Short Like A Fox

So you want to generate useful one way backlinks to your site. As far as I am concerned there is really no debating the best way to do this. It may seem old fashioned and it takes time, but it works. My surefire strategy can be broken down to one simple step:

1. ASK PEOPLE TO LINK TO YOUR SITE

Okay, maybe that is a little oversimplified. I’ll spread my advice out into a few more steps.

1. Decide on a keyword or phrase that you want your site to rank well on in web searches.
   Example: Let’s imagine that I have an online store that sells model trains, and I want to do well for the phrase “model train store”
2. Find you competition. To do this simply google the keyword(s) that you want to do well with.
   Example: OK, So I google “model train store”
   
   discounttrainsonline.com is the #1 result, so they are the competition I want to gun for.
3. Find sites that link to the competition. To do this google link:SITENAME. You will be presented with a list of sites with incoming links that Google finds to be at least somewhat important.
   OK, so I google link:discounttrainsonline.com, and am presented with a list of sites that link to discounttrainsonline.
4. These sites link to your competition, why shouldn’t they link to you? The best way to get them to link to you is simply to ask. I have found that this method works immediately about 20% of the time. The rest of the time my requests are simply ignored, or I am asked to place a reciprocal link (which I refuse to do). So click on one of the sites that link to your competition, find contact information for the webmaster, and simply ask to be mentioned in the same list that your competition is. NOTE: This obviously won’t work well if your competition is mentioned in the context of an article or post. It works best for lists of similar sites, or ‘blogroll’ type situations.
   Example: So it looks like the site scalemodel.net links to my competition. Opening up that site I see that discounttrainsonline is linked to from the “International List of Scale Model Related Web Sites.” This works perfectly! I have a scale model related web site, and if scalemodel.net is striving to create a complete list, they should actually be happy to link to my site. So my next step is to find contact information, and send whoever runs the site a nice email asking to be added to their list.
5. Repeat. Once you get good at this you will notice what emails work better than others, and you will become really good at finding contact information that can sometimes be buried within a site (this is especially true for blogs). The saying is true: Practice does make perfect.

So you want to add CAPTCHA, A.K.A. Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, A.K.A. squiggly letters and numbers to a web form.

This isn’t difficult at all assuming you know a little bit of PHP. I’d go into detail explaining how to do it, but over at Boutell.com there is a ridiculously well written, easy to follow step-by-step guide explaining how to do it. Go check it out.

So you are going to be doing some type of design and you need to decide upon a color scheme. Maybe you are a programmer or developer without much knowledge of color theory and you need some help. No problem.

Just go over to colorschemedesigner.com and let the color scheme designer help you along your way. The interactive color chooser found there allows you to enter a color and have a matching palate chosen based on what type of scheme you want (complement, triad, tetrad, etc.). You can also just press the “random” button and let a scheme be chosen for you. This could be entertaining if you decided to design based around a random scheme. The best part about this site is that it is completely free.

Main Page of colorschemedesigner.com

So you have a website, and for some reason there are similar sites above yours on the Google search rankings, and you can’t figure out why. Something worth looking at is your competitors’ keyword density. Keyword density is simply the amount of times certain keywords appear compared to how many words are on the page. By analyzing the keyword density of sites that are doing better than yours on Google you might get an idea of what you can be doing better.

Of course, keyword density is just one part of the overall SEO strategy. Modern search engines are much too smart to be fooled by keyword stuffing, but by looking at the ratio of successful websites that are similar to yours you might get an idea of how to optimally utilize keywords.

The keyword density analysis tool I like to use can be found at webuildpages.com. It is totally free, and has enough customizable options to fit my needs.

The We Build Pages Keyword Density Tool

So you want to install the best WordPress plugins? Browsing the Official WordPress Plugin Directory isn’t the worst place to start. Along with that here is my list of most essential plugins:

• Absolutely Essential
  • Akismet – The pre-installed comment spam filter. You probably won’t need to activate this right away, but you eventually will.
  • Global Translator – Automatically translates your blog into up to 41 different languages for better user and search engine friendliness. This is probably my favorite plugin. I can’t help it, sometimes I just like seeing what I my writing looks like in Galician.
  • WassUp – The best WordPress real time visitors tracking & statistics tool. Even if you use Google Analytics, this is worth installing.
  • Google Analyticator – Google Analytics is simply the best free website analytics software out there. Google Analyticator enables Google Analytics for your WordPress blog in seconds. Google Analyticator 4.0 was just released today. I haven’t had a chance to play around with it, it adds a new front end widget and Google Analytics API support.
  • All in One SEO Pack – The best all-in-one SEO plugin for WordPress. A must have.
• Kinda Essential
  • Comment Approval Notification – Lets a comment author know that their comment was approved, and is now up on your blog. Not totally essential, but still nice to have.
  • Digg Digg – Integrate a “Digg Button”,”Reddit Me Button”,”dzone Button” and “Yahoo Buzz Button” into your posts and pages. Includes lots of options for what buttons you want displayed and where you want them displayed.
• Not Essential, But They Serve A Purpose
  • commentluv – Want to encourage comments on your blog, and don’t mind sifting through a little more spam? commentluv is for you. commentluv displays a link to the last post from the commenter’s blog in their comment.
  • Get Recent Comments – Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar. This plugin could be useful to encourage discussion on your blog.
  • NoFollow Free – Remove the nofollow tag from your blog’s comments with a lot of options customizable, per user type removal, per comments count removal etc… This is useful for encouraging comments, but be prepared to start dealing with a lot of ridiculous spam and near-spam.
  • WP-Polls – Not essential, because a lot of people don’t have the need for polls. But if you want to run polls from your site, I have tried a few plugins out and have found that this one is the best.

