +0000

I have continued to bang away articles on ehow, well, as best I can. I do work all day and, to be honest, i’m quite tired when I get home. Nonetheless I managed to end up with exactly 50 articles by midnight on New Years eve (just barely made it).

Earnings were impressive considering I published most of my articles near the end of the month. I made a total of $33.05, so i’ll be getting my first payment of a bit over $34 this month.

I must say I am totally fired up with ehow, I think with some effort on my part I can easily get my earnings to about $1000 a month by the end of the year.

I’ve learned a lot about SEO, ad targeting and keywords and it has most definetly paid off. In fact, my best article earned over $10 on its own in about two weeks.

My goal for January is to get up to 75 articles and get my earnings to $100. Today is the 7th and to date i’m coming up on the twenty dollar mark, so, with the additional articles I should easily hit that magic number by the end of the month.

Not to rest on my success I will continue to study all I can about SEO and keywords until I can consider myself an expert.

Actually, I have a request, if anyone can recommend any books available on Amazon or elsewhere let me know, i’ll take a look and buy it. I’d of course prefer somebody post up their amazon affiliate link to a great book so they can make some dollars. I like to help out if I can

Also, if anyone has some tips to share I would really appreciate it.

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