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How to review a blog

I have been doing few reviews for few blogs and contests for the last 1 month, and from there, I get few ideas which I can use as a guideline when giving a review. Plus, doing some researches on internet has giving me clearer idea about it

Follow the rules
When you’re reviewing blog, you will need to follow the reviewed blog rules. Normally, the most common rules are anchor text, link back to the blog or post, minimum word and etc. In order to follow this, please plan your review before start writing to match their anchor text and the link URL

Content
The first place that I will look at is their RSS reader. I’ll subscribe to RSS feed and from there I’ll go through from 1 articles to another. I feel more comfortable reading from RSS reader since it will pull all articles into 1 page (your reader). But, not all blogger provide full feed. The problem with partial feed is, you have to go to their blog reading the full story before come back to RSS reader looking for another articles.

Few area that you can look at.

  • Best content – highlight few best contents and recommend it to your readers
  • Topic covered – 1 or multi topic
  • Why you should or shouldn’t read this blog

Blog’s physical looks
This would be the second part that I will look at. Although is not as important as content, but it does play it own roles in attracting visitors especially new one.

There are few parts that you can review

  • page loading time – How fast web page loaded
  • Graphical user interface (blog’s template)
  • plugin – eg: too many unnecessary plug-in, or missing crucial plug-in
  • advertisement – eg: too many ads or too early the blog
  • RSS – eg: Location, full or partial feed

Suggestion
If you’re think that there are few areas that might need some improvement, suggest it to them

Honest
Whenever you follow the above guides, do it honestly but does not means we critics the author personally. Being honest will credit you back later on.

After all, this is few guides that I will try to use when giving review in future. If you have better source or ideas, do not hesitate to leave your comment below

Admin 11 June 2007 Review No Comments

Traffic from MSN live

This post is continuation of my previous article about Statcounter. Since then, I have started analyzing my traffic seriously to get the pattern of my visitors as well as to know them better. After almost 1 week, I’m still wondering why not even single traffic came from MSN (Window Live Search) which make me thinking why no traffic came from there. Does nobody using MSN Live anymore? Does their search result irrelevant, and their MSN Live itself is obsolete?

As you and I know, MSN Live or Live Search is successor to MSN Search engine back to 2006. But it seems the whole process of transformation is not providing the much needed impact to them and user as a general.

From my initial digging on several blogs and forums, I found that back link is playing an important role to rank better in MSN. However having certain keyword ranked high in MSN doesn’t promise decent traffic to your website. 1 good thing that I’m pleased with Live Search is, its ability to index new website faster than Yahoo and Google.

Basic Comparison
I have done simple comparison in order to know why I’ve got no traffic from MSN Live. This simple comparison will include Google, Yahoo and Live Search

Using some keyword from my article directory name I get this result

Google : 15,500
Yahoo : 1,930
MSN Live : 509

Page indexed by search engine (site:www.yoursitename.com)
Google: 43,500
Yahoo : 1,660 (searching using this term will get you redirected to your siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)
MSN Live : 45 results

From 45 results indexed by MSN, half of it is about the blog, which is under it’s subdirectory.

Windows Live Help
To know more about Live Search, the first place that I browse to is their own Windows Live help page. One of interesting point that I found here is this sentence

  • “Submitting your site doesn’t guarantee that your site will be indexed, but it does help us locate your site so that MSNBot can try to crawl it. MSNBot doesn’t automatically crawl sub-pages on your website. If you want MSNBot to index other pages on your website, submit URLs for those pages.”

I can’t really interpret what the sentence is really mean. Does it mean we can submit multiple URL from one website using their submission tool, or does it talking about sitemap file? To be safe, I have submitted only around 20 URL’s from my sub-pages using their submission tool

Submitting your sitemap
Sitemap is one of the important components that determine how fast and how many pages from your website will be indexed. As far as I know MSN Live doesn’t have webmaster tool such as Google’s Webmaster and Yahoo’s Siteexplorer where we can submit multiple sitemaps to them directly, but MSN does support auto-discovery sitemap through robots.txt which means their bot (called MSNBot) will crawl your sitemap automatically. But, it seems like even though I can found MSNBot on my log, the page it indexed is very less.

