Seo Tricks

The real secrets to do well with Adsense and rank good in the search engines

2006-04-25T16:42:00.000+02:00

Hi there,
I thought to write about my little, personal experience about content sites and how to make money with target advertising i.e. Adsense.

When I started my first aim was to make money, receive tons of visits by having millions of pages displayed, and reasoning like "what if I had 1 click on every page, say on the 10% of millions of pages, whatever the content is.. I would be rich!". This scheme was not working, my sites that I did in this way never worked and it was a failure.

The second approach was based on the philosophy "you won't make money if you won't spend money". So I started looking for software, tutorials, ebooks, whatever it could be sold on the net. And you know what? It was another failure. 99% of this stuff is pure crap, written by people like you and me that is ripping you off money to tell you things that you can learn and discover in the same way, just doing your homework and fair research. I am sure that there are valuable tools around there to make great money with Adsense, but I am not aware about them.

The third and last approach was the only one that granted me the first check from Google Adsense and since then I am growing and growing. Here's how I did.

First of all, you will need a radical change of mind. Yes, stop thinking to make money from your sites and to rank well in the search engines. Your first and only aim must be to build a quality site, with quality and original content. You will need to add real value to your pages, and make your visitors happy to have found you. When evaluating your pages, you must say to yourself "would I be happy to see such a page? would I find valuable and good information? would I come back here to find more?". Thus, you must think to your visitors. Stick in your mind that you must rank well in your visitors head, and not in the search engine rankings This is my golden rule.

Second, you must sit down, relax and think at what you are really good at. Noone is able to do everything in the world. In the same way, you won't be able to build your site from zero just with notepad. You will need scripts, a layout, and content. So, you must be a designer, a programmer, a writer, and last but not least an innovator. You must put innovations in your site and bring that original thing that nobody has. Obviously, unless you are a pure geek you cannot do this all by yourself. Hence, if you don't have friends or if you don't want to share your revenue with others, you must rely in external resources. And wait, hold on! I haven't told you to get your credit card yet. Most probably you will find all you need on the web, and that is mostly true.

If you don't know HTML or CSS, then it's time to start learning the basics. Find some good tutorials on the net (http://www.w3.org/) and start practise. You won't need that skill to create pages. More probably, you will need this to do some minor edits and tweaks. Additional knowledge of basic PHP and mySQL is a plus. Make your own research on forums (DP is king for this ) ) and on google to learn. Remember this: with the proper research you will find everything for free, so think twice, 3 times, 4 times before paying for something you can find for free somewhere else.

Then, what about scripts. You can write them by yourself, or get free ones. www.hotscripts.com is a good place where to start finding scripts.

Regarding content, you can write it by yourself if you are a good writer, otherwise look for free article sites around the net. As a plus, you can find someway to make someone write for you for free, for instance if you build a site of poems and ask people to submit their poems. This is just an idea, you will find yours by yourself!

For designs, if you are not a designer check www.oswd.org . It is a free template repository where people will submit their own layout for free sharing. Take the one you like most and start using it: you will need those HTML and CSS basic skills to make your edits and customize the layout to your needs!

As a final note, learn some basic SEO to optimize your pages, but don't exceed overdoing it. Avoid things like keyword stuffing: remember to make your pages user friendly and that alt tags are for describing pictures, not putting keywords! Do your best to optimize your title tag, and your meta tags. Don't bother optimizing keywords for content: your content must be a quality one and you are not targetting any keyword. You are just writing fine and quality related content for your site. Period!

You will specialize on one of these fields, and for the rest you will look at the net. You can make some money in the field you are specialized by looking for freelancer jobs (for instance, www.getafreelancer.com or www.ifreelance.com the DP marketplace, or other forums) for you to get hired, or whatever else comes into your mind.

This is what I am doing and it works wonders for me if you have further tips to share, you are welcome!

Using New Content to Build Links

2006-04-23T12:12:00.000+02:00

Sometimes, link building is more than just searching out sites to request links from. Sometimes you have to get creative in how you build links.

In this article, we look at another way of building links that doesn't really require you to go out and search for relevant sites to request links from.

The web is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Technorati, a popular blog search and syndication site estimates that the blogosphere alone doubles in size every 5 months. As of the end of July 2005, Technorati was tracking over 14.2 million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links.

Who knows how much the rest of the web grows? I would bet that while it doesn't double every 5 months its rate of growth is pretty impressive.

It is because of this growth in the web that other forms of link building become somewhat easier. I am talking about building links through content creation and publishing.

Chances are you are reading this article on the Text Link Brokers blog, or one of a number of syndication partners who agree to republish the article with links intact.

Through such syndication, you could come across this article through a variety of high profile websites on the web. In addition, these high profile sites are industry specific.

This means that any links I embed into this article (which is then syndicated) will ultimately point back to this site on important key phrases.

Think about this, for the time it takes me to write this article, I could have built as many as 2 dozen high quality, keyword rich links back to both the main site as well as the blog site.

Normally, for me to build 2 dozen high quality links for one of my clients I'd have to start with a list of about 500 somewhat related sites, filtering out those that are lower quality and submitting to 50 to 100 sites in hopes of achieving those 20 or so links.

And it has been my experience that I would be lucky to achieve 5 to 10 links from that initial list of 500 sites.

All this would have taken me about 5 or 6 hours ? even longer if I hadn't used a few tools to help gather those links.

Yet here I am with much less effort, able to achieve almost the same number of links.

That's the nice thing about content ? it can do so many things for your site: -A growing site helps encourage search engine crawlers to visit repeatedly. -A growing site has more pages which have the potential to rank for other phrases. -A growing site offers more entry points to searchers. -A growing site offers more opportunities for others to link to it. -A growing site can help positively influence link popularity (if internal navigation is coded properly -And More...

There are many other great reasons for starting an ongoing content development program. Aside from the link building opportunities, you can also begin to develop your online reputation as an expert in your field.

Further, as visitors do searches on search engines, there is a greater opportunity for your content to appear for those searches, helping to build your brand.

If you take you content development program a step further and syndicate your content to a wider audience (via blog pings and so on) you can reach even more people, potentially building even more links and allowing your name (and brand) to reach beyond the ?traditional? web.

For example, when I do a search for my name, I find myself in traditional organic SERPs but also on sites like Google News, as well as most of the main blog search engines.

This is because this site, and others I write for, are syndicated. Plus those sites that I mentioned earlier ? the syndication partners ? are also syndicated.

So my articles appear numerous times for the same search. This helps build my reputation online.

Not only does my name appear throughout the web, but articles like these also get picked up by even more sources. Ones that perhaps didn't read this blog, or one of the syndication partners, but they may have found it on Bloglines, Technorati or any of the other large blog search engines.

Then, the article gets picked up by even more sources, in its entirety, with links and all.

So, the number of new links I've created has now jumped from the original two on this article, to a couple dozen on our syndication partners to ????

It's interesting to see where articles get picked up. I've found myself quoted in PDFs belonging to Universities, on foreign sites where I've been translated into Korean, Chinese and even Russian. And, you guessed it, the links remain intact.

That's because these articles aren't like news ? they last much longer than a press release which, while gaining huge exposure for 2 or 3 days, quickly disappears.

The articles last ?forever? because they continue to be circulated by various sites who find them in searches, and either copy them or link to them. Then their sites get syndicated and found by others who then also link or copy the article.

You may begin to see that this type of linking can go on almost forever, because what I'm writing here isn't necessarily newsworthy, but it is an article that people will find useful for months and years to come (I hope). As it becomes more and more established on the web (and more entrenched, because of the number of high quality related links already pointing to it) it begins to take on a life of its own.

