Google AdSense Referrals

Google now pays people for getting them referrals to adsense. Truthfully, I don't think I would ever add one of these buttons to my website, because I think any money that could come from it probably wouldn't be worth the traffic I sent them.

Regardless though, a lot of bloggers are finding it useful just to pick up some small change.
Here's a link to the google blog's latest entry talking about the makeover their buttons have had. At least they're not as tacky anymore!

FeedBurner

I've recently been looking into a well-known service called feedburner. I've seen the name around so many times that I decided I just had to look into it and find out exactly what it is.
Apparently they are a service that is 90% free, with a few features that cost a little bit of money... all related to (big surprise) feeds and feed hosting.

Just to outline a few cool features that using feedburner to host your feed...
1.) They will convert your feed to the best feed for each individual user (RSS, RSS2.0, atom, etc.).
2.) They will allow you to put an email subscription form on the page that allows users to have the feed EMAILED to them.
3.) They have statistics on your feed, including total number of users subscribed (my personal favorite feature!)
4.) Their feedflare service can allow you to add links like to the bottom of every feed for things like email to a friend, add to de.licio.us, and add to digg...basically all the social tagging stuff. Anything that makes it easier for people to talk about your blog is a good thing.
5.) Can convert your feed to HTML to be displayed on sites.

These are just a few of my favorite features. Theres more than that, and apparently they're pretty frequently adding new ones. Expect to see me using feedburner in the very near future. Check out their website at www.feedburner.com.

ProBlogger on Finding Blog Readers

I've probably mentioned problogger more than once before, but yet again I ran across another excellent post of theirs.

It's discussing tips and techniques for building up more readers (which I need to apply to this blog more at some point)...
Check it out here.

Fat, 40, and fired

Article by a guy that risked it all and took a year off work on his 40th year off after reading a book. Very moving, and a top story on reddit. Highly recommend anyone feeling drained, and exhausted from the grind of work over years check this out.

read more | digg story

Wow... Are bloggers THAT wealthy?

ProBlogger just put up a new post talking about his poll results. According to his poll, 4% of his readers make a six-figure income from blogging!

That is absolutely astounding... Check out his post here.
I'll also vouch for his blog. I read it a lot, and really like it.

Old School EverQuest Is Coming Back!

"The progression server is a new server that will start with the original, just-out-of-the-box content of EverQuest, seven years ago. Some changes are not being taken out, and instead of waiting the usual 6 to 12 months for an update, new content will be unlocked by players finishing tasks and killing bosses."

read more | digg story

What's in your link quality?

A fabulous article talking about the differences in "quality links" and true-blue "high quality links" such as those with dmoz, and yahoo! directory. This article gives some enticing tidbits of information that gave me some ideas, and even has made me consider shoveling out the hefty $299 for Yahoo directory links.

read more | digg story

HOW TO: Start Blogging

Covering DNS servers, domain names, webhosts, hosted blog solutions, WordPress, Movable Type, Textpattern, FTP and some tips for starting up a blog.

... And we all know blogging is useful to internet marketers and SEO people. If you don't, then you haven't been reading blogs and don't understand the technology. You're behind the times -- catch up.

read more | digg story

Link Building

Alright boys and girls, today we're going to talk about link building. Every good SEO knows that link building is a critical process. Why? Because search engines use incoming links to a website as a metric for how popular a website is.

Infact, Google has a very well-known algorithm dedicated to this known as pagerank. While it's unknown how much pagerank (the specific number) plays into ranking, it's undeniable that incoming links is by and large one, if not THE most important factors in ranking well on search engines. So how do you get links, you may ask....

Well, if you make good content people will typically link to you just because they like your website. That's why Google thinks links are a metric for popularity. However, if one were tenacious enough, one might find that their website is not being seen by enough people to be established as popular yet so you could do activities such as the following:

• Going out and asking to TRADE links with people in similar industries.
• Seeking out directories that are specifically built to house links.

Thank fully the trials and tribulations of good link building is nothing new. There are directories out there listing people who specifically are seeking good link exchanges, as well as directories that simply house links to websites grouped together by category.

Not all such directories are easily read by search engines however! Some directories may not get indexed by Google or the other big-boy search engines simply because their website employs too complicated of scripts for the google spider to be able to decipher intelligibly. What good is having a link on a directory, if google will never find out about it?

Here we have a solution. A couple of absolutely wonderful, wonderful people in the Search Engine Optimization industry have actually developed a directory of SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY DIRECTORIES! Check them out. Use them. Submit your website to all the directories on the list... and for heaven's sake people... please use a valid title, and description for your website!

Forum Optimization

I was recently putting together a new forum (non-SEO related) and it occured to me that this was a topic I had not talked about on my blog. Forums are an incredible way to get traffic to your website, and to keep it there.

The reason is obvious: if you're building a community that uses your website to communicate, obviously they're going to keep coming back... and the larger your community grows, the more your website will be a powerful resource to whomever seeks information on the topics your forum is discussing.

However, a major problem with forums is that because of the use of session ID's (the data proceeding the questionmark in the URL), and other forum conventions can keep search engines from indexing those pages well. That's a lot of content that your website's forum community is putting together that isn't being put to use! What a travesty!

Recognizing this, a number of wonderfully charitable coders have not only altered existing popular forums to be search-engine (especially google) friendly, but have provided the information to the public so that they can apply the same modifications to THEIR forums.

Here's one of my personal favorites for PHPBB: http://www.able2know.com/forums/about15132.html

You can thank me later. Also, their forum is running the SEO modifications so you can see it in action. (Notice that URL is a link to a post on a forum... but the address ends in .html? Nice.)