January 29, 2007
Dev | SEO Metrics: A Programmer's Guide
Here is a comprehensive list of the most common and useful SEO metrics along with their method of retrieval. Might be handy if you are deving out your own SEO tools or just curious how some of this is gathered.
Continue reading "SEO Metrics: A Programmer's Guide"Posted by Miles Evans at 7:47 PM
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October 11, 2006
Dev | Automate Pinging Google Blog Search
I noticed Google’s recently launched Blog Search is now allowing pings to be sent. I tested it out today with both Wordpress and MovableType and it seems to work fine. Here are the steps. Continue reading "Automate Pinging Google Blog Search"Posted by Miles Evans at 5:42 AM
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July 13, 2006
Dev | The NOODP Meta Tag
The NOODP meta tag can be used to tell a search spider to not use ODP (dmoz.org) data for your descriptions and titles in the SERPS. Today Google announced that Googlebot will now recognize this tag.
Continue reading "The NOODP Meta Tag"Posted by Miles Evans at 3:24 PM
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July 12, 2006
Dev | Digg Website Integration
Kevin Rose has just announced the long awaited full integration of dig into our websites. By this I mean it is now possible to allow members to not only submit your stories but also to allow your users to dig them without leaving your site.
Continue reading "Digg Website Integration"Posted by Miles Evans at 12:58 PM
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June 27, 2006
Dev | Making a favicon.ico
Here is a quick tip. If you are writing for RSS, and who isn’t these days, you really should take a moment to make a favicon.ico. From a branding perspective it looks professional to see the icon in your reader/favorites/address bar. It’s also a good idea to not fill up your web logs with failed attempts to find a missing favicon.ico. Here is a plugin to save in .ico format.
Continue reading "Making a favicon.ico"Posted by Miles Evans at 5:34 AM
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June 25, 2006
Dev | Web 2.0 Design Tutorials
Over the last month or so I have been busy redesigning some of my best earners (not this website) over to slick new web 2.0 interfaces. I suspected that making some simple graphical changes might actually increase conversions and so far this is very much the case. I found that by making some small but trendy design changes improved visitor confidence enough to really effect my earnings. I am not talking about functionality here at all but merely design and layout - there are a million articles online for working with javascript and AJAX.
Having said that it was a real bitch finding tutorials and solid info for designing for 2.0. Here is some of the best…
Continue reading "Web 2.0 Design Tutorials"Posted by Miles Evans at 10:55 AM
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May 2, 2006
Dev | MovableType Comment Spam
Alright the issue of blog comment spam has been covered and recovered but I figured I would throw my two cents into the ring as everyone seems to have a different approach. The following techniques work with MovableType but can likely be applied elsewhere quite easily.
Continue reading "MovableType Comment Spam"Posted by Miles Evans at 10:20 AM
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April 10, 2006
Dev | PHPAdsNew and Google Adsense Integration
Alright this is a powerful concept with very little effort on your part. I went over the open source PHPAdsNew in a previous review but I didn’t really get into some its nicer features, especially when it comes to integration with your favorite contextual ad publishing system. In this tutorial I will go over how I use PHPAdsnew to help me create, track, test and dynamically rotate my Google Adsense ads.
Continue reading "PHPAdsNew and Google Adsense Integration"Posted by Miles Evans at 10:29 AM
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April 7, 2006
Dev | Adding a del.icio.us link to your Blog
I recently mentioned how I add a digg link to a blog post for easier submissions and figured I may as well add a quick blurb on adding a link for del.icio.us as well. For those not keen on this gnarly Web 2.0 style stuff, del.icio.us is a very large and popular social bookmarking system recently bought by Yahoo.
Here is the code I use to generate an accessibility safe del.icio.us link.
Continue reading "Adding a del.icio.us link to your Blog"Posted by Miles Evans at 4:14 PM
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March 28, 2006
Dev | 302 Redirect Hijack
I have seen a lot of chatter lately over protecting web properties against Google's duplicate content filters, but even less mentioned and more interesting are some tips everyone should deploy for protecting against a 302 redirect hijacking. A 302 redirect is a full on exploit and it is unclear, at least to me, how Google will address the problem in the future although they said it was being worked on in Q1 2006. So let's take a look at a 302 redirect Hicjacking and how to defend against it.
Continue reading "302 Redirect Hijack"Posted by Miles Evans at 9:56 AM
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March 8, 2006
Dev | Yahoo Sitemap Generator
I got an email from a friend commenting on my previous article on building some free organic rankings. His problem was that he was nailing his keywords, but that it was taking far too long. He also noted that he was getting nowhere getting listed high in the SERP’s at Yahoo. When I ask him if he is generating sitemaps on a regular basis for Google and Yahoo we quickly realize why this is happening. Last month I discussed automating Google Sitemaps for Movable Type and in this article I will describe how I do the same thing for Yahoo.
