By successful I mean a website that’s going to make money. From my experience, this comes down to 5 important points:
1. Pick up a niche (topic/subject/industry) where there are advertisers who are willing to spend money to market their products or services
2. Have a nice looking and simple layout for your website (first impression counts so make it look professional)
3. Write articles on topics which will attract visitors to your site - make the title catchy!
4. You need to have a good balance of keywords to triggers ads which are going to make you the money. So if you are writing an article on “How to cope with mortgage repayments?”, then you don’t want ads targetting new mortgages to appear but rather ads on mortgage problems so that the visitors are more inclined to click on the ads.
5. SEO and marketing - on page seo is easy to tackle and off page seo should be done with only quality links rather than going for bulk innefficient links. Marketing should be an ongoing process to get more exposure for your site and articles.
I used to be able to quit the ipod app from playing any music by holding the home button on the iPhone 3G for 8 sec but since I updated to the new OS 3.0, this function has stopped working. This problem is caused by the new set of features that comes with iPhone OS 3.0 more specifically the voice features which are activated when holding down the home button. However there is a solution to quit any apps on the iPhone including the iPod and it works if you have upgraded to the new OS 3.0. You will need to hold down the top button on the iPhone (the one used for switching it off) until you see the red slider which says “slide to power off” and then you will need to hold down the home button for 8 sec to quit whichever app is still running. If you were on the iPod, it will close down and you will return to the home screen.
A nuissance I think but fortunately I found the solution.
It’s been a while since I wanted to have a couple of chickens running around in my garden. Today I got impulsive and travelled just over an hour to Hullbridge in Essex to get some chicks. I originally wanted 1 day old chicks but they are more difficult to look after as they need to incubator to maximise survival rate. Despite day old chicks being so cute, I opted to have 7-9 weeks old chickens instead. So I got myself two hydrids and one pure breed (Orpington) which costs me a total of £40 (£24 for the 2 hydrids and £12 for the pure breed).
In about 7 weeks time, I’ll be getting free range eggs 
Okay, the CTR of my ads are not that great and I know i could do better. So I’ve decided to test a new ad layout yesterday. The problem with the page in question is that the amount of text is not a lot and the ads appear to stand out more than blending in. Anyway, i’ll test it for 2 weeks and see if there’s any improvement in the CTR.
On the 14th of January 2009, i tweaked one webpage of my site in the hope that it will no longer be penalised by the Over Optimization Penalty (OOP) filter of Google. 2 days ago I noticed that the webpage was back in Google’s index, however the ranking is not back yet. This webpage has been penalised since October last year and i couldn’t find it in the index for several months until now. I filed a re-consideration request as well but nothing came out of it.
It was only re-indexed after I made changes to the text of the webpage. The conclusion is that OOP filter is something that is applied to webpages which seem to be highly over optimised as in url, page title, h1 tag are too tighly aligned and the keyword density is a bit high too. For that particular page, i couldn’t change the url because of incoming links and couldn’t change the title as well because this was too risky. So i ended up modifying the h1 tag and dilluted the keyword density for the phrase i was targetting. I’m really happy that it’s now back in Google index but it is ranking beneath another page of my website now for that keyword. This leads me to think that there’s some kind of penalisation which is still being applied to the ranking of this webpage for this particular keyword.
Searching for a unique phrase on that web page shows the webpage which is a good sign and searching for another variation of the keyword shows the page on search results page 2 which confirms my thinking. I’ll give it a few days to see if the rankings come back without doing anything.
Note: It took nearly 3 weeks for google to re-include the web page in its index. From the server logs, i think google crawled it 3 times within that period. However the cache of the page when it first got re-included was for the 21st of december 2008. It was a really old cache which had the over-optimised text. But subsequently the cache got updated to the new version on Feb the 3rd, 2009 when i checked on the 7th of Feb.
