One of WordPress many great built-in functions, is the permalinks function. That nifty function helps you fancy up your URLs, so that they’re easy to understand, both for humans and search engines alike.

Before you ask, let me show you what I think is the best permalinks structure to use, which is the one that I have on all my blogs.

The reason to why I use that permalinks structure is that it gives me the opportunity to place my important keywords as close to the beginning as possible, plus that it’s easy to read and understand.

However, what do you do if you have a blog that has an ugly permalinks structure and would like to change that, without causing a busload of 404-errors? Or maybe you have a static site, which you would like to convert to WordPress, without losing any traffic. Can it really be done in a simple and effective way?

Yes, it can, thanks to a clever little plugin called, Smart 404.

When someone makes a request to your blog, using a URL that cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the info in that URL, attempt to find matching content and redirect the request to it, automatically!

Here’s an example.

Let’s say that you converted your static site to WordPress. On your old site you had a page named hair-shampoos.html, which now naturally causes a 404-error.

Now, if you have Smart 404, it will seamlessly redirect the surfer to its new location, which will be /hair-shampoos/ if you used the permalinks structure from above.

Whenever a request is made to your blog, which generates a 404-error, Smart 404 does a search of your posts, tags and categories, using keywords from the requested URL. If Smart 404 finds a match, it will redirect the request to that page, instead of showing the dreadful 404-error.

As you can see, in the picture below, you can also fine tune Smart 404, so that it pays higher notice to tags instead of categories, for instance.

However, if you don’t want to fiddle around with too much, you can just install it and let it do its job. It will work just well with the default options.

I can say that this plugin has helped me a lot, with fixing ugly permalinks and convert static sites to WordPress. So, now you can get those fancy URLs for your blog too, without causing those SEO dreadful 404-errors!

You can download Smart 404 over at the Smart 404 WordPress Plugin page or read more about it here.

The business of affiliate marketing is a very lucrative business model and if you do it properly, it can bring you high rewards. There are various methods and strategies that one can follow in order to enhance one’s performance as an affiliate.

The goal should be to get into the league of the super affiliates, in which returns up to the five figures per month can be generated. Here are a few guidelines that cover the basics of affiliate marketing.

Traffic

Focus on increasing targeted traffic to you website or blog as this is the single most driving factor toward generating sales. More people that are visiting your site are equal to a higher conversion rate. Therefore, do some research and don’t be afraid to use the latest marketing strategies that you find.

Be active and post relevant and informative articles about your products on article directories and similar sites, and don’t forget to attach links to your site within them.

Be active on forums by taking part in discussions, post comments and provide answers. This way you will be able to spread awareness about both yourself and the products you’re marketing, at the same time. If they like what you contribute to the community, they’ll also be tempted to visit your site.

Keep it Fresh and Simple

Make your site attractive; make it look as professional as possible. The idea is to keep it clutter-free and rich in content. Anybody who visits your site should be hooked and tempted to buy. Keep advertisements under control and focus on providing quality information about the product. Post reviews, articles and videos that show the true benefits of the product.

Do Your Research

Never get complacent about your knowledge. A closed door approach and ‘I know it all’ attitude will go against you. In order to continually improve your performance you need to keep learning yourself abreast with what is happening in the internet marketing world and learn something new each day. Do your research and be open to change and if you find a strategy which is more effective than what you are already using, embrace it.

Stay in Touch

Stay in touch with your clients through an auto responder. In this case even if the client does not buy anything in the first instance you can try and generate their interest in the product by sending them emails, where you are highlighting the unique features of the product. The rule of the thumb is about five e-mails per client. This will help you to arouse their interest and lure them into becoming buyers.

Work Your Products

Providing competitive offers are a good way to drive sales. Do some research and see what deals your competitors are offering. Then contact the maker of the product and see if you can work out a similar or better deal to your visitors.

Finally, remember that the key to every successful performance is hard work and patience. You might not get the desired results immediately, but persistence pays. A combination of these qualities plus help from the brief tips above, should help you in becoming a successful affiliate marketer, in the long run.

