When you stray off the beaten path you can either get hopelessly lost in the bramble or you can discover hidden wonders. In this article I hope to serve as a compass as we veer off the road less traveled in search of some lesser known treasures for SEO, marketing, networking, optimizing and monetizing your blog.

How To Stay Out of Bad Neighborhoods

Text links have always been recognized as an important factor in search engine ranking, be they inbound or reciprocal links.

But an overzealous linking strategy can also backfire; sites known to be linkfarms or that link indiscriminately to content of which some or many advertisers steer clear (porn, gambling, hate speech, splogs) can drastically decrease the number of higher quality ads that show up in your Adsense or similar displays. What’s more the search engines will recognize these follow-through destinations and penalize you in their rankings.

Michael VanDeMar’s free Bad Neighborhood Link Exchange Tool will scan the links on your website and where they lead, and flag problematic destinations.  Understanding this relationships between so-called “bad neighborhoods” and your own empowers you to make choices about to how to reorganize your linking strategies.

How To Be Everywhere At Once – Build a Consistent Brand

From the “why didn’t I think of that” category comes this deceptively simple yet powerful tool for checking where a given username has already been claimed and where it remains available. CheckUserNames.com runs this search across some forty online social networking destinations from BallHype to Zoomr and everything in between. It is a great way to safely identify and build your brand across the web.

Turn Yourself into A Search Engine

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claims to increase searches from your site by up to 5x what it is now by unify your content across all your social web and blogging accounts and making it searchable. It also offers statistics on user searches so that you can better understand your readers’ interest and refocus content to this end.

As a search line on your site, Lijit shows visitors other recent searches as well. It an easy to install widget that can help keep people focused on your content and promote interactivity while giving you a clearer perspective on what is working and what is not.

Protect Your Content and Build Good Habits With Copyscape

The benefits of using Copyspace are twofold – first it protects your hard work by checking its appearance across the web to ensure that your materials are not being republished without your permission. Second it demonstrates to you that you can’t simply copy and paste other people’s work without being caught which ideally builds better habits and prevents sloppiness on your part. Copyscape is a valuable resource that is being used by ever growing numbers of content creators to self-police the internet for plagiarism and unsanctioned use of their precious commodities.

What Are You Worth

It is important to check your inventory every so often and assess that value of that in which you are investing your precious time. In my early days as a blogger I frequently saw the Blogerati talk about their “failed blogs.” I now understand this to mean either a domain, niche or site that requires far too much effort for the amount of traffic, interest or ROI it is generating. Some of my blog experiments do well regardless of whether or not I update them frequently likely because I have discovered a strong niche and the content I am offering therein is serving the interest of that audience. Others I am simply not interested in and ultimately neither is anyone else.`Acknowledging a failed blog means cutting your losses on such expenses as domain renewals and hosting, but more importantly on your precious time.

If you have ever wondered what your blog is actually worth, the answer is, as Yaro Starack put it: “Whatever someone is willing to pay.” But there are a couple of admittedly inexact tools that can give you a better sense of what your blog might be worth in relative terms. These take into account factors like “top level domains” which could mean the number of non-abstract words in the domain name, whether it is a .com vs a .tv, whether it is a developed property and thus its Google Page Rank, Alexa rank, how many inbound vs . outbound links it has and so on.

I tapped in one of my domains and both of these spit out that the sixth month old .com site about video games was worth roughly $12,000! Another of my sites, which I once felt was a virtual gold mine showed as having a value of exactly $0. They are not hard science nor are they a crystal ball, but they are an interesting way to get a sense of what is up with your respective properties.

Cubestat is a free tool where you simply enter the domain so that it can project its worth based on daily pageviews and daily ads revenues among other factors.

Sootle works in a similar fashion to Cubestat but also spits out some code you can embed in order to place a widget that displays your site’s current value to prospective advertisers and buyers.

You will likely find a discrepancy between the values each of these calculators returns but at least you will have a place to start.

Understand Google Page Rank and then Stop Obsessing

Google Page Rank is one of those dark arts that often consume too much “mindshare” for people interested in SEO, especially because it is, necessarily, a moving target.

Ian Rogers breaks down the Google Page Rank algorithm white paper (of course this is just someone who knows a lot about it attempting to reverse engineer the methodology so take it with a grain of salt.) that is not so much a tool, as a sobering analysis of what you are up against.

Into the Woods

You will need every tool available to survive out there in the wild. I hope some of these help you on on your journey.

