EzSEO Newsletter # 148
January 14, 2007 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 148
Andy Williams
“Creating Fat Affiliate Sites”
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This week:
1. Piggy Back Traffic Review
2. CSS Mini-series Part V.
Hi again.
We had a bit of a storm here on Friday night / Saturday morning, which brought the first snow of the winter to the top of Mount Teide (here in Tenerife). We were a bit surprised at the snow, because the temperatures where we live were up to 25C overnight. Then again, the micro-climates of Tenerife (an island you can drive around in a little over 2 hours) constantly amaze me.
OK, today we’ll continue with the CSS course, but first, I have a review of an eBook that I found a couple of weeks ago.
(BTW, I am in a hurry today, so apologies in advance for grammatical errors).
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1. Piggy Back Traffic Review
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Piggy Back Traffic is a short (51 pages) eBook by Ryan Deiss (Nicheology fame).
When I heard about it, I went to read the sales letter. In the opening headline, there is a bit in brackets that says “that doesn’t get you banned” (referring to the technique), and then further down the sales letter, promises of top 10, or even top 5 positions, often in days.
How is this possible? Can it be true? Why does he sell this eBook for just $47 if this technique works? Why not just keep it to himself?
These are some of the questions I had, and to be honest, I can’t answer all of them, even after reading the book.
I can say that looking at the examples in the book, these techniques do work. Furthermore, I can honestly say that I don’t see these techniques getting banned anytime soon.
Let me tell you a little bit about this eBook.
The eBook is all about using authority sites to bring you traffic. We all know about submitting articles to article directories (this book will help you get more out of that technique), but this book takes it one stage further.
The thing that got me most excited about it was the fact that you don’t even need your own web site (or product). While I recommend you do have your own site, this eBook shows a way to bypass that and get straight to the jugular. For me, that is something we should all be doing in our online businesses. Imagine having an income stream setup, without even having a web site? I would recommend beginners try this, because it will teach them about online marketing, and I also recommend seasoned pros try it because it adds another stream of income to your bottom line.
The eBook starts by explaining a few home truths about getting a web site indexed and ranked. It then goes on to explain Ryan’s system. This is covered in the first 34 pages of the eBook.
After page 34, there’s a “Frequently Asked Questions” section, and that is followed (page 41 to the end) by 10 example web sites, showing you the proof that this system works.
I recommend this eBook as a useful resource (I learnt a number of things from it that will enhance my own business), and feel confident that the techniques described are safe to use, both now, and in the future. If you are a beginner, who doesn’t have a web site, this eBook will give you the steps you need to get started. If you have your own web site, so much the better.
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2. CSS Mini-series Part V
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Last week we looked at using Topstyle Lite to create cascading style sheets (CSS). Hopefully you have had time to play with it some more, and become comfortable with creating a style sheet.
One thing I can’t do in this course is teach you everything there is to know about CSS. My goal is to get you up and running, and at a point where you can be confident to go off on your own, and learn more as necessary. CSS contains a lot of technical terms, and I don’t want to confuse you with them, but I will use the terms as we cover those aspects of CSS, so you don’t get confused when reading other sources of information.
Today, I’d like to look in a little more detail at something I mentioned last week – “pseudo classes”. Here is one of those terms. We saw it last week when we mentioned the “a” selector. I told you there were some pseudo classes of this selector.
Basically a “pseudo class” can modify the appearance of a selector depending on the “state” of the selector.
Let’s see what “pseudo classes” are available for you to use.
Open Topstyle Lite, and click on the new selector button.
Click on each HTML element in turn, and watch the pseudo class box (not to be confused with the pseudo element box).
Which HTML elements actually have pseudo classes?
Only “a”?
OK, that’s easy. “a” can have the following “pseudo classes”:
:active (refers to a selected link)
:focus (when an element has the focus e.g. if it can accept keyboard input. We wont bother with this one, but it can be useful when using web forms, to highlight which box is accepting input).
