Monitoring the Google Crawl Rate to your site

One metric that can now be relatively easily measured and can help to give you some sort of idea how "important" or "trusted" Google considers your site is to monitor the crawl rate.

There are ways of increasing your crawl rate like for example regularly updating your site, or getting high quality links from other sites.

One site that makes the crawl rate very easy for you to track on an ongoing basis and even lets you compare and rank yourself against other sites is seometer.com.

The site is free to use and its just a matter of submitting your url which gets added to their database, once your site is added you will be given a url like this one which I have set up for this blog, and be able to monitor a graph like the one in the picture below.

It takes a day or two before data is collected.

http://www.seometer.com/cache/millionnzdollars.blogspot.com



You can also create a variety of different sized buttons which you can generate on the site and display live crawl stats like in my button below...



Seometer is a valuable addition to any blogger or sites owners toolkit and with its ease of use something that won't take more than a few minutes to get up and running with.

Keyword Services - Wordtracker Review

When writing articles one keyword services tool that I have been using lately to find niche keywords to use is the wordtracker trial. If it continues to prove itself a worthwhile tool eventually I will probably start paying for a subscription to it.

The trial lets you have a play for a couple of hours - here is the wordtracker trial.

I am going to step you through it, so you should be able to see yourself why it can be such a useful tool. Remember when it comes to keywords you are looking for something that is a) often searched for and b) not to much competition. This is exactly what the wordtracker tool can be used for .

Firstly sign up for the trial, click on the link that you will be sent via email and enter the keyword you want to start mining...This will bring you to the screen below..



Now what we want to do is drill down on some of the suggestions, as you can probably pick up on I am killing two birds with one stone and using this articles techniques on this article... lets look at the term "keywords". You will see from the shot below by focusing on the word "keywords" we are starting to get some useful terms that I will add to my "keyword basket"



There are two columns of particular interest that we are looking at. One is called count and the other is called predicted. Count is what the wordtracker database shows for the particular term over the last 90 days, the other column is predicted which is the number of predicted searches for the term today over all the major search engines.

Now that we have some keywords that we are wanting to concentrate on we can move to the final stage which will show us what kind of competition we are going to be facing. If you recall earlier we mentioned that what we are looking for is words that are often searched for but little competition. Well wordtracker gives us a keyword "score" that tells exactly that as well as showing the competition for a given word.



The KEI compares the actual count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in wordtrackers data) with the count of competing web pages so that you can pinpoint exactly which words are most effective for your keyword targeting.

You can see in this case the best keywords for me to use are "Keyword Services" so I will incorporate those into the title of the article and another couple of places, however the score is not great, if I was serious about the keywords in this instance I would actually go back and mine for some more that had a better KEI score.

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Learning about the symptoms will help you answer the question - are you pregnant?

Make Money Fast - Detecting Duplicate Content With CopyScape

Most people are aware that Google likes genuine content, however not everyone is aware of CopyScape.com. Copyscape lets you put in a URL and it will check and find if anyone else on the internet has copied the content.

I have used the tool many times and also not only to check that my own content is not being copied, occasionally I use it in cases like when I start a new website in another country that may be a copy of one I already have, however I want to ensure that I am not penalized for having two copies, so I rewrite the content enough to pass CopyScape. That of course is no guarantee that it is going to pass Google's, duplicate content detectors, however its better than doing nothing.

Another use I can see it coming in handy for is say you had an article that you wanted to post on different blogs or sites, in order to increase the backlinks for one of your sites. By mixing up the anchor texts and ensuring the article passes copyscape you can ensure that it will be SEO friendly.

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How I removed 1600 unnecesary external links from my site in 5 minutes

Its always great when you have one of those "doh" moments and realize that you are doing something pretty stupid.

Over the last year I have had plenty of those moments, and the latest one was made glaringly obvious to me when I used the following SEO tool..

http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank

This tool displays a given web page in a graphical format showing all the external links that the site has. I think we all learned in SEO 101 that the less external links the better. A site will rank well if it has other sites linking to it, rather than it linking out to every man and his dog.

Anyway you can see from the image below (you may want to click on it to view it full size) the tool shows you which of the links on your page are external ones, as well as the pagerank of the sites that you are linking to.



