“Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic.”

If you’ve never heard of setting custom status headers then you’re not alone. Its a common thing to forget when setting up or designing your own site even if you are familiar with any of the following response codes below:

• 200 OK
• 301 Moved Permanently
• 302 Found
• 304 Not Modified
• 307 Temporary Redirect
• 400 Bad Request
• 401 Unauthorized
• 403 Forbidden
• 404 Not Found
• 500 Internal Server Error
• 501 Not Implemented

There’s a lot more than this, but these are the most common ones you’ll come across.

Using Error 404 For Marketing & SEO
Since Google frowns on duplicate page content then you need to be able to do two things.

1. Find out if your website is producing proper error status code pages.
2. If they’re not, know what code to implement to fix them.

Status Code Check
The quickest way to test your own pages would be to create a bad link. Easy enough. And use the headers status tool at seologs.com.

Alternatively, if you’re using PHP and you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, there is a function which you can use to output the info that a page is sending out. Here’s a quick example:

1. $headers = headers_list();
2. foreach ($headers as $header) {
3. echo "<li>$header</li>";
4. }
5. Download this code: 0902headerstatus.txt

Applying An Error Status Code
If you have a custom solution (Wordpress should already be doing this by default) you’ll want to include code like the following on your error page. Assuming you have a dynamic solution, this should be easy and might only apply to one page:

<?php header(”HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found”); ?>

Just Like No Follow
If you’re already going to the work to painstakingly go around your site and put “no follow” on your duplicate content, then this is just as important! If your error pages have fancy dynamic content (good for keeping mislead visitors on your site) its not good to let search engines waste their time crawling mixed content every time a search bot goes to it. Depending on the CMS solution you’re using a bad URL might display its own error without redirecting to a common error URL and that’s where we run into the duplicate looking content scenario. If its marked as an error page its more understandable to the search engine and you therefore will not be penalized. Google’s official webmaster central blog has a bit more on how users and search bots look at 404 pages.

Other Thoughts About Error Pages
Don’t stop there. While you’re implimenting this, its a good reason to optimize your error pages.

• Logging and then looking up where your 404 errors are coming from is a great way to keep visitors on your site longer. It also gives you some insight to correct the issues in the first place.
• Create a custom 404 page that has a little more to offer than the common error. Since error pages are common exit points, get your readers interested again by listing of 5 or 6 of your most popular articles in the past month or year. Perhaps a clip of your most recent article with a “continue reading” link which will bring them back into the site.

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BrowserShots.Org
This is a great online tool that tells you which browsers you may want to install and troubleshoot with more. At a glance, I was able to download 52 screen shots of the browsers that I chose all at once. You can see some of the thumbnailed results for robmalon.com in the left screenshot. It showed me that I had some serious issue in IE 5.5 as you can see in the picture below

Beware, when you use this tool, you may only be able to use it once per day and for one site per day. Obviously a service like this can be abused. If you want to use it more than that, you could try a clever trick like changing your routers MAC address manually which in turn should change the last set of octets on your IP address from a typical DLS or Cable provider.

Also note, when you use this tool, that some of the shots might have to be redone because I think their servers timeout sometimes.

If you do any research into BrowserShots you’ll find they have Downloads area which links to a sourceforge project which they’ve started so you can run your own. This is the only way to date, to be able to manage and emulate all browsers at once.

What To Develop For - The Browsers Visitors Use
To be honest, at some point, its time to cut your losses and develop for the majority. I’ve reviewed stats from some of the larger sites I run and you can see the results of users typical browser usage these days for yourself. Note: These stats are from the month of August 2008.

Reviewing The Statistics

• The main stats (first 3 graphs) are from the same site. Its a site in a gaming niche (I run several sites in this niche) so remember that the audience is a bit younger and maybe a bit more technical.
• The bottom left graph shows a quick percentage of the traffic on this site (robmalon.com) in which firefox usage sky rockets! I’m sure my audience here is a little more cutting edge, developers ;).
• On the bottom right you’ll see stats for a forum that I operate with similar stats to the game site.
• I’ve looked at stats across clients which I’ve done work for in the past. Even in non technical areas the trends are about the same. Firefox is always 45% - 70% and IE is usually between 30% and 45% of traffic.

That said, when I develop CSS sites, I specifically develop for IE6, 7 and Firefox 2, 3.

Typically anything you do for Firefox 3 will work in Firefox 2. IE is a different story because you cant have two instances installed on the same machine. (But wait, keep reading - There is a way).

