Scratchback

Scratchback has infiltrated Reward Rebel… eyes RIGHT! > > >

Until now blogs and websites could link from Reward Rebel only by their merit — that is to say, if I like a site for its information, advice or simply because I enjoy the cartoons, I include it on the blogroll.

Reward Rebel also hosts an Entrecard page that lists members of the Entrecard Community who’ve earned merit by consistently dropping their card.

And, of course, there’s the merit earned by leaving a comment, because Reward Rebel is a DoFollow blog.

Scratchback provides you with the opportunity to invest in a valuable link, prominently displayed above the fold, where it’s one of the first items viewed when visitors land on Reward Rebel. However, Scratchback links are not DoFollow and so the value lies in the promotional aspect of your site’s link being displayed.

Scratchback has had been introduced in response to requests to link from this website, however, in view of the links not being DoFollow, I’m looking around for an alternative method of showing my appreciation for visitors who show theirs!

Your ideas and recommendations will be greatly appreciated!

Layne | Reward Rebel

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Entrecard Good Buddies

November has been a difficult month for me personally, and one consequence has been a lack of fresh content being posted to my blogs. Reward Rebel wishes to thank the generous-spirited members of the Entrecard Community for their loyal support during this period.

By introducing an Entrecard page, Reward Rebel plans to thank its Entrecard droppers and advertisers by spreading the link love as widely and generously as time and professionalism allow!

November’s Entrecard Hotties are:

• Technically Easy
• Computer Aid
• Earn Blogger
• Authority Directory
• My Gypsy Goods
• Altered Events
• Worldwide Travel Blog
• BMW F1 Blog
• Avoid Money Scams
• Turnip of Power is no longer a member of Entrecard

Ode to the Turnip
Oh, Turnip,
the caress of your cursor
will be sorely missed
by my widget.

I’ve created the new Entrecard page, although it’s in its infancy, and will take a little while to list all the sites to be included.

Layne | Reward Rebel

How To Identify A DoFollow Blog

Reward Rebel’s last post Link Building With Comments On DoFollow Blogs raised some points that I’d like to address now.  After all, you need to know how to identify DoFollow blogs before you can begin to comment on them!

Recently, one of my commenters introduced me to the Firefox Addon, SEO Quake, and now I’m a massive fan of this phenomenal web tool!

The above screenshot shows SEO Quake’s settings options’ drop-down menu, from which you can clearly see the data you can access for at-a-glance viewing.  The simplest thing to do is select all the options that are ticked in the screenshot.

To make it super easy to identify a DoFollow blog, you just need to select ‘Line through nofollow and noindex’ then every link that displays on your browser that is NOT DoFollow will have a line through it.  Not very visually appealing, but you can always toggle it on and off as and when you are selecting sites for commenting or not.

SEO Quake also allows you to see the following data about any blog or website that you open in Firefox:

• Internal and external links
• nofollow or DoFollow
• Google Page Rank
• Alexa Traffic Rank
• Keyword density
• Yahoo links and rank
• Age of website
• IP address

Even more valuable is that the keyword density tool allows you to load Google keyword data for Adwords Pay Per Click advertising.

This is one of the most valuable free web tools I’ve encountered and it has to be a ‘must have’ for all webmasters or bloggers. So, go and download SEO Quake and be amongst those who benefit from the vital data by utilising the docked toolbar and/or toolbar floating at the head of each open web page - I use both.

SEO Quake will definitely help your Internet Marketing ambitions!

Layne | Reward Rebel

Link Building With Comments On Do Follow Blogs

When you leave a comment on a Do Follow blog, with the intention of building back links to your own site, the following checklist will help ensure you gain the maximum benefit from your investment of time, effort and intellect.

Ensure that your target blog:

• is Do Follow, that is, it removes the ‘nofollow’ links attribute
• has a Google Page Rank – the higher, the better
• is in the same niche market as the website you’re back linking to.

A less well known approach when you comment on a blog that includes the above attributes is to:

• comment on a specific web page that has, in its own right, acquired a Google Page Rank, because rumour has it that Google values such individual page rank more highly than the PR of the site as a whole or the site’s home page.

Don’t feel guilty about approaching comments so cold-bloodedly.  Remember to bear in mind that this method of link building benefits both sides of the equation, one gains a comment and the other gains a back link.

Quid pro quo.

Layne | Reward Rebel

Wordpress Custom Permalinks Structure

Wordpress custom permalinks structure settings default to using the blog post ID number, not the post title.  This means there’s an absence of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of the primary keywords you’ll have ingeniously woven into your post title!

Search Engines attach greater importance to keywords in blog post titles when your site’s permalinks structure positions the post title as close as possible to your domain’s root directory.  The closer something is to the root directory, the more important it’s considered by the search engine algorithm.

For example, Search Engines will rank the second example below more favourably than the first, simply because the custom permalinks structure positions the post title - and therefore the primary keyword(s) - immediately after the root directory, which is usually the domain name, e.g. yourdomain.com.