When I did this (I have removed them now) I noticed how all the digg this, furl this and add to delicious etc were all counted as external links. Now as there were at least 4 or 5 of these on each article and over 475 articles on the site it doesn't take a mathematical genius to figure out that removing these would be beneficial to the SEO of this site.

I have seldom been dugg, furled or added to delicious so I guess I am not really losing much by removing them. It was just a matter of editing the template and removing the code.

If you do this don't forget to back up your template first!

Happy link pruning - I suggest you weigh it up for yourself.

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Blogsearch - How to optimize your posts

For those of you that do not get a lot of traffic from Blogsearch there are ways that you can optimize your posts and your blog so that you have a better chance of ranking and therefore getting increased visitors to your site. I wrote this article after having a good read of How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts… In their own words!

Have lots of readers subscribed to your blog
It is quite possible however by no means fact that Google Blogsearch includes how many readers are subscribed to your blog as part of its algorithm when ranking the search results. Also again this is only conjecture but the type of other blogs the readers are subscribing to may also play into this.

Popular article that has had lots of readers already
Google already knows how many people have read one of your articles (through their search data) so may well include this in the ranking as well.

Being linked to by trusted sites
If trusted and popular Blogs are linking to you Google may then assume that you to are to be trusted so will increase your score accordingly

Good use of tags and social bookmarking
Google may also examine social bookmarking sites like technorati and analyze how your article and blog are tagged and how often the tags are used.

Blogsearch related Blogs
You have two shots at your site showing up when someone enters a key phrase, see in the example below where I have typed in the words make money fast that this site shows up under related blogs as a site in general and then the individual articles from sites are listed in the results below.

Its hard to get an idea out of how many people actually use blogsearch, however I can see that in the future especially with the rising popularity and acceptance of blogs that it will be a valuable search tool, and certainly worth optimizing for.

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Keyword Density - SEO for Bloggers

Keyword density is something that you may or may not of heard of. When it comes to the SEO optimization of a page it should be right up there with title tags. We are going to explore in this article how Keyword Density can be used in the battle to optimize the content of your site for search engines.

What is Keyword Density?
Keyword Density is the number of times that a keyword is shown on a page in comparison to other words. Search Engines use this as part of their algorithm to determine a pages ranking or relevance to a particular keyword search.

What is the best Keyword Density?
Well unfortunately noone really knows however if you overdo it the search engines will think you are spamming and then you will really take a hit. One method that you can use to get an idea of the ideal keyword density for your keywords is to check a few URLs for keyword denstiy from the top results that are showing up on Google.

One handy tool http://www.gorank.com/seotools/ lets you type in up to 5 URLs and it will do a comparison on them all. I have run this on my favourite term "Make Money Fast" and the results are as below.

Now we can see from the results that the first couple of sites (which are number 1 and 2 in the google search results for the term "Make Money Fast" mention the term a lot more than what my site does, for me it could certainly pay to increase the density of this term on my site.

A Word of Warning
Be very careful when doing this, increase the density very gradually, dont just go and match whatever the top site is, as the search engines could punish you and that won't help your cause at all - my suggestion is to gradually increase the density over a few weeks and constantly monitor your results with a tool like the one we looked at in this article -Tracking Keywords - Bloggers Toolkit Series

Keyword Density is one of the major contributing factors to a good search engine ranking for your given words. Something I will be keeping a very close eye on in the future.

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Google Trends - Assisting in our PPC Campaigns

I read this article on shoemoneys site Pay Per Click Targeting Tools - TFS Day 2 and it immediately got me thinking about how I could apply it to my own PPC experiment.

Firstly regarding that experiment I am struggling to get Click throughs - so far I have only had about 5 people click on the ads and none of them have brought anything. By highly targeting the geographical location via Google Trends I am going to try and improve the click through rate without spending a fortune.

By using this tool I found that one of the products that I was trying to sell specifically to the states is hardly searched for in the states at all - however is very popular in Scotland for instance. Armed with this new information I am going to tailor my campaign now specifically to Scotland and set myself up as an Amazon UK affiliate.

Amazon UK is exactly the same as Amazon US when it comes to setting up Astores so it was quite simple to simply set one up and change the region and link in my Google Adwords setup.

Its a constant process - try something - adjust - try again

Eventually for those that persevere success will come - well lets hope so anyway.