More Than Just An Image
If you need more interactivity with it you might be able to find a way to do a combination of these which will allow you to cover a fairly wide spectrum while still using a single computer:

• Dual boot multiple operating systems - Maybe a bit tedious because you need to restart the machine every time you want to try a new set of browsers installed on a different operating system.
• Virtual Boot by using something such as VMware. There’s a rather large amount of options for free virtual PC emulators available. This might be a better option as you wont have to reboot as often.

Internet Explorer
IE alone, is usually one of the most difficult issues in setting some of these things up. If dual booting isn’t an option for you (or even if it is). You might what to shorten your work load on setup by finding handy utilities like this one: MultipleIE’s. There is also a standalone IE7 version available on the same site.

FireFox
With FireFox 2 and 3 you can use managed profiled to allow the two installs to co-exist together on the same machine.

Safari
A Multi-Safari project was started for a multiple Safari install. It appears that this only works on a Mac however. You can find more info on the process at  michelf.com’s blog. You might also find the trick on lifehacker.com useful back when Safari 3 was in beta.

Opera
Opera plays nice and does not need a multi-installer to be able to run different versions on a machine. Simply install to separate directories as you go.

Conclusions
At the end of the day its hard to please everyone. I shoot to design for the two most popular browsers and have compatibility with at least the current version and previous version before it. That’s hard enough as it is. If I ever have a client that asks me to do design work with an advanced design, and they want more support than that, it can definitely increases rates.

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Custom Home Page Design & Layout
An important first step to this is drafting out what you want to do. Organize what widgets are going to go where. That’s difficult if you don’t know what Wordpress is capable of. So, to briefly go over what we have at our hands, plan out your front page content based on these questions:

• What categories if any are important enough to to give them their own mini feed on the front page?
• How many recent articles in each widget do you want to display? Offsetting this in various places will allow you to tweak a homepage to get it to balance nicely where it otherwise wouldn’t because of uneven content in columns.
• Do you want to display the first 200 characters (without links/images) of each article? Consider how this will effect the previous point I made.
• Design and architecture. - See the layout idea to the right for a visual example. In spot one in the left side example you might put the 8 most recent articles across the entire site and include all categories. In spot two you might have posts only from a category which you’ve labeled “Updates”? Or perhaps a category which you use to tag your latest “Video” posts? Then in category 3 a list of articles which you consider to be “Featured” articles. The list is endless with options. When you go to setup your page like this, a lot is determined on how well you categorize your current posts. For example, I implemented a featured area in the top tabbed area on the front page. I had to go back, create a new category, and apply that category to existing posts as I saw fit. Then, from now on, I simply add it as I go when I write a post that I want to show up in the “featured” widget on the front page.
• While you’re planning out your widgets, don’t forget, you can use code from other plugins as well. More about that in a bit.

Table Or CSS Setup
Now that you have that down, its time to implement some layout code. If you’re new to this, set this up in a table. If you’re looking to go all hardcore, then use a layout with div’s like this:

1. //Setup For Example 1 (3 widgets)
2.  
3. <div style="width:100%; padding: 5px; border: 1px solid #FFFFFF;">
4. WIDGET 1 CODE HERE
5. </div>
6.  
7. <div style="clear:both; padding-top:5px;"></div>
8.  
9. <div style="float:left; width:200px; padding:5px; border:1px solid #FFFFFF;">
10. WIDGET 2 CODE HERE
11. </div>
12.  
13. <div style="float:right; width:200px; padding:5px; border:1px solid #FFFFFF;">
14. WIDGET 3 CODE HERE
15. </div>
16.  
17.  
18. //Setup For Example 2 (4 widgets)
19.  
20. <div style="float:left; width:200px; padding:5px; border:1px solid #FFFFFF;">
21. WIDGET 1 CODE HERE
22. </div>
23.  
24. <div style="float:right; width:200px; padding:5px; border:1px solid #FFFFFF;">
25. WIDGET 2 CODE HERE
26. </div>
27.  
28. <div style="clear:both; padding-top:5px;"></div>
29.  
30. <div style="float:left; width:200px; padding:5px; border:1px solid #FFFFFF;">
31. WIDGET 3 CODE HERE
32. </div>
33.  
34. <div style="float:right; width:200px; padding:5px; border:1px solid #FFFFFF;">
35. WIDGET 4 CODE HERE
36. </div>
37. Download this code: 0826divfrontpagewidgets.txt

In case you’re confused, all this code is going to go into a “page” which you should have already specified as the homepage. If not, its not a bad idea to practice on a non-frontpage which is unpublished so you can experiment without putting an existing blog into chaos.

