Google adsense
As you can see on the leftside of the website I’ve added Google advertisements to it. Why did I do this?
Fiarly simple, To see what the Google Adsense thing was all about, and I wanted to try it out. I’m not expecting a ROI of millions offcourse, just wanted to see what it would be like.
And I have to say, setting it all up is a piece of cake. Create an account, unless you already have a Google account (say for gmail), then you can hook the Adsense on to your existing account. You select your preferred ad program, choose the layout, insert a channel, get the code and voila, you put it up the site.
Google really has it all sorted out primadonna.
Now you can ask, is it really necessary to add ads to your website Stefson? No, not really. But like I said, I just wanted to give it a go, and who knows what the future might bring.
Book review: SEO an hour a day
Ever since I started blogging, I’ve become more and more interested in Search Engine Optimization. So right about now was a good time to check Amazon for some books related to that topic, and because I’m pretty new to the subject, a novice title would be the best choise. So I stumbled upon SEO an hour a day from J. Grappone and G. Couzin. So here is my opinion about it.
For starters, I can say that as a novice in SEO, this book is an excellent source of information. It walks you through all the items you need to implement to establish a decent SEO plan. It’s easy to understand and gives a whole lot information about topics related to SEO. However at times, it get’s a bit repeating and you have to go through a lot of text to get to the really important parts.
If you like the more straight on approach, then this book definately is not for you. Also, if you expect a lot of technical stuff, you’ll be disappointed. It really is a novice book, with lots a ABC steps and planning.
Along with the book comes a website with additinal material like excel and word documents.
In my opinion, this title is a good investement if you are a small business owner and/or a novice to SEO, and you don’t want to or just can’t spend a big budget on third party experts.
Did I find the book usefull? Simple answer, yes I did. It’s easy to read and it teaches you alot without getting to technical.
Silly me
More great stuff during the search, I feel like being on an epic quest in Warcraft. Speaking of WOW, I accidently stumbled upon Gitrsblog again. This guy has excellent stuff on the game. This brings back memories of my healing and facemelting days.
OK, back to business.
A huge forum to shoot noobie questions, I present to you Webmasterworld.
And if you are new to blogging, be sure to read this article on permalinks, damn how could I have missed this?
Google sandbox or ban?
After checking out and registering at PayPerPost.com, a site/service that lets you post topics and get paid for it, I received an email back from them stating I was not eligible because my site is not indexed yet by Google.
What?
My site isn’t indexed by Google. A lo and behold, it really isn’t. So I decided to do some investigating. My biggest fear was offcourse a ban. It wouldn’t be the first time someones site get kicked of Google for now reason. But why would I get banned? The site runs with a default Wordpress installation, I only edited some php files for the Snap function and MyBlogLog. So that can’t be it right?
But after some searching on Google itself I came upon the sandbox theory. Sure, that could be it, the site is not that old yet (4/21/07). I don’t have many inboud links at the moment, so I’m not getting much love for Google.
But you do come across some interesting stuff on a search.
First up is an interesting article on why your site could have disappeared on Google. Note that all the things listed in the article are things I checked on this site.
Also interesting is this online tool to check you webranking.
And lastly, a cool site with an online function to create an XML sitemap, usefull for your Google webmaster account.
So I have created the robots.txt file, tweaked my .htaccess file, made some changes in the meta, browsed in my Google-account and learned a lot from the webmaster info section.
I’m used to work as a usability freak, learning all this about SEO is a nice change.