XarJ Blog and Podcast » Internet SEO Wordpress

Best way to interlink multiple websites together – Google PR

Xarj — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 06:35:03 +0000

Do you have any answers?

How to Interlink multiple websites together

I have a few websites that I want to interlink together as to have the best Google PR possible for each website. Let’s say that each website is somehow content related. The sites have different Google PRs.

Google will give less importance to a link if the site receiving the link also adds a link pointing to the other site. Link exchanges are much valuable then receiving a link without reciprocal linkback. Knowing this, wouldn’t it be smarter to link your multiple websites in a circular linking process like the diagram below? What do you think?

Here is a diagram with my proposal:

How to write content for the web

Xarj — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 19:04:36 +0000

Web Content to be successful

How to write content for the web

Find your main topic
Find a few short keyphrases around your main topic. The more popular your keyphrase, the better. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Write your title which should use your primary keyphrase
Write your text by emphasizing these chosen keyphrases. Repeat the exact keyphrases a few times inside your text.
Find one related image for 500 words
Write a short description of your article using approx 160 characters including spaces. Emphasize your main keyphrases by repeating it twice.
Write your top 10 keywords and keyphrases separated by commas.

With these 7 steps, you have created optimized content for the web.

Upload or post your article and see your article appear at the top of the serp results in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Google Analytics Manually Track Clicks

Xarj — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 09:52:53 +0000

I’ve learnt something about Google Analytics tracking and I want to write it down somewhere to remember it for the future. What better place than my blog so I also let everyone else know about this small Google Analytics tracking Tip.

I wanted to precisely track my sidebar outgoing clicks so when I go into my Google Analytics interface I can see how many people have clicked on any link within my sidebar. To do this, you have to manually add a small code on each link.

Append this code on each link you want to track :

onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/example.com');">

Image with the code (just in case wordpress modified the code above) :

Note : There is a space between javascript: and pageTracker

Log your links into an logical directory structure!

In the example, the directory structure is /outgoing/example.com but on my blog I have done it differently.

For all the links on my sidebar, I have used the directory structure /internallinks/sidebar/nameofthelink

For the links in my header, I have used the directory structure /internallinks/header/nameofthelink

For my footer /internallinks/footer/nameofthelink

In Google Analytics, you will find the results after 24-48 hours inside the CONTENT menu and by clicking on CONTENT DRILLDOWN

Warning! If you manually track clicks by using this code, Google Analytics will count each click as an extra pageview! This will inflate your pageview statistics so you might want to create a filter to remove those additional pageviews from your general Google Analytics statistics. See how Here.

You can see a summary of this code in the Google Analytics Help Pages : Here

Niche Stores and Ebay Affiliation

Xarj — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:30:00 +0000

How to Build your eBay Niche Store :

Signup with Ebay Partner Network
1. Registration
2. What items have you sold?
Choose your niche
1. Use Niche Level Drilling
Your Target Keywords
1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool
2. Find the Best Ratio
3. Extra Keyword Tools
Domain name
1. With or Without Dashes
2. Rules to Buying a Domain Name
Build your Wordpress Niche Site
1. Good theme for niche stores
2. Wordpress Plugins to Install
3. How to categorize your wordpress site
4. Create 4 basic pages
5. You need Content
6. Ebay Cookies
7. PHPBay Pro Wordpress Plugin
Improve your PR (Page Rank)
1. Backlinks
2. Tip to find valuable related backlinks
3. Tips for your site description
Make Money !!!

1. Signup with Ebay Partner Network

Registration

Signup – Goto eBay Partner Network for English or eBay Affiliation France for French.
Your information – Fill out the registration form with your real contact information
- Business Model – Your Primary Business Model could be “Natural Search/Website”
- Your website URL – You need to tell Ebay on which website you will advertise for them. You probably don’t already have your niche store setup so input your personal blog URL or find a good blog and add their URL. This is not really important since you’ll be able to use as many websites later but Ebay still requires this info for the registration form. Better put a nice blog so Ebay accepts your registration.
- Payment – Input your Paypal email address to get paid by Paypal
- Tax Status – If you do not live in USA, then fill out the “Certification of no US Activities” so you don’t pay tax to USA but don’t forget to declare your incomes to your own country!
Be Patient – You’ll have to wait a few days or weeks before Ebay Partner Network approves your account on all Ebay Programs US, AU, FR, UK etc…
Once Approved – Once you’ve been approved, you’ll need to create different campaigns for your different niche stores. This way you can see how much income comes from each site.
Login to eBay Partner Network Here

What items have you sold?

To see which products have been sold using your eBay affiliate ID, goto REPORTS and click on Transaction Download. Get the text file and see the sold eBay product numbers. Search the ID number in eBay and see which item you have sold. This is really interesting!

Extract your sales information

If you have trouble reading the text file, then use one of two scripts currently available which extract the information and displays it nicely.

The best is TWW ePN Item Tracker, copy the php file onto your server, upload your txt file and see the dates, sale price, ebay revenue, your revenue, acru and item information with thumbnail picture, number of bids, seller and buyer and a link pointing to the ebay item. I’m not sure the ebay revenue is actually correct and the script does not work with eBay France. Also the calculation of the totals was incorrect but it’s still a valuable script and since it’s on your webserver, your data is kept private.

You can also use the online MyepnReport. Simply upload your text file to see the campaign id, auction description, buyer and sale price. The advantage of this script is that it works a little better with auction from ebay France. You can at least see the buyer and item description and click on it to see the ebay product page. But the owner of the online script might have access to your data. I don’t really care, what is he gonna do?

I’ll discuss later in this building ebay niche stores tutorial how you can use PHPBay Pro Wordpress Plugin to display the ebay products on your Wordpress niche stores and make money.

