Pyrogenic Media

One of the biggest pains in SEO for me is tracking my changes over time for keywords in the SERPS. One or two keywords is fine, and when I am getting to number one before I move onto the next keyword, then it is obviously easy to track. But if I have incredibly slow moving keywords that will take a while to rank, then I need an easy way to track them over time, or atleast check multiple keywords all at once (Preferably with different Search Engines).

Do note that the Serp Checkers I will talk about today are options that are either 100% automated, or allow multiple keywords at once. At the end I will throw in a couple for checking individual keywords quick.y Here are the two options I use most for SERP checking.

SerpTracker.org
Just try if you will, to imagine this site with a bit better design. I will be honest, it looks horrible, and at times has horrible functionality, but is among one of the best (/only) free ones I could find that tracked your SERP results every night, and over a long period of time.

This is the graph for one of my keywords. As you can see you can check it over different time periods, and you can also check different search engines (Even different country locations for Google), in this case Google USA. The rankings update once every night automatically so it requires no intervention from you.

Now the downsides. If you wish to track different search engines, they show up on a different graph instead of drawing another line (in a different color) on the same graph. So one graph per keyword instead of one graph per keyword per search engine.

While the service is free, it only allows you to track 2 websites at once (Although unlimited keywords). For this reason it isn’t great for tracking huge amounts of data, but there is no limit on accounts so I generally create a different account if I need another couple of graphs.

And the last downside, is that the code/design is horrible. Sometimes it can take a couple of tries to login, and I am too nervous to use my usual password with it. Not that I am worried it will be stolen by the admin, but I am not 100% sure it is encrypted with them anyway.

Traffic Travis
This one is my bread and butter nowadays. I love this application to bits and it has become a staple part of my SEO arsenal.

Traffic Travis as you may have guessed from the picture is a desktop application that covers alot of SEO and PPC tools at once. For the purpose of this post I will focus on the Serp Checking feature, but I recommend downloading it to check out what else is on offer.

The Serp Checker is solid. It handles the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN), and can handle up to 5 different projects in the free version (More on that later). Unfortunately the tool is not automated which means you have to run it on your own. This is fine since when I logon in the morning, I generally want to see where I am right at that moment, but it becomes super addicting to try and check your serp results 5 times per day.

Unfortunately because of this, the graphing feature does not work that well. It only tracks the last 10 or so checks you did, even if they were all within the same day (Even same hour). So you almost need to restrain yourself from checking all the time.

It also has a nice “report” feature which outputs a pretty good PDF that you can hand out to clients should you wish to. Although it is a paid feature.

Now I have mentioned paid feature alot, so let me clarify. Traffic Travis can be used absolutely free, with some limitations. For the Serp Checker, that means no more than 5 projects (But unlimited keywords within those projects), and no printing off reports or graphs (Although you can still generate them to look at). The paid version is rather cheap, and version 4 is coming out very shortly.

Honestly, I would just download it for the free version. It works immensely well and it is a good insight into what you can do should you ever decide to upgrade.

Other Tools
As I mentioned, there is a couple of other tools that I will point out.

http://www.serprush.com/
Pretty popular. Doesn’t track, just tells you where you stand. Good if you want to go deep into the results on all engines.

http://www.seoserp.com/web_tools/google_top_1000_serps_checker.asp
The very first SERP checker I ever used (5+ years ago I think). Once again no tracking, but good to go nice and deep.

http://www.marketsamurai.com/
Market Samurai is a well known marketing tool nowadays, but it is pricey. The price as it stands now is $150 USD for a lifetime license. It is good, but not something you want to get if you are just starting out.

The blog was down for a few hours tonight as I decided to upgrade the theme. Instead of banging my head against the wall for hours wrestling free themes. Which is seriously harder than wrestling a pitbull, I went about building my own theme. I used the basic TwentyTen theme that comes with wordpress as a base, and simple upgraded it from there with a nicer menu, and nice boxes for the posts/sidebar.

With that being said, there is still a tonne of work to be done. Obviously the footer is in a bit of a shambles, and I want a much nicer header. But it was sort of a spare of the moment thing, And I don’t want to leave the blog in maintenance mode for much longer while I fiddle around. So basically don’t be surprised if you see things moving around for a while.

I am also doing a spot of spring cleaning. I am about to delete all the pages of my applications. While most still do work, they were cheap and gimmicky and don’t at all display what I am capable of. I built some of them over two years ago in an attempt to be relevant, but since then have realised that cheap tacky applications have nothing on one solid app. So who knows, maybe I have something bigger instore that I can replace all of them with.