How to use Google Trends
Here is an example of how to use the Google Trends site to find a unique or popular market for your PPC campaign. Lets say we are looking at selling Star Wars DVD's we can head along to www.google.com/trends and find out what areas are hot on Star Wars DVD's. In this case it is Hungary! There are some other not so obvious results that can be farmed.

Armed with this information we can then find a more unique market where we can pay less for our campaign and get better results.

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Submit your Site to Free Directorys - Bloggers Toolkit Series

One of the methods that I have been using recently to promote my various sites is to submit them to free directories. Now when I first started to do this I played a little bit of hit and miss as I was searching for them on Google and was often disappointed to find that not only did the site require payment, but I was probably in for a lifetime of spam as well!

Bring on Mr-SEO - I had recently been listening to a number of great pod casts regarding Search Engine Optimization and in one of his pod casts Joe mentions a directory list that he has on his site that has been built up over time. It lists directories that are free to submit your site to and they don't even require a reciprocal link.

Now you have to be very patient when doing this as it can be a time consuming task submitting your site to directories however long term it should pay off, so just get on and do it. If you have multiple sites its quite good because you can submit a number of them at at once.

I suggest starting a spreadsheet and recording which sites you have submitted to along with any other relevant information. One of my colleagues is starting at the bottom of the list and working up, I am working my way down.

Anyway heres the link if you want to go and do some work ... submit to directories some of the sites that you will be submitting to have some pretty decent page ranks. Remember its not quick, you need to submit a fair bit of info in some of the directories so put aside an hour or two and work your way through as many as you can.

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What has Paris Hilton got to do with Poker? Google Zeitgeist - Bloggers Toolkit Series

Another tool that I have been planning on writing about for a while is the Google Zeitgeist Page, now I had not even heard of this until recently however to sum it up in one sentence ..

Pulling together interesting search trends and patterns requires Google's human and computing power together. Search statistics are automatically generated based on the millions of searches conducted on Google over a given period of time - weekly, monthly, and annually.

Thats all well and good but what can we do with this information and why is it included in the Bloggers Toolkit series?
Well I guess I need to direct you to fellow fast money maker Mike for an example of this, look at his little experiment Kate Middleton And Making Money With Zlio . By adding in a sample "experiment" paragraph about Kate Middleton and her recent split with Prince William, he is (after looking at his stats) pulling in a decent amount of searches as that is one of the topics of the moment. I certainly look forward to the write up that he does outlining the results of his little foray into celebrity gossip.

There is another site as well you can check out http://50.lycos.com/ and this shows the search movers and shakers over the last month or so, well worth a visit and quite surprising seeing that Poker is number 1, then we have Paris Hilton, Spyware, Disney and Naruto rounding out the top 5. Obviously if you can cunningly disguise these into your posts somehow you may be able to drive some additional search traffic to your site.

I will of course leave that to you to figure out how to do yourself!

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Keyword Selector Tool - Bloggers Toolkit Series

Our Bloggers Toolkit Series continues with a look at the Wordtracker Free Keyword Selector Tool. This is not the only tool available in this area of SEO, however is certainly easy to use so here's the lowdown.

What is a Keyword Selector Tool?
These kind of tools let you type in any keywords that you like, and by going off what terms have been searched for over the previous month will give you an idea of how popular that term is. So for example if you are basing your website key words around the term "Money Blog" it is apparent that 602 searches on this term were carried out in February. If you manage to rank highly for these words, then you are going to get quite a few visits on a monthly basis. (From what I understand the Tool only queries the Yahoo database so there will actually be a lot more searches than what this tool shows you if you count Google etc - however it gives you a good idea of popularity)



Why would you want to use a Keyword Selector Tool?
This tool helps you directly identify the kind of key words that are popular. There is no point in spending time working on your site that is full of keywords and phrases that are rarely searched for - you are better of setting your sights on something popular as that is going to directly relate into improved traffic to your site. (As long as you do a better job than anyone else at optimizing your site for the words that you have in mind.)

OK now I know which Keywords I want to focus on - What do I do now?
Now that you know what words you would like to concentrate on it is a matter of fine tuning your site and the links into your site for these keywords. Also you will probably want to track the ranking of your site for these keywords both before you start optimizing - and on an ongoing basis, however that is going to be covered in the next article on this subject.

