The WOW Factor

You have an awesome product.

You have a web site that is easy to navigate even though most of your customers can’t read above a 6th grade level.

The search engines love you. You have top positions on Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the others.

You have an affiliate program that tracks everything. You know what ip address a hit came from 3 years ago and where it came from and if it was a hit from a direct call, a search engine, a normal link or an affiliate.

Unfortunately your conversions suck and you aren’t making any sales to speak of.

What’s the problem?

Well if we eliminate price points that are out of whack and that maybe nobody wants what you are selling then the last problem is what we call the WOW factor.

When a visitor hits your site he should immediately see something that makes him say out load. “HOLY SHIT” Come in here Mary and look at this!”

If you aren’t making your customers say “WOW!” when they hit your site then you are losing customers.

You might ask what is a wow factor?

Some examples of the WOW factor:

The Oxi Clean commercial done by the late great Billy Mays. When that tank of blue water instantly turns clear everyone who sees it says “WOW!”.

The Robert Palmer Videos like “Addicted To Love” and “Simply Irresistible” with the models all having that same look and clothing. It must have been good because to me it seems that “Deal or No Deal” on the Game Show Network has now ripped off that look.

Not to beat a dead horse but the Michael Jackson Video “Thriller”

Python Video when they put up one of the first live sex shows on the Internet from Amsterdam.

All these things have a shock factor that just make us want to see more. If your website isn’t doing that then you need to think about what would make people just blurt out “Holy Shit” when they see it.

One thing to remember when trying to figure out your WOW is to make it relevant to the product or service you are marketing. So don’t show a laundry WOW on a site that markets novelties.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t need a tour or a lot of technical or personal information on your website it does mean that before you get them to take a look at the details you are going to have to instantly capture their attention.

I see a lot of adult oriented sites that open with a picture of a nude woman… well you know… big deal we have all seen that before. Novelty shops all show their products. Big Whoop there…

Come up with something original and you will at the least get people to look deeper into your site. You may even want to set a cookie to have them bypass the WOW and go straight to the content once they have seen the WOW the first time. Of course they may want to show their friends so maybe a bypass would be easier..

I am now experimenting with multiple sites,  one is just set up for the search engines and the WOW and the other is the in-depth details and content. That way your customers that just want to get to the meat of things can go to the secondary site where they get that info and can order.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!

You only get one chance to make them say WOW so spend at least as much time figuring out what will do that,  as you do building links, doing search engine optimization and tweaking the technical portions of your site.

Of course, if you have the most informative site online, your job is half done. One of the keys to bringing in new links is having a well-designed site. If you go after link exchanges and your site looks like it belongs in the last decade, you’re going to be hard-pressed to find any takers. People don’t have all the room in the world to add links on their site. You need to provide a site that is worth linking to. On the flipside, you should find link partners with quality sites of their own.

Link popularity is not just about quantity, but quality. Certainly, it is a good idea to have a great number of links coming in, but search engine spiders also take into account the quality of those links: i.e. how many sites link to the site that links to you. Spiders hold a premium on sites that link to you without a corresponding reciprocal link. When search engine spiders surf your site, they’re looking for the type of content that you have on your site and the number of links going both in and out.

An easy way to start building link popularity is to add your site to a number of directories. These directories may or may not require a reciprocal link. The higher the quality of the directory, the more the directory listing will be worth. Really, you should spend a good amount of time adding your site to as many directories as possible. Look for other immediate avenues for link building as well—post in forums, on blogs, or create a blog of your own. All of these will be indexed by search engines, which will help increase your ranking.

One of the major advantages of having a blog is you have one more place to add a link to your site. In addition, you have one more place where you can trade links—contact other bloggers in a similar field and trade links. You should not only be looking to increase link popularity for the host site, but for blogs and other sub-sites as well.

It is absolutely imperative that your site is useful. The more content you provide, the more you can get a foothold in your industry. When you write new content, promote it: Digg.com the article and add the article to directories and other sources. Websites can then potentially place the article on their sites, linking to the site where the article originated. A link doesn’t necessarily have to be permanent—a temporary link to an article can help search engine ranking as well.

