What Is Black Hat Seo

Black Hat search engine optimization is usually defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. Either by tricking visitors or search engine spiders.

The most common forms of black hat seo are:

Keyword stuffing: Keyword stuffing is the overuse of keywords in a piece of content. Generally, this is repeating the same keywords over and over just to achieve a higher search engine ranking.

Invisible text: Quite a few cheap sites use this tactic, which involves making keywords to be the same color as the background, so readers can’t see the massive amounts of keywords, but search engine spiders can.

Doorway pages: These are pages that regular visitors cannot see, but search engine spiders can. They are used to trick the search engines so that the site gets a higher ranking. Not only do they go against the rules, but they also hurt the visitor’s experience. Who wants to see a site stuffed with keywords?

Cloaking: Its a deceptive method used to cheat search engines in order to rank well for certain keywords. A user identified as search engine is shown a specifically prepared and optimized website with only purpose to rank well for desired keywords. If a user is not a search engine they are presented with the “real” websites content which is often spammy and of lesser quality.

Cloaking is also used to trick users to visit websites based on their description in search engines. For example a user searching for a particular product could click on a website in search engine due to its description and title. The site in question will not be the one described in SERP’s. It can be totally different or irrelevant.

RSS Spamming: I recently noticed more and more people using their RSS feed in comments instead of their blog’s URL. What that does is tricks people into subscribing to your feed when they only wanted to visit your blog By doing so people don’t realize they can get their IP black listed from any site in a click. So don’t try it, it’s rude.

Does Black Hat SEO Work?

Yes is it does but only temporally. Eventually the search engine spiders catch on and your site can get permanently banned from search results. It might look like a good idea to the novice but it hurts your site and its credibility on the long run.

Why is Black Hat Unfair?

Black hat practices do not not follow the rules and regulations of search engines. Black hat tricks spiders and users into clicking and viewing content with poor quality or content. This in turn leads to a poor user experience, what Google is striving to avoid. Lets keep the web a fun place filled with useful information.

Over 20 plugins to automate and monetize WordPress

love WordPress and it’s plugins. You can do practically anything you want by adding a plugin or two without even knowing any coding. I have decided to share a list of fantastic plugins I have collected over time. So here’s the list…

eCommerce

eShop Compatible up to WordPress 2.5.1 it is a great plugin for turning your blog into an eCommerce.

wp-e-commerce is another fantastic plugin to turn your blog into a eCommerce.

Social Bookmarking

wp-notable is a popular WordPress plugin used to insert social bookmarking icons in post entries. I think they look clean and professional. You can add effects like in this consolidation blog., Hover over the icons over the comment section.

Auto Social plugin enables you to have your posts submitted automatically to social bookmarking sites like delicio.us. At the moment it’s delicio.us only but other sites are soon to come.

Socializer (not a plugin) The Socializer allows you to easily submit a link to several social bookmarking systems. Instead of having a link to each social bookmarking website, you have a single link to all of them!

WP Link Tool http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blog-linkit/

Amazon

Amazon Links Pro is a must have. Amazon Links is a Wordpress plugin which generates in line Amazon ads from key words in  your text.

AVH-Amazon plugin gives you the ability to add a widget which will display a random item from your Amazon wish list, baby registry and/or wedding registry. Read more

Link Building - The Only Way To Succeed

1– Submit to Search Engines: Google, yahoo, MSN and DMOZ are the most important ones. Other search engines get their results from Google.

2– One Way Links: Quality articles bring in backlinks but you can also submit to directories that do not require a backlink. Try to find do-follow directories that don’t require a backlink. Some are free some cost as little as 1$. Remember to choose directories with better pagerank than yours.

3– Reciprocal Link Exchanges: They do nothing for you. The don’t hurt but Google wont take them as seriously because reciprocal link exchanges have been widely used and abused of.

4– Three Way Link Exchange: Is awesome. Blog “A” links to blog “B”, blog “B” links to blog “C”. While blog “C” links back to blog “A”. All blogs are getting a one way link. Much better for your page rank.

5– Internal Linking: Your pages should link to one another. Wordpress users can use a similar post plugin or even add “also in this category” in the sidebar like I did. Not as important as an incoming link but does help even out your pagerank. Some pages might have a pr or 0 and others will have 3.

