I had logged into my blogging console to write a post about free cna training and observed that Binaryday has got the little green bar back. The pagerank of binaryday is 2 only. The pagerank is not exactly great considering that this blog has been a pagerank 4 blog in the past and it has earned a lot of good quality backlinks since then. However I am extremely happy considering that the pagerank bar had gone gray for more than 1 and half year now. Google seemed to have penalized Binaryday.

Most importantly, I resolved the issue with a method that can be replicated for any blog suffering from google penalty. I shall write a post about the method soon. For now I am going to celebrate with some Vodka

You may be surprised to see me writing about Free CNA training. However I have been working on the topic for quite some time now and I have been really impressed with the concept of free cna training in the USA and I thought it will be nice to share the concept on this blog as well.

What is Free CNA Training

CNA training is a training program that prepares people to become a certified nursing assistant. However because of the recent slowdown in the USA many aspirants have been finding it difficult to affors the cost of the CNA Training. The Free CNA Training  is a really intelligent solution to this problem. Free CNA Training programs are offered by nursing homes and old age care homes. The candidate is allowed to attend the CNA classes for free, however he is expected to pay the organization in kind either in the form of free service during the course or by agreeing to work with the organization after completing the CNA certification.

Are free CNA Training courses a fraud?

Some organizations have brought bad name to free cna training courses by promising a free training to candidates while they actually charge an exorbiant fee later. However according to me such people are few and you need not worry about them. Do your homework and basic background check well before joining any free cna training course and you shall not have to worry.

How do I get a Free Red Cross CNA training?

Looks like you are confusing two of the most popular forms of CNA training. Red Cross CNA Training is a CNA training offered by the red cross and it is NOT free. While free cna training are offered by a number of nursing homes and hospitals in America. Many people get both these concepts mixed up and try to look for free red cross cna training. To the best of my knowledge there is nothing like a free red cross cna training though.

I hope you found the information provided above useful. Let me know if any clarification is required and I shall help you out.

I have been away from the blog for quite sometime now. However a document released by Google that analyzed seo friendliness of 100 Google products and provides detailed instructions for improving the rankings and click through rate inside the SERP, has managed to get me back to blogging. The document contains sort of official confirmation about some hotly debated seo topics. Here are some seo insights obtained by me from the document.

1. Title Tag:
   • A descriptive title tag helps search engines to understand the content better
   • Most search engines use 60 characters from the title tag.
   • Search engines may give lesser importance to keywords after a certain point – Keep main keywords to the front.
   • Some users only look at titles – If you skimp on your title tag, you’re missing out on clicks from users who only
     scan result titles on a search results page Really!! (Page 5)
   • Prefered structure is <title> Brand Name – Target Keywords </title> : Leverage the brand if you have one (Page 6)
   • Do not copy title tag from some other page. (Page 7) Show this example the next time your boss shouts for a wrong copy paste job. Even Googlers use it
2. URL Structure
   • A descriptive url structure helps search engines to understand the content better
   • It plays a part in improving user click through rate
3. Meta Description Tag
   • description meta tags and keyword meta tags don’t count in Google’s ranking  (official confirmation of what we knew) -Page 9
   • The text from meta description tag is sometimes used for result snippet. Absence of meta description tag may result in non sensical text from the page to be shown as snippet.
   • Fill your two lines – Similar to the title tag, you want to use all of the space given to you in the snippet. You’ll describe your product better to users, have the opportunity for more bolded words, and take up more real estate on the search results page Page-9
   • Missing snippet for a page is a signal that something is wrong like google bot being denied access through robots.txt
4. Sitelinks
   • Webmasters can improve the chances of getting a sitelink by using 1. Hierarchical site structure, 2. using descriptive anchor text for internal links and 3. avoiding deep nesting of content behind many subdirectories. (p-13)
   • Google’s algorithm for creating sitelinks is not perfect. You should block unappealing sitelinks to get better sitelinks (p-15)
   • Google chooses popular and relevant content as sitelink (p-16)
5. Consolidating link juice
   • Either 301 redirect or canonical tag can be used to consolidate link juice from different pages showing the same content.  In the entire discussion about duplicate content, the emphasis is on split of link juice and not any duplicate content penalty. Is there a hint there? (p-19)
     
   • 301 redirect will not help if the page is blocked through robots.txt (p-19)
   • Don’t use 302s when 301s would be more appropriate (p-27) 302 redirect does not consolidate link juice.
   • 301 to the canonical or use the rel=”canonical” link element. Hopefully dobuts about effectiveness of rel=”canonical” tag will be removed now. (p-30)
6. Heading Tag Use
   • Use of heading tag helps search engines to understand your content better (p-34)
   • Smart use of CSS to get the same effect will not help (p-48)
   • H1 tags are better than H3 (p-48)
7. Images
   • Link images to the canonical destination pages to consolidate internal link juice (p-39)
   • Appropriate ALT text for linked images help search engines learn about target page and the image itself (p-42)
   • the alt text of images is  treated as anchor text by search engines (p-43)
8. Internal Anchor Text
   • Use of descriptive anchor text for internal pages helps (p-45)

Please let me know about any point that I might have missed or wrongly interpreted.