And the more articles which I write for this site which appear like this, the better it is for the site.

So, what is the downside to this plan?

The only one, really, is that you have to be able to write. And not just scribble your ideas down, but make them intelligible and easy to read.

This is what takes the practice. But I can tell you that while you may (and likely will) labor for hours over your first few articles, over time they do get easier.

So much so that you will begin composing them in your sleep, or while you are waiting for your bus, or any place else where you have ?down time.?

So if you are concerned that a massive and costly link building campaign is your only option to increasing your online visibility think again. Sometimes something as simple as an ?I was thinking? article can drive dozens of new relevant links to your site.
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About the Author

Rob Sullivan - SEO Specialist and Internet Marketing Consultant. Any reproduction of this article needs to have an html link pointing to http://www.textlinkbrokers.com

What is SEO - three parts to it

2006-04-20T10:18:00.000+02:00

getting the site mechanics correct = vBSEO
getting the onpage optimization correct = your work, plus help from vBSEO
getting links

Some facts:

Google takes TIME to get all the new links updated into its system
Google sometimes reverts back to a previous index, and so all your old url's come back
there will be less pages in Google because of vBSEO, not more. You currently have many url's for single pages. vBSEO makes one more powerful url for that one page.
you want the max number of SERP no. 1's, not the max number of pages in Google that rank 100th+
you HAVE to have good Google Page Ranking into your site ie lots of links, or a smaller number of powerful links
what is this misinformation about wanting to keep the archive version of the threads??? The archive version only ranks well because it has the best links to it, and until now, there has been so much duplicate content for the threads/different url's! The issue is that the archive is duplicate content with the main threads. So use the sitemap/archive to link to the actual threads, and onpage SEO the main threads better, and you will find the main threads will rank better than the archive pages ever did
your sitemap pages need PR as they are the quickest route to the threads - so have a footer link to each main archive page. I have numbered links ie 1, 2, 3, 4 ... with each linking to a main archive page. This gets the max Google PR to the sitemap pages, therefore best PR for the threads.
remember the formula for onpage SEO
- keyphrase to the front of the title
- keyphrase mentioned 2-3 times in the meta description of 150 characters for Google, then additional characters up to 200 for msn.
- an
  tag which has a paragraph of "firstwords" immediately following
- those "firstwords" having the same formula of the meta description with the repetition of the keyphrase, but can be a bit looser, can have other unique phrases in there that you are targetting for that page.
- dont have "welcome guest" type phrases above the
  and firstwords - as these detract from what you want Google to know about the page. If you want a guest paragraph, have it below the above firstwords formula

The above are the basics of the work I contract to do with sites. While it is seemingly basic, many find it hard. Reread through the above a few times and apply to your sites. It has amazing results.

Article Marketing: the BETTER Offpage SEO Solution

2006-04-19T17:50:00.000+02:00

Been reading up on SEO? If so, you know that there are one of two major strategies for bumping up your website on the search engines. One is onpage optimization, which involves plumping up your website's headlines, subheads, alt image tags and content with popular keywords. The other is offpage optimization, which, although not talked about nearly as much, will drastically improve your rank if done the right way.

Offpage SEO works like this:

To improve your SEO rank and increase traffic to your site, you need to get more popular websites to link to you. This is called inbound linking.

Websites are ranked 1 to 10 for Page Rank; one being the least popular and 10 being the most popular. If you're just starting out, you're probably a 1 or a 2, but you want to be at least a 6 and who knows... maybe one day a "perfect 10!"

Just like real-life office hobnobbers, your little website is going to have to do some shmoozing with those big league websites to get noticed. How can you give your site some help? Just as you feared: you must first research whose site is ranking higher than you are for your selected keywords. Then you must email them and ask if they'll place your website link on their site.

Now when you ask people with highly visible websites if they can add your URL to their list, what do you think they typically say? "Sure, for a small fee..." (But more likely a not-so-small fee). So now we're talking about money, and nobody wants to lay out cash, especially if they're just starting out.

For this reason, you may be interested to learn: there's a new wave in offpage optimization that does not involve researching other people's websites OR emailing people OR negotiating link placement fees.

It's Article Marketing.

Simply stated, Article Marketing is distributing keyword-rich articles that include your name, professional author bio and URL link to other websites that display the articles as content. Then, publishers come by and pick up that content to place on THEIR websites.

Now, let that sink in for a moment and then remember the goal of offpage optimization: to get better ranking sites to link back to your URL. Article marketing covers this easily. How so?

As an article marketer, you can distribute hundreds of keyword-loaded articles to top ranking article content sites like EzineArticles.com. EACH TIME you post an article on a site like this, your article gets indexed in their content BY KEYWORD and your URL is listed along with it. That's with EVERY article you write.

It's also worth noting, that when you choose to showcase your work on a highly reputable, top ranking site like EzineArticles.com, you get the added advantage of their expertly designed and fully search engine optimized website template to help push you higher on the search engines.

A third point: EzineArticles.com is the number one choice for real live internet marketers to post their articles, pick up other authors' articles to use in their emailed ezines, and generally affilate with for all things article marketing. So if you wanted to start getting your name out there and known by all the right people, posting your expert articles on EzineArticles.com might be a pretty good way to do it.

Still not convinced that article marketing with a top ranking site is an incredible offpage optimization tool for your site? Submit four articles and then do a Google search on your name. Tell me what comes up. Then... when you're ready to take full advantage of this incredible opportunity: create a full-scale article marketing campaign that includes keywords and highly targeted copy... submit to the highest ranking article distribution sites... and watch your website rocket up the ranks!

Dina Giolitto is the author of ARTICLE POWER: Create Dynamite Web Articles and Watch Your Sales Explode... a 49-page manual covering every aspect of article marketing on the web. Learn about article marketing, copywriting and more at http://www.wordfeeder.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dina_Giolitto

Internet Directory Submission Tips

2006-04-18T20:14:00.000+02:00

Internet Directories and their Importance

There are two very pertinent reason why we submit to directories, first, to get more targeted traffic to your site and secondly, to build link popularity in hopes of a better page rank. Acquiring links from other websites may obtain the same results, providing they are qualified links meaning the website you want to exchange links with pertains to your business.

One should not exchange links with a "sock" manufacturer, when your online business is "tool and die" they are called "free for all links".

However, there are some significant differences between the two link sources, Directories have only one purpose in life and that is to provide links to other sites. Directories are an established source of authority in regard to various subject matters. Being listed in directories serves as a level of measure as to the site's worth.

It is much easier and faster to be listed in directories than to start a reciprocal link building campaign. Since getting listed in directories is of great consequence to a website owner, it is an essential subject matter that warrants full coverage.

Submitting to Quality Directories

Submitting your website to quality Directories is perhaps one of the best ways to acquire valuable inbound links. Directories, DMOZ and Yahoo hold significant weight. Google draws its directory results from DMOZ and Yahoo draws its directory results from its own Yahoo Directory.

Keep in mind that Directories have human editors they gather all the listings in that directory, getting listed in key directories means that it is seen by many people, therefore you are more apt to get your website's links recognized by the crawler based search engines.

There a multitude of web directories presently out there on the web. They range from general directories that include categories for almost everything, to specific directories that contain categories to match specific area/s of interest for example Search Engine Optimization. Get your web site listed in as many directories as possible as this will help not only help in getting better search engine rankings, but assist in heading up your competition and as we all know, pending on the nature of your business, only so many websites can be in the top 10.

