SEO in S. A.

I’ve recieved a few questions and comments lately, so instead of answering them one by one by email, I’ll just address them all here in a single post (thereby ceating a bit more content at the same time )

Problems setting up .co.cc domains. When you get a new free .co.cc domain, you only have 2 days to set it up or it will get deleted. What I generally do, is to use the redirect feature right away and direct it to an existing website. That way it’s safe until I get around to setting it up properly.

This is really simple to do. Just click the setup button, select URL forwarding and enter the existing URl that you would like your .co.cc domain to redirect to while you are setting up properly (or even leave it pointing to an existing domain if you are just planning on using it for ad tracking) .

In order to point it to a proper hosting account, you will first need to set up an account with a hosting company or set up an add-on domain for it on an existing hosting account. In other words if you want to get the domain buycheapviagra.co.cc, first check that it is available and then set up a hosting account for buycheapviagra.co.cc, then complete the registration process.

Your hosting company will tell you what your primary and secondary name servers are (it will be something like NS1.host.com and NS2.host.com) . Click the setup button and select the Name sever (DNS) option. Simply type the names of your name server in the appropriate fields and save. That’s all .

It can take up to 48 hours for DNS propagation before your new domain is accessible. I have seen it happen in minutes before, but don’t count on it and be prepared to wait a while.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression has been that it doesn’t matter how many sites you have with the same IP, as long as they’re separate niches and don’t link to each other. Where you need separate IPsare for sites that link to each other, hence the advantage of using Squidoo, Zimbio, etc.

Spot on! Google doesn’t care how many sites you own and nor should they. I mean how many domains does Google themselves own? It’s tens of thousands I bet! (think of Gmail, YouTube, Adsense etc, etc not to mention all the derivatives like GooglePorn that bought in order to keep them safe and protect their brand).

The only problem with owning thousands of sites on the same IP arises when you cross link them all – too many links from the same IP is a huge red flag to google and they will automatically assume that you are simply linking all your sites together in order to artificially boost your search engine rankings, and they will slap you accordingly.

But 99% of sites on the internet are on shared IPs, so it would be unusual if a couple of sites within the same IP range didn’t link to each other, especially if they in the same niche, so a little bit of sensible cross linking between related sites is fine.

Using .co.cc domains with Wordpress, Adsense and Traffic Equalizer. 

Firstly I LOVE WordPress. I’ve used it for ages but only became a “power user” about a year ago and I now have loads of sites built on the WordPress platform… they don’t have to look like blogs! Also, following my beer sites principal, I don’t do any real keyword research – I just create sites around any PLR articles or e books that I have laying around on my hard drive.

Co.cc domains aren’t sub domains. They are true top level cc TLDs. Just for clarification, sub domains are something that you set up on your hosting account – http://www.child-custody.co.cc is a TLD whereas  http://stuff.child-custody.co.cc is a subdomain. Co.cc domains shouldn’t raise anymore of a red flag to Google than registering a lot of co.uk, .co.za or any other country specific URLs. I’ve never had an issue with AdSense not displaying on .co.cc sites on add-on accounts (although I’ve recently had a weird situation with AdSense displaying on Forfox but not IE!  But that must be to do with my java settings rather than URLs or domain types though..)

I personally like the Easy Adsense plugin (it’s what I use on this site) and I’ve never had any problems. Remember, it takes a While for Google media bot to come around and read your site, so it may take a little while for the ads to appear.

I haven’t created Traffic Equaliser pages on any of my WordPress sites yet, but the principal remains the same. I’m an .asp guy and I don’t know much about php (yet!)  but the principal remains sound. Dig around in the WordPress code and find the include files for the page header, navigation, theme etc and use them in your Traffic Equaliser templates. You may have to change the paths to to files slightly, and reference some other core files but it will work if done properly.  Sigh ….. this is just one other item on my to do list. I’ll do a post about it when I eventually get around to it…

Hosting on addon accounts or reseller accounts or whatever shouldn’t make any difference to Google. No matter what the server setup is, you have a unique URL resolving to a unique set of content and so the same rules must apply.