6– Anchor Text: Is so very important. Make a list of keywords and phrases you want to rank for and use them in building your links. If you want search engines to list your blog when some one searches for “home renovation” then build your links like so: <a href=”http://yourlink.com” title=”Home Renovation”>Home Renovation</a>

7– Article Directories: Article directories are wonderful because you can submit articles for others. The secret to article directories is that they have a resource box readers tend to click on to know more about the author or poster. You add your link in that box and get more traffic and backlinks.

8– Feed Directories: Submit your feed’s url to as many feed directories as possible. Get your feed to be viewed by as many people as possible while building your backlinks.

9– Blog Directories: I tend to submit to free directories that do not require a backlink. If a directory has traffic and a high pagerank sometimes I still accept a reciprocal link exchange.

10– Social Bookmarking: Stumble Upon, Digg, Delicious and Propeller are just a few. By bookmarking your articles you are telling the wold these bookmarked articles are worth sharing and people come read them.

11– Social Community Profiles: Free blogs like Blogger, Wordpress.com, My Space, Facebook and Live Spaces are crawling with curious people. It’s so easy to grow a list of 1000 contacts and funnel your traffic to your main blog. Your blog serves to announce your news on your real blog.

12– Forum Profiles: I like forum profiles because there are plenty of forums with similar content to join. I can add a forum signature pointing to my site. I can post links to my helpful articles. Self promotion is tolerated as long as no spam is put up.

13– Link Baiting: Is posting original contetnt in your blog in the hopes other will ink to you. They link because they want to not because you asked them to.

14– Comments: I talk about comments all the time. They open up the flow of readers and conversations. They bring in backlinks and new visitors. Always go for do-follow blogs as you’ll be getting link love.

15– Guest Posting: People who post articles on other people’s blogs usually get two links of their choice in each article. Again your getting exposure and backlinks.

16– Reviews: You can buy reviews from blog owners or services like Pay Per Post but don’t let Google catch you.

17– Buy Links: Similarly to reviews you can purchase links from webmasters and various sites. If you go overboard and get too many too fast Google will penalize you. I don’t recommend building link and reviews.

18– Hold Contests: Contests are easy and fun. Offer services, goods, ad spaces or reviews. If you have a pagerank you might be surprised how easy it is to get sponsors for your contest. Sponsors add to your prize in exchange of displaying their links. Simply contact webmasters and simply ask if they are interested in sponsoring in part your contest.

19–Google Maps: add your business to Goolge Maps. You get free publicity and it does help your search engine ranking.

20–Internet classified ads: submit your site and description to classifieds being read by thousands of people around the world.

Now if you put these tips in to practice, just a couple a day, can you imagine your backlinks after 6 months?

Using WordPress Excerpts vs Full Posts

What is a page excerpt?

As you must have seen in many blogs, the archives and categories are displayed as excepts or short previews. Some SEO gurus claim that post excerpts are excellent for your page views and Alexa rankings because the double the number of clicks you are getting.

Wordpress blogs have front pages which displays blog entries. They to can be excerpts although most bloggers choose to use full posts. Supposing your front page does use full posts, your archives and categories would be redundant. For this reason using excerpts has become common practice.

How Do I use Excerpts

(MODIFYING THE TEMPLATE)

Pages such as your Index, Archives and Category contain a line of code which includes: the_content

This means the full post is being used and also the default setting for many themes.

To change that to an excerpt simply substitute “the_content” for “the_excerpt”, with out quotes of coarse.

Remember, if you want your index, or main page to have full posts, make sure to use “the_content”.

(WITHIN THE POSTS THEMSELVES)

Supposing you do not want to modify your template and you only want certain posts to be excerpts, you can do that when you are writing a new blog entry.

Within WordPress 2.5 if you scroll down a little, you will see, “Advanced Options” and right under a box to paste your excerpt in. Click publish and that’s it. If you do use this way you must know that the excerpt will also be an excerpt in your front page.

My favorite way of getting an excerpt is the simplest in my opinion. I simply insert the more tag. You place it where you want the excerpt to end.

<!-more->

The more tag also affects your entries in your RSS feed. The proper way of getting excerpts depends on what you want to do exactly. Play around with the code please copy and paste to safe place a backup of the page you are playing with. Just in case…

Pixel ShoppeBlogging, Design and eCommerce

Importance of Backing Up your Wordpress Blog

Backing up your wordpress or any other blog is very important. There a many reasons and problems than can happen and ruin months or years of work. Avoid all of this and back up regularly. Many web hosts provide free backups but it is still preferable to have your own backups stored on your local drive. To be able to back up with ease you have to learn how to do the following.

