New SEO tricks (new to me anyway)

"There is nothing new under the sun" is one of my favourite sayings, but I am going to gamble that there are sufficient people around who may not have come across these specific search operands, I only came across them the other day:
When researching keywords hoping to maximise the keyword placing on your site, how useful would it be to know:

1. those web pages that have title tags containing your search term
2. those pages whose backlink anchor-text includes your search term

Well those searches can be done using the Google search operands allintitle and allinanchor, in the following formats:
allintitle:keyword(s)
allinanchor:keyword(s)
[no space between the colon and the keywords.]
Open up a google search and try this for some of your search terms and see what you come up with - all this helps to focus on the keywords that visitors might use and your competitiors have not yet latched onto. The way I would be using this is to see if I could exploit the terms that return fewer results.

Making a Favicon

I may have covered this subject before, but here is how I made my favicon for this blogspot blog:

1. First you will need to find a strong image that is going to be recognisable at 16pixels x 16pixels - you may actually be surprised at how much detail the human eye can see in such a small picture. Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert.com actually has his photograph as a favicon...
So you have your picture - I can often be found searching for images using Google image search and then editing the picture beyond all recognition using 'Fireworks'...
Some cropping and colorizing may be required, but the final step will be to shrink that sucker right down to 16x16 and export it as a 'gif' file.

2. The next step you will need to take is to get the thing uploaded somewhere - can be anywhere as long as it has a unique URL... FTP the file to a site that you have control of or host it with a free image hosting service.

3. The final step is then to get some HTML into your template, this code can be used within the HTML of a normal website or a blog if you have access to edit the HTML. This should go somewhere before the /HEAD tag (end of head section), and should look something like this:
The red part is the URL of my icon (called 'hammer.gif'), this section in your code is the complete address of your icon including the 'gif' file extension. I have used this on a number of different platforms and it seems to work on all of them. Normally you can just leave a 16x16 gif file entitled 'favicon.ico' in the root of your website (assuming you can use FTP) and that will automatically become your favicon for the entire site. This little bit of HTML code gives you the freedom to place your favicon file anywhere and even have different favicons on different pages or sub-sections of your website.
If you copy this code letter-for letter into your site, my hammer motif will become your favicon, changing the red part allows you to pick any image on the web (limited to files of 16x16pixels...)

Website building resource

I have done a little work on this blog today I was fed up with the blogger 'favicon' so I changed it for a hammer to illustrate 'website building'. I came up with a new banner too incorporating the same hammer motif. I thought it would be interesting to use exactly the same title as the default 'blogspot' banner for this template, but to introduce the motif into the design. So it's 'off the shelf' blogger template, but with a twist...
In keeping with the intention to provide information about website building, I am going to provide a link to the 'website building' section of Livewyre.NET. This takes you through many of the steps you will need to consider if you intend to build a site of your own.
In the next post I will give some pointers as to how you can have your own favicon, even on blogger blog or a site that doesn't allow you to FTP an 'ico' file.

Survey on back up...

The latest survey from dNeero can be seen below, if you would like to get paid for doing surveys, click on the widget and get involved!
This survey is all about backing up the files from your PC which is an absolute 'must do' for anyone using a PC nowadays. I use a 250GB external hard drive, but will soon need to get something bigger...
I have suffered the failure of two motherboards on the PC I am using today, all in the space of about 18 months.... Although the latest failure didn't affect my hard-drives or my operating system at all, I was able to carry on working using a different PC having access to all the same data whilst the MOBO was being replaced.

Livewyre.NET

I needed a domain to use as a main website for a platform for future projects. I decided to develop a site at livewyre.net which was based loosely on the content of livewyre.blogspot.
I have taken the themes of make money online, website monetisation, SEO techniques etc.. and created a site around these topics. I have managed to persuade a couple of collaborators to join me and add their own content, allowing them to monetise their own pages.
The intention is to develop this into a large internet resource and there is plenty of content there at the moment, but there is a great deal of information which needs to be added at some future point.
I have added a number of affiliate adverts to this site to test their viability, and hope to be able to develop this site in the near future to it's full potential.