 If you do something dodgy and incur any penalties, and ifpenalties can be past between sites on addon domain accounts (who knows) I think they will be handled in the same way  as sub domains. I.e. Your main domain will be able to pass penalties to your addon domains, but addon domains won’t pass penalties to the main domain or each other. I haven’t tested this yet (yet another item on my to do list), but at least I can do it for free with co.cc domains!

This happened to me a few years ago (back in 2000) but I’d still like to know what to do if it ever happens again.

I had a very successful but low tech website. Just plain html and graphics.  I was displaying products, descriptions, prices etc,  and if somebody wanted to order they just sent me an email and we took it from there… like I said, very low tech but  I was doing a LOT of business.

Anyway – I checked my server logs one day and I noticed a load of hits coming from a Madagascan website. No worries, a lot of my products (gems and minerals) were coming from Madagascar and I had a lot of friends and contacts over there, so I didn’t think too much of it.

Before I got around to doing any real investigation I had a really nasty bike accident and was out of commission for a couple of months (fractured skull, brain hemorrhage… you don’t want to know!) and so I forgot about it for a long while.

Much later, when I was regaining some sort of comprehension, I looked at the server logs again and saw thousands of hits coming from the same site and so I went to take a look only to discover that some bastard had stolen my site and was hot-linking to my pictures.

I don’t mean he copied my layout and copy – I mean he copied the whole site. Company name and all!  The only things that were different were the URL and (of course) the order email address. God only knows how many customers and  how much money he had managed to steal from me in the time it took me to discover him!

Anyway – I managed to trace his hosting company and had him shut down ASAP, but how could I go about prosecuting him? I didn’t know about things like whois lookups at the time and couldn’t identify who it was. Clearly a crime had been committed, but where did it happen?

I live in South Africa and created the site here, and then I uploaded it to a server in Canada. The thief copied the site in Madagascar and then uploaded to a server in America. He defrauded people all over the world by pretending to be me… so which government, police force or whatever should I have complained to?  Where, geographically did the crime occur?

I realise that the chances of this happening again are pretty scarce, but if it does I’d like to know how to REALLY nail the bastard dammit!

I know it sounds too good to be true, but I discovered a way to get FREE top level domains and free hosting. In other words 100% free websites!

I hesitated for a while before making this post because I wanted to keep this to myself, but even though it isn’t well known it’s hardly a secret – so in the interests of “paying it forward”  – here it is. If you find this useful I only ask for a link or 2 back to this site. Thanks in advance

Domains generally cost in the region of $10 per year and hosting is from around $10 per month (Yes – I know there are cheaper and more expensive options…these are just broad, ball park figures) so even the most basic site will need you to invest at least some money because even though you can get “free sites” through places like geocities (are they still around?) and blogger.com, these sites are on parasite subdomains and are practically worthless. Now I have discovered how to get real URLs with real value for free and have them hosted for free! Gotta love it!

Whether you are a professional webmaster, SEO, internet marketer, AdSense player or what ever it’s always a good idea to have a decent sized domain portfolio. It’s always nice to have a couple of domains ready to roll if you have a bright idea in the middle of the night and anyway… very few people are content with  making a  living with just one site.

Before I let the cat out of the bag, I’m going to ask you not to abuse this. Don’t go and register thousands of domains that you have no intention of ever using or (even worse) roll out thousands of worthless scraper sites.

Here are a couple of valid uses of these free sites:

1) Get a couple of keyword rich domain names that are related to your niche and then 301 them to your existing site. This makes great URLs for you to use in marketing campaigns and you can easily track your advertising without using those horrible shortening services.
2) If you are an affiliate marketer, you can 301 your free domains to the various offers that you promote and never have to worry about link cloaking or lost commissions ever again.
3) If  you are a SEO, you can develop a couple of small sites, build some link juice and page rank for them for a while and then 301 them to your main site.
4) I have always maintained that if you are an SEO and you have never had a domain banned by Google, you’re not trying hard enough. Use these free sites to experiment with some of the more risky SEO practices so that your money sites and clients sites are never in danger.
5) Never ming the risky SEO practices – just use the free sites and free domains to experiment. Period! The best way to get good at SEO is to experiment to find out exactly what works and what doesn’t, rather than asking questions on public forums.
6) Put up a few one page websites – just a “coming soon” notice and a few paragraphs of useful keyword rich content. Get these pages spidered and indexed so that when you develop your real content the domains are well seasoned and you are a lot less likely to get sandboxed.
7) If you are an AdSense  (or other PPC sevice) player…. duh…. free sites don’t even have to make a dollar a day…they can make a dollar a year and still be profitable!
If you market your own products or services, and the .com and .net version of your company name was taken – here’s another chance to get your company name as a domain.
9) Same thing for keyword rich domains – get ‘em while you can!
10) Get you’re own name as a domain – just use it for you@yourname emails
11) I could go on – there are hundreds of valid uses for your own TLD domains…. even more when you get them for free!

