Some time ago I discovered StumbleUpon and I’m submitting most of my posts now. There are a lot of blogpostings that tell you how to make a good StumbleUpon page. Three days ago I submitted, in my opinion, a perfect post to get stumbled. The results are great! (only not for my bandwidth). Almost 15.000 visitors in the last three days. You can see my Clicky stats here. I allowed public access.
Sex still sells! 
In one of my previous posts there’s a nice picture from scandinavian model Alexandra Ansgar (also known as Firefox girl). A colleague of mine who is really into blond, slutty girls looked her up on the web. You can see the truth in the picture below:
It’s a photoshop hoax! The name (Alexandra Ansgar) is made up, it’s the name of a Hotel in Copenhagen. The picture of the blonde is lifted from a softporn site. (source: museumofhoaxes)
edit: Emy if you read this, feel free to contact me! Maybe we can go for a drink or something…
My boss told me that Google is showing AdWords ads that are partially targeted to a previous search querie. After discussing this with a colleague he posted this on his blog. It was submitted to Sphinn and is now on the front page. Damn, why didn’t I wrote the post (just kidding Wiep)!
In my opinion the sponsored results are getting better with features like this. We’re still discussing what we can do with this kind of personalized search. I don’t think there’s a way we can influence it. You can read the complete post at Wiep his blog.
My friends say I spend a lot of time behind the computer, and in fact it’s true. I work at an Internet Marketing company in the Netherlands and I have a passion for everything that has something to do with “online”. If somebody asks me what I do behind my computer I sum up some stuff like working, finding information and communicating. They often laugh at me and tell me I’m probably looking at porn all day! How else can you spend so much time behind your computer?
To keep track of how I spend my hours behind the computer I installed the Wakoopa tracker. You can see my profile here. The tracker is installed on my home computer (macbook) and therefore these numbers are not representative for all the hours I sit behind a computer. I’ll explain some of the programs I use often, so I never again have to explain what I’m doing behind my computer.
Firefox is by far the most used program on my Mac. From the moment I installed the Wakoopa tracker I have been using it for more then 100 hours. I prefer Firefox over every other browser because of the plugins that are available. Some of my favorite plugins are SearchStatus, SmartPagerank and Foxmarks synchronizer. I’ll write a post about these and more plugins soon.
To bad Wakoopa isn’t telling me what I use Firefox for (or maybe this is a good thing). You just have to believe me on my words. When I’m home I spend a lot of time reading blogs, so this is probably where a lot of these 100+ hours went to. Recently I discovered StumbleUpon and I have spend some hours playing with it. There are a lot of other websites I often visit,
but I think there’s one that deserves an honorable mention here.
I visit Google hundreds of times a day. Most of these times I’m googling for my work. The service I use most is Adwords, but I also use Analytics, Adsense, Webmaster Tools, Maps, iGoogle and I have a gmail address. You can say I’m professionally addicted to Google.
But lets go back to the data from the Wakoopa tracker. The second most used program on my computer is Mail, I used it for over 13 hours. It’s the best e-mail program I ever used; fast, easy and works great against spam. I also love it because it works perfectly together with all my other mac applications like iCall and Address Book. I think I don’t have to explain what I use Mail for. Some other Mac applications that are on my list with most used programs are: Finder, Preview and TextEdit. I just love all Apple product and can’t wait until Leopard is finished.
My Wakoopa list contains a lot of other programs (some I don’t even know). Here’s the top 10:
From now on, if somebody asks me what I’m doing behind my computer, I’ll just tell them to check my Wakoopa stats. And NO, I’m not watching porn all day!
Yesterday was the pre-pre-launch of VWD’s project E-play. The new name of this project is uVme (you versus me). I was just looking at the new website, damn is it slow, maybe it’s because I work on a mac, I just can’t navigate on it. The website looks a bit better now but please remove those annoying success stories in the sidebar. I hate these success stories because they make the concept look like any other MLM concept. Statistical numbers tell us that the majority that will take part in any MLM concept will end up with nothing. Only a waist of time.