Munny4Hunny

My second-ever excursion into blogging was Munny4Hunny which started as an investigation into whether money could be made from paid posting. This has been through many different phases, and has experienced some PR fluctuations.
Currently on a PR of 0, it has been anything from PR1 to PR4 and gets a small amount of traffic with a decent amount of subscribers.
PayPerPost has recently dropped my Munny4Hunny blog because of the paid-posting to non-paid posting ratio. I have recently started doing posts for PayU2blog and they tend to send a lot of opps (paid posting opportunities) . PayU2blog do not mind about paid to unpaid ratio and it is generally fairly easy to meet their requirements.
The best I managed to get was about $300 for a months paid blogging, but this is not so easily obtainable since Google clamped down on Pagerank. Currently monthly income for blogging alone is around $100 a month.

The Credit Cruncher

This Credit Crunch blog is my proudest blogging achievement so far, I have used the extent of my blogspot knowledge to customise this template as far as I can. Many of the usual blogspot traits have been removed including the post dates and 'posted by' labels etc.. I have added some neat 'digg' and 'stumble upon' widgets - in fact this blog opened my eyes to the power of stumble upon. This blog has had a custom-made header provided by an internet associate which has meant that I haven't had to rely on my own questionable design skills.
The blog gets plenty of traffic compared with some of my other projects, is a PR2 and actually yields some adsense earnings, so as far as niche blogging goes, it has proved reasonably profitable. Inspiration for posts comes from the news every day so there is no shortage of subject matter. My schooling has included a certain amount of economics which has helped to provide some background information.
I have tried to keep a consistent design policy and have used linking at the bottom of each post to try to link the whole 'site' together. My philosophy has been to attempt to create a blog that looked more like a website and to give it quality content. I tend to use forum posting to drive traffic to the blog as questions about the credit crunch are reasonably common.

Really Traveling blog

This Travel Blog was inspired by all the photo's that I had from various trips abroad. Once this particular resource was exhausted (my travels have been curtailed by financial restraints in recent years..!), the emphasis switched to travel news. This has proved a suitable niche for paid posting and some text-link monetisation. I have been able to exchange links with other sites within the same niche with some ease usually from site visitors.
I have found it relatively easy to gear paid posts to this niche and find a way of making them look (almost) on topic in most cases. I have found some resources that keep me inspired with new subjects to post topics on and that allows me to keep the paid post to non-paid post ratio at a reasonable level. This blog currently has a PR of 2 and a small but growing amount of regular subscribers.

World of Beckam

My Beckham News blog is on a blogspot domain, this was my first venture into niche blogging, but was not successful enough to merit purchasing a domain. I experimented with monetising ideas, but my overall conclusion is that there is too much competition in this particular niche. I was not prepared to open up the niche to include gossip rather than soccer content, hence it does not really get as much traffic as I had hoped.
Having said that, the blog has some subscribers and is maintained out of interest rather than out of profitability... I have used this blog to help develop some techniques, I was offered help by a banner designer who was interested in the content. This designer went on to design a banner for this blog and also one of my other blogs.
Sport is one of those topics which also allows you to monetise on text-links, the blog currently has a PR of 1 and could probably be developed with more inbound links.

Livewyre Update

Things don't stay static for very long in the world of the internet and in blogging in particular. This was my first blog and I now have five of them, all hosted by blogger, but three of the others have their own dot com domain names.
I started this blog to promote and talk about the website that I originally had for converting cassettes into CD's. That website is still running, and I now run a second website which is really an extension of this blog formulated into a proper site on it's own domain.
I have learned a lot since I started this blog and am hopefully a bit better at blogging and particularly at monetising... Over the next few posts, I am going to shamelessly plug my own sites for three reasons:

1. To get some current content on this blog
2. To provide links to my other projects
3. To update any visitors to this site so that they will be aware of where the 'Livewyre' world is now at...

Hopefully anybody reading the next few posts will be able to see how much I have learned particularly when you contrast this blog with my latest offerings... I can tell you that I have found a way of blogging that is able to provide a reasonable return from Adsense. This flies in the face of advice that I have given that implies that it is very difficult to make any Adsense from a blog at all... Finding a niche is the key, and this is not something that can easily be done time and time again...