Adsense Tips and Adsense Tricks - Ask the Blogger
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- Get the Most Active Ingredient for Successful BloggingI’m sure you had been around (months or years) surfing the net. Over time you have found your favorite blogs. These are the blogs you visited frequently if not daily. But have you asked yourself, what made these blogs your favorite? One prime reason is because they offer you fresh content, regularly and consistently. Offering fresh content regularly and consistently made you their regular reader and that made them too, successful.
What will you feel if one of your favorite blog made no new post for a day? Maybe, you say - it’s fine. What about a week or couple of weeks? If you are like me, I will drop the blog from my favorite list if no new post will be made for two weeks. But most people will drop it in one week time.
The same is true with your blog. If you made no post for a certain time, your readership will drop and that goes with your traffic. What is ironic in the online world is that, it is so easy to lose readership and traffic but it’s hard to build them.
Commitment is greatly involve in writing fresh content regularly and consistently. And if you want your blogging to be successful, you must make the commitment to blog consistently for a stretch of time. It’s insufficient to blog regularly for few days and then stop for few weeks.
If you’ve been convinced blogging is work and blogging makes money, then you must hurdle to overcome the notion that blogging is for the short term. In fact, to grow your blog, you need to write for the intermediate-to-long term to see some kind of return on your time.
There are other great reasons for blogging regularly and consistently over a stretch of time. Having built a body of content allows Google and other search engines time to find you and get your blog out of the Sandbox, thus increasing your blog traffic from the search engine more. This will also allow you to prove to your readers that you’re in it for a longer term and you know what you’re talking about. Most of all, the time and commitment of blogging regularly and consistently will make your blog attractive not only to the search engine and readers but most especially, this will open new gates for your blog to multiple online stream revenues. Remember, build traffic and money will just come.
So, how to possess the most active ingredient for successful blogging? Simple, write regularly and consistently.
At the end of the day, the reality of blogging, is that to be successful, you’ve got to write regularly and consistently, and you’ve got to find the time to do it.
Fri, 17 Aug 2007 02:35:00 +0000 - Blogging for Profit: The Most Profitable Types of Blogs in the BlogosphereHave you heard of the phrase 'Blogging for Profit'? Yes, some people are making success driving profits from blogs. The good news is, this can happen to you. If you love to write, blogging might be a profitable business model for you.
Just as you can start with any topic to blog about, there are topics that are more profitable than others. If you are eyeing to drive some profit from your blog, you should pick a niche topic that has some solid affiliate programs and search revenue behind it. And if you have existing blogs, see how you can increase your earning capacity.
The hottest topics to blog nowadays are those fall under internet marketing, cutting edge technology and politics. Arts and music related blogs also tend to draw a large audience.
Aside from selecting niche topics, two types of blogs are immerging to be more profitable. They are the product review blogs and informational blogs.
Product Review Blogs
Product review blogs are popular and profitable. They can be monetized with Adsense, Chitika eMiniMalls and affiliate marketing as some products have affiliate programs associated with them. Two successful blogs of this type are Gizmodo and The Gadget Blog. These blogs focus on news and reviews of the latest gadgets on the market and
You don't have to create blogs exactly like the above example as these blogs requires tremendous amount of search effort. Instead, you can narrow the theme to something like "the latest digital cameras" or "the latest mp3 players".
Narrowing the theme will make your job easier, and assure you a much greater change of finding merchants who carry these products and have affiliate programs.
There's virtually no cost to you to conduct product review and there's plenty of affiliate opportunities for them. Just describe the product, put up some product images and then, link to the website using your affiliate link.
Informational Blogs
Most internet marketing blogs fall under this category. An information focused blog is usually centered around news and "how to" information. Let's take for example this blog of mine. My "front end" product is the content I provide. As you can see, my blog is primarily information focused, rather than product review focused. I share "how to" info centered on online and affiliate marketing.
On this blog, I'm able to link using my affiliate link to products and services with just a mention of their titles, or in keywords associated with them. I also have the blog monetized in other places by using Adsense ads, affiliate banners and etc.