Did I miss your favorite? Do you hate one of the plugins I mentioned? Let me know in the comments.

So you want to find a list of free directories to add your website to. There are a bunch of good sites including OneWayTextLink.com and Info Vilesilencer. But since you’re here at my site already why not check out the list I have compiled. I personally attempted to list on all of these sites between January and April of 2009.

So you want to send out a mass email or you want to create a program that can quickly be changed to send out multiple mass emails. PHP makes this easy. In this example I will assume that you have a list of email addresses you want to send a certain email to. I will also assume that you are keeping this list in a database, but this code could easily be adjusted to use either a hardcoded email address list or list from another source.

<?php

//First connect to the database that contains the email address information.
$user = "USER";
$host = "HOST";
$password = "PASSWORD";
$database = "DATABASE";

$cxn = mysql_connect($host, $user, $password) or die ("Couldn’t connect to server");
mysql_select_db($database);

//Query the table that contains the email addresses. Fill in your own table name here…
$query = "SELECT * FROM theEmailAddresses ";
$result = mysql_query($query, $cxn) or die (mysql_error($cxn));
$nrows = mysql_num_rows($result);

//Who the sender will be identified as. You can put what you want here, but it really isn’t too ethical to place an email address that you don’t control here.
$from = "From: me@mydomain.com";
//A standard email subject line
$subject = "What’s new at mydomain.com ";
//The message
$message = "Hi valued friend,

We now sell cookies at mydomain.com. Be sure to check it out!
Sincerely,
me";

//We’ve already queried all of the email address. Now we just need to send the email
for ($i = 0; $i <$nrows; $i++){

$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
extract($row);
//Replace $email with whatever the column of email addresses is called
$to = "$email";
//Send the email to each email in the database
if(mail($to, $subject, $message, $from)){

//Print the name of emails that were successfully sent. I use this just to make sure that the program hasn’t frozen. In theory their should be a steady stream of names being printed>

echo("$to<br/>");

}

}

?>

This bit of code takes advantage of the php mail() function. This is a very powerful and easy to use function. Remember that with great power comes great responsibility. Try not to use this function for evil.

If you have a website and want to tell where your users are coming from geographically PHP and PEAR make this possible. To turn a guest’s IP into a physical location the first thing you are going to need to do is make sure that you have the Net_Geo PEAR module. If you don’t have the Net_Geo PEAR module, you are going to have to use the PEAR Package Manager to acquire it.

If you don’t think that you have access to PEAR because of your hosting package, check out this explanation on how to install PEAR on an account that doesn’t allow access by default. It is written with GoDaddy shared accounts in mind, but should work for most hosting packages that don’t come with PEAR set up.

After you have Net_Geo package installed, it only takes a few lines of code to acquire geographical data:

<?php

require_once("Net/Geo.php");
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
//$ip = "64.246.30.37";
$firstNetGeo = new Net_Geo();
$geoData = $firstNetGeo->getRecord($ip);

?>

IP: <?php echo($ip); ?><br/>
Latitude: <?php echo($geoData['LAT']); ?><br/>
Longitude: <?php echo($geoData['LONG']); ?>
<br/>
Country: <?php echo($geoData['COUNTRY']); ?><br/>
State: <?php echo($geoData['STATE']); ?><br/>
City: <?php echo($geoData['CITY']); ?><br/>

 

The Code At Work:

IP: 38.107.191.110

Latitude:

Longitude:

Country:

State:

City:

Isn’t that cool? I think it’s cool. It’s a very customizable tag cloud available with the plugin titled WP-Cumulus. Getting it is as easy as downloading it from the link provided, installing it like any plugin, customizing it, and adding this line of code where you want it to appear: <?php wp_cumulus_insert(); ?>.

Have fun!

So you run a WordPress blog and want to add a table of contents or sitemap. No Problem. Just download the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. I use that plugin for this site and it is highly customizable to match your needs. I have personally found that it works better than many of the other sitemap/table of contents generators out there.