290 free Turbine Points for LoTRO

 Gam3s  Comments Off on 290 free Turbine Points for LoTRO
Sep 262011
 

… or more likely

290 “free” Turbine Points

I put the word “free” in quotes, because they are not exactly free. You need to work for them a bit. The trick?

Log into the game. Disable the “Enter last world” check box and have a look at the server list and Its count:

  1. Withywindle
  2. Laurelin
  3. Snowbourn
  4. Dwarrowdelf
  5. Firefoot
  6. Windfola
  7. Silverlode
  8. Meneldor
  9. Arkenstone
  10. Nimrodel
  11. Crickhollow
  12. Riddermark
  13. Vilya
  14. Imladris
  15. Gladden
  16. Landroval
  17. Elendilmir
  18. 10 Turbine points

    10 Turbine points

    Brandywine

  19. Belegaer
  20. Vanyar
  21. Evernight
  22. Eldar
  23. Anduin
  24. Sirannon
  25. Maiar
  26. Gwaihir
  27. Gilrain
  28. Morthond
  29. Estel

Now. There is One specific quest, that can be done ONCE on every server. That specific quest gives 10 turbine points (TP). You need to login to Every server once, create a hero from the race of MAN, SKIP the introduction quests (Un-Check box on Hero creation) and make the quest. The quest giver is east of Archet. About 1-2 minutes of walking (see picture).

10 Turbine Points

The path to Hunter's Lodge.

Doing this quest gives Turbine Points only ONCE per server. If you complete it on all 29 servers (there may be more after some time, when I wrote this article, they were 29) you will be unable to make this trick again.

There was (probably a bugged) possibility to delete your char in the server and start over. That possibility could have given you a steady unending stream of +10 turbine points every time you create new char on a server, make this quest and delete the char. But the folks at Turbine Inc. are not stupid and fixed this.

So If you are out of servers in which you can create new chars and do this quest – the easy “free” Turbine points are  over for you.

There is another possibility for

Free 110 Turbine Points

… but it takes 6 hours to complete.

This is how It is supposed to work after all. You simply need to play the game to earn Turbine Points. BUT! There is a bunch of deeds that are very easy to make. They are all focused around the villages Archet, Combe and Staddle. The deeds that you need are as follows:

Breeland

Breeland's easy deeds

  • Bree land adventurer – 45 Quests = 35 Turbine Points
  • Sickle fly slayer + (advanced) = 15 Turbine Points
  • Spider slayer + (advanced) = 15 Turbine Points
  • Neeker-breeker slayer + (advanced) = 15 Turbine Points
  • Brigand slayer + (advanced) = 15 Turbine Points
  • The history of Dunedain = 10 Turbine Points
  • Ruins of Breeland = 5 Turbine Points

Those deeds take about 6 hours to complete. Grab a char that is damage per second (DPS) oriented for faster kills. Focus on the quests in Archet. It takes less than 20 minutes to complete them and finish the Intro quest in which you lose the mayor’s life  and Carguls steal Amdir. Now the deeds can be started. Complete all quests in Archet and you will have half the easy spider and brigand deed done.

Move to Combe. Complete all quests and you will have done the 15 quests for 10 TP and the easy Spider and Brigand slayer deed. While in Archet and Combe – get the positions of the few places for the History of Dunedain and Ruins of Beleriand. The first easy ones are in Archet’s brigand place. One on The stone on which you were tricked to go to be ambushed, one hanging on a wall in the brigand’s den (also a location). Combe gives quests in Chetwood north that can get both your Brigand slayer deeds done and most of the advanced Spider slayer deed too.

When done with all Combe quests – go to Staddle. There are the rest of the quests you can do to complete all the 45 and get the rest of the 10 and 15 Turbine points for the deed completion. While doing the quests you will need to go in the Midgewater swamp with dozens of Spiders, Neekerbreekers and Sickle flies. That’s where the rest of the slayer deeds can be done if you are patient. If not, feel free to explore around – there is the possibility of another easy 10 TP when you reach level 20 if you are tired of killing and prefer questing.

And a piece of advice regarding…

“Free” turbine points

There is no such thing as free lunch, remember? (TANSTAFL) The folks in Turbine Inc. are hosting the servers and data bases, make frequent updates and bug fixes. Apparently they are okay with you to cheat a bit with creating 29 chars once on every server for 290 turbine points or creating and deleting characters for easy quests and deeds to make some free TPs. Why then you don’t support them with at least 1 month subscription?!

The advantages? You will keep most of the good stuff from the VIP after it is over:

  1. 500 Turbine Points are included.
  2. All your bags will be unlocked (and stay that way)
  3. All traits unlocked (95 TP per trait)
  4. All virtues unlocked (95 TP per virtue)
  5. Riding for free (costs 95 TP per char)
  6. No gold Cap (395 TP to unlock)

Even if this is not exactly what a Free2Play player wants to hear – the one month Subscription is worth It. There are a lot more things that can be done easily when you are VIP or Premium. One of them is Crafting everything 😉

Baruk Khazad, and don’t forget to share this article 😉

 Posted by at 12:22 pm

10 SEO optimization tricks for your blog

 bl0g  Comments Off on 10 SEO optimization tricks for your blog
Sep 152011
 

1. Think of a good post title

At least one of your keywords that your article will be focused on, needs to enter your title. If you are going to speak about candies and want your article to appear in the search engine, put the word Candy or its derivatives in the post title:

  • Everything about candies
  • 10 Candy tricks
  • 5 things you don’t know about candies
  • White chocolate Candies + Caviar?!
  • Each candy is sappy, and keeps the dentist happy
  • etc.

2. Post shortlink/permalink should equal Title.

It is simple:

  • This link http://www.candies.org/?p=984 is ordinary.
  • This link http://www.candies.org/10_candy_tricks is SEO optimized.

All blogging software and CMS platforms have options to change this. Make sure you do It in the beginning of your blogging career. Otherwise you will need some digging in old articles you wrote to recheck the links you already made to your other articles and replace the links. The other bad thing will be, that your site is already indexed. For search engines It will look like part of your blog disappeared :D. Do It as soon as you can.

3. Your chosen keyword in <H1>, <H2> and <H3> tags

While indexing your site, the search engines will have a look at your headings. All the words between the <h> tags will weight more in the search results. So if you speak about candies, make sure you insert sub Titles and Headings inside the article that point chapters like “<h1>About  brown candies </h1>”. There are some SEO optimizing software suites that make this for you. I’ve seen the promotional movie @ http://www.seopressor.com/ and am quite impressed.

It is quite expensive software though. And I am not rich blogger 😉

4. Emphasize keywords

… in Bold, Italic and Underline. This is not 100% SEO checked so far. It does look more pretty though. I’ve never seen my bold text to be explicitly scoured for keywords in search engines. And I use the <b> <i> and <u> tags a lot. Even if this is not checked in real life, it gives to the reader more points to focus his attention.

Candy

This image's <alt> says Candy 😀

5. Add <alt> tags in images.

This way they enter Image searches for your chosen keyword too. It is also very simple, edit the image’s HTML tags and change the one, that says alt=”something”:

<img title=”alt” src=”https://www.m0rd0r.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/alt-150×150.jpg” alt=”candy” width=”150″ height=”150″ />

Regardless the image says <alt> for picture search engines this images means “Candy”. They can’t decide if the picture has candy on it or not. The only means they know what this picture is about is this ALT tag we just replaced with “Candy”.

6. Density of keyword

Keywords ~ 1.5 – 2% of all words. 2000 words article should mention the chosen keyword 30-40 times. This is a lot of candy :D, but again … 2000 words is quite long article too. Just spam “candy” and “candies” everywhere you can without being annoying or weird. You want your article to be above the others.

Disclaimer and Word of thought: Google and Yahoo! employ good heuristic algorithm for keywords. If you just repeat one word 2000 times, this does not mean you will get high search rank. Exactly the opposite. Your search rank will drop into the toilet until the next time the Search engines index your page. Hopefully you will get your lesson learned until then.

