PhoenixDzine

Investing in an Ad campaign for your website or online store has benefits which you cannot be guaranteed with traditional printed media. Without getting technical with costs , hit rates etc.

If you have a website or promote a product online in South Africa you need a :

• South African consumer base (geo-targeted ad campaign )
• Consumer with Internet Access
• An easy way to reach them

Offerforge has access to thousands of website publishers to promote your product or website.  As South Africa’s top publisher (affiliate) network, Offerforge provides a platform for Advertisers to effectively promote their businesses online to a large South African market via Publishers with an existing traffic base.

Bloggers and publishers  promote your offer online and generate traffic for leads, sales, or subscriptions. SEO strategies take time to create traffic and increase page rankings for Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and the other search top  search engines.

Though a fully functional web site with shopping carts is ideal if you plan to sell products or services in a smooth user friendly environment, you can still promote your products or services if you have a very basic web site as long as it provides details of your offerings as well as contact details.

Offerforge website : http://za.offerforge.com

Clean or pretty Urls are not only easy for your visitors to remember but effects your Page Rank by making it easier for the search engine to crawl your site. This is a really simple SEO trick. The average web developer might not put much thought into the difference and yet I see even so called SEO experts and huge sites with SEO companies working for them ignore this basic search engine optimization solution.

What you need to know about canonicalization is that Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and the other search engines see a site using both URL’s as two different pages.

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.website.com
• website.com/
• www.website.com/index.html
• website.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and the other search engines “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

The amount of duplicate content can negatively effect your PR (page ranks) in  Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and the other search engines.

Yes, you read that right.

If your site resolves to both http:// and to http:// with the www afterwards then the search engines including Google consider those to be two completely different URL’s and will allocate your Pagerank accordingly.

What this means is that for example if you are a Pagerank 4 when you load your site with www and you are also a Pagerank 4 without it then you are splitting your potential Page Rank between those two URL’s.

If you try to type in http://www.numafrica.com you will see that I have placed a permanent 301 redirect to http://numafrica.com/ to prevent this.

This is a very simple redirect using .htaccess but a good SEO tweak that will do wonders for getting the most out of your Page Rank.

I have chosen to redirect to non-www but there is absolutely no SEO benefit or loss to choosing one over the other. The important thing SEO wise is to just choose one and stick with it. Load your index page into your browser with and without the www and simply pick whichever is higher in Pagerank, or if they are both the same then just

What is AddThis?

AddThis is the #1 bookmarking and sharing button on the Internet. Launched in September 2006, AddThis has become the standard button for bookmarking and sharing. The AddThis button spreads your content across the Web by making it easier for your visitors to bookmark and share it with people across multiple platforms. Users can bookmark and share your site or specific url via email, Facebook, Ask, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo MyWeb, MySpace, favourite browser and more again… and again. This simple yet powerful button is very easy to install on any site and provides valuable Analytics about the bookmarking and sharing activity of your users. AddThis helps your visitors create a buzz for your site and increase its popularity and ranking.

The wordpress plugin allows easy customisation of your AddThis button automatically adds the button to all your content. The customisation includes Branding , a custom logo , background colour and Language.

Once you have installed the AddThis plugin
in WordPress edit your theme stylesheet and add .addthis { float:right; clear:both; } to the stylesheet. The changes to the stylesheet need to be included to the plugin template as well.

• Go to Plugins
• Look for the Addthis Plugin and click Edit
• Press Ctrl+F on your keyboard and find <a href or look for the line with <a href
• Change the <div> tag to <div class=”addthis”>
• update and test your bookmark button

Why use AddThis or Bookmarking

• Ever Forget a link or needed to share content ? – Addthis makes it easy for your visitors to bookmark and share your content with others.
• Promotes Your Website/Blog – Helps send your content to social bookmarking services and social networks, which brings back more traffic to you.
• Increases Your Rankings – Increases your link popularity, which is a very important factor in increasing search engine rankings.
• Most Popular – It’s the #1 button, recognized by everyone using multiple bookmarking services. Your visitors will already know what the button does and how to use it.
• All in One Service – AddThis Eliminates the need to include a different button for each bookmarking service.
• Easy to Install – AddThis button can easily be installed on almost anywhere within minutes.
• Free Analytics – Provides valuable statistics about how readers are bookmarking and sharing your content.

It is official, WordPress 2.7 has been released. Plenty of new features or just a visual makeover ?

This version has had the most contribution by developers ever and is finally unveiled after much anticipation .

According to WordPress.org besides the new features “it’s just plain faster”  and … more here!

“It’s the next generation of WordPress, which is why we’ve bestowed it with the honour of being named for John Coltrane. And you can download it today.”

Will you be upgrading your blog immediately, or will you just wait and see what other have to say about it first?

While automatic upgrades is a welcome feature. Be sure to have a backup  !!

Fantastico Users have always had oneclick upgrades which did ensure that the users backup was made. This was always dependant on the version your webhosting company made available and having to login to Cpanel. It did however save you on another download. South African Bloggers and webmasters who constantly update large scripts will admit that it is costly if your always updating to the latest versions. Biggest Bonus is the fact that it will be faster !.

WYSIWYG visual introduction to what 2.7 is, check out this video (available in HD, and full screen):