SEO Secrets

Snickers - Super Bowl Commercial

2008-03-17T20:59:00.001+09:00

While the goal of a Super Bowl commercial is to grab the attention of the masses, this spot is just slightly less controversial than: "Don't Be Gay. Eat a Snickers."

The agency that put this commercial together did wonders for the Snickers brand, which will now and forever be associated with chest hair antics and mild homophobia. Good job, gang!

Manoj Jasra

2007-12-19T14:27:00.000+09:00

With high level, strategic expertise in many areas of online marketing including web analytics, search engine optimization, social media optimization, and more.

Manoj is a blogger and published author for Web Analytics World, Web Analytics Association, SearchEngineGuide, SearchEngineLand

Web Guru - Gary Angel

2007-11-19T14:30:00.000+09:00

Gary Angel bringings over twenty years of experience in decision support, CRM, and software development. Gary co-founded and is president and chief technology officer of SEMphonic.

Time In Line

2007-07-08T22:48:00.000+08:00

Lots of time each month is wasted standing in line at the bank, in the grocery store, and almost everywhere you go.

Some of that time can be recaptured by scheduling those errands at off peak times when the lines are much less and by completing that business by shopping and banking on the Internet and by mail.

Keep a record of your time spent in line each week and make changes that will build more time back into your days for more productive results.

Temporal Search Data

2007-07-05T15:14:00.000+08:00

All in all, I like Stoney's post, particularly for his last few lines of advice:

Almost every site owner will, at one time or another, find themselves face to face with significant ranking drops. Panicking should be the last thing that you do. Sometimes the best course of action is nothing, however you can never go wrong with a bit of research.

Many people, when seeing sudden drops in rankings, make drastic changes in their website in order to compensate. For the most part, this is a bad move. The first thing you need to do is to research the issue, identify what (as much as can be determined) caused the problem and then carefully plan out a course of action, if any, which needs to be taken.

However, make sure you're thinking carefully about temporal data the engines use and how it might be impacting your rankings/results.

Impossible is Only Some Else's Opinion

2007-07-04T16:19:00.000+08:00

"All things are possible until they
are proved impossible -
and even the impossible
may only be so, as of now."

Pearl S. Buck

Concentration

2007-07-02T09:12:00.000+08:00

What a great discrepancy there is between men and the results they achieve! It is due to the difference in their power of calling together all the rays of their ability, and concentrating them upon one point. - Orison Swett Marden

Concentration, in its truest, unadulterated form, means being able to foces the mind on one single solitary thing. - Komar

Blog and Ping

2007-06-25T15:08:00.000+08:00

Blog and Ping

The crude method involved first setting up both a blogger (.blogspot) blog and a free myYahoo page. You add the RSS or Atom link from your blog to your myYahoo page, so that your blog feeds into your myYahoo website.

You then write a page into your blog with links to webpages that you want Google and Yahoo to find and index. After posting your new blog entry, you then ping your myYahoo page to tell it that there's a new entry at your blog. Then you go to Yahoo, open your myYahoo page, and the blog headline should be there.

The assumption is that Yahoo would spider all feeds going into it's myYahoo pages and because Google owns Blogger.com they would spider all new blog entries at Blogger.com ... and in fact this is indeed what happens. Start a blog, add entry's to it every day, and in less than a week it will be spidered as soon almost as you post to it. But you must post daily.

Bad Content On Your Website

2007-06-23T15:08:00.000+08:00

Another common SEO mistake is to have bad content on your website. A couple years ago, web publishers thought that you simply had to have keyword rich content, but today it is known that it is not that easy. You need to have more than the typical how to or vague and useless content on your website if you want to really be optimized for the search engines. You can have keyword rich articles, but be sure that they are informative as this will allow for you to be seen by the search engine spiders but also keep visitors on your site once they click and enter your page!

Linking is anther common mistake that web publishers face. Links are important because the more incoming links a page receives, the more important the search engines view the web page. But, the links have to be good incoming and outgoing links. If you have poor incoming links or there is poor internal linking all of your hard work to obtain links will be in vain. Web publishers have to find a balance and only involve themselves with good links.

These are some of the most common problems that web publishers make when they attempt to optimize their websites for the search engines. SEO is not easy, but if a web publisher avoids these very common mistakes he or she has a leg up on the competition. Remember, optimization is not something that happens over night. Those that rush tend to do more harm than good to their page ranking so take your time a do a good job if you want to succeed.

Temporal Data

2007-06-18T15:13:00.000+08:00

Temporal data for a search engine can include:

When content was first spidered
When a new link was first discovered
Time frames for influxes of links
Time frames for large amounts of content on a specific subject

The engines can use this data in all sorts of ways (everything from knowing what to put in the "news" results to determining potential spammers), but it really affects the rollercoaster ups and downs of rankings, too. Stoney mentions three things that can cause the coaster:

Changes you make on your site
Changes to search engine algorithms
Changes made by your competitors

I'd add temporal fluctuations as a critical fourth. In a way, this falls under "changes to search engine algorithms," but the algos aren't really changing, they're just absorbing new data in the ways they always have. What we usually see is that Google and MSN, and Yahoo! to a slightly lesser extent, give priority to new documents on trusted sites and to even small clusters of inbound link influxes. Thus, the following scenarios happen quite a bit:

You're ranking great, when all of a sudden, a Flickr page or a Technorati tag page or a page at Wikipedia overtakes you. The page is new, has little to no external inbounds, and you're flumoxed by how it can rank well. Don't worry, amigo - that's almost certainly the fresh boost, and it tends to die out after 5-10 days at most.

You're ranking in 10th or 20th place behind some heavy hitters, but your domain is pretty tough and all of a sudden, 5-10 new links point your way. Voila! You're at the top of the results, ranking in front of pages you were sure you'd never overtake this quickly. Once again, it's fresh boost, giving a little bit of "extra credit" to your newfound popularity. I liken this to the search engines almost making the assumption that "whoa! this page got a lot of link love quickly, it must be super relevant/popular for this query, let's give it some juice." The problem is when the engines don't find lots more new links, you start falling down in the results fairly rapidly. Should we call that the "stale drop"?

Rollercoaster mania hits - you're trading places atop the SERPs with 2-3 pages almost every day. I almost want to call this the "tie" flux - new links, and possibly refreshed content on your page and your competitors is making it a really tough call for 1st place, so the tiniest of changes can bump you ahead or leave you behind.

SiteMaps Work

2007-06-16T15:11:00.000+08:00

In many effective SEO techniques employed by SEO professionals, one of the most emphasized is the site map. A site map is a page of your web page which lays out your entire web page and links to every page in your site. By placing this strategically in your homepage, you can help the search engine to crawl around your pages more efficiently and effectively.

These and a whole lot of effective SEO techniques are readily available in many sites online. While most of these techniques will require some doing and others might run counter to your personal vision for your webpage, you should consider employing these techniques if you want an effective website. These effective SEO techniques, when followed properly, can greatly help in establishing your web presence in the internet.

Choice

2007-06-12T16:38:00.000+08:00

The greatest power that a person possesses is the power to choose. - J. Martin Kohe

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. - William James

Averages

2007-06-11T16:25:00.000+08:00

What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better. - Wendell Phillips

Advantage

2007-06-06T16:35:00.000+08:00

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
JOHN F. KENNEDY

In life, as in chess, forethought wins.
CHARLES BUXTON

Using Blogs for SEO

2007-05-25T08:52:00.000+08:00

By Russell SavigeWhy Start A Blog?

I knew about blogging and blogs for years before I actually started my first blog... So this begs the question... "Why did it take me over 4 years to start my 1st blog?"

Well, why would I want a blog? After all, blogs are just for geeks, self opinionated left or right wing zealots pushing some obscure political agenda, teenage school kids waffling on about their zits and boyfriends or technical journals full of terms and jargon only a rocket scientist could understand.

And I never bothered with blogs or the development of the "blogosphere" again.

Then something changed the way I viewed blogging about July 2004. I was introduced to using a blog as a tool for SEO - Search Engine Optimization. In the crudest form it was almost spamming, but done properly, it will get your website pages spidered almost immediately and indexed in less than a week.

Common SEO Mistakes

2007-05-24T09:23:00.000+08:00

By Tan KCSearch engine optimization has become the focus of many people who have online businesses and for good reason. If you can be noticed and ranked well by search engines, you will be more visible to current and future customers. Optimization is something that so many web publishers are pursuing but in the course of trying to be noticed many are making some huge mistakes. These mistakes can easily be avoided, and many have found these mistakes to be hampering their success by trial and error.

The most common SEO mistakes is to have bad titles for your pages. The reason is titles are the very first thing that the search engine spiders will see when they look at your website. A title should give the spider as well as the visitor a clear idea of what the website is all about. If you can focus your titles, you will then find that your page rank will soar and you will likely have many more customers come your way as a result. A focused site is always a good thing and this includes something that seems as insignificant as a title!

Effective SEO Techniques

2007-05-22T08:18:00.000+08:00

You might have the greatest looking website in the world and provide the best content ever but, unless you can be found in the internet, whatever effort and cost you put into the look of your website will still amount to nothing.

In order for your website to become something of a celebrity in the world of the internet, you have to follow a few solid and effective SEO techniques. SEO means Search Engine Optimization, something you will need to do in order to promote your website in the internet.

Among the many effective SEO techniques you can find, there is nothing simpler than using the “title” attribute in your web page. While this is often very basic, this is sometimes overlooked. This is one of the places that search engines look into when indexing your website.

In your “title” attribute, be sure to use the proper keywords. It is important that you use words that are not common search terms in the internet. A good idea in finding some unique search terms is to make an Adwords search on the search terms you are considering. Another effective SEO technique is to use different titles for each page of your website.

Two effective SEO techniques that you would want to make sure of is using the

<h1>
tag and mirroring the contents of your title into it. The
<h1>
tag is very useful for optimizing your web site for search engines, especially with the Google search engine. Mirroring the title text in your
<h1>
tag helps to emphasize the description you give to each page. This will be easily picked up on by search engines when looking through your website.

Temporal Data & the Rankings Rollercoaster

2007-05-18T08:33:00.000+08:00

I noticed an engaging blog post from Stoney DeGeyter over at SearchEngineLand this evening (or rather, morning/afternoon for our American & European readers) - The Ranking Roller Coaster Cause & Effect. It's definitely worth a read, but I also wanted to point out one specific area that we see causing the "rollercoaster" effect all the time - temporal data.

Adsense Secrets

2007-05-17T08:22:00.000+08:00

Pst! Wanna know some Adsense secrets? The only secret is that there are no secrets per se!

Do a search for Adsense secrets and you will be bombarded by a myriad of ads by trying to sell you the answers to making lots of money with Adsense.

Before you buy anything, my advise to you would be to do some research on a search engine and a bit of common sense. There are literally hundreds of forums where you can pick up valuable information, as well as hundreds of articles that have been written on the subject of Adsense.

Most of the answers are out there for you to find it you will put in a little bit of work. If you buy any of the ebooks available out there, you might find one little nugget of information that you may not have seen anywhere else, but I promise you: most of the time everything is out here on the Internet - all you have to do is search for it. Here are some of the search terms that I personally have used with great results:

increase adsense income
increase your adsense income
adsense experiments
adsense adsense tricks
adsense tips

What I can tell you from my own experience is this:

1. Ads at the top of the page and on the left of the page perfom better than any other ads. (Take a look at the "heatmap" from the Google link below)

2. Ads without background colour and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background colour.

3. Ads within content pages perform better than any other ads.

4. A search box on every page gives you another chance for earning Adsense income.

5. A blue link at the top of the ad, the ad in black, and the url also in black so that it blends in with the ad copy - also tends to perform well. A black url makes the link stand out and gives you a better chance of someone clicking on it.

Google has brought out some great Adsense optimization tips. You can read it here: Google Adsense optimization tips

Experiment with your settings and see which brings you the best results. Google's reporting has become a lot better in the last month or so, so you should instantly be able to see which ads result in better CTR.

To increase your site traffic, which obviously will increase your Adsense income, the best way to get traffic is to have fresh content at your site. Write your own articles and submit it to article directories like Go Articles etc. To find more article directories, just do a search for "free article directory submissions" on a search engine like Google.

Another way would be to publish articles by other authors that are relevant to your site content. You can find free articles all over the web by once again doing a search for e.g. "free site content".

Do this on a regular basis and watch your traffic (and your income) increase.

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

How Lucrative is AuctionAds?

2007-05-16T09:35:00.000+08:00

We have some, well, buddies over a BuddyTV, so I was interested to see that they were AuctionAds' May Publisher of the Month. "Good for them," I thought, before going, "Wait, what's AuctionAds?"

Yeah, yeah, don't make fun of me. So I don't know what AuctionAds is...give me a break, we've got a lot going on here at the MozQuarters (especially with Rand in China...in fact, the Moz Squad will be very busy today playing frisbee at the park tackling that task list he left for us). Anyway, I checked out their site and found a handy list of 10 Reasons to Run AuctionAds. Read it if, like me, you're a bit slow on the uptake and don't know what AuctionAds is.

Basically, you sign up on their site to be an AuctionAds publisher and insert their ad code on your site. They show relevant eBay products to your visitors (relevant meaning related to your site's content), and you make money when a visitor clicks on the ad. I chatted with Neil Patel about AuctionAds because he's pretty familiar with the site, and he said that AuctionAds places a 30-day cookie on users who click through from your site, so during that time if they convert into a signup or win an auction you can get paid. According to Neil, sometimes you can get paid if the user simply bids on a product but doesn't win (apparently this depends on the geotargeting, the location of the user, and what version of eBay he or she is using).

Neil said that AuctionAds is much better than Adsense if you have a lot of social media traffic, and he knows people who make over $10k/month with it. I'm not sure how well the platform is working for BuddyTV, but I did see the products they served me:

Source: SEOmoz

The AdSense Formula for Making Money - 2

2007-05-15T11:23:00.000+08:00

Publish articles, even free ones, with links back to your site. Include a link to your site in the signature at the bottom of your emails or in any forum postings you make (if the forum allows it). Participate in forums/groups related to the content of your site or blog. The key is to participate, not lurk, and don't just post messages promoting your site. Add comments (relevant ones only, please) to other blogs, you can usually link back to yours. (This won't help your search engine rankings, but it may allow others who are reading those comments to find your own site.) Syndicate your content (trivial if you have a blog) and make sure that the content is registered with syndication aggregators. List your site in relevant directories.

Adjusting the ads is something you can do almost immediately:

Position the ads on the page in order to make them more noticeable. Google even publishes a helpful heat map for AdSense publishers. Choose the best AdSense ad format that works for your site. Change the ad colors either to make the ads blend in with your site or to make them stand out. Again, it varies depending on the site.
Whatever you do, DO NOT ENTICE VISITORS TO CLICK THE ADS. Google is very strict about this, see the AdSense program policies for the details.

Increasing the Average AdSense Price Per Click

Increasing the average price per click you receive from AdSense is the other strategy for increasing your overall AdSense earnings. You can do this by:

Carefully targeting your content, and/or
Filtering out and avoiding low-paying ads

Content targeting isn't just about creating relevant, unique content. It's also making sure that that content is written to target the higher-paying keywords associated with a given topic. This means:

Figuring out which keyword variations for that topic pay more. Often the more specialized variations and phrases pay more than the "generic" terms.

Ensuring that the keyword density of the content favors the higher-paying keyword variations. See the Vioxx Lawsuits page for an example of well-targeted ads due to appropriate keyword density.

And to reduce the occurrence of lower-paying ads, consider these two strategies:

Use AdSense's competitive filter mechanism to screen out the ads that you don't want.
Show fewer ads on a page. The fewer ads you show, the more the higher-paying ads get displayed and clicked.

Many publishers also report that their earnings increase if they remove ads completely from pages with few or no clicks. Again, the "less is more" strategy favors the higher-paying ads.

There's No Magic

As you can see, there's no magic involved to increasing your AdSense earnings. The Fundamental AdSense Formula is easy to understand, but that doesn't mean it's easy to apply the formula. It takes time and effort to do it, just like most things.

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

The AdSense Formula for Making Money - 1

2007-05-15T08:14:00.000+08:00

I often get asked what the secret is to making money with Google's AdSense program. This often comes from people who are dreaming of setting up websites chock full of high-paying keywords for particular niche subjects and then sitting back and watching the money roll in. "What's the magic formula?" they ask me. If they're non-technical, I point them straight to my first AdSense book, Make Easy Money with Google, and assure them that they'll learn everything they need from it. They may think it's hard, but it's not.

But what about the technical people? By this I mean the people who've already set up a blog or website, who have registered domain names, who are comfortable with basic Internet terminology and concepts. What is the "AdSense formula"?

The only AdSense formula that you need to know is this:

earnings = number of clicks * average price per click

This is what I call the Fundamental AdSense Formula because you can derive almost every AdSense "secret" directly or indirectly from this formula. Do you want to earn more with AdSense? You have two ways of doing it:

Increase the number of clicks, and/or
Increase the average price per click

Your earnings will only go up if you do one or the other, and ideally both. It's an obvious formula, yes, but it's amazing how many people lose sight of it in their quest for increased AdSense earnings.

Increasing the Number of AdSense Clicks

Increasing the number of times the ads on your site or blog are clicked is the most obvious strategy. There are two general strategies you can follow:

Increase the traffic to the site, and/or
Adjust the ads to make them more "clickable"

Getting traffic is hard and takes time, so don't look at it as a quick fix. The best way to get traffic is to provide useful, unique content and to rank highly in search engine rankings for keywords related to that content. In other words, use standard search engine optimization techniques. DO NOT "buy" traffic or use "link farms" or other dubious techniques. Other tips for getting traffic:

To be continued

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

Whether DNC or RNC, Political Candidates need SEO

2007-05-14T08:55:00.000+08:00

Due to the first round of Presidential Candidate pre-primary debates occuring recently, I decided to have a poke around and see what the State of the SERPs is like for the major 2008 Presidential hopefuls. I was surprised to find that, despite Howard Dean's major success with online fundraising in 2004, and the vast popularity of political blogs and web-centric PACs like MoveOn.org, many of the 2008 Candidates are committing huge SEO blunders.

I know SEO is a fairly young industry and not everyone is hip to optimization techniques, but considering the reach and importance of the internet to young, vocal, passionate voters, writers and opinion leaders, one would think the masterminds behind these multi-million dollar campaigns would know of and appreciate the importance of search marketing.

Source: SEO moz

How To Keep Up To Date With Internet Marketing

2007-05-11T09:07:00.000+08:00

When internet marketing was in its early stages, everyone and everything was exciting and new.

After a few years and as people got more experienced with internet marketing, things began to change at a rapid pace.

Techniques that were once profitable became obsolete.

Internet marketing changes with each passing day and a tip or method that worked a couple of months ago, will probably not be of much use to you today.

Years ago, you could begin internet marketing by placing ads in newsgroups or free classified sites.

It is just not possible to that any longer as internet marketing changes rapidly from month to month.

But you can keep up with all the changes and make suer your results do not suffer.

The easiest way to keep up with internet marketing is by subscribing to newsletters.

The people who are publishing frequent newsletters on internet marketing, keep up to date on changes and tell their readers about them.

You can also keep up on the changes by purchasing the products from well know and established internet marketing experts.

These people make their living with internet marketing so you can bet the house that they know exactly what works and what doesn't.

You can also keep up to date by joining the many internet marketing forums to be found.

The people who post to these forums and share information keep a close watch on trends, fads, and techniques.

Remember that as an internet marketing business owner, you should always keep up to date and make the changes to needed to maximize your profits.

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

SEO New Tips

2007-05-09T09:03:00.000+08:00

The term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consists of many techniques which have to applied to the website while developing a site. It is not only for higher ranking but to rank the relevant keywords which we have chosen for our website. SEO improves the chance that the site will be found by the search engine.

Commonly used search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN. Google is considered to be no.1 search engine on which millions of searches are conducted daily.

To rank your site high on search engine like Google we have to take care of few things while developing a site

1. Purchasing a new Domain name will not help unless you really have a requirement for that. It takes 9-12 months for a new domain to show your site on Search engine, so it is better and if possible to use your existing domain.
2. Concentrate on the target audience of your website and not on the search engine. The search engine looks for keyword phrase that are typed into the search box if those words relate to your website, your site will be visible through the search engine.
3. To select a proper keyword for your website. It might happen that the keyword which you think is correct one but as per the target user it is not the correct one so to select a proper keyword you can use research tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker.
4. Categorization of your website is another very important tool. A product for which you are developing your sight might have different categories as per the age, range, brand and type. So the site which we are developing should be categorized accordingly so the search engine can directly go to that category.
5. Using of HTML links. Search engines cannot search the forms, read java script links and menus, so while creating a site do provide proper HTML links to main navigation on every page which will link to the top-level pages of your site.
6. Proper labeling of internal text links and clickable images. Normally the end user tries to look at the clickable portion of your links to help them understand always use proper and as descriptive words as possible don't leave it to a guess like 'click here' or non descriptive words. These are the few tips to make your site visible when a search engine looks through your website.

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

Calendar on the go

2007-05-08T09:34:00.000+08:00

Many people schedule their day on the fly, and are often away from their computers when they need to run to their next event. With Google Calendar, you don't have to be online to be alerted about upcoming events—all you need is a mobile phone। Now you can set up mobile SMS (text message) reminders that will be sent to your mobile phone.
In fact, now you can schedule reminders for events on your personal calendar or any other calendar to which you're subscribed. Whether it's your favorite baseball team's schedule, a family calendar, or any other calendar to which you have access, you can set up mobile reminders.
This feature is available in all the 18 languages we support.

Source: Official Google Blog

Don't run the risk of click and miss

2007-05-07T08:39:00.000+08:00

As you may know, our tips and guidelines mention that "users should only click on Google ads if they're interested in the services being advertised"। While there are many precautions a publisher can take to avoid encouraging clicks on their ads, we've found that some implementations of the ad code can lead to accidental clicks that the publisher may not have been able to predict. Some implementations that could lead to accidental clicks include placing your ads:
- In close proximity to Macromedia Flash games
- Under pop-ups or download prompts
- Near site navigation controls on your pages, such as drop-downs or menu links
Generally, we ask that you not place your ads near features of your site that your users may interact with by clicking. If your site contains elements that increase the number of ad clicks without increasing business results for the advertiser, we may consider these clicks to be invalid. "Business results" can range from an online sale to a page view. If we detect enough of these clicks and determine that the risk to our advertisers is too great, we may disable the account. To maintain compliance with our program policies and ensure that your users don't inadvertently click on the ads on your site, we strongly recommend that you move any ad units that are in close proximity to interactive site features।
As always, thanks in advance for your cooperation!

Source: Google Inside AdSense

D-List Part 4

2007-05-03T15:10:00.000+08:00

Patrick Says v2.0
Paula Mooney
PBriscoe.com
Pegs AZ Life
Pencil Thin
PimpMyPageRank
Pink Poison Store
Pond, The
Ramblings Of An Undisturbed Mind
Randa Clay Design
Raw Vegan Momma
Reasoner, The
Rotten Bananas
Sassy Southerner, The
Scribble On The Wall
Scuttlebutt Pipeline
Selena’s Travel and Culture
SelfHynosisProgram
Shopping Flavor
ShowMeHealthBiz
ShowMeMoneyBiz.com
Simple Kind Of Life
Simplify Every Obstacle
Skeets Stuff
Solo Technology
Sophistishe.Org Personal Blog
SQKIKs Simple Tech
Super Blogging
Sun-Flower Family, The
Table for Five
TDZ Travel
TeaScoop
TechieZone
Teenage Angst Regression
Texas RV
Travel blog
Thermal
TimeForBlogging
Tricia\’s Musings
Two Dog Zoo
Utterly Geek
Wanders World
Web Files, The
WebStyle
Whatever I Feel Like
Wild & Crazy Ride
Winding Threads
Wired Kayaker, The
Women Mumbles
Work At Home Mom Revolution
Yoga Blog

To be continued

Up and running

2007-05-03T09:01:00.000+08:00

We were thinking the other day -- how is it that Australians can break the 132-year America's Cup drought, host the world's best Olympics, win Nobel Prizes and Oscars -- and yet not have an official Google Australia Blog?

Too right. So without further ado, consider this oversight fixed.

Welcome to the official Google Australia blog!

We’re proud that Google Australia was one of the first international Google offices and is now a hub for the entire Asia Pacific region. Google Maps started here, but lots of Australians are keen for more information about Google in Australia: Who works here? What do we do all day? Can we bring snakes to the office? Do we use Pigeon Rank or Kookaburra Rank?

We’ll be using this blog to make announcements and share all kinds of information -- details of Google products and technology in Australia, partnerships with Australian businesses, our involvement in the Australian community, and inside info about Google in Australia। We’re going to keep this page offbeat and informal and, hopefully, reader-friendly. A whole assortment of Aussie Googlers will be posting to the blog.

You may find this page to be a handy place to access specific Google Australian sites –- from Google Maps to Google News to jobs and much more. (See the right hand side of this page).

Source: Office Google Australia Blog

You've got gadget mail

2007-05-02T08:56:00.000+08:00

For a while now, we Googlers have used a bit of shorthand to refer to the Personalized Homepage -- a name that connotes interactivity, the Internet, and personalization all at once. Please meet iGoogle, the new name for the Google Personalized Homepage।

Developers around the world have been working hard to make more and more of the world's content available for iGoogle. Can you get, oh, some of the world's most beautiful pictures, updated daily? Check. Thousands and thousands of gadgets to choose from? Check. A personal note and picture from your sweetie? Now you can make your own, because starting today, without having any programming or web design experience at all, anyone can create Google Gadgets for iGoogle and send them to friends. Simple gadget templates include a photo gadget, a "GoogleGram" greeting card-style gadget, a YouTube video channel gadget, and a free-form gadget.

To make yours, choose the gadget template you'd like to use, enter your info, and enter your friends' email addresses. You can always make changes to your gadget, and you can even set some kinds of gadgets to update automatically so your friends will see a new message daily.

Today we're also making the themes that have been so popular on iGoogle in the U.S. available on every edition of iGoogle around the world, and we're making iGoogle available in 22 new locales. Visit iGoogle and click "Select theme" to pick a theme for your own page.

Internet Marketing Tool

2007-05-01T08:29:00.000+08:00

If you’re into Internet marketing, having the best Internet marketing tools is a must for you. If you’re smart, you know that you should be working smarter and not harder to market online. Having the right marketing tools can change you from an unsuccessful marketer to a successful one. Tools make all the difference: make sure you have the right ones.

The best way to be marketing online is by practising SEO, search engine marketing, and getting yourself a good internet marketing tool. Why SEO?

Search engine marketing is a great way to market your website simply because it’s free, and because you’ll get targeted traffic, which means that people are already looking for what you have to sell. Your sales will greatly increase and your website will be a success if you practise SEO properly.

Now, Internet marketing tools exist for SEO. This is important to consider since many of the tasks involved with SEO are repetitive tasks, and such tasks, with proper Internet marketing tools, may be done in minutes.

Does it make sense to work for 5 hours when it can be done automatically for you in just minutes?

That’s why working with an SEO internet marketing tool will get your SEO done quickly, resulting in high ranking and in quick integration into the search engines. You’ll be saving both time and money if you have the right Internet marketing tool.

Practising SEO is very profitable. Your website will generate a lot of income simply because it’s targeted to the visitors you receive. If you’re serious about Internet marketing, this is what you should be doing.

The best Internet marketing tool, in my opinion, is SEO Elite. This software is extremely powerful and it can automate many tasks. This marketing tool will get you visitors from the search engines in days and it’s truly the way to go if you want to cut out your competition.

Imagine – you’ll dominate your market in the search engines, and you’ll receive 10 000 free targeted visitors… daily!

If you’re business-minded, you’ll see the opportunity in this right away. SEO Elite is truly the best Internet marketing tool around.

Be webmaster of your domain (or sub-domain) - 2

2007-04-30T12:01:00.000+08:00

3. Diagnose potential problems.We let you know if, and why, we're having trouble accessing your site or specific pages. If we can't crawl a page, we can't index it -- so fixing any errors we list can help improve your overall coverage. If the AdSense Site Diagnostics tool shows that you're blocking pages from MediaPartners-Google (the AdSense crawler), you can use the robots?txt analysis tool of Google webmaster tools to test changes to that file and make sure those changes allow access. You can also see what pages you are blocking from other Google bots -- this lets you experiment with changes to see how they would affect the crawl of your site.
4. Find out which queries drive traffic to your site.Using Google webmaster tools, learn which Google queries created clickthroughs to your site and where you were positioned in the search results for that query. You can also view data for individual properties and countries as well. For instance, you can see the queries from users searching Google Images in the United States that returned your site in the results. You¡¯ll only see properties and countries for which your site has data.
5. Get re-included.If your site has disappeared from the search results, read through the Google quality guidelines, then correct any problems on your site and request re-inclusion from your Google webmaster tools account? Please keep in mind that the reinclusion request form is only available to people using Google webmaster tools.

Source: Google Inside AdSense

Be webmaster of your domain (or sub-domain) - 1

2007-04-30T08:31:00.000+08:00

If a tree falls in the forest and no one can hear it, does it make a sound? Even more perplexing: if you have a great, content-rich website and nobody visits it, is the content useful? Rather than debate this, I'd like to share with you five ways that Google webmaster tools can help you drive more users to your site and improve the visibility of the site content you've worked so hard to create।
1. Submit all of your pages to the Google index – for free.By using Google Sitemaps to submit your URLs, you help Google's web crawler do a more complete and efficient job of crawling your site। Sitemaps enables you to submit all of your pages to the Google index, and it's particularly useful for making sure that we know about all dynamically generated URLs or pages that are not adequately linked to on your site. But please note: submitting a Sitemap will not guarantee inclusion or influence your PageRank, and isn't a replacement for creating compelling and useful content.
2। Find out how Google sees your site.Once you've made sure we have access to your site, you can see the common words used to link to your pages and that are seen by Google. This allows you to see trends in your site's content, and can help you determine why you may be ranking for particular keywords. You can also see which page has the highest PageRank by month. Some site owners are surprised to find that this isn't always the home page. If an internal page has the highest PageRank, you might consider spending more time optimizing the ads there.

Source: Google Inside AdSense Blog

Spelling For Muggles

2007-04-24T08:37:00.000+08:00

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

English spelling is far from being phonetic -- and commonly-used proper nouns make the problem even more complex. Often the final arbiter is "it looks correct." Try writing "success" with one trailing "s" and you'll see what I mean.

This final aspect of spelling -- it "looks wrong" -- can be a serious challenge when one cannot see. I can spell well in English, and for regular English text, there are always dictionaries and spell-checkers that come to one's aid. But spelling commonly-used proper nouns that you've only heard others pronounce can still pose a challenge when writing them for the first time. Consider the following:

Over the years, I've come to find this an indispensible tool, especially in cases where there is general agreement on the web as to the correct spelling. And for the record, intelligence on the Web appears to believe that San Luis Obispo can also be spelt San Louis Obispo.

Google's spell-checking intelligence comes from examining all the documents on the web. Thus, correct spellings often dominate incorrect ones. The example of San Luis Obispo is interesting; if you take the Web as representing current accepted practice, it would appear that people do write that proper noun both ways -- i.e., Luis or Louis.Who knows, perhaps we'll restore the o-u parity by adopting an extra "o" in Luis for the "u" that got dropped in "color."

We're going on a skiing holiday to Taho.
I was in Rino last week.
My friend lives in San Luis Obispoe.
Notice that the proper nouns in the above all contain spelling errors, and the respective Google search triggers a "did you mean" spelling suggestion as follows:

Did you mean: Tahoe
Did you mean: Reno
Did you mean: san luis obispo
Over the years, I've come to find this an indispensible tool, especially in cases where there is general agreement on the web as to the correct spelling. And for the record, intelligence on the Web appears to believe that San Luis Obispo can also be spelt San Louis Obispo.

Source: Official Google Blog

"Augtomize" year-round

2007-04-23T08:17:00.000+08:00

It's hard to believe the month is already over. It seems like just yesterday when Mike Gutner first announced that August was Optimization Month. Since then, members of the AdSense optimization team and Googlers representing other products have shared their findings and best practices for how to optimize your AdSense earnings. We hope you've come through the month with an arsenal of insightful tips and tricks for optimizing not only your AdSense ads, but also your site content for your specific audience.

We'd like to leave you with the following:

1. Nothing warms the hearts of our team more than hearing success stories from AdSense publishers. Please tell us yours!

2. The road to enlightenment begins with the Optimization Tips page. If you haven't seen it yet or it's been awhile, be sure to check it out.

3. Teach a person to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime. The AdSense Help group is a great community to post optimization tips and swap best practices with other publishers.

Source: Google Inside AdSense

If it ain't broke...

2007-04-20T08:54:00.000+08:00

We know how important it is to maintain the quality of your site and the experience your users have there, and we often receive email from publishers asking about specific ad implementations. While we encourage you to tailor your ads to fit the look and feel of your sites, we'd like to remind you to only use the options provided within the AdSense Setup tab of your account. As you may know, our program policies strictly prohibit altering the layout, behavior, targeting, or delivery of Google ads or AdSense for search boxes for any reason. Some examples of these modifications include:
- Implementing the AdSense ad code in a "floating box script"
- Manipulating the ad targeting using hidden keywords or IFRAMEs
- Altering the height or width of an ad unit
- Pre-populating the AdSense for search box with specific queries
- Creating direct links to AdSense for search results

Once you've generated the ad code in your account's AdSense Setup tab, we ask that you incorporate it into your pages exactly as it was generated, without altering any portion of the code. Doing so will also help ensure that you're properly credited for valid clicks and impressions.

For more information on working with your ads and improving their performance, feel free to visit our Help Center.

Source: Google Inside AdSense

The AdSense API: All grown up and ready to play

2007-04-19T08:54:00.000+08:00

If you're a web developer or host, you may remember that we introduced you to the AdSense API last May. With the AdSense API, your users can create their own AdSense accounts on your site, and display ads alongside the content that they have created. They can also manage their accounts and view ad performance and earnings reports, all on your site.
In addition, you can enhance your customers' user experience by helping them to make money from their content and by giving them the ability to perform many AdSense functions without ever leaving your site. For example, they can:
1. Create and manage AdSense accounts
2. Customize and implement AdSense for content ad units and link units, AdSense for search boxes, and referrals for products such as Google AdWords and Firefox
3. Generate URL and custom channel reports
Best of all, you get to make money with the AdSense API through the Revenue Sharing program. Advertisers pay your users and you when visitors click on your users' ads. Plus, you can earn Referral Payments when your users earn threshold amounts within their first 180 days after sign up.
Today, we're pleased to announce that the AdSense API is now open for all developers, with the release of our open development sandbox. This is a replica of the live service with some additional support to help you test and debug your applications. Once you implement the AdSense API in the development sandbox, we can go live with your implementation.
So now it's easier than ever to integrate AdSense into your website or online application. It took the folks over at Hubpages.com less than a week. We’ve expanded our developer’s guide and added more sample code to make seamless integration even easier.
Were you ready to start developing yesterday? Check out our Getting Started Guide and our FAQ. You’ll also find that the AdSense API Developer Forum is a great place to discuss the API and get answers to common questions.
To learn more about the AdSense API and how it can make your users happier while increasing your income, surf over to the AdSense API site.

Source: Google Inside AdSense

You've got mail

2007-04-18T08:57:00.000+08:00

If you've logged in to your account today, you've probably noticed the new 'Recent messages' section in your AdSense account. We're happy to let you know that this is your personal inbox where we'll send you customized optimization tips. More specifically, our system will automatically analyze your account and ad settings. Based on these findings, you'll receive a notification each month in your AdSense account if there are changes you can make to improve your overall AdSense performance.

While we're not able to guarantee results from implementing these suggestions, we've found that these techniques have been successful for many publishers in the past which is why we've developed this feature for you. If you don't receive a notification during a specific month, don't worry. You've probably implemented all of our current suggestions and we'll be adding more tips in the future.

Happy optimizing!

Source: Google Inside Adsense

SEO Using Free Link Exchanges

2007-04-17T08:06:00.000+08:00

Free link exchange networks are popping up all over the place. What was once a way to market your website using the link space on others website is now a SEO tool. Because some search engines such as Google have implemented an algorithm to base a websites worth on the number of inbound and outbound links, links to your page are a must. But how are these links measured?

Free Link Exchanges

Free link exchanges can help you in many ways, including adding more back links to your website, however they can also have a reverse effect. If your page is about boats and your links are about lemon law attorneys, then the link will not help you much. In all actuality it may hurt your SEO project. Because search engines may consider this as a spammy link and may hurt your ranking.

Reciprocal Links

Having reciprocal links should help you as long as the page linking to your website is on the same theme as the one that your website is about. For instance, If you had only a few links that link to your website that are on the same theme as your website. It would be much better than having hundreds linking in that are totally different than the theme of your website.

Getting Links

To get your website noticed, you’ll need to get some links. Although this may not be an easy task, especially if your website is relatively new. It can be much easier than you think, if you take the correct approach. Simply contact webmasters of sites you’re interested in and on the same theme as your website. Usually most will turn you down, but if your website is useful and informative, some will respond and grant you a reciprocal link.

Returning the Favor

Some webmasters may link to you and all will be good. The inbound link pagerank may be higher than yours. If so, return the favor to a new website that is trying to get into your niche, if their site is worthy of a link from your site, give it to them. Of course this is totally up to you who you want your site to link to. I hope this article has given a better insight on inbound links. Of course as with any SEO article, without knowing the exact algorithm used to determine search results, it is impossible to be 100% sure of anything. However based on past experiences and daily experiences in SEO, this article provides a wealth of information.

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

Should You Learn SEO?

2007-04-16T08:40:00.000+08:00

SEO is causing a stir in the world off online marketing but for people new to the term it can be somewhat confusing. This article provides a brief introduction to what SEO and its relevance to you.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is a way in which to increase the volume and quality of traffic to your website. It is a useful tool for website builders whose who wish to make money from the internet. Optimum sales rely upon a high volume of quality traffic. The simple fact is that no matter how good your product may be, without visitors to your site, you will not sell. Without SEO, the level of traffic required is virtually impossible to achieve.

Type any keyword into a major search engine such as Google and you will find thousands of results. The ones that visitors use are those highest on the list as these come across as more reliable and therefore more trustworthy. So how do you contend with other online businesses and get your web address noticed?

Search engine use algorithms to supply answers to people searching for information on the internet. The keywords used are the ingredients for a recipe; the information provided on the sites the recipe, and the best matching website addresses are the end result. Search Engine Optimisation ensures that your website is configured to respond to the exact criteria that the search engines use to determine their answer. The better your website matches the criteria, the higher up the hierarchical order of their search results your website address will be displayed.

Search Engine Optimization uses a variety of methods to ensure that your website remains at the top of the search engine listings. One of the main methods used is through keywords articles, which ensure that the keywords searched for appear on your site the optimum number of times which improves your chance of coming out on top.

You can employ specialists in Search Engine Optimization, but this can be expensive and time consuming. It can be applied easily by any website builder, especially with the wide range of tools available to assist you. These include keyword analyzers that analyze the topic you wish to promote and provide the most popular keywords inputted in the search for this topic, complete with percentages. Other available tools include keyword clouds, suggestion scrappers and html checkers.

The fact of the matter is that without a high volume of traffic that is truly interested in your product, you will not be able to sell. With all successful businesses now using Search Engine Optimization, it is the only way to compete and make a success of your own. Isn’t it time for you to get on board?

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

D-List Part 3

2007-04-03T15:09:00.000+08:00

These blogs have the ‘no follow’ link disabled from the comments, which means that if you comment on these sites, you will get an actual link. If you would like to be included here, please let me know.

If you find this list useful, please consider linking to it.

This DoFollow Blog list is courtesy of Courtney Tuttle and was created originally by Coleen as the D-List.

Jonlee
Jones PC
JOIN - Do Follow Bloggers **
Julies
Journal
Just Not Martha
Kansha Shite
Knitting Fiend, The
Last Blogger
LeaveAmerica
Life in the Fast Lane
Life Is Risky
Life Learning Today
Life Of A School Bus Driver, The
Life Passion Travel & More
Life through eyes of Krissy
Lifecruiser
LittleAmerica.us
Live Life Organics & Your Health
Magical Rose Garden
Marketing Blagger
Master Cleanse
Midlife Musings
Mom is Nutz
MomReviews.net
Mothering Many
My Credit Group
My Dandelion Patch
My Home Recipe
My Muddled Mind
My Opinion Counts
My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings
Nanashi-Inc.net
New Century Politics
No Average Mom
Odd Planet
On the Horizon
Open Road Biker

To be continued

It Makes Sense to Add AdSense to Your Blog

2007-03-20T00:27:00.000+09:00

The code for AdSense can be placed on any of your web pages. I think placing it on your blog will give you distinct advantage because blogs have several points in their favor. They are easily indexed by search engines. Recently two of my simple blogs were indexed by Google within 2-3 days of submission of URL's which I think is quite fast. With Yahoo! it is even easier - just add the URL of your blog to your My Yahoo page and Yahoo! will start accessing it immediately. GoogleAlert is a free tool that can be used to know when your blog is indexed by Google.

You can have your blog up and running in minutes free of cost from several sites that provide this service. I personally use blogger.com. With blogs you do not need to worry about designing websites, registering domain name or hiring web site hosting service. You simply write your content on the blog and it is ready for publication.

An excellent article by John Taylor on creating blog is re-published here:

http://sanjay-j.com/art1ab33.html

With AdSense wide range of options is available - number of ads for display, shape and size of display, color schemes. More than 200 colors are available from which you can choose color for border, background and text. 24 pre-set color palettes are readily available; in addition you can have your own custom-palette to match with the appearance of your web page. Similarly, color schemes are available for Google search bar.

When the web page is opened, Google ads are placed which match with the content of the page and are highly relevant. Google finds right ads for the web page from 100,000 AdWord advertisers.

Several options are available for the ads that you would like to be displayed on your page. Ad filters can be activated which will block up to 200 URL's of your choice which you do not want to show on your page. You may like to filter away ads from your competitors. You can even choose your own default ads for display. Google uses sensitive content filters to prevent display of sensitive material. If you find that your page is not really getting relevant ads, it may be time to look critically at the content of the page, particularly the keywords used in text, links and tags. Little SE optimization of the page should resolve this problem.

Sometimes Google places public service ads when no target ads are available. To suppress public service ad, it is possible to specify your own image ad or HTML page ad which will appear in place of public service ad. This ensures that some ad is always present there. Or, if you like, the space reserved for Adsense ads can be made to collapse.

AdSense tracker is another useful feature which tracks the ads on your pages and generates report for you. The reports can be customized based on requirement. Typically reports can give page impressions displayed, number of clicks and click-thru rates. It is also possible to check earnings any time.

Web page owner can make use of all these facilities and try to get best results. With the help of Ad tracker lot of useful information can be obtained - which ads are doing well, which color combination gets better resultsScience Articles, which location of the web page is best for showing ads and so on. This analysis can be used to improve traffic as well as click-thru rates.

With AdSense you have virtually nothing to lose. If you have not yet installed AdSense on your website you can perhaps give it a thought. Any free space which can be created on your website to accommodate AdSense can be used to generate additional income.

Web Promotion - SEO Strategy

2007-03-16T15:07:00.000+09:00

article by Johnny Mayer

What's it like to work for a world class SEO? What secrets could you glean on website promotion? The SEO business is sexy, exciting and challenging. While most people want to improve and promote their site, web promo companies often deal with such diverse clients, it sharpens their instincts for what works and what don't work in the SEO game. This article presents a few tricks, tips and myths about how to SEO your website into GOOGLE heaven.

Content + SEO = Top GOOGLE Positions

If you have great content and decent SEO techniques, you're webs site should do pretty well in the search engines. If you have SEO stuffed pages full of garbage keyword phrases, sooner or later, you're gonna pay the price. There are too many billions of dollars at stake for cheap tricks to raise search engine rankings for long. Combine great content with great SEO instincts and bang... you're website traffic will skyrocket. Here are some common tips, you may have heard, but are worth repeating.

Website Design - SEO Strategy
If you can't highlight and grab the text off of your website - look out! If you can't grab it and paste it into a document, how do you think a search engine is gonna read it put it in their search engine. Sure, people will tell you, don't worry, the search engines index it not problem. Maybe they are right, my gut say Watch Out! Keep it simple!

Keyword Selection - SEO Strategy
You can spend hours researching your keywords, try lots of combo's and still get zero results in the search engines. What the problem? CONTENT! The key words and the content have to flow together. For example, if you write about dog grooming and switch to a few cat grooming examples, you may defeat your SEO efforts. If you write for the search engine like you were talking to a ten year old, you'll probably get much higher SEO results.

Meta Tag Mania - SEO Strategy
There are tons of meta tag how to's to read and confuse you. Here's a tip for writing better meta tags - pretend you're asking them out on a date and just say what you have to say without all the bull corn. For example, "I'm ah, going to be in the area this evening, and wonder if you would ahh. oh yeah and I just rebreed something... ah, what was I trying to say is ahh, there's a nice film tonight if you would like to ah... Now compare that speech that never got to the point with, "Look girl, I think you’re beautiful, would you like to see a movie with me?" And shut up!!!

Copy Writing - SEO Strategy
Ditto for the copy writing - less is more. Pretend you're writing for NPR. What do they do? They tell you what they are going to tell you, tell you what the have to say and then tell you what the told you. NPR are no dummies, if that's what they do, it must be good so jump on the band wagon and blow your trumpet.

Image Tags Copy - SEO Strategy
By the time you're concerned with adding image tags to SEO your website, you either have a great site way, way up their in the search engines or you're a SEO junky that needs help. No body can assure you #1 rankings on Google so don't set your sails for impossible goals. Someday, we'll all wake up in the 1980's again and discover the sense of freedom people back in pre-internet era.

D-List Part 2

2007-03-03T15:09:00.000+09:00

These blogs have the ‘no follow’ link disabled from the comments, which means that if you comment on these sites, you will get an actual link. If you would like to be included here, please let me know.

If you find this list useful, please consider linking to it.

This DoFollow Blog list is courtesy of Courtney Tuttle and was created originally by Coleen as the D-List.

Andy Beard
Ang’s Chicken Coop
Are we there yet
Army Mom:New Jersey
Art Kauffman
Article Writer, The
Ask Jason
Ask Jason Business
Axplay
BenSpark,
The BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo
BiggerPockets
BizMark Tech
BlogAboutMoneyOnline
BloggingForBills
BloggingTips
Blogging WV
Blogocola
Blogozine
BMonaco
BodyFitnessInfo
Body, Mind & Solar
Boston Brat
BrownSista
Buy better - Have a Better Life
BuyMeBlog
Buzz Queen, The
By the Sea
Cade’s WriteToRight
CampingCoop.org
Candid Quips
Charmed and Dangerous
Cheffin\’ It!!
Clapping Trees
Colloquium
Comedy Plus
Community Building Blog
Curious Cat Science
Confessions of a Housewife
Confessions of an Everyday housewife
CoolAdzine for Marketers
Craftblog
Crafts 4 Dummies
David Dairey
Dont Fear the Truth
DorisGoShopping.com
Down Memory Lanes
Ecomm Tips
EMomsAtHome
EMoneyMarketing
Endangered Spaces
Fibromyalgia Experiment, The
Finding Life\’s Enchantments
FitForFreedom
Flatwater Tech
Fools Wisdom
FootPrints On the Moon
Fuzzy Future

To be continued

Video post: Laura Chen answers your referrals questions

2007-02-23T10:27:00.000+09:00

We often receive questions about the policies related to AdSense referrals. In this post we answer some of your most common concerns. Live (OK -- pre-recorded) from the Googleplex, here's Laura Chen:

Laura addresses these burning questions:

1. Why am I receiving less than the full amount for each conversion in my reports? Is something wrong?

2. After I've referred a person to AdSense, can I see how much they've earned so far?

3. Can I ask users to click my referral buttons?

Adsense New pricing structure for referrals

2007-02-22T09:04:00.000+09:00

Last year we asked you for your feedback on referrals, and one of the issues we heard quite frequently was that it was too difficult to generate revenue with AdSense and AdWords referrals. To address this, we've just introduced a new pricing structure for both programs, which will be as follows:

AdSense Referrals:

When a publisher who signed up for Google AdSense through your referral earns their first $5 within 180 days of sign-up, you will be credited with $5.

When that same publisher earns $100 within 180 days of sign-up and is eligible for payment, you will be credited with an additional $250.

If, in any 180-day period, you refer 25 publishers who each earn more than $100 within 180 days of their respective sign-ups and are all eligible for payout, you will be awarded a $2,000 bonus (bonus payouts are limited to 1 per year).

AdWords Referrals:

When an advertiser you refer spends $5 within 90 days of sign-up (in addition to the $5 sign-up fee) you will be credited with $5.

When that same advertiser spends $100 within 90 days of sign-up, you will be credited with an additional $40.

If, in any 180 day period, you refer 20 advertisers who each spend more than $100 within 90 days of their respective sign-ups, you will be awarded a $600 bonus (bonus payments are limited to 1 per year).

These rules will also apply to users that you have already referred but who have not yet reached one of the new earning/spend thresholds. For example, if you referred an AdSense publisher who has currently earned $2.00, you will be paid $5.00 if that publisher reaches the $5.00 mark. But, if you have referred an AdSense publisher who has already earned $10.00, you will not be paid $5.00 retroactively for that referral reaching the $5.00 mark. However, should that publisher eventually reach the $100.00 earnings mark within 180 days, you will be paid $250.00.

Finally, please keep in mind that publishers may not click on their own referral ads and will not be paid for referring themselves for any product. For more information about referrals, please visit our Help Center.

Right Internet Marketing Technique

2007-02-21T09:55:00.000+09:00

Finding the right Internet marketing technique that works best for you is probably going to be trial and error. Different web marketers have found their successful by using different marketing ideas. Each person’s target market is different as well. You will have to try a variety before you find the Internet marketing technique that works best for you and your web-based business. Here we will throw out a few suggestions to try and see what works for you.

The Internet marketing techniques that we will discuss first have to do with the basics of a website. Ask yourself these questions to determine what steps you may try to find the Internet marketing technique that works best for you. Does your site’s URL have search engine keywords in the title? Is your site easy to use for beginners as well as experienced web surfers? Do you offer easy accessibility for prospects to contact you? These three issues should be clear before you start to evaluate a certain Internet marketing technique.

Determine what your website’s visitors are really looking for before choosing on an Internet marking technique. Understand what they want to find on your website and make it easy for them to locate it. Trust, credibility, and site loyalty are crucial factors to build into your website. The main aim is to get your visitors to buy something. Give them the opportunity to cruise your site and not be barrage by pop-ups and other annoyances.

One Internet marking technique that is sure to please your site’s visitors is the same as in the real world. That is customer service. Make your site is as user-friendly as possible. To generate revenue from your website start by asking “How can I help?" Friendly service always attracts more buyers than making it difficult to use your system. Don't start out with the attitude, "How can I sell ‘em?" Instead lead your customers to make their own decisions rather than forcing your favorites on them.

AdSense Stats and Performance 101

2007-02-20T08:41:00.000+09:00

As more and more people are getting into the AdSense game, there seem to be many questions asked again and again by the newcomers. Here, I have compiled detailed explanations to some common AdSense terms, facts, and performance tips.

Terminology

Real Stats (Figures based on actual performance tracking updated several times a day)
Page Impressions: The number of times an ad unit (a collection of 1 to 4 ads). If you have two ad units on a page, then every time the page loads you get two page impressions. Page Impressions DO include PSA (Public Service Ads) and Alternate Ads.
Clicks: The number of times someone clicks on an ad. Clicks on PSA will be included in this stat as well.
Earnings: Money you’ve made.

Derived Stats (Figures calculated from the real stats)
Clickthrough Rate: Clicks/Page Impressions. It is expressed as a percentage.
Effective CPM:. Earnings per thousand page impressions. Calculated by 1000 X Earnings / Page Impressions
EPC: Your EPC is not displayed because it does not really matter. EPC stands for Earnings Per Click (Earnings/Clicks) and is frequently talked about.

Facts 1. Stats Update Frequency/Delay: Although AdSense stats usually updates every couple hours, you don’t need to panic at all if you see no change in your stats for over 12 hours. Even if other webmasters are seeing normal updates.

2. Don’t worry about anomalies in your stats during the course of the day. These are not accurate. There could be delays in the update due to one reason or another. Only when you see figures for a new day can you know that the figures for the previous day are not going to change any more.

3. Sometimes the stats are carried forward several days. This happens when Google decides to freeze your clicks and earnings for fraud checking/tracking purposes or server delays. Thus, you may notice your earnings/clicks shoot straight up when you least expect it. It is possible for your CTR to go up by as much as 10% and your CPM to raise $200 over the normal.

4. The update on the different stats are not synchronized. For example, when you check your account, the page impressions may be freshed updated, while the clicks and earnings are from two hours ago. Thus, there may be a sharp drop/increase in the derived stats. Due to this, you don’t need to fret over all these little bumps.

5. Often delays in updates foreshadow changes to the AdSense program. For example, slow updates preceded introduction of channels, TOS changes, and addition of new languages.

6. Channels are a great way for you to track the performance of your ad on a particular page/site. If you want to use the same code for all of your pages, you can also use the recently added URL channels. Of course, channel data are delayed by two days.

Performance Tips

1. EPC doesn’t matter! That is because you have absolutely no control over your EPC. Your EPC is influenced by many variables including your webpage content, advertiser’s budget, seasonal fluctuations and more. Thus, the productive thing to do is concentrate on the factors that you have control over such as CTR and page impressions.

2. How am I doing?
Many of us probably wonder how we are doing compared to other AdSense users, including myself. However, we really can’t get a good sense of the average if Google doesn't disclose their figures, which they don’t. Since people doing well with AdSense generally don’t like to reveal their earnings due to the fear that they may be terminated by the program, any discussion about an average EPC/CTR/CPM is a waste of time.

3. From various experiments by myself and other webmasters, we can conclude (at least for now) that using image/text ads instead of just text ads will dramatically decrease you CTR because of various reasons. (i.e. fewer advertisers, banner blindness etc.) However, the EPC is usually slightly higher.

4. Blend in or stand out? This is completely site dependent. Sometimes, people will never click on your ads unless you “trick” them into doing so, although this is not so good for long term. Other sites will require your ad to scream in your visitor’s face to get good clicks. Do some extensive testing to find out what’s good for your site.

5. Make good use of the URL filter feature. Blocking repetitive (eBay ads) or boring ads (free smilies) will definitely increase your CTR.

6. Large rectangles placed above the fold will often generate most revenue. However, this may not be a good long term solution since such and ad is usually obstrusive and have little aesthetic value.

7. If you run a forum site, you may notice that your earnings are very low. Here is a solution: use a simple cookie-based php script that only displays AdSense ads once every 10 page views -- essentially a counter counts down from 10 to 0 and on 0 displays an AdSense block. Between the AdSense ads, display regular banner ads. Although your AdSense page impressions may be down, you will notice your CTR skyrocketing, and a large increase in overall earnings.

In conclusion: Play around with your ad to maximize your performance, and look at the big picture in your stats!

Optimization for misspelled words

2007-02-19T08:51:00.000+09:00

Optimizing a website for misspelled words is often recommended by many people within the search engine optimization SEO community. The concept is to capture the searchers who enter incorrectly spelled words into the search engine's interface search box. The theory is based on creating the wrong spelling, and placing it deliberately on your blog or static website. Theoretically, the pseudo-word will rank at the top of the Google search results, and receive a bonus visitor.

I do not share this SEO opinion; nor do I recommend spelling words incorrectly on a website or blog. The practice does more harm than good. It should be avoided by website owners and bloggers who want to establish a reputation for trustworthiness and professionalism.

The reasons provided by some SEO professionals for utilizing, what could be euphimistically called alternative spellings, are usually presented with good intentions. Of course, as with so many other well intended ideas, the practice doesn't match the theory. In fact, the very reasons for using misspelled words in the first place, are the reasons I don't recommend them at all. They do much more damage to a website than can be countered by any perceived benefits.

SEO theory: Incorrect spellings

The reasons for misspelling words on websites seem reasonable on the surface. In fact, some boosts in traffic can be measured as a direct result of the intentional errors. As with many statistics, the visitor traffic log can be a misleading metric if used improperly. In the case of spelling errors, the visitor traffic might not be of any value at all. It might even be harmful to your company reputation.

Let's examine why incorrect spellings are given such serious consideration as search engine tools.

It's well known that people type wrong letters when making a search query in Google. Instead of the standard and expected spelling, letters are often reversed in a transposition error, letters omitted entirely, frequently misspelled words, or letters adjacent on the keyboard are substituted by mistake. The theory holds that these are searchers who could be captured by way of the spelling error. Instead of losing those people to other sites, say these experts, they arrive at your site from ranking highly for the spelling mistake.

Making Google Adsense Pay

2007-02-16T08:20:00.000+09:00

Are you earning a lot from Google Adsense? Google adsense does pay but it is vitally important to weigh up a few factors before proceeding. Find out what you need to know.........

From what I am reading in online forums and discussion boards, Google adsense is still ruling the roost, in terms of popularity, for those wanting to start earning money from home.
I personally, have Google adsense ads on most of my websites and I find that even with the lowest of daily impressions an income can be earned. Ok you won't make a fortune with a few hits per day but if you are constantly building websites and optimizing them for adsense then the income can REALLY add up.

A few of my most recent websites are only getting 10-20 impressions per day but really high click through rates. Some days I can earn $2-$3 per site for a couple of clickthroughs from these low traffic sites. This denotes HIGH interest from advertisers paying big bucks to Google for certain keywords.

Unbelievably, many entrepreneurs are earning six figure incomes per month from adsense revenue alone.

The smart earners are building site after site then building out the ones that show potential.

The idea is to set up sites in relatively unknown markets but also balanced with some interest in the advertising field. For instance, if you choose a niche with little or no interest from advertisers then the income will reflect this lack of interest, ie. no one will be paying google for advertising in your niche or they will be paying very little and you will earn pittance per click thru.

One site of mine in an obscure niche gets hundreds of unique visitors per day and loads of adsense clickthrus, yet the income is only a dollar or two daily. This tells me that advertisers are paying very little, probably in and around 10 cents, for keywords in my niche.

At the other end of the spectrum you DO NOT want to choose a niche with so much competition that you cannot get any traffic at all. The "work at home", "home business", "internet marketing" niches are not good examples for a newcomer to make money from Google adsense. The competition is just too great. If you DO already have an established home business site then by all means add some adsense ads to your site.

Like everything else I have done online I have learnt through trial and error, Google adsense has been no different. If you don't put the ads out there then you will never know the potential.

I do get some clickthrus from my home business sites and the click thru rates can be anything from 10-15 cents to $1-2. Not bad!Google adsense is definitely here to stay for the forseeable future and we can all see why. If you have any vision at all you can see the potential in earning from Google adsense and exactly why it has become so popular.

The AdSense Formula for Making Money

2007-02-15T16:27:00.000+09:00

I often get asked what the secret is to making money with Google's AdSense program. This often comes from people who are dreaming of setting up websites chock full of high-paying keywords for particular niche subjects and then sitting back and watching the money roll in. "What's the magic formula?" they ask me. If they're non-technical, I point them straight to my first AdSense book, Make Easy Money with Google, and assure them that they'll learn everything they need from it. They may think it's hard, but it's not.

But what about the technical people? By this I mean the people who've already set up a blog or website, who have registered domain names, who are comfortable with basic Internet terminology and concepts. What is the "AdSense formula"?

The only AdSense formula that you need to know is this:

earnings = number of clicks * average price per click

This is what I call the Fundamental AdSense Formula because you can derive almost every AdSense "secret" directly or indirectly from this formula. Do you want to earn more with AdSense? You have two ways of doing it:

Increase the number of clicks, and/or
Increase the average price per click

Your earnings will only go up if you do one or the other, and ideally both. It's an obvious formula, yes, but it's amazing how many people lose sight of it in their quest for increased AdSense earnings.

Increasing the Number of AdSense Clicks

Increasing the number of times the ads on your site or blog are clicked is the most obvious strategy. There are two general strategies you can follow:

Increase the traffic to the site, and/or
Adjust the ads to make them more "clickable"

Getting traffic is hard and takes time, so don't look at it as a quick fix. The best way to get traffic is to provide useful, unique content and to rank highly in search engine rankings for keywords related to that content. In other words, use standard search engine optimization techniques. DO NOT "buy" traffic or use "link farms" or other dubious techniques. Other tips for getting traffic:

Publish articles, even free ones, with links back to your site.
Include a link to your site in the signature at the bottom of your emails or in any forum postings you make (if the forum allows it).
Participate in forums/groups related to the content of your site or blog. The key is to participate, not lurk, and don't just post messages promoting your site.
Add comments (relevant ones only, please) to other blogs, you can usually link back to yours. (This won't help your search engine rankings, but it may allow others who are reading those comments to find your own site.)
Syndicate your content (trivial if you have a blog) and make sure that the content is registered with syndication aggregators.
List your site in relevant directories.

Adjusting the ads is something you can do almost immediately:

Position the ads on the page in order to make them more noticeable. Google even publishes a helpful heat map for AdSense publishers.
Choose the best AdSense ad format that works for your site.
Change the ad colors either to make the ads blend in with your site or to make them stand out. Again, it varies depending on the site.

AdSense Stats and Performance 101

2007-02-14T08:30:00.000+09:00

What Makes Adsense Work

2007-02-13T10:00:00.000+09:00

Some adsense sites are performing well and others just exist in the abyss of cyberspace. Make sure your adsense site is the successful one and keep it out of the abyss.

What does make Adsense work – there are as many ideas as there are theories. Some maintain it is the placement of the ad on the page, some say integrate it into the page and it must have the look and feel of the webpage. It should be at the top and in this format and so the secrets continue.
There is only one real secret to adsense success; it is nothing more than traffic. Without substantial traffic your adsense pages will not make you money. There is proof of this statement, just look at the click through rate that you are receiving on your current pages and you will immediately notice that it takes a lot of visitors to generate a click.

If things go really well you could have as high as a fifty percent and upwards CTR. This is possible, has been done and proven, but it won't just happen on any old page.

Placement of the ad does play a role but it is not so big as many would like you to believe. Information on the best placement of adsense code on your page is no secret and is free information on Google. It is called a heat map and will show you exactly where to place your ads for maximum exposure and CTR.

The problem with most adsense driven sites is exactly that, they are adsense driven. Nobody nowadays seem to care about the visitor landing on the page, they have just become click machines supposed to make you money. According to most adsense sites they are there for you and not the other way around. No second thought is given to the surfing experience of the visitor.

You have been made to believe that you need a multitude of sites and use all sorts of templates and secret positioning tactics for maximum income. So every second would be adsense millionaire is putting up thousands of crappy pages all over the internet to get those adsense clicks that will elevate them to the illusive four and five figure adsense earners. They tend to forget the internet marketplace is probably the most dynamic market there is, and changes every day. Certain elements of course remain the same but you have to be able to broaden your thinking and think out of the box sometimes.

Let's go back to the least important person for most adsense publishers, the visitor to the page. These poor souls land on your pages either through generic or PPC traffic. Either way you have the possibility that they might be clicking on one of your adsense links. The only driving force for the visitor to click your link is he found the information on your page that related to his search, and after going through your page he will click on one of your links in adsense to further his search.

Now adsense displays relevant ads on your page based on the content of the page. If the visitor is not finding what they are looking for how on earth do you expect adsense to find related content ads to place on your page.

By taking your visitor into account and actually providing for them you are also insuring for yourself that the correct adsense ads will be displaying on your pages, and hence will deliver a good CTR. Just putting up one thousand new pages with some template or other automatic page creating device will certainly not hit the mark.

You would most probably be much better off with ten well designed and optimized pages, not only for the search engines but for your visitors, and you might then really be able to ensure a profitable adsense campaign.

Adsense Secrets

2007-02-09T08:07:00.000+09:00

Pst! Wanna know some Adsense secrets? The only secret is that there are no secrets!

Do a search for Adsense secrets and you will be bombarded by a myriad of ads by telling you that they, and they alone have all the answers to making lots of money with Adsense. And I say bully to all of them. I repeat: nobody has all the answers and there are no "Adsense secrets" per se!

The only thing you need to find out all there is to know about Adsense is a search engine and a bit of common sense. There are literally hundreds of forums where you can pick up all the information you need, as well as hundreds of articles that have been written on the subject of Adsense.

All the answers are out there for you to find it you will put in a little bit of work. If you buy any of the ebooks available out there, you might find one little nugget of information that you may not have seen anywhere else, but I promise you: everything is out here on the Internet - all you have to do is search for it. Here are some of the search terms that I personally have used with great results:

increase adsense income
increase your adsense income
adsense experiments
adsense adsense tricks
adsense tips

What I can tell you from my own experience is this:

1. Ads at the top of the page and on the left of the page perfom better than any other ads. (Take a look at the "heatmap" from the Google link below)
2. Ads without background colour and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background colour.
3. Ads within content pages perform better than any other ads.
4. A search box on every page gives you another chance for earning Adsense income.
5. Your link at the top of the ad should be blue like a normal link, the ad should be black, and the url should also be black so that it blends in with the ad copy. That makes the link stand out and gives you a better chance of someone clicking on it.

Google has brought out some great Adsense optimization tips. You can read it here: Google Adsense optimization tips

To increase your site traffic, which obviously will increase your Adsense income, the best way to get traffic is to have fresh content at your site. Write your own articles and submit it to article directories like Go Articles etc. To find more article directories, just do a search for "free article directory submissions" on a search engine like Google.

Another way would be to publish articles by other authors that are relevant to your site content. You can find free articles all over the web by once again doing a search for e.g. "free site content".

Do this on a regular basis and watch your traffic increase on a steady basis. You also now know all the Adsense secrets you will ever need to optimize your Adsense ads so there is no need dig out your wallet for "secrets".

Step by step SEO: Chapter 5

2007-02-08T10:05:00.000+09:00

Some search engines will allow you to submit (to replace or add a page to the index) a URL once every day and changes are usually live quickly (faster than other search engines), so use the search engine with the fastest indexing process to 'debug' your keywords and Search Engine Optimization tactics. Unfortunately this submission cycle varies, so you might need to submit pages to all major engines, but certainly not all 200 search engines. It is important to understand that the time it takes for a search engine to actually respond to a submission and to place you into their index varies greatly day-to-day. Search engine indexing was once a matter of hours, and now is weeks. You would be wise to consider submission to other engines as well to cover your bases. How search engines work is a wondrous thing, and every engine is different.

Once you have selected your major keywords, add the main words to your TITLE string, your META description string, your META keywords string, ALT tags (image tag parameter), and especially imbed them into your top-of-page displayed content. Try to use as many keywords as grammar will allow in your opening few sentences since this sets the topic for the page and contributes to the theme of the site.

Keyword tuning is an iterative loop (you keep doing it) until you rank reasonably well on several search engines. At that point you at least have the right words and a reasonable META keyword tag. But some search engines use different strings to determine keywords and their algorithms downplay or ignore META tags. These search engines extract keywords from the content on your page, so you need to place your best search words throughout the displayed content for your page. An example (grossly oversimplified) would be:

important-keyword-phrase

anchor-text-with-keywords

Note: If you are not "programming" the design of your own web site and are not familiar with how to add HTML code, please contact your web designer and request that they add these commands.

Hint: some search engines ignore content in comment blocks, but some other engines may process this content. Also, some engines processes ALT text for your images as keyword text as long as you do not spam these areas. However, at least one search engine has added indexing logic to consider the exact (or long-string) duplication of substantial portions of your keyword list in this fashion as spamming, and your entries will be removed within a week of their addition. To get around this, reword your keyword list to read as sentences, and place them in content appropriate to the page.Once the same words are in your META title, description and keywords, and also in other text (Alt and comments) and displayed content, and you are satisfied with your results, and only then, is it appropriate to submit your URL's to each major search engine. We suggest that you pace your search engine submissions, adding only up to five pages per day per site as a maximum, and not doing submission more than two or three times per week. As a result, performing the above add requests as scheduled will allow you to remain within the acceptable range for most search engines.

Hint: the engines will regularly discard search engine submissions without processing them. By resubmitting you have a higher probability of having one of your submissions "take". Also, some indexes appear to give preference to "fresh" submissions as determined by the date of last update and the last submission date. So you should update your site often following prescribed Search Engine Optimization tactics and resubmit at least twice per month.

Allow two to four weeks for each search engine submission to be indexed in each major search engine. If you do not show up (as is common), then resubmit. If you continue to miss the search engine rankings results you desire, then go back and review your keyword usage, either increasing or decreasing frequency until you have the desired results. Suggestion: on the Yahoo directory, register regionally instead of nationally (they will add you everywhere as well, but you get registered much quicker regionally), and on the others, register frequently until you are listed. Your ratings in the organic search results appear to be affected and while Yahoo is changing this is still a good move.

Step by step SEO: Chapter 4

2007-02-07T09:26:00.000+09:00

You are about to discover your real issue... you have insufficient or weak content. It takes a lot of words to convince a search engine that you are a subject matter expert. Also, most sites use images to relay their message to humans, but are now discovering that search engines are blind and do not see images. Or the site content comes from a data base and the data base has
little unique content. Or the site accepts feeds from other expert sites but
this makes all of their content someone else's, and they either get no
credit for it or are penalized for duplicate content. In any case, the
design and content on your web site may very well need to be restructured
and expanded. [If this is not you, buy yourself a drink -- you have earned
it!] Avoid mistakes, use clean optimized graphics and do it right, minimize
the use of flash, avoid pop-up windows, restrict the scope of forms except
where really needed, make JavaScript and css files external to the source
code, always use a site map, solve obvious problems first, and by all means
keep it simple. Web page layout problems really hurt SEO projects.

Even if tags are ignored today, it only takes a few minutes to do it right,
you would never be penalized for having them (unless you spam), and not all
engines will ignore them and maybe not forever.

You can never go wrong by using meta tags, and only hurt yourself if you
don't use them.

You must also unconditionally, absolutely, positively have keywords (and
certainly sufficient content containing them) throughout your body section.

We recommend that you have at least 400 words of clean sentence-structure
grammatically correct content on every page. You must also have your
keywords appear as the the most common (without excess) phrases on your
pages. In many cases there are ways to do this that work well for whatever
your page format or content, all of which is customized to the look-and-feel
of the site and the nature of the content.

And you also need to link pages together using the keywords of the landing
page in the anchor text of the sending page. This is a must... use text
links within paragraphs when possible, especially when the pages are
related. If the topics are not related, then use image links so the search
engines do not see the text and get confused.

And never, ever create doorway pages, or information pages, or hallway
pages, or whatever they are called today. Spam by any other name is still
spam. If you cannot make the real page into a subject matter expert, then
hire someone that can. But do not try to make a pig fly!

Step by step SEO: Chapter 3

2007-02-06T08:40:00.000+09:00

You will end up with hundreds of words that you should sort by your perceived descending order of importance (how likely it is that they will be used by visitors as search words). If uncertain, leave them in the order used by the highest rated pages. Be sure to identify two-word or three-word phrases if used, or if applicable. It is also important that you add words to help clarify the use of your keywords. For instance "capital" might have very different meanings -- such as intellectual capital, state capital, capital letters, venture capital, etc. So a keyword or two that helps the index builders learn the context of your keywords will help raise your search engine rankings. Hint: each keyword in your META tags must also appear within your content to avoid spamming penalties. Also, consider common misspellings as additions to your keyword lists.

Once you have your personal list, validate each phrase for popularity as a search term. There are several tools that are free that allow you to get a glimpse of the usage of various words and phrases. The most popular free keyword suggestion tool is offered by Overture and it is very popular. The best tool for determining what stemmed word is commonly used is Word tracker. It is so good that we recommend it to our clients in our SEO training courses. The results will indicate what terms generate the most searches, thus those are the most important terms (if they are appropriate to your page). Search Engine Optimization and Ranking Advice: Excessive use of META keywords is going to cause a search engine to ignore or decrease the weight for that keyword. And if you use a single word as a keyword, and later repeat it in your keyword string, then you may also be penalized. The string "Web, Web Design, Web" would be considered spamming. Also, keywords like 'word, words, wording, worded' may cause indexing to fail. Things are definitely getting tough, and it is advised that you use extreme caution when creating your Meta Tags. If you are indexed by any engine, and remain indexed for a week, then you have probably passed their test

"For best results, the following Web publishing techniques should be avoided:

Overuse or repetition of keywords

Use of keywords that do not relate to the content of the site

Use of fast meta refresh

Use of colored text on same-color background

Duplication of pages with different URLs

Use of different pages that bridge to the same URL"

It is also important to discard potential keywords that are not likely to be used in a search if they do not contribute to your revenue. Properly done, you might end up with as few as ten or as many as a hundred major keywords. If you add all of the words it will dilute the importance of each keyword, so select well. In general, you will have a hard time keeping the keyword analysis list short if you include plurals and various combinations of words to maximize your frequency counts. This site has many keywords in various forms and combinations but we felt each word was important when we designed our keywords. The last keyword should be your site identification taken from your URL (ours is bruceclay.com), for ranking and placement reasons discussed later. Be sure that this string appears as content to avoid spamming (can be in a URL string or mailto at the bottom of your page). As for spamming technologies, there is evidence that the major search engines look across pages within their index for long-string repeats, so mix up your keywords in the ALT tags to be sure they are not identical in sequence to words used elsewhere (text or META tags). Duplicate content is a very bad thing, and it can cause site-wide penalties. Hint: Be very careful not to replicate content on other URL's, and if it happens (as with affiliate sites) you have a serious problem. Duplicate content is a real problem when doing SEO. Also, repeating your keywords in the content, as long as it is within a reasonable sentence construct and has appropriate context, will not be considered spamming. A search engine usually cares about spamming outside of the standard sentence construct when reviewing content instead of sentence spamming issues. Using exotic "hidden" text techniques will usually have you eliminated, so avoid them when possible.

Step by step SEO: Chapter 2

2007-02-05T09:22:00.000+09:00

How to Identify Keywords

If you find that there are no META keywords in the site, the chances are that the site is using a server technique designed to hide keywords (such as server side includes), such server scripts submit alternate pages when a specific search engine looks for the page. These stealth CGI scripts were designed to offer content to the search engine that is exceptionally keyword loaded in an attempt to bias the spider into a higher ranking position, or both. "Some people submit pages that present our spider with content that differs from what browsers will see. We strongly discourage the use of these techniques." - AltaVista Spamming Restrictions

Or perhaps the site author indexed then subsequently uploaded a keyword-less page to keep you from figuring out how to beat them with their own keywords. I do not recommend that you try this on your site because, in most cases, anybody can resubmit your URL, thus your site will drop from the search ranking results. As a housekeeping matter, the search engine will eventually revisit and reload registered sites without owner knowledge in order to purge deleted pages or to address spamming, so these sites will eventually vanish anyhow. Hint: the META tag "keywords" may work for some search engines (like Yahoo!) while Google and many others emphasize content and titles. As a result, it is important to have the most common words also appear at the top and throughout your site if it can be done without hurting the appeal of the site. If the search is for "search engine advice", put that string in the title, keywords, and top-of-page content.

D-List Part 1

2007-02-03T15:09:00.000+09:00

These blogs have the ‘no follow’ link disabled from the comments, which means that if you comment on these sites, you will get an actual link. If you would like to be included here, please let me know.

If you find this list useful, please consider linking to it.

This DoFollow Blog list is courtesy of Courtney Tuttle and was created originally by Coleen as the D-List.

RealityWired.com
BrilliantCheers
Achille
OnTheWebEd
JonLee
ChrisHoyt
JulieAnnBonner
LinkItForMe
RamblingThoughtsBlog
BlogThatOutside
Tobsy
NOWG
CatchAFallingStar
SweetAgring
LayerCake
ErikSvend
PajamaProfessional
Hem
MyOpinionsAreImportant
HeckOfIt
RoadLessTravelled
The Fit Shack
Foximus
BetShopBoy
5xMom
Derek
Semmler
Linguistics Zone
Zr5
SmartWealthyRich
How To Split An Atom
The Alternative
Self-Employment Blog
A Politically Incorrect Entrepreneur
CrayonWriter
BlogRaters
TagsKitchen
TradeMacro
Bracing Your Brand
Mother’s Home
Brian Pratt
Best Real Income
1000MileJourney
3DayMom
A Writers Words, An Editors Eye
Aaron Roselo
Advertising for Success
And to Think

To be continued

AdSense on the same page as other contextual ad programs

2007-02-02T08:41:00.000+09:00

When Google updated their AdSense policies this week, there was a lot of confusion about the removal of the a certain part of the competitive ad policy, namely the one that saw the removal of the following:

We do not permit Google ads or search boxes accessing Google search services to be published on web pages that also contain what could be considered competing ads or services. If you have elected to receive contextually-targeted Google ads, this would include all other contextually-targeted ads or links on the same page as Google ads.

Yet, as I posted yesterday, its removal from the policy pages did not mean much in itself, as the AdSense terms still included a clause (If You have elected to receive content or Site-based Ads, You further agree not to display on any Serviced Page any non-Google content-targeted advertisement(s).) that would prevent other contextual ads on the same page.

I followed up with Google on the situation, to find out of the removal of the clause would mean that competitor's ads would be allowed on the same page as AdSense, provided they didn't resemble or mimic AdSense ads, and that the AdSense terms would eventually be updated to reflect this policy change. And the answer is yes!

I spoke with Brian Axe, senior product manager on the Google AdSense Team on the issue. "As you and others have noticed, the AdSense Terms and Conditions haven't been updated since 2005, and we're working on an update to the Terms to bring everything into line. Traditionally, we don't update the Terms as frequently, since all publishers must re-agree to the Terms whenever they change."

"When it comes to enforcing policies on third-party contextual ads, we'll be following the updated program policies instead of the T&Cs on this point. That is to say, publishers may now display other contextual ads on the same site or page as Google ads as long as they don't have the same look and feel as our ads," Brian Axe tells Jennifer Slegg of JenSense.

So what does this mean for AdSense publishers? Well, it depends what you want to use with it. Using Yahoo Pubisher Network is still a no go, because the YPN terms still contain a clause (For any webpage or RSS feed that includes the Ad Code, you agree not to display or link to any other advertising (including but not limited to any listing) that is mapped to or responds to the content of the Ad Page) preventing publishers from using another contextual ad network on the same page as YPN ads. However, I am following up with Yahoo on this issue to find out if they will be loosening this clause now or in the future to permit AdSense and YPN to run on the same page. I will update you on this issue if I get information about whether or not YPN will decide to do this.

However IntelliTXT is one I get plenty of questions on, and publishers can definitely run IntelliTXT with AdSense, provided the pop-up does not either mimic AdSense ads or obscure any AdSense ad units running on the same page.

And any other contextual ads are now fine to run, provided their own terms do allow other contextual ads on the same page, and they do not mimic the AdSense ad units on the page you currently run.

How can you ensure they aren't mimicking your AdSense? If you are using the border-less technique, the simplest solution is to add a border or change the background color of the competitor's ad unit. It is still unclear just how much of the text within a blended ad unit (an ad unit that matches the border and background to the background of the webpage) would have to be changed, but I would guess all three elements would need changing, the colors of the title, description text and the URL. So it is obviously easier to just throw up a different border or background on to the ad unit to make its appearance substantially different from your AdSense ad unit. The you can work on tweaking it later without borders once we get more confirmation on just how much of the text color needs to be changed within an ad unit to ensure you are not breaking AdSense policies. And of course, you can always contact Google support on this issue to ensure that your competitive ad units are different enough to satisfy the AdSense compliancy team.

All in all, this change is good because it does allow publishers to use competitive ad products on the same page as AdSense, something that was previously not allowed under the program policies. You just simply need to ensure that any other ads you use (whether contextually targeted or not) do not resemble the AdSense ads you run anywhere on that same site.

Update: I spoke with Yahoo Publisher Network on this issue, and they say that as of today, page level exclusivity still exists. This means you still cannot run YPN on the same page as another contextual ad network. However, they will listen to publisher feedback on this issue and take it into consideration for future YPN terms updates.

Update 2: I have had a few questions regarding whether using the same ad unit sizes would constitute having the "same look and feel", and some others are reporting that using anything in an ad unit in the same style as Google's (such as using something that looks like YPN) would violate this policy. Fortunately for publishers, the answer is no, just the fact the ad units share the same styling (as nearly all contextual ad networks do) will not break the policy as long as you take care to change the color schemes used by each.

Botton line, this means you can use the same ad unit sizes from two different programs, as long as there are clear differences in the color scheme (and things such as borders or backgrounds) used by your Google ads. It is also worth noting thaty proximity of the competitive ad units to each other also comes into factor when making changes to your site by adding competitive ads. I asked Brian Axe from AdSense to clear up just how different the ad units need to be so publishers do not inadvertantly violate the policy.

""We're asking that publishers use good judgment on how much they change the colors or formatting of the ads to ensure users don't confuse third-party ads with Google ads. Proximity plays a role as well - if you're placing the ad units directly adjacent to one another, we'd ask that you use clear borders and offsetting colors to indicate where one network's ad unit ends and the other begins. If the ad units are on opposite sides of the page, using different backgrounds colors and/or a different color scheme for ad text and borders should be fine. Ad units that are virtually indistinguishable from the Google ads on a site would certainly violate the spirit of this policy," Brian says.

Double Your AdSense Income Instantly

2007-02-01T08:34:00.000+09:00

As you probably already know, AdSense is revolutionizing the way many infopreneurs are creating revenue from their web site traffic. The reason for this is its simplicity. Through AdSense, revenue is generated when someone simply clicks thru the AdSense ads displayed on the webmasters web site.

In this article I want to give you a few simple ways to dramatically increase your AdSense income.

The bottom line:

To increase AdSense income all you must do is increase the number of click thrus you receive.

There are two ways for you to increase your total number of click thrus. You can either increase your website traffic or you can increase your AdSense click thru rate. Now, getting more traffic would be great, but let’s be honest increasing your web site traffic is much easier said than done. So, let’s focus on increasing your AdSense click thru rate instead.

4 Tips to Increase Click Thru:

Match your AdSense to your website:

You want your AdSense ads to appear as seamless as possible. Your goal is to match every aspect of your AdSense ads to the theme of your website. What you want to do is remove the borders from your AdSense ads and match the background color of the ad to your website. Additionally, you want to match the color of the AdSense links to the rest of the links on your website plus choose an ad format that makes the ads look seamless.

For example, if your web site has a white background and the default color of your hypertext links is blue you will want to remove the border from your AdSense, make the background white, choose either a square or a rectangle as your ad format instead of a skyscraper or banner, and yep you guessed it… make the links blue.

Placement Matters:

Where you place your AdSense ads is just as important as how they look. Luckily, there are only a few concepts that you need to worry about in order to increase your click through rate.

The more white space around your ads the better
The closer to the top of the page the better
The closer the left of the page the better
Follow these concepts and I can assure you that you will see an increase in your AdSense click thru rate. (It really is that simply!)

Google Search:

Now this is one that I rarely see webmasters take advantage of. The Google AdSense program gives webmasters the ability to add a Google search box to there web site.

Why should you use this function?

Well, when a website visitor chooses to use this search box from your website your AdSense ID will be imbedded in ALL of that visitors Google searches. If that person does 1 search or 50 your AdSense ID will still be imbedded throughout process.

Why is this so great?

If that visitor clicks on any of the sponsored listings while surfing from your web site guess who makes money. YOU! If they hit the back button and click on another ad guess who makes money? YOU! This is absolutely huge. Through this function you now have the ability to earn multiple click thrus from the same visitor on the site visit. Please don’t overlook how powerful this is. Besides, most of your website traffic will just be browsing anyway, so I why help them find what there looking for and make a little coin along the way?

Tracking:

Just like any other type of marketing, you won’t know what’s working the best for you on your web site unless you track the different things that you’re experimenting with. Set up a few Google AdSense channels for the different ads that you’ll be placing on your website. Then just see which channels are working the best and stick to those.

That’s it!

Follow the tips above and I can assure you that you will absolutely double your AdSense click thru rate and your AdSense income. The best part about the four tips I’ve shared here is that you can put them into action immediately and see how they will work on your website right now. Who knows… you could be making twice as much by tomorrow by just making a few simple tweaks here and there.

Good Luck!

If you don’t know where to start and you want to check out how I’ve incorporated the above ideas into of my website you can check it out below:

http://www.perfect-home-based-business-opportunities.com

Powerful SEO Secrets

2007-01-31T10:24:00.000+09:00

If you want to rank on top for Google, Yahoo!, and other major search engines, you’ll need more than a basic knowledge of search engine optimization. Those who rank high on natural search results do so because they’ve been able to effectively manage their on-page and off-page optimization factors.

On-page Optimization
What you do on your web pages can have a positive or negative impact on your search results. However, as we’ll discuss later in this article, off-page optimization is even more powerful when it comes to increasing your natural search engine placement.

Some of the most important on-page optimization techniques begin with choosing a key word to optimize your page for. There are a number of free tools available on the Internet that can help you find a keyword that is popular but not overly competitive. Keywords that are highly competitive are often very difficult to place well for.

Once you’ve selected a keyword, you can take advantage of:

Secret #1: Don’t optimize for a single keyword, optimize for a keyword phrase.
When you optimize for a single keyword, more often than not, that word is highly competitive and your chances of coming out on top are minimal. Where you gain a significant advantage is by focusing on a keyword phrase. This actually increases your chances of ranking well and ultimately helps you towards ranking well for the single word you originally chose.

Secret #2: Place your keyword phrase within the first 25 words of text, and the last 25 words of the page. The h1 tag can be used for developing a headline on your page and emphasizing your keyword phrase within the beginning of your page text (search engines love h1 tags). Another suggestion is to use your keyword phrase just after your copyright notice on the bottom of your webpage. This ensures that it is present within the last 25 words of your page.

Secret #3: Place your keyword phrase in your page title and description. Additionally, place the keyword phrase throughout your page - being sure to bold the phrase once, italicize the phrase once, and underline the phrase once. Mention your keyword phrase every paragraph or so. Just make sure that it appears natural. If you stuff the page with your keywords, you’ll potentially turn off browsers who would otherwise find your page valuable.

Off-page Optimization
Now that you’ve learned about on-page optimization, it’s important that you focus your attention on off-page optimization. Of all the techniques that have been developed for SEO, it still comes down to the popularity of your site.

The ranking of your website in a natural search engine result list is directly correlated to the popularity of your website.

So what do I mean by popularity? Popularity is the number and quality of links to your website. Although I’ve simplified the explanation here, you should know that links essentially count as votes. If everyone is "voting" for a particular website then the website becomes popular.

Secret #4: Get other sites to link to you. There are a number of ways to improve link popularity. Although I won’t recommend a specific link building tool, I will say that there have been a number of good products developed that simplify the process. It still takes time and hard work, but over time, increasing the number of sites linking to your website can pay huge dividends.

Secret #5: Make sure that incoming links are of high quality (sites with a high Google page rank). It’s not only important to have other sites link to you, it’s also important to have quality sites link to you.

Secret #6: Anchor text must include your keyword phrase. When other sites link to you, make sure the link includes your keyword phrase. Sites that link to your domain can help with overall page rank and popularity, but websites who link to you using your keyword phrase (in the anchor text) are what get you to the top of search engine result lists.

Secret #7: Give people a reason to link to your website. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, white papers, free content or tools, etc., but ultimately it comes down to offering something of value. If you do, other websites will give you their "vote", increasing your link popularity and your search engine results.

Increasing your rank on major search engines isn’t complex. But it does take time and effort. If you want to increase your website ranking, begin by implementing what you’ve learned in this article and stay the course.

Step by Step SEO: Chapter 1

2007-01-31T08:15:00.000+09:00

I am going to tell you how to optimize your website to get the max out of search engines.

First you need to know that SEO is not a thing which can bring you outcome overnight. Its a long process so the key of success in this field is......patience.

Dont worry, SEO isnt a rocket science either, anybody with a mix of logics and commen sense can do it..

So lets get it started..

How to Identify Your Competition

First you need to identify your competion, its very important, because you need to know who are you up against. To identify you competitors, open your favorite search engine and search for you most important and most relevant keyword for your site. All the sites listed on page 1 are your competitors. Closely analyze those sites to know what they have done to get that ranking. Including their contents, key word optimization and meta tags

How to use Link Tracking: locating the links TO a URL

Link tracking allows you to identify and choose possible sites that you will want as link partners once your site is content-rich and optimized. If these sites link to your competition, then you want them to also link to you! This is also done so that thesepotential link partners can be checked for META keywords that might be related to your site that were missed by your competition.

Links are vital to long-term Search Engine Optimization and ranking. The objective is this: if you get a site to link to you then you gain popularity points. If that site has a lot of quality sites linking to it and it links to you, you get a lot of points, but if that site has few quality sites linking to it, you get only a few points. As such, a link from Microsoft.com would be worth more than a link from dodomake.com provided both had content similar to yours. In essence, if enough quality sites link to you then your site becomes a quality site by association. So you want the best sites, not the most, to link to you. Likewise, if you link to other quality sites then your site is assumed to be a quality site by association. However, the sites must be covering the same topics as your linking page in both directions. All other links are minimal importance (or in the case of spam they are ignored or even a penalty). And do not bother to buy hundreds of

URL's and cross link them or to buy into an advertising network. The search engines can locate them and filter them out faster than you can perform submission on these pages. At best they are short-lived.

Hint: you should also search for your own domain name in the major search engines. While this is not obvious, it is very informative, especially since you probably do not know who is actually linking to you. Search in Google using the following search format:

"e-greetingz.com -site:e-greetingz.com" (works for Yahoo as well). Replace e-greetingz.com with your domain name.

Now you know how to Identify your competition and the Importance of links.

In Next chapter I'll tell you how to identify suitable keywords for your site to traget.

Stay tuned..

Adsense Secrets

2007-01-30T10:12:00.000+09:00

Wanna know some Adsense secrets? The only secret is that there are no secrets!

Do a search for Adsense secrets and you will be bombarded by a myriad of ads by telling you that they, and they alone have all the answers to making lots of money with Adsense. And I say bully to all of them. I repeat: nobody has all the answers and there are no "Adsense secrets" per se!

The only thing you need to find out all there is to know about Adsense is a search engine and a bit of common sense. There are literally hundreds of forums where you can pick up all the information you need, as well as hundreds of articles that have been written on the subject of Adsense.

All the answers are out there for you to find it you will put in a little bit of work. If you buy any of the ebooks available out there, you might find one little nugget of information that you may not have seen anywhere else, but I promise you: everything is out here on the Internet - all you have to do is search for it. Here are some of the search terms that I personally have used with great results:

increase adsense income
increase your adsense income
adsense experiments
adsense adsense tricks
adsense tips

What I can tell you from my own experience is this:

1. Ads at the top of the page and on the left of the page perfom better than any other ads. (Take a look at the "heatmap" from the Google link below)
2. Ads without background colour and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background colour.
3. Ads within content pages perform better than any other ads.
4. A search box on every page gives you another chance for earning Adsense income.
5. Your link at the top of the ad should be blue like a normal link, the ad should be black, and the url should also be black so that it blends in with the ad copy. That makes the link stand out and gives you a better chance of someone clicking on it.

Google has brought out some great Adsense optimization tips. You can read it here: Google Adsense optimization tips

To increase your site traffic, which obviously will increase your Adsense income, the best way to get traffic is to have fresh content at your site. Write your own articles and submit it to article directories like Go Articles etc. To find more article directories, just do a search for "free article directory submissions" on a search engine like Google.

Another way would be to publish articles by other authors that are relevant to your site content. You can find free articles all over the web by once again doing a search for e.g. "free site content".

Do this on a regular basis and watch your traffic increase on a steady basis. You also now know all the Adsense secrets you will ever need to optimize your Adsense ads so there is no need dig out your wallet for "secrets".

Secrets of Search Engine Optimization -- SEO

2007-01-29T10:51:00.000+09:00

Keyword Combination of Secrets of Search Engine Optimization.

Let's say you have a keyword combination. Anytime a person does a search on that keyword combination you want your website to pop up in the number one position. Here are steps that will help.

Place the keyword combination in your keyword metatag.
Place the keyword combination in your description metatag.
Next place the keywords in your title.
Place that exact string "secrets of search engine optimization" in the first paragraph of your page and make that string BOLD
Use that keyword combination again in the next paragraph. At least once.
You can skip a paragraph, but use it again once in the next two paragraphs.
Place an image on your page. The keywords should be in the alt tag.
Put some text referring to the image beside, above or below the image using the keyword.
After the image add at least 2 more paragraphs. Use your perfect keywords once in each paragraph.
In the last paragraph italicize the keywords.
Sprinkle headlines throughout the article with relevant keywords
Make sure the keywords are relevant to the scope of the article.

We follow this formula because of how the search engines look at your page. Most SEO experts say that metatags aren't used by the search engines anymore. But it takes nothing to add your keyword to the metatags. There might be some old style search engines still using the metatags. Don't miss the opportunity.

Search Engines look at the First and Last Paragraphs

The big search engines look at the first and last paragraph, though I have had arguments with co-workers who say the search engines have no way to know where the last paragraph is in an article. Add it anyway. Why chance failure on an assumption?

What is the proper number of times you can use your keywords in your article? There is no hard and fast rule to follow. Though the search engines know exactly the proper number before you are considered spamming. Spamming the search engine is when you have the keyword combination in your article so many times that the search engine excludes you completely.

The number I follow is to have a ratio of 1 instance of the keyword combination to each instance of paragraphs in your article. That has served me okay.

Beyond all these issues is the relevancy of the keywords to the topic you are writing about. If your article covers search engine marketing, then use the keyword combination of search engine marketing. This article covers search engine optimization and SEO. This keyword combination is relevant to SEO and optimization.

Confused about the Secrets of Search Engine Optimization?

Confused how to use all this information? Use the old speakers formula. Tell your readers what you are going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them. Three opportunities to express your keywords in all your articles.

I am big on using combinations of words when I do searches. Who knows what will come up when you do a search on one keyword like "SEO". That single acronym will return 11,600,000 matches to the keyword in Google. But if you let it become a keyword combination then the single word "SEO" becomes "secrets of search engine optimizaton techniques and SEO". That returns only 4,080 matches. Which will give you a better chance to get to the top? And these days who does searches on only one word? Maximize your potential for matches by creating relevant keyword combinations.

The Secret of Black Hat Seo

2007-01-29T10:24:00.000+09:00

Are your seo efforts at a standstill while everyone else seems to be getting results? Maybe it's time to take some tips from the guys that know the limits of optimization and the benefits of playing in the grey area. So let's see what black hats do to get traffic:

1. Go for the long tail -- black hats do this because it's easier to rank for a 4,5 or even 6 keyword search that has no direct competition than it is to rank for a search phrase that has hundreds of thousands or millions of results.

Of course, spam sites have the advantage of massive numbers of pages, so even if that page only brings one visitor per month it's still enough -- spam sites are created in only a couple of hours and usually have from 30 000 pages and up.

But if you keep writing daily (or even more than once a day), it will add up. This brings us to the next point:

2. The money's in the archives -- although some visitors will first see the main page of your site, many more will first see one of the inside pages as these will be the ones that come up for specific, long tail searches.

With each page you publish you increase your chances that at least one more visitor will find your site and more importantly, if it's a good resource, it will more than pay for itself by getting backlinks from many different sites that will diversify your inbound links profile.

3. Small degrees of separation -- this is one of the best methods for writing new content: if you have a page on a certain subject just write another that has some differences.

For example: you've just written an article on how to promote a site on Digg - now write another on how to promote on Del.icio.us, and yet another on how to promote your site on Slashdot (of course, don't just change the names and URLs, you actually have to change the article a little bit).

Please understand this: if you have a 30 page site don't put up 10 pages that resemble each other very much. By doing this you'll surely trip a duplicate content filter.

4. Comment spam but without the spam -- let's face it: black hats are synonymous with spammers. They rely on comment and guestbook spamming to get their huge websites indexed and this proves one thing that I've tested and found to be true: even "no-follow" links have the power to rank and index your site, although most optimizers say these are useless.

What to do: find 10 or 15 blogs that are on the same subject as your site and start contributing with valuable information. Don't spam, don't say "Nice blog!" every time just to get a link! You must actually participate.

5. Create (legitimate) doorway pages -- this is a great method for link building and actually getting customers while your site is in the sandbox or not ranking very good.

A very good example is Squidoo.com: it's a very powerful site with lots of link juice that lets you create pages on almost any subject. Start by creating 10 or 12 pages with unique content on various subjects that match your site and then place various links to your site on the Squidoo pages you have created.

Even better, you can actually create a very big network of pages which you can logically structure as a homepage with categories and product pages -- it's allowed, encouraged and in the end very good for you.

Now think of other powerful sites on which you can put your content: Blogger, Google Base, Wordpress.com, Xanga, Livespace and many more.

6. Blog and ping -- this is very simple and yet a very good method to get indexed fast. Each time you write a new article go to Pingoat.com, put in the name of the article and the url and ping away. You'll be indexed in no time!

Apply these tips now and just watch your rankings improve and traffic increase!

The Secrets of Good Keywords

2007-01-25T08:50:00.000+09:00

The key to search engine ranking is a set of good keywords and key phrases. More specific your keywords or key phrases are the more probable your website is for getting a good ranking in search engines. Most Internet marketing companies long to have a website that ranks high over their competitors and spend fortunes on finding keywords and key phrases that best represent them. However, it is often found that good keywords are not target by a large number of websites, and hence they fail to get rankings.

There are some very effective tools that will help you find your best set of keywords and key phrases.

The first one you should consider is WordTracker. A very user friendly website, the WordTracker can be accessed for $7 for 24 hours. The WordTracker features a window where you need to type in a keyword phrase you think suits your requirements the best. Upon doing this, the WordTracker will display a list of related phrases. Choose the ones you like the most and run through the software. Now the software will perform a set of internal analysis to rate your chosen keywords and key phrases based upon number of users searching for it and websites targeting them. The process is just to give you a list of the most targeted keywords and key phrases. The higher the rating the more effective it is.

Google Adwords, offered by Google, is one of the most preferred keywords and key phrases analysis tool. It works in a similar fashion to that of WordTracker, where you need to type in your targeted keywords and key phrases and get a list of the most used, visited, or preferred keywords and key phrases targeted by websites.

Overture is another tool which helps at identifying keywords and key phrases. Overture is highly preferred by SEO professionals because it gives a similar list of keywords and key phrases like the WordTracker, free of cost and faster. However, overture does not display the number of websites targeting the keywords and key phrases.

Using these tools optimally will surely help you get a high rank in major search engines. After all, that is what each and every Internet marketing company long.

Common Mistakes by Google Adsense

2007-01-24T10:35:00.000+09:00

Google Adsense program is a popular web advertising program which provides a good income source for many websites. There are well defined terms of service to strictly adhere to when participating in the program.

On my visit through sites and forums, I daily notice several instances of misuse of Adsense ads. So here a few helpful Google Adsense tips, probably many you already know, and few you might gain by knowing now. These adsense faq are all picked from the Program Policies, Terms and Conditions and FAQ itself and presented in a simplified manner.

1. Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. You know this one very well. This is a surefire way to close you Adsense account. Never tell your office associates or friends to click on them. Keep a check if your family or children are busy increasing your income by clicking your ads and indirectly trying to stop your income. Dont even think of offering incentives for clicks, using automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Adsense is very smart to detect fraudulent clicks. Check the ads which appear on your pages by the Google Preview tool if required.

2. Never change the Adsense code. There are enough means of adsense optimization & customizations available to change the colour, background or border to suit your needs. Do whatever you want to do outside the code, never fiddle within the ad or the search code. They know it when you do. The search code has more limitations to colour and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.

3. Do not place more than 3 ad unit and 1 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page. Anyway, ads will not appear in those units even if you place more ad units. But this is the limit they set, so it is better to stick to it.

4. Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search services on the same site which offer Google Adsense competition in their field. Never try to create link structures resembling the adsense ads. Never use other competitive search tools on the same pages which have Adsense powered Google search. They do allow affiliate or limited-text links.

5. Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS.

6. Label headings as “sponsored links” or “advertisements” only. Other labels are not allowed. I have seen many sites label ads with other titles. Dont make your site a target in a few seconds gaze.

7. Never launch a New Page for clicked ads by default. Adsense ads should open on the same page. You may be using a base target tag to open all links in a new window or frame by default. Correct it now as they do not want new pages opening from clicked ads.

8. One Account suffices for Multiple websites. You do not need to create 5 accounts for 5 different websites. One account will do. If you live in the fear that if one account is closed down for violation of TOS, believe me they will close all accounts when they find out. You can keep track of clicks by using channels with real time statistics. They will automatically detect the new site and display relevant ads.

9. Place ads only on Content Pages. Advertisers pay only for content based ads. Content drives relevant ads. Although you might manage some clicks from error, login, registration, “thank you” or welcome pages, parking pages or pop ups, it will get you out of the program.

10. Do not mask ad elements. Alteration of colours and border is a facility to blend or contrast ads as per your site requirements. I have seen many sites where the url part is of the same colour as the background. While blending the ad with your site is a good idea, hiding relevant components of the ads is not allowed. Also do not block the visibility of ads by overlapping images, pop ups, tables etc.

11. Do not send your ads by email. Html formatted emails look good and allow placement of these javascript ads. But it is not allowed as per TOS. You do not want impressions registering on their logs from any email even once. They are watching!

12. Keep track of your content. So Adsense is not allowed on several non content pages. But it is also not allowed on several content pages too. Do not add it on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results. Also exclude any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.

13. Do not alter the results after ad clicks or searches - Ensure you are not in any way altering the site which the user reaches to after clicking the ads. Do not frame, minimize, remove, redirect or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Advertiser Page or Search Results Page after the user clicks on any Ad or Search results.

14. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing - Although the definition of ‘excessive’ is a gray area and is subject to discretion, yet Google adsense with correct placement, focused content and high traffic will get you much more income than other programs, so excessive advertising is not required. Keyword stuffing does target better focused ads, but overdoing it is not required.

15. Ensure you Language is Supported - Adsense supports “Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian and Turkish”. In addition, AdSense for search is available in Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. If your web pages language is not supported, do not use the code on such pages.

Update:
16. Only single referral button per product per page - With the launch of the google adsense referral program, you are allowed to put only one referral button for adsense referral, adwords referral, and Firefox with google toolbar referral

17. Do not specify Google ads as your alternate ads. - Several services like Chitika eminimalls allow you to place alternate urls, when a targeted paying ad cannot be displayed. This involved creating an simple html page and putting the ad to be displayed instead. Even Adsense allows an alternate url feature instead of displaying public service ads. But never use Adsense ads as alternate urls.

18. Do not confuse with adjacent images - It was a common policy to increase CTR by placing same number of images as the number of text ads, which falsely gave the impression that the text ads represented an explanation to these images. Inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads is not allowed. Make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors. More.

Whenever in doubt, it is better to ask for adsense help from the learned staff of Google Adsense. They are very helpful!

Adsense Income Secrets to Success

2007-01-23T10:23:00.000+09:00

Adsense sites need planning and work to be successful. If you are thinking of producing sites for adsense income, or perhaps you already have sites that are not producing a good income if any.

To be successful, takes a lot of work no matter what you may read because there are so many people promoting products that promise to make adsense income easy.

Well some of these products may help, but there is no simple solution to receiving great income quickly.

Extensive planning is required before you start. It is important to carefully consider the topics or niches that will be targeted. It is very important to see what type of competition there is for certain niches.

If you are beginning with your adsense sites, it is better to start with niches that are not too competitive. The reasons for this are that in any niche it will take time to get traffic to the sites and make money.

Extensive keyword research must be carried out before building new sites. It is far better to target say 20 keywords that are not at the top of the keyword results.

Many newcomers make the mistake of seeing the high prices that certain words achieve, but do not realise what is involved to compete with these words.

So choose 20 related words to the main keyword, and then build a page for each of these sub keywords. It is very important to have closely themed sites as well, meaning that you are not trying to offer information on a variety of subjects.

Search engines are now looking for sites that offer their visitors good quality information following the keyword searches entered.

It is also important to have sites that are easy to navigate, so that visitors are able to find what they are looking for easily. Clear navigation linking is essential.

Another point to remember is that search engines will reward sites that are constantly updated with new content. It is best to work to a plan with new sites that allow new content to be added on a weekly basis.

Incoming links to sites are very important to achieve good rankings in the search engines. There is only so much on site optimisation that can be done. This includes different keywords and descriptions for each page, use of H1, H2, H3 tags etc.

It is essential that good quality original content is offered to visitors. Due to the abuse that occurred in the past where many people were using various software to produce hundreds of pages of worthless content in literally a matter of minutes to try to make money with adsense.

It is a good idea to work on getting links back to sites on a weekly basis also. Another good idea is to register with directories also on a regular basis.

Adsense can be a good source of income, but it involves a lot of work before the results appear. Extensive research must be carried out to check competition. It is vital to do thorough keyword testing. Then produce sites that are closely themed with a separate page for each targeted keyword. Then new content and links must be on the agenda for good adsense results.

Website Linking

2007-01-23T08:41:00.000+09:00

The Internet is a "network" of isolated sites joined together by hyperlinks. If no other website ever linked to your site, then no-one would ever know that your website existed.

So links (proper terminology is hyperlinks) are the "glue" that tie websites and therefore the Internet together.

Sure, not all links are of equivalent value. A link on a webpage that is on subject and is genuinely interesting to the reader, plus on a high top-ranking, high visibility website would by nature, pull in more traffic than a link on an webpage that was totally unrelated to your sites topic, or placed in an wrong position of that sites page.

This is a very important rule that a lot of inexperienced Webmaster forget. Web visitors are more likely to click on a link if the text surrounding the link it's related by topic and interesting.

All the major search engines have now started to rank the importance of websites by the number of quality websites that link to it. Gone are the days where the search engines would rank a site based solely on its "on-page" factors (such as keyword density, metatags and the placement of H1 tags etc).

The greater the numbers of links that point to a website the more important the search engines are starting to view that site. But as we have shown above not all links are of equal importance.

Search engines are currently placing greater importance on one-way links than on reciprocal links.

Reciprocal links are made between two or more sites where the webmaster of one sites says "I'll place a link on my site, pointing to your site, if you'll do the same for me". Reciprocal links are great in getting your sites listed quickly in the search engines, but they seem not to have a huge effect on the long-term success rate of a site.

One-way links are unquestionably needed to make a site last for the long term. But getting quality sites to give you a link can be very difficult and exceedingly time consuming.

A tried and tested way of getting quality one-way links is via submitting your website to link directory. Here you submit a site to quality link directories and if your site is accepted, they will give you a one-way link from their quality site. Just the sort of link the search engines are looking for.

The trouble with this approach is that there are almost 3,000 directories out there, let alone the specialized industry based directories. Manually submitting your website to all these directories is almost impossible. Plus, finding the really good ones can take even more time.

SEO Secrets at a High Cost

2007-01-22T08:35:00.000+09:00

Recently there was quite a stir on the internet over some free videos by Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon called Going Natural. Going Natural was basically some videos showing about how a couple of websites were pulling in about $16,000. a day by organic search. They also showed scientific studies how pay per click (PPC) ads only gets a fraction of the traffic and clicks received versus sites which appear in the top 3 positions of organic search results. The videos were hyped by many established internet marketers with a combined mailing list of over 940,000 people. Even the Rick Jerk was getting into the action, taking credit for Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon’s success by claiming that he taught them much of what has made them successful. The video series and hype continued for the entire month of September 2006 with a new free video being released about once a week. This was butterfly marketing at it’s finest! And the cliff hanger was the scheduled opening of a new membership network called StomperNet, where members could learn SEO Secretes (Search Engine Optimization) revealing how among other things to get their site in the coveted top ten position on the big 3 search engines; MSN, Yahoo and Google. But the price.. everone wondered how much this membership would cost? I thought it would probably be something reasonable.. about $97.00 per month. Well, about a day before the grand opening, the price was finally revealed.. a whopping $797 per month! Wow, I could hardly believe such a high price for membership. That’s about what most people spends a month for their house payment! What was even more unbelievable was emails I received on the day of the grand opening from Andy Jenkins indicating that when StomperNet went online, they had 50 people join in the first 30 seconds and that the membership was sold out in a matter of hours. It was reported that this was one of the most successful debuts of a new web site in the history of the internet garnering a Alexa traffic rank of 134 on the day the site opened – 10/3/06. If nothing else, this demonstrates how desperate some people are to get their web sites in the top ten position on the big 3 search engines.

Building Adsense Success

2007-01-19T08:38:00.000+09:00

Google Adsense is a simple online business model where you allow advertisers to show their relevant advertisements (in short ads) on your website. When your visitors click on their ads, you earn a fee.

This pay-per-click model gives a good passive income which can grow to very big sizeable earnings if done correctly. However, in order to be successful in building up this passive income, you must get 5 secret components done correctly.

#1 Choose the Right Keywords and Market

This is the most critical step. You need to choose a hot market for your content website. This ensures you will get loads of traffic to your webpage so that your ads have a chance to be viewed and clicked on.

With the right market, you will have a better chance of finding profitable keywords that you can build the website around. Google serves ads based on the keywords that it find on your website. If your website is focused on a hot market and have the right keywords, your earning could go up to $0.50, $1 or even $10 per clicks.

However for those high-paying ads, the competition in the search engine placement will be high too. Unless you are an expert in Search-Engine Optimization (SEO), you should try to build webpages with the 2nd, 3rd or even 5th most profitable keywords. Don't overlook this strategy. It might even generate more traffic to your website then if you only focus on the most profitable keywords.

#2 Generating content pages in optimized manner

After identifying your keywords and market, you need to upload articles that contains those keywords onto your website. You could write this articles, get a ghostwriter to write them or even use relevant articles from Article Directory (note: you need to ensure that the resource box are not removed).

With the articles in place, you should also include your keywords in your webpage meta-tags such as your website Headline, Descriptions and Keyword tags.

#3 Choosing the right layout and correct placement of ads

Always try to place your ads above the fold of your website. In doing so, your visitors can see the ads immediately without having to scroll. Make it easy for them!

There are hotspot on your webpage that you should place your ads for maximum chance of being clicked on. Generally speaking, the space on the left and top of your webpage are the hotspots. You can get more suggestions on the heat map from Google at http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html#17954

#4 Driving Traffic To Your Adsense Sites

Having the best keywords and best layout would be useless unless you are able to drive traffic to the website. By doing step 2 and 3 correctly above, you have already done most of the job. Now you only need to do the following steps:

* Submit your website to all the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN

* Add your links in your signature on forums

* Add your link to your email

* Exchange links with other similar-theme sites

* Join traffic-exchange sites such as InstantBuzz

* At advance stage, you can consider to buy traffic to your website using other cheaper pay-per-click services. But use this technique only if you have high-paying ads on your website and you are sure that your click-through-rate on those ads are high.

#5 Tracking Your Traffic

Look through your logs regularly and track your click-through rate from Google. From your logs, you will be able to identify which keywords and webpage are getting more traffic. You can then either fine-tuned those lower-traffic webpages or replace your Google Adsense ads on your high-traffic webpage with links to either your own products or your own affiliate links. By using this strategy, you will increase your earnings greatly.

Google Adwords Secrets

2007-01-18T09:25:00.000+09:00

I am about to reveal a way to make a great monthly income without much more than 3-5 hours of work a week. You can easily boost your income faster than you could ever imagine by using my adwords Google secret and using SEO(search engine optimization).

This is what you do. You start using articles that are written by authors of free content sites, like my articles. They are all optimized to get a high ranking for a specific keyword on Google. This will allow the webpage we are going to build to get a high ranking as well. You will get hits this way.

All you do is use the article, without changing it and you must include the author bio box or you are not following the guidelines and you can get in a lot of trouble. Surround the article with Google adsense for content ads. You can use up to 3 blocks of ads per site.

This will give you a webpage that is optimized to get hits every day and when people visit the site they will click on your Google adsense ads and you make money. Some ads will even make you as much as $30 or more per click. You can easily build a nice monthly income with this method.

Now let’s throw in Google Adwords and make even more money. You can pick very cheap keywords on Google Adwords that will make you more money when people click on your ads. You need a keyword tool like good keywords and you will need to build large lists of hundreds of keywords that have something to do with the subject of the webpage.

Then, you can plug these keywords into your Google Adwords campaign with a maximum bid of $0.05. If they do not activate for that price they are a waste of time and you can delete them. The idea is to pay $0.05 for a click on your ad that will bring you a visitor that will click on your Google Adsense ads that will make you more that $0.05.

This is a very easy strategy to create a monthly income. Think about this way if each site you build makes you $25 a month then you can easily build a huge amount of money by putting up 20 sites a week. That would be $500 a month that you would be able to build every week. Plus it will continue to come in because your sites will be ranked on search engines.

SEO Secrets Revealed - 1

2007-01-17T08:24:00.000+09:00

For years as a CEO of very successful online companies (while Google was in its humble beginnings) I had many SEO companies contact me to use their services. I never really understood what they meant by "optimize" my site and the quotes to do this were always between $10K - $20K (set up) and then a few thousand per month to maintain.

Beware the SEO Jargon to keep you in the Dark I was given detailed quotes which were broken down with confusing terminology and to be honest I didn't understand what any of the jargon meant or how it would help. I know now that this was the whole point, to keep me ignorant. They would make "finding the right keywords" sound so amazingly difficult and then quote so much for this service.

Exposing SEO Truths Now an expert in SEO myself I can expose these truths. In this article I will focus on the "what to do's" and what not to do's. I will go to town on the SEO firms that play on website owner's ignorance in my next article. But I want to take you through the steps you need to take to make your Website rank well. These are proven methods that have brought great search results for many of our clients.

Learn SEO Before I begin, the real truth is that if you are a programmer or you have a Website with a Content Management System you can optimize your own Website, and keep your website maintained without paying fees. Our SEO services are for those who don't have the time to learn, set up or maintain their Website. Also quality SEO firms are always going to do a better job than you can (as they do this all day everyday).

Step 1 Ok onto step No.1. Start with the right keywords. Research what people are searching for online that is related to your industry. There are websites that will give you this information for nothing. Try the Overture keyword tool, it doesn't count Google but Google has 80% more traffic so just do the math.

Step 2 Set up your Meta Tags correctly. There are websites that will generate these for you. Just do a search on Meta Tag generator. Once you have your Meta Tags (with the correct keywords you gained from Step1). If you don't know how to add or update your Meta tags you will need to talk to a web programmer. It takes 2 minutes so don't let them charge you much for it.

Step 3 Work out your USP (Unique Selling Point), This is the first paragraph of text on your site which should tell visitors who you are and what you do. You must include your keywords in here as Search Engines go here first after the Meta Tags. If you notice in the Search Engines under each listing it shows a potion of text from each site (this is the USP).

The Secrets of Search Engines

2007-01-16T11:28:00.000+09:00

While there are a few secrets to working out how search engine ranking algorithms work in ranking web sites, the secret to search engine optimisation is that there are no secrets! For a search engine advertising campaign to be successful, it requires a hard working, dedicated team of professionals who know the basic rules of SEO and good web design.

Basic SEO / design rules to consider when trying to attract traffic to your site:

Make your site attractive to search engines / directories.
Include a good amount of plain text and meta / title tags on your web site, but be careful of common search engine myths.

Choose the right search engines / directories to promote your site to.
It's important to get a high profile on search engines that receive high volume traffic.

Raise your profile in the search results.
Many search engines prioritise web sites based on the amount of traffic they receive. So the more traffic you get to your site, the higher up the list you move.

Gather links from other related sites.
An easy way to increase traffic to your site is to have a link on other, related sites such as industry association sites, to your site.

Publicise your web address.
Include your Web site address on all company communications.

Getting visitors to buy from your site:

Keep site design and navigation simple.
Make sure each page has a clear message and can be skimmed over quickly. Make sure the paths you want people to follow are clear and logical.

Include extensive product information.
Customers need to have confidence in the product in order to purchase.

Make the purchase process simple.
Anything that requires too much information or too many screens could mean the customer gives up and may purchase from a competitor's site instead.

Allow customers to purchase as soon as they are ready.
Make sure there's a path to the purchase page from every product page on your site.

Make the most of customers who have already purchased.
Reward existing web site visitors by offering incentives and special offers to purchase again from your Web site.

Good Keywords

2007-01-16T09:26:00.000+09:00

The key to search engine ranking is a set of good keywords and key phrases. More specific your keywords or key phrases are the more probable your website is for getting a good ranking in search engines. Most Internet marketing companies long to have a website that ranks high over their competitors and spend fortunes on finding keywords and key phrases that best represent them. However, it is often found that good keywords are not target by a large number of websites, and hence they fail to get rankings.

There are some very effective tools that will help you find your best set of keywords and key phrases.

The first one you should consider is WordTracker. A very user friendly website, the WordTracker can be accessed for $7 for 24 hours. The WordTracker features a window where you need to type in a keyword phrase you think suits your requirements the best. Upon doing this, the WordTracker will display a list of related phrases. Choose the ones you like the most and run through the software. Now the software will perform a set of internal analysis to rate your chosen keywords and key phrases based upon number of users searching for it and websites targeting them. The process is just to give you a list of the most targeted keywords and key phrases. The higher the rating the more effective it is.

Google Adwords, offered by Google, is one of the most preferred keywords and key phrases analysis tool. It works in a similar fashion to that of WordTracker, where you need to type in your targeted keywords and key phrases and get a list of the most used, visited, or preferred keywords and key phrases targeted by websites.

Overture is another tool which helps at identifying keywords and key phrases. Overture is highly preferred by SEO professionals because it gives a similar list of keywords and key phrases like the WordTracker, free of cost and faster. However, overture does not display the number of websites targeting the keywords and key phrases.

Using these tools optimally will surely help you get a high rank in major search engines. After all, that is what each and every Internet marketing company long.

Keeping SEO Secrets

2007-01-15T08:20:00.000+09:00

Nick from Threadwatch has an interesting post today about how the real "secrets" of SEO never make it onto search forums. I agree, but it's not a reason for most to panic.

Nick puts himself out there by discussing how when he saw an effective but generally unknown technique, he got the person posting to remove their post.

This leads into his discussion that the "good stuff" doesn't generally make it into forums -- or more important, if it does, it doesn't last long given that search representatives monitor forums closely.

The statement is both true and false. Absolutely, there are secrets and tips passed among friends that never see the light of day on forums. That might make some people feel panicked. Don't.

I've never been a big proponent on trying to have people follow "secret" techniques. For one thing, if I did write about a particular technique, the exposure wouldn't let it last long.

Much more important is the fact that such loopholes generally aren't long-lasting. Those who've built SEO work around such techniques also understand this. They'll move on to the next technique and ride it for as long as it lasts.

In contrast, if you haven't used such secrets, you might actually have a better foundation for longer-lasting success. Remember, even the most closely held secrets eventually get detected. And when a big algorithm change rolls along that wipes out a number of secrets, you may be largely immune to this.

It's also important to remember there plenty of "good stuff" out there that's not so secret, helpful tips that you can employ that will bring about improvements. It's still the case today that simple title tag changes bring people better rankings.

In the end, I think it helps to understand what style of SEO you follow. I've got a bicycle race metaphor I like to roll out to explain this more.

Those who go after really specific SEO techniques, "secret" style efforts, can be like sprinters. Those focusing on content, tried and true things like good page titles -- they're riding along at a standard pace.

The steady rider may watch a sprinter overtake them and may think, "Well, I ought to do the same." But at some point, the sprinter can't keep up the pace. They fall back, and the steady rider pulls ahead. Then the sprinter catches their breath, digs deep and sprints ahead again -- only to fall back, letting the cycle repeat.

OK, maybe it's just the tortoise and the hare on bikes! But the difference is that I'm not saying there's a particular "winner" in the story. Rather, the emphasis is more on the style of racer you want to be.

If you want to go to SEO secrets route, you've got to understand that your life will involve a lot of flux. If you go the steady riding route, you've got to understand that yes, sometimes people may shoot ahead of you or that you may never crack a particular term. However, the time you put in overall may be much less, and the consistency of your traffic might be more assured.

3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic

2007-01-12T10:31:00.000+09:00

1. Write Better, More Specific Copy and Linkbait

Good copywriting encompasses many things, titles, subject matter, the post and url's to name the most important. It also goes hand in hand with The Art of Linkbaiting. Here's a checklist for more search engine friendly copy:

Title's are everything. Titles should be short, snappy, and attention grabbing - think about how you skim through your RSS reader every day, and bear that in mind when writing titles.

Preferably, title's should contain keywords related to your topic --that should come naturally, if you have to jam them in there, its either a bad title, bad copy, or you're a lunatic.

If your blog software writes titles like this: My Blog Title My Post Title, you need to change them to this: My Post Title - My Blog Title. Many people will tell you it's even better to ditch the "My Blog Title" bit all together, in order to not dillute the important keywords in the title, but they're forgetting the importance of branding, and with blogs, establishing some brand recognition goes a long way toward gaining links and attention.

Titles are akin to advertising, and the best ones make promises, and deliver
By far the best resource out there for blog titles is Brian Clark's Magnetic Headlines series of posts on the excellent Copy Blogger site.

Body Copy. There's been much written, both online and off about copywriting, and as a writer of small talent, it's not for me to get into the in-depth details of it. I am good at linkbaiting though, and am constantly studying what kind of post are being linked on del.icio.us, Digg and other "link sites".

It's the much discussed art of linkbaiting that this post will focus on. Remember, we're talking about getting search engine traffic right? Here's a checklist for writing good linkbait (we'll discuss why links are important a little further down).

2. Make it Easy for People to Link to You

All of the above tips on writing more attractive, useful and linkable copy are geared to two things:

Providing what your readers want
Gaining links
Links are the currency with which one trades on the web, the lingua franca of the internet and key to ranking, and traffic. Hint: They're really, really important ok?

Essentially, you're looking for this:

Links coming to your posts, from many different sources
Links preferably have relevant keywords in the text used to make the link and again preferably come from sites on a similar topic
Links from trusted, authoritative sites
Apart from writing great linkable copy, there are a few things you can do to make sure that your posts get linked, and hence ranked aswell as get more bang for your buck per link.

Encourage readers to submit your posts to Digg and del.icio.us, or more specific link sites depending on your subject matter. Those categories in del.icio.us for example, are exported by users to their own blogs (targeted, keyworded link text = good), and they often kick off a knock on effect [pdf] that can have wild implications for your Search traffic.

There are varios widgets for most blog software to do the above for you, just have a search through your blog softwares list of plugins.
Where possible, make sure your urls contain your keywords. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not because Search engines pay particularly more attention to urls with keywods, but because people often just paste urls into comments, blog posts and forums where they are automatically linked by the software. Those links, contain the keywords, and it's keywords in links, from authoratitive, trusted sites, that are what we want.

Place a "link to this post" widget on your blogs templates
Ask other bloggers in your niche for links -- but don't make a pest of yourself, nobody likes to be hassled, and some people turn down link requests on general principle (me for example..). See Trisha's thread in the Performancing forums on link exchanges for a lively discussion on the merits of the dreaded link exchange.

My personal advice is dont bother, do the other things listed here and all of it will fall into place.

3. Networking, the Unsung Hero of Blog SEO

You read little about networking in this context. Many bloggers into SEO are facinated with the technicalities, despite it being a very simple thing to do and thus miss one of the biggest opportunities to gain links, readers, and traffic.

Done right, a well built network of contacts, friends and like-minded bloggers can seriously help you get the link love you need, both directly and indirectly. Here are a few tips and resources for working your network for better Search traffic:

Comment and participate on blogs within your niche -- Get to know the people around you
Email with them, LINK to them, they'll reciprocate, trust me.
Expand outside of blogs -- find forums, newsletters and groups in your topic
Use social bookmarking sites to discover related topics (see right hand side) and hence expand your groups, newsletters, forums and blogs search even further

Above all: Be generous. If you respect your network, and work hard to be part of the community surounding your topic, the rewards can really pay of -- never abuse it, it tends ot backfire in all kinds of horrible ways.

Finding Quality Link Partners

2007-01-12T09:02:00.000+09:00

Linking with quality partners is one way of practicing SEO as it can help boost your rankings in the search engines. Link popularity is a factor that many search engines use when ranking web pages within their indexes. Nineteen of the top twenty search engines currently look for this when ranking sites for their search engine pages.

Whine it comes to linking, quantity has been important in the past but the recent trend is for the search engine to consider the quality of the links. The most expedient way to get expedient links is to link yourself to popular directories such as the Open Directory Project, which is considered high quality because it is edited by humans and not search engine spiders. Once Google and Lycos sees you listed in this site they usually add you and boost your ranking.

It also hopes to look for partners whose products or services have something to do with what you are selling. For instance if you have a site selling search engine optimization software you might want to link up with a site selling an easy ezine or article submitter as the two products compliment each either. However the important thing is to choose a partner that is not going to imitate you or grow into selling the same products that you are.

When you look for such sites look for quality, highly ranked, non-competing sites that have plenty of working links or resource pages. Even better, many of the links on their pages may be a valuable resource when it comes to finding links that also suit your site.

The best way to ask for a link from a big site is to add their link first to show that you intend to work with them in good faith and then ask them if they would like to trade links with you. You can always remove it if they decide to be nasty and say no which is more common than ever with some of the larger sites.

SEO the Beginner

2007-01-11T09:03:00.000+09:00

SEO or search engine optimization is a great way to build your website traffic, and since traffic leads to sales, which create cash, you want to optimize your site? It is not a hard strategy, hence the title, Search Engine Optimization for Dummy.

Here are the top 5 secrets you need to know to optimize your website.

Secret #1 – Forget about the meta tag

The meta tag is old school. Very few, and none of the major, search engines care about the meta tag anymore. Making this great will get you nowhere. Meta tags are a thing of the past and went out like a fashion fad.

Secret #2 – Pick a keyword or phrase that is not general

You need to pick a keyword or phrase to optimize your site for that is not incredibly general. For example, if your site is about custom golf club, don’t try to optimize your site for golf. I would not even optimize it for custom golf clubs. I would focus on a more narrow area like, custom built sand wedges or something to that nature.

Most likely if you have a good site it will already optimize itself for custom golf clubs and golf anyway. Plus there is going to be such heavy competition in these areas that it is going to be hard to achieve a first page ranking anyway.

Secret #3 – Don’t overuse your keyword or phrase

You don’t need to throw in your target keyword or phrase in every place it will fit. Put it in your title tag, in the header tag, and then use it a few times in your website content. That is all you need and the search engines will eat it up.

Secret #4 – Use free articles from content sites to optimize your site
Search and find well written free articles about a similar topic to your website and offer them on your website for your visitors to read. Most of the authors that post to free content sites have already optimized their articles for a certain keyword or phrase. By adding their article to your site you will be increasing your chances of the search engines picking up your site for that same keyword or phrase.

Secret #5 – Name your domain name correctly

If your trying to optimize your site for custom built sand wedges, then buy a domain name for the page you are trying to optimize and name it custombuiltsandwedges.com. This is what many of the major search engines like, especially Google. This alone can get you on the first page of the results sometimes.

Now you have the secrets you need and I can unleash you on this search engine world. Go earn a ton of traffic and feel free to use any of my articles, as you have probably guess, they are all optimized for a certain keyword or phrase. Good luck and may you have lots of success and web traffic.

Get all the underground Search Engine Optimization secrets and secure your #1 position on all the major and minor search engines. Imagine a flood of traffic coming your way and it didn’t even cost you a dime. Go to the following site for more secrets:

SEO Secrets You Can Start Using Today

2007-01-10T09:38:00.000+09:00

If you want to rank on top for Google, Yahoo!, and other major search engines, you'll need more than a basic knowledge of search engine optimization. Those who rank high on natural search results do so because they've been able to effectively manage their on-page and off-page optimization factors.

On-page Optimization

What you do on your web pages can have a positive or negative impact on your search results. However, as we'll discuss later in this article, off-page optimization is even more powerful when it comes to increasing your natural search engine placement.

Some of the most important on-page optimization techniques begin with choosing a key word to optimize your page for. There are a number of free tools available on the Internet that can help you find a keyword that is popular but not overly competitive. Keywords that are highly competitive are often very difficult to place well for.

Once you've selected a keyword, you can take advantage of:

Secret #1: Don't optimize for a single keyword, optimize for a keyword phrase. When you optimize for a single keyword, more often than not, that word is highly competitive and your chances of coming out on top are minimal. Where you gain a significant advantage is by focusing on a keyword phrase. This actually increases your chances of ranking well and ultimately helps you towards ranking well for the single word you originally chose.

Secret #2: Place your keyword phrase within the first 25 words of text, and the last 25 words of the page. The h1 tag can be used for developing a headline on your page and emphasizing your keyword phrase within the beginning of your page text (search engines love h1 tags).

Another suggestion is to use your keyword phrase just after your copyright notice on the bottom of your webpage. This ensures that it is present within the last 25 words of your page.

Secret #3: Place your keyword phrase in your page title and description. Additionally, place the keyword phrase throughout your page - being sure to bold the phrase once, italicize the phrase once, and underline the phrase once. Mention your keyword phrase every paragraph or so. Just make sure that it appears natural. If you stuff the page with your keywords, you'll potentially turn off browsers who would otherwise find your page valuable.

Off-page Optimization Now that you've learned about on-page optimization, it's important that you focus your attention on off-page optimization. Of all the techniques that have been developed for SEO, it still comes down to the popularity of your site.

The ranking of your website in a natural search engine result list is directly correlated to the popularity of your website.

So what do I mean by popularity? Popularity is the number and quality of links to your website. Although I've simplified the explanation here, you should know that links essentially count as votes. If everyone is "voting" for a particular website then the website becomes popular.

Secret #4: Get other sites to link to you. There are a number of ways to improve link popularity. Although I won't recommend a specific link building tool, I will say that there have been a number of good products developed that simplify the process. It still takes time and hard work, but over time, increasing the number of sites linking to your website can pay huge dividends.

Secret #5: Make sure that incoming links are of high quality (sites with a high Google page rank). It's not only important to have other sites link to you, it's also important to have quality sites link to you.

Secret #6: Anchor text must include your keyword phrase. When other sites link to you, make sure the link includes your keyword phrase. Sites that link to your domain can help with overall page rank and popularity, but websites who link to you using your keyword phrase (in the anchor text) are what get you to the top of search engine result lists.

Secret #7: Give people a reason to link to your website. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, white papers, free content or tools, etc., but ultimately it comes down to offering something of value. If you do, other websites will give you their "vote", increasing your link popularity and your search engine results.

Increasing your rank on major search engines isn't complex. But it does take time and effort. If you want to increase your website ranking, begin by implementing what you've learned in this article and stay the course.

Design for SEO

2007-01-09T08:29:00.000+09:00

Since Jigsaw Design moved from focusing strictly on Design to Search Engine Optimizing, we have been spending a lot of time researching this process and reading feedback from other SEO Companies via message boards, blogs and other sources. We eventually came to the conclusion that 90% of the people out there really don't have much of a clue what they are talking about. In the next few paragraphs, we will be discussing some methods and practices that will boost your position and still keep you in good favor with the search engines. We will also be looking at some practices that SEO's put a lot of stock into that may not necessarily be as important as they will lead you to believe.

IMPORTANT
Less code more content
When a web crawler visits your site, it is there to read your title, description and content. What it doesn't want to do is wade though pages of code in order to find a few lines of content. There are two reasons why this is bad:

It looks to the crawler that you are trying to hide something (spammers will use code to hide hidden text or redirects). If the crawler doesn't understand something, it will ignore it and, most likely, your site.

The web crawler may think you don't have enough content to put any importance into your site and, if it doesn't think your site is important, then it will not list you too high in the returned search results.

What you should be shooting for is at least a 2/1 ratio in favor of content on 75% of your pages. This will let the web crawler know your site has some sort of relevance and also gives the crawler more content to index, which it really likes.

Frames and Flash
I have addressed this subject before, but I want to go into it again because it is one of those things which a lot of SEO's just don't understand. The major search engines, i.e. Yahoo, Google and MSN, will all say the same thing on their web masters pages and that is "some web crawlers have difficulty reading the context of these pages". What it doesn't say is don't use flash or framed pages because this is a no-no. The reason why I want to make that clear is a lot of SEO's will try and tell you that this is a bad thing and that all your pages need to be flat static pages with lots of alt text behind your flat images. This is not the case. We have gotten many websites in the top ten and number one spots, some of which use both flash and framed pages. Some do not even have any indexable text or links on the home page. So how do we do it? Simple and its something you should be doing anyway. You should have an alternative version of your site which viewers with flash installed will be directed to. For a framed site, you should also have a non-framed version for people whose browsers don't support framed pages. Now that you know how simple it is, here is the temptation. Because your index page will most likely only be seen by maybe 10% of the people that come to your site, the temptation will be to flood that page with keywords and search text to get yourself bumped up the search and that will happen. However, when you get caught (which you will), you will be dumped. This page should only contain a stripped down version of your site and should only contain the same text content as your flash or framed site.

Keyword overindulgence
When writing the copy for your site, write it for your viewer and not for the web crawler. A lot of people get tempted to use the same word or phrase over and over to try and get themselves placed first on an web search. This is a total rookie move and can also get you bumped for what's called keyword flooding. Here are some examples:

Bad

Bay Area Search Engine Optimizing
Bay Area search engine optimizing company, located in the bay area. Our services include search engine optimizing, SEO and search engine placement. As part of our search engine optimizing service, we guarantee you top placement on all search engines within 30 days or your money back. When you chose our company for your search engine optimizing needs we will........ I think you get the point.

Good

Bay Area Search Engine optimizing
Jigsaw design is located in the Bay Area California. We are committed to serving all your design needs. Also, as part of our service, we also include search engine optimization, web hosting and online store solutions...... bla bla bla

I'm sure you notice the difference. Our web site does show up in the top ten for the search term "bay area web search engine optimizing". However, that was before we wrote this article. So how many times can you include the same search term? That only the Search engine companies know for sure. However, based our experience with sites we have successfully placed in the top ten, we would say no more than once every two paragraphs or once every 100 words.

Out of style sheets
Style sheets are one of those things that are easy to abuse and can get you in trouble. When use correctly, they can really help you when optimizing a site. To abuse the use of style sheets is simple. All you have to do is make your H1 tag the same as your normal text style to try and make the crawler think that all your text is important. The trouble is crawlers are not as dumb as the used to be. They figured out that nobody has a header that lasts 5 paragraphs. The proper use of the H1 tag is your main page header. For example, this page is "SEO Secrets". Sub headers like "out of style sheets" should use the H2 tag and your content should always be normal text. Never, no matter how tempting it is don't make any text hidden by use of style sheets or any other method because your site will be bumped. Also do not make the folder that your style sheet is in hidden or private because, if the web crawler can't read your style sheet, it's not going to trust that everything is legitimate.

Stale content
You may be able to get your site listed in the top ten within 30 - 60 days, but that's no guarantee it will stay there. If your site is not continually being updated with fresh content and growing, then the search engines will simply dump it in favor of newer fresher sites. You should be adding a new page to your site every time the crawler visits and updating your old content as much as you can. Daily is preferred, but weekly at the very least. This will mean that the crawler will have fresh content to index and new links to explore. Thus, it will never see your site as stale and drop it.

NOT AS IMPORTANT AS A LOT OF SEO'S WOULD HAVE YOU BELIEVE
Page Rank
If you have downloaded Google's toolbar, you will see a bar at the top of each page which gives you a rating from 1 to 10 of how Google ranks your site. This means absolutely nothing when it comes to search engine optimizing. Some search engine companies think that getting a high page rank means you are going to be listed higher in the search. This is not the case. In fact, it couldn't be further from the truth. What this little bar indicates is simply how important Google sees your site and it makes that judgment on the quality of sites that link to you. The single most important thing about your site is not page rank, it is not how many incoming links you have and it is not how long your site has been up. It is your content, plain and simple. If your content matches the search criteria, then you will be listed. The more relevant content you have, the higher your site will be listed. There are a lot of sites listed in the number one spot that don't have any page rank.

Incoming links
Don't believe a word you hear about incoming links, the quality of the link or anything to do with link exchange because the truth is; it doesn't really matter how many links you have to your site and what sites link to you. What does matter is the way the sites link to you and how often new links show up to your site. If you wake up tomorrow and, overnight, 1 million other sites decided to link to you, that would not affect your position in any way (what it may do is hurt your listing because it will look like spam). Here is how links work for you:

If you are a plastic surgeon and another plastic surgery site links to you, that will give you a boost because you are being linked to a site that has some relevance to yours.

If your site sells used network equipment and the link to your site is like this used network equipment that will give you a boost because the link is a search term.

If you acquire new links slowly over the course of time, that will give you a boost because it looks like your site is gaining popularity.

If people link to internal pages of your site, as well as your home page, that will give you a boost because it looks like you have lots of pages of relevant information.

Back to Search SEO

SEO Overkill in Internet Marketing

2007-01-08T08:11:00.000+09:00

How important is SEO? For some businesses it is crucial, but for not as many as you might think. There are two main reasons this is true: 1) Traffic, clicks, links, content and page rank are overrated by SEO contractors 2) The inferences presented by these SEO statistics are often inaccurate and/or immaterial to the goals of the website.

Like most new industries, SEO, a child of the internet revolution, has been over emphasized, it is in a state of constant change, it is too skewed and stilted for real efficacy, and it has been oversold by the industry practitioners, and finally it has been overreported by the media.

SEO has some features reminiscent of the California Gold Rush of 1849. A few guys discovered gold at Sutter's Mill. A few more guys found out about it. A few guys made some money. A lot of more guys wanted into gold prospecting. Many more businesses sprang up to sell prospecting equipment and supplies. Fake reports, maps, deeds, and contracts became a huge spin-off. Criminals and security industries sprang up. Overspending and bankruptcies were a major result.

What businesses profit most from SEO? Businesses with some or all of these characteristics benefit the most: 1) Sales to national or international markets 2) Selling services or products that are easily stored and shipped so that physical location is not a cost factor versus local competitors 3) Companies who are capitalized well enough to meet short term and long term changes in their industries 4) Companies with internet and SEO expertise that is dominant but flexible, and cost-effective.

What businesses profit least from SEO? Businesses with some or all of these characteristics benefit the least: 1) Sales to local markets 2) Selling services or products with major storage and delivery costs, that have poor shelf life or need constant maintenance 3) Companies who do not have enough capital to follow through in their SEO expenditures when short and long term changes and unexpected problems arise 4) Companies without dominant, flexible and cost-effective internet and SEO expertise.

There are two exceptions to these characteristics that come to mind. Notably, the company that holds a monopoly hardly needs SEO expertise. And a company that deals in a niche area that is so exclusive that no one wants to compete with them.

How is it that clicks, traffic, page rank, links, content are overrated by SEO contractors? First and foremost, they are SELLING their services. Secondly, many clicks and traffic are from NONCUSTOMERS. Many clicks and traffic comes from employees, the website owner and webmaster, technicians, SEO experts, the competitors of your business and your technicians and your experts, fraudulent clicks, spammers, bots, AND all the wannabes of all the above categories.

What about content? Content is also oversold. Search Engines are moving to better indicators in their algorithms. The benefits from paying for redundant content generation are nearly over.

What about links and rank? Links are less important everyday and rank is tied to the other oversold SEO factors. The only trustworthy statistics are based on sales and the factors of internet related revenues.

Bottom Line: If your company doesn't meet the criteria for real benefits from SEO then you are wasting time and money on a no-win situation. You would be better off using a multiple media approach to sales - internet presence mixed with traditional forms of advertising and marketing.

Use SEO For Pay-Per-Click

2006-12-24T11:15:00.000+09:00

Here are three ways to us search engine optimization techniques make sure that you spend your time getting referrals, conversions and profits out of your rather than eternally rewording pay per click ads that don't perform

First of all make sure your ads contain a large number of relevant search phrases. Brainstorm beyond the first dozen terms that come to mind to describe your business as everybody else is probably using those as well. Try to target your customer base without being too general.

Take the time and effort to build a single unique ad for each keyword optimized search phrase. This is more time consuming than putting everything in one ad but studies have shown that it is the targeted niche phrase that keeps non paying customers from clicking on your ad.

Send visitors to the page on your website that most aptly describes your service. If they have to dig into your website to find what they are looking for, they might be tempted to backspace to the search engine directory and if that happens you lose the potential sale.

Enrolling in a pay-per-click program can be profitable for you even if you don't have that much money to fund a pay per click account. The secret is in your ability to strategize and write your advertising copy in a way that is friendly to both the search engines and to the people searching for your product or service.

Even more effective is combining different keyword phrases into one singe pay per click ad. In fact if you can make all three lines of your pay par click advertisement into three commonly searched search engine phrases then you are destined to succeed not only in terms of keeping your ad floating at a high ranking but also in terms of actual conversions and sales!

Powerful SEO Secrets

2006-12-21T09:16:00.000+09:00

If you want to rank on top for Google, Yahoo!, and other major search engines, you'll need more than a basic knowledge of search engine optimization. Those who rank high on natural search results do so because they've been able to effectively manage their on-page and off-page optimization factors.

On-page Optimization

What you do on your web pages can have a positive or negative impact on your search results. However, as we'll discuss later in this article, off-page optimization is even more powerful when it comes to increasing your natural search engine placement.

Some of the most important on-page optimization techniques begin with choosing a key word to optimize your page for. There are a number of free tools available on the Internet that can help you find a keyword that is popular but not overly competitive. Keywords that are highly competitive are often very difficult to place well for.

Once you've selected a keyword, you can take advantage of:

Secret #1: Don't optimize for a single keyword, optimize for a keyword phrase. When you optimize for a single keyword, more often than not, that word is highly competitive and your chances of coming out on top are minimal. Where you gain a significant advantage is by focusing on a keyword phrase. This actually increases your chances of ranking well and ultimately helps you towards ranking well for the single word you originally chose.

Secret #2: Place your keyword phrase within the first 25 words of text, and the last 25 words of the page. The h1 tag can be used for developing a headline on your page and emphasizing your keyword phrase within the beginning of your page text (search engines love h1 tags).

Another suggestion is to use your keyword phrase just after your copyright notice on the bottom of your webpage. This ensures that it is present within the last 25 words of your page.

Secret #3: Place your keyword phrase in your page title and description. Additionally, place the keyword phrase throughout your page - being sure to bold the phrase once, italicize the phrase once, and underline the phrase once. Mention your keyword phrase every paragraph or so. Just make sure that it appears natural. If you stuff the page with your keywords, you'll potentially turn off browsers who would otherwise find your page valuable.

Off-page Optimization Now that you've learned about on-page optimization, it's important that you focus your attention on off-page optimization. Of all the techniques that have been developed for SEO, it still comes down to the popularity of your site.

The ranking of your website in a natural search engine result list is directly correlated to the popularity of your website.

So what do I mean by popularity? Popularity is the number and quality of links to your website. Although I've simplified the explanation here, you should know that links essentially count as votes. If everyone is "voting" for a particular website then the website becomes popular.

Secret #4: Get other sites to link to you. There are a number of ways to improve link popularity. Although I won't recommend a specific link building tool, I will say that there have been a number of good products developed that simplify the process. It still takes time and hard work, but over time, increasing the number of sites linking to your website can pay huge dividends.

Secret #5: Make sure that incoming links are of high quality (sites with a high Google page rank). It's not only important to have other sites link to you, it's also important to have quality sites link to you.

Secret #6: Anchor text must include your keyword phrase. When other sites link to you, make sure the link includes your keyword phrase. Sites that link to your domain can help with overall page rank and popularity, but websites who link to you using your keyword phrase (in the anchor text) are what get you to the top of search engine result lists.

Secret #7: Give people a reason to link to your website. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, white papers, free content or tools, etc., but ultimately it comes down to offering something of value. If you do, other websites will give you their "vote", increasing your link popularity and your search engine results.

Increasing your rank on major search engines isn't complex. But it does take time and effort. If you want to increase your website ranking, begin by implementing what you've learned in this article and stay the course.

Online Marketing Services

2006-12-19T10:24:00.000+09:00

I've found the AD Server thing quite interesting, I would really like to know more about this and what kind of result we can get with this type of advertising. Well I think it's worth giving them a try as there's one thing I really appreciated is that they mentioned on the SEO page that they "do not guarantee top search engine rankings" and this only shows that they will not be using any techniques that the search engines frown upon. Worth having a look at their services.

Top Ranking SEO Secret

2006-12-18T08:33:00.000+09:00

Most web programmers and designers now have a good idea of how to optimize their site using on-site search engine optimization, such as keywords and page titles, but many don’t realize that the most important seo tool is link backs. Google and most of the search engines rank your page in importance according to the number of link backs it has from other sites. They see these as a sort of vote of confidence another site is giving you, and the more votes your site has, the better you will rank. Another important aspect is how well the page that links to your site ranks on the web and how many websites are linking to the page linking to your site. It sounds rather complicated but it’s really quite simple. SEO can be studied and applied by most web designers; it just takes time and research.

The best way to start is by finding the sites that are ranking the highest in the search engines for your keywords. Then, once you have a list of about 5-10 sites, do a search to find out what websites are linking to them, either by searching “link: www.(the website).com” in the search engines or by using a program such as SEO elite. Once you have this information, go to those sites and try to see how popular those sites are themselves. Then, see if you can get a link on those sites for your website, either through a link exchange program, free submission of your url to their directory or perhaps a paid submission. Try to get links from the most popular sites first, and then focus on the rest. The more link backs your site has from other sites, especially ones that have a high page ranking, the more importance your site will have according to the search engines. A link from a page with a pr of 7 will have a lot more weight than one from a page with a pr of 2, although they are all important. Don’t pass up a link just because the page rank is low, it still counts in the grand scheme of things. Also, make sure that the sites that you submit to are related to your website and what you do and not something completely different, as the search engines will frown upon this.

Do this for all of the websites that you wrote down in the beginning (your biggest competitors). Chances are, if you can manage to get a link back from most of the sites that each of your competitors are getting links from, your combined link backs will be more than each of theirs due to the fact that you have combined all of their link backs to build your list. Also, the more locations that advertise your website on the web, the more visible your site will be. One last tip, try to ensure that you get actual links to your site on those sites, you will know it is a straight link if, when you scroll over the link with your mouse, your website address appears in the bottom grey bar. These are the links that are recognized and the ones that will boost your site to the top of the search engines!

SEO Expert

2006-12-15T08:54:00.000+09:00

Search Engine optimization is essential for any web site to increase the rankings. SEO companies along with their SEO experts specialize in the job to increase the rankings of any website. Good rankings in search engines have a great impact on the functioning of any web site. SEO Experts conduct an intense keyword research to find the right words and phrases that can become a part of the content. These words and phrases have to be placed strategically for maximum impact.

SEO experts have to keep many things in mind. The text, graphics and the keywords on the site have to be placed in such a manner so that it is according to the current search engine techniques apart from being search engine friendly. The keywords on the website have to be added so that the search engine can find them easily and also the visitor visiting your website. Search engine optimization done by our SEO experts effectively increases the rankings of a web site. Our SEO experts also have to scrutinize and analyzes a site thoroughly and then makes changes regularly to upgrade site based on the search engine requirements. This is exactly what we at Binary Semantics do. We are constantly searching and implementing better methods to optimize and enhance your web site to get you good. Our services include:

• Keyword Research
• Directory Submission
• Article Submission
• Blog Submission
• Press Releases Submission
• Basic Search Engine Submission
• Search Engine Submission
• Link Popularity
• Internet Marketing
• PPC Compaign
• Internet Marketing Solution Online

Adsense or Affliate Marketing

2006-12-15T08:29:00.000+09:00

AdSense or affiliate selling, which is best for you?

Although I'm a big AdSense fan, I also realize that there are other ways to make money online. Readers often ask me which is better, AdSense or affiliate selling, and so here are my thoughts on this very interesting question.

The short answer is "it depends". Now, you might think that's a cop-out, but it's not. Let's go back to the fundamentals.

What is AdSense? It's an online billboard rental program, that's what it is. Say you have (as Monty Python put it) "HUGE tracts and tracts of ... land", except of course that the "land" is the set of web pages that you control on your various sites. Along comes Google who says "Hey, we'd like to put some billboards on your land. We'll then go find some advertisers who'll display their ads on the billboards and give you a cut of the money we make by renting out the billboards. And don't worry, we'll take care of finding and billing the advertisers -- all you do is sit back and rake in the cash." You get to say where the billboards are placed on your land (though Google is happy to give you some suggestions based on what they know works for other land owners)and how big they are, but you have no specific control over what goes on the billboards. Overall the program sounds pretty good to
you, because it lets you spend your time and effort on other things, such as acquiring more land. It's passive income to the extreme.

Affiliate selling, on the other hand, is an active process. You
go around and place signs on your "land" with ads for the products and services you're promoting. You might also place ads on other people's land, often via those same billboards that Google uses. You talk about the roduct/service to everyone you meet. You make money every time you refer someone to the actual seller of the product/service -- which is why you tell them to mention your name to the seller.

These are simple descriptions, but they demonstrate that AdSense and affiliate selling are very different things. And require different skill sets.

Ultimately, AdSense is all about content creation. The more pages
of interesting and (ideally) unique content you have, the more money you'll make. Affiliate selling is all about promoting the right product to the right audience.

So which is right for you? It depends on what you like to do. If you like to write, you'll probably find AdSense more appealing. I mean, let's face it, it's actually quite easy to integrate AdSense into your content, especially if you're using some kind of template-based content system (a blog being one example). It may take you a while to figure out the best formats and placements for the AdSense ad and link units, but the hard part is writing the new content, not inserting the ads into the content.

Affiliate selling, on the other hand, is a different beast entirely. It's not as clear-cut as writing new content. You have to "pre-sell" the product you're promoting. You have to direct traffic to the seller's site. You have to write ads. You have to create autoresponder series promoting the product and get people to sign up for your mailing lists. It's much more involved than AdSense. I know the affiliate programs make it sound easy -- "Hey, just put this link on your website or in your signature and you'll be raking in the cash" -- but it's not. There's often a lot of work up front, and you'll make a lot of mistakes figuring out what works for you and what doesn't.

I think, also, that some people are more naturally inclined to selling things than others. If you're not a natural seller than affiliate selling can seem particularly hard.

Gift Appreciation

2006-12-14T10:18:00.000+09:00

List of Directories

2006-12-14T08:45:00.000+09:00

These sources will be of great help to you if you want to submit your website to lots of Directories.
My favourite source is:
http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/web-directories.html a very good list of free directories, the list gives the PR of all the directories, the number of Google, Yahoo & MSN documents, and Alexa Ranking (you can have an idea of how much traffic the directory is getting, this will help you to decide whether to submit your website or not).

Another list that I really like is http://www.addurl.nu/ PR of all the directories is provided with some comments, read them before submitting your website as some directories have some problems while submitting.

You will get lists of internet directories from many other sources like other directories e.g www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories/ Directory owners also have to submit their website to other directories, else how would their ranking increase?

Another good list is http://www.andilinks.com/sea5.htm (not very "clean" just click on view in column and it'll be ok) - 789 Directories

You now have a list of more or less a thousand directories, it's a good amount to start submitting your website, remember to choose the most appropriate category before submitting your website, else all the hard work would be useless.

3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic

2006-12-13T14:12:00.000+09:00

Amongst the commercial blogosphere there is huge interest in the dark, and mysterious art of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. There shouldn't be. Not because paying attention to Search traffic is bad, or that wanting to rank higher in Google is evil, simply because it's not rocket science, and anyone can do it. Even you.

If you want get more traffic from Search engines, this post is for you. Read on....

The Big SEO Secret: It's Easy
Let me explain what i mean by "it isn't rocket science": Manipulating Search engine rankings for sites that naturally find it difficult to get incoming links and attention, say affilate sites, many ecommerce type operations and much of the web1.0 shopping experience sites is very hard, and it takes a lot of skill and knowledge to achieve.

It's become harder and harder over the last few years to game Google, and many SEO's are now wondering if it's time to give up trying to "manipulate" G results and simply start feeding Google more of what it wants -- the unfortunate result of which is a huge increase in workload, namely copywriting and Linkbaiting.

That's the thing most SEO's won't want to tell their clients. That there is no magic and wand, mystical powers or Search engine hoo joo to be had anymore, it's all down to 3 things:

Copywriting
Links
Networking

That's not to say those tasks don't require skill, but it really is that simple.

Good SEO Strategies

2006-12-13T08:47:00.000+09:00

SEO is not difficult but not easy either, there are some strict rules that you need to follow to rank well on the Search Engines. Many people say MSN is the easiest SE to rank for then comes Yahoo! and finally Google. The problem with google is that it values old pages too much, you can have a new very informative website but you will probably not be in the top 10 for your main keyword if it is a very competitive one.

Ok enough blabbering let's now come to the steps that you should follow carefully so that SE's does not consider your website as spam or worse can ban your website. The most important thing you need is link. Links, links and more links from relevant sources, tons of irrelevant may help you on MSN but it will not do your website any good on Google, so it's better to do the best thing that is not penalized by non of the main Search Engines, that is Google, MSN and Yahoo!.

How to get links? This is a tuff answer... where to get your links from? You can get links from web directories, article directories and from link exchange with other related websites. When submitting to directories, search for the category most relevant to your website, check how many outgoing links the directory have per page. It will be kind of useless to submit to directories that does not follow the Google webmaster's guidelines. Also check if the directory is indexed by Google. PR is NOT the most important thing to check when submitting to a directory, it's has some value since it's an indication its importance (backlinks from good sources).

Writing articles can also help you to get backlinks. How? Write one or two article about your website's subject, be sure to include your main keywords in the article, make it fun but to the point, don't write as if you are the most intelligent person on earth, this will just scare people away. Include examples where needed to back up your thoughts this will make you more credible to the reader. If you are not sure about something, search about it if you can't find better not write about it. Be sure to include a link to your website in the author note else the whole step will be useless. Now just search for article directories and start your submissions. There are hundreds of article directories around so you are sure to get some quality backlinks from them.

Getting link partners is the most difficult and time consuming part in your link building campaign. Most websites will not be very keen to exchange link if they are in the top 10 and you are not. Here also you need to look for websites that are most relevant to yours, let's say you have a web design website, it is ok to exchange link with templates or SEO related websites that is any websites that are related to web development. Search engines values 3 way links exchange more, e.g. I link to site B from site A and Site C links to Site A. So better go for it when you get the opportunity.

SEO takes time but it is fun and there are always new things to learn since the Search Engines change their algorithm once in a time, Google is the most complicated one but I read somewhere, better you optimize for Google and the other two will follow. Most techniques mentioned in this article are free strategies that only require your time. My advice: try all the free techniques first then go to paid if free doesn't work. Happy SEOing.

SEO Secrets

2006-12-12T11:00:00.000+09:00

Focusing strictly on Search Engine Optimizing, we have been spending a lot of time researching this process and reading feedback from other SEO Companies via message boards, blogs and other sources. We eventually came to the conclusion that 90% of the people out there really don't have much of a clue what they are talking about. In the next few paragraphs, we will be discussing some methods and practices that will boost your position and still keep you in good favor with the search engines. We will also be looking at some practices that SEO's put a lot of stock into that may not necessarily be as important as they will lead you to believe.

IMPORTANT

Less code more content

When a web crawler visits your site, it is there to read your title, description and content. What it doesn't want to do is wade though pages of code in order to find a few lines of content. There are two reasons why this is bad:

It looks to the crawler that you are trying to hide something (spammers will use code to hide hidden text or redirects). If the crawler doesn't understand something, it will ignore it and, most likely, your site.

The web crawler may think you don't have enough content to put any importance into your site and, if it doesn't think your site is important, then it will not list you too high in the returned search results.

What you should be shooting for is at least a 2/1 ratio in favor of content on 75% of your pages. This will let the web crawler know your site has some sort of relevance and also gives the crawler more content to index, which it really likes.

Frames and Flash

The major search engines, i.e. Yahoo, Google and MSN, will all say the same thing on their web masters pages and that is "some web crawlers have difficulty reading the context of these pages". What it doesn't say is don't use flash or framed pages because this is a no-no. The reason why I want to make that clear is a lot of SEO's will try and tell you that this is a bad thing and that all your pages need to be flat static pages with lots of alt text behind your flat images. This is not the case. We have gotten many websites in the top ten and number one spots, some of which use both flash and framed pages. Some do not even have any indexable text or links on the home page. So how do we do it? Simple and its something you should be doing anyway. You should have an alternative version of your site which viewers with flash installed will be directed to. For a framed site, you should also have a non-framed version for people whose browsers don't support framed pages. Now that you know how simple it is, here is the temptation. Because your index page will most likely only be seen by maybe 10% of the people that come to your site, the temptation will be to flood that page with keywords and search text to get yourself bumped up the search and that will happen. However, when you get caught (which you will), you will be dumped. This page should only contain a stripped down version of your site and should only contain the same text content as your flash or framed site.

Mike Ditka, SEO Expert?

2006-12-12T08:50:00.000+09:00

"Success isn't permanent, and failure isn't fatal." – Mike Ditka

When promoting your business online, it's easy to get caught up in the SEO (search engine optimization) game. It's important to always keep things in perspective. So let's look at the SEO "game" through the eyes of a coach, Mike Ditka.

When you put in so much time and effort in SEO tactics and promoting your website, typically, one of two things will happen. Your site will shoot to the top of the search engine results pages, and your Pagerank will go through the roof. Or like happens to so many, your efforts will appear to have been futile and your poor website will be lost out there in the suburbs on the information superhighway.

Before I get too ahead of myself, take note that these are the extremes! Obviously, most people will find themselves somewhere in the middle.

So let's look at the first case, your SEO adventure leads you straight to the top. Your results are astronomical, and you're feeling pretty good about yourself! Following Mike's logic, this is exactly where you need to check yourself. When it comes to SEO, success is most definitely not permanent.

Keeping your place at the top is a constant battle. Yes, it's great that you made it up there, but without continued diligence you can be back at the bottom or worse, in the infamous sandbox in the blink of an eye!

Alright, so let's assume that, sadly, you have practically killed yourself working so hard optimizing your site to no avail. You have read everything out there. You've implemented every strategy the gurus have preached. And yet, your site is nowhere to be found. It's easy to feel like a failure.

Well, don't get too disillusioned. Just look to the second part of Coach Ditka's philosophy. Yes, in the short term, you may have failed to accomplish your goal. But don't let that get to you so much that you throw your hands up and head to the classifieds looking for a job that will keep you as far away from the internet as possible, at least not yet! Because again, Mike is right! Even in SEO, failure is not fatal!

It may feel that way for awhile. But again, just as in the case of success, failure is fleeting online. The only way you'll really fail in the game of SEO is by forfeiting!

In both cases, and all those in between, the most important part of any online marketing strategy or SEO game plan is consistency. You must practice good SEO habits daily. Never let your success or failure allow you to procrastinate or completely abandon those techniques that have so often proven reliable!

SEO In Web Site Design

2006-12-11T11:04:00.000+09:00

If you are looking to generate free or organic web site traffic with your upcoming web site, then there are several things to consider when creating a design plan.

First you need to ask how many images are you going to add and how much space will you have available for content? Most people want a site that is pleasing to the eye and will keep the visitor entertained with the so called eye candy. You can accomplish this without going overboard.

Just a few years ago, web designers were creating sites completely in Flash format. The sites looked great and were fun to surf but were not indexed by search engines. You can have Flash movies and other scripts that add enjoyment to the site and not compromise your sites optimization for the major engines.

For every page you want to have crawled and indexed by search engine spiders, you need to have enough readable content on the page with keywords specific to your site embedded. This will allow the search engines to index your page content.

Your main content should be above the area called the fold in the page; this is where the web page drops off the bottom of your screen before scrolling down. There has been much rumor that when the search engine spider crawls the site it travels so far down looking for relevant information to match with your heading meta tags, if the information is not found it will go to the next page and your page will not be indexed correctly.

Make sure the heading met tag title, description, and keywords are relevant to the content on the page and to your specific industry. Do a search on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for specific keywords in your industry and see who comes up in the top of the free listings. Click the view, page source in your browser window and you will see the met tags they use. Compare the 3 different search engine listings and use ideas from each. See how each website has their content laid out and that you can find the meta tag keywords in the page content.

Site navigation is crucial in web site planning. All pages should link to each other and there should be no broken links. Text links give search engine spiders an easy way to get from page to page so use them when ever possible. Many sites are built using PHP and ASP scripts and the navigation links are not found by the spiders.

If you have asp or psp navigation links, create an html site map. There are many free site map generation tools available today. Place this link on every page and you are sure to have all your important pages indexed.

The key to a great web site is quality design layout and great content that is updated often. Rotate banner ads and post newsletters to keep you content fresh. This will keep the search engine spiders coming back for more.

SEO – Copywriting for Results

2006-12-08T09:32:00.000+09:00

In order for a website to have good results in the search engine results it needs to have a number of key elements. The first element is copy, without much copy your website will never rank anywhere. This is because search engines have programs called spiders which go out and scour the web – they read and index text.

The spiders cannot read pictures, flash or pretty designs. Many website owners or website designers are obsessed with creating sites that look good. Unfortunately, a great looking website with no visitors is worse than a bad looking website with lots of visitors.

As previously mentioned search engine spiders recognise certain text, this text is called “Keywords”. Keywords are individual words or phrases that you would like your website to rank for. Now everyone wants their website to rank for single words like: “Watches”. However, this is not suggested because single word phrases are too generic and competition is fierce for single word search terms. So, apart from not being able to rank for the word, you won’t get the right type of customers ringing you. Instead of people wanting to buy a cheap watch, you will get people ringing you wanting to buy a Rolex. The best advice is to go after two or three word search terms that are specific to your business.

Now chose as many keywords as possible and spread them throughout your website text. I would suggest repeating your primary keyword phrase at least five times throughout your copy. The ideal number should be between ten and twenty times. Your website should be content rich, you need it to have many pages with text that has your keywords spread throughout your website.

There is one last formula that you need to consider and that is keyword density. This is how many times your keywords appear on a page. For example: If you have 300 words on a page, and your keywords appear 50 times your keyword density of 15%. I would not suggest having a keyword density of more than 20%.

Basic SEO Tactics

2006-12-07T09:31:00.000+09:00

If your website is not getting the traffic you think you need then read on. There are some proven steps that you can take to improve your site. Now, get familiar with these terms because they will help your website.

Search engine optimization or SEO is part science and part voodoo, and how well it is done has a lot to do with the steps that you implement. Search engine optimization (SEO) is not about "fooling" search engines. But rather, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a long term and permanent answer to your traffic woes.

Remember, SEO is seen by many as a black magic art or some secret code that webmasters use in their everyday conversation. What you do not know is that search engine optimization is a relatively new science and requires both website interaction and monitoring to be successful. In fact, SEO is just one part of an online marketing strategy, but it is the fundamental part.

Search Engine Optimization is THE process of optimizing a website for high search engine rankings for a particular search term(s). The first step of SEO is to choose effective keywords or evaluate the ones currently in use.

First, analyze your competition. You know who they are. Rely on one of the most useful techniques in search engine optimization to focus your efforts and that is your Keyword Selection. This article will not show you or tell you how to select the best keyword(s) but rather enforce that keywords are integral to your site.

Second, rethink your linking strategy. Why? In the greater scheme of things within the Internet universe, adding a ton of helpful links on your site only helps those sites. In actuality, it could hurt your site in two ways. One – are those sites related to you? If they are not related then that is a potential strike against your site. Two – Have those site linked back to your site? If not, then having their sites linked on your web page brings no value to you.

A good linking strategy consists of having many one-way links. IndexGuy is service that provides hundreds if not thousands of one-way links back to your site. In addition, there are some free sites that offer free one-way links like “tagspage.com”. Regardless of who you choose, be smart about the links being setup.

There are strategies that work in the successful promotion of a website. It is these kinds of SEO promotions that go far beyond web page enhancement and search engine submission.

Blogging – Either start your own Blog or be frequent contributor of a popular one.
Forums – This is a special type of web site where users can ask questions or exchange ides.
Press Releases – These are special announcements that businesses have used in marketing campaigns.
Articles -- Submitting articles to these special websites can promote your site considerably if your articles are picked up by popular publishers.
Reciprocal Linking - This is the process of exchanging links with other similar or related websites.

There are no quick fixes where Search Engine Optimization is concerned. Search engine optimization must become a long term and permanent answer to your site’s traffic. Remember, SEO is basically the process of optimizing a site to obtain high rankings in the search engines for chosen keywords.

But now a day's search engine optimization is getting more and more important not only for regular websites but for larger corporate websites as well to attain extra website exposure.

Online Marketing Services

2006-12-06T09:24:00.000+09:00

Nowadays it is not very easy to find the perfect online marketing company who will offer you prefessional services. I've been to a website today and they seem to offer every you need in term of Internet Marketing Services, from SEO to AD Server Management serives. Complete company I must say, nice portfolio, they have worked with big names, just have a look at their customers. So, think if you are looking for online marketing then Discount Click Online Marketing Services is what you need.

I've found the AD Server thing quite interesting, I would really like to know more about this and what kind of result we can get with this type of advertising. Well I think it's worth giving them a try as there's one thing I really appreciated is that they mentioned on the SEO page that they "do not guarantee top search engine rankings" and this only shows that they will not be using any techniques that the search engines frown upon. Worth having a look at their services.

http://www.discountclick.com/

SEO and Cheating

2006-12-05T09:29:00.000+09:00

When anyone first enters into the realms of internet marketing they soon become exposed to the many products and services that are readily available to skyrocket their webpages up through the millions of pages to the first ten positions. It isn't difficult to be hoodwinked by many of these shonky practitioners and unfortunately there are more of those than there are of the helpful and truly knowledgable types. Or at least it seems that way.

The 'black hat' shonks seem to be every where and they have no interest in who gets hurt or financially burdened along the way. Some of them have excellent writing skills and can easily persuade you into believing that you should act immediately and buy their product. Most of them are very quick to take your money and even if they have a guarantee, they never seem to be able to return it as quickly as they took it from you. Beware the 'Black Hat' shonks.

The 'White Hat' Group of marketers have had their fair share of being 'taken' by the shonks as well, so they are well aware of what's going on out there. I too have been 'taken' a number of times, especially in my early days when I trusted everyone on the net but soon learned. If you truly want to establish yourself successfully on the net, you'll need to know who has all the good information and breakthroughs. Some 'white hats' have been around for many years and use their real name. That's the first test. Did they give you a real name? Only a little research will disclose that. It doesn't take that long to work out who's who.

I have learned to trust information from people such as John Reece, Brad Callen and Charles Heflin - especially Charles who seems to be on the up and up. It's not possible to indicate those that are questionable or faking knowledge due to liable. Just remember, that before you buy any thing from any one - look into it first (carefully). Don't rely on testimonials on their site for obvious reasons.

Cheating Facts

No matter what anyone tells you, everytime you buy into a sneaky little service or device that is going to help you make money by moving ahead on the search pages, you will suffer down the track. You might even do well for a year or so but alas you will eventually hit the dust. Now, let's consider that you've put quite a lot of time into cheating which most do. If you had applied the same time into doing it properly, your site would still be up making money now and into the future. Brash statement you say - well I'm here to tell you from experience. I wish I'd known of those people I mentioned earlier then I wouldn't have made the mistakes I did earlier. Those mistakes have been costly especially from a time point of view. Google is a good example of quality, they could go for the money, sure. However, they know that the long term success, power positioning and control comes from making their customers happy. I'm talking about the people who search, go shopping, and above all - want to trust! That's right, want to trust their sources. Ask yourself this - isn't it better to go back to a supplier who did it right, ethically and honestly the first time? Of course it's better. It's definitely smarter. Odds on, that's what Google rely on. They want to be reliable and equally important, they want to be known as being reliable. You will do well with Google and other search engines if you act in this very same manner with your marketing and optimization.

Conclusion

If you want to be successful with any search engine, give the users what they are looking for. Try to make content original in each case. I know you can't always do that, but it is better than duplicate content in every case. Don't simply 'slap up' a site with nothing but links and scrapings - these are being identified at an increased rate by search engines and are penalized accordingly. Look for a niche and build on it. I encourage you to attract one way inbound links based on the quality of your site not on clever software (more on that later in the next article). Reciprocal linking is ok but is often more effort that it is worth. Have someone you know who is knowledgable look over your site for 'On Page' and 'Off Page' optimization. Sling them a few hundred bucks - it'll usually be worth it. People who know about seo and sem are constantly approached by others who want the information or help for nothing. That can become an issue if you have a relationship or friendship to consider. It's a simple consideration.