Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx

Filed under: General Web — rasim

ubuntu

Update: A little late, but I finally got around to installing Ubuntu again and creating a blog on the domain. :)

Finding a good domain name can be very random.

Every once in a while I look through top stories on digg. Today I came across the article that talked about the next release of Ubuntu – 10.04 codenamed Lucid Lynx.

I was thinking about a domain for a new directory as I was reading the article. Than I thought about lucid lynx and what a great name it can be for one. After checking lucidlinks, which was taken, I tried lucidlynx.com. To my surprise it was available, as long as .net, .org and all the rest. I bought the .com, and left .net and .org in case you still want to buy one (assuming you are the first one reading it) since the value may go up by April 2010. :)

I don’t think that I will be making a directory on lucidlynx though, unless 10.04 changes the code name closer to the release date. I actually ran Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, for a while. It was pretty interesting to mess with it since I haven’t had Linux installed for several years, see all the changes to the kernel, UI and applications. I had to let it go since I installed it on my new i7 with all the new hardware and Jaunty didn’t have my video card drivers.

Anyway, to make a long story short, now I am thinking to install Lucid Lynx when it becomes available and blog about all the useful commands, learning experiences and tips. Just a plan for now, who knows, may be I will do something different with it down the road.

I thought I would post this article just to show how sometimes you can get a pretty valuable domain name or an idea as soon as you hear about something coming out. Even though you may think that digg is a distraction most of the time, you can always make something useful out of it. ;)

Featured Directory Submissions

Filed under: SEO & SEM — rasim

featured_links

Why would somebody buy featured links on a directory if they can get a regular one for free? There are a few important factors. Many tend to think that it is approval time. I think that the average approval time for a featured link is 1-2 days, however, it is not the main criteria.

As you may know, we run a few directories for several years already. We sold quite a few featured links for $5/year (I think that this is an average what they go for).  Usually the bigger the PR the more links directory sells. If you take the average price of $5 that gets you a featured link for a year, it only costs you a little less than 0.42c a month.

Well, here is something interesting behind featured links.  To illustrate the point, we will start explaining how regular links on most of the directories work. When you submit a regular link to the directory, it takes some time to get approved. Upon approval – it becomes the first link in the top of the category. As soon as another link gets added to the same category, yours becomes second and moves down the line from first to tenth, from page one to page two, three, and so on. So your link does not stay on the same page all the time. Therefore it may be indexed in one day and disappear from search engine’s list of incoming links the next day. Featured directories do not move from page to page – in the most directories they are on every single page of the category.

Where am I going with this? Lets look at a random category on a random directory – I chose “Business” on Onpaco Free Web Directory. At this point there are 154 pages in “Business” section. So, whenever you buy a link – you are buying a link on 154 relevant pages! Plus you get a chance to get a link to your site from the pr1 index page since they show random featured links on the index page as well. If you are familiar with SEO – you know that the top part of the content generally is more important then the bottom. That is where featured links usually go as well, which gives us another point that shows the value of 42 cents a month. We also noticed that featured links get more clicks as well.

Does it make sense now? Well, how do you find the right directories? You may think like the most of the crowd and go after the pagerank, but it may not be the best idea. A lot of times webmasters buy expired domain names with a pagerank and put a directory there. They run it for a few months, collect the money, pagerank drops with the next update and the directory goes down. Look at the age of the directory, amount of pages in your category and quality of approved links rather than the pagerank. Also, check if the directory is active and adds links on a constant basis. While administering Free Directory Submission Site – EasySubmits we noticed that about half of the new directories disappear within first 6 months or so. There are a ton of the ones that been out for over a year or two, target those instead.

Run an experiment, see what a featured link can do for you, but I just thought that I’d share our observation.

Edit the look of a site with javascript

Filed under: Hacks & Tools — rasim

A lot of times people ask us to make something that looks similar to already existing website. Many don’t have photoshop, gimp or other image editing software and it is pretty hard for them to explain the visual need. What we often advise is to use the javascript since it is one of the fastest and convenient ways to alter the page. We use this script ourselves sometimes on the mockups. It takes a lot of work to remove some sneaky background or image in the image editor, and this script does simplify things a bit.

