Many of my online marketing and web design clients ask me how I can make SEO work for them. The first thing I explain is the fact that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. What I mean by that is that it takes time for search engines such as Google and Bing to develop a trust with your website, especially if your domain is brand new. Most of my search engine optimization projects take no less than 8-12 months and sometimes longer.

The reason it takes such a long time is because links need to be built up in a natural way. Sure you can add your site to directories, submit articles or do link trades however, if these are done within the span of a few weeks or months, search engines will realize you’re trying to manipulate their results and rank you far lower than you might deserve.

Backlinks to your website should appear organic and shouldn’t be linked the same way. If you are doing link trades with other sites, ask them to link to you with an image every now and again rather than text. If you are linking with text, make sure you mix up the terms to keep the search engines on their toes.

Another way to make sure you’re doing your SEO properly is to create unique and useful content on your site. Start up a blog and write an article or two a week to keep users coming back. If your content is unique and written for people rather than search engines, you may actually get links to your site without having to return one.

As an online marketer, I really do believe that search engine optimization is still very beneficial to websites. You just have to be smart about it. I’ve been practicing what I’ve been preaching for a few years now and it has helped many of my sites gain great organic search traffic.

More info: SEO From An Online Marketing Point Of View – Guest Post by Sebastian Agosta

The Internet has become an abundant well of opportunities for individuals interested in starting their own business from the comfort of their homes. It is difficult to imagine living our lives without the Internet and the services it provides for us, and because we are at such ease with using it, we may overlook the fact that it takes certain kinds of skills to efficiently run an online business. Just like specific knowledge and experience are needed to be a successful offline entrepreneur, your online business may throw unexpected challenges at you, as you strive to stay on top in the ever-evolving online marketing world. In fact, an affiliate marketer’s training is never truly finished, as new tools and online mediums are constantly being developed. Let us imagine that you have a brilliant idea and you’re planning to start a website or blog – but what kind of knowledge will bring unquestionable value to your project?

1. SEO skills

Unless you’re already a celebrity, it is practically impossible to succeed with a blog or website without good search engine optimization to boost your rankings within search engine results. Studies have indicated that over 80% of internet users, that end up purchasing a product or service, start off by performing search engine queries. This means that you could be missing out on a huge number of potential buyers if you do not implement a smart SEO strategy for your website. Major search engines like Google and Bing use social media websites (such as Facebook and Twitter) to establish rankings, so a strong social media presence is an absolute must. Other components of a SEO strategy include relevant, quality content, keyword research, conversion optimization, tag and meta-tag optimization, social bookmarking and directory submissions, XML Sitemap feed creation, backlinking and many more.

2. Understanding Web Analytics

There are two ways of performing web analytics: one (off-site) is to look at the internet as a whole, with the intention of measuring potential audiences, visibility and buzz (what people talk about the most, what the trends are); the second (on-site) implies looking at a user’s actions once they land on your website. You’d be observing conversion rates, click rates, impressions and your website’s overall performance in accordance with key indicators to determine a campaign’s efficiency. Analytics are very useful in setting the direction your website should be taking, considering market progression, search engine trends and user response. Google Analytics is a very popular service offered free of charge, that enables a user to access detailed statistics about their website’s visitors.

3. Web Development skills

A working, user friendly website that is both fresh and involving can mean a world of a difference, especially for a new business. Creating and maintaining such a website demands web development skills, which involve several sub-areas of expertise, like web design, scripting, server configuration, coding, web application development, e-commerce development and more. It is very difficult for just one person to master all of these areas, so an online marketing agency with teams of professionally trained web developers is often employed by businesses to tackle every aspect of website creation and maintenance. However, some degree of understanding of web development is a definite plus, as it may come useful in elaborating long term business strategies, or evaluating costs and risks. Web developers can also add a wide range of exciting, interactive content to a website, including flash applications, motion graphics, animations, and sounds.

