Google, 1998

If you follow me on Twitter you would know that I rarely sleep. I truly stand by the quote that says “Sleep is cute when it’s trying to compete with the internet”. I code HTML, and optimize SEO, CSS and many more things on daily basis. If you follow my website, you will notice that there’s a slight change in either typography, color, shapes, borders, every day according to my mood, or the way the site is currently structured. Why do I change so much? Bloginity.com publishes a large amount of articles per day, with high quality images along with them. Those images are in different colors, shapes, seasons change and just like in the fashion world, the web has seasons too. You have to work with the images around your site to ensure that it’s all laid out properly and that’s the hardest job of all, especially if you’ve got a homepage with over 50 thumbnail images.

Gary Vaynerchuk explained it best in his 2008 keynote presentation, we are in a gold rush and if you’re not going to be doing it someone else will, and you will miss your chances. That quote is genius and here is why: it reflects to just about every single thing you do nowadays.

The world is transforming, every single day. The web is reshaping our culture, industries, improving our businesses, and connecting us with new people. You can’t expect to create an amazing website, whether it’s e-commerce, a resource site, a news site, or a platform and not innovate, innovation is the key for success.

This brings me to SEO – if you’re using a tactic you’ve used 6 months ago, that tactic might be irrelevant to today’s date and that said you’ll need to come up with new theories, new tactics, you will have to look around and do research. Let’s say you’re running a website similar to Bloginity.com, while you’re browsing other sites whether they’re your competitors or not at all. Look around, find out what they’re doing, how they’re transforming and what new tools they’re introducing to the market, how can you utilize their tools and how you can improve their tools on your own.

Here’s a thought that came to us, Vogue launched Vogue Archives the other night, for $1600/year. But who is going to pay it? We could buy that subscription, and pull out archives from the 50s, and do a daily roundup on what happened in the industry 50 years ago. You can monetize it by selling Vogue Archive subscriptions and also by bringing traffic and high retention to your site. All of this combined goes into SEO. You are producing quality material,

“if you pump up good shit, people will follow.” – also Vaynerchuk.

Languages – whether you can write HTML, CSS or PHP that’s great but the most important language you can speak is having your brain work and come up with ideas. To code a sidebar widget, can take me 30 minutes or less, something coders charge web owners about $200 a piece. So if you can learn these languages you’re not only going to be saving you some money but you’ll be able to brainstorm with the code on your own.

Brainstorming is the key for success. Leave me in a room with four creative people, let’s just talk for an hour and come up with strategies together. Put together a blueprint, and start going down that list.

Share that information with people, even your competitors. Heck, there’s no more competition, the competition should become your partner, just join them, collaborate with them, and together you can take over the world.

I’m done.

It’s been months since I’ve sat down in front of the computer and wrote a proper SEO article. Not even a few months maybe 6-7 months, at the least. But yesterday things have changed. I had a good friend who’s got an upcoming Men’s Lifestyle website join me for the day for a full introduction, SEO presentations and that has woken up a lot of muscles that have been sleeping deep inside my brain.

There are many ways of doing SEO. Link building to your website is always the easy path to go, especially relevant anchor texts – but you see sometime around June 2011 I decided to stop focusing my entire effort on SEO as I brought over 5,000,000 unique users to the site just from Google.com. The value of these users was poor and I am not sure whether it was because the site was poorly designed but here I am months later sitting on an actual brand and the user base is a lot of percentages less but suddenly I have what I was missing – retention, loyalty, and steady growth.

I am really not shy to share the analytic with you. Sharing is caring and if we all shared data then we’ll be able to understand and estimate, not just guess.

The traffic I brought from social media such as StumbleUpon, Digg was not good. 15 seconds to 1 minute average time on site, browsing an average 1.7. The traffic I brought from Google News, MSN, Bing and Yahoo was also, not the best, averaging at 2:30m average time on site with browsing 2.5 – 3.3 page per session. 4 page/visit if I was very lucky.

And here I am today, it’s October 16th, 2011 I am no longer focusing on optimizing every single title, or bolding keyword, nor building links (whatsoever) but basing my entire growth on natural growth, focusing on delivering the best navigation and getting a high retention. The hierarchy of the SEO is a given. I do make sure that I’m using the right H1′s, H2′s, that the code is clean and neat. I must make sure that my homepage is positioned right but most of all I have the user in mind. But yea, here it goes:

Today I am proud to announce that our user spends an average of 31 minutes on site with a high 7.7 page per session. Search engine traffic is still at high 43% but not as close as it was before.