Another big question mark I have with MLM is the fact that when you’re product is good enough you don’t need others to share in your profit. The people who use your product will already spread the buzz because they like it. You don’t need a million resellers that all take a little piece of the pie.
But still, it’s part of their business plan and it doesn’t even look that bad. In some way it also makes sense to me, they’re creating an enormous buzz before the project is live. There already is a large number of enthusiasts promoting their business, before it’s even live. I’ve seen Adwords ads, banners on blogs, special websites about the project and so on. This will give them a good start when they go live.
I also like the fact that they use the power of social networks. Any 16 year old has like 200+ online friends these days. It’s easy to invite these friends for a game and make some money on it. I don’t know if it’s legal but I think a 16 year old wouldn’t care for that. I think their entire project will only succeed if they have enough people spreading the buzz, and they are going on the right way with that.
I had one person signing up from a previous post, to bad I didn’t get any feedback on the marketing plan. Again here’s the link to my personal uVme welcome page. Leave me a note if you sign up!
Maurits Fondse (aka Morris) made a great song that will rock the hit charts this summer!
I am writing a manual on how to start your own blog because of the requests I got in the last few months. You can find a complete overview on my blogging page. Today I ‘m giving some search engine optimization tips. There’s a lot of amazing SEO power built into WordPress. Unfortunately it doesn’t all come by the default installation.
1. Optimize your permalinks
The default WordPress installation displays permalinks like this:
http://pietervangils.com/?p=123
A more search-engine friendly permalink includes the post title in the link, like this:
http://pietervangils.com/2007/07/11/this-is-the-permalink-structure/
This is a simple change to make. In your WordPress admin panel, click on the “Options†tab, then the “Permalinks†tab, and choose the option just below the “Default†permalink option.
Including %postname% is the most important option because having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, especially when it’s as easy as WordPress makes it. The second thing to do is to get rid of useless tags. Don’t use %day%, %post_id% , %hour%, %minute% or even %second% in your permalink structure. It will only make it harder to see the URL’s keywords on search engine results. None of these are necessary, monthly posting archives are perfectly acceptable. Want to go really mad with your permalink structure? Try dropping date tags all together for %category% to get a nice extra keyword in your URL. Change your .htaccess file if necessary.
2. Optimize your page titles
According to most SEO experts, the page title tag is one of the most important tags on your page. The problem in most WordPress themes is that it will first display your blog name like this: “pietervangils.com > SEO optimization for WordPress“. You’ll understand I don’t need pietervangils.com as the first keyword in my blogpostings. You can find the page title tag in the header template, and the default version usually looks like this:
<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title>
The best way to optimize your page title is changing this code so it looks like this:
<title><?php if (is_home()) { print “whatever title I want to have on my blog home page.”; } else { wp_title(’ ‘); print ” : “; bloginfo(’name’); } ?></title>
This tweak does a couple of different things. First, it allows you to use a more descriptive, keyword-rich title for your blog’s main page. And second, for the individual post pages, it will use the title of your post as the page title.
3. Use some good plugins
Some of my favorite SEO plugins are:
4. Write keyword rich post titles
The post title is the most important part of the blog post for different reasons. From the reader’s perspective, a descriptive and appealing title helps them decide if your post is worth reading or not. From an SEO perspective, think about the keywords or phrases people might type into Google to find your post. Your post titles should be as clear as possible. Don’t stuff your titles with keywords you are targeting with your whole blog. Choose your keywords carefully per posting. Try to make several posts about the same subject for a maximum result.
A colleague told me about the number of visitors he was getting from StumbleUpon on one of his posts. I never used StumbleUpon before and installed the plugin the same day. It’s a great tool to discover new websites! What do you think of a website that converts pictures to Ascii text? Some unfortunately named people? Or some really nice pictures?
After stumbling upon some nice websites I decided to add some posts to see if I would get some visitors from it. One of my posts is now getting around 40 hits a day from StumbleUpon, and the numbers are still going up. So welcome all StumbleUpon users and keep those thumbs up!
