I have been using ecademy over the pat 4 months or so by now . Ecademy is a Social Network for Business People founded in 1998 now with over 170,000 member profiles worldwide. As one would expect , i was invited to join , by a good friend, who found the website considerably useful . Ecademy , besides being a great haunt for networking people worldwide , also provides a marketplace with both buyers and sellers of all kind – lawyers , doctors, web developers, lecturers, carpenters, office owners as well as students and authors and hypnotists etc. Whats better is , unlike sites such as orkut , or Hi5 where majority is people from India , Brazil , china etc, here we have members from European countries such as UK , France , and America , Canada , Australia etc.
When my friend invited me till now , i have been contacted for different jobs and projects as well have made some interesting contacts and based on that I upgraded my membership to a power networker and once i get some more time , i would be highly interested in upgrading to a BlackStar member ( which my friends have already ) , and gain entry to various locale meetings and come more closer with hundreds of other Blackstars . The way you can think about it – the cost of a Blackstar Membership is around 100 USD a month , so if a person who has upgraded by paying that just to keep in touch with several other like minded professionals and businessmen , they would surely have the budget to pay for some product you can sell or service you provide pretty easily , at a percentage of that cost . Considering Ecademy has around 170,000 members even if you get a 1% of those interested in the service / product … it is worthwhile anyday .

While writing this post , i received notification that i have received a query from another ecademist , this being the 3rd in past 2 days only

Hi Arindra
How much would you charge (roughly) to develop a PHP, MySQL site like TreatHer.com?
Look forward to your reply.
Matt

DMOZ is the original Open Directory Project, one of the oldest and most reputed directories on the internet. Along with BOTW , Yahoo Directory and Business.com , if anyone serious in getting exposure and enlistment in their topic – it is the directory to be in . Numerous seo tools use a listing in DMOZ as a criteria for evaluating a website’s value. Since it’s inception as an Open Directory Project – meaning contribution can be provided by anyone with an interest and time and energy to devote, DMOZ has kept on enlarging and diversifying into various countries and languages .

However in the past – because of its basic slowness and often inactivity among volunteers , it has become the point of anger for numerous webmasters . People often read about horror stories of not getting listed for months and years , people also hear stories about corrupt DMOZ editors – who allegedly or maybe even truly taken bribes for enlisting websites. DMOZ , like WIkipedia , is not operated by a single group of people ( as far as my knowledge goes) , rather from different ends of the Internet – thus demystifying all the theories and stories might not be possible , but to come somewhat closer to its active audience – they had opened a Public Forum . It did serve some purpose and i believe several actual rules and guidelines are better explained in there , as I was just visiting it . But since past 2 years they closed down the DMOZ Site Submission Status forum , which once again angered many a people . On visiting it today I found out that AOL staff governing DMOZ has initiated a Official DMOZ Blog . Undoubtedly this is another step in having a more public face for the ODP , keeping with the current day trends for every well known websites as well. But it remains to be seen if this will become another bloodbath between the Editors and the Webmasters and also die a unnatural death like the forum. Be as it may , I am still planning to subscribe to it’s RSS feed to stay updated .

I have been blogging here for the past 5 months , however even then i am hardly what you can call a prolific blogger . Wordpress is a terrific blogging platform , and that is nothing new. But every day i get new examples or rather proof of that . In the past 1-2 weeks i have noticed how different people have been utilizing it to its ultimate limit – be it for personal pleasure or be it for earning money , below are some examples .

Example # 1. My friend Abhishek , who claims bloging has changed his life so much that he is now more of a blogger than a businessman . ( Inside scoop – he runs a web company with offices around the globe)

Example # 2. Some people are so obsessed with wordpress that they celebrated 15th August with the artwork mentioned here.

Example # 3. Wordpress as a free software, in the past few years has been playing a huge role in seo / search engine optimization for several sites and internet marketers. To stay in the radar for a large mass of wordpress users , several people have taken the oppurtunity to develop free plugins in order to further aid the increase in popularity of your wordpress site. create a realy useful wordpress plugin and keep giving optional support and you have got more traffic than you ever could amass using adsense or any other form of commercial advertisement.

Example # 4. What started as a similar ideology ala designing artisitic wordpress themes for free , has however now become somewhat distorted . People still continue making sponsored wordpress themes , which has now been blocked for submission on wordpress.org themes collection. This has not stopped people from carrying on the business , rather gearing up to make it into an art by itself .

Example # 5. But uptill now , all the examples were about invidual efforts on earning money or fanaticism or love for Wordpress blogging. But the probably the people who are in love with wordpress the most are the illustrious blog network owners and PaidtoBlog authors . It is not a big secret that blogs are a great way to get yourself or your product or service popularized .
Initially it started with true bloggers mentioning some service they purchased or some movie they saw or some web host they liked . Other visitors to that blog would comment asking more clarifications why they liked it or why they disliked it . This created a buzz , and if that blog had a good technorati rating or someone bookmarked that blog post , that would lead to a good traffic channel . Several businessmen and website owners found this to be a great way to get marketted and they decided to lure some bloggers to pay to write about their business or give them a link. There’s a bengali saying about tigers and taste of blood , i just cant recall … but the person who got $15 USD from some person he never knew for doing what he would have done as it is , would jump at the oppurtunity and if he is more than just a writer , he would take a cheap hosting, download 30 different free themes, utilise some even greater wordpress plugin to post simaltaneously on multiple blogs and create options for webmasters looking for getting 1000 backlinks, and a post on a page with google PR.
Google has recently come out with its paid link reporting tool , which might be the death of these paid blogging site for all we know , but at least untill that gets confirmed over the time , webmasters with blog networks ( often with multiple authors spinning diverse content with extra payment ) , will make some good money , and i can tell you this much that its nothing near to a measly 15 USD .

Google’s webmaster tools bring out newer and newer options , some aiding webmasters while , some encountering large hue and cry from several webmasters. If i recall, initially Google’s webmaster tools only included the option for submiting your XML sitemap for educating google . One could create an XML sitemap using the standard given my Google ( How to create a Sitemap) , you can get your newly launched site of the ground. This is just a basic requirement, of course and does not ensure that all pages will get indexed by google . Ever since launching this, they kept upgrading it to allow a webmaster to find answers to several regularly asked questions – I will just mention some of the good ones here

The prefered domain tool : Getting linked from different external sites is something every webmaster dreams of , and that is what helps better your chances of being found – either via referals or even by search engines. now when you recieve a link , the person linking you need not remember what you prefer *www.domain.com* or *http://domain.com* and this is what a search engine will also note , and thus his link power will get distributed to 2 different url’s . This can also be fixed by using 301 redirects , but that is possible for geeky webmasters – google provides a simple solution for general website owners from this tool.

Robotxt Analysis tool - This is THE tool for finding out if any pages or path on your website is being blocked and not crawled by google or any other search engine for that matter . When inside the webmaster console , as it is now called under the diagonistic tab, you will find this tool which will show wether Google has found your robots file, and when it has last accessed it. What are the pages you are blocking google to enter for any particular domain and subdomain can be found here.

URL Removal : A regular question on many forums is how can i remove or prevent my pages from getting indexed by google . Yeah , don’t be surprised , many people actually need it . For example , a warez site who shares pirated downloads or MP3’s would not want his pages to be on google , as that is an open invitation for the producers to locate them and shut them down . I personally had a family website where there were photos i am not keen on sharing outside my family , which i deindexed within 1 day using this URL removal tool . To properly use this, as advised : it is always preferable to first disallow the URL’s via your robots.txt or robots meta tag and then submit the url for removal.

Also along with this , google has now started providing direct communication with webmasters , who have taken the effort to verify site ownership , create a sitemap for every subdomain etc and also trying to adhere to its webmaster guidelines. Initially Google was sending direct emails , which suddenly started getting abused by spammers and spoofers, who created dummy emails – thus confusing webmasters even more. But now , through the webmaster console itself , google has a message centre where they leave tips and updates , often very specific to our sites. Just today i noticed / recieved a feedback from google , which said “hey , you have one warning “. I clicked on the message and it showed me that since I had last submitted my xml-sitemap , i have modified my support.html to support.php and hence there was a 404 being detected. I immediately rectified this and also updated my sitemap and pinged back google.

Coming back to the topic header, googles latest option under webmaster console – the paid links notification tool. In order to maintain a high quality index , google used to allow its visitors to always report a spammy link or url . Earlier this was possible from under google.com/about/webmasters/ or something . Google always devalued this form as the most people who took pains to use this was envious webmasters and obviously it is not possible for them to manually review every submission. But this new tool is not at all for spam reports , but for a much more questionable practise – buying links to channelize Google Page Rank(tm).. which google considers a violation of its guidelines . I had written a much detailed post about this on DP. While some webmasters are extremely unhappy as this would mean one kind of profit for business will get shut down in fear of being penalised by Google , some webmasters are also of the opinion that Google itself is in fault by having the PageRank system online.

Now the way I see it is : a website owner operates a website for mostly commercial reasons , hence he should surely try to find means of monetizing it , but not at cost of devaluing itself , nor by increasing spam or giving outgoing links to sites of no worth . Selling Advertising on ones website is and always was a coveted thing … but typically Advertising works in the way , that it adds value to the web visitor coming on to your website . If you have a website about cooking or gardening , which is mostly visited by womenfolk and you sell banner space or text links to websites selling women’s clothes or jewellery , it makes sense and gives value . But say for example , you own and operate a website for baseball fans or Tips on how to create Wooden Furniture and you are a prestigious website revered or regularly visited , and you put a 3 word footer text link to the Viagra shop , or Ink refills , it makes no sense at all . The viagra shop or Ink refill estore is simply trying to cash on your site having high pagerank and thus hoping to get some PR / link value transfered to its 2 week old spammy website , which otherwise would be nowhere to be seen . THIS is what Google is trying to stop by bringing in the Paid Links Reporting tool .

Since yesterday, i have started doing free website reviews . Many people actually charge for it , but i am finding it quite the fun , especially at a place like DP, there are hundreds of new and old members even come down to the reviews section to ask other webmasters and experts about just another opinion.

To be frank, it started with that only …. since we launched our web design website , I wanted as many visitors to start visiting it and also give their feedbacks. With a site like dp, there are always a wide variety of internet users, all on different browsers, resolutions, os. So when i posted our website for feedbacks, I thought immediately – why would others want to give feedback on mine, unless i return the love I dont know how much longer i will be keeping doing it , but i noticed that quite a few people that what i have said or pointed out actually helped them . Also I am hoping , if more people do actually view our website , in whatever minimal way , at least it will bring up our new site’s alexa ranking .

This is the month of search engine optimization. The past one month has been good to us, touch wood. So i now have a small budget to splurge on the goodies i have been waiting buy using PayPal power . Past 1 week i have been busy getting a directory submission process started . As we now have a team of professional staff, we are selecting / using various directory lists , from which we are screening off hundreds of fake directories and choosing some of the creamiest directories to submit our website to.

The first step is collecting the various directory lists from which we initially choose the directories which is worth paying a link for . As of yet , we are NOT using any Reciprocal Directories, as basiclly i think they suck . We are submitting our web design website to numerous screened and collected Seo Friendly FREE directories . I do NOT believe in any directory submission software , as I dont feel it allows any judgement at all . Not only does it submit totally on a pre-calculated algorithm, software / program can have no braind of hindthought of its own . I like going through a list of websites myself , finding the perfect subcategory for my website and submitting in it , instead of some of the higher rank / popular categories on just any directory.

What is wrong with that , you will ask…. the problem is that i like getting contextual links , instead of ANY link from any run off the mill directory . Now there are lots of tools which help you predict which of the free directories have a future .

One tip i can tell you however , is that in SEO there is no ONE GREAT THING you can do , it involves an amalgamation of various multiple tests and dares . Theres no wonder tick you can implement and voila you will have the results . Theres a 100 of search engine optimization ebooks available on the internet available , but i have heard some great reports on the one i bought . I have read it and found it to be quite useful to get the headstart . I feel you can use it too .