Complete backup vs Quick Backup

Wordpress runs on a database that stores all blog posts, pages, links and settings. A full backup consists of the database plus files from your site such as, theme, plugins, images, media.

Backing up only blog posts and comments is possible by exporting and xml document from your Wordpress admin panel. Click on manage then on export tab. You will be prompted to save a file to your local drive. You can then import this file from your new Wordpress blog.

Manual Database Back Up

In order to manually backup your database, you have to login to your control or cPanel and access your database through phpMyAdmin. Once logged in to your database navigate to Export tab.

Scroll down and check save as file box. Keep this file in a safe place. It is your database dump.

Manual Backup of Files

Now you need the rest of your files. Usually copying /wp-content/ will be enough because this folder contains your themes, plugins and uploads.

To download a copy of this folder either use Filezilla a free ftp client or Smartftp. If you have a cPanel login and download a home directory backup, your database backup, or any thing else you might want.

Wordpress Backup Plugins

These plugins will automatically backup Worpress core files. I have never backed up this way but I know from reading and from friends that Ilfilosofo have a popular backup plugin.

Use

1. Click the Manage menu in your WordPress admin area.
2. Click the Backup sub-menu.
3. The plugin will look for other tables in the same database. You may elect to include other tables in the backup.
   ** NOTE **
   Including other tables in your backup may substantially increase the
   size of the backup file!
   This may prevent you from emailing the backup file because it’s too big.
4. Select how you’d like the backup to be delivered:
   • Save to server : this will create a file in /wp-content/backup-*/ for you to retreive later
   • Download to your computer : this will send the backup file to your browser to be downloaded
   • Email : this will email the backup file to the address you specify
5. Click “Backup!” and your database backup will be delivered to you.When having the database backup emailed or sent to your browser for immediate download, the backup file will be deleted from the server when the transfer is finished. Only if you select delivery method “Save to server” will the backup file remain on your server.

Visit his site for more info.

Creating WordPress Themes

Did you ever feel like making your own WordPress themes and templates from scratch? Where you lost in the process with all those theme files?

I found a few neat generator for WordPress theme code. You customize it on line and download the theme files. So you can upload them to your server later.

These generator are excellent ways for beginners to get familiar with coding WordPress themes.

Check these out and leave a comment if you have any questions.

My favorite one is Theme-Generator1 it’s beautiful and fully customizable.

Online, download theme files: Theme Generator

Online, download theme files: WordPress Layout Generator

Download: WordPress Theme Gen

10 Paid to Review Sites

Paid reviews are the ok, are they worst than selling your own mother? You be the judge. I’m not going to go into how they can affect your pagerank or search engine results because you can read about that on another blog entry.

What are Paid to Review sites exactly? Paid to review sites bring advertisers and bloggers together. Advertisers set up campaigns and dictate what to blog about and link to in exchange of money. The price you get per article depends on your pagerank. Quite a bit of money can be obtained that way but notice respectable sites don’t do such reviews? Google can smack your pagerank for accepting money in exchange of links. That’s why Social Spark came along. Social Spark includes a no-follow tag in the the links and all posts have to be honestly identified as a paid review. Thus you are selling traffic, not pagerank.

PayU2Blog, Blogitive, Pay Per Post, Blogsvertise, Blogging Ads, Bloggerwave, Sponsored Reviews, ReviewMe, Smorty, Creamaid, Linky Love Army are all site that pay you to review other sites.

After an articles has been reviewed and accepted it must be posted for 30 days before being paid. Payments are often made through PayPal. If an article has been refused it will be explained why and most of the time you have a chance to fix the error. May articles are usually worth around 10–15$ and video content goes for 20–30$ for 1–2 minutes. Remember the higher your pagerank the more the opportunities pay.

If you join more than one site and have more than one blog your PayPal account can go up mighty fast. A car payment or mortgage loan is no sweat. So to review or not to review it really is up to you.

Installing & Activating a Wordpress Theme

I assume you have already downloaded your favorite theme and extracted the folder containing the theme’s files, to your desktop.

I also assume you have and know how to use a FTP client like Filezilla (it’s free).

All you do is open FileZilla and connect to your server or go to your cPanel. I use FileZilla. Once connected to your server drag and drop your new theme folder to:

yoursite/wordpress/wp-content/themes

All that is left to do is log into your admin panel and click the “design” tab. You should see a preview of your new theme. Click your new theme to activate it then view your blog. Your new theme should be present.

