Tagged - Guide

Getting More Traffic: SEO Tutorial and Guide

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Anyway, I’ve been playing with my SEO for a long time, in face I think I’ve spent far more time learning about SEO than writing blog posts. SEO has to be one of the trickiest things I’ve ever encountered. Here’s a few things I’ve learned to *maybe* help some people out. Using these methods I rank okay in the search engines, or maybe really well since this is still a fairly new site, as far as Internet age goes.

These methods should all be white hat as far as I know :)

PermaLinks

First thing you want to do when setting up a WordPress blog is setup permalinks. Google and other search engines will like to see keywords in your url. They may also really hate the look of ?p= because it is a dynamic link, this may hurt your rankings in itself.

Link Building

If you want to get right down to it, back links are king. The more back links you have, the higher your PageRank, and the higher your rank in the search engines. You need lots and lots of back links from other sites. Some easy ways to get back links would be through Entrecard, they have “top dropper” days where you will get listed and pick up back links. Also, if you want a quick way to get indexed by Google and the other search engines, you’re going to want to use Entrecard. If you’re not a blog, you might want to try something like ProjectWonderful to start your site off. Advertising is a necessary evil to starting a site. Once people know your site exists, more links will come rolling in by themselves if you write good posts.

Social Networking

Submitting some of your articles to Digg or StumbleUpon is a good idea for a little while, because your dugg articles will show up in the search engines.  However, you will get banned if you submit too many of your own articles.

You notice all that crap at the bottom of my site? Those are other blog networks that hold my RSS feed and list my articles there for people to find. Some also keep track of my traffic to a degree. MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and Technorati  are some examples. Even listing your site on Twitter can help. I have just recently started with Twitter to see how it goes.

Some other places you might want to list your articles would be MySpace and FaceBook if you have those accounts, let your friends know you have a blog. I use some WordPress plugins to automatically post there.

RSS Submissions

You should submit your RSS feed wherever you can, because it will list your articles more places, meaning more people are likely to find them and read your articles.

Keywords

Keywords are highly important. I don’t pay much attention to them myself, but if you really want to rank well you need to research keywords. The wording on your site can mean the difference of 50 unique/day and 0 people find your article through search engines. If you pick a term that is far too competitive for your site, you will not rank. I have only just begun to try and play with keywords in my articles. The point is, try to pick less competitive keywords when you write a post by using different wording.

Some useful SEO WordPress Plugins

All-in-one-seo - This plugin helps to automatically handle some SEO functions like title and description of the page.

Sociable – This plugin automatically puts Digg/Stumble/Etc links under each post.

TweetSuite – Puts the Tweet link under each post.

WordBook – Automatically posts your posts on the blog to FaceBook.

Google-XML-Sitemaps – Automatically creates site maps for Google and other search engines.

WordPress Related Posts – Shows related posts based on tags on each post. Helpful for getting people to read more than one article :)

Conclusion

That is about how far I have gotten with my SEO. I’m still working on it day by day, trying my best to optimize the site. Hopefully someone will find this information useful. Feel free to contribute more SEO and Traffic tips in the comments. :)

Hamachi Gaming Tutorial

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

hamachiWell, my friend and I wanted to play Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4 online together. Few problems, my friend no longer has a ps2, and even if he did, the servers for this game are long gone. So, we thought for a bit and came to the idea of playing the PC version online. So, we both got the game. We tried setting up a game on GameSpy, it simply wouldn’t work for some reason. I thought for a bit and remembered that people were using Hamachi to setup a virtual type LAN configuration. This would work! We would finally be able to play THPS4 together like we did back when I was 13 years old!

Few more problems, however :) We just thought starting up Hamachi was going to be enough. Not so. You have to make sure Hamachi is the default network adapter so the game uses it. That’s simple enough, right? Here’s a short guide of what we did to do that.

Click start –> Settings –> Control Panel –> Network & Internet Connections –> Network Connections –> Look where File, Edit, etc are located and find Advanced –> Advanced Settings –> Click on the Hamachi adapter and click up.  A reboot will be required.

Now that was done on both of our computers, everything should work, right? Not so. He could ping me, but I could not ping him through Hamachi. We finally narrowed it down to his Anti-Virus program, once he killed that I could ping him.

Now everything should work, right!? No. We couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t see his host in the game. Long story short, you cannot minimize the game while hosting, or else it kills the host. Now I could connect, and we were able to play just like we used to.Very cool.

