Speed up wordpress blog by using WP Super Cache

A really successful wordpress blog can consume a lot of server power as each page needs to be dynamically created for each user. Now you can remove the need for doing so by using WP Super Cache plugin.

This plugin generates static html files from the dynamic WordPress blog. Once the file is generated your webserver will serve the static html file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Advantages of WP Super Cache

1. It saves server power. If your blog has become popular and you are yet to move to a dedicated server, then you should use this plugin.
2. It will speed up your wordpress blog. That in turn makes the user experience of the blog readers much better. Also a faster blog/website is liked by most search engines, including Google.
3. Static html pages are better than dynamic ones from SEO point of view

Topics: Internet, Plugin, SEO, Wordpress

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Recent pagerank update

There has been a pagerank update by google recently. Unfortunately binaryday.com has suffered a drop in pagerank from 4 to 3. Couple of other blogs i.e abhisays.com and bishtblogs.net have undergone a similar drop in the pagerank. I am not sure if google has decreased the pagerank of blogs across the board or there is something wrong with binaryday itself.

Topics: News, SEO

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Link out to get Traffic !!

All of us know that incoming link can bring a lot of traffic. However has it ever occured to you that outgoing links can bring substantial traffic?

I had written a post about release of wordpress 2.5. I started getting an unusually high number of visitors on that post. (Unusual by the standard of this blog :)) Most of the traffic was coming from the trackback link on the wordpress blog.

To test the theory I wrote another article about yahoo microsoft story with several links to techcrunch articles. The post has got more than 100 visiors from trackback alone.

So always make sure to link to the sources from which you are picking facts and ideas for your post. It is the right thing to do and additionally it will help you get some additional traffic as well.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money, SEO

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Strategies that we use to get more traffic

It has been more than 3 years since we started mywalkin. With more than 24,000 feedburner subscribers and more than 1,00,000 unique visitors a month, it has been a reasonable success. I had never bothered to understand how we managed to get those users. However recently I did some analysis as I want to use the learnings from mywalkin, to get more traffic for binaryday.

If you are starting a new website or blog, then you have basically 3 different options to get traffic. Direct advertisement, Search engine Optimization and creating a word-of-mouth buzz.

Direct advertisement has the advantage of providing immediate results. If you spend X amount of money then you will get Y number of traffic. If the concept needs some initial userbase to start working like some digg like concept or forum or social network, then this is a must. However direct advertisement makes your website grow in an arithmatic progression. i.e if your advertisement budget allows you to get 200 users per month, then the growth of your site will look like 200,400,600, 800 and so on. CPC and CPM advertisement methods shall fall under this category.

Search engine Optimization looks like the most talked about method. If you are not in a highly competitive domain then it is not very difficult to rank high for target terms. It does need some initial investment both time and money. However once the work is over, much less investment is required for maintaining the position. On the downside, you will be completely at the mercy of all mighty google. It takes some time to take effect. While getting to the top 10 may be possible, moving up from there becomes a really big challenge. So with search engine optimization the traffic graph will look something like 0,0,0,50,70,100,170,300,300,300.

Word of Mouth This is perhaps one of the most important and most difficult strategy to use. And this is what differentates between a good site and a great site. For this strategy to work, you shall need to make your customers to talk about you. You can do that through quality and innovative features. However if you manage to achieve this, then this is effectivly a zero cost method of getting traffic. The importance of this method is that it makes your traffic increase in a geometric progression. assuming you manage to convince 10% of your visitors to talk about your product, your traffic numbers will look like 100,110,121,133,146,161,177,195,214 i.e the traffic will double in 8 months.

Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money, SEO, Tips and Tricks, Tools

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My Experiment with google image search-I: Result-I

I am doing some research on google image search to learn image search optimization. As part of the experiment, I had uploaded 2 images yesterday in a post with text string xyzabcabpq, 1 image named xyzabcabpq and another image with the alt text xyzabcabpq. The initial result is in.

Text gets indexed faster than image

A search for xyzabcabpq in the web search returns the binaryday page. However image search does not return any result yet. Surprisingly even blog search does not return any result. Waiting to see who wins the competition between blog search and image search. Keep checking the SEO Experiment category till then.

Topics: SEO, SEO Experiment

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My Experiment with google image search-I

I have just recently realized the importance of google image search. I have been trying to find more on google image search engine optimization. Surprisingly very less literature is present on the topic.

Hence I am starting my own experiments on image search engine optimization. I have uploaded 2 images of apple air. I will be targetting the term xyzabcabpq. That is because there is no other search result for that term.

One image has a file name same as the search term. The other file has alt text as that. let us see which one wins.

Topics: SEO, SEO Experiment

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Show your pagerank on your page

Pagerank of a blog or site is an important input for text advertisers and people interested in exchanging link with you. You can attract potential advertisers by displaying your pagerank on your webpage. You can see a demo just below the feedburner box on the sidebar of this page.

I have written a small tool to do so for any webpage. You can show a similar image by adding a single line to your blog. Add the following within php to display your pagerank

include “http://www.binaryday.com/pagerank.php?url=[your site url]”

Topics: Blogs, Resources, SEO, Tools

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How to increase your feedburner subsciber numbers?