2. Choose your Niche

Choosing the correct niche of products to sell is a vital process! It will impact on your success. So spend some time looking for the ultimate niche and do your homework properly!

On the long term, it’s better if you find a niche you are personally interested in. You will have to work many hours on the topic you have chosen so choose a topic you enjoy to read about or work with.

I recommend using the eBay categories to get ideas for your niche.

For Ebay US see the categories available
For Ebay France see the categories here

Go through the numerous categories on the page. If you don’t have enough categories, click on “See all * categories…” at the end of all main categories to see even more categories.

eBay Pulse shows a snapshot of the current searching trends and hot picks on eBay. See what are the top searched products on eBay within any category. Information on the popular searches, largest stores and most watched items. This is a GREAT tool to choose your niche of products!

Use the eBay popular products tool to see the best selling and most popular products in any category.

Use Niche Level Drilling

Level 1 : Technology, Sports, Travel
Level 2 : Computers, Basketball, Paris
Level 3 : Laptops, Basketball Shoes, Hotel Paris
Level 4 : Mac Laptops, Nike Basketball shoes, Hotel near Champs Elysees
Level 5 : Macbook Air laptop, Air Jordan shoes, Ibis Hotel Paris
Level 6 : Green MacBook Air, 1998 Air Jordan shoes, 100 EUR Ibis Hotel Room

Each next level is a sub category of the level above it. You are drilling down the levels to find a specific niche. See article on epntips.

Technology > Computers > Laptops > Mac Laptops > Macbook Air laptop > Green MacBook Air
Sports > Basketball > Basketball Shoes > Nike Basketball shoes > Air Jordan shoes > 1998 Air Jordan shoes
Travel > Paris > Hotel Paris > Hotel near Champs Elysees > Ibis Hotel Paris > 100 EUR Ibis Hotel Room >

You should choose a niche at level 4, 5 or 6. The lower the level, the harder it will be to make money but if you are VERY good, then you could make a lot more money since you are reaching a wider audience. But higher more specific levels will be faster and easier to setup with a relatively good ratio work/income. Make sure ebay has a sufficient amount of products to sell in your niche! That’s generally not a problem!

3. Target Keywords

You need to think right now about the keywords or key phrases you want your niche store to rank well in the Google serps (Search Engine Result Page).

Let’s say you have chosen to sell a level 4 category with “Mac Laptops”. “Mac Laptops” is still very generic and you’ll have a hard time ranking in the serps so transform this into a level 5 category by adding one condition, the laptops are “used”. Your new level 5 category is “Used Mac Laptops”. This keyphrase should be a lot easier to rank in the serps.

Now that you have your main keyphrase; “used mac laptops”, search for additional related keywords and keyphrases. Use a synonym dictionary on the internet and record all the additional keywords. The Wordpress Plugin PHPBay Pro will use your keywords to display the eBay listings in your pages.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Goto Google Adwords Keyword Tool and input all your keywords and keyphrases. Think about making some of your keywords plurial by adding an “s” and typing the different forms of your keywords. Make sure you choose the correct language and country you are aiming for! Google Adwords Keyword Tool will then give you some additional related keyphrases and tell you the number of times each query has been searched in Google. Sort the list by “Average Monthly Search Volume” so the most searched keywords are on top.

Find the Best Ratio

Open a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel and type in your favorite keyphrases. “Used Mac Laptops” would probably be your first choice. “Used Apple Laptops” in second, “second hand mac laptops” and so on…

In your spreadsheet add :

Your keyphrases
The monthly search volume per keyphrase
The number of results in Google when you search for the keyphrase ie: Used Mac Laptops
The number of results in Google when you search for the exact keyphrase by putting quotation marks between the keyphrase ie: “Used Mac Laptops”

Use the mathematic function in your spreadsheet to automatically calculate the ratio between “Monthly Search Volume” and “Number of Results”. Find the keyphrase which has the best ratio. Low competition but high search volume.

Extra Keyword Tools

You should use Google Trends to compare two or more keywords (or phrases). This keyword tool will tell you which keyword was searched the most between, for example, “mac laptops” or “apple laptops”. Also useful to see the increase or decrease in search volume over time (last couple years). You can also see the results according to geographic location. Very clever!

Use the Keyword Suggestion Tool by WordTracker to get some additional related keywords and see gross search volume data for each keyword.

Keyword Forecast by MSN is another tool to compare the popularity of two of more keywords over time.

The tool Keyword Mutation Detections by MSN displays common misspellings or alternative spellings of the user’s input keywords. You might get additional traffic to your site by intentionally mispelling words.

Blog Citation Trend Tool by IceRocket will allow you to compare different search terms and tell you how many blog posts have been written and published for each search term (keyword). This might be useful to know which keyword is most used by your competition within your niche.

4. Domain name

Check your favorite domain names comprised of your keywords or keyphrases and see if they are available for purchase.

With or Without Dashes

If you want to buy a domain name without any dashes (-) like usedlaptops.com make sure Google is able to break down the words. Goto google.com and type in usedlaptops, Google automatically corrected the keyword and broke down the attached words; Try “Used Laptops” instead of “usedlaptops”. If we type usedmaclaptops, no correction is proposed, Google might understand the different words but did not correct the search phrase. In that case, I might prefer buying the domain name with the dashes to help Google break down the words inside the domain name; used-mac-laptops.

Now buy your domain name with the top keyphrase you have found which have the best ratio. This might be a difficult task since so many domain names have already been bought.

Rules to Buying a Domain Name

Buy a domain name with your favorite keywords
Don’t make it too long! “second-hand-mac-laptops.com” is too long! “used-mac-laptops.com” is ok.
You could choose any extension you like. Some people say the .info are less valuable.

5. Build your Wordpress Niche Site

Google loves Wordpress so I would recommend it to everyone for their niche store. Install Wordpress, buy PHPBay Pro and select your theme.