Okay, okay – so how do I get these free domains???

Step1 is to sign up for a free hosting account that allows domain hosting and doesn’t force deliver third party ads.  A couple I am experimenting with are http://www.1free.ws , http://www.agilityhoster.com and http://www.50webs.com but there are a lot more if you just search.

Step2 is to go to http://www.co.cc and register your free domain. You need to complete the process right away which is why you need to have your hosting in place first.

That’s it!

Yes – a paid for hosting account would be better. Back up and support from the free companies is hardly stellar but ya know… free is free .

For your more important sites I suggest getting a reseller account from www.hostgator.com or www.micfo.com which will allow you to host virtually unlimited domains, for a very reasonable cost, and give you maximum control over each individual site.

Like I said earlier, if you found this useful I only ask for a link or 2 back to this site.

I’m not a huge petrol head, car fan or status symbol type of guy and I always swore I’d never drive a brand new car. It totally pisses me off that a the value of a car can depreciate so fast  that you can lose up to 30% of your investment just by driving it out of the showroom!  To me, a car is simply a means of getting from point A to point C, preferably without breaking down at B along the way, so I always took advantage of the depreciation and would only buy cheap, reliable, second hand cars – reasoning that if they got stolen, smashed or broke down I’d simply pull out my credit card and buy another one – and I’d never have to face monthlypayments of any kind.

I’ve had my current car for (which I totally love) for about 8 years (a ‘78 “S series” Beetle – the one with the curved windscreen ) but even though it goes like a dream, I knew I’d have to take it off the road for many months to give it the make over job I want, and I’d need to buy something else to keep me mobile while the VeeDub was being worked on.

So anyway – I started shopping around and spoke to a friend of mine who works at a VW dealership that sells both new and secondhand cars if he had anything decent in stock. Well, when you buy from an official dealership, even though you know you are getting a very good second hand car, the difference in price between new and secondhand isn’t a million miles and so I started considering a brand new car (shock and horror!)

I liked the VW Golf  TenaCiti 1.4i and we worked out that the monthly payments would be about R2000 per month (that’s 2000 Rand – South African currency) Now, I HATE the idea of paying for something monthly and almost chucked the idea and went to look for something cheap and cheerful that I could pay for in one lump sum without totally draining my bank account. But then I thought “Hey – Google sends me an AdSense check for about R2000 every month so it wouldn’t actually be like I was paying for it”

I must add here that I am not an AdSense power player. AdSense is not my main source of income and I always considered any money from them to simply be a bit of extra beer money and so I never really worked on maximising it.  Anyway – I did a bit of tweaking which pushed my Google income up to around R3000 per month which means that I am now driving a brand new car and never have to put my hand in my own pocket! Google covers my monthly repayments, insurance AND satellite tracking and recovery without me doing any extra work at all!

I mentioned this one one of the forums which lead to a flood of people asking me how I did it, so I decided to do a post explaining everything, and here it is

Like I said – I’m not an AdSense power player, it is not my main source of income and I do not put up any Made-For-Adsense type sites. Most of my sites are e-commerce sites selling physical products – the kind that the experts say you should never put AdSense on because it will lower your conversions! But here is the key… I know that every single visitor that comes to my site (or any other site for that matter) will leave my ite. And I want to control how they leave!