So what have I done to change?

I stopped writing about trending topics, to begin with. I stopped writing about celebrity news and focused on material that’s “forever” and “timeless”. For example, photography blog is forever, Arts & Culture is forever, interviews, profiles and Q&A’s are forever. Am I ranking high in search engines? Honestly I don’t know and don’t care enough to bother. What I do care about is that I am delivering the best content and that my users enjoy to browse the site. And I am certain that they do because we are getting a massive feedback and the analytic speak for themselves.

So if you are breaking your head on SEO – you must understand the basic of all basics.

What is Google’s primary goal: Provide users the information they were looking for. And instantly.

If your site is optimized, not caring about what the user is actually reading – you will not get anywhere. You are most likely still using AdSense or another poor CPM network (will not mention names again but let’s just say VCN for those who know what I’m talking about) on 20cents CPM or even less (sorry) while we’re lounging on a $200 CPM campaign with half your traffic making 3000000% more revenue then your site will ever make. Unless you change your ways.

What’s my point?

Get to know your readers, become a good editor and make your online entity as best as possible. Enjoy the growth, the success – will come with it.

Understand the basics of SEO, but focus on what your user wants. Word to mouth is a hundred times more powerful then any SEO traffic. And remember, this article is speaking to those who run a website that is not based on sales and has no end-goals (e.g. e-commerce). This article is directed to those who are looking to make a brand over a high-trafficked website.

If I was to share a few additional tips. Let this article inspire you and not make you envious. Get a good editor, and get a good team. Last week I had a really great conversation with Qianna Smith of Fashion Q&A and she said something along the lines of “You cannot make it in this industry as a sole, you must have a good team and a platform” and that is the key for everything. You truly cannot make it on your own, or with a bad team. Which goes back to what I advised everyone months ago. Hire hungry employees, hire employees slowly, fire bad employees.

And of course: Good luck,

As always, feel free to reach out for any advise. I am here to help everyone grow.

Since you are curious about Affiliate Marketing I have decided to create a step-by-step article to guide most of you who are still trying to make it within the industry.

There are few websites that offer affiliate programs but avoid joining most of them (trust me from experience)

The best ones to start with, and join to are the following

Commission Junction (www.cj.com)
LinkShare (www.linkshare.com)

After creating your account you begin by creating a profile for your website and applying for programs. I suggest joining programs very slow and experimenting one by one. Do not apply to many at once because then you’ll get confused also there’s a lot of notes you should look into within the program details (e.g. does the user pick up a cookie when he is referred with your link?)

One note – banners don’t work. So avoid making baners – however. If you put an image of a bag on your sidebar, and put a little text next to it – something along the lines of “I love this Mulberry bag and it’s $875 on sale click here to buy” you will most likely get about 5% more click through rate vs a banner that you will receive about 0.1% 0.9% click through rate.

So making posts with a ‘Shopping‘ section has been the most successful thing for Bloginity.com.

How I make an affiliate post using SEO (search engine optimization)

It’s a long process, but hey – nothing comes easy and if you want to make money you have to work for it. After understanding what I want to write about (bags, shoes, socks) I head off to Google Keyword Tool to analyze the keyword volumes and see what people are actually looking for – and this is how I create the title, permalink and content. Since the article I write is about socks I look for the keywords related – Cotton Socks, Richard James, Corgi.

What I discovered:

Mens socks – 74,400 (searches)
Socks men – 74,400 (searches)
Richard James – 70,000 (searches)
Knee High Socks – 60,500 (searches)
Corgi – 550,000 (searches)
High Socks – 90,500 (searches)
Black socks 60,500 (searches)
Woolen socks 60,500 (searches)
Red socks 49,500 (searches) – this could be mistaken for Red Socks the sports team.

This gave me enough data so I know which keywords I need to include within my article to make the articles rank. The more relevant and related keywords you have in your article – the better and your article content for SEO purposes should always exceed the 150 words and recommended is 300.

