I feel like I lost a lot of weight when I look at the new theme the Extreme Ezine is using. Just the other day I was on the new blog of Dennis Edell and commented about load time. I’ve known for a while that the Extreme Ezine blog was far too heavy and to long to load. I decided to get that corrected yesterday.

The first thing I did was run a few tests. I compared the Extreme Ezine with a few other sites and it wasn’t pretty. I ran five (5) tests in a row using iWebTool.com’s Website Speed Test. You can see the complete results here but here are the averages:

Domain name      Size      Average Load Time

http://csc4u.com/ 9.73 KB     0.39 seconds (basic HTML site)
http://kikolani.com/ 40.27 KB     0.77 seconds (Thesis Theme)
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ 25.53 KB     0.92 seconds
http://www.copyblogger.com/ 28.11 KB     0.99 seconds (Thesis Theme)
http://www.dennisedell.com/ 21.13 KB     1.77 seconds (not complete)
http://www.problogger.net/ 52.04 KB     1.23 seconds
http://thatsrightisaidit.com/ 41.28 KB        4.23 seconds (micro-blog)
http://wassupblog.com/ 85.33 KB     5.12 seconds
http://www.youradtracker.com/ 27.63 KB     5.26 seconds
http://extremeezine.com/              52.55 KB       5.44 seconds

As you can see the Extreme Ezine came in dead last (with our previous theme). Just by choosing a lighter and cleaner theme we were able to cut the load time in half to 2.72 seconds. That’s still too slow so now comes the work of cleaning up the code and dropping a few plugins. My expertise is very limited in this area so I may need to hire a pro.

I like the clean look and it seems easier to navigate. I will miss a few lost features but we can’t have it all. I’m still trying to get a decent photo gallery plugin working. I love the photo gallery running on ExtremeJohn.com but I can’t get it working for some reason. Hopefully we’ll see those promotional button pics rotating soon.

What are your thoughts about the change and new look? Is load time a big factor to you? Go ahead, I can take it

A quick note about the Thesis Theme: Kristi of Kikolani kicked everyone’s tail with respect to load time in my test. She’s using the Thesis Theme (her affiliate link). I ran a separate test with five sites (Kikolani.com, ChrisBrogan.com, CopyBlogger.com, SugarRae.com and LaughingSquid.com) that are using the Thesis Theme. I ran the test five (5) times and ended up with an average speed of 1.4 seconds with all the sites. That’s very impressive so I think I’ll end up using the Thesis Theme in the end.

As my long time online friends and subscribers know, I don’t recommend very many products. I ONLY recommend products I personally use. With that said I’d like to introduce what is now at the top of my recommended products – The Keyword Academy.

I’ve been a member of The Keyword Academy for a little over two months now and I’ve been able to turn what I’ve learned there into profit. There have been very few products I’ve been able to make that statement about. I HIGHLY recommend this program!

The Keyword Academy is a paid membership site that teaches everything from keyword research to AdSense site building using a step-by-step approach with videos and other tools. Run by Court Tuttle and Mark Butler, TKA is hands down the most important step I have taken to advance my understanding of AdSense, keywords, link building, niche websites and judging the competition. Yes, all the things we think we know as Internet Marketers. There’s always room for learning and this is certainly proof of that.

Mark and Court teach EVERY detail needed using video, transcripts, tutorials, webinars, Q&A sessions, a blog and an awesome forum.

Here’s the deal: The Keyword Academy costs $33 per month and you can try your first month for just $1. If you are still struggling to make a profit online you need this. A dollar isn’t much to risk to try it out but I’m going to make completely risk free for you…

Sign up with my affiliate link and watch the core videos. If you don’t think it was worth the investment, cancel before the first thirty days and I will refund your dollar personally. Enough said, try The Keyword Academy for just $1 dollar today.

Back in February I posted ‘Flickr Follows‘ excited to find we could add do-follow one way links back to our sites.

I started adding photos to my Flickr account from my personal photo blog including a link back with each one. Today I was adding a few pictures and noticed I had a Google Page Rank of 03/10. Not bad considering I wasn’t ranked at all three months ago when I started the blog. Other than Flickr I’ve done nothing to improve my SEO. I don’t even add key words or a description to most posts.

I thought for sure I was going to owe that page rank boost to Flickr, and I do but for an entirely different reason. I checked the links Google recognizes back to PassionatePhoto.com [link:passionatephoto.com] and was surprised to find only eleven links to the blog, seven of which were internal (my own site). None were from Flickr! After almost two months Google hasn’t recognized a single link back from my Flickr account.

Why The PageRank Boost Then?

I still owe the boost to Flickr, indirectly. I was fortunate enough to have Boing Boing, with a PageRank of 8, find one of my photos of Detroit and use it on one of their posts ‘Detroit and the future of America‘ which already has a PageRank of 5 for that particular page.

When I added the photos to Flickr I used Creative Commons Attribution and added the following statement below each photo:

Feel free to use this photo for your website or blog as long as the complete watermark stays visible and readable. If you need to crop out the watermark or it becomes unreadable please link to http://passionatephoto.com/ with photo credit.