Your homework for the next few days while I prepare the next article in this series is to start finding what key words you would like to track - don't always assume that it should be the most popular that you find as there is a lot of competition for these words, find something in the middle and concentrate on building quality content around these words.

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


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10 things I wish I had known 6 Months ago about Blogging and Earning Money Online

This is the list of 10 things that I wish I had come across 6 or so months ago when I began this Blog! Note they are in no particular order, just a list of 10 helpful suggestions and/or links for a new Blogger. I have not included any affiliate links in this post so you can be assured its unbiased.

I have also not mentioned Google AdSense because I was already using this before I even started Blogging and most people are already familiar with it.

1./ Money4Blogs - I actually read about this on another site quite early on, however to save you time and get you started earning some money go and see these guys. Instant money for a 1 year link on your site.

2./ Google Analytics - Simply the best way I have found of tracking and analyzing the traffic that comes to your site. If you want to know more about Google Analytics fortunately for you I wrote an article on it a while back - Using Google Analytics to track and Analyze your Blogsite

3./ Google Alerts - Find out within minutes anytime anyone anywhere mentions anything about you or your blog. Also you may want to view my earlier article about this - Google Alerts - Another must for the Bloggers Toolkit

4./ Shoemoney - this guy is a legend, if you want to read about a guy that seems to pull money out of thin air start subscribing to the shoemans site.

5./ Digital Point Forums - I have only recently discovered these, however these forums are a gold mine of information for the aspiring money blogger, also a lot of information about SEO and general website info.

6./ Colorzilla - Although I am reasonably competent with html, php etc sometimes trying to find the color to blend in with your adverts easily can be a pain, especially when there are style sheets, divs etc This tool makes it so simple, just hover the mouse over the color and it tells you what it is! Its a firefox plug in, so you will need firefox to use this tool.

7./WordPress - Obvious to most, however when I set up one of my own hosted blogs a while ago believe or not I had not heard of WordPress, I wish I had because one of my sites is now stuck on B2Evolution and its gonna be a major to move it across. Just go straight to WordPress would be my recommendation.

8./MorgueFile - Great place to find royalty free images for your websites. This is a quote from the MorgueFile About Us page...

The morguefile contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects by visitors to the site.

9./ITeamWork - This is an online project management system that allows you to set tasks and timelines for the various projects that you are involved in, you can also collaborate with other people for joint projects. Simple to use and a great way to keep track of all your ideas.

10./Ezine Articles - Ezine articles is useful in 2 ways that I have found, 1 way is you can submit your articles to the site and it will contain a link and information about you as the author. The other method and I probably wouldn't recommend this in all cases however you can reproduce other Authors articles as long as you don't change them - and you must include the references to the Author. I find this useful for some of my sites that are niche topic sites and I can supply relevant articles that I don't have to write myself. Again you need to be careful and keep the mix right with your own unique content, however I have found it to be useful to date.

Anyway there we have it 10 things that have taken me a lot of time and sweat to find - I hope you can make use of some of the items on this list, and maybe they can save you some time or help you make a few extra bucks somewhere along the way.

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


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Improving Your Google AdSense Earnings - AdsBlackList

This is another addition to the Bloggers Toolkit Series

To improve the quality of the Google AdSense Adverts that you are displaying on your Blog or Site, there is a website that you can register with that will automatically generate a list of low paying advertisers to filter out (relevant to the content of your site).

The site is called Ads Black List and is very user friendly. It is just a matter of registering, logging in and providing the URL of your main site. It automatically picks up the title and key words from your site and once this is done you can easily generate a list of URLs that you will be able to filter from withing your Google AdSense set up.

To set up this filtering within AdSense log in to your account. Click on AdSense Setup, then competitive Ad filter and simply paste in the 200 or so URL’s that have been generated for you.
You may be wondering what Google think of all this, and so was I when I initially investigated it. The fact is Google have no problems with you using the competitive ad filter - you are allowed to filter your adverts.

Most of the sites end up being filtered out because they are MFA’s (Made for AdSense) with little or no content. An MFA hopes by paying a low amount per click they can lure an unsuspecting visitor to their site, then hopefully collect a high amount on an outgoing click. Not the best way to build a reputable Online Empire in our book.