Good themes for niche stores

Simple and clear
Emphasis on the content
User Friendly
SEO Friendly
Professional looking. Looks like a boutique and not a blog!

Wordpress Plugins to Install

How to categorize your wordpress site

Create one main page for each of your main topics. If you are selling “Used Apple Laptops” then you could create one page per laptop model:

Macbook
Macbook Pro
Macbook Air
Powerbook
ibook
- iBook G4
- iBook G3
Price
- Under $200
- Between $200 and $500
- Over $500

If you have any sub-categories, then add a new page and use the main topic page as the parent page in Wordpress. This way you categorize your niche store.

I always like to include Price range pages. “Used Apple Laptops under $200″ “Between $200 and $500″ “Over $500″ … People on the internet are often shopping by price!

Also, I like that all my categories are always accessible directly from my homepage in a sidebar for example.

Create 4 basic pages

Link page (used for return link for directories)
Sitemap page
Contact Us page
Privacy Policy page (Your site will look more professional and trustworthy)

You need Content!

For EACH and EVERY page and post, write a good amount of GENUINE & ORIGINAL content! Without original content across your niche store, Google will not like your site!

On all your pages

Write a good paragraph of description about the products selling on the page. No Copy Paste!
Make sure to include your keywords and keyphrases into your text and put them in BOLD
Interlink the pages on your site. On each page and post, add a link to your homepage using your main keywords.

On your Homepage

Include your best written text describing all the products you are selling
Compliment your website, My boutique is the best because…
Include numerous keyphrases in your text
ALWAYS display some products. I like to have 10 products displayed at the top of my homepage so users can click right away. Read “Ebay Cookies“.

Add New Content

Google loves new and original content. I recommend you write a short article on your topic once or twice per week and add it on your site in a “Buying Guide” category for example. Inside this article or product review, include your keywords in bold and link to your homepage and other pages. Sometimes I also include 5 or 10 products using PHPBay Pro.

Ebay Cookies

One note of information about making money with Ebay Affiliation. When a user on your niche store clicks on a product and visits the ebay site, ebay puts a cookie file on their computer. This cookie stays on the computer for one week or one month and if the user buys anything on ebay during that period of time, you will get commission for the sale, no matter what. Knowing this, your primary objective is for ebay to put that cookie on the users computer. That’s the most important! So you want visitors on your site to click on a product before they leave your site! For this reason you display a small list of products on your homepage.

PHPBay Pro Wordpress Plugin

PHPBay Pro is a plugin for wordpress that displays eBay products on your pages and posts. It’s very easy to use and very configurable. You could use a free wordpress plugin for ebay affiliate but you won’t have as much success. If you are going to take this business seriously, I recommend PHPBay Pro. Don’t waste your time with free stuff, it can’t compete with a professional plugin. Also forget Build a Niche Store (BANS) which is more expensive and not as powerful as wordpress + PHPBay Pro.

With PHPBay Pro, inside your page or post, type in the search query, how many items to display, the category number, exclusion words, price range etc… In the css stylesheet you can change the appearance of the results, in rows, columns.

PHPBay Pro allow you to cloak the link and image link and adds nofollow so Google doesn’t notice your site is an affiliate site. You don’t want Google to see all your links are pointing to eBay! So buy PHPBay Pro!

6. Improve your PR (Page Rank)

Your niche store will never become successful if you do not work to improve your PR!

Backlinks

Most important are backlinks pointing to your site. You want as many backlinks as possible and preferably coming from related sites or pages. Make sure the backlinks do not have a rel=”nofollow” ! A backlink with a nofollow tag tells Google not to pass any link juice so it is essentially worthless for your PR.

Add your niche store to all the directories you can find. Most will ask a return link which is why you have created a page called LINKS.
Visit Forums and add your link in a well written message so people don’t think you are spaming.
Create a Squidoo Lense to get a “dofollow” backlinks
Ask webmasters if they like to trade links
Write original Press Releases and submit them to Article/Press Release Directories

Tip to find valuable related backlinks

In Google, search for your top keyphrase, “used apple laptops” for example. For each of the top 10 results, look at their backlinks by searching “link:sitename.com“. This will show you the top sites or directories linking to the competition. You also want a backlink from those sites since they are the reason your competitor is ranking so well for your keyphrase.

Tips for your site description

When submitting to directories, prepare 10 different descriptions about 250 characters in length. You do not want all the directories to display the same description! The backlinks will be more valuable if the text description is more unique.

For your site’s title, use various combinations of the primary keywords. ie : Used Apple Laptops, OR, Apple Laptop Used, OR, Mac Used Laptops …

7. Make Money

The three most important things to be successful are :

Choosing a good Niche
Having enough content
Getting valuable backlinks

Honestly, you can’t go wrong if you work hard at those three things.

Good luck! Hopefully you’ll manage to make loads of money with your eBay niche stores!

Visit my Wordpress Internet SEO category to read more interesting articles like this one!

Leave a comment if you have anything to add!

How to Mass Delete Posts in Wordpress PhpMyAdmin SQL

Xarj — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:03:21 +0000

Mass Delete Wordpress Posts SQL Query

I’ve been looking for the SQL query instructions for phpmyadmin on how to mass delete posts for wordpress blogs according to specific date range. A friend gave me a functional sql query which I have tested and works perfectly.

BACKUP YOUR WORDPRESS DATABASE before typing in any SQL Query! Read this article to correctly backup your Wordpress Database.

With the following SQL query, you’ll be able to verify how many items will be deleted in your database. Notice the “SELECT” which simply tells the database to count the lines which will be deleted. This SQL query will count the wordpress posts published before June 6, 2008.