Getting your links listed can vary from directory to directory. Some may charge a fee which guarantees you that your link will in fact be added, those who do not charge fees, it can take some time and of course there are no certain guarantees in this case.

The best and most effective way of increasing your search engine rankings is working to improve your web site's link popularity. This can be achieved by getting as many inbound, one-way links as you can from quality sites such as directories. Other ways to get these links are having great content on your site and requesting a link to your site from other web sites.

Increasing link popularity is a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process but is definitely worth the time and effort when you see a dramatic increase in traffic. Before submitting to any directory take some in preparing your submission in making sure, probably somewhere between 20 and 25 words insuring you have placed 2-3 of your keywords in describing your website, also another helpful hint is to place your keywords in your title tag.

If you are a SEO Company offering search engine optimization for other companies, you may want to write something along these lines, "Achieve higher search engine rankings and attract more targeted visitors. We can help you build a link campaign for higher search engine rankings". Rather than using inappropriate marketing ploys, which search engines frown upon, something like "World's greatest online SEO Company offering the lowest prices for Search Engine Optimization, we can make you number one in just weeks".

What to look for

Here are some of the most important criteria's to take into consideration when submitting to directories:

Are your listings going to be posted on Static pages

Are you going to gain any Page Rank benefit

Are you able to add descriptive title to your link

Are you able to specify your own keywords

Are you able to submit multiple links under one listing

Is the directory listed in DMOZ or Yahoo

Are there more than 50 links on a category page

Can you enhance your listing by purchasing category sponsorship

If you are looking for additional traffic, does the target directory's

Alexa rank justify the submission costs

A Helpful List of Internet Directories to Get You Started

We have complied a detailed chart outlining the Internet directories with their Google Page rank, Google backlinks and finally by their Alexa rank to help you gauge the mount of visitor traffic you can expect from these directories. We are planning to maintain the list of directories and provide timely updates of the Google Page rank, Google backlinks and their Alexa rank.

Our own website is listed in many of these directories, the cost can ran range from Free to a few hundred dollars. We suggest you start from the top of this directory list and decide how much you can afford to spend. If you have a small budget you may want to skip over the Yahoo directory submission as it is nearly $300 per year. You are probably better off spending money on 10 smaller directory submissions.

Shelley Murphy brings with her over 10 years of direct,e-marketing and Search Engine Optimization strategies Internet based businesses. Holding two BA's in English and Journalism Communications her writing skills have been a great asset for both onsite writing and monthly newsletters publication and has become an established writer for several SEO e-zines.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) : Pros and Cons

2006-04-17T13:14:00.000+02:00

A pay-per-click campaign is the fastest way to drive traffic to your site and is often used to to get traffic while the results of your SEO efforts kick in. The downside of PPC marketing is that you can burn through a lot of cash in a hurry if you don't know what you are doing.

Is a regular, recurring expense. Traffic stops when you stop paying.
You can get visitor traffic in as little as an hour after setup
Solution for exposure on competitive search terms where you can't get a top ranking
Good solution for "problem" sites that use Flash or dynamic content
Great for testing new product ideas or the effectiveness of ads quickly
Goal it to target a large number of low-bid-cost (niche) keywords
Perfect interim measure until your SEO results show up in the search engines
Excellent for seasonal sales or other time-dependent promotions
Easy to measure and track performance and effectiveness
Very time-intensive to monitor in-house

Search Engine Optimization For MSN Search

2006-04-16T16:08:00.000+02:00

Recently, Microsoft officially launched their highly anticipated 'new' search engine to the general public. It can be found here at: http://search.msn.com.

Although most of the search engine optimization (SEO) guidelines presented here may be similar to other engine requirements and may not come as a surprise to most online marketing professionals, it's important to note some of the subtle differences in SEO requirements unique to MSNBot as the engine strives to have its own identity.

Buried within the help files of the site, there are several wonderful clues to assist web site owners, web site marketing and promotion firms and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals in gaining visibility within MSN search, for themselves or for their clients.

It's quite refreshing to note that Microsoft has documented recognition of the importance of a well designed and optimized site. They even went so far as to state that, if you want a better chance of being indexed properly within this engine, then perhaps you should look into hiring a reputable SEO firm to assist you.

This makes complete sense from MSN's point of view. A professionally optimized site will allow their aptly named spider, MSNbot, to easily read, navigate through and thus relevantly index the web site properly. By optimizing your web site in accordance with MSN's guidelines, you stand a much better chance of being found when it counts the most - when someone is searching for your goods and services.

Here are a few guidelines suggested by MSN to help you out. First and foremost, MSN readily admits that MSNbot will actively be using Meta tags for part of its web site analysis. Yes, meta tags are still relevant pieces of code (despite all the nay sayers out there), and with this new Bot they seem to play a very important role within the indexing algorithm. Similar to other search engines, the 'title tag' again appears to be the most heavily weighted within the algorithm, followed closely by the Meta Description Tag and if you read between the lines, it is suggested that your best 'keywords' should be included in both places. MSN does not come straight out and say that the "keywords meta tag" will be utilized, but by reading between the guidelines it strongly suggests the keywords in all areas (title, description and keyword tag and content) should adhere to each other.

Content of course is still king when it comes to MSNbot's ability to put the entire puzzle together. Apparently, at this stage, the Bot does not read text within a graphic, so if you have important keywords contained within a graphic (especially on your main page), they strongly suggest you move those keywords into plain old text format. And here's a tip; the closer to the top of the page, the better.

MSN Search calls for pages to be under 150K in size, suggesting the Bot will either simply stop reading after this point or in a worse case scenario, may measure/weigh the page size before reading and simply skip the page all together. This point is not made entirely clear, but it should be of enough concern to have every SEO firm scampering to measure their clients web site's index pages, just in case. In actuality, a page size of 150k could contain a lot of relevant text content, but add a few fancy graphics in there and the total can add up quickly.

An interesting point within the guidelines suggests that words (even keywords) within headers, footers and tables will not be read. Again, simple text is the rule of thumb. This may cause some web sites to need a complete redesign. Graphics with long or non-content supported ALT tags will also be dismissed. This is very similar to the rules from other major search engines, as it provides somewhat of a safeguard against sites that stuff keywords in an attempt to fool or "spam" the engines into thinking they are something they are not. Redirects will not be read either.

Linking, as per usual, will be an important part of MSNBot's equation. They offer two suggestions as to which links will be deemed the most important: links from the main page and links no more than three levels deep. This means all hyperlinks on your site should be accessible within three clicks or less from each other for maximum effectiveness. Very interesting. Larger web sites may have a problem adhering to this rule, but it should be kept in mind that the MSNBot is still feeling its way through the web. A three deep scenario is probably the beginning of the parameter. It will surely offer a deeper crawl as it becomes more sophisticated.

Submitting Your Site.
Good news! Submission to MSN Search is offered freely by Microsoft but two rules must be followed. First, search to see if your web site is already contained within their database. There is no need to resubmit if they already have you indexed. Second, the submission procedure is manual and is not accepting automated submissions at this time. Therefore you must enter a presented code into the appropriate field along with your URL before being allowed to submit (http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx).

According to MSN Search online documentation, some sites may have been deleted from the old index. Web site owners, SEO firms and other online marketing professionals take note: It would be time well spent to double-check your inclusion status or run through your entire client roster to ensure each client is contained within the MSN Search database. They may have been ranking high in there before but completely absent now. Resubmit where necessary.

This engine is already a major player and if the search industry rumors are true, MSN Search will be taking on the Google and Yahoo!'s of the world for dominance within the marketplace.

By following a few simple guidelines and MSN specific SEO procedures, your web site will be showing up with the best of them.

Robert K. McCourty, is a founding Partner and Director of Marketing for Metamend Software and Design Ltd. The firm specializes in the development and implementation search engine optimization technologies and solutions for the improvement of web site placement within the Internet's top search engines. The company is regarded by many to be the world leader in its field, with clients in 57 countries around the world.

A little bit more on SEO

2006-04-15T13:24:00.000+02:00

What’s to be discussed below are just systematized guidelines that worked fine for me and many others on a great load of high competition keywords for quite a bunch of sites. What I’m perfectly sure of is that they might and most likely will eventually make YOUR site a success, provided you don’t treat these lines as tables of stone and realize that really a lot depends on your specifics like level of competition in your niche market, your potential audience and generally this little thingy called brain (I guess I should have placed this on top of the list:).

Build QUALITY content.

When you ask somebody what really matters for search engines in the first place and somebody starts speaking of the so-called "key factors" such as meta tags, page title, anchor text, keyword density, header elements, alt tags, etc – tell him he’s talking rubbish, those things are never determinative.

Although undoubtedly important they are SPAM in nature WITHOUT QUALITY CONTENT. Long before your site is done start piling up notes or REAL content of at least 200-500 words for each page and make sure the content is what general audience will like. Make your articles up-to-date and topical, don’t use any sorts of nerd computer lingo or flamboyant and ostentatious lexemes. You can inundate your site with “widgety widgets” on every line of your code, cramming it into every anchor text on every FFA (free-for-all) link site you might find – but if you DON’T HAVE QUALITY CONTENT you are offering SPAM to visitors and your site will be butchered one way or another, today or tomorrow. It’s much better not having a site at all then entering the web with spam. There’s enough of this bullocks on the web already – don’t add to the dump!

Cleanly Interlinked Internal Pages With Proper Anchor Text.

Rule of thumb – each page on your site should not be further than 3 clicks away from any other site page. Bots like easily crawlable sites, and you get more traffic because all internal pages get indexed and PageRank calculation is facilitated. Plus humans that use Internet as well now and then don’t like to waste their precious time finding what they want or scraping through your clandestine navigation. In this eye this rather looks to be a matter of website usability but as long as Google PageRank nowadays remains next to unbeatable factor in getting more visitors from Google (write Yahoo and AOL) and Google holds 90-92% market share, I would suspect it is cleanly interlinked with SEO as well. Plus proper anchor text, although slightly devalued lately, might help you get your internal pages right. By proper I mean SPAM-PROOF in the first place. Don’t make anchor text 10 words long topping it up with keywords – search engines get wise with this old trick.

Keep Your URLs Clean - Stay Away From SessionID’s.

Each time the bot (GoogleBot, Inktomi and Scooter in particular) spiders a page of your site it gives it some sort of associated ID number and stores it in the some sort of repository for future use (for instance for further PageRank calculation as true of Google). That unique ID is associated with the url that the bot saw when it spidered the page. BUT: when it eats into the same (in human eye!) page next time the URL IS DIFFERENT!

?sessid=999&xyz=123 IS NOW REPLACED BY ?sessid=999&xyz=124. The troubles that you’ll face are immense:

1) This leads the bot into thinking: - Aha, this page might be spam as it duplicates the content of
?sessid=999&xyz=123 completely! There’s no harder penalty nowadays then PR0 Google massacre and the main factor that triggers it is content duplication.

2) Sessionid’s is a surefire way to nip PageRank transfer to internal pages in a bud. Google PageRank calculation is multi-iterative and at each iteration (exact number of which is kept secret but IMHO hardly exceeds 50-60) GoogleBot assigns some of PageRank share to a DIFFERENT page i.e. a page with DIFFERENT SESSIONID! Thus PageRank is not accumulated and internal pages remain bare.

Whatever visitor tracking functionality you need – don’t go for sessionid’s in urls – god forbid! Either use
.htaccess for these purposes or more complex server side solutions using IP address, user agent, visitor OS info, cookies info etc. for visitor identification.

Frameset Sites Are Both Feet In The Grave.

If somebody claiming to be a bigwig designer, developer, or usability pro suggested you a frameset structure for your site – just say goodbye and never refer to the chap again. If however this suggestion was later approved and implemented – you are in a big jam. Bots loath frames and 99,999% sure WON’T follow "frame src" urls which they view as either duplicate content or spam in any other way. Say thanks to malicious blackhat "optimizers" that used this technique for years for duplicating their content on all possible affiliated and non-affiliated sites. Also you just won’t believe how many 12-year-olds stick yahoo, ebay, microsoft or amazon frames into their FrontPage juvenilia! Do you think the bots will bother spidering those? At the certain point of time due to abundance of spam from frames it just became easier for bots to ignore framesets at all. And yes, someone would probably bother with noframes tag to include text and links there, but in my view it’s just not worth it. Frameset site owners should forget it and rebuild your site structure from scratch. Framesets should go to the dustbin.

Title, Keyword Density, Metas, Headers, Alt Tags.

Aha, back to old webmaster tricks now. Everybody knows about meta tags nowadays – don’t think you’re the only one. What most of them don’t know is that nowadays most of them are COMPLETELY USELESS or at least MUCH LESS WEIGHT than before. Too many clever buggers deluging too many pages with too much spam in the metas – how would you protect the web from spammy sites of the kind by means other than just ignoring? Basically you must always keep in mind that all onsite SEO factors must be kept modest rather than ostentatious. "Underdensity" of keywords in the body and underuse of keywords in metas, alt tags, title will do you much less harm than overuse and "ovedensity". This is the general rule of the thumb. But how do you find the optimal balance? Densitywise, I would belive it ranges somewhere between 5-12%, but I personally never exceeded 7-8% with the sites I was good at for some really competitive keywords. Once in title, once-twice in description, once in headers, once-twice high on the page, might try a few times in the keywords in different variations. This is the approach that worked for me on some really tough keywords in the IT industry where every other one is somewhat clever about
search engines.

Javascript navigation does more harm than good.

Whatever they are saying – Google doesn’t parse javascript navigation. It takes so much calculation resources, plus so many keep their JS files external – Google has got other 3-4 billion pages to see to instead of wasting time and Google developer’s effort on going deep into each individual JS navigation case. However, when this seems to be the only navigation option (which seems a lame excuse to me) – be kind enough to arrange a clean href for sitemap preferable high enough on the page with plain href links for all pages you want indexed.

What you need to be conscious of now BEFORE taking the plunge for it all is that just following these guidelines won’t make you and your online business cash flow positive. Now and not then is the time to contemplate proper "reaping the fruit" approach. Converting traffic into customers and eventually staggering bank account numbers is a much more challenging task then just making your site visible on search engines – but this is a topic for a completely different story.

Search Users Stop At Page Three - SE User Behaviour Study

2006-04-14T15:16:00.000+02:00

Here is an interesting study by Jupiter Research and marketing firm iProspect

Quote:

At most, people will go through three pages of results before giving up, found the survey by Jupiter Research and marketing firm iProspect.

It also found that a third of users linked companies in the first page of results with top brands.

The study surveyed 2,369 people from a US online consumer panel.

It also found 62% of those surveyed clicked on a result on the first page, up from 48% in 2002.

Some 90% of consumers clicked on a link in these pages, up from 81% in 2002.

