Joe Majewski

Submitting Your Blog to Technorati

Technorati is one of the Internet’s largest search engines for blogs, with over 100 million distinct blogs indexed as of this writing. As a webmaster, you should find yourself regularly promoting your site in a variety of ways.

For example, some of the first few things that I do upon launching a new website include getting indexed with Google and Yahoo, signing up for tools such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, and posting in forums with my domain name linked in my signature.

While producing unique content that people find useful is the most important thing that you can do as a webmaster, you must also work equally hard outside of your password-protected Admin panel. Neglecting to keep up with the newest Internet trends will reflect poorly upon your website in the long run. HTML standards are always being modified, and in order to stay in the race it would be to your benefit to understand how the web works.

This entire process can simply be referred to as search engine optimization (SEO); I mention this concept a lot on my blog, as I find it to be the most important set of standards and practices that can and will bring good fortune to a dedicated webmaster.

In my own words, search engine optimization is the effort put forth to enhance your source code and provide web crawlers with the required data to optimize your website’s reach in order to achieve the highest possible ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for any given keyword or phrase.

Google uses it’s trademarked Googlebot to crawl the web. Although Googlebot is a brilliant piece of work, it is still a bot, and it still follows step by step instructions much like every other program written in the past century.

When first learning how to make a website, the idea of sharing information with Googlebot will probably not come to mind for most individuals. Instead, you write some HTML, view the page in a web browser, and make a judgment based on how nice it looks. This is certainly a crude interpretation, but my point is that new web developers tend to think about how their visitors view the site, without realizing that a web crawler’s view of the site may be completely different.

With that said, I have already written a slew of articles on search engine optimization. If you are curious, I strongly urge you to read on, as you may find yourself making a few minor adjustments to your website’s layout that cause your traffic to double. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Today I’m submitting this website to Technorati, one of the world’s largest search engines for blogs. In order to prove that I’m the owner of this blog, I need to verify with the following code: 3VNDRN8GG855

The deed is done. It’s out of my hands now, and into the hands of the Technorati staff. In due time, I may or may not be indexed within their pages. Only time will tell. There’s an endless amount of things you can do to promote your own blog, and today I took the Technorati approach.

Surprise! Arena 2.0 is in Development

Here’s to a new project in the works, which many are sure to be excited about. I can’t reveal too much information right now, but this installment will be written from the ground up and will be very different from the Arena that many readers are familiar with.

I’m will not be the sole creator of this game. It is being designed by Jon Hemstreet, a co-worker of mine, and programmed by yours truly. I will provide much more information in the coming weeks as things develop, but I wanted to drop this bomb to remind you that Arena is NOT over.

Questions, comments, inquiries? Leave a comment below.

How to Protect Your WordPress Blog from Spam

If your blog doesn’t authenticate new comments by using a CAPTCHA test, then it shouldn’t be long before you begin receiving a steady amount of spam each and every day with your WordPress blog.

Akismet is a plug-in that comes standard with your WordPress installation, and it does a great job of identifying your spam comments. It’s safe to allow your spam inbox to grow to enormous sizes, as it doesn’t take up very much database space, and you never know if you’ll ever decide to manually search through them for legitimate comments.

Personally, I try to delete new spam as soon as I receive it. There has been occasions where Akismet has falsely accused a comment of mine to be spam, and it’s important to me that all legitimate comments posted get displayed.

Make sure your WordPress settings force you to personally accept comments before allowing them to appear on your website. I would also recommend that you allow WordPress to automatically accept comments made from IP addresses with previously accepted comments. It’s generally safe to assume that a single IP won’t spam you after posting a legitimate comment. Be aware, however, that many spam posts are designed to look “real”, so don’t let anything fool you.

The reason that spam comments are harmful to your blog is due to the links that they attempt to post, and the keywords that they throw on your pages. If enough spam comments get permitted, Google may suspect your website to be spam itself, and this could result in your domain name being sandboxed, or permanent PageRank 0 for all pages, making it very difficult to receive traffic.

Spam comments oftentimes contain many hyperlinks to other websites, which causes your PageRank to be stolen and passed on to the domains being linked to. This could be harmful for your blog in the long run, and it doesn’t appear professional to your visitors that are reading spam comments below your real content.

By whatever means necessary, keep spam comments off of your blog. You can let Akismet do most of the work, but realize the devastation that spam can cause. Be safe.

Comment on my Blog, and I Will Return the Favor

One of the most underrated ways to improve your blog’s reach on the Internet is to get in touch with other people that write similar content to yours. When logging into your `Admin Panel`, one of the first things you take a look at is the new comments that you’ve received. It’s always good to see that other people take interest in the content that you write.

This article serves the purpose of letting others know that I fully respect the notion of you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Taking some time here and there to search the web for other bloggers much like yourself is never a waste of time, and I honor this very rule.

With that said, leave a comment on my blog, and I will do the same for you. There is a small exception to this rule, however; spammers. It’s not difficult to spot them, but when a legitimate response is made to one of the articles that you took the time to write, it’s a kind gesture to do the same for them. The more you get your name out on the web, the higher your traffic will rise.

What I’ve noticed is that only a small handful of the articles that I write actually bring in traffic through Google, and the percentage of these articles that are written will greatly increase once a sort of fanbase is developed; a fanbase in the sense that people will continue to return your website to read more of your articles on a regular basis.

Partition the time you spend writing articles, the time you spend reading and commenting on others’ articles, and the time you spend updating your website with utilities that offer better navigation, readability, and fresh ideas to write about.

Take some time out and consider what you need to focus on most to bring in more traffic to your blog, and soon you will realize that writing new content isn’t the only way (although it surely is the best way) to drive visitors to your website.

Help From Fellow Webmasters

The primary focus of this domain is my blog, the one that you’re reading at the moment, discussing Computer Science and the like. While I do have quite a few domain names under my belt, I have been trying to maintain this particular one as a means to write about the things that I have learned and the things that I have created.

One of my creations, the World of Warcraft Information Database, linked at the top of every page, is completely unrelated to this site in terms of the content that the Google spiders will crawl. What I’d like to know is whether or not this will hurt my ranking according to Google.

Imagine a website with the main topic being “mathematics” having a folder containing a lot of content regarding something completely unrelated; like “bees”. That is sort of the situation that I am in. The root directory of this site is the blog that you’re reading, but there is a sub-directory (the World of Warcraft Information Database) which contains completely irrelevant information, which I store on this domain because I do consider it to be part of my portfolio.

Does this hurt my Google ranking at all, the fact that I have a website with two unrelated topics? I sure hope not. If anyone has some insight on this baffling situation I would really appreciate some feedback, so please do comment.

My interpretation is that Google will not compare this blog to the aforementioned database nor will it penalize me in any way. Rather, Google will view this blog as it’s own entity, as it will the World of Warcraft Information Database. If some overlap occurs in terms of keywords and content, I would only assume that they will cumulatively affect my keywords. In fact, they will without-a-doubt impact my keywords. The fact that the blog and the database have nothing in common causes Google to add keywords to my site with very low relevancy, and that is why a website such as Wikipedia, which houses keywords on just about every particular word or phrase imaginable can attain such success.

Had I placed the World of Warcraft Information Database on a separate domain name altogether I do not think that anything would change in terms of keyword relevancy.

So that’s my two cents; I would highly appreciate any insight from any webmaster or Google “expert”, so please comment below! Thanks very much, friends!