Photo “Yumi Lost in the Forest” courtesy David Light Orchard used under Creative Commons License

About the Author:

Keram is a new media consultant, music producer, actor and writer who opines on SEO at blogging-fool.com and society at theculturepin.com

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. Listen to his podcast at KeramCast.com

It’s late at night and I’m almost ready to go to bed, when I hear that one of the guests on the Jimmy Kimmel show is the guy from MySpace, you know, the guy that when you create a myspace account instantly becomes your first friend. Well, his name, his name is Robert Paulson, and he’s the president and co-founder of MySpace. Just kidding, his name is Tom Anderson

(let me know if you know who Robert Paulson is). Well, I really didn’t care about who Tom Anderson was, but I had to stay and watch. I guess one gets curious about a guy that has more than 200 million friends on his myspace page and that sold a website for 680 million dollars.

I remember that when MTV aired its first video, “Video Killed the Radio Star” in 1981, the rumor was that the radio was going to become extinct because music videos had made it obsolete, the radio stars where now on TV. Well, it’s happening again, but now the “stars” seem to be online, they just don’t look like the guys from KISS anymore.

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While driving home today I started wondering about the world oldest website. Well, as I found out, Info.cern.ch

was the address of the world’s first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN (the picture shows the historic NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. It was the first web server, hypermedia browser and web editor). The address for the world’s oldest website was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which contained information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and an explanation on how to search the Web for information.

As some of you may know, the world wide web was invented in 1989 by a man named Tim Berners

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(developed in 1990) and his idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and personal computers, this would result in having a single information network to help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory. There are no screenshots available of the original web page and, of course, changes were made daily to the information available on it as the WWW project developed. You can find a later copy of the site (from 1992) here.

Now, do you want to now who is the world’s oldest living person? Check out Edna Parker. As of 30 November 2007, she is 114 years and 224 days old. Amazing!The Toxic Avenger dvd

Well, the story about my jumping eyelids goes back some months now. I don’t remember exactly when it started, I just know now that it comes and goes. I do remember however that it came out of nowhere, one random day my right eyelid started going crazy. A couple of minutes later my left eye followed. It’s a very awkward feeling, as if a little vein under my eyelid started twitching. It’s not painful, it’s just really uncomfortable and it makes you stop what you are doing for a moment to think of how annoying it is.

I didn’t do anything about it for some days, thinking that eventually, it was going to go away. Then I started thinking what could be causing it, and I couldn’t think of anything that I had done differently those days. After a week of the jumping eyelid dilema, I decided to do a little research on “old pal google” to find out what the hell was going on (sometimes I’m not sure if having all this information readily available is good or bad, as it can sometimes develop into major “l could have a tumor” freak outs). To my surprise there’s even a term for it, it’s called Eyelid Myokymia

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Myokymia

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is the spontaneous, fine fascicular contractions of muscle without muscular atrophy or weakness. Eyelid myokymia typically involves the orbicularis oculi muscle of one of the lower eyelids; occasionally, the upper eyelids also can be affected. In most cases, eyelid myokymia is benign, self-limited, and not associated with any disease…

And the causes for Myokymia according to this same article:

“The cause is unknown but may be associated with stress, fatigue, and excessive caffeine or alcohol intake

“.

I’m not a big alcohol or coffee drinker, so that’s not my case, however I do suffer from insomnia every now and then (and that’s a topic in itself, maybe for another post). I do remember that around that time I was not getting enough sleep, something that is not uncommon for me. I have a three year old daughter, and sometimes the only time I have to get stuff done is at night, when everybody’s sleeping. After a week of relatively good night sleep, it finally went away. Then I forgot about it…

Yesterday, it came back again and it’s about the fourth time it happens (as I mentioned earlier, it comes and goes). I guess I’ll have to learn to live with it…Anybody out there having the same problem?

I just finished setting up a WordPress Blog Directory for this site (does the world need one more link directory?). Please feel free to submit your blog or site for consideration. Submission is free. Only blogs powered by WordPress will be accepted or sites that provide WordPress resources (such as plugins, themes, tips, etc.). Only quality content sites will be included.

This is also a way for me to keep track of blogs that I like or that I think provide quality content. I am constantly adding sites to the directory, so don’t be surprised if your site has already been included.

The directory itself is an open source script called OpenLD. Like WordPress, OpenLD has a variety of independently developed plugins and extensions that add more features to the script. You should check it out if you are thinking about setting up your own link directory. The theme of this directory was designed by me to fit wp-blogger.com and is available for free download here

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Hello and welcome to WP-Blogger, another blog about blogs, but not just any blog, WordPress! Check out the About

section if you want to know a little bit about me. surviving the game online