Please help this content reach more people with a tweet/sphinn or any other sharing medium of your choice, if you liked it.

What happens to rankings of a website after it is sold, is one of the open seo questions. Matt Cutts is believed to have said in domain round table 2008 that is a domain changes hand, then google resets the link value to zero/ near zero. If that were true then the entire business model of site flipping would be dead by now. Hence I have a strong suspicion that rankings of a domain remains unaffected by its sale.

Good seos are expected to confirm their views through experiments So I am going to set up a simple experiment to find out what happens to a site after it gets sold. Recently one of my favorite blogs, bloggingtips.com got sold on flippa for USD 60,000. That may explain my interest in Binaryday, even though I do not have any adsense after splitting with my partner. The important thing is the analytics report was posted on the site. I have created a list of top keywords and where on google bloggingtips is ranking for them.

1. Blogging tips – 1
2. Blogger Themes – 8
3. Blogger Theme – 4
4. Great  Blogs -2
5. Blogger widgets – 13

I shall be again checking these rankings one month from now and we shall know if domains have a life after sale

1. The most successful bloggers are the ones pursuing excellence and not success itself. Look at even the big daddy of MMO blogging, john or guru of seo blogging. They were simply sharing what they knew about their respective domains.
2. There is only one way to be the best in what you do. Do what you really love without worrying about the money. If the best football player tries to play golf for the money, he will be a mediocre golf player at the best. I am not asking you to stop doing keyword research and all. But do not start writing about automobiles just because it is the highest paying term.
3. Do not become nervous because of others’ expectations. I have suffered from this issue, personally. After some of my most appreciated posts, I was too nervous to write anything as I was worried that it is not upto the mark. That sort of took the fun out of blogging for me.
4. There is no room for even the smallest mistake. Remember what happened in the movie when chamtkar was replaced with balatkar in a speech. Do not let that happen to your blog.
5. Like the hero of the movie, you have most probably not heard of the most successful bloggers. The ones that make a ton of money and are at the forefront of innovation. Seek them out and learn from them.

I have been neglecting binaryday for far too long as I was busy with my recent projects. As new year is coming near, I thought I will give my blog a new year present in the form of a new theme. Let me know how you like it.

I shall be interested to hear your suggestions for further additions to the theme as well.

Until you have put everything that you have read till now into action. I am surprised by how much time we spend reading about how to create a super successful blog and how little time we spend on the blog itself.

There is a BIG difference between the two. The problem is when people give you feedback about a design, more often than not they are talking about beauty aspect. There is only 1 way to find out if a design is useful or not and that is through analyzing user action on your website.

As some of you may know I run a website for used mobiles. The look of my website sucks. But it kicks ass of much better designed websites when it comes to number of used mobiles that get listed and number of users who visit on a daily basis. I think that is simply because of my focus on simpleand useful design.

I used to have text fields for entering the city, mobile brand and model in the page where people selling their used mobiles list the mobile phones. Then around 3 months back, I added simple drop down boxes to these fields. Mobile phones from cities in India that I was not even aware of started to appear on my site.

Next logical thing to do was add a search functionality to the listing pages. I did not have the time to do it properly. So I just went ahead and put the search boxes at the first white space that I could find. And the results since then has taken me by complete surprise.For the same number of unique users, the number of pageviews and my adsense income has gone up by 8 times!!!!!!!

Why am I writing about my experience on the used mobiles website on this blog about blogging. Because I think bloggers need to take their related posts plugin and popular posts plugin more seriously than they do now a days. Most related posts plugins show up posts that are 1 year or more old.

I am so excited and motivated to change the design of binaryday. If I can bring about a 8 times increase in income of binaryday, I can leave my day job and start living the internet lifestyle. Wish me luck guys!!!

Which of the following websites you would have invested in based on keyword research?