Good luck with the Black List!

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Learn more about your Visitors with Google Analytics

You may remember a couple of months ago we took a look at Google Analytics and went through an overview of what it can do, as well as how to get it set up. For a refresher course on this please visit the original post here..Using Google Analytics to track and Analyze your Blogsite .

Once you have been tracking your site for a couple of months a range of very useful data is accumulated with all manner of information about your visitors, referrals, search terms etc. One section that I find very useful is the web design parameters section where by looking at a number of different areas of your visitors specs and hardware of their PC's you can make informed decisions about the design of your site.

Screen Resolution - Alot of sites these days are still optimized for 800 x 600 screen resolution (like this one!) however according to my statistics over the last couple of months you will see that the majority of this sites visitors have a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 and that not even 10 percent of the visitors to this site have the screen resolution that it is designed primarily for!

JavaScript - Many sites make the assumption that JavaScript is functional on the clients browser but how often is it not? Well according to my statistics 98.62% of my visitors are Java Enabled and this would tend to be an accurate assumption.

This is of course powerful information that allows you to confidently make informed and important decisions without the fear of uncertainty.

Over the next couple of days we will be preparing our post showing the growth of the exponential experiment that began at the beginning of October 2006. 5 Months have gone by (this counts all our online earnings not just from our million dollar experiment down under) and we will be doing a full report on the progress to date. Until then - take it easy.

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Google Reader - Another Useful Tool for the Bloggers Toolkit

For many of us we spend a lot of time every day catching up on the latest news from a variety of Blogs and Websites. Google Reader is a great online tool that takes all this and keeps it in one convenient location where you can access it from any PC with your Google log in details.

There are many options that can be configured with the New Google Reader including...

• Import your feeds from another RSS Reader into Google Reader
• Manage subscriptions through one easy to use interface
• A number of well documented Keyboard shortcuts for the power user
• Incorporate into your Google Homepage
  

The Google Reader Application is appealing because it is classic Google style, easy to use with a basic layout but plenty of features if you are prepared to do a little digging around.

In summary a useful tool, so an excellent addition to the Bloggers Toolkit, tommorrow we will be posting our 100 day Summary of Earnings to date in the "Million Dollar Experiment Down Under".






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Google Alerts - Another must for the Bloggers Toolkit

If you want to be at the forefront of breaking news it can help to set up various Google Alerts for the key words that are applicable to the topic of your website or Blog.

Daily, as it happens or weekly you can have the latest information that Google picks up on emailed to you automatically. To set this up you first of all need to be registered with and signed into Google. Then go to..

http://www.google.com/alerts

Google Alerts currently offers 5 variations of alerts - 'News', 'Web', 'Blogs', 'Groups', and 'Comprehensive'. ref: Google FAQs

A 'News' alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
A 'Web' alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
A 'Blogs' alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
A 'Groups' alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.
A 'Comprehensive' alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.

Enter the search terms that you are interested in, choose a type from the options above, add the frequency and your all good to go! Another useful tool.



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Google Pagerank Update - Live PR Checker

While searching the blogosphere about the Google PR update that appears to be happening, I came across this tool (found a reference to it on the Monetize Your Blog site )

Its a great tool and one that we will add to our Bloggers Tool Kit. The tool queries the Google Data Centers and shows you all the Page Ranks that your site is displaying as well as calculates the average.

http://livepr.raketforskning.com/

Unfortunately for this site we are still looking at a bunch of 0's however maybe this will change, or maybe we are just to new. ):

Anyway check it out for your own site(s), please let me know if you are seeing any action.

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Googles Webmaster Tools - Knowledge is Power

Googles Webmaster Tools are not widely advertised by Google, however offer some useful information for Webmasters/Blogowners.

Going back through the archives it appears the webmaster tools were launched around October 2006.

To connect the Webmaster Tools to your site, you need to copy a small line of code into the html of your websites index page. To do this go to www.google.com/webmasters and follow the instructions. This ensures that you are indeed the owner of the site. Once this is done you are then able to access a number of reports and features that can assist you with learning more about the way Google indexes your site, and the searches that people are running, along with your rankings at the time they searched.

Logging into the tools console, you will come to a screen like the below. There are three main tabs. Diagnostics, Statistics and Sitemaps.

