I’m starting some new campaigns and wanted to get as much info as possible on my subscribers.

Here’s what I was after:

Record the referring URL

By recording the referring URL and monitoring user’s interaction with my newsletters, I can find out which pages or search phrases send the highest-converting traffic.

<?php $referer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; echo $referer; ?>

I believe there are more advanced ways of doing this, including using cookies to record the original referrer (this code will only show the last page accessed, unfortunately), but this is plenty in my case.

Capture IPs

Freelancers will be pushing traffic to one of my signup forms on a CPA agreement. Monitoring IPs won’t be the greatest way to stop scammers, but it’s a quick and free solution without having to install any software.

This one’s fairly simple and will also help us capture the location in the next step.

<?php $IP = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; echo $IP; ?>

Capture location

I’m promoting UK-only sites and this will help me segment the database to serve unique newsletter content accordingly.

There’s plenty of half-arsed tutorials on how to do this – including a solution where you upload an array of countries and their codes / IP ranges to a MySQL database and query them from there. This seemed like a fair bit of overkill to me and the vague instructions were beyond a coder at my level.

I was content with this solution found on the Tek-Tips forum.

 // Create the country code key

<?php
	$IP = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
	$SSID = htmlentities(SID);
	// If IP address exists
	// Get country (and City) via  api.hostip.info
	if (!empty($IP)) {
	$country=file_get_contents('http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip='.$IP);

	// Reformat the data returned (Keep only country and country abbr.
	list ($_country) = explode ("\n", $country);
	$_country = str_replace("Country: ", "", $_country);
	} ?>

// Call your city and country info

<?php echo($country); ?> // Call City, Country

<?php echo($_country); ?>" // Call Country only

The ease of calling the API from hostip.info also means that you’re reliant on these guys keeping their database online, but I’m willing to bank on it for now.

Full signup form with IP, location, country

So here’s all our code in one place. Basically, this uses all of the above functions and inputs them into fields that users won’t see because of the display:none style.

To capture these in your subscriber database (I use and recommend Campaign Monitor), simply create a custom field where you can point the data.

<form id="sub" action="http://site.com/" method="post">
	<input type="text" name="name-field" id="name" value="Name..." onfocus="value=''"/>
	<br />
	<input type="text" name="email-field" id="email" value="Email..." onfocus="value=''"/>

	<input type="text" name="referrer-field" id="Referrer" value="<?php $referer = $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]; echo $referer; ?>" style="display:none" />

		<?php
		$IP = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
		$SSID = htmlentities(SID);
		// If IP address exists
		// Get country (and City) via  api.hostip.info
		if (!empty($IP)) {
		$country=file_get_contents('http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip='.$IP);
		// Reformat the data returned (Keep only country and country abbr.
		list ($_country) = explode ("\n", $country);
		$_country = str_replace("Country: ", "", $_country);
		}
		?>

	<input type="text" name="IP-field" id="IP" value="<?php echo($IP); ?>" style="display:none" /> // this was created in the country code above, so we can call it here also

	<input type="text" name="country-field" id="Location" value="<?php echo($country); ?>" style="display:none" />

	<input type="submit" value="Join" id="button" /></p>
	</form>

Enjoy! Let me know if you have any questions of troubles.

Sure: you can change .com (or whatever), to .co.uk in the URL everytime – but, come on, why?

Add extra search engine servers to the Firefox Search Bar

For this example I’m going to add a search server for google.co.uk. Assume I’m in Australia.

1. Right Click on Firefox in your Applications folder and choose Show Package Contents.

2. Navigate to Contents > MacOS > searchplugins

3. Duplicate the relevant file (ie: google.xml or yahoo.xml).

4. Open the file with a text editor like TextMate and change all instances of google.com.au (it will most likely be the server relevant to where you currently are) to google.co.uk (or whatever you require)

5. Rename the file something relevant to the server: google-uk.xml.

6. Done! You can now use the dropdown menu on the Firefox search bar to change your servers easily. Select Manage Search Engines to set your default.

I imagine you could use a similar process for PC – you’d just have to find the right files.

What does that mean for SEOs? Mostly, it means there are TONNES of links waiting to be picked up. 850 million, in fact, says a group called Majestic SEO.

Here’s the concept: thousands of these Geocities pages have been taken down. The site you made at 12 with Michael Jackson midi files and Simpsons gifs: gone!

That leaves a whole lot of webmasters with links pointing to dead Geocities pages. Get those links.

Find those Geocities links!

Other sites have recommended searching like this to find links to these Geocities sites:

“linkdomain:geocities.com your-keyword“

I’ve found that this pulls up a lot of crap, plus a lot of discussion about the technique itself.

