One of the things about running a blog is getting regular content. I came across a good way of getting new content onto a poker blog the other day – basically each day the blog is set up to import a list of all that day’s poker freeroll tournaments at several of the top online poker rooms as seperate posts.
To do this, you need two things. Firstly you need a Wordpress plugin that allows automation of imports for given RSS feeds. Secondly, you need the URL of an RSS feed that has the poker tournaments.
The plugin I use is called wp-o-matic. It’s simple to set up on a Wordpress blog – took about 5 minutes. Once done, it has an admin panel where you can specify an RSS feed for import and set a time or times to interrogate the feed. WP-o-matic then brings in the latest RSS items and sets each one up as a new post. Voila! Automated content that gets Google spidering your blog on a daily basis – all good for SEO too.
As for the poker freeroll feeds, you can grab one from www.freerollpokertournaments.net or there is a good selection of poker feeds at Yahoo Pipes (there are also some gambling newsfeeds there you can import too). Grab the URL of any feed, give it to wp-o-matic and it will do the rest.
One problem that a lot of webmasters with good content have is that of “scrapers” stealing their content and using it on other sites. Aside from being more than just a little bit cheeky, this can also cause the originating webmaster harm in Google rankings by effectively duplicating and, thus in Google’s eyes, devaluing their content. So how do you prevent this? Read on… Read the rest of this entry »
One of the key aspects of the websites I write is the geo-targetting of information. This is primarily to ensure that adverts and location-specific info is shown to users from the relevant country.
To do this, I use a tool from MaxMind called “GeoIP“. There is a free version and a subscription version, and while the latter has more updates and more detailed information down to State and City level, I find the free version is perfectly adequate for country-specific requests. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the things you have to be careful about with Wordpress is picking a theme that doesn’t damage your search engine rankings. There’s a couple of things in particular to watch for.
Firstly, many free themes are provided with the condition that you leave the footer links intact. Trouble is, a lot of these link to sites in “bad neighbourhoods” – that is, sites that Google has banned, penalise or regard as junk. If you want to rank well and quickly, you don’t want a theme with shite links all over it. It’s worth paying for a premium theme or offering to pay the author for removal of the links. Some themes have “malicious” code embedded that add links or do stuff you don’t want. Be careful!
The second thing that is a problem is the way the header is constructed. Quite often developers embed an H1 and H2 tag in the header which is quite legitimate – usually for Read the rest of this entry »