Introduction to Domain Name Service (DNS)

Before setting up a dns, let’s take a look at the thing itself. The domain name system (DNS) is used to translate your domain name into your host’s IP address. That means that if you type “name.com” thanks to the DNS it will be the same as “077.888.999.011″, the ip address. Enough technical details, onward to the settings!

The steps to setting up a DNS

are as follows:

1. Register a hosting
2. Register a domain
3. Enter the domain control panel
4. Under the dns tab there should be two fields – “dns1″ and “dns2″
5. Copy the two DNS IP’s from the confirmation email for the hosting account
   - or -
   Contact your hosting company and issue the DNS address
6. Return to the domain control panel and fill in the two fields with the corresponding two addresses.

As simple as it gets

below is an example with the Tradeo free web hosting and the .CO.CC free domain registrar.

Tunning up the domain:

1. Login to your .co.cc account
2. Click on “Manage Domain”
3. Expand the “Manage DNS tab”
4. In the field “Name Server 1″ type: ns1.0lx.net
5. In the field “Name Server 2″ type: ns2.0lx.net
6. Click the “Set Up” button.

Adding the domain to your hosting

1. Login to your vista cpanel account (here)
2. Look for the “Domains” category and select “Addon domains” underneath
3. In the “Domain Name” text field fill in your .co.cc domain name
4. Click “Create Domain”
5. Done.

Take notice: DNS changes may take from 24 to 48 hours to update.

First you’re gonna need the All In One SEO Pack. If you have trouble uploading and activating the plugin see this video.

Once you’re done with those two steps login to your blog, go to “Settings” and from there to “All In One SEO Pack”. What we’re actually after here is to change the <title> values so that they are more keyword rich and SEO-compatible.

Title Tags

Here is the title syntax we are going to follow:
Website Title | Category > Subcategory - Item

Below you can copy paste those values in your plugin settings:

• Post Title Format: %blog_title% | %category_title% – %post_title%
• Page Title Format: %blog_title% | %page_title%
• Category Title Format: %blog_title% | %category_title%
• Archive Title Format: %blog_title% | %date%
• Tag Title Format: %blog_title% | Tags – %tag%
• Search Title Format: %blog_title% – %search%

Also, check all the “noindex” options below and “Autogenerate Descriptions:”.

SE-friendly URLs

Last thing to do is to tune your URLs to be more Search Engine-friendly. While in the settings section, switch to the “Permalinks” tab. There you will find various options for URL formatting.

By default your link depth shouldn’t be more than 2 steps, which means:
www.root.com/folder1/folder2/

While if you are running WordPress for a blog it’s not a problem to use the default year-date formatting. For any other projects I suggest experimenting with the “Custom Structure” option. It allows you to type-in your variables, thus forming a new URL structure. If you don’t know which ones to use exactly consult with the All In One SEO Pack settings tab.

Here’s what I used for one of my sites:
/products/postname/

Note

Switching to those options takes no more than 10 minutes. And it is always worth to spend some time on improving your site’s structure. Don’t underestimate small settings, because they can make a big difference.

• Create Robots.txt
• Add the following directives:

Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/K2RC6/comments-ajax.php
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /wp-login.php?action=register
Disallow: /wp-login.php?action=lostpassword
Disallow: /wp-trackback.php


• Generate a Sitemap
• Add your sitemap to the Robots.txt

sitemap: http://money.tradeo.biz/sitemap.xml.gz


Now you will avoid having system pages (like mysql queries/error and logins) indexed by search engines.

If you use affiliate links to monetize your site, add the URL’s to your Robots.txt file. This will keep them usable, but search engine spiders will not be able to follow them, thus, increasing your page value (yes, because you have less outgoing links).

If you find any good indexing optimisations for WordPress, drop a comment here or maybe a mail to let me know. Thanks!

See also: WordPress SEO 101

You know, I’ve been thinking a lot these days – What it takes to run a website efficiently?

And, no doubt, running a successful website or blog needs not only good content, but also a good psychologycal approach.

What does psychology has to do with websites?

It’s all connected in just like a circle.
First you need regular updates with fresh content. So top priority is creating a schedule. Just to note: the fact that you have a schedule doesn’t mean that you must go insane on keeping up with it.

And here psychology kicks in! To deside on which days of the week to write for your site and, on the average, how long to work each day, you need to clearly define what do you expect from yourself as well as from your website. Don’t forget – you will do a good job when you are relaxed.

I have compiled a list of questions to ask yourself in order to define if it will be your full-time job or something like a hobby.

1. On which days of the week will I make updates? How is that?
2. How many hours per day will I be working?
3. Will I handle it?
4. Will this schedule interfere with my personal life, job or school?
5. Should I be writing in the weekends and schedule updates for the weekdays?
6. - or – Should I be writing in the days I’m going to publish the updates?
7. Will I get bored with this routine?
8. What (website) results do I expect?

My example

Here’s what I came up with after trying to answer those (hard?) question.