Far more rewarding, in my opinion, is to search like this:

“site:geocities.com inurl: your-keyword“

You’ll then find the Geocities pages themselves (get used to seeing Yahoo’s holding page!), from where you can use Yahoo! Site Explorer to find links pointing to these pages.

Yes, it’s a longer process, but you’ll find old Geocities pages with your keyword in their URL, and then quality links pointing to the pages.

Pick up those Geocities links!

When you’ve found these external links, contact the webmaster with a request such as this:

“Hey there, I noticed you’re linking to [old geocities site], perhaps you might like to update your link to this site.

As you can see, there’s relevant content to your niche … “

Simple as that!

The best part is, while you’re trawling all these old sites you’ll often come across some juicy guestbooks and opportunities to add your URL to small directories. Both aren’t the best practices, but remember: these are most likely old domains and very relevant to your niche.

Good luck! I’m off to pick up some myself…

There’s now a great plugin for this!

See WP No Category Base to download and install the plugin. It does all that the hack below does, but better, and instantly.

In fact, I did have some issues with the hack after upgrading Wordpress, so found this plugin instead.

So this one’s been a killer for a long time: you can hack Wordpress in several ways to remove /category/ from the URL, though pagination and all sorts of other nasty side-effects arise.

Anyway, it’s finally been done – you can now remove /category/ from Wordpress URLS, maintain pagination and everything else!

In fact, the fix even writes out /category/ when generating category links through get_the_category or single_cat_title: instead of just redirecting it afterwards as other hacks have done.

So here it is:

Remove the Category Base from Wordpress

If only I’d found this when he first posted it 12 months ago …!!

Enjoy!

As the document mentions, part of the role is utilising social media such as Facebook and Twitter, so I imagine most college students would have half the experience already – regardless of their discipline!

Having worked with online bingo sites for many years, I would highly recommend working with a company in the sweepstakes field – especially as an entry point to the digital industry.

Seems a strange statement? Here’s why: online gaming sites and portals – including competition and giveaway sites such as Sweepstakes Hub – are at the absolute forefront of SEO, SEM and SMO.

Now that I’ve, almost by mistake, become a UK Bingo specialist, I’m finding endless opportunities all around the world in the same industry. The same would happen in Sweepstakes, I imagine.

The Sweepstakes Hub group are also entering the market at a very exciting time, as Sweepstakes and giveaways blossom in the current US economy.

I’ve had some experience working with some members of the team, and their collective business background is quite amazing. Highly recommend this one!

The contact for the position is on the Position Summary

Perhaps you’ve also found that your crawl rate is lower than it has been, and only a small portion of your site is indexed?

This was the case with Super Free Bingo – a site that I manage SEO strategies for. While our team spends a lot of time off-site generating new links, and creating new content on-site, all those great bingo stories that were written two years ago are were sitting unused and not indexed!

Time to up the crawl rate!

How to get the bots back to your old content? Change it. Make it new old content.

(Note: I am not suggesting you change the date – just update the content)

The idea is simple: if the bots are revisiting your old content, they’re going to discover all those keywords and interlinks. They’re also going to visit you more often to keep up with your changes. The more you update, the more they index. The more they index, the more chance you have of ranking for major keywords and longtail keyphrases.

Add new content

Add new content to your old blog posts: an “Update: …” line fits in well, or perhaps something like “Read about the developments here …” and link to a new post.

Change the location

Wordpress is gold: it will automatically redirect a post from the old URL to the new URL. This means that if you change the URL, any links to your old posts should redirect. You probably also know more about how to optimise your URLs with keywords now than you did two years ago!

I wouldn’t go over the top with this practice, but it does help. As well as refreshing the page to the bots, it also refreshes the archive pages (category and link pages) that link to it – bringing these to attention, and all the pages linked from them.

In the same way, you can also change the blog category. Great for spring-cleaning also!

Link to old content

Point the bots to all your new changes and wait for a spike in your crawl rate and, hopefully, your rankings!

In practice

How do I know this works? About a month ago I tested two different bingo operators on Super Free Bingo.

For one operator, Littlewoods Bingo, I did nothing but edit old stories related to the Littlewoods page. I probably edited / updated 50 posts or so over a period of one to two weeks. At the same time I pinged Technorati and other services, and, briefly, manually-increased the site’s crawl rate in Google Webmasters so that the bots would find these changes.

For another operator, Posh Bingo, I focused on generating new links to the page itself, and to the old stories. The idea was that the bots would revisit the old pages after finding the new links to them. All of these links were from other bingo blogs.

