Wednesday, 12. May 2010
Low Gas Prices For Summer 2010
As reported by the Associated Press in the article, As Summer Nears, Expect Gas Prices To Go… Down?, gas prices may have already peaked for the summer. This makes the idea of a road trip a vacation possibility. Before you hit the road on what could be an awesome family vacation, consider these easy low cost tips. They could very easily save you lots of money.
Money Saving Vehicle Maintenance Tips
The first thing you should consider before you hit the road on a road trip is vehicle maintenance. And the easiest items to check are your spark plugs, air filter, oil, and tires. In fact, these are the most common items included in a basic tune-up. A basic tune will run about $65 for a basic six cylinder car. This includes changing the oil, air and oil filters, spark plugs, rotating the tires, and chassis lube.
$65 may sound like more than you want to spend right before you hit the road, but consider these savings. If your car is lacking this basic maintenance, it could be getting 5 MPG or more less than the advertised highway rating. If your trip is 600 miles round trip and the average cost for a gallon of gas is $3.00, this 5 MPG loss is equal to. And don’t forget to kick the tires, improperly inflated tires add friction, which can lower highway fuel economy 2 MPG.
Save Money With Trip Planning
Proper trip planning can definitely help you save money on a road trip. Take for instance finding the best gas prices along your route. You could look for the best price at an exit near where you may run low on gas. Or you could use the Gas Buddy trip planner. This route planner tells you what the address is for your fill ups, what the current prices is, about how much gas you’ll need, and approximately how much your total will be.
Another good way to save money on your trip is to sign up for hotel award points. One of the main hotel points programs I use are the hotel rewards by Choice Hotels. Each time I stay I get points that can be redeemed for free nights. I also gain points by using a special code when I rent a vehicle or buy from certain online vendors. This works really good when I am on business travel. Before I hit the road I plan my hotel stays along my route and check Gas Buddy for the best fuel prices near my hotel.
Other ways how to save money on road trips:
- Set the cruise control for the maximum sped limit. This not only will save you the cost of a speeding ticket, it saves gas! Very few drivers can beat the cruise control when it comes to MPG.
- Visitor centers have a lot of coupons!
- If you are going to spend a lot of time on the road over the course of a year, buy a seasons pass to the National Park System. In three visits to a national park you have already saved money over regular price admission for a family.
- Pack a cooler with drinks and snacks, you’ll save over buying in the convenient stores.
- Save money at home while you are gone, set the thermostat to a temperature where it the ac/heater won’t run much, turn off all the lights, shut all the doors (makes it easier to control temp in thermostat zone), turn the water hear to the lowest setting or vacation mode, and unplug all the power strips in the house.
Best of luck on your road trip, have fun and be safe!
Posted in Save Money by -
Wednesday, 12. May 2010
ALT tags bring visitors to your site from image searches
Search engine optimization is all about getting ranked high in the search engine results page for a specific search query. And ALT attributes for your your images and other other media do indeed help your web page rank higher if the ALT tags are indeed keywords your are trying to rank for. But does it matter to you if your visitors land on your page because they are looking for information on Kim Kardashian or looking for pictures of Kim Kardashian?
This is the main difference between using image ALT tags for SEO and image ALT attributes for internet promotion. If you care about organic search engine results, then use the ALT tags to gain that last bit of SEO juice to give you that edge. If you care more about traffic, then ALT attributes could bring you more traffic naturally than the normal search engine results page does, either way you won’t lose by using image ALT tags.
Kim Kardashian is tagged on my webpage
If you are ready for better placement in the search engine results page and more traffic from image searches, then it is time to supercharge your images. If you examine the Kim Kardashian bikini tag below…
- Kim Kardashian Bikini
… you’ll find the following information:
- Image Title: Kim Kardashian Bikini
- Image Location: kim_bikini.jpg
- Alt Text: Kim Kardashian Bikini
- WP Caption Text: Kim Kardashian Bikini
As you can see, there are four opportunities to get you keyword text onto the web page. The best part is all of these fields are able to be spidered and indexed by search engine spiders. All of this is fairly easy to do, and most web authoring software has the ALT text data field available for your information. If you are using WordPress, then these functions are available by default.
If you need help getting your site optimized and ready for search engine spiders to crawl and index, please use my contact form and let me know what services you might need. I can perform a SEO survey of your site and recommend which changes to make and why. And for you Kim Kardashian fans, here is one fore reason to use ALT tags, each one of these pictures will bring about 500 unique visitors to this page each month.
Kim Kardashian Bikini
Posted in Promotion, Search Engine Optimization by -
Saturday, 8. May 2010
Why Not To Buy Recycled Adsense Ready Sites
I recently read the article, “Purchasing new Adsense ready site” and felt compelled to blog about this. A recycled adsense site is a website that has content written to perform well with Google adsense. Then the site is sold wholesale to unscrupulous webmasters for the sole purpose of making money with adsense. While I am all for making adsense sites and content writing sites to sell for profit, it is my professional ethical belief that flooding the internet with duplicate content is wrong.
These sites add nothing of real value for the internet community. Sure, the basic content may be useful to the visitor, or the adsense ads that are generated by the content may be of use, but over all it they are a nuisance to people. Finding the same content on four different sites while performing a longtail keyword search is very annoying.
Google’s Content Guidelines
Google wants fresh and relevant sites to crawl and index. Additionally, Google specifically warns against using duplicate content [1] . While some content management systems automatically use excerpts, use blocks of text in other places, or use sequential pages of blog posts and canonical articles, sites that are bought and sold in bulk may be reported as spam and be penalized by lowering the rank or removal from the index all together.
Spamsense Sites Still Make Money
One might wonder, “If Google penalizes or removes a site for spam, how does it make money?” This is actually really easy to answer. First these site use a different advertising system that doesn’t penalize for duplicate content. Second, the webmaster uses an aggressive internet marketing strategy that includes link building, sponsored links, paid traffic generators, paid to read emails (PTR), and paid to surf programs (PTP).
These spam sites do require money to make money. But if the keywords are chosen carefully and the internet marketing is done on the cheap, then they can be moderately successful. And thus the reason these sites are sold wholesale.
Ultimately it is up to the webmaster to decide on the business ethics and how they pertain to internet websites. I highly encourage more research into this subject before proceeding. Not only can one site be banned, but if you have many of these different sites residing on a dedicated server, that server’s IP address could be banned. If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave a comment or use the contact page to get in touch with me.
[1] Duplicate Content – Webmaster Tools Help. Google. Web. 8 May 2010. <http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359>
Posted in Adsense by -
