After some googling, the solution is simpler than I thought!

Add these lines to your .htaccess file:

# change year/month/file-name.html permalinks to file-name.html only
RedirectMatch 301 ^/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.timmguru.com/$3


Now this blog has shorter URLs and older inbounds will continue to pass on the link juice.

If you were using Year/Month/Day/file-name then the codes should be:

# change year/month/day/file-name permalinks to file-name only
RedirectMatch 301 ^/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.timmguru.com/$4


Upcoming Event:

IT Show 2012
8-11 March 2012
Suntec Singapore
Levels 1, 2, 3, 4 & 6
Opening hours: 12noon to 9pm
Admission Free

What were the Search Terms used to look for PC Show and IT Fair?

You will see that most people were using the 3-word keyphrases to look for the “it show” and “pc show” related search terms.

Here’s a list of keyword phrases which people use at search engines and ended up at my blog:

1. sitex price list
2. pc show singapore
3. singapore pc fair
4. computer fair singapore
5. next pc show
6. singapore it show
7. it show in singapore
8. pc fair singapore
9. it fair singapore 2010
10. singapore pc fair 2010
11. it show singapore 2010
12. singapore it show 2010
13. singapore computer show
14. next pc show in singapore
15. singapore expo computer fair 2010

The above keywords list is a segment of my keyword inventory – there are thousands of search terms that drive traffic to my blog everyday.

So why not start to blog about the next PC show in Singapore?

And if you need ideas to ignite your creative juice, why not check out what I’d written on the coming IT Show Singapore.

Or you can read about previous events…

• IT Show 2009 Buzz Already Started
• PC Show 2009 Shopping List
• Comex 2010
• Sitex 2008

More Consumer Electronic, IT and PC Shows

As for the upcoming events, here’s a list of IT and PC shows lined up for the rest of the year:

• IT Show – usually in March to coincide with the 1-week school holiday
• PC Show – usually in June, the 4-week school holiday
• COMEX – usually in August, over the weekend just before the 1-week school and
• SITEX – in late November, also during school holiday, just weeks before the Christmas so you can shop for a digital camera or a notebook computer for your loved ones.

You have a higher change of getting higher PR when you blog. The reason is quite simple, more web pages will link to your pages because blog is designed with that feature from the start. In fact, trackback was invented because of blog. And RSS becomes popular because of blog.

If you used WordPress, you will realize that you can tell what other blogs link to yours.

I did not solicit backlinks from these blogs. So these are one-way links. I guess many of these blogs are scraping content from RSS feeds and link to my pages. Yes, these scaper pages are really useless in terms of SEO for Google. However, there are still a good number of legitimate web pages that link to this blogs. And I am really grateful.

So I am going to mention these blogs here:

Delicious Weekender – Food and eating place recommendation from all around Singapore.

Now that I returned the link – it no longer one-way link.

Anyway, it’ alright. Since this blog has achieved a good position in Google and Yahoo.

However, if you still want use Adsense, here’s what you can do to increase your revenue.

Tips to Increase Your Adsense Revenue

Here’s the 5 things you need to do to improve your CTR(click-through-rate) and CPC(cost-per-click):

1. Blend your Ads by Google with the rest of your content. Use the small square(200×200) or rectangle(180×150) ad formats. The newer 200 by 200 is my current favorite for inline ad. Alternatively, you can use the standard banner 468 by 60 in between paragraphs. Usually, you’ll get more relevant ads with inline placement of Google ads and better change of getting higher CPC ad.
2. Use Ad Link for your sidebar. Make the Ads by Google look like one of your sidebar menu or links. Aviod using the Skyscraper ad format here. However, you may try using the square or medium rectangle formats if your sidebar column is more than 250px wide.
3. Avoid using image ads. Usually, you’ll get lower CTR. Some publishers believe video ad pays better. However, you can only choose between text or image ads but cannot specify to display video only ads. So, even if the CPC may be higher, higher CTR for text ads may be more profitable eventually.
4. Niche topics usually have higher CPC ads. For example, I discover that “singapore web hosting” pays better than “web hosting”. You have better chance of making more money with a review on “canon eos 20d” than an overview of “digital cameras”.
5. Leaderboard ad format can be profitable when you placed it strategically – near the top, below the header banner and above your post entry. Alternatively, use the larger rectangle 336 by 280. This is an effective format and usually gives your higher CPC. This is suitable when you do not have a header banner. Place it above your post entry near the top left corner.

Bonus: Additional Adsense Tip for WordPress

There are a couple of WordPress plugins for you to organize and insert your Adsense javascript to your post. These are Adsense Deluxe and Adsense Injection.

