Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog » SEO

Sitelinks FAIL

Stuart — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 04:12:27 +0000

Came across this today & had to share it. Major shopping retailer here in Australia.

Someone introduce them to Google Webmaster Tools please?

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Google’s Geographical Changes & Affiliate Marketing

Stuart — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:00:23 +0000

Google has launched a nifty new feature that allows you to set a Geographic target to help you focus your website on a particular area & region anywhere in the world.

It’s accessible from within Webmaster Tools under the Tools / Set Geographic Target.

So what does this mean for Affiliate Marketers?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is we can now build huge niche sites & specifically target certain subdomains to different regions & countries.

This pretty much ties in well with my last Local Directory post, I mentioned that once your site was up & running you could then branch out into different cities within Australia:

melbourne.yoursite.com.au
sydney.yoursite.com.au
perth.yoursite.com.au
adelaide.yoursite.com.au
brisbane.yoursite.com.au

Each subdomain can have it’s own Webmaster Tools Account, so in theory you are able to set the region for each of your subdomains separately. Giving each subdomain more exposure in the areas you want it to been seen in.

What are the Benefits?

The main benefit is that you can now target the Australian market without strictly buying a .com.au or target the UK market without buying a .co.uk domain name. Simply by setting the targeting in Webmaster Tools.

What are the Drawbacks?

It’s still too early to tell how setting this option will effect overall traffic. If you run a local site that doesn’t need any international traffic you may see a boost in Local Rankings, which in turn could mean more profits. However, if you run a site that relies on International Traffic, then setting a locality may affect you negatively.

Naturally you still also have to be careful of duplicate content, just because you can target a site to different areas doesn’t mean you can just duplicate the existing content onto a subdomain then set the targetings. I bet that was one of the first things that popped into your head!

What affiliate marketing applications can you think of that would benefit from this feature?

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Time to wake up the Pagerank Orgy is over

Stuart — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:56:01 +0000

Google dished out a somewhat interesting Pagerank update today hitting a lot of major sites (known fo selling links & participating in Blog Networks) with negative update values (i.e. a Pagerank Decrease).

Some of the more notable decreases:

Problogger – 6 to 4
John Chow – 6 to 4
Washington Times – 7 to 5
Forbes – 7 to 5
Engadget -7 to 5

The list goes on really. But you know what? I don’t care & you shouldn’t care either.

I’ve said before that basing your Business Model around something that you don’t entirely understand isn’t sound.

Yet many people still do.

You only have to look at the Buy & Sell section or the Google section over at the Digital Point forums to see how obsessed some people are with Pagerank. Me? It wouldn’t bother me if they removed it at all really.

A perfect example, would you rather get a PR6 Link on a PR6 page with no backlinks to it, or a PR6 with over 2,000 backlinks? This is part of the reason that Pagerank is flawed. Since it filters down through a site from the homepage it is possible to get high internal pages with PR that have little or no backlinks to them at all. Yet people will buy links on these pages, I wont.

You see, I’ve always based my intrinsic value of sites on more than a simple Green bar. What actually does that Green Bar even represent?

Webmasters need to wake up & start caring more about measureable metrics like:

Overall Website Backlinks
Page Backlinks
Backlink Weight (i.e. how many backlinks does the page you have a link from have)
Traffic
ROI & Overall Profit
CPA
Bounce Rate

These are metrics that will not only increase your profitability but they are also part of a Sound Business Model, get that right & you will not only have a profitable website but a sustainable one too.

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Trustrank: Avoiding Google’s Aging Filter

Stuart — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:34:24 +0000

I’ve been launching a load of new affiliate sites lately & have been coming across many different patterns to how the sites are ranked depending on the type of promotion that I use.

By far the easiest method I’ve used to get quick rankings is buying aged domains, however this doesn’t quite work if you really want to brand an affiliate site or create a brandable network of sites with a similar url theme.

Before Google will start ranking your site for popular or mainstream terms you’ll more than likely see traffic trickle through on “long tail terms,” eventually your site will start to appear for more generic terms.

Now, the time period that this starts to happen can depend on a number of factors:

The rate at which you acquire links
The number of links you acquire
The trust of the website that’s linking to you
The varation of the anchor text in the links

Many people have nicknamed this aging period the “Sandbox” however I personally think that these are filters applied depending on various scenarios & combinations of events.