I created my content and I will bold the keywords which I focused on:

My content:
I will begin the article by keeping it simple – I’m a man of socks. I love mens socks. It’s what I live for. You can see me in plain blue jeans and beautiful shoes but whenever I sit down and I cross my legs, you will notice a fantastic knee high socks, a woolen sock or a black sock with details on it. But I love colors – so I’ve got a pair of pink socks, green socks, light blue socks with hearts to circles – it doesn’t matter. It’s all we men have. It’s your tie, your underwear and your socks and now when MR PORTER is having a giant sale on it’s site I found Corgi & Richard James socks at below $20/each. That’s a bargain not to mention that some of these socks are ultra exclusive on MR PORTER like the red socks by Corgi.

The  next step is making the title
Always make sure your title does not exceed the 69 characters. Avoid using signs (& for example is actually four characters by code so you are better writing ‘and’ instead)

In my case, I would like to focus on the keyword ‘Mens Socks’ but I don’t want to ruin my article as it will focus only on SEO – it needs life.

My title: Mens Socks – A Selection of Corgi, Richard James Socks Under $18
total characters: 64 – however i’m using a sign “$” and that falls exactly into 68 – 69 characters total

I will now create a custom permalink on WordPress – mens-socks because that’s by far the best keyword for me to rank for, with that keyword, you can rank for all the rest as well. (see screenshot below)

The only thing that’s missing before this article goes live is getting backlinks to it so I can promote it better. What I’m going to do is head over to my personal website and post this entire guide how to create an affiliate article (www.danielhaim.com) and I will send a backlink to it using an anchor text mens socks pointing to that article

Also, I will now change the header of Bloginity (top right) and have a tiny banner, pointing to the article so it’s getting a homepage link which is a powerful link alone.

The next step is wait for the bait to work.

Other options – promote the article on Digg, SU, Twitter, Facebook – share it with your friends and family and share the love. Remember – sharing is caring.

Finally – here is the finished version http://www.bloginity.com/blog/2011/06/13/mens-socks/

SEO’s often refer to link-building in the same way you would hear wine lovers refer to an old bottle of wine, e.g. the older link is, the better.

What do Search Engines know about my domain

Search engines know. They know everything and they analyzes everything. Search engines record the moment an anchor text link was added, to the point it has been bolded, Capitalized, or UPPERCASED to if you decided to change the title of your blog post or the position of a link within the blog itself. And these type of things may hurt you if you don’t know what you’re doing.

My memories from 2007..

SEO is about taking opportunities, trying new thing and experimenting what works and what doesn’t. But experimenting might also bring your traffic down drastically and if that’s a chance you cannot risk to take then you are probably getting good traffic. I remember the day when I learned SEO content writing in depth. I used to get home late at night after meetings and apply all the new tricks on my old blog posts which turned out to be a huge mistake.

With today’s search engine algorithm of knowing your geographical location, the exact minute your post has been published to what food you had for lunch  (#truth). The bottom line, everything is measured. Yes, everything.

Don’t try this at home.

If you already Published an article and realized you should have re-written the title (e.g. moving a keyword from one area to another area) grab the link, and run in the search engine the following command:

site:website.com/article=?123 (website = your domain, /article=?123 your permalink extension)

If that permalink is not appearing in the results then it means it hasn’t been cached or indexed which is a good sign. But you must act quickly.

Updating your blog with new information

I’ve seen many websites continue to update blogs for several reasons.

• Breaking news
• Received new information
• Following a live event (I could list more but they are pretty much repetitive).

And surely, if the post itself is ranking high in Google News, Bing News, or Yahoo News, or even the organic results and it’s a trending topic most websites would like to provide updated information on that landing page. A few things you shouldn’t do to your post is re-edit the words within it. If you want to edit add a “del” function (on WordPress)

Breaking news! National Geographic discovered a barking <"del datetime="2010-11-05T18:13:28+00:00">turtle</del> dog.

Adding new sections to existing blog posts is a good thing as well.

Example:

Breaking news! National Geographic discovered a barking turtle dog.

11:01 AM UPDATE: The turtle was not actually barking, it is now believed the turtle is actually a green dog.

Changing the posts date after it has been published

Bumping articles

This is possibly the worst thing you can ever do to your blog. I’ve met webmasters who “bump” articles back to the top of the page by changing the time on the post to right now. If you must do that, make sure that your permalink structure does not include “/date/time/” because changing the date/hour around you might actually change the permalink structure which will create a 404 page on your site that is previously indexed by a search engine. In addition, you are re-notifying a search engine about an existing post that they’ve indexed just several hours (or days) ago and asking them to recrawl a brand new page, with a new permalink.