You can do the same thing for other niches. Just think of the areas that interest you or in which you have some knowledge to share. Your post doesn't have to be novel length. All you're really doing is writing short articles.
There you have it, the two most profitable types of blogs in the blogosphere.
Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:35:00 +0000 - Monetize Your Blog with ChitikaChitika eMiniMalls is another type of ad that you can use to monetize your blog. The ad comes in a range of sizes but usually have a picture of a product and then some tabs running across the top that say “Description”, “Reviews”, “Best Deals”, and “Search”. As you put the cursor over the top of these tabs they change what the ad shows.
The ad comes with a customizable advert box which can be targeted either by keywords input when the ad code is generated or contextually in much the same way as Google’s AdSense program does.
Just like AdSense and YPN these ads pay out on a per click basis. The value of the clicks depends upon the product being featured. It can range from $0.10 to as much as several dollars.
When Chitika eMiniMall ads are set to be on non contextual and to target specific keywords, you can used it conjunction with AdSense.
Chitika eMiniMalls also offers a referral program. They pay out 10% of any clicks your referrals generate in the first 15 months. All the links to the Chitika site from this page contain my affiliate link, however that will have no impact on your earnings if you do decide to sign up here.
The program allows you to choose between different Ad formats. They also allow you to make some changes to the design of your ads by changing colors of borders, title and text to match your blog.
Chitika will pay you 30 days following the end of the month that your commissions are earned. You can opt to have Chitika either pay the money direct into your paypal account at the end of each month, as long as the monthly total has exceeded $10, or you can have a standard cheque when your earning reach $50.
Chitika is a best choice for those people who want to show some products like Digital Cam, Laptops, PC Monitor and etc. on their blog because Chitika’s ads are totally product based.
Personally, I would recommend you to try this program; even if you find it's not for you or that it doesn't really fit with your site's theme it is still worth an attempt.
Monetize your blog. Sign up now!
Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:30:00 +0000 - How to Turn Your Adsense Earning from $10 to $800 a WeekI was inspired on the disclosure made by Chris with his Adsense income. Chris is 21 years of age and a university student from Brisbane, Australia. Over the last 12 months he has taken his sites from $10 to $800 a week of Adsense income.
He disclosed how he unfold the true potential of his sites, not just in terms of AdSense but also in terms of SEO and the importance of building a good quality site.
I like to quote his answers to the following questions:
How did you get serious?
I took a bit of a risk, bought a few books about AdSense, SEO and general website development and dropped down to part time uni and started dedicating more time to my websites. I started writing articles that were on topics that people wanted to know about and topics that people were searching for, and I placed these articles into a highly optimized template that was just designed for these articles, then I went about building a few backlinks for these articles to help with the SEO. I’d have periods of maybe a week where everyday I would sit down and write an article two, often three or four, and I’d just keep writing, sharing my knowledge, sharing my expertise.
Why were articles successful?
These articles each focused on an individual search term or topic within my industry. The articles were informative and useful. They were 100% original and completely unique in the industry. They were my thoughts, opinions and beliefs on topics that I was very knowledgeable on. They were detailed and lengthy. And the search engines loved them.
Why did the search engines love them?
Because they were original and unique, and because they were getting backlinks and they were on my established sites which I believe have a fair amount of "TrustRank" because at this point my sites were well over 2 years old and had thousands of backlinks, because I had slowly but surely developed them over the previous two years. Plus the articles were all on niche topics that there wasn’t that much competition for, and I had employed very basic, but very solid SEO techniques. Things like:
- Giving each article an individual highly relevant page title.
- Using meta descriptions and keywords, but not abusing them.
- Using H1 and H2 tags.
- Using good keyword density and specific phrase targeting.
- Using good quality, unique, original and focused content.
- Building some well anchored backlinks.
- With a good navigational system between articles.
- Using an aged domain with good TrustRank.
You can read his story along with the question and answer session that transpire in the following post on Digital Point forums: My 2006 AdSense Summary - From $10/Week to $800/Week. Go, read and learn from him.
He indeed turned his sites into money making machine. You too can!
Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:12:00 +0000 - Eight Benefits of Blogging
There's a reason blogging is so addictive! Whether you blog for a hobby or a career, you're sure to be enjoying some of the many perks and benefits of maintaining a blog or two. Here are the top eight:
1. Community
Where else can you meet so many great, like-minded people? Blogging is a great way to share ideas and enter into discussions with people who share the same interests. Nothing makes up a successful blog like a thriving community. Whether or not you share the same opinion doesn't matter. If you have an active community, you're never alone!
2. Recognition
If you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field, blogging is a great way achieve recognition and turn others on to your point of view.
3. Employment Opportunities
Blogging can open many new doors, many bloggers have been able to quit their day jobs to blog professionally, while other receive job offers as a result of their expertise.
4. Revenue
If your blog is popular, it can also be profitable. Some bloggers earn millions each year.
5. It's Fun!
Blogging is fun! Even those of us who do it for a living enjoy what we do.
6. You're Part of Something Special
The blogging community is a special one indeed. Even those who feel as if they never belong, find a place among bloggers. From the social networking to the sharing of ideas, there's nothing like the world you'll encounter blogging.
7. Find Other Great Blogs
Blogging helps you to findother great resources. Your community members are sure to have recommendations, plus you'll find lots of great stuff while researching your niche.
8. Swag
Sometimes businesses will send you products or books to review. Many bloggers receive great swag.
Sat, 28 Jul 2007 17:11:00 +0000 - Important Skill in Blogging - CreativityDo you face challenges or road blocks to success? How about on turning your blog into money making machine?
Some one says, creativity is a million dollar skill and I believe on this. Without creativity you lost your greatest leverage for producing value. In turn, this will cripple your earning potential as earning in most cases is a function of your ability to product value.
Creativity transforms good ideas into great ideas. Creative thinking can give insight into overcoming challenges. Creativity enhances the ability to problem solve. And the good news is – everyone can be creative.
Tapping into self creative ability is vital to maximize results. Even if you’ve never considered yourself creative, there are proven techniques and approaches to help anyone claim their own creativity. Along with the techniques and approaches to help you become creative, Steve Pavlina defines clearly the ground rules for maximizing your creative output.
Remember, creativity is a million dollar skill and can be learn. Use and maximize your creativity to turn your blog into money making machine.
Wed, 18 Jul 2007 11:43:00 +0000 - How to Make Your Blog UniqueHow Do You Make Your Blog Unique and Stand out from 55 Million Others?
There are 55 Million blogs out there and every day this number is still keep growing. They said, blogosphere is still in it’s infancy. So, how do you make your blog stand out from the rest?
As regards money, for example, 99% of blogs don't make a penny and most soon disappear.
The blogging winners will be those who persevere, adapt and keep on learning and try to be creative.
Your blog post maybe speaking the same thing with hundreds of others. This situation demands maximum creativity in order to stand out. In one of the post made by Steve Pavlina, he gives us a sneak-peek at his flowing creativity experience. Learn from one of the top blogger, read his post entitled "My Experience in Creativity".
I hope you can get lessons from Steve on how to make your blog stand-out through creativity.
Fri, 13 Jul 2007 04:03:00 +0000 - Monetize with Affiliate MarketingWhat is Affiliate Marketing? How can your blog make money from it? Affiliate Marketing is a widespread method of promoting a website, in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying finder's-fees to individuals who introduce new clients to a business. Here, your agrees that your blog will feature buttons from an ecommerce site, and you gets a compensation based on performance such as on sales, clicks, registrations, or a combination of all.
Yes, you can make money online by publishing websites and featuring the offers of merchants in the content of your blog. I build content rich landing pages. Within the content I build links to my affiliate merchant’s products, and I make money online when visitors make purchases. It's really a simple process because affiliate programs are abundant online. The best thing about this is that there are absolutely no limits to how much you can make money.
Some companies pay you 75% or more. You can even make $100 from just 1 sale, for doing nothing but placing an ad on your blog. And if you have a free blog like mine, then it's literally money for nothing.
But how do affiliate advertising really work?
Let's say one of my friend was advertising www.adultfriendfinder.com and was being paid $1, each time she bring them a unique visitor.