• I’ll write new content in the weekends, whenever I can (kinda like going fishing!)
• I’ll schedule my updates to be published on the 1, 3 and 5^th day of the week.
• Yeah, it might be a problem with school, good thing I graduated recently
• I quit my dialy job so now I’m gonna work on my sites and have fun rest of the time.
• Hope I will be ok with that…
• It has became a hobby so I guess I won’t be bored with it any time soon.
• Results.. I’m not quite sure about that. Some comments would be a good start
  Otherwise I just want to be useful to my readers.

So, that’s it. Be Zen and you will be successful. And my advice – don’t try to manage more than 2-3 sites if you are still a beginner. I’ve been doing this for around year and a half and I can say that it’s not easy to manage more than 3 websites (even small ones) with good content and marketing.

Hope this helps

Let’s talk about content. Yeah “content is king”. Everyone has heard that, but no one listens to it either. I was like that when I started out, myself. Then I came to realize that every page with content is a Landing Page!

Okay, but what is a landing page?

A Landing Page is a page that is targeted by the search engines and thus, visitors “land” when they click-through to your site from the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Types of content, formatting and elements

Let’s get back to the content thing we were talking about. If we have to classify content by types and effectivness it should look something like that (1-best; 5-worse):

1. Formatted original and useful content with stock images in it
2. Plain text original content
3. Pre-written content with stock images
4. Pre-written content
5. Copied content (equals ban from search engines)

Before we discuss the types of content any further, let’s have a look at the page elements we can use to add a more interactive look to our content. Such page elements are:

• Videos
• Images
• Flash objects (embedded mp3 players, slideshows, etc.)

Those three are the “heavy artillery” of article publishing. Use them wisely and you will not regret it. Confused where to put them? Why don’t you get yourself a newspaper and see how it’s done. Your readers will always appreciate a well formated and entertaining piece of content.

[note: if you are planning to use such page elements on an affiliate article check first what resources you have been provided by your affiliate program, such as MoreNiche. In case you are using it, you can check right away (links open in a new window) by logging in or registering.]

Some good places for stock resources (that is, stock resources out of your affiliate program) are YouTube – for videos; Stock Exchange – for photos/images; Widget Box – for flash and other interactive objects. The types of content you plan to use must co-respond to a certain aspect of the work on your website. If you preffer to work on the marketing, SEO (search engine optimisation) you should use re-written content either formatted with stock images or just plain text.

If your don’t feel like exchanging links 24/7, optimising your site, etc. you should start planning out some fresh content for your site. Either way you will get visitors from search engines and, eventualy, you will start selling right away. You can read more about search engines in the SEO category. I’m classifying the types of content because there is no point in over-working yourself doing full-time both types of website works.

Original content

There is nothing like fresh and new thing to learn when visiting a site. This can get you a lot of backlinks (depending on how useful it is) or at least a lot of visitors. Remember that whatever site you have, your visitors won’t need always to come over and buy something. You gotta convince them that your site is a good place to hang out.

Starting out with original content is not always the best idea. Beginners, always save your content on your hard drive, because if your marketing efforts fail and your site is no longer worth working on (get’s banned from Search Engines, etc.) you will delete it, start a new one, but your precious content will be long gone before you realize it. Always keep a backup copy of your original content. If you decide that you have no further use of it sell it, heck, you can even sell it on eBay!

But enough bullshit, let’s go over some tips on writing down an original content. Because you will be writing on a content that is relative to your niche, product you are promoting it might not always be so interesting to write about. Make sure that you choose a niche to work on that has something to say about – previous life experiences or personal expertise.

Choosing your niche to work on wisely will be a big bonus when you start creating your content. Other good thing to keep in mind is to be actual. No one is interested in reading on topics that are outdated. Even if you run a pharmaceuticals shop, make sure you create a blog, get links exchanged in between, and write down something original for your visitors. Don’t feel shy to write down something you’ve seen the other day (for example), because clients/visitors love seeing a chief figure getting down to earth and speaking to the average folk.

Pre-written content

Pre-written content is a great thing for people just starting out or all of you marketing/seo gurus out there. It takes me about an hour to fully transform an article I’ve scraped from the net, and believe me, this is the easiest way around. Just think about it – if you spend 2 hours per day (or two articles), 5 days a week (ten articles) and every month you’ll have FOURTY new articles on you website.

That’s great but the key to success is doing something often, even if it’s for short period of time. On the average a good website has around 2,000 pages of content on it, excluding product catalogues, etc. It is the size that gives popularity. Just like putting your local news stand against a mall. Remember, though, it is better to be quality than quantity.
A good article resource I use for my affiliate sites is Article Geek.com or Ezine Articles.com.

[hint: if you login to MoreNiche and go to the "guides" category there is a ebook on "fast and effective article re-writting" which I highly recommend.]

Copied content

Scraped, copied and duplicate content. There is not much to talk about it. No one likes to see a rip-off of someone’s hard work. Additionaly, you can easily get banned from search engines. Don’t think it’s a low price to pay – it will kill nearly 50% of your traffic.
Just don’t be an asshole and play fair, ok?