Changing text links within the existing posts

This could be misleading but hear me out. The more links your article contains the better. It’s a fact, search engines want to provide one thing and only for their user: good quality information. Since the engine doesn’t have a brain of actually understand if it’s really qualifying information or not – it measures keyword density.

An engine has crawled XYB amount of pages that contain the keyword [Clark Kent] and it has realized that in XBY amount of these pages, the keyword [superman] has been found as well. That said, if you edit your content in a relevant way you will rank higher on search engines. Adding links to your site is a very important aspect as well. While many SEOs believe it is bad to share your link juice, and just link internally – that’s false information. Link out, and link to specific articles.

[example]

If TMZ has written about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie break up, don’t quote “TMZ.com reports that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have gone publicly with their break up. E! Online has began a rumor that Angelina Jolie will get to keep the kids.” [-false information-]

Hyperlink “Angelina Jolie will get to keep the kids.” to the E! Online where this was stated. Hyperlink TMZ.com reports to the exact link where they reported.

The sarch engine will now crawl through your article to E! Online, and TMZ and realize that the three of you are all talking about the same thing: [angelina jolie], [brad pitt], [divorce], [breakup] [kids] and so on.

Note that I’ve added [divorce] because if that keyword has been found on either E! Online, or TMZ.com it will often be a related density keyword with “break up” (explained above)

Changing these links afterward to better articles, is bad. Don’t change these links, ever! Not unless they have been 404.

I’ve been doing major research on the latest news for SEO and wanted to update everyone that’s been in our little yet superior community.

Let’s go over the facts

1. 1. In 2009 Google has made 500 changes to it’s search engines that is more then one change every day
2. 2. It seems that Google might be collaborating with Word Press to fight black hat spam. – Everyone, get ready to do some tweaks.

What do I need to know?

How a search engine works:

• More than 100 factors
• Information based

• Exact Phrase: are your keywords found as an exact phrase in any pages?
• Adjacency: How close are your keywords to each other?
• Weighting: How many times do keywords appear in the page?

The next one is

• Popularity

• External links (also known as back links, in links or inbound links)
• How many links point to the page?

Where do they come from? Why do they link to you?

• Social Buzz, online PR, social bookmarking, Twitter

The Building Block of SEO

Technical SEO

Code Optimization / Site Performance / Usability / Site Architecture

Content Keyword Research and Selection – Keyword Targeting and Allocation / On page Optimization content Development and Distribution

Popularity and Trust Link Building / Social Media

The SEO Cycle

1. 1. Keywords
2. 2. Strategy
3. 3. Implementation
4. 4. Monitoring
5. 5. Diagnostic

What you need to do

Make sure your articles have

1. 1. Main Heading (H1)
2. 2. Secondary Headings (H2)
3. 3. Tertiary headings (H3)
4. 4. Use of bold
5. 5. Internal Links – related articles
6. 6. Pages (products, articles, news)
7. 7. Images – USAGE OF Attributes

The anatomy of a link

Anchor text

• URL Value 5
• ANCHOR TEXT Value 5
• RELATIONSHIP OF A LINK Value 5
• Title Value 3
• Attribute Value 5
• Target Value 1

(1 lowest 5 highest)

Do not copy articles from other websites and repost – you won’t get any hits even if you are, and especially if you are in Google News. Work on UNIQUE content. Take an article, reword it and submit.

Don’t ever exceed the 69 character title.

Use “link bait”

Press releases, articles submission

http://www.prweb.com http://www.articlesbasecamp.com http://www.searchguild.com/redir/o.php?out=http:// http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art12838.asp

• Prizes, quizzes, contests, awards
• Widgets, schedules
• Tools – be calculator

And ANALYZE.

Conclusion

What you should do is go into your PHP and all the anchor texts that have ‘Read more, previous or next article’ ‘more information’ ‘privacy policy’ etc makes them no follow. The good juicy articles, titles, make them do follow. Use ALT for every button you have on your site including and especially your navigation bar.

Hi guys, I was recently asked a very good question:

“I am THE marketer for my company and wear too many hats. I can’t “do” SEO by myself. Any suggestions on a wallet friendly company that can help with our SEO needs?”

Since my reply was in such greater detail, I decided to share it on my journal.

