Under 2 weeks ago, I made some rigorous changes to my political debate community, www.defendingthetruth.com

Some of the new additions made to the web site include:
-Articles revisions
-Member Interviews
-Politician Reviews
-DtTunes (mp3 jukebox)
-Complete re-design

I think it was definitely time for a complete overhaul as the 2008 elections are approaching. Before the updates were made, the atmosphere of the web site was mostly focused on a political forum. I wanted to give the members more features to play with, along with a cleaner, more user-friendly look. The old design was much too plain and it was in need of a desperate change.I threw in around 40 hours of work into the new site. I am proud of the results and I hope that the members are enjoying the new features. Free speech will now be expanded to not only in a debate fashion on the political forums, but now in a way where members can submit Political Articles and Politician Reviews. Submitting Articles and Reviews will be a great way to reach out to a larger audience.

Please visit www.defendingthetruth.com to check out the new look and features.

Enjoy!

Well, it looks like quite a lot of web sites received a Page Rank update today! Thankfully, all of my web sites have received an increase in Page Rank.

DefendingTheTruth.com
Old PageRank: 4
New PageRank: 5
Age: 2+ Years

ExpertiseForums.com
Old PageRank: 0
New PageRank: 3
Age: 4 Months

Jon-Kingsbury.com
Old PageRank: 0
New PageRank: 4
Age: 2 Months

A couple of years ago, I mentioned the name Mitt Romney on my web site as a possible candidacy for President in 2008. www.defendingthetruth.com is a well established political community that I have created back in January of 2005. Today, the community is very active with valued members across the entire globe.

When I first mentioned Mitt Romney’s name, most of the members were not sure as to who Mitt Romney was. They might have known that he was the Governor of Massachusetts, but his successes in life were all left unknown. Since Mitt Romney’s decision to run for President in 2008, he has become widely known on my web site, on the Internet, and across the globe. Now I do not feel that this is due to the media alone, but his innovative and unique strategies in reaching out to everyone via the Internet.

If you search on Google for Hillary Clinton, John McCain, or any other candidates, you will retrieve a list of web sites including their personal campaign web pages. The difference between those candidates and Mitt Romney, is the unique strategy I have noticed that Mitt Romney is taking to reach out to the public.

What is the difference? One word, “YouTube” YouTube is a very popular broadcasting service which allows anyone free registration to gain access to and post random videos whether it be personal, television, comedy, and so on. Mitt Romney was smart enough to adopt this feature by advertising his campaigns on YouTube, posting videos as he reaches out to a global audience. His videos help explain to the people what he stands for, the problems currently faced in America, and how he would make a good President in fixing these problems.

If you watch many of his videos, you will capture the word “innovation” from many of his speeches. I feel that this word is a strong point in his campaign as he has used innovation to help solve the many problems that has been brought to his attention during his lifetime (investment in Staples, Winter Olympics, Debt to Surplus in Massachusetts, Healthcare for all in Massachusetts, and so on..)

Watch his latest video posted on YouTube below:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=c70pGVmh5IE

As you can see, he is reaching out to a global audience on YouTube by asking them what they feel America’s single greatest challenge is. In just 4 days alone, his video has received close to 300,000 views! Sure you can run expensive campaign ads via the media, but this strategy is much cheaper as it allows you to connect with millions of people via the Internet. What I see in the media are just ad campaigns used as a scare tactics or attacks based on the other candidate. What I see on the Internet is more of a connection between the candidate and the viewers.

Mitt Romney’s name is receiving more attention thanks to his innovative and unique strategies in reaching out to the people. He may very well be the next President of the United States of America.

Today I received a lot of goodies in the mail. A brand new MSI motherboard, AMD Dual Core 3800+ Processor, 250GB SATA Hard Drive, 2GB DDR ram, 256 nVidia 7600 GT graphics card, and a bunch of other stuff. It was time to build a good performing system to replace my old system I built in 2001.

Tonight I did a fresh install of the Windows Vista Business Operating System on the primary 250GB Maxtor Hard Drive. Everything was running smoothly until I encountered another problem with Windows Vista. After shutting down the computer to install my old 160GB PATA Hard Drive (transfer files), Windows Vista would no longer boot. Instead I am left with a nice “Non-system disk or disk error” message. Now you may be asking if I had set the jumper settings correctly, or the boot sequence in BIOS…well of course!

I then figured it would be best to return to the original way I had everything set up, so I removed the old Hard Drive…no luck. So what to do next? I threw in the Windows Vista install CD and selected the “repair” feature after booting off of the CD. The repair feature instantly recognized that the master boot record was damaged, and it fixed the problem accordingly. After a fresh restart, Windows Vista booted fine.

Now I still needed to get my old Application Data files off of the old hard drive, so I reconnected the hard drive to the motherboard and yet again, “Non-system disk or disk error” JUST GREAT! Yet again, I had to throw in the Vista install CD to repair the master boot record, and now my computer boots fine with both hard drives connected.

I have never experienced a problem like this when i was running Windows XP, or the earlier versions of Windows, as I have moved hard drives around in the past. So in conclusion, if you ever need to throw in another hard drive while you are running Windows Vista, you might experience a problem similar to this. Just giving you a heads up.