4. Social Media Marketing Skills

A seamless marketing strategy, which compiles various avenues and tools that work to amplify your impact on potential consumers, is truly the driving force of commerce. Social Media has really created a whole new dimension to internet use and has pushed online marketing toward engaging, new horizons as far as business opportunities are concerned. Social Media implies near instant access to an incredibly resourceful community of active internet users – the ones who essentially dictate what is hot and what is not at any given time. Every marketer’s dream is to tap into this resource, use it and become part of it as these networks expand. Places like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Youtube and Google Plus are immensely popular and can be used in a coordinated manner to launch influential campaigns. Social profile creation, research, social media audit and analysis, blog design and installation, video creation and optimization are all important facets of a powerful social marketing plan.

5. E-commerce Skills

Purchasing and selling products and services online, or e-commerce, entails more than just the sale and the acquisition themselves. Complex processes of developing user-friendly interfaces (such as online shopping carts), marketing, delivery and payment must be carefully elaborated for a successful sale. On top of that, online stores take into account some “offline”, traditional concepts like supply chain management, along with new notions, such as online transactions, electronic money transfers, data collection and processing, electronic inventory management and several more. The visual aspect is essential in influencing a person’s decision on making a purchase, and an unappealing or unfriendly website can lose you a customer. What is more, good SEO allows for efficient pay per click management. This refers to a very popular advertising model by which an advertising company pays hosting websites for each instance when their ad is clicked on. Keywords relevant to the target market are very important in determining the number of clicks an ad can attract.

6. Focus on User Experience and User Interaction

To the responsible entrepreneur, the success of a product or service is usually dictated by the degree in which it can respond to and satisfy a consumer need. To determine this, you have to consider how you can improve or optimize the user experience of your customers. Similarly, the way your potential customers interact with your website can also be optimized, and a clever interaction strategy can even guide customers to perform specific actions. In this respect, an appealing, interactive website coupled with a goal-oriented strategy are key for improving the online interaction that the users are having with your business. And when customers feel involved in a purchase, they are more likely to mention the purchase to their friends, or even become loyal consumers. Much like tending to a garden, continuous improvements and maintenance are important in keeping this experience real on the user’s end.

7. Online Reputation Management

Online visibility is everything to an internet business, and for this reason, e-marketers have elaborated procedures to monitor and mitigate brand mentions in online media. This can typically be done by creating and spreading positive or neutral content to counter any existing negative mentions. However, Online Reputation Management (ORM) works in contrast to traditional e-commerce strategies (which seek to improve results with a specific web search, to obtain more page views) by downgrading top ranked negative results. Consequently, ORM can generate an overall positive environment for a specific brand, and can prevent or stop reputation threats. While SEO and ORM are closely knit, their immediate goals are entirely different. A good ORM plan will be proactive and able to quickly provide responses to criticism, either by generating positive comments, or by offering free samples to interested reviewers. More extreme forms of ORM will involve notices to take down disparaging comments and, in some cases, even lawsuits.

Since all of these skills are important and can play a part in the destiny of your online business, various companies that provide unified internet marketing solutions can be hired to collect and interpret data from web analytics services, perform web development, create elaborate SEO strategies and coordinate online marketing campaigns with a high guaranteed success rate.

More info: Running An Online Business – Guest Post

There was a time when I used to crank out one page web sites because they were simple to rank on MSN. All you really had to do was use your keyword in the browser title, in the meta description, in the meta keywords, in the article title in “strong” tags (not h1 though for some reason), in the first, second, and third paragraphs of a 300 word article. Additionally, the 3 keywords used in the article body were also hyperlinked back to the site. That was it… submit your site to MSN and you were in business, often getting #1 spots. These sites even ended up ranking in Google after some time.

Things have changed and I’ve, for the most part, stopped whipping out these one-pagers in that fashion. But do they still have value? I think so. I come across sites frequently that are based on just one-page. Granted there are usually different “pages” of content, but they are hidden from view (using CSS or JavaScript) until a link is clicked. Take this site for example. The contact page drops over the site upon clicking the “we should talk” link.