What this all means is that link popularity is an evolving process. You should always be corresponding with site owners looking for a link trade. And you should be frequently providing new content to ensure that your site is worth the link.

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The Google News Team has an interesting blog post about the “truths and myths” of how Google includes and ranks articles.

Some of the facts that stand out include “Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH. While having a good image with your article does improve your chance to get your picture shown, it has no impact on the ranking of the article itself.”

“Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we’ve crawled it, they won’t be reflected on our site.”

Google says it is working on being able to re-crawl articles that have been updated but currently does not re-crawl update articles.

It’s a myth that timing of an article improves ranking. Google says,” Whether you publish before, after, or in the midst of when other publishers post articles won’t affect your article ranking. Our algorithms take a number of factors into account when choosing the best articles in a cluster.”

Having a sitemap will not help your rankings but there are reasons to have a sitemap. “First, sitemaps give you greater control over which of your articles appear on Google News; they tell us specifically which articles to crawl.”

“Second, sitemaps allow you to specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date, or keywords that help inform which section of Google News the articles should appear in.”

Redesigning a site could affect coverage in Google News. “If you drastically change the structure of your site or your page layout, the crawler may have trouble navigating the new design. When in doubt, check out the section in our publisher help center about changes to your site or contact the Support team.”

Using AdSense on a site will not improve article rankings.” We try to stay as objective as possible, and giving sites with our ads product a boost, well, that wouldn’t be very objective!”

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Let’s assume that you have your on-page optimization done for the web site you want to promote. I am going to  use my online pharmacy as a real world example.  Both the blog site and the pharmacy have only been online 3  months and both are on info domains. I will be supplying you with a lot of material that is pretty much background  information so you can see what else is going on aside from just the blog promotion.

The basic information here will be about the blog located at http://onlinemedicineblog.info/ and the pharmacy at:  http://www.onlinepharmaceuticals.info

KEY PHRASE INFO:
The keywords that I am targeting are:

Buy Cheap (DRUG NAME) No Prescription Butalbital Medications Free shipping
Buy Cheap (DRUG NAME) Free Overnight Shipping
Cheap (DRUG NAME) Free Overnight Shipping
Cheap (DRUG NAME) Free Shipping
(DRUG NAME)  Free Shipping

I also am targeting all the variations of these terms.

SITE PAGES:
There are approximately 150 total pages and about 90 or so English language pages on the site. Right now Google  has indexed 93 pages using the site:onlinepharmaceuticals.info and 139 pages using the  site:www.onlinepharmaceuticals.info command.

PRESENT STATS:
At the moment (06-29-2009) my stats are as follows:

9 First Place Rankings
97 First Results Page Listings (Top 10)
179 Top 20 Listings
257 Top 30 Listings

Not bad for an info domain that’s only been up about 90 days.

OTHER PROMOTION METHODS:
1.  I set up links…the same ones that I sell at http://www.free-text-links.com to the main pharmacy site and the blog.
2. I put up articles announcing the new site on twitter, myspace and on 5 or 6 of my other unrelated blogs.
3. I aliased a page containing the entire html version of the sitemap for both the blog and the pharmacy on a lot of  my domains.. Roughly I added it to 800 different domains for 30 days. This was used to kick start the site and these  were taken down after the first month. As a point of interest this works well but only in short bursts to get indexing  started it should not be used long term. If you want more info on how to do this read my article on aliasing pages  across servers so they appear on every domain. Please be aware that this can get you into trouble with Google if  you use it long term.

VALID SEARCH RELATED INFORMATION:
When you read the detailed information below realize that both the blog and the pharmacy are not trying to fool the  search engines. They are just extremely optimized for the products and all the optimization is valid for the page  displayed. This is not like saying guys like to hunt, fish and drive fast cars – guys also like to see pictures of naked  women, so therefore if you target pages to hunters, fishermen and fast car enthusiasts you will also be targeting  people who like to see pictures of naked women. This is probably true but the problem is that eventually if you get  ranked high enough for fishing and a human at Google visits your site and sees that you are about naked women  and not fishing you will get your site ranked lower or even banned. So be careful to only search enhance  information that actually pertains to the site being promoted.

