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

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

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

• 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

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!

Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

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

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

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

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.