Mostly I see businesses or individuals offering a service use these one-page sites kind of like virtual business cards. I’ve also seen them cleverly used to spotlight single products (like a book or an app), or in situations where archives aren’t really necessary, like one example where a real estate showed their latest and greatest property for sale and just overwrote the old one.

It’s a great idea too, use a simple design and have all the important elements in plain view (phone number, services offered, address if applicable, portfolio, menu PDF link if applicable, links to all your “social” pages (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and so on.)

It’s strange though for some of the sites I’ve been seeing to be ranking for high traffic, high competition keyphrases. But I suppose.. where they lack in fresh content they make up for in speed. I’m going to do a case study soon with a one page site and see what it takes to get top spots in Google. I’ll keep you posted.

More info: Do One Page Websites Have Value?

Understand something from the get-go. I have a great deal of knowledge of SEO and search engine ranking. I have insider knowledge from some informed folks that work at Google and Bing. Matt Cutts personally sends me SEO tips via anonymous postcards, and I am close friends with the smart folks that work with the Google algorithm :) OK, none of that is true, but I do have some insight on things… being on both ends… as a browser and a marketer with a bit of SEO and technical know-how.

This isn’t going to be some inside secrets to SEO, as I don’t know any, all I can suggest is to think like the searcher. Is what you are offering worthy of top positions for your targeted search term? If yes, then good.. if not, then you have some work to do.

What I’d like to discuss is a bit about my experiences lately regarding some search terms that I am targeting, and what appears to be Google “testing” the worthiness of my search terms.

I know what I’m about to discuss might sound like Google is measuring “bounce rate” to determine the quality of a page but that’s not it at all. Bounce rate may give some indication and you can check bounce rate on a per-page per-keyword level, but it doesn’t provide a complete picture so it couldn’t be really used effectively, in my opinion, as a true factor in search ranking. First off, not everyone uses Google Analytics, so Google couldn’t assess the bounce rate on all sites (which is the only way it would be a fair assessment). On top of that, high bounce rate is actually appropriate in some cases, depending on the goal of the web page being visited. Someone might come to a page, get EXACTLY what they want (like a recipe), close the browser and ultimately increase the bounce rate, and without all the facts it would appear as though the content did not give value.

But.. where Google can measure things consistently, regardless of the Analytics package used.. is… keep track of “click-backs” (if someone clicks the back button after clicking a link in the results), and seeing if they click on another result. The result they do not come back from.. is.. in most cases, I would say.. the most appropriate result.

The Google Keyword Worthiness Trial

Perhaps it is a mere coincidence, but this happens quite often to be a coincidence for me… I submit a piece of content to an authority site… and if it gets published (and therefore probably crawled) immediately… I fire up my “real-time” search traffic tool for the page I linked to from the content.. and I start seeing an in-flux of traffic for the keyword (or phrase) that I used in the anchor text. It’s usually just brief.. it seems like Google is ranking me higher temporarily for the anchored keyword, and grabbing some stats for analysis later, or for implementation later.. to determine if the content is worthy (based on the number of “click-backs” that occurred from that content), for the given key-phrase.

Now.. this doesn’t happen all the time.. it just seems to happen for keywords that I am on the brink of getting top spots for. And Google is testing my worthiness before it gives me the privilege of being #1 (or close to it). If this is what is happening, I think it is a wonderful, fair, way of determining the value of content for a given keyword… because really.. the number of backlinks to content can be inflated pretty easily (and the number of backlinks is not a true measure of value), we all know that.

After all.. only the people that visit our page can truly determine the “value” of it.. and.. they should be the one’s that do (without any extra effort on their part)… even Facebook’s ‘like’ and Google’s +1 can be inflated inappropriately. I s’pose eventually we’ll see contests being run on the web… and instead of asking people to “+1″ or “like” or “share” our content… we’ll be asking them to fire up Google.. search for our keyphrase, find our page in the results and click and stay there… which in my opinion is equivalent to asking someone to click your AdSense ads.. but hey.. what do I know?