Coding The Widgets
Then you have some options for each widget. What you need to do is tell the proper Wordpress function to loop through the posts that you’d like to display. Here are the examples:

1. <?php
2. //Setting up the new loop of posts
3. global $post;
4. //Getting Posts - More on this below
5. $gettingposts = get_posts(‘numberposts=5&category=1′);
6. //Starting the loop
7. foreach($gettingposts as $post) :
8. setup_postdata($post);
9. //Below is a custome output of a link setup
10. ?>
11. - <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to &ldquo;<?php the_title(); ?>&rdquo;"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
12. <div class="postbreak">
13. <?php
14. //End the loop
15. endforeach;
16. ?>
17.  
18. <?php
19. //This bit of code will loop through 5 recent articles covering all categories and post the_excerpt() - A 200 character clip from the post that excludes any html in from those first lines.
20. global $post;
21. //Getting Posts - More on this below
22. $gettingposts = get_posts(‘numberposts=5′);
23. //Starting the loop
24. foreach($gettingposts as $post) :
25. setup_postdata($post);
26. //Below is a custome output of a link setup
27. ?>
28. <h3><a  style="font-size:14px;" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
29. <?php
30. //Display a clip from the post
31. the_excerpt();
32. //End the loop
33. endforeach;
34. ?>
35. Download this code: 0826codefrontpagewidgets.txt

Creation of intricate homepages can be further enhanced by using multiple wordpress template tags. All the documentation is there, simply call the functions with the parameters you want (as available in each template tag). In the example above I first show a way to iterate through links in a particular category using the template tag get_posts. In the second example I use it again but this time don’t specify a category (so it displays all recent posts) and show the_excerpt() with it which takes a clipping of the current post in the_loop.

Look through the get_post documentation and append the proper variables to adjust the output you’d like to see. Fro example, the following get_post function will display 3 posts from all categories except 5 and 8:
get_posts(’numberposts=3&category=-5,-8′);

If you want to find the ID of a category, post, or page do the followign:

• log into admin.
• Navigate to the manage tab.
• Click categories (or posts or pages)
• Hover over or click on the proper category, post, or page you wish to know the ID of
• In the status bar (if you’re hovering) or in the Address Bar (if you clicked) you should see a link that looks similar to this:
  http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&cat_ID=11
• In the above example I was in categories. The category I chose has an idea of “11″. Now I can exlicitly include or exclude it. In some cases you’ll want to do this with posts and/or pages as well. get_posts doesnt support this, but if you play with other Wordpress functions, they sometimes do. Check the template tag documentation on a per function basis. You’ll at least know how to get the ID’s now without having to log into your mySQL database.

Plug-ins
You may need a plug-in called Exec-PHP installed on your blog so that you can execute the above PHP code inside posts. Be careful about installing this plug-in if you have other people managing your blog with you though. If so you can setup custom privileges. If not then just make sure its installed and activated.

I’m sure you’ve seen countless other plugin’s out there which provide you with a snippet of code which you can use in your sidebar.php file inside your theme folder. You can also use that code within any of the widgets you create on your homepage within those blocks. You can usually find code like that inside the readme or install notes file that most plug-in come with.

Examples

On the left is an example of my front page from when I recently redesigned RobMalon.Com. I also recently helped a personal friend of mine create a similar setup with his page at ToddRecommends.TV who does Live streams and talks Movies and Tech. You can see a clip of what his front page currently looks like on the right-hand side. He has his recent posts for each of his main categories on his page and is displaying a feed on the top right from another category which he uses for updates about events, updates, and general news.

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1. Left Aligned With Content
When you left align the banners they are in line with the content and flow with it seamlessly. As opposed to the “bad” layout where they are centered and pulled away from the content. Some people suffer from banner blindness because they’re so used to seeing ads. This helps the eyes shift over the ad while they’re looking for the start/continuation of the content. As I mentioned above, this is one of those that might be a little to “in your face” with the ads. Split test this and see if its worth it. If you only see a 5% increase in CTR, it might not be worth it to annoy your readers with it there.

2. Content After Reading
Having an ad at the bottom of the page provides something to do. Somewhere for the user to go next. If you’re not utilizing this space for anything else, throw an ad down there.

Problogger calls them “Pause Points”:
“These sections are all at the end of articles - a point where readers end one activity and look to do another one. Many readers simply hit ‘back’ at this point or head to Google to search for something else - however when you give them something else to do or read you have a decent chance of convincing them to stay on your site.”

Another good idea would be to split test the 468×60 banner type with a box banner which has dimensions similar to the one in the body.

3. Body Banner
While I’m not displaying it in good or bad display, knocking your content down BELOW the banner entirely has also proven to be effective. More often then not it pays off. However, if your site is in a liquid design, this wouldn’t be the smartest move as its going to leave you with an absurd amount of white space to the right of the ad (if the user is browsing in a larger resolution). I typically design in a 1024×768 setting these days, this being one of the reasons for doing so. The other reason is because most people browsing the internet have at least that. 800×600 is becoming a resolution for severely outdated technology.