And 41% of consumers changed engines or their search term if they did not find what they were searching for on the first page.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4900742.stm

The details of the survey are available here

Fast Fun & Easy way to find your most valuable Adsense keywords

2006-04-13T11:55:00.000+02:00

From http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=70469

<<
www.symbiotic.com the data base now contains the top 700k keywords from the more than 6 million originally found.

Just enter any keyword and it will give you it's most recent value which gets updated every 7 days and it's high low range for the last 6 months.

I like the find alternatives feature which will automatically show you your 15 best (highest value) keywords related to the one you have entered. Just a little hint the top keyword to the right is your highest paying alternative.>>

SEO Tips: On-Page Optimization

2006-04-12T15:20:00.000+02:00

SEO Tips: On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is often forgotten these days, as we focus more and more of our time in getting inbound links with targeted anchor text.

On-page optimization, however, is something you can do quickly to give yourself an extra boost in the SERPS.

These tips will help you to optimize your web pages to make the most out of your inbound links.

One Page - One Target

Each page should be optimized for only one search term. If you are targeting two search terms, make pages for each term.

If your search term has a synonym, make separate pages for each synonym. For example, if you are targeting "drywall" and "sheetrock", make separate pages to target each term.

One Target - Two Pages

The preceding tip only tells half of the story. You don't actually want to be #1 in the SERPS for each of your search terms -- you want to be #1 and #2.

Google and some other search engines will display two listings from a web site together if both are relevant to the users search. Therefore, for each of your important keywords, you want to build two web pages which are both optimized for that search.

The URL

Search engines tend to rank pages well when the URL contains the search term.

If your page is about drywall, call your page drywall.html, not page-1.html.

If your content management system (CMS) uses autogenerated URL's, use 301 Redirects to turn those URL's into highly optimized URL's.

Use Hyphens, not Underscores

Google and most other search engines treat hyphens as spaces, but do not treat underscores as spaces.

If your URL is robert-duvall.html, your page will rank well if someone searches for "robert duvall".

If your URL is robert_duvall.html, your page will rank well if someone searches for "robert_duvall".

Which do you think is searched for more often, "robert duvall" or "robert_duvall"?

Optimize the Page Title

The page title should contain the keywords for which you are optimizing, and little or nothing else.

Many sites prepend the site name to every page title, like this:

Smith Drywall -- Sheetrock Delivery

A more optimized title would simply look like this:

Sheetrock Delivery

Leave the company name for the title of the main page of your web site.

Optimize the Description Tag

Not many search engines utilize the description tag anymore, but it's best to set it properly just in case.

Optimize the Keywords Tag

Even fewer search engines utilize the keywords tag, but it's best to set it properly just in case.

Use Headings

Use the

,

, and

heading tags to define your important content sections, and put your keywords at least once in each heading style.

Use CSS to set the fonts and sizes of the h-tags to something pleasing to your visitors.

Add a Linked Image with ALT Text

Use an image of your page with a filename which contains your chosen keywords, such as drywall-delivery.jpg.

The ALT text for this image should include the keywords for which you are optimizing.

Google is sneaky, in that it only counts the ALT text on linked images. We're sneakier, so we link the image to the page upon which it is displayed.

Validate the HTML

Use the W3C HTML validator to validate the HTML of your page.

Very few HTML errors will cause a web page not to rank well in the SERPS, but you don't want your page to be that page.

In addition, validating the HTML will help to ensure that your page will look reasonably well in the wide variety of web browsers used on the Internet.

Keep Your Body Text Readable

Use your keywords in the body text, but keep your body text readable.

Don't drywall stuff drywall your drywall keywords drywall into your drywall text until it is unreadable by humans.

Make Reasonably Sized Pages

The search engines seem to prefer pages which have at least 500 words of text. Give your visitors something to read!

Summary

If you follow these simple tips, you will get better SERPS with fewer inbound links.

On-page search engine optimization is the first step towards good search engine rankings.

Explaining how to mod rewrite, 301 redirects, and optimizing apache

2006-02-01T20:06:00.000+01:00

I would like to report here an article that appeared over Digital Point forums, located here, in which mod rewrite is discussed and explained in detailed. I have never find on the net a guide more clever than this one, so I thought to report it here for the convenience for who wouldn't never read it. But I must point that the credits for this article are for Nintendo, a poster on DP forums, a mod rewrite master! :D

Introduction.

Welcome to mod_rewrite, the Swiss Army Knife of URL manipulation! Despite the tons of examples and docs, mod_rewrite is voodoo!

This module uses a rule-based rewriting engine (based on a regular-expression parser) to rewrite requested URLs on the fly. It supports an unlimited number of rules and an unlimited number of attached rule conditions for each rule to provide a really flexible and powerful URL manipulation mechanism. The URL manipulations can depend on various tests, for instance server variables, environment variables, HTTP headers, time stamps and even external database lookups in various formats can be used to achieve a really granular URL matching.

This module operates on the full URLs (including the path-info part) both in per-server context (httpd.conf) and per-directory context (.htaccess) and can even generate query-string parts on result. The rewritten result can lead to internal sub-processing, external request redirection or even to an internal proxy throughput.

This module was invented and originally written in April 1996. [1]

How to change your URLs from dynamic to search engine friendly static URLs using mod_rewrite.

Get an example of the dynamic URL and the way you want it. For example

http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=Nintendo&id=4867635&item=Pokemon
and
http://www.domain.com/store/Nintendo/4867635/Pokemon.html

Now that you got both URLs, make a domain.com/.htaccess file starting with...

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^

Depending on the server, you might not need the first two lines.

Right after RewriteRule ^ enter the static URL, then a $, a space, and then original URL (with out the domain part for both URLs).

You now got...

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^store/Nintendo/4867635/Pokemon.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=Nintendo&id=4867635&item=Pokemon

In the first URL, the static URL code, where ever the URL will change, replace it with a (.*) (Nintendo, 4867635
and Pokemon in the example above).

Then after .html add a $ and add a \ before the .html
If you have a hyphen (-) in the new static URL, add a \ before the hyphen, for example...

RewriteRule ^store\-(.*)\-(.*)\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=Nintendo&id=4867635&item=Pokemon

If you don't add the \, you might get an Internal Server Error message, depending on the servers Apache version.

Now in the static part of the URL where the URL changes, in the first change, change it to $1, then $2 and so on. Then add an [L] at the very end, with a space before the [L].

You now got...

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^store/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1&id=$2&item=3 [L]

Save the .htaccess file and upload it at domain.com/.htaccess and your static URLs will now work.
http://www.domain.com/store/Nintendo/4867635/Pokemon.html

Here's some other examples...

http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=Nintendo&id=4867635
RewriteRule ^store/(.*)/(.*)\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1&id=$2 [L]

http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=Nintendo
RewriteRule ^store/(.*)\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1 [L]

http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/store.cgi
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi [L]

In this last example domain.com will show the index of the script. If the page shows nothing, try

RewriteRule ^$ cgi-bin/store.cgi [L]

With all the examples combined, you got...

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^store/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1&id=$2&item=3 [L]
RewriteRule ^store/(.*)/(.*)\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1&id=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^store/(.*)\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi [L]

Notice the order. if you list it as...

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi [L]
RewriteRule ^store/(.*)\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^store/(.*)/(.*)\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1&id=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^store/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)\.html$ cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1&id=$2&item=3 [L]

then mod_rewrite will freak out and it won't work! List the line with the most variables first, then the second most and so on.

Can I have the .htaccess in a directory?

Yes.

In the above example, for having it at domain.com/store/.htaccess, change the code to...