I sure am glad I decided to share my photos with other websites. I also appreciate Boing Boing linking back to my site because they didn’t have to with the terms I set up. As my photos increase and improve my photo blog will grow as well. This goes to show, being nice can pay off sometimes, even when you’re not looking

I was working on my personal photo blog recently and I decided to start copying photos over to my Flickr account. I setup a separate set (group) called ‘Passionate Photo‘ hoping to drive a little Flicker traffic to the site. I made sure I had a good title, description and tags. I also added the following terms in the description of each photo:

“Feel free to use this photo for your website or blog as long as the complete watermark stays visible and readable. If you need to crop out the watermark or it becomes unreadable please link to http://passionatephoto.com/ with photo credit.“

I was pleasantly surprised to see that my blog URLs on the main pages does not have the rel="nofollow" tag included. I noticed this when I received a Google Alert and clicked the link. (I use the SeoQuake Firefox plugin that helps me quickly see the do-follow links.)

Flickr.com has a Google PageRank of 09/10 and is rated 32 by Alexa.

Mobile devises are quickly becoming one of the most popular electronic purchases around. The internet is here to stay and so is blogging. It stands to reason that if we’re [bloggers] going to survive the future we need to move with the trends.

There’s no better time to prepare our blogs for the future then right now as we count down the final days until 2009. By preparing for the future I mean going mobile. Sounds scary I know. You would think we would need a new URL, format and somehow get our content into a special site that is mobile device friendly with those tiny screens. Thankfully it’s not that difficult. In fact I setup a mobile version of the Extreme Ezine blog in minutes.

Blog4Mobile.com [Sorry, Blog4Mobile.com is down taking our mobile URL with it] has really simplified things for us. Using our logo and feed Blog4Mobile.com provides us a unique URL that our visitors can use in their cell phones and PDAs. Our mobile URL is [removed] but I plan to redirect to it using a sub-domain.

Are Decent Dot Coms Still Available? Most of us would prefer a dot-com domain over another extension. There are exceptions of course such as exotic extensions like .TV and .MOBI but for the most part we prefer a .COM.  As a ‘part two‘ to my post back in October ‘Searching For The Perfect Domain Name‘ I have listed several free online tools you can use to find your perfect domain.

Free Online Domain Name Tools

• Instant Domain Search is a free service that instantly checks .com, .net, and .org domain name availability as you type.
• NameTumbler lets you search for and check up to 500 domains at a time.
• It looks like Yahoo! domains uses this same service as DomainTools’ Domain Suggestion Tool
• Search for 3, 4 , 5 or 6 letter random domain names at Domain Name Soup
• The NameBoy Domain Name Generator is similar to the one by DomainTools but with different results.
• Domain Exposer is a very fast and easy domain name search tool.

Get Paid
Are you good at finding great domain names? Get paid to do it at PickyDomains.Com by becomming a contributor.

Protect Your Find
Protect your brand with DomainTools’ Domain Typo Generator. I used it to find that ExtremEzine.com/ (missing an ‘e’) and ExtremeEzines.com (plural) are already registered by other people – bummer. ):

HURRY - Grab these up: Feel free to register these if you like. While playing around, I mean researching I found that FreeBloggerTools.com and TopBlogTools.com were available at the time of this post. Please leave a comment below if you take one or both so I can cross them out.

Related Posts:

• Searching For The Perfect Domain Name
• Domain Name Tips From Experience

What does the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) mean to you? More importantly, what does the term do to you? If it makes you uneasy and just a little confused you are not alone. Between Google’s obsession with secrecy and extremely unqualified marketers pretending to be SEO experts saying whatever it takes to turn a profit it’s a wonder that anyone has a clue about real search engine optimization. Apparently Justin Brooke, author of SEO Lies, managed to sort through all the lies and BS and write an ebook to help clear things up a little. I just finished the thirty five page .pdf ebook and I’m very impressed.

SEO Lies begins by clearing up five common lies and moves on to what is important from there. We’re long overdue for an ebook like this and you can get your own copy for just one dollar. That’s right, for $1 USD you can download a personal copy of SEO Lies for yourself. You will also be able to resell the e-book for one dollar yourself with the built-in affiliate program.

Best of all you get to pay me the dollar – just joking. You will be paying me via PayPal but, trust me, I would give it away free if I could but one dollar is a small price to pay for the truth.

My Personal Deal

I’ll make a deal with you. If you buy SEO Lies with my affiliate link and are not satisfied with the ebook I will refund your dollar. If you are satisfied with the ebook you will comment below saying such. Deal? Here’s the link: http://4u2bn.com/hi12

Recommended reading: Want more? Check out Lynn Terry’s Keyword Placement: Page Optimization Basics. It won’t even cost you a dollar.

Those new on the scene of website ownership and search engine optimization (SEO) could easily misunderstand the whole ‘link building strategy‘ and begin buying links. We even see well established marketers become convinced that buying one-way inbound links are a good way to increase page rank.

What’s the big deal? After all, why would the sites selling the links be so popular and rank so high themselves? It’s everywhere you look. And I’m not just talking about shady looking link farms. There are some high quality sites out there doing a ton of business. An even better question is why would Google allow text link advertising for the very sites they penalize for?

It is tempting to toss a few bucks to gain some non reciprocal one-way inbound links but be very careful. It seems confusing when you see other sites or blogs not only buying links but even promoting the sites they are buying from. That confusion clears up when you look at Google’s views on the matter…

In Google’s Webmaster Guidelines you will find, “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

There are many black or gray hat link buying techniques that are being used but, in my opinion, they are risky. Some try to ‘spread it out‘ by buying just a few every now and then. Others try to disguise the links as advertisements. There are a ton of tips on ‘hard to detect‘ techniques and many seem to be getting away with it. Try these at your own risk. Google even has a ‘Report paid links‘ page where others can ‘tell on‘ their competition.

The best way to build links without worrying about the search engines penalizing your site or even excluding it from their index is what no one wants to hear:

Write original, high quality and relevant content that will make others want to share it. That’s a hard thing to accomplish but it’s the only way to build long term success.

Related post: Buying Traffic Is A Waste Of Time

Related Topic: My site is disappeared, over 30,000 link in at very great cost

I was just reading another great post from one of my new friends, Peter Lee, called How Blog Commenting Got Me 1200 Backlinks in 5 Days

In his post Peter included a valuable free online resource that I wanted to share with our subscribers and visitors. It’s a simple online search engine that finds Do-Follow blogs called LINK REMOVED [Oops, That link is now bad. Try this one instead http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/ or this http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=013390256337737331053:jq3m6dxkyts]This speeds up the time it takes to find blogs that reward quality comments with search engine friendly backlinks. As you know, these back-links are needed to improve your SEO (search engine optimization).

NOTE: I noticed that I only get the first ten results while using Firefox/3.0.3 In Internet Explorer 7 you get the ‘next page‘ links at the bottom of the page. I don’t know why Firefox cuts that part off but to build backlinks that count it’s worth opening up Microsoft’s browser.

There has always been a lot of discussion as to the best ways to get a site quickly indexed by Google. You can spend a fortune buying up all of the e-books and programs that promise instant search engine results. Many of these techniques can get your site blacklisted. It’s very easy and simple to do things the right way without risking your site’s inclusion before it even gets off the ground.

Assuming that there are no outside or technical issues preventing your site from being spidered you should find it relatively easy getting included.

I have brought dozens of sites online over the years and I have never had a problem getting indexed by Google within twenty four hours. In fact, just yesterday I uploaded a brand new site to our server with a brand new domain name and had it indexed in half a dozen locations in less than an hour. It doesn’t rank high but it is there. With that said, I’m certainly not an SEO expert or even in the field. I just hate to see so many people throw money at something this simple just to risk being penalized later.

You can submit it once at at google.com/addurl but that takes a while and still doesn’t guarantee your site’s inclusion. There’s certainly no reason to continue submitting your site once it is indexed.

It Is This Easy

Get a site that is already being indexed (the higher the rank the better) to link to your site on a page that gets spidered. It’s that simple! It’s not rocket science and it doesn’t take a so-called SEO expert to get you there. By the way, as a side note, most of those ‘SEO experts‘ can’t even get their own sites beyond a Google PageRank of three or four. Be careful who you give your money to.

If you already have a site that fits the bill then you are way ahead of the game. Set a link from the already established site’s front page and Googlebot should follow the link.

Need Outside Help?

If you need to get your backlinks from other sources, and you do if you want any rank or search engine traffic, then start by taking advantage of the social networks, related sites, article directories, and high quality directories such as Dmoz and Yahoo. Remember, this article is about getting indexed, not getting to the top of the search results.

Quality Content

Google likes to see sites build links naturally and by merit. If  it looks spammy or mass-generated you are in trouble. Don’t get greedy and impatient. Always write quality and original content. This includes content on your site and content on the sites linking to you. Unique and relivent content will help your cause. Well established sites considered high ranking in Google’s eyes will boost you to the top in many instances.

Make It Count

Another thing to keep in mind when using outside resource to get indexed is the rel=nofollow microformat. Find sites that do not add this attribute to outside links. If they do then Google won’t bother following the backlinks to your site. Here’s a couple online lists to get you started:

Huge List of DoFollow Sites!

The Definitive List of Big Dofollow Social Bookmarking Sites

TIP: There is a better solution than viewing the page source when checking to see if a site is using the rel=nofollow microformat on it’s outside links. I use the Firefox browser with the SeoQuake plugin. The SeoQuake plugin has a Line-through “nofollow” and “noindex” setting that informs you instantly if a link is tagged with the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Here is an easy to follow article on how to achieve this: How to detect rel=nofollow using firefox

Avoid Black Hat Tactics

Avoid black hat or even gray hat schemes. Stay clear of web rings, link farms, free-for-all (FFA) sites, link directories and paid links. These methods are nothing but trouble.

Extra Credit:

Here’s a cool fact that I have long suspected but is now confirmed – Google ignores the meta keywords tag. They do use the title tag. You can learn many other relevant things like that from Google Webmaster Help. Here’s what Google says about Adding a site to Google.