4. Provide Relevant Ads
If you have several ad spots producing public service ads then you may want to use an alternative advertiser when you setup your ad spots. If you don’t have one you can simply point to a link that provides an affiliate link, or even a page on your own site that you’re trying to popularize. Doing this also decreases banner blindness. For example, if the first page a visitor comes to has an annoying and obvious ad, that user is going to spot out very easily that content in that spot, even on other pages, is irrelevant to them. Doing this helps to avoid that problem.

5. Less is More - Random Display
I noticed my CTR on ads nearly doubled when I randomized the display of the ads so that the only sometimes appears. Again, this plays on the fact that users gain a banner blindness when they consistently see an ad in the same place. This strategy is more then ideal for users that have a low bounce rate and having users spending a long time on the site while visiting several pages. I would not employ this strategy on a site with a bounce rate higher then 70% and a user average page views of 3 or less. You can do this random display by Using PHP and wrapping a Simple Randomized Script around your ads.

6. Utilization of Differently Sized Advertising Blocks
If you consistently display only one size ad throughout your site, your users are going to become that much more prone to banner blindness. By mixing it up, it allows them to become seen easier. You can do this in a similar way to the banner randomizing script I mentioned above. Only this time you’re going to be replacing the last bracket “}” With a  “} else {”. Then place your Code and conclude it with a closing bracket “}”.

7. Banner Displacement
I created what I call a displaced ad script with one of my sites and found it to be quiet beneficial. This employs another solution to banner blindness by randomly placing an ad in your content.

8. Increase Keyword Relevancy
Ensure pages of content have at least 200 words on them. Ideally each page of content should have 500 words as Google will index up to that amount and rank you high for your choice of keywords inside of that content. Having more keywords in your content not only improves your relevancy of ads that will show up, but will broaden the range of ads that can be triggered. Thus more competition for your ad spot which means higher payout on clicks.

9. Different sites, Different strategies
One of the main things you should walk away with after viewing this:

• Four main types of sites. 1,2,3,4 - I would recommend not putting ads on a ecommerce site as it distracts users from purchasing products and sometimes can lead your visitors to your competitors deals.
• Other than that, know that your tactics are going to be slightly different based on the about of page views per user, bounce rate, and the type of site you have as mentioned above.

10. Placement Order
I shared with you the importance of this tactic in Multiple AdSense Banners Could Cost You Money last year, and it still holds true. The Google video above also mentions the important of the order of your ad placement. What is a high CTR worth if your income from that CTR is low? If your highest paying ad is in the body of your site its awfully hard to make it the first if you’re still using a table design. Think about CSS Positioning Your First Ads to increase revenue from the highest competing ads.

11. Split Testing Placement
Your location of ads is of the main reasons users fail at getting good click thru rates. Most never employ multiple strategies in multiple places while also changing basic placement. The more traffic you have to begin with the more obvious your results will be. If your running a site that gets less then 25 hits a day, doing this might be a fools errand. 100 visitors a day is a good number to start doing some split testing where you’ll start to notice some results, though it will still be a bit hard until you at least have 5,000 ad impressions a day.

12. Logical placement of Vertical and Horizontal Ads
When placing banners in content, its best to place them within a particular vertical or horizontal space that the visitor is scanning across. For example, the square ad works better in content often times because the 2nd ad (to the far right) is missed when using a 468×60 ad.

13. Titling
Do not title your a spot on your site as “advertisements” or “sponsored links”. Also try not to separate the advertisement bar in its own widget on your site. For the sake of increasing CTR, try to put your vertical ads under content in your side bar WITH a blogroll, your facebook, twitter, digg page etc. Not as its own separate entity. Telling a user that you’re about to show them an ad is like telling them “skip this section and go to the good stuff”.

14. Last In Sidebar
Putting an ad as the last item in your sidebar (left or right side) is one of the worst things you can do when trying to increase your click thru rate. If you can unobtrusively place the add before, in-between, or after your menu content, do so for best results.

15. Coloring And Blending
Ads typically perform best when you match their background color in the spot you’re placing them and you remove the bordering (which for AdSense ads means specifying the same color of the background and ad again. Also matching text color and adjusting your sites text size and font will help with this). Read more here: Optimize Google AdSense By Blending Content Ads.