I hope this helps someone if they’re trying to setup a LAN server through Hamachi for a game. It can be a pain at first. :)

Want to join us? Contact me through e-mail, the forums, or my IRC server. Quite a wide selection :)

Here’s a youtube video showing in game footage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzrXTKnIkfs

UPDATE: I was able to convince my friend azlesk8er to take a cap of him hitting 26 million. Here is his video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4bFR0VMA9s

Tips on Running Multiple Operating Systems, Linux, Hackintosh, multiple Windows versions

Monday, December 15th, 2008

General things needed for multiple OSes

Setting up a multiple OS platform for is pretty straightforward. I recommend you buy another hard drive, because in my experience partitions are nothing but trouble. If you want to go with partitions, then just use tools to do so, there are many of them out there I used to use Partition Magic, but you can easily do this from the DOS prompt as well.

Linux

Linux is a highly useful operating system, with many programming tools pre-installed, and it’s really not that hard to get used to. (for me)

I’ve tried many different distributions of Linux, including SuSe, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Slackware Linux. Slackware Linux is my favorite Linux distribution. Why? It’s stable, it gets the job done. I don’t need all the fancy tools they include in Ubuntu. Often I will also install Dropline Gnome onto Slackware, and choose whether I want to run KDE or Gnome. Slackware Linux also offers a few other GUI setups that are less resource hungry, if your PC isn’t up to date, Linux and slackware is the best bet for you.

Linux generally requires an Ext3 file system, but there are others that it uses as well, so in partition magic select that when you go to make the partition, if you’re doing it that way, if you’ve purchased an entirely new hard drive, then continue on.

Now, you’ve successfully partitioned your hard drive or bought a new one. What’s next? Well, just download the distribution you want, burn onto a CD and look into your motherboard for directions on booting from the CD drive.  Insert the disc during start up, and wallah start installing Linux.

You might need to format your hard drive to Ext3, or if you made a partition, it should already be formatted. Just install everything, it will also most likely install grub or lilo, (I’ve used both) install that to your boot sector on your main drive. You should be about done now, the PC will restart, and you will be prompted to select Windows or Linux. Depending on your distribution, it may require some setup to get into the gui. Slackware linux generally requires a bit of command line work before you can access the GUI, so you’ll have to read a bit. (here) That guide helped me when I first took on the challenge of installing slackware, interestingly enough, slackware was the first distribution of Linux I ever installed.

Hackintosh

Hackintosh is another story alltogether, the same applies for setting up partitions or a new hard drive however. You may have to try multiple discs of hackintosh before the automated installer works for your system. You also have to check to see if your computer components are compatible with Hackintosh. To do this, I advise you read over a few things at insanelymac. There’s also a “legality” issue with running hackintosh, so I’m not promoting it or anything ;) I may or may not have installed hackintosh, I can’t remember :P

You’re going to have to create a “blank” partition, where it has not been formatted. This is because Partition Magic does not format to the Mac OSX file system, and neither does any other utility. This is done through the installation. Also, if you’ve purchased a different hard drive, then just leave it unformatted. Hackintosh is quite touchy with hardware compatibility, because it’s expecting your computer to be a mac, and macs basically just have USB ports. You’ll have to look for modification scripts on insanelymac, or if they don’t exist, then your hardware wont work and don’t continue. Many people purchase certain components on purpose to make it 100% hackintosh compatible, because their system will be MUCH cheaper than a Mac, but a lot of manual work is required. I’ve never been 100% hackintosh compatible myself.

Anyway, once the installation is done, then you might have to go into the bios and select the drive that hackintosh was installed on to be booted first. There are some utilities that can be modified to make dual booting with hackintosh work without doing it this way, but it is somewhat difficult.

Windows

Multi-booting with different versions of windows is a real pain. I currently have Vista and XP installed on separate hard drives, and have not had any issues, but it’s a real pain to setup. Each windows version will vary, Vista is very difficult to get working with dual-boot configurations. It requires some editing of the boot.ini file. Also, some of the boot files from windows XP have to be transferred to the Vista hard drive. This is because it is booting Vista first, and using the Vista bootloader. From there you select either XP or Vista. I can try to help you if you really want this kind of setup, but I’m not going to delve into it here, unless I get a request then I will edit this with the needed info. (Maybe I’m being lazy not wanting to look things up.. What you see here all came from my head :D )

There are some tools out there that can help you out with multiple Windows versions, I believe that every version except Vista works similar to Linux, but you have to edit the boot.ini file, or install one of the many OS selector applications out there.

Thanks, I hope you enjoyed reading this, and if you need help, I’m here, just go post in the forums :)

A goal of mine someday is to go Quad Boot. I love to mess around with different operating systems and have a choice when I boot up :) This is a general overview, to get you started on the road to multiple OSes, if I get a good response on this article I might make a more complete tutorial.

Small update: It seems Ubuntu has made it so you no longer have to partition your hard drive in order to install it. It will run with windows, apparently. I’m going to test this out soon.