SEO Tips

How to Stop Comment Spam Dead In Its Tracks

There is a traffic bridge that a lot of bloggers will eventually have to cross. In a previous posting, trackbacks and pingbacks have been mentioned and explained. Unfortunately a lot of abuse happens in this area of traffic generation. It can also drag your site down with those site owners who choose to use automated software to exploit this particular method of traffic generation.

Now I don't mind if someone automates a process, but what really bothers me is one blasts their link out there into space, and plasters it all over my site.

If this is happening to you, and you are having a tough time figuring out what is spam, and what is not, there are at least 2 plugins that work together in harmony to halt this sort of spam in its tracks.

Akismet, and SI-Captcha

Si-captcha basically adds a captcha image, or math question to your comments submission area. This locks out any bots from submitting to the comments area. Bam! Stops them dead in their tracks.

Akismet is a spam detection algorithm Works offsite by pulling spam information from another server and compares it to comments in que. Akismet works, but sometimes marks comments as spam that may not be, so there is always work to sift thru the comments just in case.

Why is my website loading so slow? Tip

Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization

Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you're designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the "quality" of the JPEG image -- normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image's file size.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format -- the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

Why should I use a sitemap?

The Importance of a Sitemap

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Conveying your site's theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors' time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.

404 Problems, Are you burning your bridges?

I get a lot of comments, those that may or may not be automated. I am aware that some people
do try to use automated software to generate backblinks via the comments posting.

But are you aware that you may be burning bridges you have not yet crossed?

One thing that I've learned in the process of learning how to build quality backlinks, is to revisit the links that
readers have left behind. I try not .. and I try really hard not to mark backlinks, ping backs, trackbacks, or site entries in users profiles to readily. I don't mind helping other people out with page rank.

It does hurt my site when people drop a link, with a comment when their site does not fall into the meat category of the search engines.

By meat, I mean content that other people are searching for. Its not that your site doesn't have the content people are searching for, but the content that is missing when they click on the link provided by the search engine when they indexed your site days, weeks, months, or years ago.

When was the last time you updated your site map?
When was the last time you checked out the hits to your 404 page. A 404 page is what shows up when a page is not found.

If you look at your aw stats log, you will see what pages were attempted, and also what site was referring to that page.

If your not looking at your 404 logs, you are burning your bridges, which means you are losing a lot of quality traffic. The people that are seeing your 404 pages, are the ones you have been chasing.

It might take weeks, months or years to see this happen to you. It might even just take minutes to lose that all mighty sale you have been looking for just because you missed it.

Visitors come and go every day. You just never know what they are looking for.

Make sure to read your 404 errors log, to see what bridge you have started to burn, and stop it before it becomes a blaze.

Just a personal experience.

Lyle Kannenberg
After all, it is just My Dime Marketing, Just when you thought you had it all.