Basic Blog Optimization

Blogs, have more optimization opportunities compared to a regular web site. As discussed earlier I expect by now you must have chosen the keywords, you want to target. According to a research done by EntireWeb, 31% of the people search using two word phrases, 25% uses three word phrases and only 19% try it with one word. Also, keep in mind the following:

1. Popular keywords will bring you untargeted traffic.

2. Do not choose keywords that you have no chance ranking for.

3. Do not choose keywords that no one looks for.

4. Do not choose a keyword that does not relate to your content.

5. Do not use words that may get your blog filtered or banned from search engines.

6. For best results, optimize one post for one keyword.

Let’s talk about a few simple yet very effective steps you should take towards optimizing your blog.

Title Tag- Undeniably, the most important aspect of blog optimization is Title Tags.

Your blog’s title tag should carry the major keywords you are targeting and should give an idea of the subject your blog is based on. Do not make it very long. Anything more than the Google’s Limit of 63 characters is superfluous. Although Yahoo displays up to 112 and MSN up to 70 characters, 63 characters would be able to cover your major keywords, and will make sure search engines display whole of your title tag.

Do not worry while using stop words like the, a, is, an- they are generally omitted by search engines, but make the title more palatable for humans.

A trick that you can use to shorten the length- Suppose the two major keywords you want to target is Blogging Strategies and Business Blogging. You can save up to 10 characters by combining them and using Business Blogging Strategies. This will be as effective as using them separately and will give you space to include another word.

As a general rule, the closer you place your keyword to the beginning of the title tag, the better the ranking advantage. However, bear in mind that we've seen fluctuations on this element from engine to engine and even from month to month. Regardless, on the whole, you can expect better results by placing your keywords first in your title tag.

Each of the post-page should carry a title tag including keywords you want to target.

Make sure to make your title tag consumable by humans... otherwise anyone would hardly click your link!

Writing Related Content- The most important part of blogging is fresh, interesting content, for both your readers and the search engines. Blog search engines sometimes display results chronologically. If you wrote about "apple iphone" half an hour ago, but someone else wrote about "apple iphone" twenty minutes ago, they get listed first in a search for "apple iphone".

So, whatever keyword you are targeting try and write good content on that keyword and its parallel ones, often.

Optimize Categories-

When you create categories for your blog, be sure to consider keywords in the titles. This will help not only search engines but also your audience to get to relevant content. So whenever you post, be sure to default to a general category that is relevant no matter what the post is about. Choose multiple categories on each post whenever appropriate.

Getting in Blog Directories-

To get registered in any directory, you should write at least one post today, at least five posts the current week, and your blog should be at least 3 months old. If this is not suitable for you, you can still get into some search engines and directories, but not all.

Personal bloggers should try to post every day at least once. Business blogs should post slightly more often than their competitors. New posts will need to be made at least three times a week for some search engines to list a blog at all.

Posting daily or more than that may not be feasible so post as often as you and your blog's audience can comfortably handle.

Social Bookmarking-

Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved. Social Bookmarking sites can be excellent sources of traffic to your blog, so be sure to make it easy for readers to bookmark your blog posts.

Here are some bookmarking sites:

1. Digg
2. Del.icio.us
3. StumbleUpon
4. Reddit
5. Squidoo
6. Furl
7. BlinkList
8. Blogmarks.net
9. Ma.gnolia
10. Simpy
11. Spurl
12. BlinkBits
13. Shadows
14. Raw Sugar
15. Yahoo MyWeb

It’s important to realize that there are other factors also that can play into how successfully your blog gets indexed and how well the search engines treat it. We will discuss them in the coming posts.

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Belajar Optimasi SEO Untuk Pemula

Belajar optimasi Seo untuk pemula bertujuan untuk memberikan sedikit petunjuk bagaimana kita menggunakan optimasi seo pada blog kita. Ada beberapa cara untuk dapat mengoptimasikan blog. Diantaranya seperti Optimasi Seo pada Judul Artikel atau Optimasi seo pada keyword density atau adapula yang menggunakan Meta Tag. Terserah anda ingin memilih cara yang mana, pada dasarnya semua tehnik Optimasi SEO adalah sama yaitu menempatkan posisi Blog atau Website kita pada urutan pertama pada mesin pencari.

Bekal kita untuk dapat belajar optimasi seo ini adalah sering berlatih dan sering experimen menggunakan keyword yang umum digunakan oleh visitor/pengunjung. Untuk dapat urutan nomor satu dalam mesin pencari tidak lah mudah, namu itu dapat dilakukan dengan tehnik atau cara-cara tertentu seperti Optimasi SEO, baik itu pada judul artikel atau pada keyword density.

Mungkin nanti akan saya bahas pada lain kesempatan mengenai optimasi seo yang saya sebutkan diatas.

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Kampanye Damai Pemilu indonesia 2009

Pemilu atau Pemilihan Umum diIndonesia dijadikan bahan kontes SEO . terhitung mulai tanggal 1 februari 2009 Banyak para blogger ikut dalam kontes SEO ini. Rata-rata semua mengambil judul 'Kampaye Damai Pemilu Indonesia 2009'. Sebenernya sih cuma iseng-iseng mau ikutan kontes SEO. la wong saya baru dalam dunia blogger ini kok berani-beraninya ya ikutan kontes SEO ini. Ya berani lah... kan saya sudah punya blog kalo ngak ikutan buat apa blognya ini. di Indonesia sudah terkenal apabila menyelenggarakan kampanye pasti diwarni dengan tindakan2 yang urakan atau kampungan padahal kampanye itu sendiri seharusnya dilaksanakan secara damai. Semoga dengan diadakannya kontes SEO ini dapat menyadarkan rakyat indonesia betapa berharganya arti kata Damai. Mari para blogger kita dukung pemilu indonesia 2009 dengan Berkampanye Damai .

Daftar Kampaye Damai Pemilu Indonesia disini : pagung117

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Money Management Basics for Forex Traders

Money management in the foreign exchange currency market requires educating yourself in a variety of financial areas. First, a definition of the foreign exchange currency or forex market is called for. The forex market is simply the exchange of the currency of one country for the currency of another. The relative values of various currencies in the world change on a regular basis. Factors such as the stability of the economy of a country, the gross national product, the gross domestic product, inflation, interest rates, and such obvious factors as domestic security and foreign relations come into play. For instance, if a country has an unstable government, is expecting a military takeover, or is about to become involved in a war, then the country’s currency may go down in relative value compared to the currency of other countries.

There are five major forex exchange markets in the world, New York, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo and Zurich. Forex trading occurs around the clock in various markets, Asian, European, and American. With different time zones, when Asian trading stops, European trading opens, and
conversely when European trading stops, American trading opens, and when American trading stops, then it is time for Asian trading to begin again.

Most of the trading in the world occurs in the forex markets; smaller markets for trade in individual countries. Simply put forex trading is the simultaneous buying of one currency and selling of another. Over $1.4 trillion dollars, US of forex trading occurs daily and sometimes fortunes are made or lost in this market. The billionaire George Soros has made most of his money in forex trading. Successfully managing your money in forex trading requires an understanding of the bid/ask spread.

Simply put the bid ask spread is the difference between the price at which something is offered for sale and the price that it is actually purchased for. For instance, if the ask price is 100 dollars, and the bid is 102 dollars then the difference is two dollars, the spread. Many forex traders trade on margin. Trading on margin is buying and selling assets that are worth more than the money in your account. Since currency exchange rates on any given day are usually less than two percent, forex trading is done with a small margin. To use an example, with a one percent margin a trader can trade up to $250,000 even if he only has $5,000 in his account. This means the trade has leverage of 50 to one. This amount of leverage allows a trader to make good profits very quickly. Of course, with the chance of high profits also comes high risk.

People who do forex trading do so because they are attracted by 24 hour trading days, by strong liquidity unlike stocks, buying and selling is almost instantaneous and the fact that forex trading usually occurs without paying commissions.

Like many other speculative investments, a key part of money management for the forex trader is only using money that can be put at risk. It is wise to set aside a portion of your net worth and make that the only money you use in forex trading. While the chances of good profits are there, if you should have a problem and get wiped out, you’ll only have a limited amount of money placed at risk.
Also remember that the market is n constant motion. There are always trading opportunities. If a currency is becoming stronger or weaker in relation to other currencies there is always a chance for profit. For instance, if you believe that the Euro is gong to become weak compared to
the US dollar then selling Euros is a good bet. If you believe that the dollar is going to become weaker than the yen, or the pound sterling, then selling dollars is wise. Staying current on the news and current events in the countries whose currency you hold is a smart move. Many people reach points where they can predict currency changes based on political or economic news in a given country. Remember though that forex trading is speculation, so be careful when managing your funds and only invest what you can afford to risk.

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Basics of SEO

Nowadays, even the smallest company uses the Internet as a main tool in building a customer base, keeping in contact with their clients and this is also their most basic means of advertising.
Designing a company web site is cheap and effective, not to mention essential because the world wide web is the only medium that offers instantaneous information access to millions of users around the globe. Any web developer worth his salt should know about search engine optimization or SEO. This is the key towards building an effective web site that would get a lot of hits and visitors. A web site that nobody visits is useless so the challenge lies in leading Internet
users to visit your web site.

Thus, your web site need to be "found" when users type in keywords in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, AOL and others. Once a keyword relating to the products or services that you offer is keyed into a search engine, a direct link to your web site should emerge on top of the list. You should employ search engine optimization techniques to lead traffic your way, and get more hits that would later on lead to more profit for your company, which is your goal in the first place.

Here are some tips on how you can make it to the top of the list of search engines, and use your SEO techniques to benefit your web site and your company:

1. If you have an existing web site and domain, just optimize the one that you currently have instead of purchasing a new domain. It will take some time before your web site will show up in a
particular search engine, like Google, so it better to use the one that you currently have instead of switching to a new one.

2. Know who your target audience is and aim for them.
If you are in the manufacturing industry and a user types in your product in a search engine, then you would immediately have your target right in front of you. As soon as the user hits the Enter button or clicks on 'Search', then the person will be lead to your web site. Make sure that your target market will get 'hooked' on your web site. Once the search engines show the link to your web site, their job is done. What you should do next is to make sure that your visitor will not leave your web site without them trying out your products or services, or at least leaving some pertinent information so that you can contact them in the future for marketing and advertising purposes. When hitting a particular target market, learn about their interests, location and age to have an idea of what you can offer them in return. Also, you can somehow link their interests to your products and services.

3. Search for the right keyword.
You should be creative, persistent and flexible when looking for the keyword or keyword phrases to use in optimizing your web site. Google and Yahoo offer some tools and tips on how you can
come up with keywords that will yield results. Do not settle for just one keyword. You can also vary the words and phrases that you use for each page on your web site so that you can have more hits.

4. Consider your target market when designing your web site.
The design itself would include the general theme of the web site. You should also pay attention to smaller details such as color and font style and size. Make sure that the web site is user-friendly and do not forget to insert helpful articles, tips, hints and related links that can be shared to other users. It is a good thing to have an option to send a link or an article to a friend, which will add more users and increase your client base. There should also be various ways to browse through your web site, to fit each user. A person might find it to difficult use the scroll down option so you should also provide hyperlinks which are accessible to them.

5. Concentrate on the web site content.
Regularly update the content of your web site so that old and new users can find something new when browsing through your site. Make the content brief and precise. Writing a content which has more than 600 words will make the users lose interest, since most of them do not actually read but just skim through the text. Strive to be the best and most comprehensive web site and
you will make your mark when it comes to information about the products and services that you offer. It helps a lot to pay attention to detail, too. Finally, keeping your web site's content updated is a must. Spread the word about your web site and use the basic search engine optimization techniques and you will surely gain positive results once users visit your web site.

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Making Bucks With Blogs

Making Bucks With Blogs Writing blogs isn’t exactly effortless, but it is something a lot of people do for fun and because they’re updated regularly, Google loves them. If you’re going to write a blog anyway, then you should certainly be making money out of it.

The biggest challenge when writing a blog is getting ads that give you good revenues. Because your entries are going to be talking about all sorts of different things, there’s a chance that you’re going to get ads on all sorts of random topics.

That’s fine, unless your ads are barely giving you enough revenue to pay for the blog.

If you find that you’re getting lots of ads related to “blogs” for example, instead of what you’re blogging about, you can try changing the meta name in your template. Delete the <$Metainfodata$> tag and replace i t with your ow n keywords and description:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow ">
<meta name="keyword s" Content="You r keyw ords ">
<meta name="description" Content= "Keyword-rich description" >

Make sure that your blog h as plenty of keywords and use lots of headlines containing key phrases, repeating them throughout the blog. Above all though, make sure that your blog has plenty of text. It might be fun to stuff your pages with pictures of friends, family and pets but Google can’t read them and you’ll end up with public service ads instead of revenue.

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Online Money Making

There are so many money making programs available in the Internet. But there also too many online scams are out there in the Internet, who steel both money and time of the people. This makes people to think that, online money making is a mere fake and it is only for persons who are scamming the web. But the real truth is one can really earn from the online resources. Here we are going to learn about some popular ways and some which is really helping people to earn money using their computer and the Internet. The following are the most popular ways for the people to earn online.

• Online Surveys
• Data Entry programs
• Undertaking online projects
• Medical Transcription Online
• Form Filling
• Forex Trading
• Website Content Writing
• Few good programs paying for clicking ads and surfing websites
• Online Photo Editing
• Product Reselling
• Advertising Revenue
• Selling on Ebay

Learn further how to use these programs for your prospective earnings.

Online Surveys :
Being a potential consumer or a person interested in a particular field of expertise, Companies producing consumer products and services respects your opinion and are willing to pay you for the time you are spending in answering their questions about the things you know and you are familiar with the product or services they are offering. It takes only a few moments for one to answer those surveys and as a result they will earn a considerable amount for taking part by providing useful feedback or thoughts.

Data Entry Programs :
There are some Data Entry Programs Which are in need of well versed professional typists and data processors. The jobs may be to convert data in the form of image files into documents, writing ad formats, etc. What you need is a more than decent typing speed, errorless typing and creative data presenting techniques. You should be person who is willing to hard work to undertake such a kind of a job. But it can provide you a decent income.

Undertaking online projects :
You may also join a program for online freelancers where the employers or job buyers providing the job with its unique specification, and normally as a job seller or freelancer you have to bid along with others for the projects which are related to your field of expertise. Most probably the availability of the projects is depending upon the reasonable or for the lower bid amount and the previous project handling record of a freelancer. The websites who are being the mediator between the job buyer and the seller will transfer money and the projects safely with a certain percentage of fee.

Medical Transcription :
Medical Transcription is also a genuine and legitimate program for a person to work from home online. But you need training to learn medical transcription. There are some websites offering programs for Medical Transcription along with training. The nature of the job is to convert medical prescription or Billing or case study reports in the form of audio to written or typed statements. For which you need a high or adequate speed Internet connection and Tons of concentration and willingness to work for hours and hours. Like Online Data Entry, this is also a hardworking field.

Online Form Filling :
There are in certain fields of work such as insurance, people need to fill up long registration or application forms. For persons who are not having the time to fill up data into various fields of forms, one can assist and such jobs are available online through a mediator network. The job is very simple, but your earnings differ from network to network depending upon the nature of the forms.

Forex Trading :
Foreign Exchange Trading popularly known as Forex Trading is mostly an investment scheme rather than an online job. This is a process of bidding your money over a foreign currency's economical increase in value against another one. You need to consistently monitor the growth in economical prospect of currencies of different countries to do forex trading successfully. But your returns are great.

Website Content Writing :
For a person who has excellent grammatical skills and who can write keyword rich high content articles to be republished in web pages, there are so many good opportunities in the Internet to earn. That is, here your thoughts and your knowledge will be converted into money. There are so many websites available there to buy your content.

Get paid to Click and Surf :
There are some programs available which provides you money to click ads and to surf(view) web pages. Most of the programs are hardly paying, but there are some legitimate ones too. Webmasters around the world are looking to drive traffic to their sites. Potential customers for their products are available through bringing visitors to their websites. Thus they pay to view their websites.

Online Photo Editing :
If you are expertise in photo editing, image designing, adding graphics, and other multimedia designing, then you can look for Photo editing jobs. Creative presentation, and huge knowledge over images, files types and colour combination is required to achieve success.

Product Reselling :
You can resell free and bought products in online malls and shopping centers to earn a considerable monthly income every month. You can also buy Emini malls from various shopping websites to sell their products with your traffic and can earn a percentage of commission for each sale.

Advertising revenue :
You need a website to do this. There are so many free hosting companies affording hosting for your websites you may use them. You need to buy a domain name for your web site and to provide REAL USEFUL CONTENT in your web pages and then you can earn by placing context-sensitive advertisements in your web site Of coarse, it requires a lot of skill in web-designing, code editing, and web promoting. But this will give you a stable and long going earning from your web site

Selling on Ebay :
Ebay is an online market place which has millions and millions of visitors everyday. Number of people selling and buying things every day. The things which you think useless for you might be precious for somebody out there. According to the ebay users, there was a buyer for every thing there. Collecting things at a cheap rate and selling or selling your own ebooks, free give-aways will make you earn a brilliant amount every month.

One should also have to use common sense and should be aware of online scams to succeed online.

* Good Luck *

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Professional Blogging Tips

Here are tips to help you blog professionally – whether you are operating your own blog or using one of the paid-to-blog companies. Many of these points are what separate the professional bloggers from the amateurs.

1. Never publish a post without ensuring that every single word is correctly spelled, that the words are used correctly in the sentence, and that the grammar and punctuation is perfect. Believe it or not, your readers will call you on poor spelling and grammar – and advertisers may as well.

2. Never publish a post unless you are absolutely sure that your facts are correct. Failure to do proper research can result in ruining your reputation not only in the market that you are blogging in, but also in the blogging community as a whole.

3. While SEO is important, your first goal should be to turn out a great blog a blog that people want to read, and can easily read. If you don’t have the ability to produce a blog that has the potential to gain readership, your blogging efforts are a waste of your time – and theirs.

4. Pay careful attention to the template or design that you choose for your blog. You don’t want anything on the page that may irritate or distract your readers. The page should be laid out in a clean and organized fashion.

5. Lighter backgrounds with darker text are easier to read. Experts recommend white backgrounds with black or navy blue text. You don’t have to go with the black/white advice, however the lighter background is highly recommended for easier reading.

6. Use the category feature of your blog! If you don’t use this feature, your visitors will not be able to find past posts that interest them easily and in most cases, they won’t even try. They may not be interested in today’s post, but they may be highly interested in a post you made three months ago. Make it easy by setting up and using categories.

7. Make sure that your content is original. You can get free content from numerous sources. Unfortunately, it is content that is being used on other websites and blogs. This hurts you in terms of search engine optimization, and it fails to give your readers ‘fresh’ material.

8. Choose a tight niche for your blog. This will eventually provide you with a closer following of dedicated readers. It also makes it easier to keep your blog organized, and you will find that your blog makes more money this way. It also reduces the amount of competition that you have overall.

9. While the niche for your blog should be tight, each blog post must be even tighter. Stick to one topic in each post that you make. Don’t drag your readers all over your blog topic. Keep it tight and stay focused – so that your readers can also stay focused.

10. Expert Opinions vary on the length of the post. Some say that you should keep it short – around 300 words. Others say that you should post between 750 and 1000 words per post. Research leans towards shorter posts, because of people’s attention spans. However, this is really dependant on your topic.

11. Keep paragraphs short and easy to read. A paragraph that covers ten lines won’t do. Keep paragraphs under five lines, if possible, but avoid paragraphs that only contain one or two sentences as well.

12. Spice up your blog with videos. You may even consider adding your podcast to your post. The videos and podcasts don’t have to be your own but they do need to be relevant, and you do need to add textual content as well.

13. Make your content scannable. Many people don’t want to take the time to read but if they can scan the post, and see that it will interest them, they will take the time to read it. You can make the post scannable by making important words bold.

14. Your blog should not be one bold page of advertisement. Use images that relate to your posts, but avoid the use of banner ads. If you use AdSense ads, don’t overwhelm the reader with the ads. The blog should be useful to the readers first and foremost not to the advertisers.

15. Shoot for a lower amount of traffic. You may think this is an insane concept, but it really isn’t. What you want is quality traffic not unqualified traffic in droves. The qualified traffic is where you will make your money.

16. Unless your blog does not have any other form of revenue, do not have buttons that ask for ‘donations’ or ‘tips.’ This works well only on blogs that are really not designed to be income producing blogs.

17. Know when to start a new blog, with a new topic. If after three or four months, your blog isn’t earning enough revenue, you have a problem. Either the topic isn’t profitable enough, you aren’t promoting the blog in the right way, or you aren’t producing a high enough quality blog. Either
make changes, or move to a new market.

While this not meant to be a complete blogging course, I hope it has made things easier for you. When I first started, there were courses similar to this one, but they were packed with “too much” information. I wanted something easy and quick!

I wish you the best in your online ventures and good luck

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Tips for Reviewing and Filtering AdSense Ads

The process by which the Google AdSense program reviews and filters ads for their participating sites is a semi-automated one. Google has put in p lace strict policies for the content o f its ads, including bans on profanity and racially discriminatory content. These types of ads are automatically filtered out and will not be included on any participating site.
In addition to this automatic ad filtering, owners of participating sites are free to block ads they or their visitors may find offensive. This filtering is done through the use o f custom filters, and it is somewhat different than simply blocking a single advertiser (although that is possible as well). These filters are generally easy to use, and Google provides good assistance to their member sites in order to ensure only wanted ads are posted on the member sites.

Although it happens quite rarely, there are times that Google’s auto mated algorithms for determining web site content are not able to make a good match o f ads to the web site pages. In those cases, the publisher of the web site will be permitted to choose his or her own ads. If this does happen and you fail to make a choice, the site will automatically host a number of public service advertisements.
One of the best things about the Google AdSense program is that the look and feel of the ads can easily be customized in order to provide a consistent look and feel to the content on the web site. One of the key concepts of effective web design is to provide visitors to the web site with a consistent look and feel. This includes making sure that the same colors are used throughout all the pages, making sure that the fonts are consistent and being sure to make the navigation of the web site as intuitive and simple as possible.

Fitting the ads served by Google AdSense into this equation is generally a simple process, and a number o f tools are provided to make it easy to customize the look and feel of the ads being served. For instance, the Google AdSense program allows web site owners to customize the color and layout o f the ads in order to be more consistent with the rest o f the site. Web site owners are free to choose from the opt ions provided or to apply a custom layout and color to the ads. The advertisers do not have control over
This process; once their ads appear on your site you are free to customize t he text and control how it looks. This is a big advantage o f t he Google AdSense program, and one that many web site owners would not want to do without.

Since the customization of Google AdSense content is so easy to do, it is important for all web site owners to carefully consider how to format the ads they host. It is a good idea to periodically review the web site, and the targeted ads contained o n the site, in order to make sure that the ads served are appropriate. At the same time, it is a good idea to look at the overall look and feel o f t he web site, not only the ads themselves but how they fit into the overall look and feel of the web site. It is important that the ads not look jarring or out of place. If the ads do stick out, reformatting them to more closely match the look of the web site itself should help a lot. It is best for the ads to be unobtrusive but still easy to notice for the casual web site visitor.

This type of web site testing should be a staple activity for the owner or manager of any web based business. It is important to periodically go back to the web site with the eyes of a potential visitor. Look at things like how easy the site is to use and navigate, how intuitive it is, and o f course how relevant t he ads are to the content. This type of review, of both ad copy and web site content, is a great way to keep the site fresh and relevant month after month and year after year.

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Linkedin Traffic - Drive Traffic to Your Blog With LinkedIn

The social media has exploded in 2008, and the number of folks participating in multiple social media channels is growing fast. Linkedin is the number one social networking site for business professionals. While communities such as Facebook and Twitter do get some attention from business professionals, Linkedin is specifically designed to give the business pros the opportunity to network with others and build relationship.
Bloggers can use LinkedIn to drive traffic to their blogs and get some exposure. It has many features available for bloggers to allow them to share value and build relationships. The best way to start with Linkedin is by adding your blog(s) to your profile. Building a solid profile is the first step you need to take if you want to get some exposure in that community.

You should also try to build up your network. You should try adding former colleagues, friends, and folks that you know from the past. As you add value and participate in the community, you are going to get more friend requests.
You can also use Linkedin groups to get more exposure in the community. There are hundreds of business groups available on Linkedin that you can join and start participating in. Your goal should be to truly add something to your group. Linkedin nation is very sophisticated and you won't get away with just plugging your blog.
Linkedin's Q&A feature is very powerful as it can help establish you as an expert in your niche. You can ask question and also answer questions. You should try to ask meaningful questions about the developments in your blogging niche. You should also try to provide the best answers possible to the members' questions. Communications on Linkedin are very much similar to real life communications. In essence, when you ask a question and folks take time to answer your question, you should try to get back to all the participants and thank them for their time. You can also engage them to try to add them to your connections later on.
Linkedin applications are a great way to share you blog RSS with your connections. You can add these applications to your sidebar and your feed will be available for folks to see.
Linkedin is more formal than Facebook and Twitter, and it should be treated as such. While it can drive you significant traffic, you should avoid looking unprofessional. So it is safe to be polite and thoughtful on Linkedin.

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What is SEO vs SEM

SEM: Search Engine Marketing - using search engines to market/promote the website (e.g. Google Adwords, sponsored linked, etc). You pay to have your site listed on search engines through their various promotions, and you may have to pay for each user the search engines send your way.

If SEO is working as intended, then there may not be a need for a SEM campaign; where as you will still need an SEO strategy even if SEM is working for you.

SEM has a higher running cost and the cost is directly proportional to the number of users sent or the position of your ad.

SEO and SEM are usually best serviced by the same provider because they have already performed the research, have extensive consultation with you, and know which strategy is best for the task at hand.

SEM, in most cases, can be implemented in real time and results are immediate. Hence, if traffic is essential to your web site and you’re still waiting for the SEO results, a short term SEM campaign m ay provide you with the traffic while waiting for your SEO to come through.


GLOSSARY:
ALGORITHM The search engine’ s mathematical formula used to determine how a web page will be placed/ran ked in the search results pages.

ALT TEXT “Alternate Text” – use to de scribe the image (for users/browsers that do no t support i mage display). This text appears when you hover your mouse over an image.

ANCHOR TEXT aka Link Text, the clickable text of a hyperlink – text used to describe the link.

BELOW THE FOLD Content of a web page that is not seen by the user unless the user scrolls down.

BLIND TRAFFIC Low quality traffic gene rated by misleading banners or SPAM.

CLUSTERING – In search engine search results pages, clustering is limiting each represented website to one or two listings.

CPA Cost Per Action.

CPC Cost Per Click.

CPM Cost per 1,000 impressions.

CSS Cascading Style Sheets.

CTR Click Through Ratio.

DOORWAY PAGE A web page designed to draw in Internet traffic from search engines, and t hen direct this traffic to another page or website.

EPV Earnings Per Visitor.

HIT A single access request made to the server. A web page can register multiple hits due to the number of graphics and/or scripts making u p the page. Not an accurate measurement of traffic.

IBL Inbound Link. A l ink fro m another site to your site.

OUTBOUND LINK A link from your site to another site.

PAGE VIEW S The number of times a we b page is served/viewed. More accurate measurement of traffic than “HI TS”.

PPC Pay Per Click.

QUERY The execution of a search on a search engine.

ROI Return on Investment.

SE Search engine.

SEM Search Engine Marketing.

SEO Search Engine Optimization.

SEP Search Engine Placement.

SERP Search Engine (Search) Results Page.

STEMMING Variations to a particular word. E.g. if one was to query the search engine for "design ", the search engine (that supports stemming) may return results that includes "designs ", "designer" and “designing”.

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What are some SEO secrets?

Keyword Research

This is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Knowing what consumers are typing into a search engine to find your product or service is essential. There are many tools to help you discover which keywords are profitable and help you decide which terms to optimise your website for.
Most SEO firms will guide you in determining the correct keyword terms. One of the best ways to find out is to ask a user when they ring your company.

“How did you find us?” If they say Google, ask them what words they were putting into the search engine. Another way to identify keywords is to type your product or service into a search engine as if you were a consumer and analyse the websites that are listed in the top ten. Alternatively, you can choose to use tools such as Google AdW ords’ Suggestion Tool or Overture. Just remember, what would your customer type into a search engine to find your product? If you are not listed under that keyword term then you may want to consider SEO.

Linking Strategies
A major contributing factor to higher search engine results is links to your website. Do not be fooled into thinking quantity is king here, quality is far better for rankings than volume.
For example, if you sell lounge chairs and a webpage that is ranked number one in Google for “lounge chairs” links to your site, this will be much better than 100 websites linking to your site that have nothing to do with lounge chairs.
Likewise a site that uses the wording 'lounge chairs' in a link to your website will be superior than using just your domain name. Another way to build links to your website is to create unique content that is valued by readers. One of the methods to do this is to provide regularly updated content, online newsletters, blogs and podcasts. If you create information that is helpful, informative or a valuable resource, other site owners may link to it therefore increasing your rankings. Most SEO firms will make recommendations about the types of site you should approach for linking purposes.

Page Titles, Meta Data and Content
Another aspect to consider when analysing your website is the page titles and meta data that is played on your pages. Page titles are the names of the pages on your website like Home and About Us. If your company was to sell teapots in London, it would be more beneficial for your homepage to be named ‘Teapots for sale London” as opposed to “Home”.
Meta data are keywords that are added to the code of a webpage. Internet browsers do not display this information but search engine spiders use this data to learn more about the page it is crawling. Using keyword-rich meta data can assist in achieving higher rankings however, make sure extensive keyword research is conducted to find the keywords of most value. These are some of the basic aspects of search engine optimisation that can have a positive effect on search engine rankings. Content is extremely important considering many search engines are starting to bring Latent Semantic Indexing into the mix. LSI means that search engines will hold more weight to pages that have related terms in the content than one term repeated many times. Relevant, timely and unique content naturally gets linked to as well, you will find if you provide this type of content on your website, you may not have to chase links as much as you would if your content is a re-hash of other info on the net. Ultimately search engine optimisation is an ongoing process. Rankings rise and fall with the ebb and flow of the Internet. Competitors will change content and optimise their own website; search engines will change the algorithms that drive their results.

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Which Links to Focus On

After submitting your site to the OPD, Yahoo, and any other specialized search directory and portal in your industry, the next order of business is to start asking for links on other websites. The majority of links that point to your site should be from other business websites similar to yours. If you provide interesting, useful, and timely content on your site, others will be compelled to link to your site.

Your ongoing objective is to obtain the highest number of “high-quality” links as possible from other sites. Just remember to exchange links with sites that offer related or complementary products and services to your own.

Best Practices and Tips
Although the blanket statement of “get as many links as possible” applies in general, here are some tips and best practices for prioritizing your link exchange efforts:

• Only exchange links with sites that are relevant to, similar to, or are in the same or a complementary customer market as your own business.

• Start by looking at other sites that are listed in the OPD and in Yahoo under the same category as your site. These make great sites to start focusing on.

• Do a search in Google and see what the top 30 sites are for your top keyword phrases. These are either your competition or prominent complementary sites to your own. Brainstorm other products or services that your customers may also find useful.

• Focus first on getting links from sites with a PageRank (PR) of 4 or higher. Links from sites with a PR = 3 or less won’t influence your ranking negatively, but you probably won’t be getting an appreciable boost from Google unless you have a large number (more than 100 or so) of these.

• However, don’t discount the power of even low PR sites directing traffic to your site over time. Today's PR = 3 site could be tomorrow's PR = 6 site, and vice versa. Don’t fret over the PR of the site, remember this is a long-term continual effort on your part to get more links!

• Your best links will be from sites that have a large number of incoming links themselves and that also have a relatively small number of outgoing links (such sites are called authorities). Just make sure these sites are relevant to your theme or keywords.

• Always try to get your keywords included in the text of your links. Have “Link to Us” code to make it easy for others to simply copy the exact link code you want used.

• Try to get your link on a page that is as close to their home page as possible. A link is less important (has less PR) if it is buried several levels deep. For example a link on, http://www.acme-house-plans.com/links.htm is better than a link on http://www.acme-house-plans.com/Links/SectionA/links.htm.

• Always include a link to your site in your email “signature” line when posting on forums, blogs, newsgroups or discussion groups, when submitting articles to online publications, or when sending out newsletters. Content that you write and send out has a way of being posted on a web server somewhere.

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Measuring a Blog Success

If you are building a blog to earn money directly, or if you are hoping to make sales from your blog, then money is your obvious metric to determine how well you are doing toward your goal. What if direct income or sales leads are not part of your plan—how can you measure the success of your blog then?
Every blogger you speak to seems to have a unique preference for what determines a successful blog. For some it could be about traffic, others willprioritize subscribers, and there are bloggers who count comments as the best measure. Each metric means different things to different people. Here are a few measures of success that different bloggers use to evaluate how their blogs are going. Some will be more or less relevant for different blogs and will depend upon the goals and objectives of the blogger.

Traffic
The most common ways that bloggers seem to evaluate a blog are the different measures of traffic. Different bloggers seem to have their own preferences for different aspects of traffic, plus each tool you use to measure traffic will givea different result due to the differing methodology. It is very rare to find two different tools that agree on any one result, so when measuring traffic it is best to stick to your favorite service and use it to show progress rather than obsessing over the actual numbers.

Unique Visitors
The idea of unique visitors is to count the number of people who visit your blog. The problem in determining this accurately is there is no way to actually know who is visiting with any confidence unless you get each person to log in every time they read.
To get a rough guide of how many unique people visit a blog, techniques such as counting each unique IP address (a number given to each device connected to the Internet) or recording “cookies” (small text entries saved by your web browser for later retrieval) can be used. All methods have propo nents and problems. For example, your IP address today might be different tomorrow, or many different computers could be simultaneously surfing under one number due to differences in how networks can be organized. Cookies have a lot of fans, but, increasingly, they can not be relied upon because so many people delete them manually or automatically via security and privacy software.
A further complication is that if you have readers who choose to take your content in feed form rather than view your blog in their web browser, your audience is actually larger than this statistic represents.
Advertisers, especially, like to know how many unique visitors your blog attracts in a given month, and if you are ever going to sell your blog, this metric will be extremely important also.

Visits
An individual visitor could make several visits to a blog. Visits are more reliably measured than unique visitors, but to compare results you have to agree on what constitutes a visit. Visits are also sometimes termed “visitor sessions.” Depending on who you listen to and which software you use to measure, a session could be calculated in several ways. One popular way to determine a session is an unbroken stream of page views after a certain period of inactivity. If someone visits two pages ten minutes apart, is that two page views in one session or two visits? Many website owners take note of average session length as a way to deter mine how long people spend on their site. As websites become less about downloading pages and more interactivity within a page, session length is gaining attraction. The longer visitors spend looking at your content the bet ter, because it means they were more engaged and according to media-types, gaining more affinity with your brand.

Page Views
Page views are the total number of pages read in a web browser. Most bloggers like to know how many page views they attract both on a daily and a monthly basis. As well as the total page views, you also should monitor ratio of pages viewed per visitor. It is best to have both a high number of pages viewed and for the average visitor to read more than one page. Each article you write will receive its own page views, and by comparing individual page counts you can work out which articles are gaining the most attention, giving you an idea what content your audience finds most interesting.

Hits
Hits count the number of requests sent for a file to the server. This is a dated and largely unhelpful metric because every request for any file is counted. Though it sounds useful, in actual fact it gives you little information that is actionable. If you have a page containing four images, one request for that page is counted as five hits. To increase your hits you could just add an image to the page! Due to the misleading nature of the metric few people use it seriously, and the phrase “hits” is often erroneously used in conversation and the media when what they actually mean is to describe traffic in general, or specifically visits or page views.

Subscribers
Bloggers can vary from indifferent about subscriber counts through to subscriber-obsessed. Why are subscribers so important? Counting a blog’s subscribers gives a good indication of how popular it really is because these are the people who want to read your content long term and have signed up to receive updates so they never miss one. These are your loyal readers, the people you can hopefully count on to come back again and again. Whereas the metrics mentioned before are important, and they are traditional measures for any website, subscribers are critical to blogs. A visit could be a person arriving, not finding what they need, and going away never to return. A subscriber has made a small commitment to you and demonstrates you are providing something a little more useful and compelling. Subscribers are usually split into RSS subscribers and email subscribers, though as I will explain, the lines are blurring.

RSS Subscribers
RSS subscribers are the people who use your feed to read articles. They use a feed reader (service or software application) to pull down updates to your feed and might never actually visit your blog at all. The most popular feed-measurement service is FeedBurner.com, and because of this most bloggers rely on that service to compare progress against each other. Both Bloglines and Google provide a count of readers using their feed-reader services, but only FeedBurner provides a count across all of them. Even though nearly all bloggers rely on FeedBurner, even the company would admit that counting feed readers is not an exact science. Numbers fluctuate every day, and glitches can make it seem like you have lost or gained readers almost randomly. The best idea is to use the count as a progress guide and not an exact count of individuals.

Email Subscribers
In addition to RSS readers, many bloggers publish their content over email. There are services available to allow you to take your RSS feed and deliver email updates automatically, and then there are specialist email-newsletter publishing services such as AWeber.com that allow you to create messages or import your content. An advantage that email lists have over RSS is that when a visitor subscribes you get his email address. Valuable on its own, a list of email addresses is also a far more reliable indicator of how many individuals you have subscribed.

Comments, Feedback, and Interaction
Much as we all want readers, when a blog is truly engaging you will hopefully attract comments. Comments show that your visitors want to interact with you. They allow you to build a sense of community, further encouraging readers to return time and again.

Comments
You can begin by counting the number of comments you receive after remov ing junk and spam comments. If on average each article attracts ten comments, you know you have made an improvement over when your blog gained only one or two.
There are two types of posts you might particularly want to receive: good feedback and considered posts. If the only comment you ever receive is, “You suck,” you might not be quite as happy about those ten comments as back when you received two “nice post” comments per article!
Many bloggers also judge quality equally as important as quantity because it is so easy to just post any old rubbish into the comment area, and people do just to get a mention of their own website, but when someone takes time and care to craft a thoughtful comment it can be much more satisfying.

Feedback
Obviously, as well as comments, people will use your contact form and email to get in touch with you. Many of my best articles have been inspired by reader questions, and it is important to all of us to receive feedback, good and bad, so we know where we are going wrong and what we are doing right.

Interaction
There are many ways that readers can participate on a blog that go beyond comments and emails. Taking part in your blog might include responses to polls, competition entries, and other calls to action. In general, if people do in large numbers what you ask, then you have an engaged audience!

Links
Links are the currency of the World Wide Web. The levels of incoming links to your blog can be an indicator of how well you are engaging other bloggers. Incoming links are good for a blog in most cases because of the incoming traffic that follows them, but also because they are a major factor in climbing the rankings in search engines. They can be monitored in a number of ways.

Trackbacks
If another blogger links to your article you can be notified using a special comment called a Trackback, which appears linking back to the original blogger with a small quote of the text used. Though some bloggers hate them due to spammers taking advantage of the free link back, blogs utilize them to further conversations and as notification of what others are writing about you.

Search Engines
To find out who is linking to you, type link:domainname into Google. You can get a good quick picture of the incoming links that that search engine has indexed for your blog. There are also browser plugins and easy-to-use web services that will show you the same thing.

Technorati
Another popular service that has become a bit of a competition among bloggers is the Technorati ranking. Technorati counts how many references to your blog have been made by other bloggers; currently they call this “authority.” The more authority you get in any six-month period, the higher your ranking. Technorati’s Top 100 List has become the defacto A-list, the holy grail of blogging for many.

Referral Stats
Most statistics packages offer the ability to track where your readers come from to get to your blog. This shows you the things they are searching search engines for but, also the sites that are linking up.

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Make Money Blogging More Traffic, More Leads, More Money!

Start any new business with a blog. It's much easier to start a blog than creating a website from scratch.
What blog platform should you use?
I've achieved top rankings for many of my keywords with my blogger blog. When your visitors and subscribers read your blog, something magic happens. Who wants to learn how to blog for money?

Step #1: Set up one primary blog around that features your BEST content, and your strongest affiliate offers.

Step #2: Create categories on your primary blog around the keyphrases above

Step #3: Point the primary phrase link in each blog, lens, hub and social profile at the appropriate category page on your blog

Step #4: Rewrite the content above about 30% or so, and post on your primary blog.
A lot of work? Yes....it is - about 2 weeks per blog to get GREAT traffic to ONE "thick" affiliate blog that converts like crazy for a long time to come on ONE primary offer.

Most folks are either starting a blog or have already done it. It's true that most folks start with a personal blog. But there is money to be earned in the blogging world. Some folks go for the money right from the start. The right way to make money from a blog is by providing real value that keeps folks coming back for more. A few top bloggers recommend not using any ads on a new blog until proper trust has been earned. There are many affiliate marketing and CPA networks that you can use to search for proper offers for your blog.
Writing search engine friendly posts can also help you receive free-targeted traffic from search engines.

Drive Traffic to Your Blog With LinkedIn

Linkedin is the number one social networking site for business professionals. Bloggers can use LinkedIn to drive traffic to their blogs and get some exposure. The best way to start with Linkedin is by adding your blog(s) to your profile. Linkedin nation is very sophisticated and you won't get away with just plugging your blog.
You can ask question and also answer questions. You should try to ask meaningful questions about the developments in your blogging niche. Linkedin applications are a great way to share you blog RSS with your connections.

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Getting Traffic To Your Web Site

One of the most frequent questions I am asked is “Will your ebook teach me how to get more traffic to my web site?” Lots of people have written books — and series of books — on generating traffic. The focus of this article is to show you how to maximize the traffic that you already have. And while tips for building pages through forums and free content are excellent ideas, they are no replacement for a solid course on how to get more people to visit your site. Because this question is so common though, I will address it briefly in this chapter. I’l l give you the basics, describe some unusual ideas that some people are using and tell you where you can get all the i nformation you need. In the next chapter, you’ll also find a quick run-through of search engine optimization.

1. Advertising

Let’s start with the obvious: buying advertising. We’ve already talked about AdWords/AdSense arbitrage but exactly the same principle applies to buying your traffic from other sources too.

For example, the minimum pri ce for advertising at Overture is ten cents per click and you must spend at least $20 each month. If you can see that the ads being served on your site are generating less than ten cents per click then you’re never going to make a profit.

Exactly the same is true of any other pay-per-click advertising campaign.

One of the advantages of following your AdSense stats is that you can estimate how much th e clicks on your ads are worth. That can tell you how much you can afford to pay for clicks from other sites when you buy advertising.

It mi ght well pay to advertise, but before you buy make sure it pays a profit.

2. Recipro cal Linking

Many people focus on linking in order to improve their search engine rankings. That’s important but don’t forget that the links themselves can be one of your biggest sources of traffic!

Probably the easiest way to invite links (apart from searchi ng out related sites and writing to each one) is to add a “link” section to your pages where webmasters can choose a banner, button or text link to place on their site. On the same page, they can also submit their own site for linking. That should help you swap links without being swamped by sites looking for free placement.

The most critical factor when requesting a link though is where the site places it. Links on the home page alw ays do better than a link buried on one of the internal pages and a good banner or graphic link on a site with content related to yours will usually get more clicks than a text link.

If you find that your links aren’t appearing on the pages you want, there are a couple of simple remedi es that you can use.

The first is to ask for a better position! If you have a good relationship with
the webmaster or if it’s a small site, there’s a good chance that they’ll agree.
It certainly won’t hurt to ask.

Not everyone is so generous though, and another option is to offer something in return. A link in a simil ar position on your own si te can make a good deal if your sites are of similar size but you can also offer content or even a special page for that site’s users.

If you have a si te about furniture for example, and you want a link at a top directory for home furnishings then you could create a special welcome page for users of that site to draw them deeper into yours and deliver targeted ads. You might even want to go as far as creating a sort of co-branded version of your site for their users to click into. As long as you’re getting paid when the users click on the ads, what do you care whose design they’re looking at?

3. Send A Friend

There’s nothing like viral marketing to promote your site! It’s free, it comes with trusted recommendations and it gives you great CTR.

Each of your content pages should have a link marked “Send a friend” which opens a form so that the user can send your URL onwards. Until Google allows ads in email, there’s little point in AdSense members sending actual content but there’s no reason why you (or your users) can’t send links to pages with ads.

4. RSS Feeds

One of the challenges of keeping your user base is that readers can be pretty forgetful. Adding an RSS feed to your site is a great way to let people know that a new post has gone up and that they should stop by and take a look You’ll want to make sure that your headlin es are attractive and inviting. Many users don’t look past them, so if they don’t do the job, the post won’t be opened or read, and the user won’t click to your site. Images can also help you r feeds to stand out.

It’s rarely a good i dea to send more than RSS post to a subscriber each day.
The most common reason that users unsubscribe isn’t poor content or too much advertising, but too many posts.

One good strategy then is to divide your RSS feeds by theme and let subscribers only receive posts on the topics that interest them most. If you’re writing about a range of different themes, that should already help to keep the deliveries down to a manageable level.

The only other choice you’ll have to make is whether to include the whole
post in your feed or just a teaser to bring people to your site. When the goal
of the feed is to get people back to your site to click the ads, you might think
that there’s little point in giving them the whole article in their feed reader.
But readers will often unsubscribe if they can ’t see the whole article. That would reduce your subscriber base. You might be better off givin g them the whole article and inviting them back to your site to add and see comments. Test both options and see which works best for you.

5. Of fline Marketing

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they build an Internet business is to forget that there’s a world outside the Internet! Just because you make money out of traffic doesn’t mean you h ave to source all of that traffic online.

You should make sure that your U RL is listed on all of your marketing material: your business cards, Yellow Pages ads, flyers, envelopes, freebies and just about anything else you can think of.

You should certainly have your site address in your email signatures.

6. Promo ting Yo ur B log

I’ve tal ked quite a bit about blogging in thi s book, mostly because I know
from experience that it’s possible to make a very nice income from a good blog but also becau se a lot of people aren’t making the most of the blogs they have.

If you’ ve got AdSense on your blog, there’s a whole range of different things
that you can easily do to increase your traffic and earn extra cash.

The first thing you should do is make sure that your blog is set to ping rpc.pingomatic. com as soon as you’ve updated. Pingomatic.com offers a free all-i n-one pinging service that covers all the large blog directories and search engines. On Blogger.com, you can find this in your settings; other blog tools, such as Movable Type and Wordpress have a similar option.

You should also set up an RSS feed to l et people know w hen you update. Apart from the fact that you can now place ads on your feeds, it will also keep your regu lar users coming back to see more ads (and to see your latest posts).

Instead of linking to the previous month’s or the previous week’s posts, each page should also have its own link. Sounds obvious, right? And yet how many blogs have you seen with one l ink to about twenty different entries?
One link per entry means more pages for ads, better links from external sites
and higher search engine rankings.

You should certainly comment on other peopl e’s blogs, especial ly those that write about the same sort of things as your site, but ultimately the best way to get traffic to your blog is to make it good. If your writing is dull or difficult to read, it doesn’t matter how hard you push it, no one will want to read it — and those who do stay won’t stick around to cli ck the ads.

7. Public Relations And Publicity

Just about all of the methods that you use to bring people to your site will
cost you money. You’ll have to pay for ads on other sites, you’ll have to give up valuable real estate on your site to li sts of links and you’ll have to decide how much you want to pay for an AdWords campaign or to get yourself promoted through Overture.

Publicity can be free.

It doesn’t have to be of course. You can pay a PR expert to publicize your site for you and place articles in the press on your behalf... bu t it’s not necessary and they can be too expensive for most sites, especially at the beginning.

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How Google Works

This explains those elements of the Google ranking process that will matter most to you. It is not meant however to be an exhaustive inside look of how Google works – only a handful of persons at Google know this.

Google, like other search engines, uses automated software to read, analyze, compare, and rank your web pages. So you need to know what elements and factors Google cares about, and how important these factors are in relation to each other.

Because this is an important concept, it will be repeated: Google uses automated software to analyze your website – not human beings. Which means that visual elements of your website that may matter to you – like layout, color, animation, Flash, and other graphics are ignored by Google. The Google search engine is like a blind person reading a book in Braille – anything that is graphical, spatial, or visual in nature is simply not seen.

As such, you need to start thinking like the Google search engine.

So What Is a Ranking?

As stated previously, a ranking on a search engine is a web page’s listing and relative placement on a results page (also known as a SERP) for a certain search query. As an example, if you type “house plans” into the search box at Google, you will get those listings displayed (10 listings per page by default) that Google deems most relevant to the search phrase house plans, sorted in order of relative importance.


The most relevant and most important web pages are listed in descending order. For Google, page relevancy is dependent on how well a web page “matches” a specific word search. Page importance on the other hand is dependent on the quality and quantity of links that point to your web page from other web pages (particularly from web pages on websites other than your own). The concept of link quality is important and will be discussed in a later chapter.

If your site does not appear in the top 30 for your most important category or subject, you might as well forget getting much traffic from Google or from any other search engine. Because many people never go past the first page for a search result, you really need to be in the top 10.

It can be debated how much more traffic a #1 gets compared to say, a #3 or a #10 ranking. Studies indicate that those listings “above the fold” on a results page (which means anything higher than a #4 or #3 depending on your monitor size, resolution, and other factors) do better than those below the fold as a certain percentage of people do not scroll. Above the fold is anything displayed on the page before you have to start scrolling.

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+ 6 SEO Strategy for beginner

1. Strategic objectives
• Maximise visibility and awareness of the OU brand and offer relative to our competitors within key international search engines
• Maximise the OU’s share of search within the education category compared to competitors (institutions and other providers)
• Maximise quality of website visitors from search engines, attract those that convert to the outcomes the OU requires when they visit the website
• Maximise the lifetime value of visitors from search engines

2. Visibility and awareness
• Ensure that OU brand is visible and appropriately represented within search engine results pages (SERP’s)
– Search/IA mapping to create keyword hierarchy for OU site
– Identify and optimise keyword entry points/information pathways
– Gap analysis between OU website and potential search terms
– Balance of SEO vs PPC
– On/off page optimisation

3. On/off page optimisation
• Integration of SEO with IA
– Off-Page Factors: domain name, directory structure, filename, URL
• Integration of key SEO factors within style guides and standards and the production process via optimised layout mark-up (OLM)
– On-Page Factors: title tag, meta tags, page content, copy relevancy, text formatting, frequency/density/prominence of phrases
– Off-Page Factors: internal link structure, external link structure
• Link building strategy
– Directory Listings, JISC XCRI CAP project
– Anchor text of inbound links
– Page quality of inbound links

4. Share of search
• Ensure that OU brand is visible against key competitor institution/providers within search engine results pages (SERP’s)
– Identify and monitor search behaviour of competitor institutions/providers websites
– Search term gap analysis between OU and competitor websites
– On/off page optimisation
• Suggested target
– Appear within 2 rankings + same SERP as primary competitor
– Higher frequency of rankings than competitor institution/provider within 1-3 SERP’s

5. Quality & value of visitors
• Ensure that visitors from search engines are those who convert to the outcomes the OU requires when they visit the website and
subsequently engage in an ongoing relationship with The OU
– Identify and optimise best performing keyword conversion/information pathways
– Profiling of search engine visitors
– Profiling of enquirers/students driven by search engines
– On page optimisation, particularly copy relevancy
• Suggested targets
– Reduction in single visit visitors generated by search (Feb 06, 30% of SVV)
– Increase in VVR,PRR & RCR for search (May 07, 1.4, 1.2%,0.6%)

6. Work in progress
• SEO review of primary portals within “Open Portals” information architecture
• Target keyword mapping to “Open Portals” architecture
– Brand (OU Home/About)
– Core/Generic (About/New/Study/Research/Five)
– Specific (Study/Research/Five)
• Integration of SEO requirements within Style Guides and Standards

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AdSense — Making The Money!

Once you’ve done all this, you’ll be ready to start using — and profiting from — AdSense. I’m going to talk you right through the process of signing up to AdSense from reaching Google to being ready to place your first ad.

If you’ ve been putting off signing up until you get time to figure out how to do it, you’ve just run out of excuses!

What Is AdSense?

Before signing up to AdSense, it’s important to understand what you’re signin g up to. Many of the principles and strategies th at I describe in this book make the most of th e way that AdSense works. If you can understand where AdSense are getting their ads, how they assign those ads to Web pages and how they fix the prices for clicks on those ads or for ad appearances on those pages, you’ll be in a great position to manipulate AdSense in a way that gives you maximum revenues.

Unfortunately, I can’t really do that.

Much of the way that Google runs the AdSense program is kept under wraps.
I know a few things — and enough to do a great deal with our AdSense ads. But I don’t know it all. N o one outside Google does. And for good reason. If it was clear how Google figured out the content of each website and which ads suit that site best, there’s a good chance that the Web would be fi lled with sites created specially to bring in the h igh est paying ads instead of sites built to bring in and inform users.

People do try to build sites for ads not content, but they tend to make less money than high quality sites that attract loyal users who click on ads.

The fact is, w e can make the most of both AdSense and our own ad space without knowing the algorithms that Google uses to assign ads and pay sites.

That’s because AdSense is pretty simple. At the most basic level, AdSense is a service run by Google that places ads on websites. When you sign up to AdSense, you agree to take the ads that Google gives you and recei ve a fee each time a user clicks on that ad (or for each thousand ad appearances the ad receives on your site, depending on the type of ad).

The ads themselves come from another Google servi ce: AdWords.

If you want to understand AdSense, you will need to understand AdWords.

Adverti sers submit their ads to Google using the AdWords program. They write a headline and a short piece of text — and here’s where it gets interesting — they choose how much they want to pay.

Adverti sers decide on the size of their advertising budgets and the amount they’re prepared to pay for each click they receive. Google then decides where to put those ads.

The company’s owner might then say that he’s prepared to pay $1000 a month for his adverti sing budget but not more than $1 for a click. He can be certain now of getting at least a thousand leads a month.

But that’s where his control over the ad ends. Google will figure out which sites suit an ad like that an d put them where it sees fit, charging the advertiser up to a dollar a click until the advertiser’s budget runs out. (Of that dollar, how much the publisher receives is a Google secret. The New York Times has reported Google pays publishers 78.5 percent of the advertising price per click. The figure hasn’ t been confirmed but it is around what most peopl e in the industry expect that Google pays.)

That makes AdWords different to more traditional form of advertising. In the print world, an advertiser chooses where it wants to place its ads and decides if the price is worth paying.

The newspaper too decides how much it wants advertisers to pay to appear on its pages. Any advertiser that meets that price gets the slot and the publisher always knows how much his space is worth.

Neither of those things is true online.

When an advertiser signs up to AdWords, he has no idea where his ads are going to turn up. When you sign up to AdSe nse, you’ve got no idea how much you’re going to be paid for the ad space on your page.

You leave it to Google to decide whether to give you ads which could pay just a few cents per click or ads which could pay a few dollars per click.

Google says that it always assigns ads in such a way that publishers receive maximum revenues, and that adv ertisers get the best value for the ir money .

So if you have a site that talks about interior design and which mentions “homemade furn ishings” a great deal, Google will assume that your readers will be interested in the sample ad above. But that won’t be the only ad that could appear on you r page. There could be dozens of others. Google will give you the ads that it thinks wi ll give you the highest revenues.

That might not be the ad with the highest possible click price though. If a low er paying ad gives you more clicks and high er overall revenues, you should find yourself receiving that ad instead. In theory then, you could just leave it to Google to decide which ads to give you and at which price.

In my experience though, that just cuts you out of a giant opportun ity. You can influence the choice of ads that you get on your page, both in terms of content and in terms of price. You can certainly influence the number of clicks you receive on those ads. Google leaves that entirely up to you — and it’s a crucial part of the difference between earni ngs that pay for candy bars and earnings that pay for cars.

In short then, while signing up for AdSense can be both the beginning and the end of turning your site into income, if you’re serious about making serious money with your site, it needs to be the beginning. You’ll w ant to make sure you’re not getting low-paying ads, and you’ll want to make sure that you’re getting the clicks that turn those ads in to cash.

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An Introduction to Google AdSense

Many smart web entrepreneurs have discovered how to use the power of Google AdSense, but the first step is to understand just what this program is and what it has to offer web site owners.

Google AdSense is a program which serves up ads on the hosting web site, but the key is that the ads that are placed there are related to the subject of the web site on which they appear. For instance, a web site devoted to the antique car hobby might host ads for companies selling cars, promoting car shows and the like.

In fact, AdSense is part o f an advertising principle k nown as contextual marketing. Placing the ads in context, as with the old car web site, increases the chances that those ads will be seen and responded to. After all, t he general public may not be interested in buying fancy chrome wheels or hubcaps for a Model T, but owners of classic cars may be.

The possibilit ies for contextual ad vertising in general, and Google AdSense in particular, are endless. A hockey site can host ads for hockey equip ment and hockey sticks, a tennis web site could host ads for tennis balls and tickets to tennis tournaments. It is easy to see why this program has become so popular and so well respected with internet users and web site owners alike.

The good news for web site owners is that Google AdSense can be quite a lucrative endeavor, especially for high profile sites and those sites with excellent, high quality and in demand co ntent. One of the best t hings abo ut the Google AdSense program is that the ads are highly targeted and relevant to the subject of the web site. Targeting t he ads makes a great deal o f sense, since targeted ads are more likely to get the click t hroughs that generate revenue.

Google AdSense ads are text only, unobtrusive and very easy to read. Unlike banner ads and pop up ads, these ads do not get in the way of the web site visitor’s experience, and t hey are designed in such a way that they do not overwhelm or overshadow the content of the web site itself. Chances are the average web user has alread y seen hund reds, if not thousands, of Google AdSense ads.

There are not many places left where web site owners can make money directly off of their web sites, but Google AdSense is one such destination. Google AdSense allows web site owners to make an income off of every page of the web site. In addition, the algorithms used by Google to index web sites automatically select the best ads for each page of the web site, providing highly targeted and effective ads for their advertisers and lo ts of income for the owner o f t he site.

Those web site owners and designers who have been around for awhile may remember a concept known as AdWords. In essence, Google AdSense is an offshoot of the initial AdWords model. It is important to keep in mind, however that AdWords and AdSense are not the same thing.

When you do a Google search, you have probab ly noticed the small text ads which are disp layed to the right hand side of the search results. These are contextual ads, served up based on the search criteria. These targeted ads are known as AdWords, and they are used by various companies to generate revenue and drive new customers to their web sites.

Google AdWords uses the pay per click mo del to generate inco me for Google. When a user clicks on one of t he AdWords, that advertiser pays Google an agreed upon amo unt of money. This process is fully auto mated and easily trackable by all parties. The amount of money changing hands with each click varies all the time and is subject to word bidding. The placement of the ads, and the amount of revenue received for each click, is subject to market forces, just as in the brick and mortar advertising wo rld.

With Google being the predominant search engine today, the company has continued to exert its power and influence, and the ads served up by Google, both through AdWords and AdSense, can be powerful revenue generating machines. Many smart web site owners have already discovered the power of Google AdSense in generating revenue and profit ing from their web site
content, and many more web site owners are discovering this power every day.

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