SPECIFIC PHARMACY OPTIMIZATION:
Ok the first thing i did was a rewrite of all the drug description pages and the templates so that they wouldn’t be  considered duplicate content. This is very important.

Then I did my keyword research. I took a look at what I thought were the primary key words and phrases and then  ran them through some custom programs. These allowed me to come up with a list of about 300 words and  phrases related to the primary word like VIAGRA. To give you an idea the top phrases related to VIAGRA are:

viagra      10
impotence     10
education     5
overseas     5
erectile dysfunction     5
erection     5
viagra samples     4
Pfizer     4
deaths     4
erectile     4
sex     4
international     3
effects     3
men     3
ed     3
side     3
potency     3
performance     2
erectile dysfunction treatment     2
dead     2
sildenafil     2
search     2
Viagra claims     2
development     2
diabetes     2

You will notice that the number beside the phrase. That number is the relevancy factor of how related that phrase is to the main key phrase. The higher the number the more related it is.

I ran the top 300 for each drug and also each illness that it was used to treat and then got rid of all the duplicate  entries and used that list in both the blog and the optimization of the pharmacy sites pages. Most search engines  now look not only at the main phrase of the site in the title and content and descriptions but also look for related  terms when they determine the TOPIC of a page. So using related terms help a LOT.

Then using the rewritten drug info pages, descriptions and phrases I did my on-page optimization for the site.  Pretty simple so far isn’t it?

Ok that is the background information. Here are the specifics of how to now use this information to promote your  site using a blog.

ACTUAL BLOG PROMOTION:
There are 4 major sections of the blog, which are very important.

1. Links
2. Postings
3. Categories
4. Forums

If you take a look at http://onlinemedicineblog.info/ you will see that I first created a link category called:

! Online Pharmacy List !

The reason for the ! at the beginning and end is that i always wanted this link category to appear at the top of the  list. Most blog software automatically go in alphabetical order so this allows me to place all my drug related sites in  that top section. I do this for my adult and also my mainstream sites just so i can use one blog to promote multiple  sites.

BLOG LINK CATEGORIES:
When creating a link category please do NOT get LAZY and just create a title and think that is enough. It isn’t.

So when creating a category use the category names, descriptions and slug like i did in these examples:

Title: ! Online Pharmacy List !

Description: This Online Pharmacy employs a network of certified physicians and pharmacists who evaluate your  request, then dispense and fill your prescription, usually within 24 hours. Once the prescription is filled, your  medications will be shipped to you overnight via FedEx.

Slug: online-pharmacy
——–
When creating a link category please do NOT get LAZY and just create a title and think that is enough. It isn’t. When creating a category use the category names, descriptions and slug like i did in these examples:

Title: Headaches

Description: Medications to relieve mild to moderate to severe headaches. Medications include: Imitrex, Esgic  Plus-Generic, Butalbital, Fioricet and Motrin.

Slug: Headache

Notice that the description actually contains the information about specific links that will be located in that  category.

Make sure the description uses a lot of relevant phrases and make sure the slug is really a primary phrase, as it will  become a part of the URL. Having related or primary phrases in your URL will help with the rankings.

A well thought out description and slug can really help your SERPS so please don’t just do it fast to get it done. Do  your research and spend some time with it.  Make sure that you do this for every link category you create.

LINKS:
When doing your links it is almost the same as the categories, however the links serve 2 purposes one just for the  search engines to have something to feed on and the second to entice real human visitors to click the link.

So take a look at this example under Online Pain Medications:

Link Name: Buy Cheap Butalbital Online

Link Description: This medication is a pain reliever and sedative. It is used to relieve mild to moderate pain and  tension headaches.

If you take your mouse and run it over the actual link on the page you will see that it displays this description to  both entice the visitor to click the link and also for search engine indexing purposes.