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /store/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ /cgi-bin/store.cgi [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)\.html$ /cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1&id=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)\.html$ /cgi-bin/store.cgi?section=$1&id=$2&item=3 [L]

You moved store/ up to the RewriteBase line and added / before cgi-bin. If the script was in /store/store.cgi
you would of had store/ instead of cgi-bin/ and then just got rid of it, to look like...

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /store/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ store.cgi [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ store.cgi?section=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)\.html$ store.cgi?section=$1&id=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/(.*)\.html$ store.cgi?section=$1&id=$2&item=3 [L]

The URL to the index of the store will be domain.com/store/

Ack!!! Now it's messing up the rest of my site.

If you have domain.com/index.html for example, make sure your mod_rewrited URLs use another extension, like .htm or .shtml.

The original script URLs don't have the product name in the URL. Can I add the product name to the URL?

Yes! If you can change the script to put the product names in the URL, or edit the links to link to them, yes you can. Here's an example. Notice there are two (.*)'s and no $2.

RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)\.html$ cgi-bin/file.cgi?Item=$1 [L]

Just edit the script links, or links in the static page to link to domain.com/whatever/PRODUCT_NAME.html have the product name show up where the last (.*) is in the .htaccess code.

But how can I get rid of special characters or spaces?

For perl, you can do search and replaces, for example...

$value =~ s/ /_/g;
$value =~ s/?//g;
or
$value =~ s/[^\w\d\-_. ]//g;

which gets rid of almost everything but letters and numbers. Just make sure it only changes the URL and not the content. As for php or asp, I don't know how to do it there.

Can I rewrite a sub-domain to a directory?

Yes. Here's the code [url=http://forums.digitalpoint.com/member.php?find=lastposter&t=20416]mnemtsas came up with...

xxxxx.domain.com

to

www.domain.com/XXXXXX/

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[www\.]*xxxxx.domain-name.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URL} !^/XXXXX/.*
RewriteRule ^(.*) /XXXXX/$1 [L]

Does .htaccess increase server load?

I have yet to ever see it increase server load on my dedicated server. IMO, that's just a rumor. I got about 30 domains with about 54 lines in the domain.com/.htaccess file and have yet to ever see it effect the server. The only effect I've ever got is getting GoogleBombed (Google chomping away at the static URLs so much that the server almost crashes or does crash!!!). Don't panic. This is why you have static URLs, to help search engines crawl your site.

If you ever see high server loads or a slow server, try optimizing Apache.

How do I optimize Apache?

You have to have access to the actual server through telnet as root.

Edit your httpd.conf file.

Here's the best settings I've found.

Timeout 50
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 120
KeepAliveTimeout 10
MinSpareServers 10
MaxSpareServers 20
StartServers 16
MaxClients 125
MaxRequestsPerChild 5000

and then restart apache. Even when I have massively HIGH server loads, the sites are fast. Once I had the server load above 100, which is EXTREMELY high, and the static pages loaded as if nothing was high!!

Don't ask me how to do it. If you don't know what you're doing, don't mess with it. Ask your web host. Mess up and your sites can 'die' until it get's fixed! For example, simply pressing return can crash your sites until you go back and undo the return, geting it back to how it was before.

How can I do a 301 redirect?

at domain.com/.htaccess

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^whatever/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1/ [R=301,L]
or
RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.domain.com/ [R=301,L]

The second example only changes one URL.

(.*) and $1 work the same way here as in mod_rewrite, so you can easily change a lot of URLs with one line. The only change with redirects and mod_rewrite is the R=301 (Redirect 301).

Conclusion.

Yes, mod_rewrite is voodoo, and it may look hard to learn, but it's not that hard. When I first tried to figure it out, I spent a day over at apache.org and hardly got any where (hence there is only one link there as the source to the introduction.) I then posted over on the Amazon Associate board, some one gave me a few lines of code, I changed it a little and with in a day I had a completely search engine friendly Amazon store using MrRats script, and my mod_rewrite hack, which as you may know by now, it completely revolutionized the Amazon AWS industry, until it drove Google insane! mod_rewrite rocks, if you got any URLs that have ?, =, or &, do mod_rewrite!

A Scientifical Approach to Adwords

2006-01-29T21:11:00.000+01:00

This article is useful to explain the relations between the various variables involved in a PPC campaign and its main intent is to focus the crucial factors that will turn your strategy into a success, or not.

Requirements
It is assumed that you know what PPC is and how it can be used to generate a revenue. This model can be used with PPCs more than Adwords, of course, assumed they are using the same pricing logic.
Moreover, a knowledge of elementary algebra and linear systems is required to understand the mathematics I used in the problem.
A last note: I am not a math geek, so I may have incurred in mistakes. If so, let me know it and I will fix the various bugs.

The model
Okay, let's go inside the problem now.
In this model we focalize the attention to the balance between the money spent and the money earned. We will see what are the necessary conditions in order to have a positive net revenue, and we will use the model for particular cases, such as what is the minimum CTR we must reach in order to have a net revenue (and see if that aim is realistic or not).
Further applications of this model can be done to extend its purposes to a specific product selection or PPC campaign, for instance using statistical/stochastycal methods.

The variables are:

CTR
SALE_PRICE
SALE_COMMISSION
CPC
MAX_PER_DAY

The relations between them are:

SALE_EARNING = SALE_PRICE * SALE_COMMISSION
SUCCESSFUL_CLICKS = CLICKS * CTR
GROSS_REVENUE = SUCCESSFUL_CLICKS * SALE_EARNING
NET_REVENUE = GROSS_REVENUE * MAX_PER_DAY

Being CLICKS = MAX_PER_DAY / CPC

In this model we assume that the net revenue is referred to a time period of 1 day, and that the campaign performance is the same on everyday of the week.

Being more realistic, this is not that true because it is seen from the experience of thousands of marketers everyday that there is a substantial variation of the campaign performance in the days of the week. On a larger scale, there's a variation also in the months of the year and using historical records we can identify yearly trends.

For these reasons it would be more correct to define the above variables in function of the time also, but in this starting model we will limit the analysis to variables that are steady in time.

Using shorter variable names and playing with them a bit the result is:

a = b*c
d = e*f
g = b*c*e*f
h = e*(b*c*f - i)

where i = CPC and h is the net revenue.

Since we want the net revenue > 0, this means e*(b*c*f - i)>0 coming to the two conditions:

e > 0 (of course, we assume e i.e. clicks > 0 because we buy them)

and

i < b*c*f

Where i in this case is the [B]maximum CPC[/B] you can afford in order to have a net revenue.

To be more clear, the maximum CPC you can afford is smaller than the product of the sale price, the sale commission and the CTR.

For example, if you sell an article worth $20, where your commission is 5% and your estimated CTR is 5%, the maximum CPC you can bid is $0.05 . In order to be safer you can define a risk factor R greater than 1 of your choice, so the formula would become

i < b*c*f*R^(-1)

I have made a simple XLS file helping you to calculate your maximum CPC that you can find here: http://www.forumboosting.com/maxcpc.xls (will be active in a short time, got temporary problems with my FTP)

Further developments of the model will be published in the following days. Stay tuned :-)

Falco85

Use PPC Ads such as Google Adwords to build traffic

2006-01-29T15:00:00.000+01:00

First of all I would like to excuse myself with my readers for the absence of those days. I have been busy with my studies so I wasn't able to post there. Will try to post again every day starting from now ;-)

Apart from this introduction, the main topic of today is PPC: Pay Per Click Advertising .