SELECT count(*) FROM wp_posts WHERE post_date < '2008-06-06 19:18:00' AND post_status = 'publish'

Once you are certain you want to mass delete the posts in your wordpress database, use the following SQL Query. This SQL query will delete the wordpress posts published before June 6, 2008.

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_date < '2008-06-06 19:18:00' AND post_status = 'publish'

Wordpress Rules

Notice the two phpmyadmin sql queries are exactly the same except for the first argument. The first uses SELECT to count the posts and the second actually DELETE the posts.

There are many different SQL queries which would work, these are not the only ones!

Note that these queries delete the posts but some elements will remain like the meta data associated with the wordpress posts. These meta data are situated in the wp_postmeta table in your wordpress database. I do not know how to remove these elements as well. If anyone knows a better SQL query which works in phpmyadmin, please let us know in the comment form!

Crawl Rate Tracker Data

Xarj — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:08:01 +0000

Data from Plugin “Crawl Rate Tracker”

Two months ago I installed the Wordpress Plugin called “Crawl Rate Tracker” you can download here. It’s compatible with Wordpress 2.6x.

With the data offered by this great wordpress plugin, Crawl Rate Tracker shows us how often the Search Engine Bots come crawling our websites and blogs. When a search engine bots crawls your site, it will index your latest posts and any modifications in your pages. For example the latest comments which might have been added etc…

Wordpress Plugin Crawl Rate Tracker can identify the bots from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Technorati.

As a rule of thumb, the more often a bot comes to visit your site, the more your content is popular and your website successful. Very big and famous websites get lots and lots of visits from the bots hungry to index the latest post and article.

Each bot visiting your website uses server resources from the Google, Yahoo or MSN Datacenters. So the more crawling, the more power is needed. It’s important to note that bots also use your own server’s power and bandwidth! But I’m very happy they come check out my blog! It’s for a good cause!

Here’s my Crawl Rate Tracker Screenshot ::

Crawl Rate Tracker Data

The data spreads over one month from August 6 to September 6. Google in dark blue, Yahoo in Green, MSN in Yellow and Technorati in light blue.

I’m surprised Yahoo visits my site more often than Google! As I said above, the more a bot visits your site, the more popular you are and I barely get a couple serp listings on Yahoo! Google loves me but I don’t get much love from Yahoo and MSN! Maybe Google’s bot is just smarter and can do more with less visits. It’s impossible Yahoo has more computing power than Google! So I’m surprised the Yahoo bot comes in first position!

New content appears pretty regularly on my blog but the data shown on the graph are absolutly not constant and stable! It’s all over the place! Especially for MSN in yellow. Three huge peaks on August 10th, 24th and September 4th. You can also see the humongus peak for Yahoo on August 14th. Weird. I wonder why those peaks occur.

Anyone else uses this great wordpress plugin “Crawl Rate Tracker” on their Blog? How do your stats look like? Do you get more than 130 pages crawled per day and per search engine on average?

Twitter vs Plurk – Traffic Analysis

Xarj — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:02:33 +0000

I’ve been using Twitter for a couple months and there’s a new contender in town called Plurk. Lots of blog writers have written articles comparing the features of both messaging systems but I wanted to take a new look into the two competitors. I want to analyze their statistical progression to evaluate their future popularity and success.

Signup to my Internet RSS Feed — Visit my Internet articles category
Follow me on Twitter!

Ranking Tools :

For my report, I have used the following rankings systems to evaluate Twitter vs Plurk:
Alexa :: Google Trends :: Trifecta :: Compete :: Quantcast

Alexa Rankings

Alexa Internet is a California company based in San Francisco founded in April 1996. It belongs to Amazon. Its Web site is mainly known for providing traffic statistics on the websites of the World Wide Web. My Blog and Podcast ranks 28,842. Visit Alexa here.

Twitter vs Plurk – Daily Traffic Rank Trend – Alexa :

Twitter vs Plurk - Daily Traffic Rank Trend - Alexa

The graph above shows the Alexa ranking of both Twitter and Plurk in the 6 last months. Twitter’s 3 month average is 950 and Plurk’s is 29,428. Obviously Twitter has a higher rank because people have been using twitter for a longer time and Twitter was the first web service to offer a messaging system.

Twitter’s graph increases slowly while Plurk’s is all over the place. Plurk was very popular at first and then people lost interest but they started returning in June 2008. Now it looks like plurk’s audience has stabilized. I’m surprised it’s not increasing in july!

Statistics about Twitter.com – Alexa :

Twitter Statistics on Alexa

From the data above, we see that Twitter’s global internet reach has increased by 53% in the last 3 months and it’s rank has increased by 584. 0.054% of all visits on the internet are to Twitter! That’s a lot! On the other hand, people are spending less time on twitter with a lower number of page views than 3 months ago. People are viewing an average of 5.72 pages per visit.

Statistics about Plurk.com – Alexa :

Plurk Statistics on Alexa

From the data above we see that Plurk’s traffic rank is increasing at a much faster pace than Twitter’s. In the last 3 months, Plurk has gained 23,525 places in the Alexa rank system compared to 584 for Twitter. Plurk is growing fast!

We also notice that Plurk’s number of page views per visit is lower than Twitter’s although it’s increasing much quicker, 286% increase in the last 3 months compared to -11% for Twitter. People are enjoying Plurk and are spending more and more time.

Google Trends Rankings

Google Trends is a tool from Google Labs to see the frequency with which a term has been typed and searched in the Google search engine, with the ability to view the data by region and language. Presented in the form of a graph, the horizontal axis indicates the time scale year by year, starting in 2004, and the vertical axis shows the value of the frequency search term. The tool can also compare the frequency of several search terms. A feature by Google Trend is the presentation of news articles directly related to the peaks of popularity of keyword. Recently Google Trend has added data on the visitor traffic for most websites on the internet. Visit Google Trends Here.