This particular link goes to the drug information page at the pharmacy site:  http://www.onlinepharmaceuticals.info/product.php?prod=Butalbital

I also added a second link to the actual order form at: https://onlinepharmaceuticals.hsnsecure.com/order.aspx? prod=buta_50_30&st=7285&lang_iso=en&cid=&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

It is titled Butalbital Online Order Form and used the same description.

You should set up links like this for every page on your site, one link to the main information or description page  and another to the signup or order form related to that page.

POSTINGS:
This is an example for Tramadol
First choose a title: Tramadol Drug Information

Next come up with a description and an excerpt:
Tramadol is used to relieve moderate to moderately severe pain. It also may be used to treat pain caused by  surgery and chronic conditions such as cancer or joint pain. This medication is sometimes prescribed for other  uses; ask your doctor or pharmacist for more information.

The excerpt will appear in the summary post listing on your blog and also the related RSS feeds. The description  will appear as a part of your meta description tag.  Yes I know a lot of people say that tag isn’t indexed but I really  don’t believe that. There are very few sites in the top 10 that do not mention their primary key phrase in both their  title and Meta description tag. The worst case is that it still displays in the SERPS, so if it is good it will entice  people to click the link. This also reinforces my belief that Google does index the Meta description tag. I can’t  believe they would hold it in their database and not place some weight to is as far as relevancy to page content.

I use the same for both at the moment, as I believe that since they are in different positions on the page that one  reinforces the validity of the other when they are the same..

This post is located at: http://onlinemedicineblog.info/2009/05/21/tramadol-drug-information/
I won’t put the post here because it is just too long for this article but you can take a look at the link above and see  it. Notice how the page slug works as a part of the URL.

You will notice that this post is the drug patient information sheet. This could be the complete description of your  product in your catalog or an informational page about your site. There are a few things to remember when posting  the article. Always start it with a link to the site you are promoting using a primary phrase, in the example above this  is BUY CHEAP TRAMADOL ONLINE and is linked to http://www.onlinepharmaceuticals.info/product.php? prod=Tramadol

When posting you then need to choose a category to post to. In this case it is listed under Pain Medications. I am  experimenting now trying to find out if it works better to place a post in only one category and do a duplicate post  in other categories it relates to or to post the same post to multiple categories. So far I haven’t seen much  difference in any of my tests. Although I am sure if you used different post content to each category it would work  better… there are only so many hours in a day unfortunately.

Tags are next. I hate to admit it but I am very lax at doing tags. I should do more with them but it seems that the only  thing they are good for is when a user does a search on your main blog page for articles and if your post content  contains these tag words and phrases it will show up anyway. BUT… they really should be used. The tags I created  for this post were:

cheap tramadol free shipping pain medication tramadol

The last one… tramadol was probably not necessary, as it should pick it up in a site search just from the first tag  cheap tramadol.

The last item to deal with when doing a post is the Forum Post. Hidden on the bottom of the post page is a Link to  Forum option. This requires that you have a forum pre set up for this category of post. I forget that a lot but you can  save your work as a draft and go set up the Forum and then choose it to post to.

This post went to my category Pain Meds.

What this does is create a topic within that forum and then posts to your blog and your forum at the same time.  This makes life a lot easier. More on forums in the next section.

FORUMS:
If you want to make your life a lot easier then here are a couple quick tips:
1. Set global permissions to:
Guests => Read Only Access
Members => Full Access
Moderators => Moderator Access

I used to allow anyone to post to the forums without registering but the bot spam just got to be too much so I had  to make them register first. This saves me at least 30 minutes a day per blog.

2. If you have a lot of posts that go to a single category set it up right before you do your post and set the Display  Sequence to 1. This makes this topic appear as the default on your blog post page. This means you only need to  check the block there to automatically create the post and not have to go through the drop down menu to find the  correct forum to post to.

After all your postings are done you can then go back and reset the display order to whatever you want them to be.

These 2 tips will save you so much time you will not believe it. Ok on with setting up for forum posts.

This is just about the same as when you set up your categories on your blog.

PLEASE USE SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT WORDING ON YOUR FORUMS FROM YOUR BLOG.

