Savvy internet users have you be skeptical of testimonials. If you’re searching for an e-book and come across a Clickbank product, you will see probably 10 testimonials on one of those long sales pages.

Here’s an example of a page I just found with a couple of sketchy testimonials: Make Cash With Will. Looks like the owner of the website just found a couple of pictures from Myspace and wrote in a fake testimonial.

You’ve go to be careful with this things. I would only trust a testimonial if it comes with a person’s URL, and then the name/url match is confirmed by doing a WHOIS lookup. Even then I’m not sure I’d believe something off one of these online sales pages.

So what do you think? Do you believe anything some online testimonial says?

I found this list on DP by some guy named “SEOSUCKS”. It’s a rare day when you actually find something worthwhile on Digitalpoint. So this guy just posted a list of the Top 10 on-page seo optimization tips. I’ll give my comment by each tip.

1. Kewords Analysis - making sure you have the right keywords picked out for each page. You don’t want to litter your Xbox website with keywords for pink designer shoes. Use keyword tools to find out the most searched keywords and run with them.
2. Title tag in Header - If you’re going to put the title tag somewhere, it should be near the top.
3. Meta Tags (Content Desc. and Keywords) - Some people say meta tags are worthless… others say they’re still useful, just not important. I still use metatags on some of my sites. Single pages in Wordpress don’t use meta keyword and description tags, yet those pages still get indexed well for me.
3. Page Tiltle - Must have a great page title.
4. H1 and H2 - Search engines place more importance on the words in these tags. Make sure you have your keywords in them.
5. Body (Quality Content) - Unique content is the best way to go.
6. Header and Footer - Not sure what this guy meant by header and footer? Making sure you have them? Making sure they’re clean? I don’t know…
7. Keyword density check of your keyword on a particular webpage - If you’re going after a certain keyword like “football” you want to make sure you use that keyword a certain number of times based on how much content you have. Saying “football” one time in a 10,000 word article isn’t going to help you.
8. Check for w3c.org validations - Make sure you have no code errors on your page.
9. Use of Anchor/Alt texts - This means putting title tags in your link codes and alt tags on all your images.
10. Use Sitemap and robot.txt - Sitemaps help search engines crawl your website. Robot.txt will help show the spiders what to crawl and what to avoid.

If you have anything you’d like to add, please comment.

My freshman year of college, one of my professors went over an easy way to remember very long numbers (or even phone numbers). It’s called chunking. You take a long number, then break it up into several chunks. Then you assign each chunk with something you remember (in my case, professional athlete jersey numbers). If you don’t know jersey numbers, then you’ll have to find something else… like birthdays, anniversarys, etc.

Let’s do a quick example so you can see what I’m talking about. Let’s pretend the below number is either a phone number, or an assigned login password for one of your affiliate accounts (not all accounts let you pick your own password).

2872398329

This is how I would break up the number:

28 | 7 | 23 | 98 | 32 | 9

And I would assign each number with a player’s jersey I know:

Fred Taylor | Mickey Mantle | Michael Jordan | John Henderson | Jones-Drew | David Garrard

It is easier for us to remember a small sequence of famous names then it is for numbers. So take 3-5 minutes to memorize the players names. You don’t have to worry about the numbers, because you already know those because you’re a big time sports fan.

Then when it comes time to type in your password, just go through the players’ names and their jersey numbers will come to you.

This may sound ridiculous, but trust me… it works. And remember, if you don’t know sports jersey numbers, just use birthdays or something you do remember. If I remember correctly, people have a hard time remember more then 6 numbers in a row, but if you break it up into chunks you can increase that to almost 15.

You know, I actually had a Facebook profile back in early 2005 (probably January or February). This was back when Facebook first started out and you needed a .edu email address to join. Because Facebook was so new there just weren’t many people on it. I ended up deleting my account maybe a month later, really not knowing what Facebook would become in the future.

I haven’t had time yet to add photos, install apps or edit my profile details. At this point I’m just trying to find some people I know.

In addition to keeping in touch with my friends, I also want to use my Facebook account to build pages for some of my websites. My members on Gator Envy have been asking for some time now that I create a Facebook Page. So not only can I post info about the site on the fan page, but this will also be a great opportunity to attract new forum members.

I’m sure there are a lot of ways I can use Facebook to my advantage in building my network grow. If I think of any more I’ll be sure to post them.

This morning I replaced some of the Google ads this morning to my sports merchandise offers (the only pay 10% commission, but if I can made a couple big sales a month it will be worth it), and I will be exploring affiliate marketing. Google Ads just aren’t cutting it anymore on my forum.

In addition to new advertising scenarios, I am in the process of redesigning the homepage. Currenlty the homepage is a Vbulletin portal plugin. My new homepage will be a wordpress blog. I’m going to skin it so it matches Gator Envy’s currently theme, however now that it will be a blog theme, it will have many new ways and more prominent ad placements.

I am also excited about having a blog on there because it will give me a new way to get traffic. Google loves wordpress and is very quick to index new posts. I’ll still be able to do all my weekly matchups, but now I can be more in depth. And in all the posts I write on the homepage blog, I can link keywords to specific threads in the forum, thus driving traffic to the forum and bumping up the rankings.

I had the idea to transform the homepage into a blog for a long time now. I just finally got pushed over the edge this past week after I became sick of looking at my earnings from one of my most popular sites. A site like this should be making a couple hundred a month!

Once the new design is up (this weekend) I’ll let you know.

I run a lot of sports websites, so I like to look for widgets that are related to sports. One way to keep visitors coming back to your website is to add games. It doesn’t take much to add a “Games” link somewhere on your navigation, then provide 3-5 cool, related games for your visitors to play. Widget Box makes it extremely easy to add a game to your site.