Search Volume – Twitter vs Plurk – Google Trends :

Search Volume Twitter vs Plurk on Google Trends

From the data above we see that a lot more people are searching for the keyword “twitter” than the keyword “plurk” in Google. Plurk seems to have stabilized while Twitter is increasing. Remember Twitter was launched before Plurk and has had a lot more press coverage so is far more notorious than Plurk. This seems to be exponential leaving Plurk far behind.

I believe the name “Twitter” is more marketing friendly than “Plurk”. Both Twitter and Plurk have gotten some news coverage but Twitter has had far more and it seems it’s increasing since July.

Searches – Popular in Countries – Google Trends :

Searches are Popular in these Countries on Google Trends

The data above is quite interesting. The top countries who search the keyword “Twitter” are in Asia with Japan and Taiwan. The main country that searches for Plurk is Taiwan. I’m surprised to see Canada with a population of only 30 million is 4th on the list! Way da Go!

Websites Traffic – Twitter vs Plurk – Google Trends :

Websites Unique Visitors - Twitter vs Plurk on Google Trends

From the data above we see Twitter is steadily increasing its website traffic and has passed 400,000 daily unique visitors. Plurk on the other hand is having a hard time with a small increase followed by a sharp decrease in visitors.

Websites – Visitors come from – Google Trends :

Visitors come from these countries - Plurk vs Twitter

From the data above we see that the top 3 countries visiting Twitter are United States, Brazil followed by Japan. These 3 regions also represent more than 70% of the total visitors. United States, China and Taiwan are the top users of Plurk.

I do not understand why the top visiting countries are not the same as the top countries searching for the keywords “twitter” or “plurk”. Do most users from USA and Brazil access the websites through their bookmark instead of searching for the link on Google? Seems a little strange… Any ideas?

Trifecta Rankings

Trifecta measures the strength of pages, blogs and entire domains based on factors like popularity, influence and ranking ability. Trifecta counts the number of sites/pages that link to you, the number of times your brand is mentioned on the web and how much traffic your site receives. My Blog and Podcast has a final score of 24%. Visit Trifecta Here.

Trifecta Report – Plurk vs Twitter – SEOMoz :

Trifecta Report – date : July 29, 2008	Twitter.com	Plurk.com
Pagerank Of Homepage	8	3
Dmoz Links	10	0
Google News Mentions	338	0
Google Blog Search Links	59,548	2,317
Google Domain Mentions	73,000	57,800
Compete Rank	791	5,276
Alexa Rank	950	29,428
Yahoo Site Explorer Links To Domain	24,565,793	578,150
Quantcast Rank	2,115	NA
Wikipedia Links	50	8
Technorati Blog Reactions	3,486,444	13,770
Age In Days (First Google Cache)	1,135	1,271
Final Score	82%	49%
Original Trifecta Report	Click Here	Click Here

I love this new tool called Trifecta by SEOmoz! It offers very complete information about any website or blog. You need to signup to have access to one report per day. Become a paying customer for unlimited reports.

PageRank – Obviously Twitter has a much higher Google Page Rank than Plurk with 8 vs 3.

DMOZ – Dmoz is a directory of websites maintained by Google. Getting a link from Dmoz means you have a great site and it boosts your credibility. For regular websites and blogs, Dmoz links are quite hard to get, I’ve submitted my link a couple times in the last 2 years. Twitter has 10 Dmoz links and Plurk doesn’t have any yet. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a couple Plurk links appear in the next 6 months.

Google News – 338 articles written about Twitter and none for Plurk. Twitter was the site to introduce the messaging system onto the web. That’s a pretty big deal and I’m not surprised they have gotten so many articles written about their service. Maybe Plurk should already have a few articles, surprising!

Google Blog Search Links - This data only counts links from blogs and does not count regular websites. I don’t know how Google decides what is a blog and what’s not. Maybe if there’s an RSS Feed? 59,548 blogs or posts have a link pointing to Twitter and 2,317 for Plurk, that’s 3,9% of the total links of Twitter! Ouch! It will be hard to catch up! But remember 2,317 links from great blogs is probably better than 59,548 links from crappy blogs!

Google Domain Name Mentions – This data is quite interesting! This data represents the number of times the domain name appears on the web. The domain name does not have to point or have a link to the website. Just writing www.twitter.com in any text without linking to the website would count in this value. 73,000 domain name mentions for Twitter and 57,800 for Plurk! Wow! Plurk almost has as many as Twitter! That’s weird! Are people writing the url to Plurk without adding the link pointing towards the website?

Compete Rank – Compete is a competitor to Alexa showing statistics just for United States usage. Twitter is ranked 791 and Plurk 5,276.

Alexa Rank – Twitter is the 950th website in the world in terms of quantity of visitors worldwide. Plurk ranks at 29,428. The Plurk number should continue to increase for a while as Alexa averages the last 3 months and more and more visitors are joining Plurk.

Yahoo Site Explorer Links To Domain – This tool includes all links towards a specific domain, including links with rel=”nofollow” which tells a search engines not to give any link love. 24,565,793 links are pointing to Twitter and 578,150 links towards Plurk. Plurk has 2,4% of the total links to Twitter. Big difference! Hard to catch up!

Quantcast Rank – Quantcast is a competitor to Alexa. Twitter ranks at 2,115 and no data is available for Plurk, probably because the site is not old enough.

Wikipedia Links – Everyone knows the great Wikipedia encyclopedia. Getting links from Wikipedia gives a lot of credibility to a website! Twitter has 50 links and Plurk has 8! 50 links is a lot! I’m impressed! I’m glad to see the small guy already has 8 Wikipedia Links!