The Diagnostics section shows you any errors that Google has found while crawling your site, the crawl rate (how often the Googlebot visits and checks your site), robots.txt analysis as well as enhanced image search if you want it. (This is where Google somehow labels all your images to make them easier to index).

Moving onto the Statistics tools, these include crawl stats , query stats, page analysis and index stats. The query stats show very useful information on the commonly used search terms that are finding your site, the image below shows the top searches for this blog. This is info that I have not been able to get at this kind of detail before.

The final section of the webmaster tools is the sitemaps section, I have not used this yet but it appears that you can upload a sitemap and google will use this in addition to its normal indexing techniques. If you need more info on this here is an article from Google explaining in more depth.

What is a Sitemap file and why should I have one?

I recommend that you check these tools out, knowledge is power when it comes to building your sites, so it is important to try and get all the information that you can. Googles Webmaster Tools will help with this, so we are adding them to our Web bloggers toolkit .

Tommorrow I will be posting my 80 Day Summary, so be sure to check back!

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

RSS feeds for your IPOD

It is possible to get your RSS feeds synchronized with your ipod. This is made possible by a cool looking application called ipodagent.

If you are looking for the free(beta) version you can download it from here. (if you go to the vendors website they have a later version, however it is no longer free. you can go here for this.


How does it work?

You fire up the program, enter the address of any RSS feeds that you would like to synchronize with your ipod and click on synchronize. It really is as simple as that. The rss feed then is available under the notes section of your ipod. I have a video ipod, but I am sure it works on earlier versions as well.


Why not give it a shot, if you commute to work, or ever have a bit of spare time waiting around, you can read your favourite blog on the go! Another tool for the Web bloggers toolkit.






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The Soapbox Jury - Get an honest appraisal on Your Blogsite

The Soapbox Jury Site is an interesting idea, basically you submit your Blog or Website to this site, and it will get a no nonsense review, along with a rating, screenshots and also tips for improving parts of your site that may be letting it down.

It is mentioned, because I believe if you have a money making blog, or any blog for that matter, having a review done on it can only help bring traffic to your site, plus as an added benefit may highlight some areas where you can improve on what you are currently offering to your readers.

A word from the site about the Products and Services that they offer:

Products and Services: Soapbox Jury prefers web reviewing, but we'll also review products or services if requested to. Please only ask for a product review if that product is readily available to us for testing.

We all know the truth can hurt sometimes, so be prepared for some constructive criticism, however from the reviews I have read about on this site, Tom and his team are quick to point out the good points of a blog, and they also provide useful tips to help counter the not so good aspects.

A number of categories are used to determine the rating of the site including description, appearance, navigation, regularity of posts etc.

It appears that the blog has mainly adbrite adverts on it as far as revenue earning goes, plus a donation option for those that would like to give something back for the obvious time and effort that is put in reviewing different sites.

There is no actual charge at this point in time for a review of your site, however this is certainly something that could be turned into a money earner in the future one would would imagine. I encourage you to submit your blog or website to the Soapbox Jury for a review.



If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Using Google Analytics to track and Analyze your Blogsite

I have recently started using Google Analytics and I have to say that in line with most of Googles products it appears to work well, and has an in depth amount of information that you can drill down into.

Google's service was modeled upon Urchin Software Corporation's analytics system, Urchin on Demand (Google acquired Urchin Software Corp. in April 2005). Google still sells the standalone installable Urchin software through a network of value-added resellers.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics

Setting up Google Analytics is a simple enough process, you need to go to www.google.com/analytics and enter the normal information. (email, website etc). Once this is done you will be provided with a small amount of code that you need to place on your site.

It can take a day or so before Google Analytics starts processing the data from your site, however the information that it provides is both clear and meaningful.

Many ad filtering programs and extensions (such as adblock block the Urchin JavaScript. This prevents some traffic and users from being tracked, and leads to holes in the statistical data. Also, privacy networks like tor will mask the users actual location and prevent accurate geographical data.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics

Here is an example of the type of graphs that are shown when looking at your sites statistics. This has only been running for a day and half so the data is a little scarce however it is certainly easy to interpret. I will certainly be using Google Analytics from now on, another valuable Web Bloggers Tool



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