I’ve found number 4 to be the single most significant factor at tripping Google’s Filters & really dragging out the initial aging phase. The filters that are applied seem to vary, I’ve seen filters applied on a keyword basis only & also on a sitewide basis.

Once you’ve been hit by the filters I’ve seen it take up to 14 months to recover fully.

9 Rules to obide by when launching a new website

Send a Press Release via PRweb when you launch, from what I’ve seen it seems to pass some initial authority to your site.
Don’t overdo it, build your links slowly. 5 in the first week, then 10 & so on.
Avoid Sitewide links initially, the lack of variation in the anchor text will trip the filters.
Don’t go after high PR links, get links from all sources. PR isn’t important, rankings are.
If you’re buying links try to get links initially on individual pages. This will often be cheaper & more effective when your site is starting out.
Try to balance relevant links with non relevant links (i.e. directories & blog comments).
Don’t submit your site to 500 directories with the same anchor text. Keep the anchor text unique.
Avoid reciprocal linking until you start to see your site rank. Try to keep these links on topic.
Don’t just try to build links to your homepage, promote inner pages. This will help your inner pages rely less on the link popularity of your homepage & rank better.

If you want proof that this works, have a look at the following screenshot from Google Analytics. I launched this site for a client of ours on the 12th August (this is search traffic from Google only).

Here’s a graph from another site that’s been around much longer (about 18 months).

In this second graph you can clearly see a period of filtering just before the huge spike. This period lasted around 3 months. However, since then as the generic rankings have improved so has search traffic.

Slow & Steady: This is how you should be approaching new sites. Naturally as Affiliate Marketers we want rankings RIGHT NOW. I’m sorry but if you take this approach it can actually take you much much longer to get those rankings.

Start slow, experiment with PPC to see how people interact with your site & use that knowledge to help build your keyword focus. If you find yourself getting impatient then do what I do, finish one project, do some initial promotion then move onto the next project. When you start to see traffic increase you know that you can start pushing your promotion a little harder.

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Google Removes “Supplemental Results” Tag

Stuart — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 06:52:34 +0000

If you’re like me, you will have struggled with the term Supplemental results since 2003. They have been the source of many headaches & frustration, not to mention sheer panic.

Well, Google has finally announced that they’ll no longer be labelling Supplemental Results.

The changes we make must focus on improving the search experience for our users. Since 2006, we’ve completely overhauled the system that crawls and indexes supplemental results. The current system provides deeper and more continuous indexing. Additionally, we are indexing URLs with more parameters and are continuing to place fewer restrictions on the sites we crawl. As a result, Supplemental Results are fresher and more comprehensive than ever. We’re also working towards showing more Supplemental Results by ensuring that every query is able to search the supplemental index, and expect to roll this out over the course of the summer.

Whilst this may initially sound good, it’s hard to tell how this will effect search marketers. It all depends on how much visibility supplemental results will continue to get as changes are introduced, will this visibility increase?

I’ve always been a big fan of the labelling of Supplementals. It allows me to quickly assess a website for any particular problems, including:

Link Saturation
Indexing Problems
Duplicate Content Problems

I’ve heard rumors that this may be getting integrated into the Webmaster Console but if you check out Matt Cutts latest poll, there’s much jucier features i’d like to see first (and everyone else for that matter).

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Real Impact of Google’s Squidoo Filtering

Stuart — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 02:28:04 +0000

Cam over at Web Cite has posted a nice article with some Hitwise graphs showing the drop off in traffic from Squidoo since the start of July. These graphs seem to back up the theory that the lenses were filtered by Google.

A similar pattern also emerges when you check the url at Alexa too.

It’s fair to note here that Hitwise’s data is usually much more accurate than Alexa (since it monitors data at the ISP Level rather than with toolbar installs) however both graphs show the same bleak pattern.

Although this brings up another question. I’ve had this happen to similar sites of my own over the past few months.

