Category Archives: General

WP Super Cache – An Essential Plugin for Your Blog

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I’ve always tried to keep my hosting costs low as possible as it’s a bit of a necessary evil. Hosting costs vary wildly, from $1 a month to several hundred for a small blog like this. Obviously, huge sites can spend millions.

I’ve been through my fair share of hosts and thought I had found the perfect cheap host when someone recommended Hostgator. It’s inexpensive, has 24 hour support and has really amazing up time.

However, even this company let me down eventually. I wrote a post called 10 Google Easter Eggs and spent at least six hours researching, writing, and formatting the post. Then I proceeded to promote it on the various social networks. The article was doing really, really well and two hours after launching the hosting company turned off my hosting. Without ANY warning!

I contacted them straight away and while their online support is good, they didn’t have any power to turn my site back on again, nor could they tell me what the actual problem was. I created a support ticket and and started a dialogue with their support team.

Here was the one of the emails I received back from their support team:

“You have exceeded your cpu quota, by driving system load up almost to 20. Normal system load is less than 10. Your account is starting to cause service outages for other users on the server, and re-instating it will continue to cause slowdowns and problems for other users. With that in mind, what do you feel is fair in this situation?”

Now, all I run is a blog, and who am I to know that their server can’t handle it? More to the point, I don’t know what’s fair? All I want is my blog running and yes, I don’t want other peoples’ sites to go out.

I literally begged for them to turn my site back on, but to no avail. Twenty emails later I got this response:

“The only way to get more CPU resources is to purchase a dedicated server: http://hostgator.com/dedicated.shtml However, there are quite a few things that can be done such as installing WP-SuperCache or another caching system and optimizing the database or using a theme that doesn’t have so many callbacks.”

Now most people know about WP Super Cache but I never thought it was necessary unless you are trying to hit the front page of Digg consistently, or were generating tens of thousands of visitors.

WP-Super Cache generates HTML pages directly from your Apache server instead of generating load-bearing PHP pages. This obviously stops your server from crashing, even if you get a huge amount of traffic, from Digg or somewhere else. Or in my case, I had a theme which was generating too many call backs and loading the server more than usual.

Click the link here to download WP SuperCache, it’s a great system and can save you tons of money and even more importantly, a lot of time and hassle.

10 Google Easter Eggs

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An Easter Egg is best described as a message or feature which is hidden in a piece of software, be it a DVD, CD, program, or video game. Below I’ve listed 10 Google-related Easter Eggs in no particular order, they are:

1. It’s been fixed now, but it used to be possible to ask Google Maps for directions from – for example – Providence, Rhode Island (in the US) to Rome in Italy (in Europe) and be told that you would have to swim many thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean in order to get there.

2. Famous photographer-evader Nessie the Loch Ness monster has been spotted just off the coast of Google. If you set your browser to the Beach iGoogle theme and wait until 3:14am, Nessie will surface from the sea for approximately 60 seconds. The rumour is that Google developers wanted to create a tribute to the mathematical quatity Pi (roughly equal to 3.14159). Similar instances that occur at this time on other themes include the Aurora Borealis appearing in the Seasonal Scape, or kitsune (mythical fox spirits common to Japanese folklore) appearing in the Tea House theme.

3. The Google calculator facility can often be a useful tool, but it is not without its fair share of easter eggs. Have a search for the “answer to life the universe and everything” and see what you get. Ever wanted to know the “number of horns on a unicorn”? Try searching for it now, and the calculator will let you know.

4. Ever wanted to momentarily pretend you were Elmer Fudd? Google gives you that chance with Google Elmer Fudd. Further possibilities include Pig Latin and even Klingon.

5. If you open up Picasa – Google’s free image software – and use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-Y, a teddy bear will show up. The more you press it, the more bears will pop up, until they eventually take over the screen.

6. Included in the Spam folder in Google Mail, just above the “Delete” button and where you usually come across advertising spam of some sort, you’ll find various recipes that include Spam as the main ingredient.

7. Hidden within the Google Earth program is a flight simulator. Accessed by pressing Ctrl-Alt-A on the keyboard (or Command-Option-A for Macs), you’re given the chance to try your hand at piloting either a propeller-powered plane or an F16 jet. You’re also given a choice of starting from a number of famous airports. Controls are available, and I recommend you read them, as I crashed even before I’d taken off. Hopefully you’ll fare better, good luck!

8. Google Maps has a tiny character called the Pegman show up whenever you zoom in close enough to experience Google Street Views. Occasionally, depending on the time of year, Google dresses the Pegman up in different costumes. For example, at Halloween he becomes a witch, and at Christmas he becomes a snowman.

9. If you type in “google easter eggs” and hit the”I’m Feeling Lucky” button, you’re treated to a minigame in which you control a rabbit and have to catch eggs which then spell out the word “Google”.

The following isn’t really an easter egg as such, but I thought I’d include it anyway.

10. As part of an April Fool’s joke in 2007, Google decreed that it would be launching Gmail Paper. This system would allow a Gmail user to print their entire account’s worth of emails and have it shipped to them as a hard copy. No amount would be too much, as it was possible to “print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails”.

10 Successful Google Bombs

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Below is a list of 10 successful Google Bombs that I’ve come across in recent years. Some of you may even remember them from when they were active. So in no particular order, we have:

1. “More evil than Satan himself” brought up the Microsoft homepage.

2. “Dumb motherfucker” linked to a site selling George W. Bush-related merchandise.

3. “Miserable failure” or “failure” on the 29th of September 2006 brought up the official George W. Bush biography.

4. In the run up to the 2005 UK election, “liar” linked to former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

5. A long-lasting and moderately successful bomb would be making the word “Scientology” link to Operation Clambake (www.xenu.net), an anti-scientology movement.