Results

At the beginning of the test, both operators were at the top of the third page for their respective terms on Google.co.uk.

The Littlewoods Bingo page then slowly climbed its way to the first page and is now quite steady at 6th or 7th result.

Posh Bingo actually fell away, and the site’s Posh Bingo page is now ranked on the fourth page – losing a whole page!

SEO isn’t just about LINKS

As you can see! Re-use your old content and reap the benefits! By keeping your site fresh and active, you’ll keep the bots there discovering your keywords, content and interlinks. Hopefully you’ll then see results like I did!

Enjoy!

What is it?

Automatic Backlinks is what it says: a platform to generate backlinks automatically. By placing a code on your site (it’s available for html, php, asp, and some CMS) you automatically post links on your site from other bloggers. This earns you link credit, which you can spend by placing links on other websites.

How much?

Free. However, if you don’t want to place links to Cottages in Italy on your website about Bottled Water, you can purchase a link credit subscription. See the site for info on how much you get per link credit / US dollar. It starts at $1USD = 1PR link, but gets cheaper as it goes higher.

How’s the quality?

If you really don’t care for quality (ie, you’re working on getting mass links – like 20k+), or you just don’t know any better, Automatic Backlinks really is automatic. However – if you don’t want your link to an English site on a page in Swedish with 50 outgoing links and no content – then it’s going to require some attention.

Personally I use Automatic Backlinks for one client requiring a tonne of quality links. As long as I check each new link generated, it’s perfect. It does mean removing about 10-20% of the links generated, but the platform responds well: you can opt to not receive links from that site again, etc.

Note: this type of link-building is always being penalised by Google so only, only, partake in link buying alongside other more organic SEO initiatives.

The platform allows you to filter by page rank, language, site category, and number of outgoing links (only those managed through Automatic Backlinks), though as always: there are plenty of scammers that fake page rank or categorise incorrectly.

All the same, this is a great option for small- to mid-sized bloggers that want to begin exchanging links through an easy-to-use platform.

I made a post on the Wordpress support thread with my fix, though thought I should expand here. This may not fix the issue for all users, as the reloading might be the result of other problems or faulty plugins.

1. Remove any additional rewrite rules from your .htaccess, besides the Wordpress-generated code. Remember to back it up!

(If your Wordpress settings state that your install is on http://mysite.com, but you are running a .htaccess rule to rewrite http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com, you’re running the wp-admin page in a loop of redirects).

2. If you can now log in, go to Settings and change the location of WP and your blog to http://www.mysite.com (assuming this is where you wanted Wordpress installed). If your blog or Wordpress installation is located in another dirctory or subdomain, don’t change these just add the www.

3. Re-add the .htaccess rewrites.

They might like look this –

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]

(This rewrites http:// to http://www as well as removing index.html or index.php from your URLs)

If the above fix doesn’t work, try removing plugins from your server one by one and then try to log in. An outdated plugin that doesn’t work with your current version of Wordpress has also been known to cause this problem.

This had me stumped for five or ten minutes, until I saw a comment on the Bing Twitter.

Which user agent / bot does Bing.com use to crawl your site?

The answer is msnbot.

To add msnbot to your robots.txt file, add the following:

User-agent: msnbot

You can then make any Allow or Disallow rules that you like.

Bing.com are also running a Webmaster Central, much like Google but seemingly cleaner and not as tool-packed.

Sascha Kimmel has some good info on navigating through this.

It should be interesting to see whether Bing.com can make a dent in Google’s 80% share, but it isn’t looking likely. Most say no, and if they are still using the msnbot technology, then I have to agree.

Update:

The official Bing page outlining more on their bots is here. Thanks to Benjamin for the link.

I’ve made an enjoyable progression over the last few years through Journalism, some authoring in Publishing, a few nights out Sydney-Socialising, playing Bingo Mogul at the top of Google with some SEO and, most recently, making sure you click on my PPC ads. Water anyone?

There was also some time left to make some music, design a simple site or two, take a tonne of photos, model for a bookcover and get my snaps on National TV.

But the time has come to move on to something new and now I want to further my online skill set. I want to work with more clients and on larger projects. Plus, I’m hoping to retire the word bingo from my vocabulary!

After achieving amazing SEO results for gaming sites, I now want to experiment further with clients more suited to link baiting and SMO. Not that I’d knock back any more affiliate gambling – I love a challenge!

There’s a lot more I want to learn and experience; and it would be great to be able to continue using my writing, design, SEO and SEM skills all in the same position.

If you have a suitable position, please get in touch! I love to chat

Download my resume

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Email me