Continue reading "Yahoo Sitemap Generator"Posted by Miles Evans at 3:56 PM
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March 1, 2006
Dev | Building a Movable Type Podcast
If you are using Movable Type or any blog software you likely know there is a ton of buzz over hosting your own podcast. People seem to like to muddy the waters over podcasting by casting it in a mysterious light but there is no need to be confused. A podcast is a link to an audio or other media file. That’s it that’s all. The fancy name just comes from the fact people like downloading MP3’s to their Ipods. So let's take a look at getting your podcast working nicely with Movable Type.
Continue reading "Building a Movable Type Podcast"Posted by Miles Evans at 8:45 AM
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February 27, 2006
Dev | Adding a Digg link to MovableType
Continuing on my recent spat of articles on ways to improve MovableType for SEM and traffic building purposes, I have another quick yet effective hack which is guaranteed to yield some very nice traffic gains. In fact I am tripling my traffic with every digg submission, although the burst usually dies down after 24 hours. Here is how it works…
Continue reading "Adding a Digg link to MovableType"Posted by Miles Evans at 3:01 AM
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February 26, 2006
Dev | MovableType SEO
Alright I touched on this last week in my best movable type plugins article with the intent to come back to it and provide some juicy details. I will tell you that MT is optimized quite well out of the box, but there are a few quick tricks to easily providing the spiders with some dynamic content.
For my main home page and category index pages I hardcode most of my meta data. Your meta tags will be at the top of the template within the <head> tag. You can get fancy on your index pages but I cannot really see why. Optimize these two templates by hand for whatever keywords you are targeting site wide.
Posted by Miles Evans at 9:01 AM
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February 24, 2006
Dev | Styling Movabletype Comments
So how do you get people adding comments to your blog? Stylizing Movable Type's comments of course.
Comments are the stickiness factor for many large weblogs. The Movabletype comments feature allows anyone to add valuable content to any entry. Active comments stimulate more comments. On my own weblog’s I traditionally set the comments feature to ‘anyone can comment’ provided they use an email. Comments are often misused by cheeky webmasters or spambots but I keep a close eye on them - MT sends out handy emails when comments are added.
Continue reading "Styling Movabletype Comments"Posted by Miles Evans at 2:25 AM
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February 21, 2006
Dev | Google Sitemap for Movable Type
Movable Type has no tool for making a Google Sitemap out of the box. Making a Google Sitemap is critical to keeping your website up to date in the SERP’s with big G. Luckily creating a sitemap and even keeping tabs on how often Googlebot visits your website, couldn’t be easier with Movable Type. For this tutorial I will describe how to set this up and keep it automated.
Continue reading "Google Sitemap for Movable Type"Posted by Miles Evans at 2:49 PM
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February 20, 2006
Dev | VideoLan Tutorial
Going along with yesterdays post on how to record skype conversations I decided today I would focus on video streaming so I prepared a down and dirty VideoLan tutorial. As far as marketing goes I guess this article may one day bring me some hate for teaching some dumbass to build online infomercials, but I assure you my motives are far less industrious. If you live outside North America, like me, you might think watching your favorite TV provider back home was impossible. In fact for years I figured I was just stuck with crap TV and limewire downloads. Trailerpark Boys, Battlestar Gallactica, and Family Guy had become pleasures I relied on friends to send me in the mail, years after they aired. Until now...Continue reading "VideoLan Tutorial"
Posted by Miles Evans at 11:07 PM
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February 17, 2006
Dev | Apache Coming Soon Page
Alright I hinted at this tip in an earlier article and since a friend of mine was asking I decided I would detail quickly how I handle a ‘coming soon’ page for my domains. Feel free to customize or expand on it but this is the basic principle behind how to do this in Apache. I am sure there are much more clever ways to do this.
This tip is useful because it is easy to make the mistake of having the first
Posted by Miles Evans at 1:10 AM
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February 14, 2006
Dev | Best MovableType Plugins
My personal list of the Best Movabletype Plugins will be the first article to kick off a new category on ProfitPapers reflecting my love of everything development. The aptly named Dev category will serve as a receptacle of all things related to: Unix, Apache, PHP, SQL, Movabletype, and other geeky subjects. As always I will be paying special attention to SEO/OLM tactics throughout these pieces.
First off Movabletype is server based blog software. In fact, I would say it is hands down easily the best blog software available today - for a few different reasons...
Continue reading "Best MovableType Plugins"Posted by Miles Evans at 9:28 PM
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