DoFollow Blog Search
Dofollow vs. Nofollow
The majority of blogs implore the nofollow tag in their comments. That means that when you specify your website URL when leaving a comment, the link created does not help to elevate your website’s status in the algorithms search engines use. Although not really an “official” term, people often use dofollow to describe blogs that do not use the nofollow tag. In other words, comments left on these blogs do help to elevate your website’s status in search engines.
What Credit Cards can Teach Us About Making Money Online
The following is a guest post from DR. DR is the blogger behind The Dough Blogger, and internet marketing blog, and The Dough Roller, a blog about making and managing money online.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Bankaholic, a one-man WordPress blog that last year was bought by Bankrate for nearly $15 million. In the article I analyzed why the blog might actually be worth the eye-popping sum that Bankrate paid. I won’t rehash all that here, but do want to focus on one very important aspect that led to Bankaholic’s success–backlinks.
Make Money Online: Quality of Service
In addition to the size of your market and existing competition, the quality of service you provide is a very important factor in making money online. High quality will provide credibility for your content or service, and result in repeat visits and referrals. If your site is low quality, you may have a difficult time in earning the trust of those that visit your site.
Making Money Online: Existing Competition
This is the third part of a multi-part series about making money online. So far I’ve discussed deciding whether to provide content or service as well as evaluating the size of your market. The next logical step to making money online is to analyze the existing competition in the market you are considering.
WordPress PageRank Widget Plugin
There are a number of PageRank plugins for WordPress, but it seems that all of them involve manually editing the template to incorporate them. With the lack of a better option, I took it upon myself to develop a WordPress plugin to display PageRank in a widget. And thus, the PageRank Widget for WordPress was born.
Busby SEO Test – What the Hell Is It?
Are you wondering what the hell Busby SEO Test is? The other day, I received a comment on one of my posts that went like this:
Busby SEO Test!!! it’s a nice post. thanks for informing
It was obvious it was just some comment spam to obtain a backlink. Mostly out of laziness or perhaps indifference, I didn’t even bother to moderate the comment or visit the site linked.
A few days later my curiosity piqued, and I took a look at the site. The comment spammer was a participant in some sort of SEO contest. It took some time to find the actual contest website, but I finally managed it with a few different Google searches.
My Three Goals for 2009
What do you think of new year’s resolutions? I for one am not a big fan, but Chris Brogan had a good idea for setting goals in the new year. Since 2006, he has been using a few simple words to guide him towards achieving his goals.
The simplicity of such a strategy makes it easier to keep focused on the tasks at hand. It also makes it easier to know whether or not you have even reached your goals, because the measuring stick is very easy to read. I’ve decided to implore his strategy with these three goals in mind: listen, engage, and develop.
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Two Ways to Reclaim Your Feeds from FeedBurner
Do you use FeedBurner for your blog feed(s)? Are you annoyed that the article links are feeds.feedburner.com URLs rather than the URLs of the original articles? This bothered me for some time until I was finally able to figure out what was causing it and how to prevent it from happening.
Track the Mention of Your Blog or Website with Google Alerts
I have a couple of Google Alerts set up to track the mention of GeekLad and ForeverSMS on other websites. You can do the same with the names of your blogs or websites. Tracking your names and brands is particularly useful when they are mentioned on blogs. Blog articles provide you with perfect opportunities to respond by replying with comments.
The Brilliance of the Izea Kmart Campaign
Izea recently ran a promotion for Kmart that would offer influential bloggers a $500 Kmart gift card, if they blogged about their experience at the store. In addition to offering the bloggers gift cards, they also gave them an additional $500 gift card to offer as a prize to one of their readers. Whether or not you agree with the ethics of the campaign, you have to admit that it was quite brilliant.
Some other Bloggers You May Enjoy
It’s not a big secret that promoting others is a great way to make friends online, as well as promote yourself. In doing so, you site sources of great information and demonstrate to others that you can be a trusted source as well. In accordance with that thought, I’d like to introduce you to a few other blogs I really enjoy reading and that you may enjoy reading as well.
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4 Simple Ways to Make Friends Online
In creating a new blog, I’ve found myself in need of new friends. No there’s nothing wrong with my old friends, but most of them aren’t geeks like me. I’m not talking about getting as many people on Twitter following me as possible, just for the sake of doing so. I want to befriend the folks that write the stuff I’m interested in reading and learning about. So how does one go about making new friends, when they have few or none to begin with?
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Google Friend Connect Goes Live
A few days ago I got an email from Google telling me that I had been whitelisted to use Google Friend Connect. I took a glance at the Friend Connect pages, fooled around with it a little bit, but I didn’t yet put any widgets on my site. Then, yesterday the Official Google Blog announced that Friend Connect is now available (the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog announced it as well). Yesterday, Bwana made a nice write up on three ways to utilize Google Friend Connect, so I decided to go ahead and put it up on GeekLad.
Open Invitation for Guest Posts
Today, Ann Smarty posted the first guest post on my blog. She wrote up a great article on how to find people that share your interests. I solicited her and other MakeUseOf.com authors to guest post for me on my blog. I’d like to open the invitation to anyone else who is interested in making a guest post.
Disqus vs. Intense Debate
I recently made the move to install Disqus here on GeekLad. I had been running it on WealthBoy for a while and decided to go ahead and install it here as well. I did also take a look at IntenseDebate, but in the end Disqus won out.