Almost like a 50% filter hits & the breadth of keywords you rank for drops significantly, check out this Google Analytics data for example:

This site is slowly recovering, but the drop is so instant that it makes you wonder why the filter kicks in, or even what the filter IS. Regardless of how many new relevant backlinks I generate, this site just can’t seem to shake the filter (which has been in place since February). It’s almost certain that Squidoo are suffering from something similar to this.

Anyone else noticed anything similar on any of their sites?

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Google filters Squidoo Lenses?

Stuart — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:34:53 +0000

I’ve been noticing a sharp decrease in traffic to most of the Squidoo lenses I make decent money from, it appears that a few other blogs have noticed something similar:

I’ve seen about a 75% decrease in traffic to all my lenses since Wednesday 4th July, but I’ve also seen some of the more popular lenses keep their consistent rankings.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the rankings come back or whether Google has applied a permanent penalty to Squidoo or whether you just need to put more effort into building backlinks to get the lenses ranking (this seems more probable).

It’s not surprising really since 80% of the lenses on Squidoo are probably spam anyway & rank ridiculously well without any effort.

In the meantime, don’t despair many people are already jumping onto Hubpages which also seems to be doing equally well in the SERPS

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Aged Domains: What you need to Know

Stuart — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 10:37:29 +0000

I’ll start with a quick fact. If I start a new domain it normally takes me anywhere up to 3 months to start ranking, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer.

That’s 3 months of link building, writing articles, linkbait & working. That’s a lot of time.

If you’re starting out in Affiliate Marketing should you really be waiting around for your sites to come through Google’s filters? OR would your time be better spent hunting down some domains that could rank for you in as little as 2 weeks?

Bingo

Despite what many people say I feel there’s really no such thing as the Google Sandbox. It’s just that newer sites are subject to more filters than older ones. The more trust your website gains the less it becomes filtered & the easier you’ll find it to rank.

There are 2 basic ways to beat these filters & rank your sites quicker.

Build natural strong links from relevant sites (not too quickly)
Buy an aged domain with authority already

If you are planning on making Affiliate Websites then can you really afford to wait up to 3 months for a domain to start ranking? How much in potential revenue is that? Even more, say you’re creating a website to promote a particular product, what happens if you get filtered & by the time you end up ranking the competition is too fierce?

Don’t get me wrong, it IS possible to rank new sites quickly & it can be done (depending on the keywords) but what if you could buy an aged domain & rank right away & make money right away.

So what do you look for when buying an aged domain?

Age: This for me is the most important factor, the older the better. Pre 2000 is always a winner.

Banned: Check the domain hasn’t been banned.

Backlinks: Check Yahoo Site Explorer to see how many backlinks the domain has.

.Edu Backlinks: Does the domain have any authority backlinks?

Indexed: Has the domain been indexed before? search engines calculate a domain’s age from when it was first indexed. If a domain has a good Search History then you’re onto a winner. To check this out fire the url into Way Back Machine.

Price: What price are they asking for? You can pick up a good domain for around $10-100 if you look in the right places, a small price to pay for not having to wait to rank.

Pagerank: Generally Pagerank isn’t an issue for me although many sellers will try to sell the domain based on Pagerank. I’m more concerned about age & IBL’s. Although if pagerank is an issue please check to see it’s not fake.

Where to look?

I don’t think I really need to say any more on this subject. Buy smart, rank quicker, make more money

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Removing Supplementals in WordPress or Other Sites

Stuart — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 23:49:57 +0000

I’ve had a few blogs hit supplementals lately even though they’ve got a pretty decent Inbound Link Authority. Generally whenever this happens I’ll query the site in question with Google’s site: operator to see if I can see anything out of the ordinary.

Well chances are that if you’re using wordpress & you’ve not set up your robots.txt correctly then you’ll be getting heaps of pages indexed that you don’t want.

What don’t you want indexed:

Your Plugins & Content Folder
Categories
Galleries & Images
Feeds & Trackbacks

What you DO want indexed:

Posts
Pages
Sitemap

Shoemoney had a similar problem a few weeks ago (And most people think he’s an SEO?). What happens in that in order to rank a page in the main index Google must attribute a minimum pagerank value to it. If it falls below the threshold it’ll hit supplemental. So you need to make sure that your site has a good distrubution of pagerank or authority. So if most of your links are hitting your homepage & you’re second level of navigation are your categories then you’re losing heaps of link popularity that should be going to your posts instead.

Ony my blogs I’ve implemented the following robots.txt with reasonable success (50% more pages indexed):

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /trackback/

There is a good set of reasoning behind doing this on all of your sites. You should almost be telling the engines which pages you want to rank & which pages you don’t. Removing the pages that are worthless to the engines & only serve as a navigation between different parts of the site increase the relevance & internal linking power of other pages.

I have a Joomla content site that has more category pages than static pages. So I exlcluded all the category pages & my traffic has jumped from around 500 uniques/day to 1500 in about 8 days. Gotta love Everflux

Remember if you have unique content on your blog & you’re still suffering from Supplementals you need to get some links to your main page & internals, never stop this cycle of linkbuilding or linkbaiting.

I’ve received about 4 or 5 reviews about Earners Blog that I asked for last week, I’m still looking for a lot more. So keep em coming. There’s $25 & an SEO Audit in it for you.

I also think that the DNS is still settling after the switch to the new hosting, so some of you may still be seeing & commenting on the old version of the site. I’ll try to get the databases synced so we don’t lose some of the comments

In other news check out Eli’s new post about Power Indexing sites with a large number of pages.

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Deconstructing Google’s Trustrank Algorithm

Stuart — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 09:22:58 +0000

It has long been thought that Google has a Trust mechanism for each & every site it indexes. Just like there has been evidence of an Aging Delay on new sites (Sandbox).

I’ve seen it happen first hand with many clients & personal websites that have been starting from scratch. Yet with others, like Earners Blog I’ve not noticed any signs that could pertain to a “lack of trust.”

Firstly we need to know why Google is starting to play a lot of importance on Domain Trust:

To reduce spam from making it into the main index
To prevent webmasters leaking Pagerank between their sites
To push less relevant pages into the Supplemental Index
To reward Webmasters for much more relevant & topic specific links

Lets face it, Google is going to have a hard time trusting a brand new domain. No matter who owns it. From my observations there seems to be a pattern of events that may reduce your sites ability to gather trust quickly (hence the aging delay or sandbox type effect):

Too many links too quickly (i.e. 1000 links in the first day can look *suspicious*)
Too many links with the same Anchor Text (Sets off instant spam red flags)
Too many pages within the site initially (I prefer to grow sites rather than place everything down at once)
Not enough links (Not promoting the site at all)
No Topic Specific links (I.e. links coming from off topic websites)
Too many thin links (Links from Directories, Blog Comments or Social Networking Sites)
Links from the Same C Class IP (Has been disputed but I’m more than sure G keeps track of who owns which site via whois info)
Duplicate Content (Copying Articles from Article Directories etc)
Too much Recropical Linking (Especially if Off Topic)
Outbound links to Unrelated Sites

These are all classic Reg Flag scenarios for Google. Not always, but lets not be complacent enough to think you’re immune or they “won’t detect anything.”

For example I read a forum post today about someone who had created the ultimate spam promotion tool. It does all of these methods automatically:

trackback spam
comment spam (filters out blogs from msn, blogger, and free wordpress blogs)
guestbook spam
forum spam
blog and ping (uses blogger blogs and free wordpress blogs)
referrer spam
rss injection (inserting html link into rss feeds so any feed searches or directories that don’t properly sanitize feeds will give me a backlink)

It’ll generate 10,000 links to one site within 24 hours…..

I closely followed the thread & within 6 days a brand new domain with 8000 pages had been fully indexed by Google. However he’s still only getting a mere 25 unique visitors per day (he didn’t mention what niche he was targeting).

Whilst these sort of tactics may be good for the short “hit & run” type website on a .info domain, taking a new website from scratch & making it into an authoratitive domain will take a lot more than a load of link spamming with the same Anchor Text to multiple sources.

So lets look at some factors that Google might look favourably upon:

Growing your site gradually (Growing slowly at the start then picking up the pace)
Growing your links gradually (2 per day for the first week, then 3 per day & so on)
Attracting Topic Specific Links (Blogs are perfect for this)
Outbound Linking to Authority sources within pages (Lets G know you’re talking about a specific topic that’s relevant to the on page copy)
No Affiliate Links (I’ve had a sneaking feeling that Google will check new sites & devalue them if they are full of Affiliate Links)
Domain Age (This plays a HUGE importance in Trust Factor, any domain that’s pre 2005 has a huge advantage)

Now, how do you know whether your current site is well trusted or not already? With the latest Link Buying fiasco Google is now (according to Mr Cutts) starting to devalue a sites ability to pass Page Rank & Trust if it is brokering text links openly via services like Textlinkads. Whether this is true or not is hard to tell but lets look at example of a site that was smacked for doing this not so long ago, W3C Supporters Page Anyone? But don’t you find it Ironic that Google puts a rel=nofollow on all Google Video links except those from its sponsors? (I guess that’s for another post).

If your site is well trusted it’s very likely that you will notice things like:

You’ll keep a steady amount pages in the main index
New Pages will get indexed quickly (within 24 hours)
New Pages will rank quickly
Decreased number of pages in the Supplemental Index
Spiders will follow & trust your external links

Whilst the word of the year is “links” the thing to remember is that a Page Rank 6 link may be worth less than a very targeted on topic Page Rank 3 link. This is I guess another awesome argument for creating very targeted Linkbait.

So remember, not all links are created equal. Nor are all websites. You have the ability to make or break your site in Google’s eyes. Whichever path you choose

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Good Internal Linking Increases SE Rankings

Stuart — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 22:00:28 +0000

Beyond the creation of a website a lot of the average “internet marketers” focus is links, links, links. More to the point, External Links.

Whilst no-one can doubt that external links are all well & good why do I consistently see people not making correct use of their own Internal Linking?

After all, using the right anchor text within your own site is bound to have some sort of effect?

This blog is a testament to that exact theory. I’ve been using various internal linking strategies since launch & I’ve had nothing but sucess in a number of different areas:

Increased Indexing (A post is now normally indexed within 24 hours)
Deepness of Spider Crawling
Picking up More & More long tail searches (by using varying anchor text in links)
Ranking on Competitive Keywords with not that many “External Links”
Maintaining a high proportion of indexed pages
Reducing Supplemental Results

There are 5 ways I use internal linking for maximum effect:

Have a static sitemap, this allows SE Spiders to find all your pages & also you’ve got some nice anchor text leading to each page. I use the Dagon Design sitemap for WordPress.

Have a related posts section after every post, this means you’re automatically linking to another 5-10 posts on EVERY PAGE. This dramatically increases the crawlability of your site & also naturally boosts your rankings. I’ve found this to work quite well even for affiliate review sites.

Interlink your pages with keywords. I use SH Autolink for this. Normally when I write a post I try to think of the most appropriate Anchor Text for it. Then I link to that page with the chosen Anchor Text. Say for example I might choose Internal Linking Strategies for this page. Any time I type that word on any other post, it’ll automatically link to this post.

Refer to other posts as often as you can. This not only helps your readers explore your blogs much deeper but it also makes other posts more relevant for more & more search terms. I try to vary the anchor text I use up to 5 times to give pages the ability to rank for larger breadth of keyword terms.

Optimize your Template to include proper anchor text. For example in my template I decided to call “Home” “Earn Money” instead. This means for every post I write I’ve got a link to my home page with the anchor text “Earn Money” instead of it saying “Home.” You can do this right across the board for things like reviews, popular posts & interviews.

These are all things that you can apply to your blog quickly & easily without paying any money & without having to hunt down any external links. Write some good content & the battle is half won

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Check Indexed Pages in Google using a Typo

Stuart — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 21:59:21 +0000

NOTE: This has been fixed by Google.Â

I came across this little gem the other day & I’m sure once the rest of the search world get a whiff of it (unless Google fix it), it’ll probably spread like wildfire. So, you heard it here first

Using the site command you can check how many indexed pages you have in Google. Problem is that it’ll also display any Supplemental Pages as well.

I usually prefer to know exactly how many pages I have in the “Normal Index” minus the supplementals.

To do this I used to use: allinurl:www.earnersblog.com site:www.earnersblog.com

However a few days ago I realised that you can actually do the same thing with the site command by making a simple typo.

site:www,earnersblog.com

Notice how I made a typo by adding in a comma? This will return all your indexed pages minus any supplementals

If your site is indexed without any www. you can still use:

site:earnersblog,com

Enjoy

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Dedicated Product Pages Get More Exposure

Stuart — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 18:02:16 +0000

Whenever you’re promoting products or affiliate programs on your blog many webmasters link directly to the program from the post with their affiliate link. Now whilst this is good to get a customer from your site to the purchase point, I personally find that unless that particular person is looking to buy at that point in time, you’ve lost your chance at the sale.

That’s why on many of my blogs I prefer to make dedicated pages for each product. The page might have a review about the product or some information which has the affiliate link embedded into it. If you use the product personally it’s also good to endorse it & mention that you use it personally.
There’s one major advantage to using this type of approach for affiliate marketing:

You have a chance to rank these pages in the search engines!

I’ll give you two examples of Dedicated Product Pages:

Seo Book
Textlinkads

You can see that I’ve created a page for each separate service. I can link to these pages as often as possible from within my blog, not only driving potential customers to use the service but, the more I link to the pages the more chance they have of ranking well in the engines.

If your page ranks well you have the opportunity to get more sales from organic searches than you previously would have from merely just using the affiliate link alone. You also have more opportunity to catch buyers towards the end of the buying process depending on what type of keywords you target in the page title & link anchor text.
So before you think about linking directly to an affiliate product, maybe take the extra time to create a dedicated page, endorse the product if you use it yourself & you may find that your sales increase over time instead of going for that one off quick hit.

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Dispelling the Pagerank Myth

Stuart — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 23:26:56 +0000

I see posts on various forums everyday asking when the next Page Rank update will be in the hope that it will help boost their rankings. Well first of all I’ll tell you what I think Pagerank is good for:

Having High Page Rank links (PR4+) will help to get your site indexed
Higher Page Rank sites can sell Text Links
Higher Page Rank sites have more weight or Authority in Google

Aside from what I’ve just mentioned above I fully disagree with the following statement:

A higher Page Rank will help you rank high in the Search Engine Results

Why do a disagree with this statement?

This blog, which is PR0 currently. Is outranking many many other blogs for phrases like:

Earn Money Blogging
Earn Money SEO
Earn Money Blog
Textlinkads
Buy Text Links

So it goes to show that if you work hard, lay out your blog properly, follow simple on site Blog SEO techniques, write good content & get relevant links you don’t need to worry about your Page Rank being 0. Don’t get put off by it. Chances are, if you’re getting links & ranking for phrases like those listed above then when Google Updates you’ll be PR4+

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SEO Blogs Don’t Make Money

Stuart — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 22:21:29 +0000

SEO blogs are everywhere now, you don’t have to look far to see the cobwebs on a few of them either. So why do many webmasters insist on having a blog about SEO?

Personally speaking, I’ve been there, done that, hell I’ve even had a forum. But whilst I didn’t fail miserably I felt that the effort put into the blog & forums didn’t warrant the returns.
I’m absolutely sick of seeing guys (or girls) on forums who have links to SEO Blogs in their signature asking stupid questions like:

What is Anchor Text?
How Come my Blog isn’t Indexed Yet?
Why can’t I rank for the word SEO?

Why on earth would you bother reading or hiring someone who asks these types of questions?

I came across a rather interesting post yesterday mentioning that the site that ranks number 1 for Search Engine Optimization only gets roughly ~200 hits per day & that traffic rarely converts into a paying client (0.001%). Most clients from from referrals.

This is a common pattern, in the company I work for, most clients that come through our website are low quality, the high quality corporate websites are ALWAYS referred or contacted directly.

So it still baffles me as to why so many people start up SEO Blogs. The best solution that I can come up with is this:

SEO is something you can’t be taught, it’s almost like learning through experimentation. In this game knowledge is power & more power equals more respect.

Whilst SEO Blogs themselves do not make money they do help the webmaster network with like minded individuals. For example, Earners Blog has only been around for a few months & I’ve already networked with a number of other great bloggers simply because we found each others writing creative & interesting.

It’s almost like the whole DJ analogy. DJ’s these days don’t make much money from record sales, but they need to make the records to get noticed & get bookings for gigs, thats when they make their money. SEO is very similar, you need to increase your profile to the point where people will want to consult with you & PAY you for it.

There’s a number of ways to increase your profile. Take Shoemoney for example, when he posted his $100,000+ Adsense cheque the traffic to his blog went through the roof.

So there you have it, whilst an SEO blog itself may not make you any money. It doesn’t mean that it can help you reach the stepping stones to bigger & better things.

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Blog SEO Part 3: Paid Search

Stuart — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 06:44:49 +0000

Whilst Paid Search in itself isn’t really a form of SEO I feel like it’s important to understand how it can impact on your Search Engine Optimization strategy.

Paid Search is classified as paying for traffic from a Search Engine via their pay per click program. A good example of this is Google Adwords.

You’ve probably seen examples of Google Adwords, in fact if you haven’t I’d be worried that you may need glasses

I like to think of Paid Search as an integral part of any SEO Strategy, it’s something that we recommend to most clients. Whether it’s for Brand Awareness, Product Launches or pure conversions nothing can quite deliver quicker results than Paid Search. The problem however is that it’s short term, whereas Pure SEO is a long term strategy. That’s one of the main reason I feel they compliment each other so well.

The second point to note is that running a PPC Campaign is the absolute BEST way for you to know what’s working in your market, which keywords get the most traffic & more importantly which keywords CONVERT. It’s fine doing your keyword research with programs such as Keyword Elite however it can only provide you with so much information.

Here’s a few examples of PPC Engines that work well:

Google Adwords: Probably the Daddy of PPC, however the hardest to master. I’ll be doing some case studies over time to try & give you an idea on how to run a successful PPC Campaign with Adwords.

MSN Adcenter: The new boy on the block, Adcenter is currently only Operating in the USA & UK with plans to launch in Australia & France at some point too.

Adbrite: Adbrite is a completely different type of system that makes bidding & placing ads much simpler however it is much less targeted than Adwords & Adcenter, due to the lack of pure keyword control (it does have basic keyword control). You also have more options such as paying for a month long ad on a particular site instead of bidding on keywords. So for example say you were selling a product related to Myspace you could buy a spot on a popular Myspace Resource Site for best conversions.

7Search: 7Search is an American PPC Company that seems to be quite popular with Adsense Arbitragers lately. Basically that means bidding on cheap keywords with 7Search then diverting them to a page with Adsense in order to increase profits.

I’ve personally had varied success with PPC, it depends on a few things. The product or Service you’re promoting & also what you hope to achieve out of it. Some people merely want to increase traffic, which is fine, you can make up huge lists of keywords & go for as much traffic as you like. Most people prefer to convert their visitors into paying customers, this in itself is much trickier. The trick is to catch your customers at the final stage of the buying process. Lets have a look at the buying process quickly:

Buyer wants a particular product
They search out reviews & of the product
They’re Ready to Buy

Ideally you want to get the customer when they’re at stage 3. No bullshitting around, you just want the customer to convert.

In order to do this you need to try & target the right combination of words. This could include things like buy, purchase etc also try & be as specific as possible with the name of the product. Don’t use keywords like “buy lg phone” that’s way too generalised, you need to use more targeted keywords like “buy lg 8110 phone” or “buy lg 8110 mobile” or even “lg 8110 mobile deals”

Anyway you get the general idea & I hope this article has helped you understand the value of running a PPC campaign along side your SEO campaign

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Blog SEO Part 2: Referral Traffic

Stuart — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 09:29:03 +0000

This continues the Blog SEO series with a bit about Referral Traffic. This is the type of traffic that originates from other websites, not search engines.

I would argue that this is probably the hardest type of traffic to get. Why? well it’s directly affected by the quality of content on your blog. If you write good, interesting content then people will be inclined to link to you. If you recycle other peoples material then people will probably link to the original source instead.

First of all it’s important to understand why this type of traffic is important.

It increases the link popularity of your blog.
Helps increase the Page Rank of your blog.
It’s a good steady source of traffic, we all know how unreliable search engines can be.
It can help you drive targeted visitors to your blog, which in turn can increase the amount of subscribers you have.

So what are the best ways to get this sort of traffic?

Writing a Series of posts like this one, keep your readers captivated by continuing on with a series.
Try to be original, if you find out about a new product or service try to blog about it first.
Write Product Reviews, I quite like this one. Write honest reviews of other peoples products then ask for a link
Write Lists, like the top ten or top twenty or even top 100 best ways to do something. These attract links like crazy when done right. They also usually do well on social networking sites like Digg or Stumbleupon.
Comment on other peoples blogs, try & strike a relationship with other bloggers in your niche or topic. Once you build up a relationship you can exchange links or even ask for them to post about one of your recent entries & vice versa.
Write Articles & publish them on article directories. Include links to your blog in the resource box. Make sure & use relevant anchor text like Earn Money Blogging etc
Add links to your site on Wikipedia in the relevant section. So for example if your site if about pottery, add a link to your site in the relevant section. Sometimes the links get deleted if they don’t deem your site relevant enough, but sometimes the links stay & give good traffic
If you sell a product creating an affiliate program can drastically increase your exposure & also increase your incoming link count. Provided you use an SEO Friendly Affiliate Program.
Include options on your site that allows visitors to email articles to friends, vote for articles & generally participate more. This will increase the chance they will recommend your site or mention it to someone else.
Claim your blog on Technorati & include an “Add to Favourites” button on your sidebar. The more popular your blog becomes, the more people will add it to their favourites.

There are hundreds more ways to increase your referral traffic, this gives you a general idea of the basics. Getting this type of traffic is one of the hardest parts of running a blog, but once you get into a stride, you figure out what works, what sort of articles work then you’ll be on the road to riches :p

If you do anything that works really well for you why not share it by commenting & I’ll include it in this post.

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Blog SEO Part 1: Organic Traffic

Stuart — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 10:20:46 +0000

So you’ve got a blog, you’re posting religiously every day. Perhaps getting a few visitors here & there from rather generic keywords. How on earth do you get the traffic to your blog?

First of all, there’s a number of different ways.

Organic Traffic
Referral Traffic
Paid Search
Social Search / Viral Content
Advertising

In this 5 part of the series we are going to concentrate on what you can do to your blog to increase Organic Traffic. Organic traffic is referrals strictly from Search Engines for particular search terms.

For example, this blog ranks quite well for Earn Money Blogging.

Lets look at some of the main factors for getting a good volume of Search Traffic to your blog.

Good Keyword Research
Good Linking Structure
Outbound Links
Inbound Links

It’s important to make sure you include important keywords in the title of your posts. Try to do some research about your topic before you post. For example say you want to write a post about Adsense, I would usually pop the word Adsense into a program like Keyword Elite & that will show me which variations of the word Adsense get the most traffic & also what the competition is. There’s really no point you targeting a term that will maybe only get you 10 visitors per month when you could maybe get 10x that amount.

This is the basic philosophy that I adopt when making posts.

The second thing I like to do is make sure that I interlink all my pages properly. This is called your internal linking structure. So for example, say last week you wrote about Adsense, then this week you’re writing about Adsense Positioning then you can go back & link the two articles together. I use a nice plugin for doing this called SH Autolink for WordPress. It allows me to add keywords to a database & link them to a particular page.

For example if I type in Azoogleads, that’ll automatically link to an article I wrote about Azoogleads last week & in turn help me rank for the word Azoogleads

Outbound links on your blog are equally important, well not equally but they help Google decide the relevancy of your page. To do this try & link to other sources that are relevant to your post, the more trusted the source is the better. This way, Google will know you are writing & sourcing a particular topic. It also lets other Webmasters see that you’re writing about them or their site, this can help you set up relationships, trade links & network.

And finally, perhaps the most important method for generating organic traffic is getting inbound links to your blog. This can be hard for people just starting out. Try not to just get links back to your homepage, I like getting deep links to particular posts. The Anchor Text of the link will determine what you rank for, this is the text contained within the hyperlink.

So as I mentioned earlier, for the link about Azoogleads the Hypertext is Azoogleads & will help me rank for that term. Remember to do this with your internal linking aswell as your inbound links (which you can’t control all the time).

There are a few good ways to attract links to your posts, for example you can buy links from Textlinkads. But this is a topic I’ll cover at a later date, so stay tuned!