Realistically, I will have maybe a few more days with the apps up, then I will remove the lot. If you want any of them, get them now because after that they are gone forever.

From there, I have a bunch of stuff that I want to do a case study on but just don’t have the time. Anyone want to do a small project on the side with me? Everytime I start a new project I forget to start writing it out, and then when I get half way through it is too late to try and backtrack. It is also a bit hit and miss at the moment for me with SEO work, Imagine me writing out a massive long case study into a particular SEO keyword, only for it to go nowhere, meanwhile other projects I have on the boil are going nuts.

Anyway, enough from me. Back to work.

To keep myself occupied while looking for a new permanent job, I decided to go ahead and start doing a bit of testing with Adsense sites again. Adsense was the first ever monetization method I used in my career. And it can still bring in a hefty chunk of change today when done right. There are more lucrative ways to make money (Usually by being on the advertiser side not the publishers), but nothing ever comes close to how easy Adsense is to use.

I will skip all the junk about me picking a niche and how I researched the topic and go straight to the site itself. I decided to use WordPress. Mostly because I was going to be doing multiple posts on the topic, not just a single landing page, but also because of the SEO benefits it gives me. Part of that being the wide array of plugins available. However something that I ended up researching quite heavily, was how the theme, and more importantly the ad placement helped out with boosting income. In some cases people had doubled their income by switching to a more click friendly theme.

After doing a bit of digging, I came across CTRTheme. CTR Theme is only one of many themes that supposedly boost your adsense earnings. But it came with a couple of unique selling points.

Multiple Themes
While CTR Theme in itself is one “Theme”. It actually comes with several different layouts that you can choose from. While they don’t differ too wildly from the original scheme, it was nice to have an actual choice. It also means that if there is say, 6 different layouts, that of the 100 people that purchase the product, they won’t ALL be using the same theme. Sure alot of them will use the same layout, but it waters it down just a bit.

Here are the current themes you can use. But in actual fact since I have owned the Theme (A couple of weeks), he has added another layout for anyone to use. I expect a few more will probably be added in the near future.

Random Ad Spots
Cool enough, on each page load CTR Theme actually randomizes which ads will show up and where. For most sites that are made for adsense, it isn’t that important because you don’t expect the visitor to come back, nor do you expect theme to view multiple pages. But with the randomized ad layout, it restricts ad blindness because they can never be sure where the ad is going to be. By that I mean that while browsing a site, you may get used to where ads are so your eyes subconsciously never look in that spot. No such problem with this theme!

Here are the current ad spots built into the theme. Note that you can untick any of the layouts to have them not show (If you think you earn less with that particular ad spot, then don’t show it).

Customizable
Another cool thing about the theme is that while it comes ready to use out of the box. You can implement your own stylings to the theme if you want. It may sound like a given, but some other themes I looked at were pretty locked down and required you to delve deep into the code to change anything. For starters CTR Theme has an interface to change the bulk of the colors on the site (Link color, Header color), that when changed, also change the color of your adsense ads. On top of this, they have a text area inside the admin section where you can add your own CSS to manipulate the theme however you please.

Referrer Blocking Built In
This is another very very awesome feature that was unique to CTRTheme. You can add in sites/referrers that you don’t wish to show ads to. For example, if I submit any of my sites to Digg.com, Reddit or another social bookmarking site, I may not want to show ads to users coming through there. The amount of ads on these sites is bordering on obscene and I would easily get flagged as spam on these sites. With CTR Theme they will suppress ads to any user coming from those sites (Or any sites you choose) so that on first glance the site looks nice and clean, and yet when they come back later, or they link it from their own blog, the ads will show up. A little sneaky, but it is a great feature.

Extended Tracking
So far I haven’t really gotten down to the nitty gritty of tracking things. I track things based on site and ad size, but that’s about it. But within CTRTheme you can actually track using the channels of Adsense right down to the ad layout that gets used (Within the randomization). What this does is eventually (With enough data) you can see which ad layout brings you the most income and start knocking out the less profitable.

Now onto the nitty gritty. The price for CTRTheme is $75USD. But that comes with an unlimited site license. If you have one site that is getting 100 visitors a day, don’t bother. However if you have one site with a tonne of visitors per day (1k+) or a network of sites that are already earning, CTR Theme is a great investment. Plus it comes with a 60 day guarantee should it not improve your income enough.

