Ok, so I fooled you – I know I know – I’m usually the guy thats sharing great tips on stopping comment spam, wordpress customization, building up your backlinks and social networking profiles.  And I’m sure you thought, well, this is a Justin Bartlett post so I’m gonna find some great stuff that’s really going to help me out here.

Sorry guys, today I’m here to gripe.  First order of business, let’s change that title from The Importance of Choosing a Good Hosting Company to Man I Really Hate JustHost, or better yet JustHost: That Psycho Ex-Girlfriend Ya Wanna Forget About.

Yep, I think the later title is by far the most suitable.

I’ve been a just host client for two years, and pretty much every single website that I’ve built for myself and for every single client I’ve had has been hosted with them.  Our story starts the way most awfully ending relationships do – with passion, fireworks, and amazement – Support was legendary, I never had a problem with a site being down, and sites hosting on the JustHost basic hosting were loading blazingly faster than my significantly upgraded GoDaddy hosting.  Things were great for a little over the duration of a year, then suddenly 6 months ago the rug get’s yanked out from underneath me and I’m wondering why every other week a site is down or something is wrong.

Time for that legendary support, right?  Far from it.  Their “live chat” is now staffed by (*breath*) — can’tdonothing, can’thelpya, lemmereferyousomewherebut-I-REFUSE-to-give-you-a-phone-number, wait15minutesinbetweenreplies, Englishgrammarain’tmystrongpoint — do nothings that crawled out of a deep dark hole somewhere that they most assuredly and with all haste should crawl back into.

Over the last couple of months, things have gotten worse.  I’m definitely not wanting to change all of my websites (30+!) over to another host as this will take time away from actually working on my sites, responding to those clients that just now finally reached a live site through which they can finally contact me, or enjoying time with my girlfriend (a real relationship, take that JustHost!) and finally getting away from my computer.  And what about my friends & client’s websites – do I have them switch to?

Am I the only one here or are other people having biiggg problems with JustHost?  Who are you guys using for hosting now?  I love the GoDaddy support but man I really much prefer cpanel.  Lemme know lemme know!

PS – Drew who are you using for hosting?  And how can I get involved / help with the re-design?!  Much love fellow GeekEstaters.  (I love comments more than Cookie Monster loves Cookies)

Hold on to your hats; today we’re going to take a look into Social Networking domination with Twitter.

Twitterfeed.com is a wonderfully awesome service that allows you to auto tweet content pulled from an RSS feed throughout any number of twitter accounts.  So, if you have 20 twitter accounts each with 300 followers that are all “tweeting” from the same RSS feed, with one new item in the feed you’ll reach 6,000 people.

Now, there are a couple of tutorials out there regarding using Yahoo Pipes or similar services that you can use in conjunction with twitterfeed.com to grab the tweets of one account and disburse it to be retweeted by your 19 other accounts.  But this is complicated and silly.

Here’s a solution: Simply create a free blog at wordpress.com that you exclusively use for your tweets.  Grab the address for your feed and use that in your twitterfeed account.  So creating a new post on your wordpress account = distributing this new post to your twitter network.

That’s great Justin, now where do I get the follower’s from?

There are a number of great tips out there regarding how to increase your twitter following – guest posting on high traffic blogs, giveaways, humorous and relevant tweeting are just a few, but aside from close friends and family where does one start to gather the foundation of a large Twitter network?

I’m sure that you can think of a number of ways to start yourself off, but one round-about way is through one of the open networker groups on Linked In: TopLinked.  With over 100,000+ members, TopLinked is one of the largest LinkedIn Groups.  They send out a list by e-mail that you can find here: http://www.toplinked.com/invitemelist/?p=freedownload with the e-mails of thousands of members.  And guess what, 99% of these networkers have Twitter accounts, and will re-tweet your tweets if they are worthwhile!

So here’s what we do – we download the list, upload those contacts into our e-mail account over at Yahoo or Gmail, and in turn import those contacts into Twitter automatically when we create a new account and follow them.  The majority will reciprocally follow you in return!  Give it a week, then methodically go through and delete those that don’t follow you.

I’d say start out with 300 – 400 followers to get the ball rolling on each account; you want your twitter following to be comprised as much of people that are actually interested in what you have to say as possible – this is the reason for creating 20 accounts – chances are much greater that one of your tweets will go viral.

Happy tweeting

The idea behind long tail optimization is very simple – if you’ve got a relatively high ranking website, simply writing a new post or new page on your website targeting the keyword should be enough to place you in the number 1 or number 2 spot, sending with it all of the traffic that google receives through that keyword.  Other great examples of “long tail” keywords are localized searches – e.g. “mortgage refinance rockville maryland”.