Whatever it is, examine the links that you are getting yourself. It’s almost liked a “I can’t trust anyone, anywhere, no matter what”. Some links may hurt you when link building. A lot of services that offer SEO claim you are in a high ranked directory when it’s actually a auctioned domain with an average PR on it that they’ve installed a ‘Directory Template’ on.

You must always follow the steps, and examine one by one – and that process, costs money. So wallet friendly, I’d have to say you could do a nice link building for a company for approximately $5000 (without labor).

Look closer.

Take your time, spread approximately 200 – 300 directories which are good value, make sure they are indexed and get page rank, make sure you find yourself the exact niche within the directory – don’t be so quick to submit. Remember that if the directory itself, within the niche has pages (1,3,4,5,6,7) go all the way to page#7 which is most likely where you’ll be listed when approved and make sure that page#7 is getting a PageRank, and who else is listed there with you.

In regards to your question Alexander I would like to write this publicly.

Let’s take this domain for example

Http://www.skyalliance.net/ – looks like a normal directory right?

Let’s use the ‘WayBackMachine’ and see what this site looked like in 2003.

Http://web.archive.org/web/20021114152532/http://www.skyalliance.net/

You see what I mean? This is in some Asian language, nothing related to a directory. Which means the owners of this domain purchased it because it had a nice PR and it was auctioned at the time.

In 2004: http://web.archive.org/web/20030210053650/http://www.skyalliance.net/

In 2005: http://web.archive.org/web/20040210060512/http://www.skyalliance.net/

In 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20050109041248/http://www.skyalliance.net/

In 2010: http://www.skyalliance.net/

Other things you should take a look into when doing link building (if you do it yourself, and trying to search the directories by yourself) I would recommend to use a nice FireFox tool called ‘Flagship’ which declares where the site is hosted, and it’s IP.

Remember that if the site is hosted in Germany, and it is a .com – that might be a bad link for you.

If it’s hosted in Germany, and it’s a .de – that might be a good sign, and will help you rank in Google.de, but not in the .com engine.

If the site is hosted in USA, and it’s a .com – that will help you rank in the .com engines (or USA engines) but then the next directory you choose – make sure it is not hosted at the same place, with the same exact IP – that would not count as two different links.

Be VERY careful using SEO companies that charge under $500 for link building of 30-50 links. This amount does not exist, I saw a company offering $80 for 1000 directory, you will end up hurting yourself, and working double time because you will either get penalized, or have to manually go into these directories and remove the links yourself. And trust me when I say you will be hurt being listed in sites like that.

TIPS:

When a company offers SEO services for directory listing always ask for their excel sheet to see their plan, Examine the links, make sure they are not hosted same place, they are all USA, or European hosts, then carefully choose which ones you want and where you want to be listed. Send it back to them and tell them these are the links you are interested and how much they will charge you for them.

This narrows down their job, and helps you get efficient links, and powerful link building.

NOTE:

There are MANY more aspects when doing link building like making sure that Alexa, Compete and mozRank and PageRank and similar within values, If a website is pagerank #1 and mozrank is 5.8 – something must be wrong (either mozrank did not update it yet) but that page might have gone through penalization.

If the page does not get a PR, and receives Alexa, Compete and Moz – that means it might be penalized. Take the URL, and search it in Google like this:

Example #1: site: http://www.url.com/
example #2: site: http://www.url.com/subpage

See if the actual domain (not sub pages) comes up in search. (Or the sub page that is not getting a page rank).

Let’s do some SEO!

For more information about this thread please go to http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?vi…%2Egmp_2976409

Feel free to find me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/danielhaim

Read about my progression in Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/businesswire/2010/08/03/businesswire143344209.html

August 01, 2010

When I first wrote this article, I was a bit upset with Value Click’s services, but I learned to work with their team and we’ve come a long way since. Some of the stuff I’ve noted in the article still bother me, but I stopped carrying because I only care about one thing and that’s: Getting Paid. I will be going through this post, and commenting in red anything that I think should be updated, or noted but won’t get rid of my original thoughts.

May 4, 2010

Hi everyone, over the next 30 days I will be examining and detailing the top CPA, CPC, and CPM networks including CJ, Linkshare, ADSDAQ, Pulse360, ValueClick Media. I currently have the upper hand: I have is a domain that receives approximately 750,000 – 1.8M unique visits in a 30 day period – it should be a good place to start making money  - right? Well, to my discovery – not really. It’s not easy making money with CPA, or CPM.