Today I’m going to post my top 5 game widgets to add to your sport site.

1. Home Run Derby

I play this game all the time. It’s addicting and fun. The most homers I’ve hit in a single session is 12. Try to beat it.

2. Bowling

Who doesn’t love bowling? Try to score a 300.

3. Ping Pong

Ping Pong is another simple game that everyone loves to play. Doesn’t matter if you run a football site, they’ll want to play some ping pong.

4. Drifting

Those of you with car racing sites will love this one. This little game will keep your visitors on your site for hours!

5. HORSE

This game is kind of hard, but a perfect addition to anyone running a basketball site.

Now, I own a Michael Crabtree fan site. So because of his amazing play (see video below), there were a ton of people searching for him online. Check out how my traffic stats increased just because he made that amazing play.

See normally, I get just over 100 uniques/day. However on last Saturday and Sunday my traffic shot up to almost 700 uniques.

I experienced the same thing last year on my Tim Tebow fan site. When all the Heisman voting was going on, my traffic just boomed. That is one of the positives of owning a fan site for a superstar athlete. One thing to note though… there is always a possibility of a reverse effect. Let’s say Michael Crabtree blows out his knee and can’t play football for a year or maybe even his career is done. Then you’re fan site becomes worthless.

I’m not going to spend too much time addressing this issue. This is not a political blog, and now that the election is over, I intend to return this blog back to its roots.

My loyal readers know where I stand on the tough issues that face this country. It’s my belief that the majority of Americans made a grave mistake yesterday in casting their votes for Barack Obama. I am dumbfounded about the whole thing. There will be a lot of disappointed Americans when Obama doesn’t deliver you free gas for your car or pay your mortgage.

Mark Alexander, publisher of The Patriot Post, said it best in his Publisher’s Note today:

Fellow Patriots,

Tuesday, 4 November 2008, is a date which will live in infamy. While most presidential elections are followed with calls for unity by both candidates, Barack Obama issued no such call in his speech last night, with the possible exception of his observation, “I may not have won your vote tonight, but … I will be your president, too.”

Of course, none was expected — liberals have elected a Socialist with deep ties to cultural and ethnocentric radicalism, and his executive and legislative agenda poses a greater threat to American liberty than that of any president in the history of our great republic.

Obama has twice taken an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” He has never honored that oath, and, based on his policy proposals and objectives, he has no intention to honor it after again reciting that oath on 20 January 2009. Obama seeks to, in his own words, “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”

For that reason, this morning, the symbol of our national heritage of liberty, the American flag atop the 35-foot mast at our editorial offices, was respectfully lowered, inverted, and raised to full mast as a sign of national distress. It will remain inverted until next Tuesday, when we right it in honor of Veterans Day.

Today, at least 55,805,197 Americans are concerned for the future of our nation’s great tradition of liberty. Some 63,007,791 Americans have been lulled, under the aegis of “hope and change,” into a state of what is best described as “cult worship” and all its attendant deception.

One of our editors, a Marine now working in the private sector, summed up our circumstances with this situation report. It aptly captured the sentiments around our office: “It’s been tough, fellow Patriots; tough to stomach the idea that more than half of my fellow citizens who vote, have booted a genuine American hero to the curb for a rudderless charlatan. What a sad indictment on our citizenry that some are so eager to overlook his myriad flaws — his radical roots, his extreme liberalism, his utter lack of experience or achievement. Barack Obama is the antithesis of King’s dream: He’s a man judged by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character. If it’s God’s will that Barack Obama is our next president, then so be it. We Patriots will pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and wade back to the war front, intent on liberty or death.”

This battle is lost, but the war is not. Let’s roll.

Mark Alexander,
Publisher

Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, said “Anyone who isn’t prepared for ads to go down 40 percent is crazy.”

For those of you who make your living online, you should draw out a plan on how you will deal with things should the worst happen. Especially those of you who rely solely on Adsense or other PPC types for your earnings. Adsense could take a beating real soon. Those of you with private advertisers, try to get them to renew asap and pay upfront. Offer a discount if you have to.

So I’m asking you: are you prepared should online ad prices drop even further over the next few months? I’ve seen a drop in my earnings since the economy started going south, but luckily I don’t rely on my online earnings to live. It’s purely supplemental.

How about you… have you seen a huge decrease in your earnings over the past few weeks/months? What have you done to prepare yourself for the future?

My old computer was a total piece of crap. It’s pushing four years old. It’s a Medion with a 3.0 ghz Pentium IV processor and 512 RAM.

For $569, I got a load PC that is very past. Sure there are plenty of computers on the market that are faster, stronger, and more powerful… but one of our biggest factors in determining which PC to buy was price. I would rather spend $569 now and be able to buy another top of the line PC in 2-3 years. If we had spent $1500+ on a PC now, in order to justify the price we’d have to keep it forever (like the one I’m currently getting rid of).

So here are some of the specs of my new PC, for all of them, click here:
# Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core processor E5200
Featuring an 800MHz frontside bus, 2MB shared L2 cache and 2.5GHz processor speed.
# 4GB PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM - expandable to 8 GB
For multitasking power, expandable to 8GB.
# SuperMulti DVD±RW/CD-RW drive with double-layer support
# 500GB Serial ATA hard drive (7200 rpm)
# Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 graphics
# Front-panel 15-in-1 media reader
# Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition 64-bit operating system with Service Pack 1 (SP1)

The only downside of this PC is the graphics card it comes with. I’ll probably upgrade that for Christmas. I also love that it comes with several empty PCI slots, some of the other HP models didn’t.

So for the next day or so I’ll be backing everything up on my current PC before I install and set up the new one. I can’t wait to load it up and actually run multiple programs at the same time.