7. Internal links pointing to your other blog posts.

It is not JUST keywords you know. You need to know that your other Candy articles get attention too if this article you just wrote makes the readers interested. The reader attention span is very short. If he is not interested in your current article, he searches “where to click/go next”. It is good this next click to be YOUR blog/site.

There is one web metric system called “bounce rate”. Ideally you want to keep this below 75%. What does this mean?

If you have 1000 visitors per month, 750 visitors will leave your blog being NOT Interested in reading further or going somewhere else, because you have links pointing to other sites. This is 75% bounce rate (750 from 1000 left).

You want bounce rate below 75% or your search engine ranking will suffer. You want your readers to keep reading your other articles.

Enough said.

8. Be regular.

If you like blogging like me – blog. Don’t just wait for miracle 100k readers to come from nowhere. This does not happen overnight. It needs some dedication and good motivation. Some day you will find the perfect article you want to blog about and you will be noticed by everyone.

Until then – Blog about small things. Be there for us at least once a week. The search engines don’t love the sites that don’t get updated often.

If one article is old – It is simply old.

Compare this with a Newspaper article from a journalist at the distant 1934 regarding starting World  war II. It is a very good and strong article that can make you burst in tears. But …

This article will be stored by some librarian somewhere and 60 years later, probably only a few historians will make a reference to the article.

If your whole blog is 1934-ish – no one will come to read you. Only some really dedicated Google junkies like me, that delve sometimes deeper than page 40 of search results for some gems.

9. Do not steal

Make sure, your articles are genuine. There is no point taking someone else’ article and claim It’s yours. I wrote an article yesterday about Autoblogging. This is not the way to get more readers. This is the way to make some bloody money on someone else’s account. He/she will not be happy. The search engines will not be happy either.

You will have some visits. Some of them will click your ADs (if your blog is monetized) and that’s all. Bounce rate = 100%. Search engine ranking = some. Some cents revenue per day. Unhappy rivals that will report you to the Google support team for scrapper site. And if you use AdSense – probably It will not be for long.

Search engines don’t like duplicate articles. They analyze (easily, believe me) which one is the original article author. The others get their search ranks below him.

Period.

10. Don’t struggle having ALL of the above.

If you do, the result will be a very Keyword heavy article that will probably be in 1-st page of search results, but:

  • It will be annoying and
  • Hard to read, and because of this –
  • Regardless of the links posted inside, the bounce rate will be high because the readers will
  • Feel like they are trapped inside your keyword mish-mash

Avoid this!

At all costs!

(Bonus) 11. Be helpful.

Even if you strive to be in top 10 (page 1) of search results – It will not happen overnight. If you find something worth investigating and think you can write good article about It – DO IT!

Imagine you’ve been the one found the “unique combination of taste in white chocolate Candy with caviar”.

If you write passionate article of this little something you’ve found and you get interested visitors to read and share your article in the social networks, the corresponding search engines will be glad to raise your rating.

  • Facebook reports “likes” to Bing!
  • Twitter reports “tweets” to Bing!, Yahoo! and Google.
  • Stumble upon reports to no engines.
  • Google+ is quite self explaining.
  • Yahoo!answers too.

As long as someone with huge circle of friends/readers/followers stumbles/tweets/likes or pluses your article – your visits will skyrocket as will your search engine rank.

Help the others and they will help you too.

HTH

 Posted by at 6:09 pm

Autoblogging.

 bl0g  Comments Off on Autoblogging.
Sep 142011
 

What actually is an autoblog?

Let’s start with what exactly is a Blog.

Blog is short of weB log. It can be your diary, your notes, things you want to share or something that interests you. You may share your opinion on a movie you recently watched, share piece of advice for something you did or generally just write your research in one neat page so everyone can benefit from It.

Some of the bloggers out there, including myself insert advertisement on their pages. Those advertisements generate some income every time someone is interested in them and clicks to check how much it will cost or to get additional information. This way, the blogger that shared something that can help his readers can get some small amount of money (cents actually). It is called monetizing or

Blogging for money.

What does it have to do with Autoblog and what exactly is It? An Autoblog plugin such as WP Robot, Autoblogged, or DatafeedR are not actually generating any new material for you. It is impossible. Cannot be done. It would be one of the best artificial intelligence software if It did. No. It is actually scraping thousands of RSS feeds, Yahoo! answers, WebHowTo’s and many other daily updated internet resources and copies new articles matching your chosen category to your own blog. It’s one of the new trends in making money online. It is of course…

Stealing

Remember how I defined blog monetizing? The original publisher is posting articles with attached ADs inside or beside them. The Autoblog software is attaching your ADs in their place. The original publisher does not get a single penny for his article from your blog. It is like getting a bestselling book and reselling it for profit, claiming you are the author. Suppose the original author has a small blog with Page rank 1 and your page rank is 5. Your blog will appear before his/hers in the search results. And he will lose possible readers because of you. His hours of trying to create a successful blog will be in vain. And even worse:

Some of the * Autoblog * plugins don’t even leave a link to the original article. It’s pure thievery. And as one of the bloggers I found in the network said:

It is a small world.

It is very easy to catch if one of your best articles that generate few cents per click is copied. Mark a random passage of few sentences and search them in Google. If anyone had stolen them – you will have them as result 1 HOPEFULLY after your original article.

License your work! Even a widely open license as Creative Commons allow you some hammering. Everyone can use your work as long as there is a link pointing to the original article or a credit to the original author.

You may send a note to the “blogger” and ask him to remove the article or cutting some part of It and linking to your site for the rest. You can also try my few

anti Autoblog tricks.

  • Use hidden text. Mark this with your mouse —> Original work Stoill “m0rd0r” Barzakov, visit www.m0rd0r.eu for more <—— The scraper Autoblog software will copy it without the tags and it will appear black-on-white somewhere in the article the “blogger” took from you without asking. The bad part is -> there will not be actual URL pointing to your site and you will not benefit from his page rank. It can alarm his readers that he is lazy thief though.
  • Do not enable full RSS feeds. Even if a scrapper Autoblog software aims at your RSS feed – they will only get the heading of the article.
  • If you want to provide your readers with full RSS feeds – use Yoast’s RSS footer plugin to insert links to your own article and some heavy AdSense or Chitika AD under every article text.
  • Put your license in visible place. Scarecrows can make autoblogger turn back and some of the scraper robots that want to survive are going to point a link to your site if they see you are licensed under creative commons or so.
  • Always point to your sources (e.g. your own blog) when answering Yahoo! answers or writing HowTo’s.
  • When you can, use plugins that place content only if the content is in your own site. (such as wp-table) The scrapper will only get [ table ID = 1/ ] instead of the original content. Have a look at this article -> http://www.gobalakrishnan.com/what-is-autoblogging-and-how-does-it-work/ It is autoblogged article about autoblogging 😀 Somehow the original author wanted your opinion in a decent poll with a poll plugin. The thief copied something with square brackets instead.

Autoblogging is not Blogging after all…

Do not feel bad about the people that do It.

  • They are not real bloggers.
  • They don’t have real loyal readers.
  • Search engines are not dumb, they soon drop their page rank and stop rating them on the same page as your articles.
  • Their AdSense and Chitika accounts get suspended if they get caught.
  • Google and Yahoo! often change their rating and search algorithms so the Autoblog scraper sites get behind or get caught.

Having said enough while being grumpy and bitter, I can add few more encouraging words:

  • My Yahoo! answers being scraped still point to my articles.
  • Good article that took me a week to create was stolen by a scraper. His WP account got disabled and his articles deleted after I reported him to WordPress staff.

… so, there is still hope for real bloggers to remain alive 😉

(Disclaimer: the site AutoBlog.com has nothing to do with Autoblogging software and is genuine blog. Good work guys. Keep up!)

 Posted by at 10:34 am
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