WordPress, out of the box, is very good in optimizing your blog for the search engines. However, a default installation of WordPress does not give you the ability to add the description and keywords Meta Tags, to your posts.

But, Do I Really Need Those Meta Tags?

Since many search engines has devalued the information in the Meta tags, they are not as important anymore, to get a good ranking, as they were a couple of years ago. However, the description tag is still important, not for SEO maybe, but to click-troughs from the search engines results, though.

Many search engines e.g., Google, displays the information in your description tag, in their search results. If they cannot find a description tag inside your post, they create their own, usually from the first paragraphs of your post.

That often results in a not so attractive description of your post.

People often tend to scan their search results. Therefore, if the description for your post, looks massive and incoherent, chances are that they chose to click on a result with a description that is short, to the point and tends to stick out.

So, even if Meta Tags isn’t that important for SEO, they give you a chance to explain why someone should click though to your post!

OK, How Do I Get Those Meta Tags?

Luckily, there are several ways to add Meta Tags to your post and pages.

You can use a theme, with that function built-in, like the spectacular Thesis Theme for WordPress or you could simply use a plugin, like the All in One SEO Pack, which will create your Meta Tags.

How To Use Custom Fields For Meta Tags

If you don’t want to use a plugin and/or your current template doesn’t support Meta Tags, you can use the custom fields in WordPress, to add Meta Tags to your posts, rather easily.

To start using custom fields, you’ll need to edit your theme, so make sure you take a backup of your theme, BEFORE you start editing anything at all!

First, open up your header template, usually named header.php, using either a standalone editor of your choice or in the Theme Editor, found below the Appearance box, inside WordPress.

Second, find the line with the tag </title> and copy and paste these two lines directly under it:

<meta name="description" content="<?php $key="Description"; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>" />

<meta name="keywords" content="<?php $key="Keywords"; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>" />

When you’re done, it should look like the image below.

If you cannot find a line with </title> in it and you’re not familiar with how header.php in WordPress is constructed or with coding, then you should use a plugin, instead.

Now, save your changes.

To use your new Meta Tags function, you’ll need to add two custom fields. To do that, scroll down to a section named Custom Fields, which you’ll find below the edit box, on your post page.

Click on the “Enter new” link, like in the example below.

You should now see an empty field, where you will type Description, as in the example below.

After you’re done writing your description, click on the button labeled “Add Custom Field” and repeat the process to create a field for Keyword, as well. Make sure that the first letter is capitalized, for both description and keyword, or else the code will not work!

Publish or update your post. To see if you your Meta Tags works correctly, visit your post and right-click and select “View Source”.  If everything worked, you should be able to see your description and keywords in the head section of your post.

Since your new fields are stored, you don’t have to add them again, next time you write or update a post. Just click on the drop-down menu, shown in the image below – select your field, enter your text, click the “Add Custom Field Button”, and you’re done!

As you can see, it’s fairly easy to use the custom fields feature, to generate your own meta tags, without the need of a plugin!

Visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Custom_Fields, to learn more about custom fields and what you can do with them.

This review might look weird, since I wrote it while I was testing Bilbo Blogger, kind of a live review, if you want.

This is a test of the Bilbo, a blogging client for Ubuntu with a ton of smart features, like WYSIWYG, HTML editor, post previews, ability to schedule posts, handle media files and much more, plus it’s free!

Currently I’m testing the submit function, which is the most vital feature of any blogging client, plus I have assign the following tags with this post; Bilbo Blogger, Blogging Client, let’s check if they show up, underneath. Yes, it did, remarkable!

Now, I’ll try to attach a screen-shoot to this post and update it. If everything works out, we’ll see an image below this line.

That also worked like a charm and the image was added to the media list in Bilbo Blogger.

The Setup

The setup of Bilbo Blogger was painless and took under a minute to accomplish. All you need is the URL to your blog, plus your log-in information, Bilbo Blogger took care of the rest. You can also set your blogs API manually, in case you want to go hardcore, that is.

One thing though, you must enable remote publishing on your blog, which you do in the writing settings, if you use WordPress. But besides that, I had Bilbo Blogger up and running within a few minutes and was able to start publishing this post under five minutes.

