Ennui Blog

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Last spring, I was in the planning stages of starting a website that would become a database of all the immigration policies of every country in the world. It was a daunting task (it still is!). I knew that I wouldn’t be able to set up the site overnight but I wanted to get the framework of the site going to that it would start building traffic for carefully targeted key phrases. I needed to create a ’stub page’ or a placeholder for each country, targeted for key phrases. These pages would build traffic and rankings until I would be able to actually write the content.

How could I do that when I had no content and no time to write it?

Welcome to the world of unique content generation.

Basically you use mad-libs (remember those?) to create this ’stub’ content quickly.

There are many programs out there that purport to do this, but they charge and arm and a leg. Anyone can do this themselves for free, as long as you have a little knowhow in MS Office and some data.

So, how do you generate web content from a template using MS Word Mail Merge, mad-lib style?

First, you need to think about what the pages will be about. For example, I wanted to create a stub page for every country that would basically target key phrases such as: immigration to comoros, immigrating to comoros, comoros citizenship, etc. There are two elements to creating these pages, a database and a template.

The database was simple. I needed a list of every country of the world. Then I used Mail Merge in MS Word to insert that country into the template, 300 times.

So, the first step was to get a list of every country in the world (thanks Wikipedia) and create an Excel database.

The next step was to write a country page template. I wrote six paragraphs of generic content using a template tag in place of each country like {country}. Then I put the template into MS word and opened the mail merge function. Once you load the Excel data, you need to replace your template tag with MS Word’s template tag. Once you’ve done all that, all you need to do is run the mail merge and have it open the results in a new document.

I ended up with 300 automatically generated pages. All I had to do at that point was cut and paste each new page into my Drupal CMS. There are solutions for importing multiple pages into most CMS’s with .csv files, but I was never able to get it to work correctly.

You can also write your templates with HTML, so you can add text bolding and hyperlinks. MS Word doesn’t care. It just looks for it’s tag to replace. Then you can insert this code into your CMS and it will show up as a page.

So, what was the result? I did all of this 8 months ago and the site has been very successful. I rank highly for many of the key phrases I targeted and have several hundred pages generating a ton of adsense revenue. About 40% of my Google Adsense revenue comes from Global Citizen Wiki.

Unfortunately, I was unable to roll out full country pages as quickly as I’d hoped. Doesn’t matter though, the site still has increasing traffic and rankings, despite the pages having no actual content on them.

Duplicate Content Concerns

I don’t really have to worry about duplicate content because each page is different. And the trick is to use your template tags in order break up any repetitive writing. This will ensure that each page appears to be unique content, which, in the end, it is.

I’m giving Squidoo a try after hearing a Webinar from Seth Godin today. I set up a page about how to choose a web hosting provider. We’ll see how it goes.

Check out How to Choose a Web Hosting Provider on Squidoo.

Sometimes going through Google Analytics reports is like looking at porn. I could spend hours pouring over the figures and seeing what far flung parts of the globe that traffic comes from.

I recently ran into a problem though, on this blog actually. It appeared I was getting no visitors. This saddened me greatly because of all the work I’d put into it and SEOing it correctly. Something was fishy.

I double checked everything and everything appeared to be set-up correctly. I decided to install a Wordpress Plugin and compare the two. I installed the Statpress Wordpress plugin. I immediately discovered that something was terribly wrong.

Google was not tracking the site at all, despite everything being set up correctly. I was actually getting more than a hundred pageviews a day and Google wasn’t picking it up! I did have readers, by golly!

I re-installed Google Analytics and now it appears to be working correctly.

This raises an interesting point that I want to share with everyone. Don’t rely on one web traffic statistic platform. If you’re running Wordpress, it would be a good idea to install both Google Analytics and Statpress, that way you have redundancy and can have fun comparing the two data sets. Google does not pick up everything, especially since a lot of people block javascript and their visits would not be read. If you’re running other CMS’s such as Drupal, there are traffic monitoring programs built in that provide pretty good data.

So, from now on, Statspress will be part of my default Wordpress installation, along with Google Analytics.

I recently decided that it would be a good idea to add a link directory to one of my blogs, Anglotopia. I wanted to create a repository for links related to Britain and Anglophilia. I figured there was a simple Wordpress directory plugin for this.

I was wrong.

A google search revealed two competing link directory plugins. Neither of them actually work and have been abandoned by their developers. Both have not been updated in sometime.

If you’re really interested, here are the links.

WP-Directory
WP Link Directory

Initially, both were rather impressive. They were integrated well into Wordpress and their interfaces made sense. The only thing is that they didn’t work. Both suffer from pretty much the same problem, they fail to actually display any links.

They both display the categories just fine. But both fail to show the actual links. I did some digging and this has to do with them being incompatible with the latest Wordpress updates. And since neither plugin has been updated in quite a long time, that leaves us with no Wordpress Link Directory Plugin.

Since I don’t know PHP or how to write Wordpress Plugins, I have not idea how to figure how to fix the Wordpress Link Directory Plugins.

There is, however a roll your own solution that I adapted to fit the situation. It’s called PHP Free Directory. It’s a simple PHP script that can run along side Wordpress since they use the same platforms. It can even coexist in the database you use for Wordpress (be sure to use a different prefix).

It’s fully customizable and themeable. Though, it would take some work to make it look like your Wordpress theme.

PHP Free Directory doesn’t take much work to set up. Just change the setting in the config.php file with your preferred text editor and upload the files. Run install.php and in a few seconds you’ll have a full operational link directory. Best of all it’s free.

The only caveat is that to remove the footer, you need to buy a license, which is $50. There is also a more advanced script that has more functionality such as charging people for links.

Now, the question is how to integrate PHP Free Directory into Wordpress? The simple solution is to just keep it separate and put a static page link in your header to it.

That’s all well and good but it’s not integrated in the blog.

The solution I found was simply to embed the page in an iframe (using the tag. This will put the directory in a frame on the template page and the user can navigate through the whole directory.

I don’t think there are any SEO issues with this, Google theoretically treats the iframe as a separate page and should crawl it accordingly. It’s not elegant, but it works. I don’t have an example because I opted to just let the directory live on it’s own for now.

It would also be feasible to simply copy the code of a loaded PHP Free Directory index page into your wp page body. Again, this works. But any clicked linked will take you to the actual directory and you’ll have to update the page every time you make changes to the front page.

Hopefully, some good soul familiar with PHP and Wordpress will adapt this fantastic script into a Wordpress Plugin. I’d like to see PHP Free Directory as a Wordpress Plugin.

Stay tuned for tips on how to customize PHP Free Directory. There is also a forthcoming post on how to put a static link in a Wordpress header.

Check out the two link directories I’ve set up.

Anglotopia - Anglophile Link Directory
BacklinkUtopia - SEO Link Directory