If you are just want to add Adsense javascript at every of your post at random location, then Adsense Injection is what you’ll need. Otherwise, if you want more control on where to place the ad then use Adsense Deluxe.

I do not have Google Ads on every single post, and definitely not on the home page so Adsense Deluxe is my preferred choice.

For my new readers, here’s how the old layout look like.

In fact, I prefer the previous layout. However, it was just too challenging to build a theme/template from scratch. I tried and spent more than a month to learn how to build customized WordPress template. So far, I have not succeeded and I have to resort to other’s template, such as this cavemonkey.com’s Clean and Mean theme.

I’ve made a couple of small changes, such as the header graphics and the sidebar items. Also, I installed several plugins…

WordPress Plugin – Ultimate Tag Warrior

One reason why I selected this “Clean and Mean” theme was the built-in support for several popular plugins e.g. Brian’s Latest Comments, Ultimate Tag Warrior and etc.

It was easy to install the plugins – just upload the files to the WordPress plugins directory and then activate.

But, configuring the Ultimate Tag Warrior is quite complicate process. Here’s a how-to guide which I found quite useful:

http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/UltimateTagWarrior

And if you selected to use “url rewriting for local tag urls” then you will have to add the following to your .htaccess.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /index.php?tag=$1&feed=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/page/?(.*)/$ /index.php?tag=$1&paged=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/$ /index.php?tag=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)/page/?(.*)$ /index.php?tag=$1&paged=$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^tag/?(.*)$ /index.php?tag=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

You’ll not see Ultimate Tag Warrior on the homepage, instead the tag cloud is displayed near the top right corner of the sidebar on the single post pages.

The first thing I’m going to do in the new year is to migrate to WordPress. I will probably migrate my web hosting server too. And will delete other none blog pages. Yes, I have many pages in this website.

Over the next few days, maybe weeks, I will need to come up with a new design suitable for me to customize with my limited knowledge of WordPress template commands. I could have use it as is. But, I am the SEO expert, right? So I need to tweak the template so that it is as search engine friendly as possible.

I have done some work on Shi Hengcheong’s Blog and learned how to have individualized title tag, description and keywords meta tags. However, with this blog I may need to do a bit more. As you can see this blog is more complicated. The layout of the main page is different from the post item pages and archive pages.

Anyway, I’ll have to figure it out. Wish me luck!

Happy New Year!

This is what I did.

The Blogger blog was originally published to my server. WordPress did not have a function to import Blogger blogs published own server. So to work around the restriction, I had to re-publish all the pages to Blogspot.com**. Then imported them to my new WordPress blog.

Fortunately, there were only 30+ posts, so it didn’t take too long. It was a pretty smooth process.

The difficult part is the customizing of the WordPress template. Well, I got some WordPress tips from Blogopreneur and actually managed to create a satisfactory search engine optimized template!

You can take a look at and compare the new Shi Heng Cheong Blog (WordPress) with the older Shi Heng Cheong blog (Blogger.com) versions.

**I added <meta=”robots” content=”noindex”> to prevent indexing of these page so that my new pages created WordPress will be the ones to be indexed.

For more information on moving Blogger blogs to hosted WordPress blog, please read this very useful post by Tom Sherman: Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Best Practices

Also, WordPress is more powerful. There are many plugins available to extend the functionalities. I could also save some time whenever I tweak the template because there is no need to regenerate all the pages and upload to my server again and again.

However, the move is not easy. I have been losing sleep for the past 2 nights trying to customize WordPress theme or template for TIMMGuru.com. I want to use the existing design and layout. And it was not easy to convert the template. The WordPress theme is far more complicated than Blogger’s template. I have to search the documentation and learn the right commands and tags. I find the Conditional Tags necessary to customize the sidebar. As you can see, the display of this sidebar is different on the main page, individual post page and archive page. So I’ll need to do some progaming logic to control what appears on which page.

The basic type of pages for WordPress are the

• Main Index Page (MainPage in Blogger.com)
• Single Page (ItemPage in Blogger.com)
• Category Page
• Archive Page
• Search Page
• and others

You can control what to appear in each of these pages! Now, flexibility comes with complexity!

Why Google didn’t like this blog As Much As Yahoo Does?

I suspect that I’ve added a thing in this blog that Google didn’t like. That is the Archive List.

You see. I’ve grouped my posts into monthly archive and each archive had short link text such as July 2004, August 2004, … October 2006 and November 2006. A list of more than 25 items with nearly identical anchored links. To the eyes of the search engine, these could be “optimized” keywords for doorway pages.

I’ve deleted the archive listing and created a PHP script to generate my own archive page instead.

So you should be very careful when using Blogger.com to publish your blog. Avoid using the archive feature.

Now, I have one more reason to migrate to WordPress.