The Toolbox

As you can see in the screen-shoot, Bilbo offers you a nice little toolbox on the right, where you can view and set various options for your post, like categories, tags, if you want to enable or disable comments or trackbacks, modify the timestamp of the post, set the permalink and the summary for your post.

You’ll also get a list of all your previous posts, which you can download to your computer, with a double click, for further editing. All your local entries are also stored in the toolbox.

What I miss is the ability to assign meta descriptions to your post. However, since meta tags are theme/plug-in dependent, I recon it could be hard to implant that, in a way that it would work with any theme or template framework out there, though.

Edit

I like the editor, which provides all the basic features such as, bold, italic, underline, code, font size and color, blockquote, links, alignments, lists and split, as well as heading and paragraph options.

Post Preview

As you write your post, you can view a preview of it. The beauty of this feature is that Bilbo Blogger can download your blog’s style-sheet, so you’ll know exactly how your post will appear on your blog, once you decide to publish it.

Besides the WYSIWYG editor, you also have a HTML editor at your disposal. The different editors are accessible through tabs, which makes it easy and fast to work with your posts.

Conclusion

I think that Bilbo Blogger for Linux is a good alternative to Windows Live Writer, maybe it doesn’t have all the features of Live Writer, but it has all the essentials you’ll need to run your blog(s) straight from your desktop, in a creative, easy and fun way.

Bilbo Blogger is available through the Synaptic Package Manager and even though it’s for Kubuntu (KDE), it runs fine under Ubuntu (Gnome) without any flaws so far.

Do you use a blogging client, and if so, which one do you prefer and why do you use it?

With the latest word from Google, that they MIGHT consider to include loading speed into their algorithm, I decided to have a look what I could do to improve the performance of my WordPress blog.

It turned out that there is a lot you can do, without involving your host’s tech department, to speed up your blog, considerably.

However, before you start fine tuning your blog, you must first know how it performs right now, in its current state. It might just happen that you’re so fortunate that your blog loads at the speed of lightning, but how would you know, if you not test it first?

I have found two great and free services that you can use to test your speed and that shows your blog’s bottlenecks, if any.

Vertain – Provides a quick and straightforward test result, using a 10 mbps connection. They also give you the average test result, for all the test conducted the last week, which you can compare against your own result.

When I tested my blog, the average loading time where 5.1 seconds, which I passed. However, that was after I tweaked it a little, with a few easy and simple tricks, which I will give you in my next posts.

Chew The Web's speed result

Now, if your blog take more than 3-4 seconds to load, then you should start to investigate your blog further and indentify what is causing it to load so slowly. Remember, Vertain use a 10 mbps connection for their test, which means that 3-4 seconds equals 20-60 seconds on a DSL or dial-up connection!

Let’s say that your blog got a result over 3 seconds, mine did when I first run the test, what should you do next?

Well, you would like to find your blog’s bottlenecks and eliminate them, one by one, with another great and free service.

WebPageTest – Works just like Vertain, but gives you more options and detailed results. For example, you can choose different locations and connection speeds, browser, etc. for your test.

The results are rather impressive and give you everything you’ll need to find what is dragging your blog down. You’ll get a waterfall display of your blog’s load performance as well as a detailed connection view, together with an optimization checklist.

Here are some of the results from my blog, using a connection speed of 1.5Mbps from Dulles, VA.

Waterfall View

Optimization View

Now, with the websites above, you should be able to identify what type of objects (css, scripts, images, etc.) that are causing your blog to load slowly and see what you can do to fix it.

For example, you could compress your images a bit further, optimize your css files or remove JavaScript that you don’t use from your blog.

However, tomorrow I will write a post that shows you some neat and simple tricks, which you can use to speed up WordPress.

I hope that I’ll see you back then!

The easiest and maybe the fastest way to squeeze money out of your blog is to use Adsense. Using Adsense is simple, straightforward and within minutes, you will have ads that fit your reader’s interest.

However, if you want to get some real income from Adsense, then a few cents per day (which is the cold truth for many bloggers), you’ll need to do more than just copy and paste some piece of code, onto your blog.