16. Using Text Ads Only
Using text ads only next to other text has proven to give higher click thru rates, however, this is something you’ll want to split test on a site by site basis. When an advertiser purchases a whole ad unit, the clicks on that ad unit are worth much more, thus you get a greater share of profits. Sometimes quality is better then quantity. Also a lot is dependent on the ad being pushed up next to other content. The benefit of doing this may not be as great if your site has a high page view rate per user and a low bounce rate.

17. Diverse Site Content
Having several different kind of contents or sub categories allows a lot of different ads to be triggered from the keywords you use in your content. This gives a more likelihood that one or more of the ads will relate to one of the users on your site while they’re browsing. Making Flexible Content Websites To Diversify Your Income Is one way you can accomplish this easily.

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My main point in testing this out was to see if the reducing ad frequency would prevent banner blindness of visitors coming to two of the sites I run.

Some Quick Stats:

• Both get at least 1000 unique hits for their daily traffic.
• Site one has a top banner CTR of 1.8% and site two has 1.6% in the same place.
• Sites were tested over a period of two weeks.
• Page views per visitor for site one is 3.4 and site two’s is 3.1.
• Both sites are information based sites

All of these stats were gathered from Google Analytics.

After Experiment Results
Click thru rates increased to 3.2% in the first case and 2.4% in case two when I had the top banner displaying 75% of the time.

Theoretical Reasoning
Banner blindness for visitors causes them to ignore banners when they see it in the same place too many times. Therefore I also assuming there is a “hot spot” setting in which some sites will get the best CTR from anywhere between 40-95 percentage displays.

The reason why I feel this worked so well for me, is because an average visitor to either site typically views about three pages. If the typical user only viewed one or two pages, I’m sure my results would not have been so great. Also the higher my page views per user are, the more likely I could get away with a lower display number percentage.

You might also see variations with different designs than I have, or different banner placements. I would also assume that the most extreme difference in results that anyone would see is with top banners or banners in the top/body of their content. Furthermore, a different kind of site (like a forum) might produce entirely different results. That’s why I’m going to give you the simple code I used to let you test it on your own site.

HowTo Randomize Banners

1. <?php
2. //For 75% Display Chance
3. //Create random number between 1 and 4
4. $number = mt_rand(1, 4);
5. $remainder = $number % 4;
6. //The Math:
7. //If $number is 1 then remainder is 3 (25% of the time - Do Nothing)
8. //If $number is 2 remainder is 2 (runs code below - 25%)
9. //If $number is 3 remainder is 1 (runs code below - 25%)
10. //If $number is 4 remainder is 0 (runs code below - 25%)
11. //last 3 cases add up to 75% chance of code running
12. if ($remainder !== 3) { ?>
13. PUT AD CODE HERE
14. <?php } ?>
15.  
16. <?php
17. //For 50% Display Chance
18. //Create random number between 1 and 2
19. $number = mt_rand(1, 2);
20. $remainder = $number % 2;
21. //The Math:
22. //If $number is 1 then remainder is 1 (50% of the time - Do Nothing)
23. //If $number is 2 then remainder is 0 (runs code below - 50%)
24. if ($remainder == 0) { ?>
25. PUT AD CODE HERE
26. <?php } ?>
27.  
28. <?php
29. //For 25% Display Chance
30. //Create random number between 1 and 2
31. $number = mt_rand(1, 4);
32. $remainder = $number % 4;
33. //The Math:
34. //If $number is 4 then remainder is 0 (runs code below - 50%)
35. if ($remainder == 0) { ?>
36. PUT AD CODE HERE
37. <?php } ?>
38. Download this code: 0818randomizebanners.txt

You can change the percentage by changing the equation using some simple math. I gave you examples for 75%, 50% and 25%. Good god, my HS math teacher was right. You DO use fractions in real life.

Notes
Bear in mind, if you don’t get much traffic to your website its going to be very hard to tell what your results are after a week even. Let it run for a while. Typically if your site is getting 50 visitors a day it ads up to $10 of CPC ad click revenue at the end of a good month. At least in my experience. To me that’s not worth monetizing a website yet and you’re almost sure to have a hard time in seeing any kind of results from this.

Reports
If you try this, give it a go and report back in the comments below. Be sure to include the stats of your site, what percentage you used, and what your results were like.

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I just added this text to my front page to improve the understanding of what my site is about to new visitors

About This Site:
Who? Rob Malon is an entrepreneur running multiple websites to make money online.
How? Automating websites for passive income by usage of online tools, & PHP/mySQL applications.
Why? To share and brainstorm ideas and tactics with the community to allow others to do the same.