More info: Is Google Testing Your Worthiness Of A Search Term? They Are Testing Mine.

First, I will explain the obvious way people are wasting their SEO efforts in terms of ‘first link priority’, then I’ll talk about a not-so-obvious way that I myself was guilty of (but I corrected with just 2 minutes of work).

I have several web sites that get most of their content for free from those auto spinner/submitter networks. Some of them let you approve the content before it gets posted so I tend to use those ones more. Well, one network will email me a copy of the content with an ‘Accept’ and ‘Reject’ link included, so I actually read them before allowing them to get posted.

Well, I find, more often than not, if the person is not trying to link to some random site unrelated to the content, they use their 2 or 3 links allowed in the content to point to the same exact target, but they use different anchor text. On the surface this seems like they are getting 2 or 3 keyword-rich do-follow backlinks from just one piece of content, but that’s just not the case.

Only the link that shows first in the content (actually within the HTML code which can be deceiving) will take priority, the rest are just wasted and could have been better used for linking to another related site or to some deeper pages on the same site.

It seems like a great deal of wasted effort, and although it makes me slightly happy :evil: to see this going on with my competition, I really do wish I can contact these people and tell them that with a tiny amount of extra effort they can be doing much better in the SERPS.

This happens with images as well. Consider this example:

The text link:

Getting full coloured glossy brochures printed, could be the edge you need for your business. With a 24-hour turn around time, NextDayFlyers does what it says on the tin… etc. etc…

The image link:

In the example above, only the text link would be the one that passes any “juice” right? Right. Now, you might not see it, but the image has alt and title text of “brochures” so one might assume those words act as the ‘anchor text’ for the image, and if that’s the case, those 2 links are created equal so it wouldn’t matter if the links were reversed. If the image link was included first in the content (or more properly, the HTML) it would stand to reason that NextDayFlyers would get the same “juice”….

Well, according to the latest post at the Market Samurai blog, that’s not the case. The ‘alt’ and ‘title’ text in the image is not equivalent to ‘anchor text’. What’s the point? Well, this shows that the text link showing first on the page has much more value than if the image link were to be shown first.. and that is VALUABLE knowledge in regards to SEO…

OK… with that said, we don’t always have control over how other sites link to us… but we all (or I would hope, most of us) have control over our on-page SEO factors and the linking that goes on throughout our sites.

The All Too COMMON On-Page SEO Mistake That Is SIMPLE To Fix And Avoid In The Future

It’s standard practice to have your web site logo link back to the main page of your site, from every other page of the site right? Well, a lot of times that logo link shows FIRST in the HTML code, therefore preventing you from having valuable anchor text flowing to your main page. And please don’t assume that keyword-rich inter-linking within the same site does not have value for SEO. Have a look at the top sites, built by affiliates in your niche, to see the inter-linking going on.. from post-to-post-to-post…

I knew the value of linking to the home page with proper anchor text but I never even thought about ‘first link priority’. I only practiced that with external content for some reason. So often what I did was change the standard ‘Home’ link in the main nav to reflect the key-phrase I was trying to rank for, but I think having a clearly defined ‘Home’ link is important for usability so I started to just include a keyword-rich link to the homepage in the footers of my sites. Now, that was a waste of time!

The Fix: In order to fix this, some CSS-styling can be employed. What it does is display the logo when browsing normally, but when CSS is turned off (as is the case when being crawled by search engines), just the keyword-rich link is shown.

The entire process is shown very well on the Market Samurai blog , so I won’t duplicate the process here. They provide a link to a FireFox add-on that lets you turn off CSS in order to test your fix (or you can just use the text-based browser Lynx). Plus, they offer different methods for employing the fix, if you don’t want to use just CSS.

So.. please, take the 10 minutes (or probably less) to make this fix on your biggest sites, it could possibly bring your site to the first page next crawl!

More info: First Link Priority – Don’t Waste Your SEO Efforts

For most of these you just have to add your domain name into the proper place in their URL for the page to get auto-created. There is no need to setup accounts, it truly is as simple as visiting the page.

Some of them will have already been created for your site (from past crawls), some will allow you to create an account to edit the page if you like. In some cases that may be worth your time. I have a list of about a dozen that I visit at some point in my SEO-promos. I created a tool to make the process easier. It’s not fully automated, but it allows me to enter my domain and all the links get created for me, which upon clicking, will auto-generate the website profile page if it doesn’t already exist. It takes like 2 or 3 minutes to do all of the ones listed.

Here are a couple examples:

http://statbrain.com/yourdomain.com/

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yourdomain.com

Here’s the tool (currently available publicly): Website Profile Link Generation Tool

If you know of anymore that I can add please let me know.

More info: Website Profile Link Generation For SEO

When I create a PPC ad on Google or Bing I generally use just one keyword per ad group. And in my ad, I try to use the keyphrase in the title, the ad itself and in the destination URL.

Passing The Keyword For Dynamic Insertion

Now, for the landing page, I like to pass the keyword to it from the ad. That way I can dynamically use it on the page, plus use it for tracking. I use the passed keyword in the title, the meta description and the H1 tag.

It is effective to also have the keyword in the URL for better Quality Scores (in general you pay less per click and can get higher spots when you have a decent quality score). You can get fancy with .htaccess and Rewrite Rules, or if you take EzineArticles as a cue, it would appear as though using a keyword in the querystring is the same as having it in the URL and it doesn’t have to be part of a file name or subfolder.

Then you can pull the keyword from the querystring and dynamically insert it into the page. This way you are able to optimize your page for virtually any keyword, essentially having unlimited landing pages for PPC. It gets tricky when trying to use the keyword in a sentence when doing it dynamically but it works well for putting it in the title and h1 tags, which I feel is enough to get a decent Quality Score.

When linking to the page for SEO, don’t think that you can have unlimited landing pages like with PPC, because of duplicate content. They simply will not rank. Only one will, so treat it as just one page when trying to get organic listings. Use your best keyword as the “default” keyword that gets dynamically inserted. Then sprinkle some related terms throughout the content (which will help with SEO and PPC for relevance), as long as they make sense and don’t appear “stuffed” in. Then when linking to the page from other sites (I’m not talking PPC here, I’m talking article marketing, etc.), use various keywords as anchor text that you want to rank for, but use mostly your main default phrase.

Additionally, having some extra pages attached to your landing page is effective for both SEO and Quality Score. I’m not sure what’s considered the best pages to have, because I hear different things all the time, but I usually include the following: About | Contact | Privacy | Terms | Disclosure | Disclaimer as links in the footer. Also, in the footer, I use the keyword to link back to the main page. Plus I’ve found it effective to attach a blog to the site. I just install it in a “blog” folder and link to it from the footer. I also place my business (or site) name, address and phone number in the footer.

Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion In Conjunction With Tracking

When passing the keyword from PPC ads for dynamic keyword insertion and tracking, only one querystring parameter is needed, so use the one that your tracking software uses. Even if you are using Rewrite Rules and .htaccess you can do this.

In the sample landing page that I created for you to use, I made it ready for using Prosper202 (free tracking software) by using the ‘t202kw’ querystring parameter.

Making Your Own Landing Page For Dynamic Keyword Insertion

This example uses PHP to dynamically insert keywords into the title, h1 and meta description. It is also ready for tracking using Prosper202.

Include the following chunk of code at the top of your landing page…

<?php
 
// default
$mainkeyword = "Wordpress Geo Targeting";
 
if (isset($_GET['t202kw'])) {
	$mainkeyword = preg_replace("/-/", " ", $_GET['t202kw']);
	ucwords(strtolower($mainkeyword));
}
 
$pagetitle = $mainkeyword . " Script";
$metadescription = $mainkeyword . " script to automatically determine the geographic location of your site visitors and display location-specific content to them.";
$h1 = $mainkeyword;
 
?>

In the above code, you would give a default value for your keyword. That way, if nothing is passed from PPC, or when linking for SEO, then the default will be used.