My first review is: Value Click Media a great and friendly CPM network.

Value Click Media – A company who claims to be a leader in the CPM Network industry.   ‘Voice Ads’ “You have been selected to receive a free iPod” have you ever gotten those? Value Click Media has them! – It’s disappointing, but you can filter them out. In my opinion a CPM network should exclude all bad ads, even to those who pay top notch to be in it.

This evening I had a 300×250 CPM for 0.01 cent about Jesus Chris and converting to Christianity. Fantastic.

Day 1 with Value Click Media was pretty confusing. I couldn’t get my account activated and had contact their customer support which has been on the phone with me for approximately fifteen minutes but waited for approximately 1 hours for the account to mysteriously activate itself until one of their representatives said “Oh, your account has not been confirmed yet – that’s why it’s not working” – Silly me.

Finally, I’m in the backend, I’m ready to make money. First thing I’m headed towards: Filters – because who wants to have voice ads, massive diet pop up ads on their domain – Are you still following?

When that was done I was headed to see what’s running on their site – what CPM as well as trying to Excel exactly how much money the company would be making every single month.

I selected 728×90 banner to appear on my site, and guess what? I have both 728×90 banners and 468×60 banners appear within the same code.

I was about to email Value Click Media once again, and let them see a 2nd screen-shot which I was about to take and as I opened my domain, I loud noise was heard, saying, “You’ve been selected to receive a Wal-Mart Gift card” NO! I’ve filtered those

It really didn’t take too long to disable that, I just reached out to a representative who quickly had that removed from my domain.

Value Click’s back-end panel

Media Management is the area where you see the available campaigns, their CPM, CPC and sizes (468×60, 728×90, 300×250 etc). I started going over one by one – some, It is a bit disappointing that you have to select one by one but their filtering let’s you bulk-select by category (Casino, Pop Ups, Diet, etc).

1. Overall their back end panel is simple, easy to use, quick to understand and gets 6/10 stars in my review.
2. Overall support and customer service – after being their customer for almost 3 months now I will say the customer service is definitely 10/10 – they are keen to help, they want you to succeed.
3. The ads that are shown in their site are decent, it really depends on the location you are coming from but they manage to do a very good filling rate.

Nowadays I have migrated our domain to being able to advertise 2x 728×90, 3x 160×600/120×600 300×250 and 180×50 thus will ensure a successful revenue model.

To anyone who is interested joining Value Click Media I truly recommend it. Just be smart, and you will be able to make really good money by reading their targeted ads, and how much CPM they are offering using SEO content.

At the start of 2008 there were over six-and-a-half billion people on the Earth, with just over 1.3-billion of us on the Internet. At the same time, there are almost 100,000,000 top-level domains registered, quite a few of which are held by private citizens. What does this mean to the average person? It means that if we want to protect our brand or our name on the Internet, we need to move quickly.

Why not buy a .jp?

Invest in a .jp domain name

Japan is a funny country when it comes to rules. Anything that can be governed will be governed. This is true with everything from ketchup to nuclear power to domain names. In order to have a .jp, certain conditions need to be met.

Note: Don’t let these prices scare you! Keep reading for cheaper alternatives.

.co.jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy

limited to only one per registered business must have at least one working office in Japan .ne.jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy

Can be owned by citizens or businesses no limit on number of domain registrations must have a Japanese address .or.jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy

Must be a registered non-profit organization in Japan limited to only one domain per year .jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy

Can be owned by citizens or businesses no limit on number of domain registrations must have a Japanese address With these prices, it’s no surprise that people aren’t picking up .jp domains as quickly as we see with other country-specific extensions. But it doesn’t always have to be this expensive.

Buying an IDN Multilingual Domain

Since 2004, it’s been possible for us to purchase Internationalized Domain Names using non-alphabetic characters. This means that if you wanted to buy something like ジェイソン.jp, you could. The advantage here is that very few Internationalized Domain Names have been purchased using westernized names converted to Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, Hebrew, Hindi, Arabic and Chinese characters. That said, with so many people who use these writing systems coming online all the time, it’s only a matter of years before all the common or otherwise desirable names are taken.

Luckily, there are places where we can purchase top level Japanese domains and, as luck would have it, they’re often cheaper than buying the Romanized TLDs.

