5 Killer Ways to Promote Your Website Offline

by Patrick Altoft on January 7, 2008

Print your url on a fake rocket

Former Dragons Den contestant and winner of North East Entrepreneur of the Year Ling Valentine has a unique method of promoting her car leasing website.

In 2005 Ling had a 6 wheeled military truck imported from the People’s Liberation Army in Shanghai and her husband built a giant nuclear missile to go on top. The truck was parked next to the A1 motorway in North East England for a couple of years before being moved to one of the busiest motorways in Western Europe, the M62, where it remains. Read more >>

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How to use the Google “Query Deserves Freshness” or QDF model to your advantage

by Patrick Altoft on December 3, 2007

The Query Deserves Freshness or QDF algorithm was first discussed by Amit Singhal in a New York Times article about the Google Algorithm in June. During the second half of 2006 Google was trying to figure out a way of showing new content for some “hot” search terms while keeping the more competitive keywords spam free. Read more >>

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10 Linkbuilding Tips for Ecommerce Websites

by Patrick Altoft on August 29, 2007

Most of the linkbuilding tips on BlogStorm have been focused primarily towards linkbait for blogs rather than ecommerce sites and, after an email from one of our readers, it’s time to redress the balance and offer some help to webmasters who run ‘real’ websites. Read more >>

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Ultimate Guide to htaccess and mod_rewrite

by Patrick Altoft on July 14, 2007

Often described as “voodoo” by frustrated webmasters the use of mod_rewrite and htaccess files is one of the more advanced tasks a web developer has to face.

The good news is that unless you are looking for really advanced solutions you don’t have to fully understand how they work to use them on your website. Most of the htaccess and mod_rewrite tips on this page can simply be cut and pasted into a text file and uploaded to your server. Read more >>

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Beginners Guide to Linkbait

by Patrick Altoft on June 29, 2007

Linkbait is the act of adding content to a website with the aim of attracting links from other sites. The content can take a variety of different forms from a unique tool or a breaking news story to a well written article or controversial image.

Sometimes linkbait is intentional but quite often the best linkbait is conceived quite by accident. Read more >>

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Advanced use of Google Analytics and the new interface

by Patrick Altoft on June 7, 2007

Update: following lots of peoples questions I have posted Google Analytics Tutorial Part 2

Since Google Analytics was launched in 2005 it has become one of the top analytics packages for small to medium sized websites. Growth was initially slow due to the frustrating waiting list system initiated by Google to avoid over stretching their servers. Now that the waiting list has been removed anybody can sign up to use this great service. Read more >>

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How to use hotlinkers and Google Images to build natural links to your site

by Patrick Altoft on June 7, 2007

Are you tired of people using images from your website without linking back to you? This simple script has the answer.

View the demo here (right click on the image). Note that I prefer to only run this script for users who arrive from an image search engine rather than for everybody. Read more >>

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