1. Amazon
2. Ebay
3. Techcrunch
4. Labnol.org
5. Seomoz.org

I am at a loss to know a single great website that could have been started based on the philosophy of “enter a niche based on extensive keyword research”.

What will you do if there is a real estate that you can buy for 20$ a year or you may rent it for free. Will you buy it or rent it knowing fully well that it can easily fetch 20,000$ after 2 years? What will call someone who decides to rent it because there is a 1% chance that it may result in a grand 50$ loss to him.

That was easy wasn’t it? Now let us say what you get into when you decide to create a blog a free blogging platform like wordpress or blogger.

1. There is a good chance you will never see any payout from your blog. Wordpress does not allow you to post advertisements. Blogspot allows you to put advertisements but then I doubt many advertising networks will be too keen to accept something.blogspot.com
2. You are bound by the stupid rules of the blogging platform. They may change the rule any day they want and you will loose a blog that you developed over years of hard work. I have been astonished by the number of people that have lost perfectly genuine blog because the stupid software thought they were spamming.
3. You can not extend your blog to anything additional. If I wan, I can add a forum, a private members only area or anything else to binaryday. Can you do that on your  something.blogspot.com?

I can go on and on about why it is stupid to have a blog on a free platform. However before you curse me and leave, I will request you to go to the top of this post and read my real estate example once more. That real estate available for 12$ a year is a self hosted blog with your own url and own hosting space. I am sure you know a lot of people who make a decent amount of money from their blog. If you do not then I shall suggest that you read December earnings report of 15 bloggers.

You are lucky if you have not already created your blog on one of these free blogging platforms. Create a self hosted blog today itself. If you already have a blog on one of these free blogging platforms, then you are in luck. Harsh at shoutmeloud provides a very valuable service of migrating from free hosted blog to self hosted  platform. No that is not n affiliate link nor Harsh has paid me any money for linking to his page.

P.S: Feel free to contact me at ask[at]binaryday.com if you need any clarification regarding how to get complete website for less than 20$ a year.

Other posts of mine that you may like to read

1. A simple framework to select topic for blogging
2. 25 Factors that determine your adsense earning andList of Indian Advertising networks
3. 6 websites to get your indian startup profiled and get free backlinks and
4. My roadmap to blogging success

I have read more than 25 really good blog posts about how to select a topic for blogging and they have suggested different methods including passion, keyword research, income analysis, competition analysis etc. These posts left me confused even after more than 4 years of blogging and they are supposed to be read by beginners!!!!!!

My framework is really simple. Just identify all the topics that you are interested in and then rank them from 1 to 5. 1 being the most attractive and 5 the least attractive one. Sum it and you will be surprised by how easy it is to identify the topic of your choice.

Damn too apt…..

Came across this really useful post about earning more money through referrals. This is one of the best posts about blog earnings along with my post about 25 factors that impact your adsense earning.

Coming to referral income, have you observed the way most of the successful online products gets launched. Take the launch of Membershipmastermind as a case study. It does not matter which MMO blogger you have subscribed to. Everyone has sent at least one post writing about the virtues of the programme. The programme may be good, I am not contesting that. But there is a lot to learn in the way it is being sold.

It is difficult to believe someone when he says I have come up with this great training programme but you need to pay 750$ to subscribe. But the credibility factor increases when a third person says Yaro has come up with this awesome course. You will be stupid not to enroll for as little as 750$. It becomes even more irresistible when 4-5 top bloggers that I have subscribed to and take daily advice from recommend the product.

The question is if you are planning to use referral products, you need to build up your own echo chamber. You need those 3-4 guys who will say binaryday has come up with this great programme that you will be stupid not to enroll.

Who is there in your echo chamber? Let me know in the comments if you shall like to be part of my echo chamber.

Just a quick update. Seems like the long awaited pagerank update is going on with active discussions happening on webmasterworld and Digitalpoint.

To understand why you need to keep track of your pagerank, read my article 5 reasons why Toolbar Pagerank is still important.

The following posts on binaryday will help you get backlinks and hence increase your pagerank

1. Beginners guide to building free backlinks
2. Why you need to know what type of backlink your blog needs
3. 60 dofollow blogs
4. 6 websites to get your indian startup profiled

The fluctuation in adsense earnings keeps on puzzling bloggers. And not many bloggers do not think of consequence of something like adding a top commentator plugin on their adsense earning.  This post about 25 factors that impact your adsense earning will help you think about consequences of such small changes that you make on your month end earning.

