My pal SEOidiot hits 33 today. He’s done a cartoon on his blog of a SEO/spammer workstation… I’m not sure whos it is (it can’t be Pauls cos the guy in the toon has got hair), but it looks an awful lot like mine:
That’s pretty tidy for me (afterall I have only been here a month). Anyway, Happy Birthday Paul… next time I’m in Preston the beers are on me.
hmmm, SEOidiot has left me with a bit of a puzzle here. Not so much of a problem to find 5 things to write about, more a problem finding 5 people to hit up to continue the chain. Youll have to read this post if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Now the hard part, who to tag?
This theme might look pretty basic… that’s because it is!
This theme has been designed to be quickly added to any Wordpress site with no customisation. There is no need to alter header images because there aren’t any… like Kubrick it relies on text generated from your blogs title and description, and also from the category and post descriptions.
Adsense is integrated (3 units per page, and one linkunit ~ the maximum Google allows), and the theme also includes Adsense for search in place of the standard Wordpress search function. Of course, it is easy to switch out Adsense for any other advertising program you may wish to use, the banners are standard sizes.
Some basic SEO has been carried out… the “title” and “h1″ tags contain the most relevant information… on a post page, the post title is used, on a category the category title is used etc. This should give Search Engines a better understanding of your page, and hence an improved ranking for your page. Another often overlooked advantage of correct use of tags is that your result in the SERPs will be formed correctly, so instead of your websites name (eg. pilkster.com) being used in every result, the page title (eg. SEO Adsense Wordpress Theme) or category title will be used. This is a much more useful and appealing result for the searcher.
This theme is also compatible with my Amazon Plugin For Wordpress.
Adsense is located in the following files; header.php (728×15 linkunit), footer.php (728×90 adunit), sidebar.php (336×280 adunit, 160×600 adunit).
Adsense for search is located in searchform.php.
The theme is intentionally basic and should be simple to build up and out from. If you use this theme as-is, or build a new theme from it, please let me know by commenting on this post.
Download SEO Adsense Wordpress Theme
Just added some credit to my Skype account so that I could make some calls home to the UK. Even though the account is registered in the UK with a UK payment address, the site insisted that I pay in AU$ (guess they must be taking my location by IP address, a very stupid thing for them to do considering that many people using their services will be expats) which was compounded by the fact that Paypal doesn’t use AU$ as one of its currencies, so Skype converted the amount to Euro for me before charging. As I keep my Paypal balance in US$ Paypal converted the Euro amount to US$ before charging my UK bank in UK£.
I wonder how much ‘value’ I was left with after being scalped on each of those conversions?
When making the call I noticed the price was $0.36 per min ~ with my Vodafone mobile I get 10 mins to the UK for $3. Somehow I think I might not be using Skype too much again.
Sponsored post:
Rate My Webhosting is a handy online app from Hostgator. Just by adding a snippet of javascript to you enable your sites visitors to rate the load speed of your page on a sliding scale (1-5 stars). Hostgator provide you with a secret link to a Google maps mashup with your visitors locations overlaid, and a breakdown of how they rate you. This should be a useful tool to run on any site that is geotargeting ~ if you are located in Europe paying for North American adwords traffic and have a host in Asia it is good to know how well your site is responding. Sites that are slow to load lose traffic, and a lot depends on the location and quality of your host.
You can see my secret link here (I’m not too worried about showing the stats on this blog, although I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone working in a competitive niche).
I liked this little app so much that I wrote a Wordpress plugin for it. Wordpress can be a pain when it comes to adding javascript snippets, so hopefully this will make it quick and easy to add Hostgator’s tool to your site. If you want a copy of the Wordpress plugin please contact me and I will make it available to you.
Don’t forget to rate my webhosting whilst you’re here!