Its a known fact that lot’s of people ask Google questions – e.g. – they’ll search for “What time is the movie playing?” or “What is a reverse mortgage?”.  I recently found a pretty cool tool that can help you find long tail keywords to target – simply write a post, and increase your monthly visitors by 10 – 1,000!

The tool is by wordtracker labs and is called “Keyword Questions” – it’s free and you can find it here!

Just in case you’re not ranking #1 for your “long-tail” posts / pages, here’s a quick tip to build a couple of great backlinks quickly using Digg!

Question: Can you Digg It?  (Unlimited PR4+ Links)

Shh!  Keep this one quiet.  If any of you have an seo toolbar installed in your favorite browser that displays the Page Rank of a given page, and you’ve ever been to a Digg page that’s 365 + days old, you’ll notice the majority of them have insanely high PR!  Simply post a comment on the page and enter your url in this format: http://www.yourwebsite.com.  Voila!  Unlimited PR 4+ links.  As a word of caution, obviously do not abuse this – you do run the risk of being sandboxed.   Stick to 4-10 Digg links per month – a safe, wonderful way to naturally increase your rankings!

I did a little bit of hunting and there aren’t any press releases on the net or on Amex’s main page that I can see; Anyone here using it / have any insight into it?

Fotobook – Ever wanted to automatically post all of your facebook photos to your blog? Lets say you have a facebook page where you post pictures of a listing, and you want that albumn in your blog. This automatically does it for you and works great!

WP Facebook Connect – The original shared WordPress and Facebook login plugin. Not too shabby, but in my opinion there are better; Read on! ↓

Gigya – Is WP-FB Connect not powerful enough for you? Do you want to allow people to login to your blog using all open id sites, including myspace and twitter? Would you like to automatically update your status on all social networking sites from your wordpress blog? This is the way for you to do it! So let’s say its 5:30 am and your writing a post here on Geek Estate that you think is great and you want to update everyone you know. E-mail is so old-fashioned! Post an update to your blog and it automatically goes to your Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter statuses! Awesomeness!

Status Press – Ok so our previous plugin allowed you to update facebook from wordpress. What if you want to update wordpress from your facebook account? This plugin will display your latest status in a handy sidebar widget on your blog!

Jan Rain RPX – Pretty much same as above regarding logging on using an open id but this accepts Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, MySpace, AOL, and Windows Life! And it looks much more visually pleasing.

Facebook Dashboard Widget – Ok, so you never want to login to facebook again, you just want to take Drew’s advice and create a FB page, but hey, who can keep track of passwords or remember to check it regularly. Here’s what you do: integrate your updates into your WP-Admin Dashboard. Sweet!

Status Updater – Here’s another automatic status updater, if say you would rather use Jan Rain for your login integration.

I’ve recently created an update of the WP – FB Connect Plugin that has it display links to your profile, mail, groups, etc. for buddypress after you login, so if you are a buddypress user and want to have access to it I’m happy to send active Geek Estate Bloggers a copy. Its live at mortgage-reverse.org. I don’t think I’m going to upload it to WordPress for everyone to use until I extensively test it. Wanna help?!

More and more Real Estate Professionals are becoming active on Twitter, so in the spirit of helping everyone here on Geek Estate become top human aggretators I figured I’d share a couple of my favorite Twitter Analytics programs.

1. Twitter Grader – Finally, a website that gives you a ranking 0-100 of how good your Twitter profile is!  Your Grade is based upon the number of followers, types of followers, number of tweets, etc.
2. Twiangulate – This is an awesome website that tells you the followers in common between 2 or even 4 profiles!  Talk about being able to quickly social network with your friends’ followers!
3. Twitgraph – Shows detailed graphs of your most popular links, most used words, and retweets!
4. TweetPsych – Interested in the psychology behind your tweets?  This website creates a psychological breakdown of your updates, including how negative, emotional, and thoughtful your tweets are!
5. TwitterAnalyzer – Do you want to know how active a user truly is?  How about how many people actually retweet your tweets?  This analyzer offers charts and tons of info!

Retweet / Comment if you find this post useful!

I’m in luv with, well you guess it, Comment Luv. As an avid blogger, I enjoy getting feedback and comments from visitors; it tells me what I’m doing right, what I could do better and of course, comments provide a forum for discussion and the voicing of ideas.

I like to give back to frequent visitors and fellow bloggers that contribute meaningfully to discussions on topics; those visitors that I find the most witty and interesting I’ll including in my blog’s blogroll as a way of saying, “right on man, you rock.”

Comment Luv is a plugin that helps me give back a little to the bloggers that comment on my website by adding a little link to the bottom of their comment with their last blog post. Pretty exciting, huh? Here’s a snapshot of Comment Luv in action (courtesy of Comluv.com):

I definitely don’t think Comment Luv should be used as a means of enticing visitors to comment on your blog, but I do think that a good comment deserves some link love. Here’s a look at the Comment Luv back end:

If you get a chance, check this bad-boy out; Here’s a link to where you can download and install the plugin on your own blog: http://comluv.com/download/commentluv-wordpress/.

Another plugin from Comment Luv distributes is Twitter Link; now I haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon on this one, but it allows the visitor to merely enter their Twitter user name and, lo and behold, their latest tweets show up below their comment. Sound cool? Check it out here: http://comluv.com/download/twitterlink-comments/. Here’s a look at Twitter Link in action:

A great way to keep discussion going on a WordPress post is to separate comments and pings – have trackbacks and pingbacks in their own separate area, and allow comments to flow uninterrupted. Here’s a great plugin that can automatically do this for you without having to jump into your template’s source code: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/separate-comment-pings/.

Hope the above plugins provide some help to all those bloggers out there!

First things first, I love WordPress. There are a number of blogging and CMS platforms out there – Joomla, Blogger, PHP Nuke, et. al., but in my humble opinion WordPress outperforms them all in terms of ease of use, the sheer number of themes and plugins available, and sheer power. From a developer’s standpoint the ability to expand on a WordPress installation is a cinch, as opposed to other platforms.

Is my website more geared towards fostering discussion and social networking? No problem; in 15 – 20 minutes I can be up and running the latest version of BuddyPress (which BTW, the new installation no longer requires you to be running WPMU!). Want everyone to be able to create their own blog? No problem – There’s WPMU. Need a forum? There’s BBPress for that, and some hot themes and the ease of customization that make all other forums seem antiquated, obsolete, and non-user friendly.

Ok, I’m sold on WordPress, and my first order of business in creating a new website is developing a logo. Having access to great Web 2.0 fonts is almost a surefire way to create a great logo. Here’s are my four favorite free fonts for logo design (preview images courtesy of www.instantshift.com):

ABC Font

Advent Font

Alexandria FLF

Grandesign

Now, there are a positive ton of Worpress free and premium themes out there, however I’ve been hearing so much about the premium theme Thesis, I figured I’d buy a copy and see what all the hype is about. This video cover’s Thesis pretty well:

Even out of the box, Thesis is hot! The use of typography is friggen amazing; plain articles pop out at ya and legibility is second to none. Ok, looks shiny. I’m a developer, what about the backend?

All I can say is “Wow!”  Diythemes, the makers of Thesis boast on their website that Thesis has the strongest SEO of any wordpress them, and, after reviewing the HTML, PHP, and CSS code that makes up the theme, I’m hard-pressed to think of a better coded site. This theme lives and breathes SEO, and in my opinion optimizes each page better than the “All-in-one-SEO-Pack” plugin that I’m so fond of.

For a developer, Thesis is a dream; you have complete control of each and every page on your website through “hooks”. For non-developers and those new to wordpress, Thesis’s options panel offers a huge amount of control in a very simple, easy to use GUI.

Alright, so I’ve got my logo and theme.. The front end of my site is pretty much up and running. Next it’s time to implement some awesome plugins to encourage return visitors, lower bounce rate, and boost my rankings, but for right now we’re done with the first steps.  Next post I’ll be covering some awesome plugins to make your site sparkle, including CommentLuv, the tweetme, and dig this plugins!

1. Get a gravatar.
2. The field that says “name”, well, that typically is asking for your name. If your name actually is “Buy Cialis”, you must be very, very young and your parents must have a horrible, horrible sense of humor.
3. Join a discussion. Talk about something. “Closet Spam” or “Compliment Spam” is just as bad — If I truly had a subscriber and a frequent visitor for every spam comment I’ve gotten saying “nice post, I just subscribed and I’ll be back more often”, my Alexa rank would be top 10. For shame. Would you like it if I knocked on your door 100 times in one afternoon shouting, “I like your house, I like your house!!”
4. Run your comments through a grammar and spell check. The latest craze in spammers seems to be writing as though they are Borat, your best Kazakhstani friend – “Ehlo, etta Borat. Blog to like I do. Very nice!!”
5. Really? “asdfyu ojdf fhyeifj sdf” with a backlink to “www.yowhfhi.com”?? Your website doesn’t even exist there buddy… Do I need a English-Wookie translator?



6. Given the number of “where’s a fresh joke from the net” comments that show up in my spam filter, I think it’s only fair if I get to fire one back:

How many spammers does it take to grease a combine?
Only one if you run him through slowly!

Alrighty, that’s a start. Anyone got anymore rules to live by, please comment below. (Have mercy on Drew you spam-a-holics.)

As you all know, Search Engine Optimization, especially when it come to ranking high in the “big 3” – yahoo, msn (bing), and google, primarily revolves around the quality and quantity of links pointing to your site.  Here are a couple of great ways to build tons and tons of backlinks like a professional, without downloading any programs or spending a huge amount of time emailing webmasters, begging for links.

First things first, the easiest way to get a link to your site is to post a comment on a blog with your link in the comment, or your url provided so that your “name” is the anchor text for your link.  E.g. – “Hey, nice article on puppies.  I have a black lab.”  Enter your name, email, and website and presto! One backlink down.

The only problem with this is that some of these links don’t count.  Wait Justin, what do you mean some of these links don’t count?

Well, google devised this way of evening the playing field so that happy SEO nerds like me couldn’t merely comment a thousand blogs and then jump to the top for a given keyword.  This is done through inserting rel=“no follow” into the <a> tag (link code), and is automatically done by default by most blogging platforms: wordpress, blogger, typepad, etc.

Now a number of webmasters do not agree with this, and they have enabled “dofollow”, meaning they will give your link credit if they decide to approve your comment.

So, we don’t want to waste our time commenting blogs that don’t “dofollow”.  Firefox has a wonderful add-on that will show you which links are dofollow and which are nofollow: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687.  Bon appétit!

Wait, Justin, knowing whether I’m going to get a good link for commenting a certain blog is awesome, but how do I find these blogs?

First things first, we want a high PR for our website, correct?  So lets ask ourselves, what kind of websites almost always have high pagerank that we can post a comments on?  Why .edu and .gov sites of course!

Enter this into google, of course replacing the word “keyword” with the phrase that you want to rank highly for:

site:.edu inurl:blog “keyword”
site:.gov inurl:blog “keyword”

As you visit each site, make sure your dofollow plugin is enabled.  When you find a good dofollow .edu or .gov site, note the site, and leave a good, relevant comment – DO NOT SPAM!!! – and every couple of days stop back by and comment another article.

You can do the same search for all other site types by merely searching google for:

inurl:blog “keyword”

Another great place to get backlinks quickly is DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites.  Here’s a list (in order of pagerank with alexa traffic rank).  Create an account, register or suggest your site, and watch the traffic start rolling in!

Pagerank 9

• technorati.com 694
• slashdot.org 1,605

Pagerank 8

• reddit.com 574
• mixx.com 854
• propeller.com 2,027

Pagerank  7

• metafilter.com 2,451
• wikio.com 3,331
• care2.com 3,190
• folkd.com 4,098
• connotea.org 8,197

Pagerank 6

• dzone.com 3,836
• sphinn.com 4,945
• linkagogo.com 11,499
• kirtsy.com 16,850
• tipd.com 23,528
• kwoff.com 24,261
• bloghop.com 31,217
• weheartgossip.com 32,225

Pagerank 5

• indianpad.com 3,185
• spotback.com 11,391
• mylinkvault.com 12,748
• buddymarks.com 13,857
• plime.com 18,583
• designfloat.com 22,384
• web2list.com 23,051
• fcc.com 37,050
• linkatopia.com 40,811
• iliketotallyloveit.com 42,754
• japansoc.com 60,200
• buzzup.com 68,384
• scoopit.co.nz 91,077
• ngopost.org 94,741

Pagerank 4

• humsurfer.com 1,321
• a1-webmarks.com 10,230
• oyax.com 11,312
• socialogs.com 19,806
• quadriot.com 22,255
• blurpalicious.com 22,742
• wagg.it 23,275
• uvouch.com 24,122
• blogmarks.net 24,989
• maple.nu 27,330
• mysitevote.com 33,282
• blogbookmark.com 33,810
• blogengage.com 38,085
• pageactive.org 40,026
• totalpad.com 47,978
• solinkable.com 48,485
• graphic-design-links.com 52,491
• justpoint.org 55,067
• indiareporting.com 60,218
• feedmarker.com 67,554
• pfbuzz.com 83,239
• websapiens.net 86,767
• ioch.org 14,140,955

Happy Holidays to all and I hope you use your new SEO Super Powers wisely! Next week I’ll be talking about CommentLuv, so check back here at GeekEstate regularly!