• Automate & Increase Traffic/Hits/Sales/eCommerce.
• Reduce Time On Daily Routine From Spam & Other Tedious Chores.
• Increasing Overall Efficiency Of Running A Website & Automate Your Goals.
• HowTo Create & Monetize Websites While Utilizing Free New Tools & Tactics

Consider what your first day was like when you started learning about the niche you started a website from. Sometimes it starts with a trip to wikipedia or websters before you take full interest in a subject you previously didn’t know much about. Factor in some time and experience with any subject, and you can be quick to throw around terminology on your front page which new users might not understand.

Unless you are ok with your bounce rate increasing, do not make your visitors research what your site is about.

Information Sites
If your site is informational, users should be using your site as a tool instead of using another tool to understand what your site provides. If they don’t know about the subject to begin with, this text will help intrigue them and they’ll hopefully keep moving through the site. If not, you would have lost them anyways!

Service Based & Sales Sites
If you’re running a hot/unique new service and someone comes to their page without already being able to compare it to another competing service, then that user probably knows nothing about what that webpage is talking about. Putting your plans and prices on the front page is great, but no one is going to buy anything if they don’t know what the purpose of the service is in the first place. You can only hope that the visitor just came from a referring site that had a nice and explanatory review of your websites services.

If you’ve explored the make money online niche to any degree I’m sure you’ve seen those flashy product pages that seem to be pages long. Marketers keep using them because they work. They’re easy for visitors to skim though, and when done right you can get the readers attention easily and effectively. That is essentially one long “About This Website” blurb crammed into a giant about page with a “Buy Now” button at the end.

Why Use About Text?

• Neatly organized blurb like this on your front page also increases the amount of relevant keywords in your web copy.
• Have you ever seen a commercial on TV and just not gotten what exactly is being advertised? One of the biggest reasons why some businesses are failing to convert natural and organic search engine referrals to sales is because the user doesn’t know what the service is for in the first place. Websites are not limited commercial length!
• Putting an about blurb shows that your site has purpose. Think of all the spammy feed, cookie cutter sites out there just trying to regurgitate info while slapping some AdSense ads on them. Putting the extra effort in posting an “About This Site” section shows that you put some thought into it! Consciously or unconsciously, a visitor is going to find more of a excuse to put a time investment in a well defined site that peaks their interest.

HowTo Organize Your “About This Website” Blurb

• Bullet Points make it easier to understand and quicker to read. More visitors will glance over something like that than a 5 or 6 sentence paragraph.
• Short and to the point. Its your front page. You want to provide something that flows and is unobtrusive to the rest of the page while not wasting too much of your visitors time. Rewrite and check over your text a few times. Continually make it more efficient. I would even argue that mine is too long!
• If you find you can sum up your site effectively in a single sentence, include an additional sentence that states a comma delimited of your top categories and consider linking to those sections categories as well.
• Headline it. If you don’t include text like “About This Website” and make it noticeable, it might as well not be there at all. You can change the heading name, but avoid putting “Welcome … text text text” as its not as clear to the visitors that you’ll be explaining what the site is about.

Tag Clouds
Another way to help a user know what your site is about is to include a tag cloud. You can see the one I use on the top of my front page and towards the bottom of any other page. The words that are larger and darker stand out more. This makes it more apparent of my main topics that I frequently talk about on this site.

To get a tag cloud on your site, install the Simple Tags PlugIn. It has several other benefits as well:

• Meta keywords generate from tags in your header’s blog
• Technorati, Flickr and Delicious tags
• Dynamic Tag Clouds with colors with Widgets (random order, etc)
• Related content since common tags
• Possibility to add related posts inside RSS
• Extended the_tags function (outside the loop, technorati, etc)

Usage Your Site
If you have any kind of fear what-so-ever that doing any of this will cause you to lose visitors, then you either need to rethink the copy you’re using or the usefulness of your site to begin with. Website traffic that left after viewing your “About This Website” blurb probably would have left anyways. You simply can not intrigue someone who is not interested in the topic to begin with but at least the didn’t leave out of frustration.

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• Get Rich Quick By Preparing Early On - Career Advice
• Main
• Contests Anyone Can Do - Promoting Blogs & Websites
• HowTo Eliminate Wordpress Trackback Comment And Pingback Spam
• 7 Steps of Time To Make You Rich Online

Note:
PayPal to PayPal Funds Transfer - When a buyer adds funds into their account (always free no matter what kind of account you have) and then pays a merchant with the funds with an existing balance from their PayPal account.

The only way around this is to actually have two accounts, and paypal allows this as noted in their FAQ:

“Yes. PayPal members may have one Personal account and one Premier or Business account. You can add additional email addresses, credit cards and debit cards, and bank accounts to your Personal, Premier or Business account. However, each account must have its own email address and financial information. If only one account is needed you may also upgrade from a Personal account to a Premier or Business account.”