In the square brackets next to ‘GET’ is the querystring parameter used when passing the keyword from the destination URL from the PPC ad. I used ‘t202kw’ because I use Prosper202. You can change that to whatever is appropriate for your tracking software.

The next bit of code removes any hyphens from the keyword if there are any (it’s largely unnecessary but I include it anyways). After that it puts the keyphrase in proper caps since it’ll mostly (or only) be used as a heading or title rather than part of a sentence.

Most of the time you can just make the page title the keyword but you can also prepend or append extra words. You have to be careful with that though since sometimes the passed word may not make sense in your chosen sentence.

Optionally you can include a meta description which includes your keyword, however you may run into the issue where other keywords may not make sense in the sentence.

Now you just have to plug the variables into the appropriate spots in the content using PHP echo statements like below:

<html>
<head>
<title><?php echo $pagetitle; ?></title>
<meta name="description" content="<?php echo $metadescription; ?>" />
</head>
 
<body>
<?php echo $h1; ?>
</body>
</html>

That should do it. Here’s an example of a landing page… you can download a zip file containing the php files and images used in the example, at this link (the files were safe and virus-free when uploaded to my server, but you accept any risk with downloading and using the files).

After unzipping the files, open and edit each of the files in the “config” folder. It might be best to upload all of the files to your server first, then edit one at a time to see the effects of each change as you go along. You’ll probably want to start by editing “config.php” as it contains information that is used by some of the other files.

“footernav.php” doesn’t have to be edited, it’s just in there in case you decide not to attach all of the extra pages (disclaimer, etc.).

The rest of the files should be obvious what they are for. For example “about-content.php” contains the content that will be used on the about page. The only two files that might not be obvious are “content-left.php” and “content-right.php”. Those files contain the content for the main page (the landing page).

You shouldn’t have to edit any of the files other than the ones in the “config” folder.

I attempted to use a script for the contact page that is generic enough to work on most linux servers. It works just fine on GoDaddy servers. Be sure to test it to make sure it works. You could change the link in footernav.php to a mailto: link direct to an email address if all else fails. Don’t let the contact page stop you from getting your ads running.

Some PHP files get messed up in Notepad, so you might want to download a more advanced editor, like TextPad (it’s free), to edit the files.

Please use the comment section below if you have any questions.

More info: How To Create, Use And Reuse A Landing Page For PPC and SEO

1. I pick a topic that is related to my niche but not a topic that I would write about on my actual niche site. For example, if I had a site about “walleye topwater fishing lures”, I might look to a topic like “walleye night fishing”. I would use Market Samurai to find a keyword that gets a minimum of 100 SEOT for exact match, has less than 60,000 SEOC and weak competition. To understand what I mean, grab a free copy of Market Samurai and watch the intro videos.
2. Now I decide where I want my content to go to determine how many articles that I need written. I usually get four articles written targeting the keyword. I submit one to Ezine Articles because they require 100% unique content, one to Hub Pages and one to Squidoo. I also “spin” one (usually the one I submitted to Squidoo) and submit the spin to both SK and AMA. This spin lands me tons of backlinks in the long term which is where most of the benefit is, rather than ranking for the chosen keyword. But when submitting to SK and AMA, there are plenty of valuable sites that your content will land on and your article may just end up ranking well in the search engines. Keep in mind that all “spun” content is unique as well.
3. I submit the fourth piece of content to various article directories and I also repurpose it for extra leverage. These days I spin the article and submit it to Unique Article Wizard which is a service similar to SK and AMA but it submits unique versions of your content to blogs, article directories and other web sites. The great thing about SK, UAW and AMA is that your content contains backlinks to your sites with random anchor text of your choice. So, for the “walleye topwater fishing lures” site I might link to it with the anchor text: “walleye topwater fishing lures” or “walleye topwater fishing baits” or “walleye topwater fishing plugs”, etc. The system will just pick one and drop it in.
4. The first part of the repurposing is creating a PDF from the article. You can do that free using OpenOffice.org software. Then submit the PDF to sites like Scribd.com and Docstoc.com.
5. I then take main points from the article and add them to slides in a PowerPoint Presentation and submit the presentation to Slideshare.com. I sometimes submit my PDF to Slideshare as well.
6. Next, I use Jing from JingProject.com to record myself reading the slides and navigating through the presentation. I submit the resultant video to video sharing sites like YouTube and put my URL in the description.
7. I record myself reading the entire article and save it as an mp3. I use MP3 Voice Recorder (freeware) to accomplish that. I then submit them to podcast directories like PodcastAlley.com.
8. Then I convert my PDF to an EXE using PDF2EXE. Then I generate a PAD file using PADGen. Then I submit the EXE to software directories using ABB Pad Submitter. Very powerful!
9. I submit any RSS feeds that I have (from article directories, Squidoo, my blog, DocStoc, YouTube, etc.) to Feedage.com and FeedAgg.com and a few others, but mainly the 2 mentioned.
10. I Digg just one of the published articles. I add another to Propeller.

Performing all of the steps above often lands me in several top spots for my chosen keyword, then my site is just 2 clicks away! Be sure and use your keyword in the title on all submissions. Also, locate the RSS feed for all your profiles and be sure to submit them to RSS directories. The RSS links are often do-follow even if the ones on the site are not.

Also, complete your profiles on all 3rd party sites and drop in a link to your site if there is a space for it. I know it’s a lot of work but it’s well worth it.

More info: Article Stretching And Repurposing

BTW, did you notice that I added a couple extra sections to the manual? I will also be covering SEO and PPC keyword tracking. Also, I will explain how to add phpBay code into your themes and give an example of when that might be useful. Those sections will be up in a few days. So far, I have had the luxury of having these posts pre-written because they exist already in a PDF manual I wrote. The new ones however have to be done from scratch, plus added to the PDF. I shouldn’t be delayed too long, if at all, I still want to try and get a post a day out to you. Anyway read on for the steps…

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• Installation/Activation
• Configuration
• Testing
• Per-Post/Per-Page Settings
• Geo-Targeting
• Making The Images Clickable
• Replacing WordPress Search With eBay Search
• Inserting phpBay Code Into Theme Files
• Buy phpBay Pro (20% off coupon: DA9CD69F42)
• From Picking A Market To Building/Managing Your phpBay (Or BANS) Site

Making The Images Clickable

To make the images in your auction listings clickable you just have to make a quick change to one or two of the template files that phpBay provides.

There is one file to change if you use columns and another file to change if you don’t. It doesn’t hurt to change them both in case you switch between a single column and multiple columns on occasion. Here’s how…

1. Download the files ‘template.ebay.results.html’ and ‘template.column.results.html’ located in the ‘/wp-content/plugins/phpBay/templates/’ folder, to your computer.
2. Open ‘template.ebay.results.html’ with a text editor. If using TextPad, right-click it and click TextPad and it will open with TextPad. If you double clicked it, it will likely just open in a browser and you won’t be able to edit it, so you will want to open it like mentioned.
3. Locate the line with the code: (it’s all on one line, it’s just wrapped in the image below)

   

   and change it to: (again, it’s wrapped)

   

4. Save the file and re-upload, overwriting the existing file.
5. Now open ‘template.column.results.html’ with a text editor.
6. Locate the line with the code:

   

   and change it to: (wrapped code below)

   

7. Go back to your test page and Refresh (F5) it to see your changes.

Next we’ll replace the WordPress search with a search that displays phpBay results instead.

More info: phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Making The Images Clickable