:hover (refers to a link when the mouse is hovering over it)
:link (refers to an unvisited link)
:visited (refers to a visited link)
To use one of these pseudo classes is easy. Just include it after the selector, e.g. a:active, a:hover etc. Fortunately, this is very easy with Topstyle, as it will create these for you.
The first thing to learn here is the order in which you MUST define these pseudo classes in your CSS file if you use them.
To be effective, you must define them in the following order:
:link
:visited
:hover
:active
OK, let’s create a style sheet that modifies the links on a page.
Create a style sheet in Topstyle that defines all four of the above pseudo classes. Just leave the parameters empty at the moment.
It should look something like this:
a:link {
}
a:visited {
}
a:hover {
}
a:active {
}
Remember, the order is important to get right.
OK, now lets have some fun.
Let’s set the font of all pseudo classes to:
“Courier New”, Courier, monospace;
Just select each pseudo class in turn, and change the “font-family” property in the “Style Inspector”.
You can see this style sheet in action here:
OK, all links are the same, and moving the mouse over the links has no effect on them.
Let’s add an effect when the user moved their mouse over a link. Using the Style Inspector, add a new property to the a:hover pseudo class. Make the background-color yellow, and add a blue border to the top of the link (You’ll need to open the +border-top style and modify the border-style, color and border-top-width).
Here is the same page you saw earlier where I have done this.
I’ll show you the code in a minute, but I recommend you try to do this for yourself first using the preview built into Topstyle to test your CSS file.
OK, success?
Here is the code I used for the a:hover pseudo class:
a:hover {
font-family: “Courier New”, Courier, monospace;
background-color: Yellow;
border-top: solid Blue;
border-top-width: 1px;
}
OK, let’s change the appearance of links that have been visited. For this, modify the a:visited pseudo class in Topstyle. To demonstrate this, I am going to change the font colour of visited links to a dark grey colour.
Here is the web page:
Click on the Stomping Review link, and then click the back button of your browser. See how it has changed colour?
Here is the code I added to the a:visited pseudo class:
a:visited {
font-family: “Courier New”, Courier, monospace;
color: #656565;
}
Finally, the a:active pseudo class. OK, so what is this for?
Let me give you an example. Look at this page:
I have set the active property so that the a:active link appears with a red background – this is done for demonstration purposes, not for its design quality ;o).
Can’t see anything?
Try using Internet Explorer, as Firefox doesn’t seem to recognise this pseudo class.
Press the TAB key on your keyword a few times.
Still cant see anything?
Click somewhere on the web page before pressing the tab key.
The active link is highlighted with a red background. Some browsers don’t appear to support this, so if you haven’t seen this one, look in Internet Explorer.
Now, the red background is a little heavy, so what I want to do is to use the same effect as if hovering the mouse.
I could just copy the parameters for a:hover into the a:active parameters section, but this gives me the opportunity to show you something else combining selectors.
Click on the “new selector” button and click on the a:hover “HTML element”. Now click on the “Add current selector to selector list” button. Its the small button that looks like a right arrow. Repeat this with the a:active “HTML element”, adding it to the selectors box.
Then click OK to create the selector. You should see this appear:
a:hover, a:active {}
What this does is to define the same set of parameters to two or more selectors. Anything that appears in the curly brackets will modify the appearance of both the a:hover, and a:active pseudo classes.
In the main editing window of Topstyle list, delete this combined selector.
Now, edit the a:hover selector, so that “a:hover” is changed to “a:hover, a:active”. Do this manually by typing into the editor screen.
Delete the a:active selector you created earlier.
You’ll now have this:
a:hover, a:active {
font-family: “Courier New”, Courier, monospace;
background-color: Yellow;
border-top: solid Blue;
border-top-width: 1px;
}
Here is a page that uses the latest version of our style sheet:
Again, you’ll need to use Explorer to see the full benefit of the active selector, but it should now show the same effect as if the mouse was hovered over the link.
Here is something to try. Press tab to make a link active. Now move your mouse pointer over the other links. See what happens?
This is CSS section is now part of a much bigger course available as part of the CSS Tutorial PDF eBook.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
http://ezseonews.com/archives
Have a great week!
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