I was redirecting a web page with a 302 redirect accidentally and I found out that the page which was being redirected got a PageRank of 2 which is the same PR as that of the landing page. Here’s the scenario:
1. Redirect Page A to Page B with a 302
2. If Page B has PR5, Page A will be assigned PR5 in the next PR update as long as the 302 redirect is still up.
Now you may be wondering why you would want to do such a thing. Well for people who sell links on their sites, they want to have the highest PR to get the maximum value for the links placed. If they have been 302 redirecting to a site they own which has a PR of 6, then even though the other URL does not have any incoming links, it will be assigned PR6. Once the visual toolbar is updated, they will then remove the redirect and when you go to that page, you will see a fake PR of 6 for a site which doesn’t have any backlinks. If they don’t remove the redirect, you will be redirected to the real url with real PR (but that’s going to defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it).
So before buying any links, make sure you’re checking the backlinks in yahoo explorer for credibility!
Let’s see whether these forums links could be killing my SERPs! So i must have about 50 links with the same anchor text pointing to an internal page on my website and the web page appears to be penalised. I edited the content a bit to dillute the keyword density about 2 weeks ago but it didn’t solve the problem. Yahoo and MSN are not showing the page in their search results as well. So there must be something about that particular page which is preventing it from ranking. But what?
I lost most of my rankings for really good keywords in October 2008 but today it seems my website is back to normal in Google. Some keywords are ranking better than they used to back then and some are just a few places down in Google. Now i don’t know whether this is a temporary thing, like some algorithm update but if that stays the same, i’ll be a happy bunny.
As far as the rankings themselves are concerned, most of the keywords have now become more competitive and larger companies are trying very hard with their SEO and spending large amounts of money on it. However, optimisation needs to be done very carefully and there’s this very fine line which if crossed gets your site penalised and makes it very hard to recover from (and may take months as well).
So let’s see if this new update lasts for a bit! (fingers crossed, it will)
I’ve noticed a couple of problems with my site which could be pushing visitors/search engines away from the site in question. Here’s what i found:
Contact Page not working: I changed the url for the contact page about 3-4 months ago and thought it was working correctly but to my amazement it wasn’t. I was checking the 404 stats today and noticed that since Aug last year, i had about 300 requests for this contact page which resulted in 404 error code because the page rewriting was messing things up which means i’ve lost 300 queries!!!
Cananonical problem: This can cause duplicate content penalty/filter if not corrected. However i’ve set my preference to be www.example.com instead of example.com in Google Webmaster Tools but i still should have done a 301 redirect as i believe this problem could be leaking about PR juice.
Category name changes: I’ve shortened my category names and made them more concise a while back. To ensure the old url did not result in a 404 error, i made 301 redirects for the old urls to the new ones. However i didn’t spend to much time looking at the trailing slash problem caused by certain urls and this resulted in few unexpected 404s. (eg example.com/old-category/title/ –> example.com/new-category/title/ but not example.com/old-catetory/title –> example.com/new-category/title/) Yeh, i know my regex was wrong!
Keeping urls short: It’s good to keep the folders upto 3 levels, so i cleverly changed my urls from 4 levels deep to 3 levels. However i made category name changes at the same time and because i didn’t spend too much time testing everything out, there are occurences where some urls are giving out 404 errors.
Ugly message for bad requests: For urls that don’t exist, the website just says a one-liner to inform the user that the content was not found. This is disgraceful and should really show the user the same layout as the website and give alternate urls for the user to try to enhance the user experience on the site.
Feedback for questions not working: I found it really odd that questions which were asked by visitors were not being followed by either by themselves or other people. I didn’t pay too much attention to it until today and when i tried to insert an answer myself, the page would just refresh without saving the feedback from the visitor. Very bad!! I don’t even want to know how many people tried to send feedback and thought it was sent through when it didn’t make its way to the database 
The keywords that I am targetting are too closely aligned to the anchor texts of internal links on my website. Therefore instead of linking to a particular page with the page title as the anchor text, I will link to it using the subject instead. I remember i used to link to my inner pages with the subject but in an attempt to get better rankings, i switched over to linking with title tags. This had a very nasty consequence for me as i lost most if not all of my good rankings some 6 months ago. But i never really bothered to switch back to the original lest it was too many changes in a short space of time for GoogleBot and i thought i would be penalised further. But now it seems that this is all too much over-optimisation and as the algorithms have now changed in Google, i need to make sure that i am getting the most by under-optimising my web pages.
One other thing, my homepage has got like 137 links and Google recommends to have less than 100 links, so this needs to be rectified as well