You have certainly read success stories about bloggers who rake in hundreds of dollars per day from having Adsense on their blogs and what they all have in common, besides traffic, is that they think out of the box, making things a little bit different. These bloggers rarely spills their Adsense secrets all over, which is quite natural, would you?

However, there are a few basic points that are crucial to know, if you want to take your first steps to make some real money from Adsense.

Below you’ll find the basics, which have helped me improved my click through ratios and income from Adsense.

• The first thing you should do is to focus on one ad format. If you do a quick search around the web, you’ll find that the large rectangle, 336×280, is the format that tends to work very well, for a majority of bloggers. The success of the large rectangle is because the ads will show up like normal links, and since surfers like to click on such links, your click through ratio will be good, naturally. Another click friendly format is the wide skyscraper, 160×600, which you should place in one of your sidebars.
• Use a color scheme, tailored to your blog’s color scheme. Your goal is to make the ads to blend in. Make them look, as they are a natural part of your blog. For example, if you have a grey background on your blog, then make sure that your ad’s border and background are also grey, plus that the titles has the same color as your links.
• Place the ads so that your readers notice them, as quick as possible, which is usually at the top of your blog. Do not make the most common mistake of them all, placing your ads at the end of your posts. Think about, why would you like to hide your ads?
• Be active and creative when it comes to place your ads. Remember, surfers tend to develop ad blindness quickly. One way to prevent ad blindness is to move your ads around, from time to time.
• At last, make sure that your blog has a primary topic and a clear cut navigation system. Then create as many posts about it as possible. That way your readers will stay longer, this increases the chances that they, eventually, will click on one of your ads, which is the whole point!

I believe that the points above, together with a content rich blog and some traffic, will give you a good start on your journey, towards those impressive checks from Adsense!

Matt Cutts said something interesting, in an interview the other day. He said that there is some lobbying going on, to introduce an additional factor into Google’s algorithm; site speed.

Why?

Well it’s simple really. Think about it, if a web-page loads too slow, the surfers will most likely hit their back button and no page is loaded, and of course, no ads either. However, I do not think that you will need to purchase dual geo distributed servers and dedicated bandwidth, just yet, if ever. My best guess is that Google will not implant site speed into their algo, not as an important factor anyway.

Google are much smarter than that. By insinuate it, they know that hordes of webmasters will start to look over their websites and make sure that they load at optimal speed, just in case, which will give Google exactly what they want, faster sites and more ad impressions, without the hassle of messing around with their algo.

Clever and simple!

Nevertheless, something that I think they would considering adding, which would be both fair and useful, would be to just show the average loading speed, next to the search results. That way the surfers could decide for themselves, if they would like to visit the site or not.

Anyway, I don’t think that we’ll need to be frightened that Google would drop your site, just because it takes over 10 seconds to load, not in the near future anyway. What I do believe, on the other hand, is that if you make sure that your website loads as fast as possible, you’ll get more visitors, or what do you think?

In a previous post, I said that I would address Google’s PageRank and sort it out for you; what it really is and not is.

It’s PageRank, not SiteRank.

Google calculates your PageRank by looking at the quality and amount of back links, to a particular page. Since many people only link to the main page of a domain, it will also get the highest rank, of all your pages.

However, it is possible that a subpage of your blog can outrank its main page, as well.

Let’s say that you write a truly striking post on how to cure a terrible illness, and both CNN PR 8 and Wikipedia PR 9, would link to that post from their main page, then you can be certain that your post would outrank your main page.

Therefore, when it comes to blog commenting and SEO, you should look at the PR of a particular post, not just the main page, to increase your chances of getting some PR juice out of it.

The same goes for directories, only submit to directories with PR on their actual category pages. That way you’ll get the most out of the boring submitting routine.

High PR = High placement?

PageRank is just one of over 200 factors that determine your placement in the search results, therefore a high PR alone, does not automatically equals a higher placement.

If you have Google toolbar installed in your browser, you can check this yourself. Just do a couple of random searches and look at the PR, of the sites that comes up on the first page. Chances are that you will see sites with very low PR, outranking sites with much higher PR.