Technorati Blog Reactions – Technorati is a famous search engine and service website for blogs. Technorati counts the number of links pointing to any website from the blogs in their database. It’s similar to the Yahoo Site Explorer Links. Twitter has 3,486,444 blog reactions while Plurk has 13,770. Plurk has 0.39% of the number of links pointing towards Twitter! Wow! HUGE difference!

Age In Days (First Google Cache) – This data checks when the Google bots first crawled the website. The results are most bizarre! Plurk’s cache is older than Twitter’s! What? How is this possible! Plurk is 1,271 days old (3 years and 6 months) and Twitter is 1,135 days old (3 years and 2 months). I guess the domain plurk.com was online previously but was not offering their current service. When I check the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, they do not have any results for Plurk.com! Twitter’s first page appears in March 2001. The Google cache archived Plurk but not the Wayback Machine! Weird! Any thoughts?

Final Score – Twitter obviously wins with 82% while Plurk still gets 49%.

Compete Rankings

Compete is a USA web traffic analysis service that publishes the number of US visitors to the top 1 million web sites in the USA. This number is computed from sources like internet service providers, opt-in panels, application providers, and users of the Compete toolbar. My Blog and Podcast ranks at 18,140. Visit Compete Here.

People Count – Plurk vs Twitter – Compete :

People Count Twitter vs Plurk

From the graph above we see that Plurk has only started getting some traffic starting March 2008. The Twitter curve seems to be nicely increasing while the Plurk graph is also augmenting since May 2008. According to Compete, Twitter gets 1.75 million U.S. visitors in June 2008. Only for America! That’s 58,333 unique visitors daily. Not bad! If my calculations are correct, Plurk gets an average of 13,333 unique U.S. visitors daily in June 2008. Plurk gets 22,8% of the traffic going to Twitter. Five times more visitors on Twitter.

Velocity Graph – Plurk vs Twitter – Compete :

Velocity Graph Twitter vs Plurk

The graph above is most interesting! How is the popularity of both sites increasing? What is the velocity at which both site’s traffic is increasing? Overall I would say Plurk is winning (see the red bars on the graph) but Twitter is putting up a fight and has been surpassing Plurk at the end of July. Twitter is gaining momentum! Plurk’s growth was at its highest during the two first weeks of July. More users were signing up on Plurk than on Twitter. Remember this is for USA alone!

Pages per Visit – Plurk vs Twitter – Compete :

Pages per Visit Twitter vs Plurk

The graph above is also quite interesting. This is the number of pages viewed per visit. The more pages per visit, the more time a user is spending on the website. If a website is really interesting, you’ll want to spend more time on it! Twitter has been winning the battle all the way until June 2008. Huge increase in pageviews for Plurk between May and June! Wow! This means that more and more users are getting addicted to Plurk. Overall, users visit an average of 7-8 pages per visit on Plurk and Twitter. That’s a lot! On my Blog it’s 1.6 pageviews per visit! Remember this is for USA alone! If we compare the pageviews from Compete and Alexa, we see a big differences. Alexa’s data is much lower : 5,72 pageviews for Twitter and 4,29 pageviews for Plurk! That’s 20% less than the compete data!

Quantcast Rankings

Quantcast is a service Website that allows viewing statistics from other Web sites. Quantcast Corporation’s prime focus is to analyze the Internet’s Web sites in order to obtain accurate statistics. My Blog and Podcast ranks 13,391. Visit Quantcast Here.

Traffic Comparison “Relative” – Twitter vs Plurk – Quantcast :

Traffic Comparison "Relative" - Twitter vs Plurk - Quantcast

The data on the graph above is amazing! It shows that Plurk’s traffic is increasing at a much quicker rate than Twitter’s! 25,000% increase in february 2008! Twitter’s relative traffic is extremely stable compared to Plurk’s. Since May 2008, Plurk’s relative traffic has been exponentialy increasing. Plurk definately wins the battle from this data!

Traffic Comparison – Twitter vs Plurk – Quantcast :

Traffic Comparison - Twitter vs Plurk - Quantcast

The graph above is the third traffic comparison chart for Twitter vs Plurk. You have seen Google Trends’s and Compete’s now Quantcast. The result is the same as before, Twitter has a lot more visitors than Plurk.

Twitter Demographic Statistics – Quantcast :

Twitter Demographic data on Quantcast

From the data above we see that as many men as women visit Twitter. I would have thought that the top users were 12-17 years old but it is not the case! Most users are between 18 and 49 years old! 82% are white caucasian. 72% of visitors do not have children, ok. The salaries of Twitter users are relatively high! 23% of people earn more than $100K a year! Wow! Members are also educated with 18% to have gone to Graduate School. Remember this data is for USA alone!

Plurk Demographic Statistics – Quantcast :

Plurk Demographic data on Quantcast

On the data above with see very different demographic figures than with Twitter. The audiences on both sites are quite different! 73% of Plurk’s users are female. 12 to 17 year olds represent 27% of the user base. 15% are African Americans followed by Asians. 56% of the visitors have children! The users make less money than Twitter users with 19% making $0-30K. Most Plurk users have not been to College with 59%. The estimated monthly users for Plurk are drastically decreasing according to Quantcast! People seem to be much more addicted to Plurk than Twitter. Plurk has 4% addicts and 36% regular users while Twitter has 1% addicts and 26% regular users. Remember this data is for USA alone!

I’m surprised the demographic statistics are so different between Twitter and Plurk!

Twitter vs Plurk Conclusion

From the results in my analysis above, we clearly see that Twitter is the current winner in most areas except:

Quantcast’s Relative Traffic
Compete’s Pageviews per visit.
Age In Days (First Google Cache)
Alexa’s 3 month change

The first two statistics might say a lot about the future of the two competitors. Are people using Plurk having a better user experience than on Twitter? It seems to be the case.

