Chasing the dream… and finding out exactly what that means
Archive for January, 2006
WordPress SEO
Jan 30th
I wanted to give a quick plug to Semiologic’s WordPress theme. I spent quite a bit of time pondering whether to buy it or not; at US$299, it’s not cheap! It wasn’t until a while later that I found that two of the themes, the two-column version that you see represented here and a three-column version, are available for free!
The main purpose of the theme is to optimise your blog for SEO, and although I know little of SEO, what I do know lends me to believe that this does the job admirably.
Check out this page for more information: Semiologic theme and CMS for WordPress. The link at the bottom of the page is what you need to use to download the theme. Get some traffic today!
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
Blocking your own views with Google Analytics
Jan 6th
This tip applies to anybody running Google Analytics on their own web site.
If you’re like me, you’ve never got the filters to work in Google Analytics. I’m a seasoned programmer; I know all about regular expressions, and yet getting the system to exclude page views from my IP address just doesn’t work. I either fail to block anything, or I block everything!
If your web pages use PHP and you have a static IP address, there’s an alternative. Simply wrap the Google Analytics code up in the following:
<!-- IP: <?php echo $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]; ?> -->
<?php if ($_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"] != "IP_ADDR") { ?>
<-- Google Analytics code -->
<?php } ?>
Replace IP_ADDR with your IP address as reported by the script. For example, mine is 86.7.14.186, so that’s exactly what I insert between the quotation marks.
If you have dynamic IP, this technique may still work, but you’ll have to keep an eye out for when your IP address changes. You may find that only the last number of your IP address change, in which case you can filter on the remaining three only with a small change to the code.
To find out your IP address, go to www.whatismyip.com. It will show you your IP address and that of your proxy. Note that you may have to use the address of your proxy. The definitive way to find out which IP address to use is to view source on one of your web pages after you have modified it, and look for the IP address, which will be detailed in a comment starting with <!-- IP: in the header.
Note that you may also block traffic from some other people if you have to block based on a proxy IP address. Personally, I’d rather do that, and not have to worry about my own page views appearing in Google Analytics.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
AdWords Dominator review
Jan 3rd
I’ve played with AdWords Dominator a bit now, so I thought I’d write about it.
AdWords Dominator is a tool that allows you to set up Google AdWords keyword-targeted campaigns offline, and to automatically upload your changes when you are ready. It uses the AdWords API, which is currently in beta. Anybody who has a Google AdWords account can get AdWords API access.
This is the first product of its kind ever released, and as you can expect, it has a few rough edges. I have had occasions where clicking on the ad group name has not produced the keyword list, and I’ve also had nothing viewing in the summary window, but these may well be a result of me rushing ahead without reading the documentation! There is a learning curve to go through with this application, and if you decide to buy it, you would be well advised to read the manual.
I had a problem for a while when trying to send new ads to either a new campaign or an existing campaign; the ads simply were not getting uploaded. In the end, it turned out that while manually entering the ads, they were disapproved for obscure Google reasons, but it would have been nice if the program had shown an error message to me to indicate that this was the case. It is quite easy to tell when a change to an ad or a new ad has not been uploaded because the ad is shown with a surrounding grey border, but it takes a while before you figure this out!
I have found that when you delete ads, the deletion doesn’t seem to take effect, with the result that I have to go in manually through the web-based interface to do this.
I felt that the program could also do with at least as much functionality as Google provide with respect to automatic keyword CPC editing and similar things you can find in the tools menu on the web site.
The reports and graphs are a worthwhile feature, and they save you waiting for Google to produce them!
In summary, though, I can’t recommend AdWords Dominator to our readers in its present state. The acid test of a product such as this is whether you end up using it on a daily basis. I have tried AdWords Dominator, but I’ve gone back to the web-based interface for most of my AdWords campaign editing. If you regularly experience problems with your web connection or you need to edit your campaigns on the move, AdWords Dominator would be useful, but otherwise I do not recommend the product.
What do you think? Add your opinion to this article!
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer