Sorry for being so late on schedule in posting about my Top Keyword. I was busy studying for my exams and my mom banned me from the computer. The keyword is…. See for yourself :

It is Taj Mahal. If you go a Google Image Search for that word, you’ll find GotChance.com listed first. (Uh oh ! It has changed now). Anyway that was unusual. But this is a nice piece of example of Seasonal traffic. I wrote the original post just in time when the New 7 Wonders were being announced. It hit the first page and i received good traffic. Thats it !

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I’m happy to announce the winners for my Ad Banner on GotChance contest. I’d like to thank everyone who participated and all the blogs that posted about the contest. Special thanks to My Blog Contests (why ? thats my blog, Lol). I had a total of 44 Entries. I gathered all the names and usernames from Digg, del.icio.us etc.. and put them all in an Excel file, one name in a cell. Then, assigned numbers to them. After that, i went over to Random.org to generate three random integers between 1 and 44. Here are the results :

So, the winners are :

• 31 - schizodiary from StumbleUpon
• 11 - Laura @ Laura Williams’ Musings from the Comments
• 42 - wirelessgirl from del.icio.us

I’m contacting schizodiary and Laura now. But, i couldn’t find any contact info for wirelessgirl. If you are wirelessgirl, feel free to contact me with some kind of proof. All the banners will be up anytime now once they send it to me.

If any of these three don’t reply within 48 hours, i’ll pick another winner. Once again, thanks for all your participation. Look out for my next contest very soon. Planning to really give some “gadget” away.

UPDATE : It turns out to be that wirelessgirl is LOLDogs.

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For the past few months, i have seen this particular keyword top my list of “Top search keywords”. And, also it tops the list of “Traffic Sources” in my FeedBurner stats. But, i didn’t bother to check it out as the keyword was unrelated to this blog. Today, determined to check where it comes from i did a Google search first and then a Google Image Search. To my surprise, its from the Google Image Search. Here’s a screenshot from my FeedBurner stats :

I’ll let you readers have a guess at the keyword. I’ll give you some clues. The traffic comes from Google Image Search. A specific post from GotChance is displayed as the number on result for the keyword. I’m sure that there are lots and lots of websites out there which provide better “pictures/photos” of the same. The image was taken from WikiPedia and the WikiPedia page is nowhere to be seen in the results page. Maybe because, i directly displayed the image, whereas WikiPedia shows a Thumbnail link.

More clues, the major part of the keyword Search traffic comes from images.google.co.in showing that it is an India-related keyword. Any Guesses ? I’ll disclose the answer in 24 hours or after the correct answer is guessed (whichever occurs sooner).

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This is something simple that all blogs can do and all blogs should do, but not all blogs do. Do you know that http://www.gotchance.com and http://gotchance.com are treated by search engines as two different websites. So, the search engine results may split up and even worse the Google PageRank will split too. So, it is generally a good practice to do a Search-Engine-Friendly redirect from on to the other.

Here i have chosen to redirect www.gotchance.com to gotchance.com. But that doesn’t make any difference. Here’s how to do it. Just add the following code to your .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain :
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^www.yourdomain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
If you want to do it otherwise (i.e) from Non-WWW to WWW, here’s the code :
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
Now, go ahead and start concentrating your SE Optimization on one domain.

UPDATE : When i checked the FeedBurner stats (while making this post), i noticed something that is very much related to this post. Here is a screenshot. I use gotchance.com/feed for my FeedBurner feed and www.gotchance.com shows as one of the top referrers. This is before i started redirecting www to non-www :

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Social bookmarking sites are among the most popular sites on the web and they are the greatest sources of traffic for any blog. So, you should make sure that your posts hit the doorsteps of these sites. Having a busy schedule (:P) it is not practically possible for us bloggers to go and submit our posts to these sites. Instead we can let our visitors do it. It also makes sure that only the posts that people like are being submitted. So, here are 11 tools that can help your visitors promote your site/blog :

Official Tools :

Many of these social bookmarking sites have their own official tool to be used on blogs and websites.