Some of you may remember that a long time ago I gave away a free content locker gateway type thing. The same sort of thing that BlamAds, CPALead and Leadbolt use. Only you could use your own offers within the gateway.Well after creating it, I posted it to a couple of forums and away I went. I actually made the thing because people were paying outrageous sums of money for custom gateways in the first place, and it never made sense to me. A gateway is such a simple piece of code if you know Javascript even half assed. So after posting it, while I expected a bit of interest in it, I wasn’t pushing it at all.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago. I am reading a “ShitList” thread on a internet marketing forum. The thread is in relation to a product called SilentLock 3.0. It provides a gui interface that then outputs gateway code for you to use. You can use your own offers and it has things like changing the background image etc. (A sales thread is here if you want to have a look : http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2107764). The thread had complaints about the quality of the program and what not, really, I don’t know anything about the owner or the product itself so I stayed out of it. but then they linked to an example page for the product.

The link was this one : http://bhdubclub.com/silentsoftware/ex/MyGateway12.html

Meh, looks OK. Just your average content locker I suppose. But something set me off. As weird as it sounds, the red color of the headline was this off red color that I distinctly remember having a laugh about how horrible it looked when I created my own Content Locker. Ok, so same red color, who cares right?

Well I decided to look at the HTML source. There are certain things I do in my code that I was going to explain here how they match up with his. But there is no need. His HTML and Javascript code is an exact copy and paste of mine. Literally the javascript is identical to mine, including the comments in the code.

So, I was kinda flabbergasted as you can imagine. Here was someone selling a product, that to be fair did have a gui interface to make it a bit easier to build the gateway (Although anyone with even a smidgen of brains can work it out), that was an exact copy and paste of code I gave away for free. I sort of posted a grumbling that while not illegal, I don’t think we should condone that sort of behavior. Do I care that he is selling my work, a little. What I really care about is people are paying for something that they can get for free anyway.

Through this, it sort of dawned on me, do I need to start putting up the licensing terms for each and every piece of code I give away? This guy literally made an entire product, off nothing more than code I gave away for free. I always think people are so up themselves when they have all these terms and conditions for a free piece of software. But now I am starting to understand why.

As much as I love applications like Sick Submitter, they really peeve me off with taking away the focus from the main window. Sure I can still browse reddit or point and click with my mouse, but I can’t type as the active window is always being taken away. This happens with alot of Internet Marketing applications, really anything that uses an IE browser window will cause this.

I have setup Virtual Machines before (Infact it is part of MCSA training), but that was many many moons ago. So I thought I would go about installing it, and at the same time write it out for anyone wanting to install a VM of their own.

First I had to decide which VM software to use. I have used a couple before but a quick Google search brought up a nice intuitive one that works on all platforms (Linux + Mac + Windows). It was Virtual Box. Aswell as running on all OS’s, it also had a pretty slick interface that looked easy to use. After downloading it (70mb or so), the install was quick and painless.

Now, onto the OS. Pretty much the default nowadays for running virtual machines is a trimmed down version of Windows XP called TinyXP. Inside your virtual machine you can run ANY OS of your choosing. However you do need a “legit” copy. It doesn’t just give you a drop down of what type of OS you want and you have free rein. Now, I am really unsure of my boundaries here, so for some of it you may have to read between the lines.

If you have a computer with Windows Vista or Windows 7, you are within your rights to get a copy of Windows XP (For free) to downgrade. One way to downgrade is to find an ISO image of Windows XP. I recommend getting Tiny XP as it is very light and comes with alot less drives. Try googling for “TinyXP-Rev09.iso”.

Ok great, so now you have your iso right? From whatever means.

Open VirtualBox, and hit create new VM. Name your VM whatever you want, and select the type of system you will be running. Obviously if you decide to go with TinyXP, then select Windows XP, but if you want to run a different OS simply select it from the box. For memory, I usually start with 1GB, and then lower it later. TinyXP + SickSubmitter use around 300mb when going all out, and without SickSubmitter running it is significantly less. Depending on your OS, you will obviously require more or less ram. Next screen, select new harddisk, and make it 10GB.

Ok, at this point the Virtual Machine is “active” but it functions much like a blank computer. There is NO OS currently installed.

You need to select your VM, Hit settings along the top, Storage, Select the disk drive (Will be the second one down, image of a discs), and then select the little disc image on the right. I have highlighted it for you here :

Click it, and select your OS image. If you downloaded TinyXP it will be an ISO image from whereever you downloaded it to on your local computer. What this basically does is make the virtual machine think it has a CD drive, and that the OS disc is in there. A little more complicated than that, but just think of it along those lines.

