SEO: What’s that?

09.19.2007 | 6:14 pm | Beginners, Getting Started, HTML, SEO, Search Engines, Site Building, Tips, Traffic, Visitors

SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is various techniques used to improve the ranking of a website in search engines listings.

SEO can also be considered as a subset of internet marketing as it provides a valuable service for your business. Search Engines provide new targeted customers who are looking for you and are ready to buy.

Creating a new industry, many coperations as well as small business websites tend to hire SEO consultants who undertake optimization projects on behalf of clients’ sites. But so much of it is pretty straight forward stuff that you can do it yourself.

Break Out of a Frame on Page Load

11.22.2005 | 11:12 am | HTML, Site Building

Does someone link to your site from inside a frame and now your site ends up inside of their page’s frame? Do you get a lot of referrals from search engine image searches and get stuck in their frame too? Me too, I have a little of both actually and I wanted a way for my site’s pages to load in their own frame automatically or “break out of the frame” while the page initially loads for the visitor without them doing anything themselves. Thankfully, I found that this is quite simple to do all you need to do is add the below code to your BODY tag.

Code to add
onLoad="if (self != top) top.location = self.location"

Place code in your body tag. Like this:
body onLoad="if (self != top) top.location = self.location"

Various Chitika eMiniMall Code to keep in mind

10.28.2005 | 2:50 pm | Ad Networks, Beginners, Chitika, HTML, PPC

There are a variety of other pieces of code that you can include in your eMiniMalls code to change the functionality of your ads. These include:

Disable Search Tab -
If you want to disable the search tab (and remember if you use the Adsense search function you need to) - simple add the following line of code to the middle of the code that Chitika give you:

ch_nosearch = 1;

Make ‘Best Deals’ Tab the default -
Some site owners prefer to have the ‘Best Deals’ tab showing first to readers rather than the default one. To do this simple add the following code:

ch_default_tab = ‘Best Deals’;

Rotate Random Ads -
I’m not sure why anyone would use this one but if you want completely random ads use the following code. Before you do remember that this will mean you get ads that have no relevancy to your site’s content which is likely to decrease your click through rate and earnings significantly.

ch_non_contextual = 1;
ch_query = “”;

Change Fonts -


ch_font_text = “Arial”;
ch_font_text = “Arial Narrow,Verdana”;

How to Run Google Adsense and Chitika eMiniMalls on the same page

10.28.2005 | 2:35 pm | AdSense, Beginners, Chitika, Google, HTML, PPC

So how does one “make eMiniMalls non-contextual” and thereby able to be run on the same page as Adsense?

Default Code

Chitika has made this extremely easy - in fact they’ve made it so easy you don’t have to do anything different at all because they’ve just changed the default of their ads to be ‘non contextual’. So when you log in and click the ‘Get eMiniMalls Code’ link and design your ads they’ll supply you with the code that makes using eMiniMalls work with Adsense without you having to mess around with adding code.

The all important code in what they give you is:

ch_non_contextual = 1;

If you’ve previously inserted code into your site it might be worth checking its in it or else your ads will be contextual.

Targeting Keywords - Rotation

So the question many will no doubt ask is “If the ads are non contexual - what determines what ads will now be served?”

Good question. If you look at the code that Chitika gives you you’ll notice another new line of code that comes to you by default like this:

var ch_queries = new Array(”digital cameras”, “ipod mini”, “sony playstation”, “dell laptop”);

This is the line of code that tells Chitika what ads to serve your site. If you leave it as is it will rotate four types of ads through your pages - ads for ‘digital cameras’, ‘ipod minis’, ’sony playstations’ and ‘dell laptops’. The beauty of eMiniMalls is that while these ads might pay ok per click - they are not likely to be highly relevant ads to the topic of everyone’s site - so you’re able to change them. Simply remove the words between the “and” marks and insert relevant words to your site. If your site is about MP3 players try “MP3 Player”, “ipod mini”, “ipod photo”, “iriver” etc. You can insert as many keywords as you like. This will help to keep your site looking fresh and hopefully stop your regular readers becoming blind to your ads.

For example, on a cameras site,you might change the list to be:

var ch_queries = new Array(’Canon Powershot S2 IS’, ‘Canon Digital Rebel XT’, ‘Canon Powershot A520′, ‘Canon PowerShot A510′, ‘PowerShot SD400 Digital Camera’);

You might also like to periodically check and change the ads you rotate to help with ad blindness. I know of a couple of sites who are changing the keywords that they target once per week to keep things fresh.

Targeting One Keyword

If you just want to target ONE keyword do so by:

1. deleting this bit of the code:

var ch_queries = new Array(’phrase1′, ‘phrase2′, ‘phrase3′);
var ch_selected = Math.floor((Math.random() * ch_queries.length));
ch_query = ch_queries[ch_selected];

2. replacing it with:

ch_query = ‘ipod mini’;

Targeting Titles as Keywords:

One of the things that is done on many of sites is picking keywords that are pretty specific. ie instead of just adding “digital camera” you can add “canon eos 20d” and get ads for a specific digital camera. This is particularly useful on a page about a specific digital camera as it will increase your click through rate quite a bit.

One way of targeting specific words is to target the titles of your pages (if you use titles that include the keywords of your pages that is). How you do this will of course depend upon the system that you use to make your site or blog - but if you’re using Movable Type or WordPress you’ll find that both of these systems have title tags that will trigger the title for a particular post.

For example on a MT blog they line of code targeting keywords would look like:

ch_query = ‘< $MTEntryTitle$>‘;

In WordPress to target the title you’d use this…

‘< ?php the_title(); ?>’;

If you use another blog platform please feel free to let us know what the code would be in comments below.

Keep in mind that this will only be effective if you use titles on your site that are pretty specific to products. If you don’t you might want to consider specifying some keywords as you might end up with empty ads or very irrelevant ones.