Many regular readers of Binaryday will be aware that I have been working on a used bikes website for quite sometime. Around 1 month back I moved binaryday and the used bikes site to a new server on bluehost. While doing some routine seo checkup on the site, I realized that google has not indexed the site since September 15 i.e almost 1 month time!!! A quick check on other sites showed that all sites that had been moved to bluehost, were showing the same issue. I was really scared at this point as that meant google might have flagged off something about my site.

I logged into google webmaster tools and went straight to the crawl stats page. Here is a screenshot of the crawl stat page that confirmed my fear that google has stopped crawling my pages. From an average of 200 pages per day, Google had stopped crawling my pages all together!!!

My next stop was the sitemaps section of google webmaster tool. The sitemap for used mobiles site was showing some stupid error i.e robots.txt unreachable. I never put up a robots.txt file on my website out of my love for GoogleBot. It has always worked fine. What is this new issue??

A quick search on google led me to this file. This is a google webmaster help file.I found the problem at the bottom of the page. It is OK to not have a robots.txt on your site if an attempt to access robots.txt results in a 404 error. However if you do not have a robots.txt file and the server is giving some other error status then google does not crawl your site at all !!!

I have just added a new robots.txt to the site and google has started to access the files. Hope everything will get back to normal soon. This has been one of the stupidest mistakes that I have done in the last 5-6 years. I am confident of going past it in future though.

Used bikes section completed

I just added a new section to my contacthello.com website that will allow users to sell used bikes online in India. Unlike the used mobiles niche, the used bikes niche is dominated by some really well established and old websites and hence I am expecting a much longer time before I start ranking well in this niche.

KW research for used bikes broke my heart

The keyword research for the used bikes keyword has been the most depressing work that I have done  in quite sometime. After spending close to 10 days, developing the website for used bikes I went to Google adwords keyword tool and tried out the keyword used bikes with geo targetting set to India. Less than 4700 people are searching for the keyword every month. That means I will get less than 100 users a day even if I were to reach the #1 spot for my target keyword

I am still bullish on the used bikes segment though

The above goes on to show that you must always get your keyword research done even before you start writing the first html page for a site. However I am not giving up on the used bikes market. I am confident that sale of used bikes, cars and used mobiles will increase in India over a period of time and more importantly more and more transactions will move online thereby increasing usefulness of contacthello. Only I am not expecting to start getting 1000s of visitors overnight.

Final thoughts and way ahead

I know the aesthetic of the site sucks especially the index page. I intend to hire a web developer to give a consistent and better look to the site as soon as I am done with adding the used cars section. I intend to develop the used cars section as a vertical search engine more like bixee for cars. Wish me luck guys!!!!

Getting the initial users is one of the most difficult tasks for any startup. If you are targetting online users then a good ranking on google will solve the problem to a good extent. As all of us know getting links from authority websites goes a long way in obtaining a good ranking on Google. The good news is that the following 6 websites specialize in writing about Indian startups. Hence try to get your website profiled on all these 6 and a good amount of your seo work would be completed.

1. http://www.killerstartups.com/(6)
2. http://headstart.in/(5)
3.  http://www.pluggd.in/ (5)
4. http://www.webyantra.net/ (5)
5. http://www.yourstory.in (4)
6. Startups.in (3)

The numbers in bracket represent the pagerank of the website. That is one PR6, 3 PR5 and 1 PR4 and PR3 links each. No website can get a better start in less than 1 week work.

I am exceptionally thankful to every person who has ever tweeted the link to any of my blog posts. However till date it was next to impossible to figure out who have tweeted about your post thereby providing the all important traffic. That is why I love this new tool called tweetiator. Tweetiator lets you track all the people who share a link on your blog directly or through a url shortening service.

While it is a paid product, you get a 1 month free trial. Go and give it a try and find out who are tweeter power users.

Warning: This post is a comparatively new one. However make sure to read it as I share a step by step method of finding profitable niche (used bikes) with a real example. This is my most successful strategy through which I have been making good amount of money.

Niche sites are a great and popular way to earn some really good passive income. The most critical part is the process of identifying the niche. There is no dearth of sites that talk about the concepts in a theoretical manner. However most of these sites do not share the real niche sites from which they have been making money for the fear of attracting competition. In this post I am going to share a niche site about used bikes for sale that I am starting to work upon and most importantly I shall share the exact process of how I zeroed down to this particular niche.

In this post I shall talk about

1. Requirements of a good niche
2. Identifying the broad industry
3. How to find out potential niches inside the broad industry
4. Competition analysis
5. Identifying the income potential
6. Selecting the niche to work upon
7. Designing a niche site
8. Preparing for niche domination

[Read more →]