Preferably, I want them to leave from my receipt page after making a purchase but if they don’t want to buy my products then I’d rather that they left via an affiliate link, Adsense ad or any other monetized link rather than simply hitting the back button, starting a new search, closing the browser or anything else that doesn’t at least earn me a few cents.

I craft my pages in such a way that I almost force visitors through a series of  “obstacles” in order of which will earn me the most money. 1) Newsletter opt in. 2) Buying my products right away. 3) Leaving my pages through a monetized link such as AdSense. I mostly put the AdSense code at the bottom of my pages – if a visitor doesn’t opt into my list, if they don’t buy my product – then I’ll damn well put AdSense ads at the point where they are going to leave my pages anyway!

I also put a fair number of auto-generated Traffic Equalizer type pages on all my sites. It’s a much maligned piece of software and the forums are full of assholes who don’t know how to use it properly crying that it doesn’t work. But here’s how I use it and make money from it.

Firstly and most importantly,  I don’t use it to create millions of pages with nothing but shitty scraped content and AdSense ads! I use it to create a lot (but usually less than 1000) of valid pages that target long tailed keywords related to my site. Call them doorway pages, call them bait pages, whatever… the fact is that they are real valid pages and I craft my templates in such a way that visitors have to pass through the same series of steps that they would have to on my “real” pages. Ie. 1) Newsletter opt in. 2) Buying my products right away. 3) Leaving my pages through a monetized link such as AdSense.

The reason this works so well, is that for many long-tailed keywords it doesn’t take much more than some basic on page optimisation to show up on the first page (sometimes even first position on Google). I don’t stuff my pages with nothing but SERPs harvested by Traffic Equalizer, but I do use it to generate 100s of pages that have proper title tags, H1’s, H2’s, <strong> tags, anchor text etc. All pages have the same navigation bar as the rest of my site so all my pages are easily navigable and I pull valid content from my own products database as well as RSS feeds from related sources.

I don’t do all that keyword research that the experts advise – I simply make sure that AdSense displays related ads and manually remove any ads that are not relevant to my sites. The point is – that if people arrive on my site looking for “blue widgets” and don’t buy my blue widgets for what ever reason, they are more likely to leave my site via a “blue widget” AdSense ad than an ad for “Travel in Hawaii”

So that’s it in a nutshell really, put AdSense ads where people are probably going to leave your site anyway and manually remove any ads that aren’t directly related to the content of your site!

 I’ve made this a DoFollow blog so feel fee to comment or ask questions, but DON’T abuse it with fuckwit comments like “Nice post” or “Thank you I learn much”. If you’re going to comment, make it something sensible or ask a valid question. Dumb bombing for links will not be tolerated!

You’d think that internet marketing and search engine optimization in South Africa would be exactly the same as anywhere else in the world. I mean the principles don’t change across borders and what works in England or America should work here too, right?

Well, broadly speaking that is true but here in South Africa we have a whole set of problems to overcome before we can even get started to compete with the internationals!

1) Connectivity and bandwidth – thanks to Helkom’s (the most despised company in South Africa) pathetic service and insanely high bandwidth costs, we start with the legendary albatross around our necks. The majority of South African’s can’t even afford basic internet access and even the more affluent consider a decent ADSL connection a bit of a luxury. Sure, many have a small data cap for basic surfing and email usage but to buy enough bandwidth to set up and run a home based internet business costs much more than it does in overseas countries. Apart from this all locally based hosting companies are forced to buy their bandwidth from Telskum and as result, hosting fees are much higher locally than internationally.

No matter how good the hosting service is or how well meaning they may be – the fact that they are forced to resell bandwidth that they are paying too much for in the first place means they simply can’t compete on an equal footing

For this reason alone, I almost always recommend that people should host their sites on international servers but to compound the problem, if your site is hosted on a server within South Africa there is a very real chance that there will be long periods where nobody can access it due to the widespread theft of copper cables (and Telkom’s legendary speed in repairing such problems doesn’t help either!