1.    yourdomain.com/2008/10/28/how-to-make-money-online
2.    yourdomain.com/how-to-make-money-online

However, the default permalinks structure on Wordpress looks like this:

You’ll notice that this site’s root directory is rewardrebel.com/blog but the same rule applies.

If you’re not too confident with this area of blogging, there is one simple and straightforward amendment you can implement that will greatly improve the effectiveness of the keywords in your post titles when they are indexed by the search engines.

Open your blog’s Wordpress Admin Panel and go to ‘Settings’, ‘Permalinks’; click ‘Custom Structure’ and in the box, type: /%postname%/ so that it looks like this:

I’ve noticed a number of Wordpress blogs that have retained the default permalinks structure, and I’ve wondered whether this is so because the blog author is unaware of this simple SEO edit, and how beneficial it could be.

So, I decided to show you this, because it’s so simple, and I’m good at doing ‘simple’…..

Layne | Reward Rebel

NOTE:
I apologise for having overlooked a very important point mentioned in the Comments here by Dennis Edell of Direct Sales Web Marketing.

If you customise the permalinks settings on an established blog that has pre-existing links to specific posts, those links will cease to function.  Google and other search engine links will also cease to function until they index the site again.

You have now been warned!

Commenters Or Commentators - What Do You Call Yours?

When referring to those wonderful folk who leave comments on your blog posts, what do you call them?  I ask this, because I notice that on many sites, the author uses the term ‘commentators’, whereas I prefer ‘commenters’.

My understanding of a commentator is someone who commentates, whereas a commenter comments.  On a blog, we refer to comments, not commentaries, therefore one must conclude that the person writing the comment is referred to as a commenter.  Yep, that’s about the strength of it… QED.

For the sake of this post, I checked dictionary definitions for various forms of the words ‘commenters’ and ‘commentators’ and they all say pretty much the same thing.  Here are definitions from Collins English Dictionary:

COMMENT
1.    To remark or express an opinion.
2.    One who comments is a commenter.

COMMENTATE
1.    To make a commentary.
2.    One who commentates is a commentator.

COMMENTARY
1.    An explanatory series of notes;
2.    A spoken accompaniment to a broadcast, film, etc;
3.    An explanatory treatise on a text.

So, the two terms ‘commenters’ and ‘commentators’ do not mean the same thing, and are not interchangeable, but perhaps you can convince me otherwise!

I don’t really mind which word you use, but while you’re here, why not comment to let me know whether you regard yourself as a commenter or a commentator?

Layne | Reward Rebel

Google Page Rank Misrepresentation

Until this weekend, Reward Rebel blog displayed a button declaring a Google Page Rank of 2, however, I’ve discovered that I’m guilty of misrepresentation and – worse – that this blog doesn’t have a Google Page Rank at all!

My apologies for this error, which occurred because I was deploying a URL redirect from /blog/ and it is the root domain rewardrebel.com that has the Google Page Rank 2.  I had developed a habit of always using rewardrebel.com to direct to the blog and when I used the Page Rank Checker Tool, I automatically entered the root domain URL.

There are many web pages hosted on rewardrebel.com and they are all independent sales pages - there isn’t a website as such on that domain name.  The domain was about six months old when I started the Reward Rebel blog, and it’s URL is rewardrebel.com/blog.

I thought I’d make it easier for people to remember the blog name and address if it was simply rewardrebel.com, so I used the redirect.

My knowledge about links, site authority and Google Page Rank was pretty basic, and it didn’t occur to me that what I was doing harboured intricacies that could spawn problems for me further down the line.

Having become further and further embroiled in the development of my blogs, I was pretty oblivious to anything awry until a couple of months ago.  I realised that two sets of stats existed on Technorati - one for rewardrebel.com and one for rewardrebel.com/blog – both relating to the same articles!

After some lengthy email correspondence with a guy from Technorati Support – who was incredibly helpful and the experience was much easier and non-techy than I’d have expected – it was recommended that I use rewardrebel.com for my blog address and dispense with /blog, but that was suggested without him knowing that I have many files and folders on rewardrebel.com, even though there isn’t an actual reward rebel website.

I requested that Technorati merge the two sets of stats, but they couldn’t do that, so it was agreed to delete the rewardrebel.com stats, leaving rewardrebel.com/blog. Of course, this didn’t resolve the main problem, and a second set of stats soon began to generate again.

The redirect has now been removed, and I’m still finding instances of the root URL being promoted on my sales pages, where it should be /blog, but I’ll get through them all eventually.

If you consider using a URL redirect, bear in mind that Google and Google Page Rank does not like redirects, and your site’s Technorati Authority will be weakened by being divided between two URLs – although perhaps there’s a way around this that I’m unaware of.  No doubt, redirects impact in all sorts of ways I’ve not mentioned (or yet discovered!) and your input here could be very helpful, both for myself and people reading this.

I’ll not be deploying URL redirects again in a hurry… if ever!  At the time, it seemed so perfectly straightforward… (cue maniacal laughter fading into the distance).

Layne | Reward Rebel