Feedburner subscriber base is the most assured way to increase number of repeat users. feedburner stat also acts as a good proxy for knowing how many readers find the blog really cool. That is the reason I keep checking my feedburner stat and keep thinking about ways to increase that number.

Below are 2 methods that I find are the most useful to increase the feedburner subscriber number.

Ask them to subscribe You will be surprised how effective is that “if you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed” link. If you think about it, the reader is most likely to subscribe to your feed after going through a really good article.

Convert the Unverified Subscribers This is one data that really surprised me. If you have a feed subscription service for quite sometime, you will be really surprised by how many people who subscribed to your feed never confirmed the subscription. It is normally as high as 40% of your total active subscriber base. These are people who liked your blog (why else they will subscribe at the first place?).

So go ahead and remind them to just verify the subscription. In my experience the best way is to subscribe their email ids once more. They will get a confirmation mail. At least in my case 80% of the people confirm the subscription.

If you found this post useful, you know what to do.

Topics: Resources, SEO, Tips and Tricks

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The increased importance of image search engine optimization

They say you can never understand women. I think for us webmasters that translates to you can never understand google. I thought I knew quite a lot about SEO (Search engine Optimization). However I was pleasantly reminded by google that there is just too much that I do not know even after 3 years of trying to understand it.

While Binaryday has managed to get a pagerank of 4, our sister blog adoholik has a pagerank of 2 only. Binaryday has a lot more text rich pages compared to adoholik. Hence I was quite confident that binaryday would receive a lot more traffic from search engines than adoholik. Boy, can I be more wrong? In the last 15 days of march, while binaryday has got little less than 500 visitors from google, adoholik has managed to get more than 2000 visitors.

Where did I go wrong? Well I seem to have underestimated the popularity of google image search. If my experience with the SEO world is anything to go by, then the entire SEO community commits the same mistake. Here is a screenshot of search engine traffic of adoholik to convince you that image search can indeed send you some serious traffic.

The 2,000 visitors may not look great but when you consider that it is for a website with pagerank 2, in a competitive field like advertisement that number starts looking quite impressive.

How image search became so important?
There is a reason why the seo community by large seems to avoid optimizing for image search. Not so long ago, very few people used it. However some timeback google introduced universal search. Basically universal search brought search results from different verticals like image and video and showed them up on the main Google SERP. I think that was the turning point in the history of image search.

Why you must concentrate on image search engine optimization?
As I have established with the above data image search represents significant opportunity to get search traffic. More importantly you should do it because not many others are doing it. The text search engine optimization is such a widely studied subject that everyone is doing it and if you are targeting a popular term, you have hardly any chance of ranking higher. However image search represents an opportunity to rank higher with comparatively less effort.

How to do search engine optimization for image search?
I am yet to find out myself. Over the next 15 days I shall be doing some serious research myself and using them on binaryday. I intend to keep writing about my experience here. So stay tuned in for more updates.

P.S: If you are a webmaster and you are interested in image search engine optimization then please leave a comment below with your mail id. I shall like to talk to you on the topic.

Topics: Internet, SEO, SEO Experiment

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Get a pagerank 4 without any external link !!!

At the beginning of this blog, I had planned to keep writing about my SEO efforts. There were only 2 posts (here and here). There were no more posts after that because I got busy with content creation and with another venture of mine. I had forgotten all about SEO till I happened to install google toolbar on my browser and surprisingly I have a pagerank 4 for binaryday. I was surprised because I have not tried to get any external link till now.

The reason I am posting it here is because the pagerank goes against all conventional SEO theory I have read till now.

The domain is not old. It is less than 6 months old.

I write about diverse topics. I have never thought about SEO while writing an article. So you will not find any keyword concentration on my page

Most importantly the blog does not have absolutely any external links to it. There are a couple of linkbacks from comments I had left on other blogs like techcrunch, but I am sure google must be heavily discounting those links.

Then what explains this sudden jump in my google pagerank? I am not sure. If any SEO expert happens to read this post, then will request to let me know what is it that I am doing right.

Topics: Internet, SEO, SEO Experiment

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You must market your blog

Why do I need to Market my blog?
This is the most frequently asked question that I have heard from blogger freinds who blog as a hobby and do not intend to earn money. As a matter of fact many of them find it beneath them to market their blog. So I will like to address that issue first.

It is your duty to the Internet Community
There are two types of people creating content on the internet. People who are creating content for easy money and people who are doing so because it is their passion. The second class of bloggers may monetize their site but money is never their primary motivation for blogging. IMHO the quality of the content created by the second class is better than the quality of the content created by people who create content simply to make money.

Unfortunately the passionate bloggers do not want to market their blog. And the quick maney bloggers have a huge incentive to do everything to get more and more people to read their blogs. Net result of it is that the normal reader is bombarded with inferior quality content while the better quality content remain hidden from him.

If you want to prevent this deterioaration of quality of content on the internet, then you must actively try to make your blog accessible to as many people as possible and try to bring other good quality blogs to the front.

Topics: Blogs, Make Money, SEO

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