Get TWO .jp domains for $40

JP-Domains, a Canadian company that helps with Japanese domain registration for foreigners and non-residents, currently offers one of the best deals on the web. As of this writing, they’re offering customers two IDN .jp domains for a price of $40 USD. Considering how a single Romanized .jp is $99 USD per year, it’s hard to complain with the price. Of course, if you absolutely must have a Romanized .jp address, you can buy one for the low(er) price of $69 USD per year.

With the weak US dollar, though, these prices may go up substantially in the near future.

Attaching an IDN to Our Website

We can attach an Internationalized Domain Name to our website one of two ways. We can either forward all visitors to our main site (e.g.: http://ジェイソン.jp will take you to http://www.j2fi.net/), or we can buy the name and then edit the name servers through our account’s control panel to point to our webhost’s name servers. The first option is quite simple, but I’ll show you how to do both.

Forwarding an IDN with JP-Domains

When you click on the “Edit Name Servers” link in your left panel, you should see the same thing on your screen as the image below (click for a larger picture). From here, you simply need to click on one of the DNS addresses.

GUIDE: HOW TO FIND THE WORDPRESS PAGE ID / POST ID / CATEGORY ID With WordPress 2.5 being released, the IDs on all admin pages have been removed as it is. For more advanced WordPress Users/ developers those IDs were quite interesting for some plugins or template tags.

In order to perfect your Transcript theme you can simply eliminate useless pages, or pages that you prefer to appear on the Footer instead of the Navigation bar. To do that, you have to find the Page/Post ID/Category ID.

Example of Transcript’s “Exclude Page from Navigation” -

(Transcript is one of the most advanced WordPress Newsletter based Premium WordPress theme that is currently offered in the market).

Method 1 - after you’ve logged into your WordPress dashboard, (http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin). Go to Pages > Edit or Posts > Edit and from the list of Pages/Posts hover over the Page/Post title you want to find the ID of. Every time you hover over, your browser’s status bar will show you a URL ending with a number like this.

This might be a painful process. Method 2 - If you don’t see anything when you hover over, click on the Page link to open edit Page screen. Now, look in your browser’s address bar and you’ll find the URL ending with a number. And that is your Page/Post ID.

Method 3 - what this plugin does is to reveal most removed entry IDs on admin pages, showing the entry IDs, as it was in versions prior to 2.5

Features: Following IDs can be revealed: Posts, Pages, Categories, Links, Media, Users, Comments, Link categories, Tags (WP 2.8 and above) Each ID can be de-/activated seperately, plus you can allow/permit user roles to see the IDs

DOWNLOAD THIS PLUGIN: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/…r-wp-admin-25/

Don’t bother with splash pages.
A splash page is normally a pointless page people put on their websites as an introduction. The page normally contains some sort of image on with a big click here to enter sign, or sometimes people don’t say anything and just hope you will click on the picture to enter their site. Splash pages are fairly pointless and it is just creating more work for your visitor as they have to click the mouse button an extra time just to see the content of your site. By removing the splash page the visitor can get to see the best parts of your site straight away, without having to wait for a pointless page to load.

Keep your navigation simple.
To put it simply if your navigation is too complicated and people don’t understand how to get around your site this is a huge web design fault. If a visitor doesn’t know how to navigate around your site they will get frustrated and end up leaving. Keep your navigation simple and try to avoid using scripts or complicated flash based menus, not all browsers support scripts, so some of your visitors might be missing out on important.

Keep your paragraphs reasonable readable lengths.
Although having lots of relative and informative content on your website is good, it is a bad idea to have the blocks of text to big. Not everyone likes reading and to much can deter a visitor. If you keep your paragraphs in reasonable lengths it is much easier for a visitor to read and absorb.

Use CSS for style.
Make sure your text is readable by using a standard font which is compatible with other systems. While some fonts may look good on your computer other people might not have that font installed. It is good web design practice to use CSS when building you site. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are a perfect way to set and adjust your websites font and size settings. The great thing about using CSS is that you can change the look of your whole site simply by editing the one file.

Test how your site looks in other web browsers
When you are building your site and still in the web design stage it is important to check how it looks on other browsers, just because it looks fine in internet explorer doesn’t mean it looks good on Firefox or Opera. A lot of people use alternative browsers and if the website looks like a complete mess then you will loose that visitor for ever. You can check your sites web design to make sure it complies with the web standards at the w3.org website. Validating your page will help to ensure it works properly on other browsers.