1 important information that I found from Wikipedia is, how to submit your sitemap to top 4 search engines including MSN Live.

Google

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=www.yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml

Yahoo!

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=SitemapWriter&url=www.yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=www.yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml

Ask.com

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=www.yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml

MSN

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=www.yoursite.com/yoursitemap.xml

To be indexed by Alexa
This is off topic. I have also found article from blogcritics.org about submitting your website to Alexa to be crawled by their bot. I have no idea if this will have impact to your Alexa ranking for old website or does it have same impact with placing Alexa widget on each your page, but why not just give it a try to see the result. Try it now

This is basically what I did to try to improve my MSN ranking. The methods above does not entirely correct or proven to improve MSN ranking, but it is parts of my experimental techniques so far

Admin 9 June 2007 SEO & Webmaster No Comments

Subscribe RSS and win $335 in Podcasting Equipment

Subscribe RSS and win $335 in Podcasting Equipment

Don’t get me wrong, this is not my blog. I can’t afford offering this to this blog reader. icon smile Subscribe RSS and win $335 in Podcasting Equipment Sounds tempting huh. Yeah, by subscribing RSS from createbusinessgrowth.com, you stand a chance to win $335 in podcast ing equipment.

Well, yeah it was easy. And if you blog about it (like what i did), you will receive 10 additional submission entries which means higher chance to win it. Due data is on July 18.

I love the idea of offering some prize to grow RSS subscriber, but I’m just wondering after the contest end, the number of subscriber can be grow further or will decreased. Basically this blog has theme ‘create business growth’ with articles about entrepreneurship, marketing and sales tools. It was authored by group of experinced author which produce quality article that worth for your read

Admin 7 June 2007 Review 6 Comments

Free Directory Submitter

Free Directory Submitter

I have not much word today. I’m spending the whole morning before I went to office submitting my website to free web directories using free software called Directory Submitter. This software was offered by Brad Callen and can be downloaded here FOC

This is one of my earliest techniques (I guess everyone know about this technique) to increase back link to my website even though it is only 1 way link. Previously, when I just started joining internet marketing, I did it manually, where I’ll searching for high PR directory, copy and paste my information into the submission form and submit it. It is very tedious task, but since I have no budget to market my website, I have no choice but to do the same task again and again. But nowadays, it is totally different story

How this software works
On the link above, Brad has provided tutorial in video format, how to use this free software. But I would like to give reminding, this software is not run fully automated, but semi-automated is good enough since you still have control on the submission process. The first thing that you must do is to create new project where you will fill in information about your site such as title, URL and description. 1 project is for 1 website. You can have as many projects as you want

After done with this step, what you need to do now is choosing which directory you’re interested (I started with high PR) to start the submission process. Select the correct category and this software will automatically fill in the information required into the submission form based on the information that you have filled in earlier in the project. Finally, click submit button. It takes less than 30 second to submit to 1 directory. Basically what you need to do after create the project is just choosing the right directory and category matched with your website, that’s all.

Standard (free) and Gold version.
I’m currently using standard version which has 350 directories inside. But I plan to upgrade to Gold version for USD97 if the result is encouraging. Gold version has over 2,200 (wow) directories inside. I highly recommend this software especially for newbie who has limited or no budget to market their website. Go get it now. Happy trying

Admin 6 June 2007 Traffic 9 Comments

Viralink – Increase your ranking

Another round of viral strategy to get better ranked by search engines, Technorati, Alexa and etc. I have across this technique called Viralink from JackelDaily.com

To join this link just copy and paste instruction below to your new post. This technique are originated from andy’s blog Read more there to get better understanding how it works complete with graphical figures and how to.

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions below this line———

Below is a matrix of 120 stars, I have already added a link to my blog onto one of the stars, all you need to do is copy and paste the grid into your blog and add your own link to one of the other spare stars, and tell others to do the same!

 

Viralink

********************
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New Addition: When I receive a ping back once you have added the Viralink to your site I will add your link to this grid, and each person who copies the grid from here will also link to your site!

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions above this line———

Rules
No Porn Sites
Only 1 link per person (i.e don’t hog the viralink!)
Please don’t tamper with other peoples url’s
Enjoy!

Powered by ScribeFire.

Admin 5 June 2007 Promotion No Comments
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