Below is how I set up this category as a Forum:
Forum Name: Pain Meds
Forum Slug: pain-meds
Forum Description: Information about Online Pain Medications including: Butalbital, Fioricet, Tramadol, Ultracet,  Ultram, Motrin and Celebrex.
——

Well this covers most everything you need to know about setting up your blog to promote your web site.

If you do not have the time to do it yourself, I do initial set-ups of the blogs for just 250.00 bucks with the plugins for  forums, search engine optimization and the Langit theme along with sample posts to get you started. So if your  interested you can email me at dively.joe@gmail.com and we can see what we can do to get you started.

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As some examples:
free text links 1 of 209,000,000 results
descriptive text links 7 of 8,300,000 results
modular homes DE 1 of 731,000 results
SEO Altoona 4 of 42,300 results
SEO 16601 3,5 and 9 of 5,050 results
Buy Cheap Estradiol free overnight shipping 5 of 327,000 results

Remember when Yahoo owned the search engine  market share and that newcomer Google hit the market by storm. I seriously believe that in the next year with Microsoft’s resources and especially their cash Google will be just another search engine and Bing will be the most searched.

My recommendation is everyone start optimizing for bing.com now!

Joe

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I came across an interesting one and if the guys grammar would have been better I would have approved it.

Let me introduce myself. I am a Swallow Bird. I am an Internet newbie and ocasionaly find your site via search result.
It is awesome. Do you order the web design of your sit or create it without assistance? Looks nice. I hope I can create my own
site in the future. Here it is my first site easy homemade bird feeders , tea cup bird feeders .

I almost thought that one was real. So if your looking to spam out with a program use something like that and not the ones that just list words and links like this:

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Download Rm To Mp3 Convertor , Kate Gaffney Band mp3 download * Pokemon Digimon Mp3 , Den Harrow mp3 ? Jie Kou Mp3 $ download Ali Campbell mp3 * How Do You Put Mp3′S Into A Mini Sd * Audioweb . Nickelback Hero Mp3 ; download Harold Budd and Eraldo Bernocchi mp3 # Sunno Mp3 ? Babul Supriyo & Theme Song Download Mp3 @ Air Conditioning mp3 download ! Booty Free Mp3 Ms New % Richard Stoltzman With Judy Collins ! Let Me Love You Mario Winans Mp3 * Meat Beat Manifesto mp3 download , Free Mp3 Sting # F.ormal L.ogic D.ecay !
Dj Jazzy D – Lady Soul.Mp3 Mp3 , Amor A Segunda Vista (2CD) movie & Jason Becker Mp3s * download Amazonas – Smaragdskogen divx : Daniela Romo Mp3 ? download FarvГ¤l Falkenberg free online * Cartoon Heroes Speedy Mix Mp3 # Son Of Darkness full movie * Actius Mp30 Ultraportable @ download The Big Blue (Version Longue) movie ; Autumn Wind Mp3 ! download Iron Jawed Angels divx . Good Vibrations Mp3 ! The Dead Are Alive online ^ Along The Watchtower Mp3 ? download V字仇杀队 dvd : Annihilator Mp3 , download Baccano! 01-13 full movie ? Rythmbox Mp3 Fedora # A Good Year film #
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It’s pretty easy to tell this one is spam. So when you do your daily work take a look at the spam and get some creative ideas for yourself!

– Joe –

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This is a fast fix for this. Just go to your Headspace2 options and put i the details for the forum page like title and description into the headspace2 options and then it will start working again.

For some reason when it tries to pull the Global Setting to the forum page it doesn’t render correctly and gives you that error, but putting the info directly into the forum page options will make it work again.

I imagine either headspace2 or simple-press will come out with a big fix update soon but for now I don’t recommend doing the simple press update and if you do feel the need to do it, then make sure you put in the headspace2 into on the forum page options.

To add that info just go to your admin panel and choose PAGES — and then choose EDIT for your forum page. You can enter the data there.

Hope this helps!

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First follow the instructions listed in the other bulletin to download the proper plugins and themes. Then start thinking about what people actually search for.