Chris Brogan’s Advice to Me
As far as all of my blogs have gone, GeekLad really has started with a bang. I never really had this kind of blogular momentum (I think I just made that up). My other two blogs (jsierra.net and WealthBoy) have been plagued with inactivity. Although in WealthBoy’s defense, it has fallen back mostly due to my efforts on GeekLad. I really have no excuse for having neglected jsierra.net other than my own laziness and lack of direction with that blog.
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Fast and Simple SEO to Increase from PageRank 0
I was very surprised when I learned that I had quickly increased to a PageRank of 3 within less than 30 days of having created this blog. A few weeks later, I reflected upon some of the things that may have contributed to improving my PageRank. More recently, I came across some additional information that may actually provide the real reason I rose so quickly.
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A Perspective on Micro-blogging from a Microblogging N00b
In 2007, a micro-blogging service called Twitter took the ‘Net by storm. I will often jump onto public (and sometimes private) betas to check out new products, but for some reason Twitter never grabbed me. In real life I am somewhat social, but online I never really developed the kind of presence I would have liked. On the other hand, my college buddy Bwana did a much better job of developing an online presence over the course of many years.
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Writing for Make Use Of
Last month, I read Jimmy Roger’s tips & sites for finding freelance blogging work. At the end of the article he mentions that Make Use Of is always seeking writers. I decided to offer my services and I contacted them.
A few days later, Mark O’Neil (managing editor for Make Use Of) contacted me and allowed me to join the team! I think it will be a good opportunity for me to promote GeekLad. It will also give me another place to share some of the great software tools and sites I come across from time to time.
My first article was published just a few days ago. I wrote about a tool to turn Windows Live Writer into a portable app. Initially I was going to blog about it here, but later I decided it would make a great article for Make Use Of. I’ve already submitted my second article as well. Hopefully it gets approved and will get posted soon.
Greasemonkey Script for Submitting Pages to Ping.fm
Today I put together yet another Greasemonkey script. This script will allow you to quickly submit URLs to Ping.fm. You’ll first need to supply your Ping.fm application key to the script. Just right click on the little monkey 
and go to User Script Commands, and select Set Ping.fm App Key. When prompted, provide your key. Please note that the app key is stored in your Firefox browser settings. Do not use this on a public computer, because it would be easy for someone to obtain your app key from the browser.
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Update to Google Webmaster Tools Greasemonkey Script
I recently made a minor update to my Google Webmaster Tools Greasemonkey script for displaying nofollow information. The script allows you to learn which incoming links to your website are nofollow links when viewing the detail for a site within Google Webmaster Tools. I have added functionality that will also display the PageRank for the incoming links.
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Increasing Your PageRank
A few weeks ago I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my blog had reached a PageRank of 0 in less than 30 days since having created it. I blogged about some of the things I believed that helped contribute to my rapid rise of a PageRank of 3. I’d like to share a few more strategies that I believe also helped to increase my PageRank.
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PageRank 0 to 3 in Under 30 Days
Less than a month ago, I set out to create this blog. GeekLad was “born” on September 3, 2008. Although I had learned quite a bit about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when I created my personal finance blog back in January, I’ve learned quite a bit more with my launch of GeekLad. I’ve been keeping a close eye on my PageRank and tonight I was pleasantly shocked to learn it has already hit three! I think it was many months before WealthBoy ever hit PR3. I’d like to share with you some of the things I’ve learned over the course of the past month, and perhaps touch on some of the things that I believe that have helped me to reach a PageRank of 3 in less than 30 days.
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New Theme Marketplace
This morning I read about a new theme marketplace that Envato has launched. The marketplace is called ThemeForest and it features themes for WordPress, Drupal, Typepad, Movable Type, Blogger, Joomla, and more. The prices for themes range from $10 to $50. It seems like the Our Community theme has made the most money so far, with 53 sales @ $30 each for a gross total of $1,590 (the author’s cut is probably 25% – 35% of that).
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Alternate Recent Posts Widget
I’ve been fooling around with WordPress a lot lately, trying to get GeekLad.com configured just how I like it. Most recently I added a Recent Posts widget. The default Recent Posts widget displays links to all of your most recent posts. If you are already displaying your most recent posts on the front page, the default Recent Posts widget can be rather repetitively redundant. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find something out there that could quickly resolve the issue, so I resorted to writing a hack myself.
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Two WordPress Plugins That Will Make Your Life Easier
Whether you’re a seasoned WordPress blogger or you’re starting up a new blog from scratch (as I am here), then these plugins will make installing new plugins, themes, and WordPress updates a snap:
Effortless Plugin Installation
Installing new WordPress plugins and themes can be somewhat of a hassle. You have to download the file, upload it to your web host, and extract the contents. The Single Click Plugin Updater will alleviate much of the pain by allowing you to install plugins and themes all from within WordPress. You just provide the URL of the new plugin or theme, and the single click plugin does the rest. You don’t even have to download it to your computer first!
WordPress Automatic Upgrade
Much like installing plugins and themes, upgrading to a new version of WordPress can be a tedious and time-consuming process. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin makes it much easier, although I would call it more of a semi-automatic upgrade. It’s not a single-click process, as you have to manually click through each step of the process. It does still make it a lot easier to just perform each of the steps at the click of a button rather than performing each one manually.