The reason for this is, simplified; that Google’s algorithm will present what it thinks is the best content available, for a particular set of keywords and not just the page with the highest PR.

There’s a reason behind the phrase, content is king, you know.

Google only updates PR every few months.

Just because the PR in the Google toolbar updates every few months, doesn’t mean that your actual PR just changes then. The truth is that your PR changes frequently, but Google has decided only to reveal it, every couple of months, through their toolbar.

How to Increase Your PR

A solid way, to increase your blog’s PR is to post good, relevant content and gain quality back links from authority sites, with an established high PR.

Make sure that your content is original, well written and with correct spelling and grammar. You can bet that Google can distinguish the difference between a handcrafted article and a spam article made by an article spinner!

Don’t bother to gather many links from low quality sites, your own sites, or even worse, buy links. Google will just ignore them and in worst-case scenario, ban your site or lower your rankings considerably, instead.

In addition, you should also be very fussy, with what type of sites you link to, from your blog. Only link to sites, in your own niche and that you feel gives value to the visitor.

I hope that you have learned a bit more about what PageRank actually is from this post and understand why they say, content is king.

Now, my test of Twitter Rocket has ended and I’m stunned over the results. If you read my initial post about Twitter Rocket, you’ll know that I started with 65 followers. Now, as I write this review, I have 671 followers, not bad for someone that barley grasped the essence of Twitter, before!

This also gives the answer to one of the questions that I had, before buying Twitter Rocker; can anyone use Twitter Rocket, without any prior knowledge of Twitter?

That’s a definite yes!

If you can read and follow simple instructions, you can absolutely use Twitter Rocket to 100% and see a staggering growth of your followers.  I think that the evolvement of my account proofs that, in an undisputable way.

The other question that I wanted to know, as well as you, if the techniques described in the book actually works and is there any spam or other shady stuff involved.

I’m pleased to announce that Twitter Rocket does not contain any shady or spam related techniques, what so ever.  That is also, in my opinion, the reason to why Twitter Rocket delivers such good results, that there is a human behind the wheels, and not an automated process.

In a nutshell, you could say that Twitter Rocket shows you, in a simple way, on how to start social networking.

Take your followers list to higher levels with Twitter Rocket!

My Review of Twitter Rocket

Now comes the moment that you have waited for, the in-depth review of the techniques behind Twitter Rocket.

Twitter Rocket is an E-book, written in a straightforward educational style, without any technical jargon, which makes it easy to follow. The core of the book consists of a 5 days schedule, with a couple of tasks, which you have to complete each day.

However, before you start with the 5-day plan, Twitter Rocket gives you a comprehensive walkthrough on how to set up and configure your account. Systematically, the walkthrough introduces you to a vast number of important steps and a few tricks, on how to utilize your account to the fullest.

This introduction is rather vast, without being troublesome in any way, so decided to start with, the 5-day plan, the following day, just so that I could take in all the valuable information, it contained.

After the introduction, the fun starts right away, as you take your first trembling steps to skyrocket your followers. In the first two days, you’ll l learn how to avoid common pitfalls, the basics of Twitter’s functionality, as well as some really smart and easy ways of attracting real followers, to your account.

The steps explained in the first two days, took me about 10-20 minutes each, to complete, however the steps in day 3 took me almost an hour. Therefore, if you buy the book, you can contact me and I will be able to help you save some time on these steps.  (Don’t worry, I will not show up at your doorstep, or anything like that, you’ll understand exactly how, when you read the book.)

The steps in day 4 and 5, become the big finally of the book since the steps in these two days, resulted in far more followers, than the other days combined. In addition, these steps took less than 30 minutes to complete, as well.

In the last chapters of the book, Ashley Morgan explains how to monetize your new Twitter account, and how to continue growing your followers. He also gives you an overview on what you should avoid, if you would like to keep your account on Twitter.

Twitter Rocket – A system that gives 100% and beyond!