As you can see in the highlighted text above, there is a catch which is the only obstacle in reducing your PayPal fees. The way around this is simply to setup a 2nd checking account. How you do that is up to you. I was able to get two checking accounts from my bank (Chase), have a balance of $0, and pay no fees on them because I have my mortgage through Chase. Before that, I was in college and took advantage of one of my local banks that allowed me to have two checking accounts with no fees in the same manner because I was a student. You’ll likely need to sit down with your bank and discuss the options that are available to you.

Below is the rates and fees breakdown so you can get a better idea of what you’re avoiding:

	Personal account	Premier/Business account
Open an account	Free	Free
Send money	Free	Free
Withdraw Funds	Free for bank accounts in the U.S Fees for other withdrawal options	Free for bank accounts in the U.S Fees for other withdrawal options
Add funds	Free	Free
Receive payments funded by PayPal Balance, PayPal Instant Transfer or PayPal eCheck	Free	1.9% to 2.9% + $0.30 USD
Receive payments funded by Credit Card, Debit Card or Buyer Credit	4.9% + $0.30 USD (limit of 5 transactions per 12 month period)** for domestic or U.S. transactions 2% + applicable Fees Fees for cross border payments 4.9% plus $0.30 USD for card payments received using PayPal on Skype	1.9% to 2.9% + $0.30 USD

Once you do you’ll be able to associate a personal PayPal account with one of the checking accounts, and A premium PayPal account with the other. You’ll also need to setup two separate emails, but you can get that kind of stuff for free through GMail.

Provide Your Buyers With Easy Buy Buttons and Subscriptions
Another great thing about having two accounts is you now also have the ability to save money in some places, but have the optional benefits like reoccurring subscriptions with a premium account.

John Chow recently posted a video on HowTo Setup PayPal Subscriptions, though I don’t believe he mentioned You’d have to have a premium or business account to do so ;). See the video below.

If you only have a personal account you can still go to the “Merchant Services” tab and create one time (or even dynamic) “Buy Now Button” buttons. However you will not have access to the subscription feature. Also you’re relying on the fact that the user has a PayPal account, AND has funds or the ability to transfer funds into the account.  95% of the advertisers that approach me have this. So if your Buy Now buttons are for advertisers to purchase banner spots on your site, you’re probably OK doing this with a personal account.

What If They Pay With A Credit Card Anyways?
If they DO pay in credit card, the payment will still go through and show up in your account. You will have an option to accept or deny payment. Of course accepting the payment will bring you through the steps to upgrade your account to a PayPal Premium account. Only takes a couple minutes and can be done online. Anytime an advertiser has done this, I have simply deny the payment and use the provided email they used to send the payment to reply back. In that email I request they send me a direct funds transfer to that account. If they cant do that, I tell them to pay PayPals fees (2.9% + $0.30) plus whatever the initial fee was to my premium account. If their advertising cost $500 per month, then they end up spending $15 more. Usually enough for them to go to the trouble to deposit their funds properly and send them to your personal account ;). Again, this is a rare case. It also sounds like a lot bending over backwards to avoid semi-minor fees, but if you go through it once, you’ll find its pretty straight forward and worth it long term.

Big Money Savings
The usefulness of this is dependent on the size of the purchase. If you’re selling something for $20 and not doing it too often, then your time and effort to go through this probably isn’t worth the $1.00 you’ll save from that $20. Analyze who your buyers are and what you’re selling. It still might pay off if you don’t have to deal with it too often. Also its worth dealing with it on large ticket items.

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Defense Line 1: Number CAPTCHA
Two months ago I posted a series of 5 Spam Blocking Posts. In one of those, I introduced my Enhanced Number Equation method. I have essentially refitted that code for Wordpress use! I actively use this on several of my own sites. Navigate to a comments section in a content page on one of my custom coded sites: mmorpgexposed.com. It has worked wonders for me!

Here’s the steps on how to implement it. Note I’m using Wordpress 2.6. If you’re using an earlier or later version it should work, but make sure you BAKCUP before you edit anything. Also make a note somewhere that you’ve edited this file so you can carry over the changes in the future.