Ultimately, I believe internet users always want to use the “better product” (like people switching to gmail) and according to the many blog posts comparing both services, Plurk offers a better service and user experience.

Twitter needs to stay alert! They should improve their service by adding new features and making sure the servers can handle the huge amounts of traffic! People have complained a lot about the site being down. If they don’t react, it’s possible the users will switch to Plurk and within a few years Plurk could surpass Twitter.

This probably is an unlikely scenario because of Twitter’s current leading position, they got on the market first and also because of the strong momentum Twitter has gained thanks to the huge press coverage! But messages can spread very quickly now thanks to internet. If Twitter went down for a week, it would die.

Your comments and remarks are welcome, please insert them in the comment area below.

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Twitter vs Plurk Other Great Comparisons :

My Popular Blogging Posts

Xarj — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:32:41 +0000

Power of Blogging

I love to read articles about Internet, SEO, Wordpress, Blogging and Social Networking. Although there is a large quantity of bloggers discussing these issues on their blogs, some topics are missing or are worth writing in more depth.

On my Blog and Podcast, I post articles related to the Internet and blogging in my Internet Category but I also post on completely different topics (see my categories). I do not have a niche site! There are too many topics I’m interested in and I can’t be bothered to have multiple blogs for each topic so I manage everything right here. It’s an advantage and a disadvantage. It’s easier to work on one blog but it’s harder to build loyal readership. I try to write and share the best about the many topics I’m interested in.

Visit my Internet Blogging category or signup by RSS Feed.

I have written some Blogging articles which have become popular. They are a nice read and will probably teach you one thing or two.

My Popular Blogging Posts

SEO Guide to Google Image – Google Image search engine has the potential to bring in huge amounts of traffic to your blog or website. It is important to optimize your featured images so Google and other image search engines like Yahoo and MSN can index your pictures. In this article you’ll find 27 great tips to understand how Image search engines work and how to optimize your blog posts.

Are Social News Sites Useless? – You are a new blogger and are spending lots of time adding your latest article to various social news sites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx? You are probably wasting your time. Read this article to know why.

SEO Optimized Wordpress Post – 14 Tips to optimize your wordpress posts. Reach a greater audience by putting all chances on your side and optimize your posts for search engines. Use proper title tags, descriptions, keywords, meta data etc… A complete list of points to optimize your articles.

Effect of Banalization – Your post is Incredible or it’s Crap! People have gotten used to reading incredibly well written, thorough and complete articles and anything that is not at least as good as what they have read previously is not worth their attention. You now need to work three times as hard on your stories if you want to impress your audience. A look into the rising demands of today’s readers.

Hotlink and Google Image – Google Image allows hijacking of image serp. If someone hotlinks your image which appears in the first positions for a popular query in Google, the website stealing your image might also steal your link and all your traffic! Learn all about this problem and what solutions to protect your image listings.

Trade Links with Great Blogs – One of the most efficient way to improve your site rank is getting valuable backlinks pointing to your blog or website. This article discusses one way to build links with other sites by researching and emailing the webmasters.

Add Line Breaks in Wordpress – Adding line breaks in Wordpress shouldn’t be a problem but it still is when using the Rich Visual Editor TinyMCE (wysiwyg). Wordpress will modify your code and remove certain tags making your life a little harder. In this article, some tips are given to solve this annoying line breaking problem.

Submit your Post to get more Exposure – You have written a great article and would like people to find it? Submit your post to the top Social sites to increase your exposure. You’ll find the complete list of Social News Sites, Automatic submission engines, Social Bookmarking, Rss Feeds listings, Article Submission and other submitting services.

Compression Format for your Podcast – You have a podcast with video and audio and are wondering which is the best compression file format to offer your various media? Which video format is the most compatible on the internet today?

Multilingual Plugins for Wordpress – You would like to have a multilingual blog using wordpress? Each article and page should be translated into 2 or more languages. Use the recommended wordpress plugins to enable the multilingual features and offer your content to an international market. Manually translate the text for optimal results or use the automatic plugins to make your life easier.

Monetize Wordpress – Make a little money with your wordpress blog using Google Adsense. Guide to add the adsense code into your wordpress template files in the areas where you want the advertizements to appear.

My Favorite Blogging Blogs

Get the best news and tips for superior blogging by visiting the following blogs and signing up to their feeds.

Another excellent site to get the best and latest Blogging news is Sphinn. Add the Hot Topics RSS Feed into your Feed Reader.

Visit my Internet Blogging category or signup by RSS Feed.

Multilingual vs Translator Plugins for Wordpress

Seby — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:47:22 +0000

World Flags & Languages on the Internet

Websites in English only count for 30% of the total websites on the internet. Source: World Internet Statistics. The top 3 languages used on the web (english, chinese, spanish) account for 56% of the total internet users. For this reason, more and more websites are offering their content in various languages to grow their readership and market an international branding image.

You have a blog using Wordpress and you are looking for solutions to offer your content in various languages. You have two options; multilingual translation plugins or automatic translation plugins.

Multilingual Translation Plugins require you to manually translate your content into your chosen languages. Once you have translated your text, you simply input it into the corresponding boxes inside your wordpress post and the plugin takes care of the rest.

Automatic Translation Plugins do the hard work for you. They will use online translators like Google Translator to automatically translate your text and offer the new content inside your blog. These translation plugins are 100% automatic and save you loads of time but automatic translation is far from perfect! I believe they are sufficient for simple texts. People should understand the correct meaning of the text but they are limited!

For serious blogs and websites, you have to use a Multilingual Translation Plugin. Get your text translated by a professional and make sure the translations are coherent.

Multilingual Translation Plugins

Polyglot Wordpress Plugin

Polyglot Plugin in Wordpress

Polyglot plugin is certainly the most popular but not as good as QTranslate. It was developed by Martin Chlupac. He is one of the first developers to work on multilingual wordpress.