She would place something about adultfriendfinder on my blog - either a small text ad, a banner ad, or a video ad. The ads are generally provided by the Advertiser so you don't need to worry about making your own. In this case, all she have to do is copy and paste some code into your blog. That's easy.
Each time someone clicks on her ad, she would be paid a commission. And due to the program policies of Google Adsense, I cannot display this affiliate banner.
Some affiliate programs will not going to pay you for the clicks but for the subscriber and/or customer you bring. The good thing about affiliate marketing is that the visitor doesn't need to make a purchase on that day. Some affiliate program will still pay you for the lead even if the visitor you introduce will become subscriber and/or customer say 2 weeks or 30 days later.
Join a merchant's affiliate program, publish websites about the offers of that merchant and make money. There are a number of Affiliate Marketing Networks that bring you a wide rage of Affiliate programs. This makes things much easier for you as you don't need to go to each merchant individually. These are: Clickbank, Commission Junction and Clixgalore.
So there you have it. Your blog can make money from affiliate marketing. Start looking for affiliate programs related to your blog's theme or blog post. Remember, the best thing about affiliate marketing is that there are absolutely no limits to how much you can make money. So, Turn Your Blog Into Money Making Machine though affiliate marketing.
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:52:00 +0000 - Monetize Your Blog with ReviewMeMany of you have surely heard about blog advertising site PayPerPost. PayPerPost allows bloggers to make a few bucks by blogging about a product, service, or another website. The only problem (according to many) is that PayPerPost does not require the blogger to disclose the fact that the post was paid for. And they also require that the post be more or less positive in nature about the reviewed product or service. Needless to say, this opens the door for some questionable ethics.
Comes into play the newcomer ReviewMe, a PayPerPost (PPP) kind of ad network, with a twist. The contract between the ad network and the blogger makes it mandatory to disclose the fact that you are blogging for money but certainly not this one because I am not paid to write this post. I find my blog too young to join ReviewMe.
But that's not the only difference. Whereas a single fee per post is charged to advertiser for any bloggers, ReviewMe determines the set price by using an algorithm based on Alexa, Technorati and other statistics. The asked price varies, from 30$, up to an enticing 1,000$ per post, depending on your blog importance in the blogosphere.
And there is more. The blogger can share his/her honest opinion and still being paid. Of course, I have some doubts personally about how this can really be implemented. It is obvious to me that ReviewMe is trying to give a non-partisan flavour to their ad network. This way, it gives it more credibility. However, looking at it from any angle, since we're being paid by a third-party to talk about them, we can't truly bite the hand the feeds us. Anyway, the fact that we have the illusion of that choice is still a nice feature.
The only other requirement has to do with the review length and time limit to come up with a review, 200 words and 48 hours for this particular assignment. Payment can be made by check or by PayPal.
Getting Started
Signing up is extremely easy, taking literally one or two minutes to fill out a small form. You are then automatically logged in and ready to go. The next step is to submit your blog. This is done by entering basic details of your blog such as Title, Description, RSS URL, Keywords, and of course, your URL. Your blog is then either automatically approved or declined. This is based on Alexa ranking, Technorati ranking, and RSS subscribers. Publishers may have up to 6 different blogs attached to their account.
If approved, you're completely set up and ready to go. There is very little to actually read in terms of instructions on the site, but a FAQ section is there to help answer some of the questions you may have.
Reviewing
Reviewing is quite simple. ReviewMe's system works by advertisers choosing which blogs they'd like to be reviewed by. This is most likely determined by what topic and niche your blog lies in. You get to decide if you'd like to review them or not, the choice is completely up to you and you're not forced to review anything you don't want to.
Once your have finished your review and posted it on your blog, you simply return to ReviewMe and submit the URL of the post with the review and you're done.
Payment Details
Publishers are paid 50% of revenue, which may sound high, but is pretty standard. Also, ReviewMe's prices to advertisers are somewhat expensive so publishers are really getting paid quite well.
Price is automatically recalculated monthly, based on factors including theme, estimated traffic, link popularity, and estimated RSS subscribers. Publishers are paid the first of every month via PayPal or check.
Additional Information
Publishers may publish an unlimited number of reviews.