What is PPC About

Pay Per Click Advertisement is maybe the biggest business present in the Internet today. Millions of companies and websites relies on paid search engine rankings to promote their content and get traffic. This is for sure the most effective method to get targeted traffic to your page, but it has got a cost: in fact you pay for every visitor clicking your ad, and the most famous advertising places are expensive for this. You can pay from $0.05 to several dollars per visitor.. so this "game" is worth the price if you will have a return from it (the so called ROI, Return On Investment).

One way to make money from the Internet is to use PPC Engines, obtain targeted traffic and make it to buy products from your affiliates, from which you will get commissions.

In that way, the net revenue you will get will be the difference between of what you earned in commissions and what you spent in ads. The most difficult part of the game is to balance your daily budget, keyword bidding and several other factors. If you play with those factors without knownledge of what you are doing, you will simply lose money. And yes, you can lose serious money if you are not aware of what you are doing. If you want to conduct this way of marketing, you will have to constantly monitor your progresses and see what is winning and what is not. In that way you will be able to fastly recognise the sectors in which you are losing money consequently dropping a losing advertising campaign.

Let's go straight to a combo you can use. For example, you can join the Amazon Affiliate Program and promote their products over Google Adwords . I must warn you that Adwords is the most expensive PPC on the market, but it's also the most known and effective (its results go in the first page of Google search rankings ). You can also try cheaper PPC such as newly started ones (MSN AdCenter and Yahoo Publishing network I guess) to promote your products.

I would advice to be very synthetic on your advertisements, and always put the nominal price in order to avoid curiosity clicks (people who will click your ad just out of curiosity, but won't buy the product). Mention every bonus if any, such as free shipping or discount coupons. Conduct a search before publishing an ad and figure out if you have any competitor doing your same job.. and balance correctly the click price / daily budget in function of the ROI. Basically this is everything you need to know for this kind of marketing. I am currently doing this as an experiment, and will let you know my strategies and results once I have got the first resumes.

Make search engines index your site and create traffic

2006-01-17T13:26:00.000+01:00

Ok, until now we have spoken how to monetize your current traffic, and how content websites can be used to create a revenue.

Today we will speak about a crucial topic, that is create your targeted traffic and make it increase steadily.

In fact, your site lives because of your public, and the more the public is interested in your arguments, the more the odds that your advertisements will be appreciated and clicked by them. That makes a sense, isn't it? You don't need traffic whatever it is. You need targeted traffic interested in your topics.

In order to create this targeted traffic, you will need of course to have original quality content (possibly written from your own) to be displayed, resulting useful to the visitors. Anyway, this is not sufficient to bring you lots of traffic. You need a quality exposure of your website in the major sources of targeted traffic. Nowadays, the major sources from where you can get traffic are search engines, of course!

There are millions of search engines around here, but the most important ones are Google, Yahoo and MSN in this order. Another important website in which check your popularity is Alexa, that ranks the websites up to their curent traffic.

The main question is: how to make the search engines know that your site is alive, and how to make them to crawl it in the better way in order to have a proper indexing in their archives?

There is no exact answer to this question. Every Search Engine (often abbreviated with SE, while SERPS are the "archives" we were talking before) has got its own indexing algorithm (we'll abbreviate it in the future as "algo"), and everyone of them has got different ranking criteria. Furthermore, SEs update their algos on a regular basis and a website that was ranking #1 for many keywords, can drop in the ranking the next day. Let me give you a suggestion about this: don't put all your eggs in a basket . If you just point on a single website and for any reason it falls from the rankings, your efforts will be vain. That's why is better to earn $5/day on several websites instead of $50/day on a single one.

Let me give you some tips that will make search engines acknowledge about your website.

1) Get backlinks : that means that you must have links pointing to your website from other sites, possibly on a different IP class and from websites whose content is related to yours. The higher Page Rank the other sites will have, the more the SEs are indexing their pages and they will note about your link, and the bots will come to your site. Many people obtain links by purchasing them, others by spamming guestbooks (but DON'T do this, because it's SPAM). The better way to obtain links is to create quality content: if your site is interesting, people will link to your website without need that you ask them to do it. You can get some good links as start putting your website URL in forum signatures, if the forums in which you stay allow this practise. For example, Digital Point Forums are a good way to have your site indexed quickly, but don't abuse about your signature and don't put websites with questionable content ;)

2) Create a proper robots.txt file in your server : robots.txt is a file frequently picked up by the search engines, letting them to know if you have content you do not want indexed by the bots. I don't need to reinvent the wheel since there are nice tutorials about robots.txt out there. For example, read this nice robots.txt tutorial .

3) Make your pages correctly linked between them : broken links are penalties for your indexing

4) Use proper meta tags and titles (as said in my previous article)

I have had an interesting trick lately, that you may try. Once you have got good keywords, select the best 4 among them and make sure they are present (in the same order) in your title and meta tags. Put them also in your page as the first and the last present in the body content. Make them bold or italic if you feel so. This should help your ranking. Currently I am testing this strategy and I will let you know about the results.

So, the most important thing when creating a website, is to obtain links to let search engines know that you exist :) . SEs also have a submit feature in which you can directly submit to them your URL, but there are people saying that this will lead to a penalty on your rankings so to be sure don't do it. I don't need to directly submit my sites, but I get always ranked :) Try this Google Search to read about articles speaking about this.

Another nice thing you should do to improve your traffic is to have a constantly updated blog on your website. Looks like SEs love blogs, and index them often. Once you have updated your blog, ping it using services like Ping-O-Matic and Blog Flux Pinger. Those services will list your blog in their ping pages, which are constantly monitored by the major search engines.

This is all I had to say about this argument for today. If I will have updates about it (and I do have them sometimes), I will post about them here :)

If you have any indexing tip that you may share, comment about it and if worth and proved I will make it public! I love comments and I love helping people, so don't exhitate to contact me with a comment... also, if you like this blog, remember to link it. It is greatly appreciated :)

Make your site search engine friendly

2006-01-15T21:07:00.000+01:00

Optimizing your pages for the search engines is crucial for a good spidering from the search engine crawlers, and you should avoid the most common errors in which newbie webmaster incur, having their pages filtered for some reason and not showing in the SERPS.

This practise is called onpage SEO and it's the first important step for your success as web publisher.

First of all, remember that all the crawlers read text only pages, so putting your relevant keywords in images (i.e. logos) won't be any good.

These are the most common suggestions about onpage SEO:

1) Optimize your title and meta tags. Make sure that the title and the meta tag description and keywords are present. They are your website's business card, so you must take care of them. Put relevant keywords only, that make sense together.

2) Use h tags in the correct hierarchy (h1, h2, h3 ..) and put there your relevant keywords.

3) Repeat your most important keywords at the end of the page, as the last words the crawler would see.

4) Stress your relevant keywords using the bold and italic html tags.

5) Write clever paragraphs about your topic, and do the proper in-site linking through your pages.

6) Check your keyword density with a tool like this, and make sure it does not exceed a 25% or you will get most likely banned from the serps.

7) DO NOT use hidden text, and make sure that your text is all visible and that won't match your background color. This is frowned upon all the major search engines and their bots can detect that kind of cheat.

8) Do not abuse of image alt tags. You can put relevant keywords there altough it is considered black hat seo. Just use moderation and common sense. Same thing for the title tag for the a hrefs.

Mainly this is what I do when optimizing one page :) There are advanced techniques that you can implement to do this, but let's start from the basics ;)

Make sure that every page on your site is properly linked, that there are any broken links and that you can easily browse through your pages. Building a sitemap and submitting it to google sitemaps is a good idea and it will be subject of a future article. We will also speak how to optimize your keywords using databases. Every page must have unique title and meta tags, otherwise the search engine will take them as duplicate pages and won't consider it in the serps.