Like any regular wordpress plugin, it installs in the directory \wp-content\plugins\ and must be activated in the administration interface. You may now start to create your wordpress blog into a multilingual site. Do not forget that some parameters should be modified inside the file polyglot.php file. For people allergic to code, do not be scared, you just have to add the variable “$polyglot_settings”.

How to setup the PolyGlot Installation:

Example for a site in french / English:

$polyglot_settings['flags']['fr'] = 'fr.png'; $polyglot_settings['flags']['en'] = 'gb.png';

Here we chose the correct image to display the corresponding language. All flags images are in the directory “polyglot_flags”.

$polyglot_settings['time_format']['fr'] = 'G:i'; $polyglot_settings['time_format']['en'] = 'g.i a';

$polyglot_settings['date_format']['fr'] = 'j F Y'; $polyglot_settings['date_format']['en'] = 'Y-m-d';

Here we chose the date format to adopt for each language. (hours and date). By default if you do not set this parameter, the Polyglot plugin will chose the date format you have set inside Wordpress. Personally I did not use this parameter.

$polyglot_settings['text_is_missing_message'] = '[lang_en]Sorry, but this post is not available in English[/lang_en][lang_fr]Désolé, mais cette article est indisponible en Français.[/lang_fr]';

And voila it is almost finished. Now you have to write your articles in the various languages.

You must tag your text with the different languages. Example of the article’s title in French and English:

[lang_en] This is my title post[/lang_en][lang_fr]C'est le titre de mon article en Fr [/lang_fr]

You must do the same for the text. If you import media in your articles, they must also be duplicated for each language.

How your post will look inside Wordpress

Conclusion - Polyglots plugin for Wordpress works well, it is not too complicated to setup, but it is lacking a graphical layer that would make it more user-friendly. If you want a fully bilingual site, you must also translate your categories. On the following picture can see the kind of horror that Polyglot will generate inside your backoffice.

Ugly Polyglot Categories

With more than 2 languages, it is not recommended to use PolyGlot. If you run your wordpress with several authors, I can not imagine a consistent method for managing the posts by various authors in mutlilingual content. Some planning is necessary.

PolyGlot Plugin Links :: Official

Qtranslate Wordpress Plugin

Qtranslate is better than Polyglot because of its graphical interface which makes it very easy to use. The main quality of this plugin is its ergonomics which is designed for easy input of articles in several languages.

QTranslate Wordpress Plugin

To display your flag, just add the following code inside your template files :

First advantage of QTranslate plugin, various tabs will appear depending on the language that you have selected. And this is where QTranslate exceeds Polyglot because tabs are easy and clear to users.

QTranslate Categories inside Wordpress

Second advantage is the management of categories. Once in your category admin panel, you just need to fill in the category names in different languages.

QTranslate Complete Options Panel

Conclusion - QTranslate is practical and really optimized for Wordpress use. I highly recommend the use of this plugin for Multilingual wordpress blogs.

You can see my own blog using QTranslation Wordpress Plugin at Easy Dream.

QTranslate Plugin Links :: Official :: Wordpress.org

Automatic Translation Plugins

Global Translator Wordpress Plugin

Global Translator for Wordpress is the ultimate automatic translation plugin on the market. It can automatically translate your text in English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese etc… It installs very easily and takes care of all configurations so all you have left is to add the php code inside your template sidebar or header to tell wordpress where the language flags should appear.

Global Translator is SEO friendly as it add an extra directory inside the URL to point towards the language translation. ie: yoursite.com/fr/ or yoursite.com/es/ …

The plugin uses a caching system so the same page does not need to get translated hundreds of times and you do not get banned from using the Online Translation Engines.

If you run a serious blog and need good quality translation, do not use any automatic translation plugins. The current online translators are not sufficiently high quality and your readers might have trouble understanding your article. Global Translator should only be used to roughly translate your text.

Global Translator Links :: Wordpress.org :: Official

Interesting Articles :: Translation and Multilingual WordPress Plugins @ Lorelle’s

Successful Wordpress Server to Server Migration

Xarj — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:50:24 +0000

Smart Computer Dog Installing Wordpress

I have successfully migrated my Wordpress installation from 1&1 hosting to my very own dedicated server. I am not an expert with Linux, MySQL and technical things so I am REAL proud of myself! Wahoo!!!

1&1 is one of the biggest Web Hosting companies but the service is bad and their servers have been very rough with my Blog and Podcast! Lots of “Error 500” and various problems. I guess it couldn’t handle the daily visitors, so I got myself a dedicated server! Up to now it’s working like a charm except I’ve had to hard reboot my server a few times for unknown reasons.

The wordpress migration from one server to the other went perfectly fine except for one thing. It took me 2 hours to figure out my .htaccess was messing up my entire site! So I deleted it and configured it properly.

How to Migrate your Wordpress Installation

Backup your site. Export your database using PhpMyAdmin and backup all your blog’s files through FTP.
Create a Database in your new PhpMyAdmin and import your SQL file. Write down the name of the new database, the username and password to access the database.
Add your new domain in your Web Control Panel (CPANEL), so it creates an FTP folder and the associations between the folder on the server and the URL request.
Upload your files on your new FTP.
Modify your wp-config.php file with the new database information.
Modify the DNS to point to your new web server.
Wait a few hours
Now it should be working! I usually check all my Wordpress settings and Plugins.

If your Site doesn’t Work

Trying deleting your .htaccess file inside the root directory.
Remove your php.ini if there is one.
Check your file and folder permissions on your FTP. You might have to chmod 777 some files and directories.
Are you sure the new DNS are already in place? Upload a random file and try to access it.
Check if your wp-config.php is correctly setup.

Read more info about moving your Wordpress Blog, Click Here.