Reviews do not necessarily have to be in English. ReviewMe asks for reviews to be written in the Publisher's "normal" language. If their blog's category is German, for example, advertisers will generally expect the language of the review to be German.
Wed, 04 Jul 2007 17:37:00 +0000 - Have You Ever Heard of JohnChow.com?An hour ago, I come across a post from John Chow Dot Com entitled Review My Blog & Get A Free Linkback. John Chow has organize a review contest where you can win a MiniTV USB from him by writing a review for his blog. Besides the MiniTV USB, you can also get a linkback from his blog too.
The contest is now over but he said, he will continue to offer linkbacks for reviews.
I am more interested to the linkback than to the MiniTV USB. I know that getting a linkback from a blog with a Google Pagerank 4, Alexa Ranking 3,297 and Technorati Ranking 1,393 is definitely a plus specially for a blog like mine which is just 3 months old, enjoying a daily average traffic of 30, Google Pagerank 3, Technorati Ranking of 246,904 with 82 links from 15 blogs and having made 30 post so far.
Basically I would like to know the impact of his linkback to my blog. So I will give it a shot to review johnchow.com. I hope that after a month from getting his linkback I shall be on better position to evaluate the value of his linkback. I shall then make another post in here entitled “The Impact of the BackLink of Johnchow to my blog” so everybody will have an idea of the value of linkback from a popular blog such as this.
Johnchow.com is a technology blog. Even a car is considered a product of technology; I find his banner a little bit misleading. If a first time visitor spend just 5 seconds to his blog and right after ask about the theme of the blog, the visitor will probably answer the blog is all about cars. I also find his banner bigger than the average. It occupies greater space than the average banner size without giving any benefit.
The navigational feature of his blog is fare. But I find his category too broad having only 8 against 700 plus number of post. While the blog has a search function, it maybe more beneficial to the visitor to break down a little bit the categories.
I find his post valuable for anyone who wants to succeed online. Most of his topic center on marketing, traffic building, advertising and technology. .
While his blog earnings are high coming from multiple online streams, I still find his earning below his blog true potential. There is still a big room for him to engage to other revenue source.
I don’t find all his post interesting but generally all of them are informative while some are empowering.
So that’s it this is my review but remember this is not just a review but the beginning of an experiment to measure the value of the linkback from a blog like his.
I hope that after a month from getting his linkback I shall be on better position to evaluate the value of his linkback. I shall then make another post in here entitled “The Impact of the BackLink of Johnchow to my blog” so everybody will have an idea of the value of linkback from a popular blog such as this.
Mon, 25 Jun 2007 03:15:00 +0000 - Five ways to get Explosive TrafficDo you feel good about the volume of traffic currently you are getting? How would you like to exponentially increase your blog traffic without investing an extra cent on advertising?
Yes, this can be done. Your ultimate target should be to create sustainable traffic system, a kind that will pay you for years for a one-time effort. All this can be done through the powerful principle known as leverage.
What then is the secret to leverage?
The secret to leverage is in coming up with effective, efficient and self-perpetuating systems to gain traffic for years and years. You need to invest time creating traffic building generation tool. Once done, let it loose on the web and let others do the work for you. You will only do this once but the system continues to grow and multiply your results.
Any system you set up which allows your sales message or your links to propagate online in "word of mouth" fashion qualify as leverage. This can be an article with your byline and links on it submitted to multiple article directories, a free e-book and even your affiliate program.
However, for these tools to work their magic, the same must contain incentive either in the form of profit or value. You're either paying someone in commissions for their effort or you're offering them valuable information for free.
With this in mind, here are five no-cost explosive viral leveraging tactics you can put into action immediately:
1. Viral Free Report Traffic
Free reports are common these days. If you sell information product, it is almost a requirement to have at lease one freebie report aimed to pre-sell your information product and to be given away to other websites or blogs. Allowing others to re-brand your report with their affiliate links is the basic incentive for webmasters to let your report be downloadable for free at their website. In this case, your army of traffic multiplication is made up of other webmasters.
Place more value to your free report. Your success depend upon how likely webmasters are to earn commissions by giving it away. The more webmaster made your free reports downloadable, the more traffic you can win.