Ok next, You need to start your VM. And the first time around a tonne of boxes will start popping up giving you info. I recommend you read each one, click “Don’t show again” and then continue on. Because of the way a Boot Order works on a PC, there is a small time window when your computer will say “Press The Enter Key To Boot From CD”. At this point you need to press the Enter key (Duh!), but the popup windows inhibit this and you will likely miss it first time around. Simply reboot the VM and try to catch it again.

You should be greeted by a blue screen like this. Fair not non-techies. It is not a blue screen of death (BSOD).

This screen WILL look different depending on what OS you have. This is the screen for TinyXP, but each OS will have a different one. I will run through the instructions on what to select for TinyXP, but otherwise you are on your own.

- Select 1 to install TinyXP
- Select 1 to install TinyXP WITH IE + Driver Packs. Some people decide not to, but this is the easiest way to install.
- Wait while it installs a couple of drivers.
- Select the partition (There should only be 1, should say 10237MB if you left it default), and press C to create a partition.
- A new screen should popup with the amount of space you want to take up, leave it as default (Should be the complete space), and press enter.
- Press Enter again.
- Next screen select to format as NTFS (QUICK). Make sure you select quick otherwise you will be here a while.

That should be it, it should now run through the install of TinyXP.

One more thing that I see many people do, is that they watch it and start pressing buttons. Your computer will restart many times on the install process. Do not touch a thing. Until you hit the Windows Desktop, it requires no interaction from you.

Once you are at your desktop, you now need to install the Guest Additions. On your VM Window Menu, Select Devices, then “Install Guest Additions…”.

Now we need to allow for the sharing of folders. We need this to be able to transfer files from your local pc into the VM. For example if we have a bunch of applications we want to run on the VM, there is no point downloading them all again when we can simply transfer them over.

Because TinyXP is supposed to be light. It has a couple of services switched off by default. We need to turn these back on.

Inside your VM go…

- Click Start Button
- Go Administrative Tools
- Click Services

Now each of these services needs to be activated in the same way. The three services are :

- Routing And Remote Access
- Network DDE
- Network DDE DSDM

Find each one in the services list. Right click and select properties. Set the startup type to “Automatic” and then hit the “Start” button.

Great, now we should be able to add Shared Folders. Simply hit Devices –> Shared Folders along the top of your VM Window. Click the Folder Icon with a Plus sign on it to the right, and then select your folder that you want to share. I usually make a folder on the desktop of my local PC with the name “VM Shares” and dump everything in there. Up to you!

Once you have selected the folder. You now need to go Start->My Computer in your VM (NOT on your local PC). Up the top of that window there is an icon to map a network drive. You have probably never seen it before, but it is this one :

Select that. Keep the drive letter as Z. Then.. You need to click Browser->Open up Virtual Box Shares, and then select that folder. Hit OK, and you should now have a direct link to the shared folder on your PC.

Ok, we are finally getting somewhere. But there is still a couple more issues we need to clear up. The first of those is networking. Now I spent literally hours trying to work this out. There is many many guides out there with similar content that point to absolute non existent drivers etc that do nothing. One of the most common says that you should use a driver ISO called : networkdriverstinyxp.iso. I can guarantee you, you will never find this driver. I sure as hell couldn’t and ended up getting redirect to all sorts of crazy download sites.

What you actually want is this driver here : http://www.downloadatoz.com/driver/download_driver_37453.html . That driver is for the virtual network card that is by default set on the VM. You will need to download it to your local PC, move it into your shared folder, and then retrieve it inside the VM. Run it and install it.

Open up internet explorer inside your VM and see if it is working. If it is not, then do the following.

- Click Start Button
- Right click My Computer and select Properties from the drop down menu.
- Go to the Hardware tab and then click “Device Manager”
- In the list there should be Network Adapters. Open it up, right click the adapter inside there (Should be named VMware Accelerated blah blah) and select Update Driver.
- A window should popup. Select “No not this time”, hit next.
- Select “Install the software automatically”, hit next/finish.

You are now done, you should be able to browser the internet via your VM now.

And that is it! There are a few more hints and tricks that I think I will leave to another post. For now you have a fully functioning VM that you can install any software on and run it in the background. Another great thing about VM’s is that they isolate it from your main computer. If you are not sure about an application, or you are one of those people that installs applications then uninstalls a week later, this is a great way to make sure your own computer doesn’t turn into a hunk of junk.

If you have any questions or get stuck on any part, post in the comments and I will do my best to help you out. Just because this guide worked for me, doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. I know that plenty of other guides out there for this exact version of VirtualBox and TinyXP never worked for me.