We’ve had a chance over the last few years to try out a lot of different marketing schemes and tricks to get higher Google rankings, including auto submitters. One of the ways to get your site listed higher in the major search engines is to create a number of external links that point back to your landing page. In it’s day, mass article submitters worked great, but nowadays it seems they are just a waste.

The problem is that the major search engines have caught on to the trick of mindlessly submitting your article to hundreds of link and article submission sites. What they look for now is that each article be different. If not, the submission is not only discarded, but can count against your overall page ranking. Thus was born the companion piece to mass article submitters, the article spinner.

The concept behind this software is that it takes your base article and looks for synonyms to words that are in it’s database. That way every time the article is spun, it is worded differently than the original and will thus count as a positive back link to your landing page. The problem is that these ‘newly worded’ articles can make you sound like a dumb-ass. While you may be able to sneak your new article into a directory and have it count for Google, the result may be that the reader will be so turned off by your abysmal writing that they will look for a more ‘credible’ source. And once you lose your credibility, they won’t follow you again.

The other problem is stop words. Stop words are extremely common words that search engines ignore when indexing pages, calculating relevancy and when interpreting a search query prior to pulling pages from their indices. By simply switching stop words for example ‘this’ to ‘those’ will make no difference to the way a search engine views a page.

This is obviously a very simple example but when you consider that on average 40% of the words in any document are stop words it illustrates that Google will only consider approximately 60% of any document when calculating how unique it is is. Also consider that in order to create documents that are readable, even those created by article spinning, this percentage of stop words has to be maintained.

Article spinning cannot address this problem and in-fact may make things worse. Article spinning is a weak attempt to game search engine algorithms and as such should be used with care if used at all.

For a lot of our customers and some of our staff, World of Warcraft (WoW) is the only MMORPG. It’s popularity launched Blizzard from a medium sized gaming company to an online powerhouse. One of our customers bought this WoW cheat code book and sent us an email regarding some of the best tips they found. In honor of our many customers who enjoy WoW, we present this small sampling of World of Warcraft Tips and Tricks.

World of Warcraft Terms & Acronyms

Add: Additional NPCs for the party to fight, usually unexpected or undesired.
AFK: Away From Keyboard
Aggro: To have aggro means that the enemy mobs are focused on the player.
AoE: Area of effect, a spell or item that deals damage to a given area.
BoE: Binds on Equip - An item that becomes soulbound when equipped.
BoU: Binds on Use - An item that becomes soulbound when used.
BoP: Binds on Pick-up - An item that becomes soulbound when picked up.
CC: Crowd Control - spell effects and abilities that limit enemies from performing actions, e.g. Mind Control, Shackle, Sap, Seduce.
DoT: Damage Over Time - spell or ability that deals damage every N seconds, e.g. Poison. 
DPS: Damage Per Second - how much damage a weapon can deal per second on average.
Kite: Kiting an enemy means to aggro the enemy and lead him away from the party, often this is done by hunters who can feign death and escape.
LFG: Looking for Group.
LFM: Looking for More.
MC: Mind Control - spell effect that takes control of an enemy
ML: Master Looter. the person that is designated to loot all items from any kills
MOB: A mob is an NPC.
MT: Main Tank. The main player responsible for keeping the aggro of the enemy away from other party members.
Mule: A player that is designated to carry BoE items until the end of a raid.
Ninja: A ninja is a player that loots an item they are not supposed to loot, many groups use ML to avoid ninjas.
OOM: Out Of Mana.
PST: Please Send Tell.
PvE: Player versus Environment.
PvP: Player versus Player.
WTB: Want to Buy.
WTS: Want to Sell.
WTT: Want to Trade.

Scholomance Hints & Tips

Killing Summoners:
Make sure you have someone in your party that can MC (Mind Control). Use MC on the summoner, and let the other enemies take it out, works extremely well when there are two enemies to attack it. For situations where there is only one other enemy, you may need to bring the summoner to the stairs to prevent it from aggro'ing the entire room.

Warlock Hints & Tips

How to Solo Elites: High level warlocks can use Curse of Doom and Fear to solo high level elites, such as the Demons in the Winterspring Gorge, or the Undead in the Eastern Plaguelands guarding the towers.

Cast Curse of Doom on the target
Cast Fear
Mana up with Dark Pact
Repeat until the target is dead. Note: to speed things up you may want to use your wand and cast Corruption and Siphon Life.

Hunter Hints & Tricks

Taming a New Pet: Use a trap to immobilize your target before you start to tame it. You can also use items such as sticky glue, nets, etc.

Miscellaneous Hints & Tips

Unlimited Storage Space
Ok, instead of buying extra space at the Vault (10 Silver), you can take advantage of the auction/mail system.

Put the item you want to store up for auction at a very high price (something no one will buy)
Set the time of the auction to 2 hours
Just wait, no one should bid on the item and it'll be stored in your mail box, accessible from anywhere.

A few years ago, eSource Development created a software pack that contained popular free virus and spyware programs, but also included a neat little system inventory program written in house. Since our service center closed, we stopped supporting or updating the starter pack program and let it fall into the ‘abandonware’ category.

Well, we decided to pull it out of the time capsule and give it a new face for Windows Vista and Windows7. The new Dr. Torgo’s System Inventory program will give comprehensive and in depth system information. It is an advanced System Information tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings and displays it in an extremely comprehensible manner.

Dr. Torgo’s System Inventory can create a report file (CSV, HTML, TXT or XML), and is able to run in batch mode (for Computer Software and Hardware Inventory, Asset Inventory Tracking, Audit Software Licenses, Software License Compliance).

Look for it soon. The program will sell for $49, but you can get an early bird coupon worth $20 off. That means you get Dr. Torgo’s System Inventory for only $29. Now that’s something the Master would approve of (it’s a reference to the movie from which Torgo originated).

Part Four

SEO Basics

SEO is often thought about after a person has set up their blog or website. But, SEO best practices are bred into the site or blog as it is being developed, designed, and updated. We’re all about the SEO here. Our training class, SEO Launch Secrets, will be available May 11th, 2010. Remember that you can still get your early bird coupon by entering your email on the sales page.

What the heck is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engines are an excellent source of completely free traffic that continues to pour in for years to come but it usually takes a long time for a brand new site to begin getting traction in the search engines which is another reason why it makes sense to consider it from day 1. Here is an important point - ANY blog can build up a significant amount of search engine traffic over time even if that blog does not naturally lend itself to SEO. Why? Simply due to the sheer amount of content that gets posted to a blog.

If you create a few good articles every week (say 3), that really adds up over time. In a year you will have around 150 posts! Every single one of those posts can rank in the search engines and even though they may not all be individually optimized for specific keywords, they WILL bring in some traffic.

Backlinks… Learn it, know it, live it!

This lesson covers SEO basics and covers on-page optimization (making sure that your post is optimized towards your chosen keywords). However that is only one half of the SEO process and is arguably the least important half.

If Google has two pages that are equally optimized towards a keyword then how does it decide which one to rank higher? There are many factors but one very major factor is the backlinks to the page and these are simply links from another website.

 
Over time you will want to grow your backlinks as much as you can as this helps you rank higher and higher. With esourcedevelopment.com I must admit that I rarely pay much attention to on-page SEO as I tend to just write what comes to mind without really worrying about keywords. But over the last year or so we have attracted thousands of backlinks which means that whatever we do choose to write about will still bring us search traffic because this blog ranks well for terms in the posts.

You don't need to worry too much about building backlinks at the beginning, but you do want to know how to do the basic on-page SEO so that when you start to create your first few posts you can be sure that you are getting it right.
SEO is a massive subject and is an industry in itself. SEO consultants will often charge companies thousands of dollars to optimize their websites because of the power it has to draw so much traffic.

Optimizing Your Posts For On-Page SEO
The first step in optimizing your posts is knowing what keyword phrase you want to target. It is possible to target more than one but much more difficult. Now one thing that I would emphasize here is that as a blogger, particularly if you are starting out, if you have no idea about what keywords you want to target then just don't worry about it as its best to concentrate on writing good content rather than thinking about search engines. But if you're writing a blog about digital camera's for example and writing a post about a particular model then it makes sense to optimize that post to the model of the camera as that is something that would be searched on in Google.

This list is taken directly from SEO Launch Secrets. It covers where you need to place keywords in your article posts:
1) The title - at the very beginning if possible. This is the single most important element.
2) The post content - you need to make sure you are writing about what you want to target! Don't overdo it but make sure it appears a handful of times throughout the post. Ideally, your keyword phrase will appear at the beginning, middle, and end of the article. The more the better, but no more than once per paragraph.
3) Tags - WordPress and other blogging platforms allow you to add tags to posts and this is a great way to add keywords to any post.
4) The URL - if you are using WordPress then this is very easy to do because it has a feature to allow you to convert your post title into the URL and we have a video that demonstrates how to do that later in our SEO Launch Secrets course.

These are the most important places to put your keywords and this is all you really need to know when you're starting out. By the way if you don't know how to do this stuff don't worry because soon in the course I'm going to be getting onto the technical stuff and we have a bunch of free videos that show you how to do this technical stuff.

What if you already have an established blog?
If you already have a blog and this is the first time you have thought about SEO there are some things that you can do to tweak things. One thing that you should NOT do is change your post URL's because Google will still be indexing the old ones and if you change them you will have broken links.

However what you can do is change your titles and the copy text in your posts. One mistake that people often make is putting their keywords at the end of their title rather than at the beginning. For example, if you are targeting the phrase "make money blogging" which is best out of these two titles:

- 10 Great Ways to Make Money Blogging Today!
- Make Money Blogging - 10 Killer Ideas!

The latter title is more SEO-friendly as it puts your keywords at the beginning so you can go back and tweak old posts in this way if you like. You can also check through the post itself making sure the keyword appears a few times and if your blogging software supports tags then make sure you tag it with your keyword.

Once you make changes it can take a while for Google to pick it up and act on it so don't expect results overnight!
Note that if your URL's are not optimized then it is possible to restructure them to better ones and do something called a 301 redirect to tell Google that the link has changed.