2. Viral Free Article Traffic
Yes, an article containing your byline and links submitted to article directories will gain you more traffic. Your traffic will be coming from the re-distribution of your articles with the clicks on the link in your byline and from the search engines themselves.
Place more valuable information on your free articles and optimized them as well. Webmasters love to publish valuable articles especially if it's for free. The more re-distribution you get, the more traffic you can win.
3. Viral Subscriber List Traffic
If you have built your subscriber list, not put it to work for you? Again, all you need to do is offer an incentive.
One great example is for you to announce to your list that one lucky member can receive a high ticket items from you for free if they can refer say for example X number of new subscriber to your list.
4. Viral Affiliate Program Traffic
If you have your own product or acquire a resellers right of the product made by others, opening your own affiliate program is a good traffic generator. The profit incentive is built in and you pay nothing for the publicity until an actual sale is made.
You can also consider implementing a multi-tier affiliate program with an attractive incentive plan. This will build your affiliate base like crazy and generate traffic on steroids for your site.
5. Viral Referral Traffic
I have seen this to some major sites. They have a referral script to implement a "refer a friend" feature. Remember, for this to work with great success, you have to give some form of incentive in exchange for the referral.
So, they are the 5 explosive secrets to boost your traffic for free for years. Try one of them. Integrate in your campaign the principle of giving incentives and watch your traffic multiply on autopilot that will last for years if not forever.
Remember, your ultimate target should be to create sustainable traffic system, a kind that will pay you for years for a one-time effort.
Good luck.
Tue, 29 May 2007 08:46:00 +0000 - Advanced SEO Techniques
What about those sites above mine in the rankings that use spam techniques?Yes it's true that you will see sites above yours in the search engine results pages that have used questionable techniques to get there. This is a short term phenomenon! Those sites are usually crushed by the search engines at the next update. You can afford to be smug if you see those sorts of sites above yours - because when they get kicked out of the index for doing the wrong thing, your site will be there ready to move up a few more places! Remember, our watchword when doing SEO is patience, we can afford to smile because we know our sites will eventually prevail.
Linking out from your siteWho you link to tells a search engine alot about your site. Outgoing links are very important because they can help you recommend your visitors to more resources. Visitors appreciate being helped, so this is a good strategy to have on your website. The only problem is that search engines don't like you linking to 'bad neighborhoods'. 'Bad neighborhoods' are low quality sites which may tarnish your website. Avoid these like the plague. Try and link to only good quality sites which are relevant to your site. The better the sites you link to, the more favourably search engines look upon your site.
Paid linksFrom an SEO point of view these are bad news. Paid links should only be used to get traffic. Search engines don't like paid links that pretend to be a 'vote' for your website. If you pay for a link, ask the linking site to add rel="nofollow" to the link which tells the search engines not to count it as a 'vote'.
Duplicate PagesSome people will tell you there is some sort of penalty if you have 2 pages the same on your website. Duplicate pages are where the URL is different but the content on the pages is too similar or exactly the same. For instance, http://www.google.com and http://www.google.com.au are nearly identical, even though they have different URLs. Typically a search engine will look at those two pages and decide they are both similar, and display only one. There is no penalty as the searcher finds what they are looking for anyway. The problem comes when there are links (or 'votes') to both pages. That means the 'votes' are split and the information is seen as less important than it really is. For this reason it is usually best to avoid duplicate pages from the start. If you already have duplicate pages, it is best to do a 301 redirect back to one.
What is PR? Is it important?PR stands for PageRank, Google's system of rating webpages. You can check PR of pages but the tools available show outdated information and are not really relevant. PR plays less of a role in search engine placement these days and you really shouldn't worry about it. Far more important is making good content and getting good incoming links to your site.
www vs. no wwwSome search engines have a problem with www and non www. What this basically means is that they think there is one website at http://example.com and another website at http://www.example.com. Of course this is a silly concept for humans but a challenge for automated search robots. Always point internal links to either one or the other for your site. Of course there are people who will link to you the opposite way.