6. Another Scientology-related google bomb was born on the 29th of January 2008, when a google bomb linking the search “dangerous cult” to the homepage of The Church of Scientology was created.

7. Steven Lerner, the creator of Albino Blacksheep, created a joke webpage in 2003, which was titled “French Military Victories.” When searched for on Google, the top entry took you to a page that resembles google, but reads “Your search – French military victories – did not match any documents. Did you mean French military defeats?” This received over 50,000 hits in the first 18 hours of opening. Links near the top of the page lead to a simplified list of French military history. Even if you google “French military victories” now, it’s still the top result.

8. A bombing run targeting former US Senator Rick Santorum was embarked upon by columnist Dan Savage after the Senator made several controversial remarks towards homosexuality. The bombing was part of Savage’s plan to have the word “santorum” used for the combination of semen, lubricant and excrement that results from anal sex, and propelled the website created for that purpose to a high result for “santorum”.

9. Jewish writer Daniel Sieradski asked his blog readers to link to the Wikipedia article for “Jew” after he found that googling “Jew” returned the anti-Jewish website “Jew Watch” as the top entry. The bombing was a success and removed the site from the top result, but unfortunately Jew Watch still appears on the first page of results.

10. A search for “McDonald’s” was linked to the film Supersize Me, which was highly critical of the McDonald’s restaurant chain.

Google Delivers Better ROI than Major Sport Sponsorship By a Mile

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Formula 1 (F1) is the highest class of open wheel racing and is a very popular motor sport in Europe, which is becoming globalised. Each seasons eighteen races will be watched by more than a billion viewers. It is also a multi-billion dollar industry. For those in the USA who are less familiar with F1, the cars look similar to Indy cars, except they race on a circuit as opposed to an oval. While Indy is a Burger and Beer type of atmosphere, F1 is Champaign and Caviar.

F1 is an abundance of excess and glamour, many major A-List celebrities are seen at every race rubbing shoulders with their favorite team and drivers.

So you would think you would be safe to believe that sponsoring a team would be great for your business and make your sales shoot through the roof? Not so. Notice the traffic trends below, kindly supplied by Robin Goad from Hitwise.

This chart shows two companies that sponsor one of the oldest teams, Williams F1. They have been racing successfully for thirty years.I chose two companies who haven’t sponsored a team before and don’t have a well know brand yet. This would give us a good idea as to how effective the sponsorship actually is.

The blue line shows a clothing fashion label called www.allsaints.co.uk, it shows a doubling of traffic at the start of the year. It is unclear what marketing efforts account for this at the start of the year. However, it is well before the F1 season starts and doesn’t seem to be associated with it. The traffic is still comparably low, suggesting they are getting less than 200,000 visitors per month.

The next company is called www.mydiamonds.com, a high end jewelry retailer. Unlike the previous example at the start of the season you can see a rise in traffic. However, the traffic does not really climb to any sort of substantial level. This would indicate that they only have a couple of thousand visitors per month looking at the graph. Take into consideration the amount they are paying to be a major sponsor of the team, and you’ll see that the direct return is extremly poor and does not represent good value in terms of ROI. My understanding is that they are paying between $5 Million & $10 Million dollars PER SEASON. Their web address is placed prominently on the rear wing of the car and gets a significant amount of TV time.

Give me a $10 Million dollar budget and I’d give you a return which is thousands of times better than what they are currently getting. I also checked their backlinks and they have fewer than 100!

Think carefully before investing in offline advertising or sponsorship which is costly. One maybe wiser and make a much higher return in a shorter timeframe to use Google and other major traffic generators.

SEO Will Make You Rich

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Hands up if you’re tired of people droning on about how SEO is dying and in a few years there won’t be a need for it anymore.

The fact is, unless the world ends, SEO will never die.  However, SEO is getting and will become almost impossible for the majority of people. Google’s algorithm is getting tougher to crack and it becomes more difficult each day.

The good news is there is light at the end of the tunnel, while many SEO’s will go out of business as their spam becomes useless, the best will stay on top of what needs to be done and clean up. Really good Search Engine Optimizers will become very rich in the not to distant future.

As companies become increasingly desperate to get exposure on the Internet SEO’s will start to charge more, and that figure is going to multiply. I expect the demand will double every year as the number of credible SEO’s shrink. The actually dollar amount will rise dramatically, I wouldn’t be surprised if prices are five to ten times higher in a few years.

Speak to any SEO in a competitive market and they will tell you prices are going up, costs are rising as companies throw tons of money at Search Engine Optimization to stay competitive. All this is doing is raising the bench mark and the entry point to which businesses need to operate to market themselves on the Internet effectively. 

Become a great SEO and you’ll become rich, if you don’t, you won’t be in SEO for long. That’s a promise. 

 

Introducing PingPongPie.com

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This is where it all starts for PingPongPie dot com. My name is Christopher Angus and I’m a SEO and Social Media Marketer. 

My specialty is in competitive SEO, especially in the finance industry. Type any finance-related search into Google.co.uk and more often than not I’ll have a site in the top ten results. I’ve also got interests in the travel and gambling sectors too.

I have put off starting a Blog due to me not wanting to raise attention to myself as an effective SEO. However, the time has come to offer my two cents on SEO and Social Media matters. I own several other blogs but they are purely revenue generators.

This Blog will be offering insight into how I achieved success in dominating the SERPS as well as how Social Media can help your website and business grow and rank well. I feel, at this point I need to mention that I try to stick to the search engine guidelines as closely as possible. 

I’d love to receive comments on the coming posts; I welcome suggestions and opinions. If you feel that I have missed something or would like me to blog on a certain subject, please contact me.