Sure some people still type in sex wanted or something like that but for the most part they know what they want or want to see and what to type in to find it.

So before making any posts you will want to take a good look at your content and or products and see what people would type in to find them.

Lets say you sell Rabbit Vibrators That would be your main key phrase for that product and it would be in multiple categories like Vibrators. Products for Women etc.,. It would also have multiple postings because of variations in the product options.

So you will want to set up those categories in both the links and the posting sections of the blog and create a forum with that name too, read a bit further if you have a lot of categories I may save you some effort on the forums.

So category 1 would be Vibrators

Then we would want to create a good category description to put in there during setup. So our description might be:

Vibrators, dildos, adult sex toys and masturbators for men and women. Our adult toy store has a huge selection where your satisfaction is our pleasure. Safe Secure and Private. Shipping is always FREE and in discreet packaging.

Ok that does 2 things. It is a paragraph that when it shows up in the search engines results display it brings people in. The search engines also will like it because it uses the key phrase well along with some related phrases.

You should vary the category description a bit in both all the setups along with the category names. Use the plural for the links sections like Vibrators. Something like Vibrators and Dildos for the blog and for the forum use something like Vibrators and Masturbation.

The first thing, although it is a lot of work is setting up all those categories. They should closely match the categories of your store or site. If you are a super site you might have the category MILF or Asian instead of Vibrators but the concept is the same.

Once you have your categories all set up then I would suggest doing all the links first. Take every item in your catalog and place a link to it in the appropriate category using the product name as the title of the link and the product description as the link description field.

Next you will want to do your posts. This is where SLOW is better. Do not do more then one category a day. If there are a ton of products in a single category then limit yourself to a max of 25 posts a day. Remember with each post the way I set up these blogs it notifies Google Ask and Yahoo about the new post and generates a new sitemap and rss feed. Don’t bombard them with too much content all at the same time.

Use the full description fromm your catalog in your posts including pictures. These should just cut and paste into the post without any problems. Then at the top of each post give it a title different from the post title like 18″ Rabbit Vibrator and link that to the page on the catalog site.

When doing the main posts remember to click the forum post too so that when it posts to the blog it also posts to that forum in your forums section.

I do this by not creating all my forums at once. I create them when I add a new category. This way it defaults to that forum if you make sure when you set it up its in the number 1 position. You can rearrange the forums to suit your sales goals after you get done doing all your posts.

DO NOT get lazy and post your links and Blog posts to multiple categories at the same time. This gives the post only one URL. We are creating content so we want to make each post individual so that it creates a new URL for each one. Also it makes managing the forums a lot easier because there it will only create one topic automatically.

This should get everyone started. If you need help let me know. My prices are pretty reasonable to get things set up and ready for posting. Just message me here if you want more information or email me at dively.joe@gmail.com

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A lot of people have been doing blogs to promote their web sites for years. The search engines love blogs. The  reason is Blogs mean News. New NEWS. Old news is bad New NEWS is good. So of course they index blogs a lot  faster then anything else because they don’t want Old NEWS listed, they want NEW NEWS to show up.  LoL ok  enough… you get the point.

So you decide to jump on the old bandwagon and try your luck. Of course you have been to a blog and read them  and maybe you have written notes on facebook or used the blog feature at MySpace but now you are ready to do  your own.

There are several different software packages to consider. Today I am only going to go into the details of Word Press  as it appears to be the most popular and the easiest to install. It also has a lot of plugins that can be added to help  you out in the search engines.

So how do we get started. There are 2 ways to install it. I prefer to just buy a new domain name and run only the blog  on that site. The other way is to take an existing domain and create a subdirectory there to hold the blog.

From a pure search engine standpoint the stand alone version on it’s own domain will work a lot better, although you  may want to get started using it on an existing domain.

Either way to get started just go to http://wordpress.org/ and download the current stable version. If this is your first  real blog attempt don’t even think about the beta versions. As of the writing of this article the most stable version is  listed on their web sites main page as version 2.7.1

Download it in either zip or tar format, whichever is more comfortable you use and then just copy it into your web  root directory if you are doing a stand alone install or into the subdirectory you want it in if you are using an existing  site.

