Rice Blogger

Previously  I have actually written about blogs that are manage by more than one person. The reason mainly because of time and wanted some variety in the posts. Currently it is doing pretty fine as we could get around $50/month, not much but I would say that it is pretty decent since we just spend like 2 hours each person each week. But the downside was that we only have two person blogging now. It was expected that some friends will give up or found out they do not like blogging.

Anyhow, it was nice that I found someone to share my interest and share my knowledge with and it generates new idea on how we could promote and increase our visitor. We manage to get 450+ visitor a day which is pretty good because it is quite a competative topic that we are blogging about. Not the best blog out there but pretty satisfied.

I am doing a trial for Malaysia purchase since I got the advantage of getting supplies of Surgical Face Mask and earn a small margin out of it. Previously I have tried various software for ecommerce. OS Commerce was the first but it has limitation because it is very very hard to edit things, but I still maintain the website with OS Commerce. After that I tried Zen Cart, I think it is better in terms of theme editing, new add on module and admin panel is much better, but still remain a lot similar with OS Commerce. While choosing Zen Cart I have tried Joomla’s Virtuemart and CubeCart but each have its own limitation and I ended up with Zen Cart.

My third experiment on online shopping cart is WordPress E-Commerce, I wanted to try this a long time but did not had the chance until yesterday I setup a WordPress E-Commerce site to sell only 2 items, which is the highly demanded Surgical Face Mask. Although I will not recomend this plugin for a full fledge e-commerce site whereby you have a lot of item because the order handling, receipt, invoice and quite a lot of features in a normal shopping cart is not there. Nevertheless, I like the fact that it is using WordPress, and I am very comfortable with adding more plugin to make it search engine friendly.

My first 2 E-commerce site had fail, although not making lost since I could still make the money to pay for the domain renewal. This is my third, and purposely built on top of my 4 years old Classifieds to gain credibility. So if you are interested to purchase some 3-ply face mask or surgical mask.

Get them here: Surgical Face Mask

Previously I have posted a pretty good software to check internal pagerank but something happen to SEO Junkie and they are revamping their website. I did not notice it until a person commented on my blog about that. So I begin to search around for the same old software or a new tool which I could use to check internal pagerank. And I am in luck because I found an exact software by SEOJunkie was found in another blog.

So here u have it.

Download Page Rank Software

An important task as a webmaster is to prevent your resources to be stolen or your website to be hacked. I had both of this experience now after finding one of my blog got 280gb of bandwidth used on the month of June 2009 and even at 2rd week of July it is already at 350+gb of bandwidth used. Fortunately and unfortunately, I did not even get any warning email and no service disconnection from my Hostgator Shared Hosting account.

This is the stats with around 1k users a day. You can confirm someone is stealing your bandwidth when you see a sudden of increase in bandwidth usage and also see that your image bandwidth is taking a whole chunk of your bandwidth (my case was 96% of the 400+ gb at the end of the month)

Immediatelly I use .htaccess to prevent image hotlinking by adding the code below into the .htaccess file:-

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?website\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|jpg)$ /no-hotlinking-image.jpe [L]

I know that there is draw back on this but this is the quickest and most popular method to solve this problem and as you see the bandwidth drop pretty quickly after 13 July. After that I have reduce the size of  my no-hotlinking-image.jpe to a bare minimal and also remember to include some advertisements on the image.

To find out who is stealing your image bandwidth you can check out the raw access logs. This is where I look for at cpanel admin. Download the logs and if you see some image being load on other url other than yours, visit them and you should see your image (no-hotlinking-image.jpe) display on their page.

Everytime I make a post, I am thinking of SEO on mind as my ultimate purpose is to get people searching for my post. There is some trick and technique to this and most season bloggers do this if you pay attention and study their posting method. Your post title play a very crucial role.

1. Write Post Title with Search Term

You have to always think of what a people would type at Google when they are doing a search. If you are writing about a car, have the car manufacturer, year, model included or the type of car,  having post title like “I like the new Honda” wound not help your Search Engine Traffic as most people would not search for this word and “new Honda” would be a competitive keyword.

2. Keyword Density

It is important for you to use the similar keyword that you have used in your title and use them at least once or twice the post body. Do not repeat them too often that you will actually get penalize.

3. Start with Long Tail Keyword

Try to aim for something smaller when your blog is new as you will not win the big boys by having the same title keyword for your post. Be specific so that you are targeting a niche and smaller crowd.

4. Make sure that your html title <title> does have your post title

Although it is mostly built in with most blogging theme / templates, you have to make sure of this. If you look at the following picture. You notice that the search terms are in bold and your website link is actually using the <title> of the current link or title of your blog post.

Another flexible alternative for WordPress user is to have All in One SEO Pack plugins installed. It is quite easy to use, but the latest version require some pre-configuration before you can actually use this plugin. Nevertheless, it is still a very powerful tool.

5. Permalink

This is a superb built in function on WordPress and Blogspot because having the post title on the link gives you a slightly better advantage over sites that does not have them. Although this may not ensure that you beat another website / blog that does not use this, but we are sure that it is taken into account because it will be highlited in bold.

You can see that top 100 malaysia blogs is highlighted.

Give this a try and you shall see some differences in time to come. SEO does not happen instantly, even if you have made some changes to your previous post, it will take days to week for Google Spiders to come crawling to your website and update their database.