I have made a short video demonstrating how to install and activate a new Wordpress theme.

Vendors Be Careful When Selling Using Paypal and GoDaddy

I have come across some interesting bit of information. We are all aware of PayPal fraud but I wondered how it is a person can sell a site through paypal and end up with no site and no money. Well I was on Digital

Point this morning and came across an article by MOG that clarified everything. How easy it is to be dishonest.

There has unfortunately been a large amount of fraud in the last few days with a few users whom appear to be buying domains and then reversing their paypal transactions.

As the perpetrators of this fraud appear to be using good, respected and well + Itrader’d accounts it is very difficult to detect any fraud in advance.

Basically: as a domain transfer is for a non tangible good, paypal will always return the funds to the buyer if they add a dispute to their transaction. It may take up to 60 days to do this if you disagree with the dispute, but paypal will always return the money.

Also, GoDaddy who are the most popular domain registrar, will never enter into discussion about fraudulently obtained domain names, as in their opinion if you sent it and you were authorized to do so, it is your responsibility not theirs.

Both of the above companies have every right to take their stance, but because of this a few members (including myself) have been caught out in the last few days.

SO BE CAREFUL WHEN SELLING YOUR DOMAINS!

My advice would be if you are using GoDaddy and its more than say $100, or at least if its more than you could afford to lose, then use a different service like moneybookers, and for goodness sake if its an amount more than $500 then use escrow.com or a similar service.

Please don’t start posting suspected fraudsters usernames in this thread, that is NOT the point in this, but please be extra vigilant over the next few days/weeks when carrying out transactions.

Above all, remember, if you are being offered a price that seems to good to be true, it most probably is!

Money Making Widges

There are plenty of cool little widgets that can help you earn money. These widgets are easy to install and really make a difference in your earnings. Here are a few worth looking into.

Advertlets.com is an Asian blog/weblog advertising network that offers the remarkably sensible proposition of targeted, unintrusive advertising that benefits the online advertising and blogger community, as well as their readers.

Bloggers get better advertising that is relevant to their readers, and advertisers make their advertising dollars and their message count.

Through a system that allows the collection of real-time demographics, and also allows bloggers to make their own custom polls, we are different from anything out there, at least until our competitors start copying us.

Magnify.net We do the work, you get the traffic. Your ad network does the rest. With AdShare, you simply put your own ad network tags into the Magnify.net pages, and you’ll get 50% of the ad impressions delivered directly to your ad network. No new accounts to set up, no waiting for a “rev share” check. Don’t have a membership in AdSense or another network? We’ll help you sign up.

AuctionAds: There is no need to sign up for our affiliate program because it is built right into the ads you display! If a user clicks on the “Ads by ShoppingAds” link and signs up for our service, you earn 5% of all revenue generated by that user for the first 6 months. You will get paid the first of every month via Paypal. We feature a 30 day cookie on all referrals.

Tumri’s AdPods: Cool widget that displays ads. Choose from a growing collections of over 10 million products from 2300 merchants!

Boo-Box The presentation is very dramatic and visual. The installation could not be easier, requiring a single line of code. However, that line of code must be inserted every time you create a boo-box link within your content. If you are Wordpress blogger, Boo-Box has developed a plugin to make it easier to implement Boo-box. Earnings with this widget will come down to the content of the site. In other words, you must embed boo-box into various keywords in your content, and if your content does not have an applicable Amazon related product, you might have a tough time using it as often as you like. Finally, you must sign up to be an Amazon affiliate to add boo-box to your site.

TtzMedia is John Chow’s widget which uses Shopping.com’s product catalog to display ads. The TTZ widget offers a nice variety of layouts which are an improvement over Shopping.com’s similar widget.

Kontera Not your traditional widget, Kontera turns various keywords on your page into miniature link ads. When a visitor hovers over a Kontera link, a small pop-up appears with relevant advertising to that keyword. Kontera calls this keyword linking technology “in-text relevance”.

Kontera calls this keyword linking technology “in-text relevance”. Unlike other widgets which require some maintenance, Kontera is automatic and contextual, so after initial installation there is no further maintenance required. Kontera publishers are paid for every visitor click on advertising pop-ups.

Vibrantmedia.com if you are considering Kontera, you should also take a look at IntelliTXT as well, which offers a very similar service to Kontera. The result is impressive. Authors claim to have earned more per month using IntelliTXT than he did with Kontera. That is probably because the ads are flash with audio and video, real eye catching.

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