The Support, Guarantee & an Astonishing Bonus

Now, we all know that the Internet is constantly changing and you might be afraid to invest $97 into something that might not work, tomorrow or next week, something that I can understand completely. Ashley Morgan knows that too, and since he is an honorably person, he gives you a lifetime ‘guarantee’ which means, that you’ll get any future revisions or updates of Twitter Rocket, freely.

In addition to that, Ashley Morgan also gives his customers the ability to get a promotional push from a series of networked Twitter accounts with a total following of over 250,000 quality followers! If you think about it that alone is worth more than $97, don’t you think?

To wrap it All Up

I found that Twitter Rocket was an honest system, which actually showed me, how I could grow my Twitter account, (from 65 to 670) in just 5 days, with little effort and time.

However, the best thing with the book, besides it did what it said it should do, was that it explained what exactly each step did and why they actually worked. This helped me understand them much better, than if they just had been a plain list of tasks.

Even though Twitter Rocket is a full proof e-book, I would have wanted to see a more detailed introduction and syntax, to the various functions inside Twitter. That would have helped me, as a Twitter newbie, to grasp the book a lot quicker. I have mailed my thoughts about this to Ashley, as well.

Therefore, considering that you will get a tested and proven system, which will take your followers list to amazing levels, together with the lifetime support, together with the bonus push from a 250,000 followers Twitter network, I must say that Twitter Rocket rocks and is worth way more than the measly $97 Ashley asks for it!

Take Your Followers To a W Twitter Rocket and skyrocket your followers, today!

Blog commenting is a free, easy and powerful way of driving targeted readers to your blog.

It can also lead to both productive and profitable relationships with other blogger as well. However, for it to be a success, you must do it right and systematically.

The most important key, to succeed with blog commenting, is relevance.

I’m sure that you can see why leaving a comment on Aunt Annie’s gardening blog, with a link to your death metal blog, wouldn’t do you or your ads for T-shirt hell, much good, compared with a link to your bonsai tree blog.

The second key is to get your comments to stand out from the rest.

Dare to be bold, challenging and passionate while you write your comment. Your goal is to be interesting enough, so others want to click on your link, to find out more about you.

Therefore, stay away from measly comments like, “Thanks, for sharing!”, “Great tip!”, “I agree!” etc.

Instead, express what it is, exactly, which makes you like or dislike the post, or add additional information about the topic discussed. These are comments that will make people notice you.

Now, when we have covered the basics of blog commenting, let’s move on to finding the right blogs for your exceptional comments.

Two great sites, to find blogs in almost any niche there is are, blogcatalog.com and technorati.com.

Start browsing through the blogs, listed in the niches that you feel is relevant to yours and chose a number of blogs, that you feel you can leave comments on, on a daily basis. Here is a tip, to keep things organized, create a new folder in your bookmarks, and place your findings there.

Now, all you’ll need to do is visit the blogs on your list, and leave a comment. The trick is to include this into your daily routine and to use the same name, for all your comments. That way you will build an identity around yourself and your blog.

If you follow this routine, every day, you will soon see an increasing number of new readers, finding their way to your blog. Moreover, the blog owners will also notice you and might contact you, which will help you build a very important network of friends.

I will address two things, which always arise, whenever the topic is blog commenting, PR and Nofollow, although, I will be brief, since these two subjects are immense.

First, PR. I have never bothered with tracking down high PR blogs, because PR stands for PageRank and not SiteRank. Often, you will leave comments on new post, which doesn’t have a PR yet, so it doesn’t matter much.

Next, the Nofollow tag. The general rule is that all blogs attach the Nofollow tag to all the links left in their comments. Originally, the idea was to instruct the search engines (read Google) that a link, with the Nofollow tag, should not influence the link target’s ranking in their index.

However, whatever or not the search engines obey the Nofollow tag, is highly debated.

Besides, I don’t see blog commenting as a way of attracting search engine robots; I see it as a way of attracting real people, such who actually reads what I write, spread the buzz around and click on ads.

Nevertheless, I will address these two red-hot topics, in a post of their own, though.

I hope that I have encouraged you to throw yourself out there and start writing comments, and remember, 99% of all blogs out there want comments, just like you, so don’t be afraid to leave yours!