For keyword suggestions, use nice tools like the one in Digital Point: Keyword Suggestion Tool . If you want a professional tool to do it, then you should consider Word Tracker .

Build content sites to create a revenue

2006-01-13T14:51:00.000+01:00

A content site is a web site in which gather articles, paragraphs and documents related to a certain argument. People go there to find informations, and most likely they will be interested in the contestualized ads you are offering to them.

For this reason, adding proper affiliate banners and adsense on a content site is a winning game. On the other hand, a content site requires a lot of time and dedication to write your own original content, and of course you will need your writing skills and knowledge in the field in which you want to contribute.

A good content site anyway needs the proper marketing and must bring fresh content everyday to interest people and create a recurring public that will visit your site everyday. Word of mouth also has a strong power: the more your site will be useful, the more people will know about it and will link it in their blogs, websites etc... thus increasing your popularity and Page Rank (don't you know what page rank is? we will talk about it on a future article).

When opening a new content site, you must first conduct a small market research to see what the competition is already offering and what is already indexed in the major search engines. In fact if you are going to start a content site about a very competitive argument, most likely you won't have success because you won't have the proper visibility.

The best thing for a new content site is to choose your own niche in which your contribution in terms of content will be an added value so will be warmly greeted by the public. Bringing new ideas and new documents about a selected niche is another key to success. Of course this will need your dedition and also a bit of luck, but if you are serious about making money from the net this is the first step.

Another good advice is: don't create a website to make money only. Create a website for your public, make it interesting and unique in its genre. Once you have got the proper traffic, monetizing it is just a simple step of putting the proper ads.

Choosing a good domain name is a plus that you should consider also. We will talk about choosing a good domain name in a further article, because it is an important topic.

Another good tip if you are willing to open a content site is: try to create an online community about it. This means you should open a forum board (you can find free solutions on the net such as phpBB, just google about it), a blog or whatever else. Make alliances with similar websites if possible, for a mutual link exchange. This will benefit both of you if your arguments are similar.

In the next articles we will speak about more arguments about how to create content sites and how to monetize them. Stay tuned!

Making money on the net: what is Adsense

2006-01-12T10:40:00.000+01:00

If you are a web publisher and you have many hits daily on your pages, you can monetize your traffic by putting advertisements. They can be static banners, dynamic banners, text links and so on. A new form of advertisement that lately had great success is the so called contestualized advertisement, such as Adsense.

Adsense is the Google Advertisement program, and consists in a little script you must add to your html code. Adsense has got some kind of crawler that will analyze your page, and will put on the chosen spot relevant ads that are relative to the content you are publishing on your site.

For example, if you have a website about mobile phones, Adsense will display relevant ads for instance about ringtones, spare parts and so on.

On Adsense you are paid for each click you have on your ads, but the click value is not constant. In fact advertisers place their bids, and Google will display the ads with the higher bids first. The price of an ad is up to the actual higher bid thus your commission depends on this. There are content keywords that will display high paying ads, and others that won't. Anyway, don't build your website just to rank for those high paying keywords. In fact most probably they will be highly competitive and if you are new to web publishing you won't make so much money from it.

My personal advice is to create a site for your public, writing original content and putting interest and value on your pages. When you have the traffic, the money will follow. If you have an already started website with ontopic content, just place your Adsense in a good way and you will see the cash flow!

There are many ways in which Adsense can be placed on your page. You can choose between different formats and you can set your favourite color palette. Regarding colours and style, there are 2 different opinions in the webmaster community. There are people that believe that you should put high visible colours to attract the attention of your reader. Others think the opposite saying that your ads must blend perfectly. I use this second philosophy: depending on the page I set the border and background to be the same of the one used in my page, and as text colour I use the same used on the content text.

Another important issue is to place your Adsense in a good spot. The following image is a hot spot map that Google advices to place the ads:

Google is speaking about Adsense on its optimization tips page that I think you should read carefully because it's the best guide you can find. Don't believe people selling you their ebooks on adsense, they are just trying to rip you off some money for informations that you can easily find for free on the net. I hope that with time this page will become a valuable information source :-) But it will take time, of course.

Mainly, this is all you need to know to start your Adsense campaign. To sign up to the program, you must already have a quality website running that you must submit to the Adsense team for their approval. Once approved, you can use your adsense code everywhere. Please take care of the Adsense Terms and Conditions , and follow them strictly. If you will get caught cheating in some way they will permanently ban you and your balance will be erased. Just be honest and you will see your results in a short matter of time, I proved it personally and now I can proudly say that :-D !

Another interesting way of tweaking adsense is to make the ad colour change on every refresh. This is done for example on Digital Point Forums (you can see the link on the right column), but I guess they do it with a script that randomly put a new script code on each refresh. In fact you cannot modify Adsense code in anyway, so this is the only way they could to it without infringing the rules.

Also, don't disregard the value of link ads. They are simple text links that you can put in different formats on every page. I use them on several pages and have great results with them, because they perfectly blend with the rest. Many people say that Adsense is working because it looks like regular content and people click there to seek for informations. As long as you follow their TOS you are ok with this ;) so just try to make your ads more natural as possible.

Every page has got its "perfect" ad. It means that in a page in which link ads work perfectly, maybe an ad unit won't, and viceversa. So you must experiment a bit and see what's the best combination for each page.

For now this is all I wanted to say about Adsense, I will add some more informations and advices in the future, when I will be a little bit more expert to talk about it :-)

Have a great day!
Falco85

What is SEO about

2006-01-11T23:00:00.000+01:00

First of all let me introduce me since it's my first post in this brand new blog.

My name is Alessandro and I am based in Rome, Italy. I am known on many forum boards as falco85, mainly webmaster related boards.

I started my webmaster "career" on November 2005, so I am still fresh and I am currently learning about all this stuff. I created this blog to share my thoughts and what I know so far about this huge world, in which many persons dedicate their life, with some quitting their full time job to create content websites.

I will try to write there all I have learned and practised in these months: since November I have built up a few sites and made some money from this activity, so I touched by hand that yes you can make money on the web but it will take great effort to have real results!

Let's start with a brief article about what is SEO about.

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. It's the art of making a webpage rank high in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN (the most famous three). This is done with many techniques, that include the website page optimization (called onpage seo) and link building (offpage seo).

There are many ways in which SEO can be done. There are "legitimate" techniques that are part of white hat seo, and "tricky" ones (frowned upon the search engines) that go under the name of black hat seo. As far as I know both white and black hat seo have got success if implemented properly but black hat seo involves "cheating" to the search engines and building spam sites, so from my personal point of view is not recommendable. For now I have not investigated on black hat too much, but I am willing to do it soon to know in detail what it is about.

So for now, my future articles will be about white hat seo, with which I have reached my first satisfying results. Just to write a number, as an overall of my activity as webmaster I have made $500 from November (so in 2 months), spending like $200 to set up everything. I expect my earnings to increase in the future, putting more effort and using my increasing experience in the field.

Here there are the articles I will try to write on a daily base:
- Making money on the net: what is Adsense about
- Building content sites to create a revenue
- Make your site search engine friendly
- How a search engine will acknowledge of your site
- Check your server stats to optimize your traffic
- Use PPC Ads such as Google Adwords to build traffic
- Blog Revenues
- Affiliate Marketing
- Database Driven Websites

This is the planning for the next 9 days, I will post a new summary when those articles will be completed.

Hope you will like the idea :-) Comments are well appreciated