You can move, delete, resize and modify elements on the page by clicking on the element that you want to alter. Javascript works right from the browser’s URL bar. Just copy and paste the code below into the browser URL bar, press enter and the content becomes editable:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable=’true’;void 0

Then you can click “print screen” button, open word, paintbrush or an image editor of your choice and “paste” it into the new file.

Below is a simple example of what you can do to a page right from your browser.

page_edit_javascript

Sometimes its just fun to poke around, mess with a few websites and see how it would’ve looked with some adjustments.  Of course there are other tools like firebug that do more, but this is one of the simpler ways to do it.

Free directory submissions with EasySubmits

Filed under: Our Projects — rasim

Update: We do not own EasySubmits anymore. Please feel free to leave a feedback to the new management that already took it to the next level by adding new features such as social bookmarking and link classifieds. As for us, we find it more entertaining to build new services and spend time learning affiliate marketing…

easysubmits

One of our most visited websites is a free directory submission site – EasySubmits.

We came up with an idea to create EasySubmits while submitting our own sites to the directories. It took forever to fill out the forms, especially find the right categories in the drop down boxes. This is when we decided to automate it. Even though there are other desktop applications, we thought that we could bring something new to the table. Something that with a better tracking and availability from anywhere as long as there is a browser and internet connection. We were not satisfied with the results after trying a few desktop applications since most of them are pretty complicated to figure out, don’t work or crash half the time.

At first we just put it out online. It was not available for public for a few months and we thought about starting a directory submission service. Since we do custom web projects and have a lot on the plate, we changed our mind about submission service and made it public. It took off almost instantly. In just a few weeks we had so much traffic that we had to dump a shared hosting and move to a dedicated one. Now some sql tables, such as tracking, have over 1,000,000 records. EasySubmits gets 200-500 new user registrations every day and around 10,000 daily page views.

There were a few problems on the way and some are still there. Directories tend to go up and down on a regular basis. With over 500 listings it is hard to keep up and assure quality of the list. Some directories become paid as they grow and attract more traffic, others get broken with the corrupted databases, smarty errors or just disappear and the rest keep on changing their captcha settings. It also happens that directories go down for a day or two while switching hosting or having problems with the server load. These are the main issues that we have to deal with.

Now I would like to go over directory submissions in general.

Many people tend to believe that directory submissions do not have any effect on SEO anymore. While it doesn’t make much sense to spend days and days to submit, we believe that it still has a certain effect. The main argument is that people don’t see much links listed in google from the directories by typing “link:url” and this is true. You will not see every single link, however, you should still see some. Besides, search engines do not show every link that they know about. Another factor is the amount of pages that the directories have. When you submit a link, it usually goes to the top of the list, and as more and more links get added, your listing gets pushed down to further pages. Yes, those pages are PR0 in most of the cases, but being around relevant content still passes some value.

Many people do the submissions wrong. They use the same anchor text or irrelevant anchor text. Do the keyword research, go towards the keywords for which you want to rank good and change the title (anchor text) every 50 submissions or so… This way you will get good ranking for the keywords and search engines will not think that you are trying to spam them with the same link titles. For instance, if you are trying to get higher on search engines for “florida realtor”, don’t use “florida realtor” all the time. Make a few variations like “realtor in florida”, “florida real estate”, “real estate services in florida”, etc.

Just to prove the point, we did an experiment once. We got a new site and submitted to all of the directories with a few relevant keywords. In a week we had no backlinks showing in google, however, we were already indexed. With some onsite optimization we were already on page 8. Two week later, some directories showed up and we had 2 backlinks, however, we were already on page 2. It is up to you, but we believe that directory submissions still have some effect, not as much as few years back , but it still helps.

Some people also say that it is bad to submit to over 10 directories a day. We don’t think it matters since the directories have different approval time. While some may list you the same day, others wouldn’t approve your site for months. That is besides the fact that the links will be picked up by search engines at different times as spiders don’t crawl the same page over and over every day. We just chose 100 since we get bored to submit all day and the number works for us. What’s more important is continuous link building.

Another point that you may find useful – do not use primary email address for directory submissions. Many directories do send spam! Register one that you will be using for submissions and commenting on the sites that send spam.

These are pretty much the points that we had to share with a few users who would email us and ask for some advice. We hope you can find this information useful.

Please let us know if you have any problems with the site or have any suggestions.

Thank you and enjoy EasySubmits!

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