If you are into search engine optimization, you will have no doubt used some form of mass-submission of articles to article directories hoping to get some search engine benefit from the links. But did you know that Google’s spiders filter out duplicate content in the search engine matrix and send it into ‘Google Hell’ so to speak, and those links from those multiple articles that you submitted go to waste. So the key is to have content unique enough in the eyes of Google for it not to be discounted. But with the increasing competition on the internet eyeing for the small pie on ranking on first page of Google, the amount of content needed to achieve that is astronomical, but how can anyone produce so much unique content that is cost-effective at the same time? This is where article spinner comes into play.

The main purpose of an article spinner is to assist you in creating many versions of unique content from one piece of article, for example; thus reducing the amount of duplicate content you send out, helping you in ensuring that the links that points to you from all these article directories and other hostsí sites will count.

There are two types of article spinner out there, one is an automated spinner where you pluck in an article into the software and you press a button, and presto, multiple versions of the same article is produced without needing you to do much work at all. This software scours the whole article and does random switching of words using their built-in thesaurus and synonyms. Sounds good? Beware, the articles produced by this type of spinner is at best mediocre as some of the switching of words will alter the meaning of the sentence completely or worse, generate bunch of gibberish that is not readable by humans.

The other type of spinner is where you still have to do the bulk of the work in rewriting the article. This is normally done either on a paragraph by paragraph basis or sentence by sentence basis, where you will write 3 different versions of the same paragraph or sentence, making it four diverse paragraphs or sentences with the same meaning but completely different writing style. It is normally done in the following manner, {original paragraph | version-1 | version-2 | version-3}. Once that is done, the article spinner will then help you to generate different versions of the article by scrambling the order of the paragraphs or sentences in an orderly manner from top to bottom. The scrambling will only be done at the sentence level or paragraph level within the intact syntax {}.

Articles produced using the spinner as explained above retains the original meaning of the article but at the same time, making it diverse as compared to the original. Whether this passes the Googleís duplicate content filter is up to the writer to ensure the diversity of each versions rewritten compared to the original. The article spinner will merely help you in ensuring that all versions of articles produced using the software is at least slightly different than the rest, thus ensuring uniqueness in the eyes of Google.

The easy way is never the right way and the right way is never easy. Choosing to use an article spinner that promises you multiple versions of the article instantly without doing any work should be avoided at all cost. Instead, strive to give quality to the search engines by doing a bit of work, write different versions of the same article yourself (or outsource it to someone else), and get an article spinner that will scramble the order of the paragraphs or sentences with the syntax {}. You will benefit from this for years to come.

Action Steps To get started:

1. Get an Article spinner - Jetspinner is a free article spinner you can use
2. Write some articles or have them written - ifreelance.com is a great place to find writers
3. Submit a unique version of your article to each article directory that you can find. Make sure to submit to the top 5-10 (Google Article Directory)by hand and use an automated solution for the remaining 300-400 smaller article directories. (Jetsubmitter submits to ~390 smaller directories currently) I’d also suggest not doing 400 submissions in a single day, use an automated system that allows time release submissions or Google may flag your site for the sandbox. Submit to between 10-20 sites per day, and do 1-2+ new articles per month)

- Todd Dickerson

Bottom-line value:

The following is NOT a paid review:

My girlfriend bought me an incase Sling Pack for by birthday because my mobile edge backpack just wasn’t cutting it. I have to say, this is the best looking pack I’ve ever seen. Not only is it great looking though, it is also VERY comfortable. Sometimes I forget I’m even wearing a pack. It is slimmed down to the essentials and it’s perfect for me. With my last backpack, I found I rarely toted anything around besides my MacBook, and peripherals. This pack fits them all very well and still has a little more room to spare, but it’s not too roomy. It sports 3 pockets besides the main notebook sleeve and still remains slim, light, and oh so comfortable. I am very impressed with incase and will definitely be making all my future casing purchases from them.
(Also, they have one of the best looking websites I’ve ever seen. It was designed by electric pulp.)

If you’ll look in the archives, you’ll find a post about how I think John Chow has no style whatsoever. Mainly that’s the impression I get from his ugly blog. But that’s only the designer side of me. I think he’s great at what he does. If there is one money hungry monster I respect, it’s him. He recently released his eBook on making money online, and supposedly it’s going great for him. His eBook is completely free, and is chock full of great information on making money online and how he got himself up to 10k+/month. The awesome part is, there is no OTO, no fee, no catch, just an honest effort to gain more traffic to his blog. In the PDF, he has a link at the bottom of every page to his site and he’s getting a ton of traffic back. It’s refreshing to see an eBook without all the one time offers and marketing BS. Just honest, useful information. So stay tuned for the Jetpacked eBook on umm… Marketing, design, and badassery!