2) Merchant accounts and payment gateways – for reasons only known to themselves, PayPal won’t allow South Africans to connect their PayPal accounts to South African bank accounts. This means that even though we can accept payment into a PayPal account, there is no way that we can actually access the funds! I learned this the hard way a few years ago when I set up a site and accepted a few thousand rands worth of sales before discovering that I couldn’t withdraw the money. After a certain amount of time (60 days if memory serves me correctly) PayPal simply informed me that since I hadn’t retrieved the money, they were refunding my customers. This is after I have packed and shipped the goods!

The only way to accept money via the internet in South Africa is by opening your own online merchant account and using a third party payment gateway (some of the banks provide their own gateway services). This isn’t as easy as it may sound at first. In order to open an online merchant account you can’t do so in your personal capacity and you must be a registered business so you pay your money, go through the registration process and wait around with your finger up your nose until the process in finally completed. Then you apply for your online merchant account and the fun begins….

I had set up several sites for other people using Nedbank’s system and so when I wanted to create a site for myself, they were my first port of call. I don’t bank with them and so they needed all sorts of codes, verifications, paper work and wot not from my bank which led to weeks of playing telephone tag with a bunch of people who didn’t know what I was talking about. Thanks to a friend in a right place, I got the phone number of one of the head honchos at Nedbank (a Mr Bowie I think…) and after a few phone calls between him and my own bank I was told (and I may be paraphrasing slightly here – it was about 5 years ago – but these are almost his exact words..) ” I’m not going to get into a game of who-said-what. I’m not interested and we don’t want your business. Good bye”. Thanks for wasting a month of my time there buddy!

Next I tried FNB… nobody knew what I was talking about. “eish… online what?”

So next I approached ABSA. It was great! They were helpful and knowledgeable and I had my online account approved and opened in about 2 days. Then they put me in touch with their payment gateway people and then the “fun” began again!

I’m not a professional programmer, but I can knock up a decent website and find my way around basic programming but it still took me about a week to connect to the payment gateway. (They sent me a whole lot of documentation by email. How was I to know that the cryptically named “APO” document contained the inadequate help files!)

Eventually I got it all connected and working, but the process kept freezing on their secure page. Every time I called support I was told to send a screen capture of the error. It’s your damn secure page, you should know what it looks like! Eventually I created a page with a screen capture video showing them step by step what I was doing and where the process was freezing. I was told they couldn’t view it because they were behind a firewall. This is a simple streaming flash video!

I asked them several times to look at my code to make sure I was passing the correct variables but I was told repeatedly that they couldn’t (wouldn’t) do that and after a couple of weeks when they finally agreed that there was a problem I was told that they would send a programmer to my place to sort it out, charging me at an hourly rate! No thanks!

Finally I tried Standard Bank. What a pleasure! They sent somebody to me to sign the contracts and open the merchant account within a day and everything was settled within about 36 hours. They put me onto VCS as a payment gateway which ran so smoothly that it scared me! I decided to pay a little extra and use another company (whose name escapes me) to host my gateway pages on their secure server because they do custom work and the payment pages look like the rest of my websites. The programmer’s name is Ainsley and when ever I set up a new site I just call him and I’m sorted out in a couple of hours.

Moral of the story… the only payment system I can recommend is a Standard Bank merchant account with a payment gateway supplied by VCS. I have also heard good things about MyGate as a payment gateway (they can interface with a merchant account from any bank) and I am ion the process of setting up a site for a friend using them. I’ll report back as to how it goes when the site is live.

3) Post Office theft – OK, I went on a bit about banks and payment systems but the post office is another problem faced by South Africans when setting up an online business. I have had several charge backs because parcels take so long to arrive that customers get nervous and think I haven’t sent their orders. I have also had more than one case of customers complaining that only a portion of the order arrived and that can only be attributed to light fingered post office “wekkas” helping themselves. There have been enough exposés on TV to know how rife this problem is.

OK – I think I’ve rambled on enough now and I don’t want to make this post too long. That’s only the tip of the iceberg and I’ll probably do another post or two about the unique problems that internet based business face in South Africa at some stage but I’d like to sign off by saying that I don’t want to be all “doom and gloom”. Yes – it can be challenging and yes, it is probably a bit harder here in South Africa than it is internationally, but it not impossible. The average person CAN start and run a very profitable internet based business for a relitively small ammount or money and that is what I am going to be posting about here!