Dynamic URLsDo you have a dynamic site? Dynamic URLs have a ? in them with a few parameters after the ?. Check to see if dynamic URLs are generated for your site by using a spider simulator on your site. If so, you will need to get rid of those session URLs for spiders! This can be quite complicated and depends on what type of server and software you are using, but you can start your research here and here.
Once you get rid of session ID's, dynamic URL's are indexed and ranked on Google quite well. MSN and Yahoo still have problems indexing those pages. Overall, if you have the skill or you can find someone to help you do it, it is better to convert dynamic URLs to static URLs. This gives you a better chance of being indexed by all search engines.
Photos and ImagesFor all photos and images on your pages, make sure they are not too large. It is best to resize them in an imaging program to their finished size before inserting them in your webpage and uploading them to your site. Make sure all images have an
tag which accurately describes the photo or image.
The robots.txt fileA good robots.txt file is like an invitation for search engine crawlers to check out your site. It is also useful for stopping some crawlers. For example, I used to despair because I was using way too much bandwith on my webserver account for one of my sites. The main reason too much bandwith was being used was because the Google Image crawler was visiting my site a couple of times a month and downloading the thousands of product images we had. Now, there is no reason for my thousands of product images to be on Google search, these are well known products and people were just looking for images to steal to put on their own websites anyway. The solution? I blocked the Google Imagebot from my site using the robots.txt file. This saves many gigabytes of bandwith every month. The robots.txt file is useful for several SEO purposes - for example stopping search engines from indexing irrelevant content .
Sat, 26 May 2007 08:41:00 +0000 - Get Your Site Indexed by Search Engines
First of all, you need quality content. That does not neccesarily mean a long boring article about some subject in your niche. For example, a friend of mine has a site with photos. Each page has a photo with a brief description of the subject. Each and every page of the site is indexed. Searchers usually find these pages because they are looking for a photo of the subject. So quality content can not only include articles, but also photos, tools, jokes, discussions, forums, videos, commentaries, advice, FAQs or a myriad of other types of content. Be brutal. If you came to your webpage as a regular visitor, would your page be entertaining and/or informative? Would you find your way around the site easily? Would you stay? And, more importantly for our next point, would you recommend your page to others?
You need incoming links! The best incoming links are what search engines call organic links. What are organic links? It is where someone likes your site, and adds an unsolicited link to your site from their site. Sounds easy? Wrong. Gaining organic links takes a long time if you sit back and wait for others to link to you. There are quicker ways to gain good incoming links which we can't cover here but I can thoroughly recommend this page - 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006. Of course, all links are not created equal. As a general rule of thumb, links from sites which are more authoritive relevant to your website carry more weight with search engines. Least weight is given to irrelevant links from low ranking sites. To give examples, if I have a site about growing cactus in the UK, a link from the British Cactus and Succulent Society would be an ideal link. A link from a home loan site would be totally irrelevant and would probably be ignored by search engines.
To summarize links, search engines consider links from other pages to your page as a 'vote' for your page, however some votes are better than others. As Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall say on the abovementioned page, "Because links are still the basic connector, the basic relationship, on the Web. And for the forseeable future they're going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page."
Links from better sites are always harder to get, but if your content is worthwhile major sites will happily link to you. Don't bother with reciprocal links (where someone links to you if you link to them) as these links are usually worthless. The better your incoming links, the deeper search engine crawlers will go into your site and the more pages from your site will get indexed. The better your content, the better your links, the more accessible your pages are, the higher you will rank.
Wed, 23 May 2007 05:38:00 +0000 - Know how Search Engines Function
Just because your site has been crawled, doesn't mean your site will be indexed by the search engines. Lets take a quick look at how search engines work. There are 3 stages - stage one is where search engine crawlers visit websites collecting the information on webpages and following links on those pages to other pages to collect the information on those pages and so on and so forth. On some websites the crawler may decide to only crawl a few pages if the site isn't considered too important (and we'll come back to this later, as that 'not so important' site may be yours!).
After collecting all that information, usually hundreds of millions or even billions of pages, the search engine starts indexing those pages. The search engine analyses each and every page to see what the page is about and how it fits in the site and the overall world wide web. The search engine decides which search queries the page may be relevant to, and then ranks that page against all the other pages on the web which are about the same topic. A single web page may be relevant to few or even dozens of different search terms so these all have to be taken into account. Obviously this is quite a simplistic view of how this works but I just want to give you some idea of the enormity of this task.
When a searcher types a search query into the search page, the search engine searches through it's index for what it thinks is the most relevant pages which will match the searchers request. This typically (and quite amazingly) only takes a fraction of a second, and the searcher is presented with a list of webpages that the search engine believes matches their request. For example, I just did a search for "home loans" and there were 34,000,000 results returned. Consider for a moment that you would like your webpage to rank in the top ten for the term "home loans", your page would have to better than 34,000,000 others! Of course, that is not impossible but unless you are a large national or multinational home mortgage company, there is no need for you to rank in the top ten (from a searcher's viewpoint).
Okay, this is where we get to part about why your pages aren't indexed. Even though your page exists, that does not mean it will be automatically included in the search indexes. There are far too many pages on the Internet to include every single page. Search engines need other clues about a page's quality to include it.
Sun, 20 May 2007 08:36:00 +0000 - Make Your Site Become Search Engines Friendly
A very important point made by Google, MSN and Yahoo (and the others) is that your website should be designed for humans, not for search engines. I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment but you still need to make sure a search engine crawler can find it's way around your site.
You have to make sure every page on your site will be found by search engine crawlers and crawled properly. Your site and pages have to be set up correctly for this to happen. You need at least basic HTML knowledge to understand how to do the following.
Your website will need internal links that a search engine understands.Your website should be linked together so that every single page can be found by clicking a link from another page. The best way to do this is to have a site map. A site map is a single page (or series of pages if you have a huge site) which links every page that exists on your website. If you use a javascript menu, you will need a "noscript" section as well. Another important point to remember is that, generally speaking, the more clicks away from the home page a webpage is, the less likely that page is to appear in the search index (but we'll cover the exceptions later).
Your web pages will need a unique titleChoosing titles for your web page is not hard - just choose a short sentence or phrase which accurately describes what your page is about. If your page is about growing cactus in the UK, there's your title... Growing Cactus in the UK. This is also what people will see in the search engine results pages, so if they see your relevant page they will click on your link, even if it is number four or five in the search results. Make sure every page has it's own unique title.
Your web pages will need a unique meta descriptionMake sure your pages have a unique meta description. An effective meta description is a short synopsis of what visitors will expect to see on the webpage. This is NOT a place for repeating keywords or telling lies about what the page is actually about. To use our example of growing cactus in the UK, an appropriate meta description would be "How to successfully grow cactus in the UK, with practical tips and examples". If you don't have different and unique meta descriptions for each page, the search engines may presume that all your pages are the same.
Your pages need < h1> and < h2> tagsThese tags, as well as < strong> and < em> tags, emphasize to the search engines (and more importantly, visitors) the overall theme of the content of your page. Remember, use these tags honestly and appropriately. One heading with < h1> is enough. A < h2> or < h3 >for each relevant block of text is OK. One or two strong tag on a particular keyword or keyphrase is more than adequate. If your headings look ugly and contrived to a visitor, you will probably be penalized by search engines now or in the future for them.
Check for errors on your siteIt's easy to check for errors on your site, and there are a couple of great tools available for free to do this. The first I use is Xenu Linksleuth. You can read about it and download it from here. Basically Xenu crawls your website like a search engine spider and reports any broken links. This is very valuable information, because broken links can stop search engine crawlers from crawling your site. Broken links can arise from misspellings or pages that were deleted.
Another useful tool is Google Webmaster Console. There are many useful functions in Webmaster Console which we will talk about later but right now we'll highlight their error reporting. (At this point don't upload a sitemap to the Webmaster Console, I'll talk about that a little later). Once you validate your website at Webmaster Console go to the crawl error screen and you will be presented with any errors the Google crawler encountered on your site. Obviously if the Google crawler has a problem navigating your site then other search engine crawlers will also have a problem.
Using these two tools gives you the opportunity to diagnose and fix any errors with linking on your site and ensure greater success when your site is indexed.
Thu, 17 May 2007 20:31:00 +0000