I’m not too worried about it, but today I encountered my first Windows Vista problem. About 30 minutes before writing this blog entry, I restarted my computer and suddenly things went wrong. First off, it took about 10 minutes just to get to the login screen. Secondly, I noticed that my screens resolution was a dreaded 800×600, when normally it was 1280×1024.

Right off the bat I had a good idea that something was up with my graphics card. So I went into the Windows Device Manager and guess what…the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card is experiencing aborted I/O operations because of either a thread exit or an application request. What does that mean?? Well I really have no clue as I have never experienced that type of problem before..

So my best bet would be to uninstall the current drivers for the graphics card, and install the latest drivers from ATI’s web site. However, as I said in the first sentence of this blog entry, I am not too worried about it. The ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is a pretty outdated graphics card, and to my left are three boxes which include a brand new PCI Express graphics card, 430 Watt Power Supply, and a new MSI 915GM Speedster motherboard. Tomorrow I will be throwing all the new parts together along with re-installing the Windows Vista operating system.

Lets hope I do not encounter a problem like that again…

When it comes to running any type of web site, if you want to increase your Google PageRank or receive higher results in search engine queries, you need to focus on backlinks.

Backlinks are links from other web sites that link to yours.

Here are some key steps I use to help increase my web site “PageRank” or popularity rating, and traffic.

-Check current backlink stats
Google tends to show different results at different times, so the best Search Engine I like to use for checking backlinks is Yahoo or MSN. To check your backlink, visit Google, Yahoo, or MSN and type in the following:
link:www.yourdomain.com
A list will be retrieved showing you all the (backlinks) links linking to your web site.

-Check backlinks on related, popular sites
I would visit similar web sites to mine with a much higher traffic rating or PageRank. I would then retrieve all of their backlinks via Google, Yahoo, and MSN (link:www.theirdomain.com).

-Submit to backlinks retrieved from related, popular sites
This step has been most rewarding in increasing my web sites popularity ratings as it shows you what other web sites like yours have for backlinks. What I would do next is submit my web site to all of the results I see queried from the search engine. I would not do this for just the results retrieved from Google, but from all the major search engines. This approach can help dramatically as it has helped with web sites that are related to yours.

-Get listed in Dmoz.org
Dmoz.org should be the first directory you submit to, as it is among the highest rated directory among most of the Search Engines. If you get listed in there, you are on a very good start. Dmoz also offers a script to webmasters where they can list the the directory/sites on their own web site. So if you get listed in dmoz, you will also be listed on hundreds of web sites that have the script installed.

-Hound “in a nice way” Dmoz.org editors
Why hound dmoz.org? Well, many web sites have claimed lately that it usually takes up to 1 year, or even longer to get listed in Dmoz. Dmoz.org claims that it could take several weeks to get your web site listed, but in reality, it takes several months. I would send a friendly e-mail to the editor a couple of times a month asking what the progress is on my submission. In just a month, I got a response from the editor stating that my web site was accepted into the Open-Directory. I’ve browsed through many webmaster discussion web sites, and people are complaining about how slow it is to get listed in dmoz.org. Well, if you kindly e-mail the editors on a regular basis, you might just get them to list your site sooner so that you will stop sending them e-mails. It worked for me.

-Submit to free-directories
Submitting to free-directories is free, and it is counted as a backlink. However do keep in mind that submitting to directories with a PageRank of 0 will not help much…Try to submit to directories with a good PageRank or Alexa rating.

-Purchase text-links
Some web sites will not list your web site for free. Some will require a reciprocal link, or a small cost. If you are willing to pay for a text-link, only do so if the web site pulls in good traffic, or has a high PageRank. Other than that, save your money.

-Text Link Ads Service
One service I admire the most is the new Text Link Ads service. Registration is fast and free. Once you are signed up, you can browse among thousands of web sites to advertise your web site on. This isn’t a typical dynamic link generated to your web site, but a static HTML link which would be considered a backlink to your web site. Their search feature is organized by Category, Alexa rank, Google PageRank, and so on. Prices usually ranges from $10/mo to $250/mo for a text-link. The big benefit with this service over lets say Google Adsense, is that it’s not based on CPC (Cost Per Click) That static link will be on that web site for as long as you want it to be. You can advertise on web sites all the way up to PageRank 10! Some web sites only offer homepage advertising, and others offer side-wide advertising. Side-wide advertising is advertising on all of its pages (usually hundreds to thousands of pages) This service is a quick way to boost traffic and PageRank. I use it regularly for Defending the Truth - Debate Politics Online
You can sign up for free here.
Or for a limited time offer (requires minimum $125 purchase) you can get $100 free in Text Links!

-Check backlinks weekly
After all that work you have spent submitting/asking webmasters to list your web site, why not keep up-to-date with your results? Each week I like to check my backlinks on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, along with recording my results. Increasing backlinks sure is a time-consuming process, but it can be rewarding in the end if you keep up with the dedicated work.

Good Luck!

Hello everyone.

I would like to welcome you to my personal blog. Feel free to click on any of the links up top for more information.