1. Digg : One of the most popular tools out there. They integrate like a charm into your website.
2. Del.icio.us & Tagometer :Launched just towards the end of 2006, the Tagometer has gained a lot of popularity.
3. Reddit : Cool buttons from the most popular Digg-alike.
4. Facebook : The recently most-hyped social network’s “Share” buttons.
5. StumbleUpon : Let your posts get discovered. I would call SU as the best source of “Instant Traffic”.

UnOfficial Tools :

These tools, thought unofficial, allows users a wide range of options to share and also saves a lot of space.

1. MadKast : One of the easiest tools out there. But, i would call this a bit Intrusive, since they occupy the space near the post title.
2. AddThis : The easiest and the most popular out there. Especially because of the fact that it can be used on Non-blog sites too with ease.
3. Social Bookmark Link Creator : A very flexible plugin that allows you to generate the links for these bookmarking sites.
4. Sociable : Very popular wordpress plugin, mainly due its very cool look.
5. Share This : Probably The most popular Social Bookmarking plugin out there for Wordpress. I use this too.

Bonus (Err.. Not Really)

NetScape Widget : I have separated this from the rest of the list due to the fact that NetScape might get closed down. Otherwise, a great tool to use for NetScape. Though unofficial, it competes with the official ones of Digg and Reddit. Kudos ! ! !

Hope you enjoyed the list and feel free to add to the list, if you know any more.

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I have always wanted to run a contest here on GotChance. But, i am not money maker as John Chow is. So, i don’t have hundreds of $$ or 24 inch LCD monitors to give away. But, i do have good traffic and some Adspace left to giveaway. I’m giving away 125 x 125 ad banners on the right sidebar to three people. There will be a total of 5 banners that will be rotated using Got Banners plugin. Three will be the banner from the winners and one Kontactr and one “Advertise here” banner.

I’ll keep the rules simple here :

• Comment on this post and receive one entry.
• Write a post on your blog a link back to this post for two more entries.
• Add to del.icio.us, Stumble or Digg this post for one more entry each.

After doing these, email me, letting me know about your entries.

I would run this contest until next Saturday, 15th September. I will randomly pick names and announce the winners on Sunday.

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A 404 Not Found page on Technorati reads as “Sorry! We have a zillion pages, but not that one”. Thats nice text for a not found page. But, your users wouldn’t like to see it when trying to access few important pages. What are those pages ? Lets see…

1) Contact Me

The contact page is the most important page of any blog. I do have a Contact page here and all bloggers who are serious about blogging have one. It not only helps your readers interact with you, but they also let you know of any errors that might pop up on your site. You don’t have one & don’t know how to make one ? Never worry. Kontactr is a service that i created, to make contact forms easier. It takes less than 30 seconds to setup your contact form (that depends on your Internet speed though :-P).

2) About Me

This is something that would make your blog more personal. It is also a part of personal branding. When they users get to know about you, they become more loyal to you. Take a look at some about me pages. I know that i don’t have an About Me page here. The reason is that i’m not able to come up with a good one. I will try to put one soon.

3) Advertise Page

If you seriously want to make money online, an Advertise page is a must. I don’t have one as my blog is new and doesn’t have Pagerank yet. I’m expecting PR4 in this update and if it hits, i’ll put up one. Check out John’s or Nate’s advertise pages to know what should be put up in an Advertise page. I do have an Advertise page on my other free webmaster resources website. Does it meet John’s and Nate’s quality ?

4) Search Page

The search feature comes packed with Wordpress. But, if you have a Non-blog website, you should really consider getting your own Search facility. I get irritated when i see websites without a search box. You might give Google Co-op a try. Thats works very well.

5) Sitemap

A sitemap is helpful not only for Search engine robots, but, also for human visitors. It helps them find what pages are where. There are lots of sites (even a wordpress plugin) that help you create a sitemap for a robot. But, you should manually gather the links and organize them properly to make a sitemap for humans. Check out these sitemaps of some giants : Google, eBay, Apple.

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