Ok now you need to create a database in your MySql directory where the program will install all the tables for you. So  just call it WordPress or really anything you want to name it. Create a user for the database and give them all  privileges and rights to the database.

Next you will see a file that needs to be modified. It is called  wp-config-sample.php.

Open this file in the text editor of your choice (notepad or wordpad are both fine) and edit a couple lines of code  there.

// ** MySQL settings – You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘dbasename‘);

You will enter the name of the database you created above where it says dbasename

/** MySQL database username */
define(’DB_USER’, ‘username‘);

next replace username with the database user you created

/** MySQL database password */
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password’);

then put in that users password.

/** MySQL hostname */
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

This is sometimes a bit more complex but typically it will be localhost however if you are using Godaddy or another  large hosting provider they may have a designated database server and you will need the server address from them.   Sometimes an IP address is used instead of a name. If localhost doesn’t work just contact your hosting provider and  they can tell you what you need here.

This is really the only thing you have to do to get it running but there is one more advanced feature I would like you  to know about. This is how to run multiple blogs under the same database name.

This is good for some limited hosting plans that only allow you to create a small number of databases or charge you  for each database created. This way you only have one database but can run an unlimited number of blogs under it.

Near the bottom of the sample file you will find this code:

* WordPress Database Table prefix.
*
* You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique
* prefix. Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!
*/
$table_prefix  = ‘wp_‘;

For each blog just change the table prefix to a different value. I usually use either the name of the blog.. like “fishing”  or just increment it up by one for each blog I set up for example wp-1 and wp-2 and wp-3 and so on. This is a really  neat feature to have. I prefer to use names though because in the event I need to fix something in the database tables  or manupulate it somehow I can see the files named fishing a lot easier then I can relate fishing to wp-17, although if  you are an organized person, which I am not, you can have a chart to see which one is which.

Ok now we just save this sample file as   wp-config.php and copy it into our main directory where the blog is located.

That’s pretty much it. You then go to the page in your web browser. The program will see that it is a new install and  just create everything it needs to do to set it up. You may be asked a couple questions like your email address so if  you forget the password it gives you for admin that it can email it to you.

Other then that you are done with the initial install.
WAIT… Before you do anything else now it is time to choose your THEME. This is not only the look of the site but  choosing the correct theme will help you in the search engines. I personally have had pretty good results with both  the Langit Theme from http://blog.eches.net/themes/ and also the ProSense Blue and Grey available at  http://www.doshdosh.com/prosense-adsense-ready-seo-theme/

Once you have chosen your theme you just download it and copy it to the /wp-content/themes directory. Then you  go to your admin dashboard and choose that theme from the Appearance option there.

We aren’t quite done yet. If you want to get maximum exposure from the search engines we also need to down load a  few plugins. Plugins work just about like themes except they get copied into the /wp-content/plugins directory.

The first one you will want to download is called HeadSpace2 it allows you to add custom titles, descriptions and tab  or keywords to each of your postings, categories and pages. The search engines love this. You can download  Headspace2 at http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/.

The next plugin you will want is the Google XML Sitemaps. This builds your xml sitemap each time a post, link,  category or comment is posted to the site. Then it pings that out to the major engines to let them know your site was  updated.

When you do this make sure you follow the link in the install area of this plugin and get your Yahoo developers code.  This can then be pasted into the plugin so that Yahoo will accept the notification of the update to your site. You can  download this plugin at:  http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/.

The last plugin I recommend as a must have is the Simple:Press Forum plugin. It is available for download at:  http://simplepressforum.com/. This allows you to make a forum a part of your blog. It really is neat. You set up forum  topics to mirror your category postings and then each time you post to the blog it will automatically create a forum  post too.

If you are worried about having to manage comments you may want to lock down the forum but I don’t do that. I  allow anyone to post but then I go in once a week and just delete all the spam in mass.

Once you download all the plugins and copy them to your server just go to the plugin option of your admin  dashboard and each of them will basically walk you through their activation.

Then go you your Settings option and make sure you have your options for RSS feeds turned on. The only other  advice that I feel is a must have is a good ping list of where it broadcasts your updates to. Currently I am using the  list below:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

(I have been using this list for several months so if you notice any of these no longer are valid or know of ones I don’t  have here please let me know.)

You can copy this list in at the bottom of the SETTINGS  – WRITING menu of your admin dashboard.

Now you will need to take some time to setup categories and forums and determine what you want the search  engines to see. Practice makes perfect so just play with things until you get used to them. Go one feature or plugin at  a time.

Then go look at your post and then look at the source code of the page to see what the Search Engines are seeing  too.

I use blogs a lot to promote most all my new sites. They work really good with all sites but particulary well with hard  to get indexed adult oriented and pharmacy sites. Posting the drug info sheets to the blog and then pointing a link  from the blog post to the actual page on the site for that particular drug and then add links in the link section for both  the pharmacy sites main page and also the order form for that particular medication.

This can also be used for catalog type sites. If you are selling toys to tractor parts and anything else you can start a  blog using the item description as the blog post and then link to that items page from both within the blogs main post  and also from the links section.

As an example I got a pharmacy listing to a PR2 in 3 weeks doing this and some front page listings. I can’t wait to see  what I get from it over time.

Well this should get you started. If you need an specific help please just shoot me an email at dively.joe@gmail.com.  Also please visit Links are Blue (http://linksareblue.com) for more help with Search Engines and Promoting your website.

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Of course the best links are ones that actually produce some traffic and not just having a link placed and indexed. Here are some high PR places to link to yourself and also get some traffic at the same time. With these you get the best of both worlds.

SELF GENERATED LINKS:
As most of you know Wikipedia, Ebay, YouTube and Yahoo come up very high in the engines on a large amount of topics. So this is one place where you can place your own links and not get penalized.

They are all pretty simple to use. At Wikipedia you just need to write more information on a topic similar to your website and either include a link in the body of the text or in your tag line at the end.

Ebay is also pretty easy. We all have an Ebay account. Have you ever noticed that no matter what the product Google almost always list the matching entries near the very top? I don’t think it’s a special formula Ebay uses, I truly believe that they must have cut a deal with Google to get that many high listings.

Anyway. If you do a listing to sell your domain there, set the starting price at a million dollars (don’t do this unless you are prepared to actually sell it for a million, set the price to what ever you would actually take because on the Internet you just never know). It is only a couple bucks to list it and you will be amazed at your extra traffic for the small listing fee. Who knows you may also sell it for a million bucks, stranger things have happened on Ebay.

You are allowed a more information page about what you are selling so create one and make sure you link that page back to your main page. That way you will move traffic from the millions of people on Ebay to your main page.

Also if you actually sell a product there list them for sale and point the more information link to a product page on your site. Make SURE people can’t actually buy the item from that page because Ebay will cancel the auction if they see you can sell it without them getting their cut.

YouTube is even easier then Ebay. Create a video on anything. It doesn’t matter. Something related will help the post the video. If you type in Canadian National Tower I have a video there that’s on page 2 of google (not a bad serp for over 6 million competing pages) usually near the top of the page. You can’t miss it, it shows a young lady with large breasts and is has a description that starts out “Visit Joe at http://marriedmatch.com/This is an AWESOME photo of the CN Tower – Canada National Tower in Toronto. I hope to see them … it soon again!”

So you’ll notice the description is pushing traffic to my site at Married Match. Make sure you place your url at the beginning of the description so that it shows on YouTube without the visitor having to click the MORE INFO tab on the description. This video has had about 700,000 views but it’s biggest importance is the high volume link to the dating site.

Try some of these you will find that they will do really well for you.

Yahoo now has what they call “Yahoo Answers”. This is where someone asks a question and then someone else posts a reply to it. So go there and start asking questions about something related to your website. Then using another yahoo account go back in and answer them all using your URL in the body of the text or in your signature line. You will be amazed at the results.

Don’t forget to visit me here at Links Are Blue and Free Text Links for more tips and information.

Joe

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