1. <?php
2. //FILE: /wp-content/themes/YOURTHEME/comments.php - where YOURTHEME is the name of the theme you’re currently using
3. //FIND: <textarea name="comment" id="comment" rows="10" cols="35" wrap="virtual" tabindex="4"></textarea>
4. //AFTER any closing tags for your paragraphs or label setup, add:
5. function numbercapcha() {
6. $firstnum = rand(5,8);
7. $secondnum = rand(1,4);
8. $coinflip = rand(1,2) % 2;
9. if($coinflip == 0) {
10. $math = $firstnum + $secondnum;
11. $operators = array("+","Added To","Plus");
12. $operatorschoice = rand(1,3) % 3;
13. } else {
14. $math = $firstnum - $secondnum;
15. $operators = array("-","Minus");
16. $operatorschoice = rand(1,2) % 2;
17. }
18.  
19. echo $firstnum . " " . $operators[$operatorschoice] . " " . $secondnum . " = <input type=\"text\" name=\"number\" maxlength=\"2\" size=\"5\" id=\"numcapcha\" style=\"width: 25px;\">";
20. return $math;
21. }
22. // Contiue with your theme and use this snippit of PHP to generate the input field:
23. // <? $_SESSION['capcha'] = numbercapcha(); ?>
24. // Example usage shown below:
25. ?>
26.  
27. <p><label for="security">Security</label><? $_SESSION[‘capcha’] = numbercapcha(); ?></p>
28.  
29.  
30. <?php
31. //FILE: /wp-comments-post.php (in the root directory)
32. //FIND: $comment_type = ”;
33. //This should be on like 63 in Wordpress 2.6
34. //AFTER ADD:
35.  
36. if ( is_numeric($numcheck) && $sessioncapcha == $numcheck ) {
37. //This should be left blank unless you want to do something else if the number was answered correctly
38. } else {
39. //Number wasnt answered correctly - Show Error
40. wp_die( __(‘Error: You did not answer the security question correctly.’) );
41. }
42. ?>
43. Download this code: 0810wordpresscommentcapcha.txt

The above code may differ slightly with the HTML only. You may want to tidy it up to suit your theme. I also use CSS to modify the display which I have not provided here. That goes a bit beyond the goal for today.

Here’s a very quick howto for some CSS styling to get you started, though it doesn’t have to be all that incredibly fancy right away:

Also, I have intentionally placed the error code before any other error is checked. Checking that the CAPTCHA is correct first saves the effort of processing anything else until it is determined that the CAPTCHA has been entered correctly.

Defense Line 2: Akismet Or Defensio
Akismet is your second line of defense for comments. It used to be your first, and you’d have to sort through all that garbage! You should see a big time savings here but it should still exist. I also posted How Akismet And Defensio Create Another Line Of Spam Defense a while back. If you’re not already using one, try them out. Long story short, Akismet caught more spam than Defensio did… but times change, try them both.

Dowload Akismet Wordpress Plug-in Or Download Defensio Anti-Spam Wordpress Plug-in

Defense Line 3: Simple Trackback Validation
Blocking Trackback and Pingback spam has never been so easy. Wordpress users are very susceptible to being abused to this kind of spam which is becoming much more popular for a spammers choice of attack.

This plug-in checks two things which can both be toggled on/off for customization:

1. Checks the IP address of the webserver sending the request and checks it against the trackback URL that’s being provided.
2. Checks that your URL is actually on the page that the referring URL is sending from.

What I love about it most, is it also marks a trackback by temporarily renaming it to “BLOCKED BY STBV” as highlighted in the example below. If you mark it as accepted, it will remove the titling and make it active.

Download Simple Trackback Validation Plug-in. You can also go to the STBV plug-in homepage and read up about it a lot more.

Other Options
That concludes the setup that I have which is safeguarding me so well that I actually had to wait a week so that I could grab that trackback picture I used above for this post. However, I find it necessary to share with you additional options that I combed through in the process of setting up the redesign of this blog. You might also have a earlier or later version of Wordpress in which some of these methods may not work. Therefore you’ll have a few more options:

WP-Hardened-Trackback is a lot like STBV. When I tried it, it didn’t work with 2.6. If for whatever reason STBV doesn’t work for you because you havent upgraded yet, try this out.

Math-Comment-Spam-Protection is the exact same idea as what I presented to you in Defense Line 1. However the plug-in only works for Wordpress 1.5.2, 2.0.x and 2.1. I tried it out and had a lot of problems with it which is why I modified my previous solution for another site to fit into Wordpress. Again, if you’re on an old version, maybe my hack wont work for you. So try this!

WP-SpamFree is a plug-in that claims to do it all. It weeds out bots by assuming they cant use JavaScript and Cookies. While this will reduce a lot of spam, I feel there is a small enough user base not using JavaScript or cookies, that this might cause a problem for users that want to comment on your form. The point in using this would be so that a user doesn’t have to enter an extra CAPTCHA field. But at the end of the day, if a user cannot add or subtract single digit numbers, I don’t know if their comment would be of much use to anyone anyways. Another reason you might use this is it would be somewhat less technical then copying/pasting the code I have for the CAPTCHA above. There is also ton of documentation on their WP-SpamFree