We got our private beta invite for the new mailplane mac app. Mailplane provides apple users with a rich gMail experience on OS X, there are keyboard shortcuts, file drag and drop, and iPhoto integration. While all of this is great, the best thing about it is that it includes Google Talk, right on the desktop. Yes, you can access Talk with adium and even iChat, but not like this. Get a better idea of MailPlane at MailPlaneApp.com

Google announced this week that they will be introducing and moving over to a universal search platform. Another words when you search you’ll automatically be searching Websites, News, Videos, (images? books? more?) at the same time.

This isn’t a small change to say the least.

All of the sudden the masses who search Google for other websites every day will have Videos, news, and more automatically thrown in front of their faces. This effects the way we play SEO and the way advertising will be done… big time.

We’ll have to wait and see how things end up when Google officially changes over to Universal search, but be on the look out and keep this major change in mind. This is a huge incentive:

• To get your site into Google News (or your site in the news regarding your keywords)
• To get your videos ranking in Google video for your keywords (now even the people who haven’t considered the possibility of a video having the information they’re searching for will have their eyes opened)
• To get into every single search platform Google offers!

Not to mention the major changes we’ll see with Adwords… Video ads on Google’s main search, news ads?, etc.

We truely have some amazing changes coming down the road here with Google.

They have big plans and changes in mind and now is the time to get in and take advantage, not when everyone else is already doing it next year.

- Todd Dickerson

I just finished putting together the first official Joomla template for Jetpacked.com.

It’s a port of the current un-released Jetpacked.com Wordpress Theme.

Jetpacked 1.0 Joomla is a 3 column template with all the normal content elements to the left where Jetpacked currently has posts showing. Navigational elements are located in the center blue column and additional modules are designed to be placed in the right 3rd column or at the bottom of the center column.

It’s a nice, clean, easy to navigate theme perfect for a business Joomla site or a personal site.

Jetpacked 1.0 - Free Joomla Template Download

A while back Jason talked about some of the often overlooked advantages to a custom built blogging theme.

But you don’t need to have a blog to get many of the advantages. In fact we use custom Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla themes as a starting point for many of the new sites we launch, despite what CMS platform they are built on.

There are many highly respected, high PageRank, and high TrustRank sites dedicated to sharing these free CMS themes. Beyond that, every site that uses your theme automatically provides you with at least 1 backlink, most likely an entire site-wide grouping of backlinks (the beauty is, you can control this - when you build the template just customize if you want homepage or sitewide, and even the target destination page)

This is the only active method we’ve used to promote the Jetpacked.com blog. In the few months since we launched we’ve received over 5,000 backlinks and a PR5 ranking in Google (with PR 4 on almost all inner pages).

AND better then that, we rank in Google for virtually anything we blog about within a few days.

Other hidden ways to profit:

• Writing ReviewMe.com reviews (after distributing 1 theme you will most likely be able to charge $40-60 per review blog post that you make)
• Your Technorati ranking will skyrocket, every blog that uses your theme is now a blog that links to you. Your blogs value with sites like ReviewMe will increase and your visibility on blog search engines will greatly increase.
• Anything you blog or add pages about will almost overnight start ranking, you can easily post affiliate reviews of products and rank right on par with the product its self (people love jumping over and reading a review before they buy a product). And you can of course promote your own products and rank for competitive keywords in a couple days that you only dreamed about before.
• Your PR5+ ranking will almost instantly be worth $100-200/month by selling text link ads through TLA or by selling direct on your site.

Jason and I are thinking about putting together a package to help a few people take advantage of the huge benefit of distributing themes without needing to lift a finger on their own behalf. I know we moved away from doing client webdesign work (which theme building and distribution is pretty close to), but we’re thinking of doing this on a very small scale with a select group of maybe 10-20 people who are serious about getting the benefit of theme distributing with their website (if there is enough interest).

- Todd Dickerson

Bottom-line value:

www.strictlymensbusiness.com.au
Online retailers of Men’s Skin Care and Grooming Products.

Most Wordpress blogs like using the default permalink structure with an archive format of something like year/month/day/postname - I understand some sites like to provide an easy structure for navigating their posts by date. But unless your site has hundreds of posts per month it’s not the best idea for a few reasons.

1. From a user stand point: If you blog isn’t updated often, its obvious at a glance. This sends readers away faster then anything else. Remove your post dates completely. Don’t show them in the URL and don’t show them in the post header.
2. From a SE stand point: It’s been rumored and shown that search engines discount the SE rankings for archives. This makes perfect sense. If Google wants the most recent up to date content showing at the top of their SERP’s why would they be ranking archives higher? It isn’t helping you for sure.

When we redesigned Jetpacked.com we did it with this in mind. But our previous structure had been using the standard archive format. So this creates a new issue. How do you convert over to a standard /%postname%/ permalink structure without killing all your currently indexed pages.

Simple, thanks to the permalink redirect plugin. If you’re going from archive format to post name format using the simple plugin will be enough. If you’re doing more complex redirection the creator has a good guide to help you out.

- Todd Dickerson

Bottom-line value: