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Euro 2008 started, will Portugal win the trophy?

A few minutes back the first game of Euro 2008 ended. Too bad for the one of the hosts Switzerland that they’ve lost to Czech Republic with 0-1 but in my opinion, the Czech deserved the win.

They had more ball possession, some of the best chances, and a bit of luck the Swiss didn’t had.

For me the next few weeks will consist out of sleep, work, run a bit and watch as much soccer as I can. So I’m going to excuse myself for not going to update the site as much as before.
Whenever I have some time free I’ll make sure to write something interesting for you all.
And if I run into something interesting, I’m going to make sure I’ll make some free time.

Now a question to you guys and girls.
Are there any soccer fans between my readers?
Who do you think will win the European Championship title?

I think Portugal with a brilliant Christiano Ronaldo and Ricardo Quaresma will have a great chance of winning the title. For Ronaldo it will be the crown on a fabulous season where he has won everything he could win.

Also the Netherlands with a very strong team will be one of the big contenders for the title, but I think they’ll come a bit too short at the deciding moments.

The biggest surprise of the tournament will be Romania in my eyes. They have a team that will work for each other like no other team, making it hard to beat. And if you can’t beat them, they’ll score against you and take away the win. If they survive the group of dead (Italy, France and The Netherlands), anything can happen for them.

Biggest disappointments of this tournament will be:

France: Without Zidane, France isn’t the same anymore and I don’t feel that Ribery is filling the gap Zidane left behind.

Spain: They’re always very strong in the qualifying rounds, but on every tournament, they tend to play bad. Almost like they can’t handle the pressure. I surely hope this year it will be different for them as they do deserve a price for once.

Italy: The World Champions will be lucky if they survive the group stage I feel. With the loss of Cannavaro they lose the hearth of their defense and if you look at the scoring capabilities of the other teams in the group, they have to make sure they’ll score some goals.

So far my opinion, now I’m going to watch the future European Champion (Portugal) play against Turkey. My prediction for this game: 3-1 for Portugal, two goals from Christiano Ronaldo and one from Deco.

What’s your SEO Score?

Today I saw a light bulb popping up above my head for a new site. So I immediately started searching for a proper free domain name. While I was searching I saw something interesting which I’ve always seemed to overlook.
A percentage is displayed for your site’s SEO Score.

What’s SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” ("organic" or “algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords.  (source: Wikipedia)

This made me wonder what my Million Dollar Challenge site’s SEO score is.
So I quickly typed in the URL and was pleasantly surprised by an almost perfect score. My SEO score shows an astonishing 98%.

I know that I did a lot of tweaks to make sure I got my site’s SEO worked out like the way it’s supposed, so I’m really happy with this score.
The cool thing about this check is that you also get some info about what you can fix to get a better score.
Like missing Alt tags, I have 7 of them out of 17. Definitely going to fix this.
Look at the screenshot below to see the rest.

And especially if you compare it to other blogs, my site has a really nice score if I say so myself.
A few top money making blogs ranked by SEO Score:

ProBlogger, SEO Score 93%

John Chow, SEO Score 89%

Zac Johnson, SEO Score 88%

ShoeMoney, SEO Score 78%

45N5, SEO Score 78%

Off course this doesn’t mean that I’m making more money than the ones I’ve listed out, but I thought it’s pretty neat that I’m ranking higher than them on this part.
The only thing this is accomplishing is that search engines index your site like the way you would like to be indexed. And as a result you’ll be ranking higher on the particular keywords you’re using.

So what’s your SEO Score? I love to see them in the comments.

Need any help with your SEO? Contact me via the contact form.

Stats for the soccer fans

Well If you’re a big soccer fan like me, you’re surely going to love the site I found browsing the web.

This Saturday, the European Soccer Championship will start in Austria and Switzerland.
And the cool guys from Castrol Performance Index made a little site where you can follow every game live.

Now I’ll hear you thinking, there are lots of other sites where you can follow it or even better you could watch it live on TV. But wait, they show something pretty nice instead.
If you followed some Champions League matches this year, you’ll probably noticed that whenever there’s a player being replaced, they show some info about how many meters this particular player had run during his time on the pitch.

Well this is what they’re showing on this site, not for one player, but for all the players of the game. And also the maximum speed a player had during his game.

True, this isn’t as exciting as the game itself, but it gives you some nice info about what the player has done on the pitch, was he lazy or did he ran after every ball?

But not running much doesn’t mean your lazy, it also can mean that the player just knows where the ball is going to end up, so he doesn’t have to run much.

At the moment they’re displaying some statistics from a few friendly games that were played last week.

Here you can see that Sweden’s Kim Källström ran 12566 meters, the most of all the players and friendly matches right now.
And Philippe Senderos was the fastest one of the bunch, he did a sprint with a maximum speed of 35.9km/h. If he could keep this speed over a 100m distance, he would run it in 10.03 seconds.
A bit far from the new 100m record from Usain Bolt last Saturday, but very fast for a soccer player.

I’m definitely going to take a look at this site next Saturday.

Lightning Bolt breaks 100m World Record

Yesterday Evening, Jamaican Usain Bolt beat Tyson Gay on the 100m at the Reebok Grand Prix Athletics meeting.

Being only 21 years old, he broke the previous record by 0.02 hundreds of a second, to set the new fastest time to 9.72 seconds.
He was a bit lucky with the tailwind (1.7m/sec) being just under the maximum allowed wind (2.0 meters/sec), but you still have to be very very fast.

The previous record holder was his compatriot Asafa Powell.

I can’t wait to see him, Asafa Powell and Tyson Gay competing against each other at the Olympics in China in about 2 months. Probably they won’t break the record again there, because of the hot weather, but it will give Usain Bolt some satisfaction if he wins.

He said himself, this record doesn’t mean a thing if I don’t win at the Olympics. The record can be broken every day, the Gold at the Olympics, only every 4 years.

Is Entrecard slowly dying?

First of all I would like to point out that I’m still behind the idea of Entrecard and I don’t want to upset people by the title of this post.

When you’re a starter blog, you can really get your name out in the community with the simple use of the Entrecard widget.

For those who still don’t know how it works, you place the widget on your site and some other blog owner buy’s the ad space for 1 day if you’ll approve it. Also you can earn Entrecard Credits by simply drop your card on other widgets.
At first it can be very addictive, and then you’ll work out a system to drop the cards as fast as you can, …

That’s basically it.

But a month or 2 back they dramatically changed the pricing system and in my opinion they made a mistake by doing this.
I understand why they did this, but this change is actually most appealing to the established big blogs and a few others.

Before almost anyone could get their ad listed on a big blog if they saved their credits for it. (I feel this is a pretty fair deal)
After the change, you still can do this, but it’s going to cost you a lot of credits, and the question then is, is it still worth it?

For example, before you had to pay 700EC at most to get your ad listed somewhere.
Hell, I got my ad on JohnChow.com for just 248EC (Entrecard credits) and receive 44 drops.
Now it costs 4096EC due to the new price system. Even if you get 144 drops then, is it still worth it to pay this amount, just to get your ad displayed on a big site?

Also if you look at the activity on the Entrecard forum, I feel it’s dramatically changed from very very active to just active.

I noticed a change in my Entrecard activity itself, from being an active dropper to an occasional dropper if I have some time to spare.  I even thought about removing the widget and stopping with Entrecard completely. But the idea behind the whole Entrecard thing and the community at Entrecard is convincing me to give it a few more months.

And all of this, I think is because of the change in the price system which is really sad, because it’s really a nice system that can help the smaller and the big blogs.
What about you, do you feel the same as me or am I the only one who has this opinion? I’d love to hear it.