Very new ideas for the old internet

Content, Traffic And More Google Adsense Profits

How to get content using articles grow targeted traffic and get more money with Google AdSense program.

Today everybody is talking about good content and how important it is to have one on any site. Good, relevant content is so loved by search engines. Quality content is a powerful advantage in the Internet.

The demand for quality content gave second birth to article. I am sure you already tried to submit or write and submit article(s). Everyone does it now. My experience shows that nice content and good submission work give you a huge publicity online. With time article pages get bigger and bigger PR and keep sending you extra targeted traffic.

Even if Google, Yahoo, MSN change their rules, will this affect good content? Never. Internet is nothing without good, relevant content and good article is a nice content indeed.

This is when it comes really easy to understand that running your own article directory is a very smart thing to do in terms of Internet marketing, SEO.

The BENEFITS of having article directory on your site are great:

- every day your site grows with new relevant content – articles;

- each new page is indexed by search engines, these are the pages with super relevant content, on your keywords, this means with every new article in your directory you score more on your keywords with search engines;

- each article page is a page with quality content, the Page Rank of article page grows with time – just think how many pages with nice PR you will have automatically;

- article directory gives you traffic from search engines, very targeted traffic, people who come to read and find, your site gives them super relevant content (tests on real sites prove that people click 10+ more pages in sites with article directory in comparison to 2-3+ clicks before article directory was created on this site);

- you have no problems with content, it grows itself, fresh articles, on the keywords you need;

- you can easily monetize the traffic with Google AdSense, if you have your own products/services in the niche – direct traffic from article pages to your subscription email or order page – you have the right to do that, it is your site.

So, having article directory on your sites is much better than not having article directory.

What can stop you from creating article directory for your site now?

#1. You do not have the skills. – Now everything is easy as programs do all the job. All you need is a professional tool for creating and running your article directory. You just install it on your sites, do setup and the rest is managed by the tool.

#2. Articles can be dangerous. – Yes, they can. If you plan to create directory with 200-1,000 articles in 2 days, search engines may think that you are a spammer. But who says to do so? Grow your directory gradually. 5-10 new articles a day are better than hundreds in a bulk.

Search engines like to see gradual growth of articles in the directory, give them this gradual growth. All you do is picking up or declining articles. Accept about 10 top relevant and interesting articles and the tool generates pages, puts them in the category you choose, creates RSS feed for the pages – everything to get bigger attention from search engines.

Now you see, that the only problem with article directory on the site is the question of balance. When you try to squeeze everything at once, your directory will have the content, but search engines will notice your growth only once.

On the other hand, if you are not trying to catch up with wind and care for quality of each article, the gradual growth will show much better results. Still, getting extra 10-20 new quality content pages every day is not a bad thing. Even if Google bosses visit your site every week, they will not say anything: you are not spamming, you are managing your directory, taking care of the quality for your clients and visitors

Tags: article, article search, article submissions, content, free web site content, increase traffic, increase web site traffic, traffic, web site traffic

Choosing The Right Keywords

Internet marketing and search engine optimization hinge on knowing what keyword or keywords web search surfers are searching for on the web. By doing extensive keyword analysis you can zero in on the best keyword terms to use when setting up pay per click advertising, writing keyword articles, and optimizing web pages.

Not only is it necessary to know what keywords are searched for the most but also how many times particular keywords have been searched. There are a number of effective tools available for keyword analysis and keyword suggestion.

Yahoo Search Marketing

Yahoo has an excellent tool for helping webmasters and Internet marketers determine what keywords people are searching for on a monthly basis. This tool, located at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php is powered by Yahoo Search Marketing that was previously known as Overture.

Wordtracker

One of the more popular tools for doing keyword research is Wordtracker.
WordTracker can be found at http://www.wordtracker.com/. Keyword results provided by Wordtracker are compiled from Dogpile and Metacrawler. Wordtracker is not free but with the ability to do targeted keyword research the results can quickly pay for the software.

Once you have done some preliminary research you will need to decide which keywords or keyword phrases to target in your Internet marketing campaign. It is best to choose keywords that have a good amount of traffic without too much competition for placement.

For example, let’s say you are marketing a variety of photography books and you search on photography only to find that it had more than 1,000,000 searches last month. The competition for placement with this keyword is probably going to be pretty tough. Try researching on more targeted phrases such as nature photography, landscape photography, photography books, etc.

You will likely find that these terms have less monthly searches and much less competition. There will be a lower search to competition ratio. Generally, a keyword with 30,000 to 50,000 monthly searches is going to be one that you can compete for in terms of placement and being found on the search engines. Instead of spinning your wheels marketing for those who are searching for photography instead create multiple campaigns that market to more targeted keyword phrases.

You can evaluate the search to competition ratio by taking the number of searchs of a particular keyword and dividing by the number of web site which return for that keyword when searched. The higher the number the better. For example, if you have a keyword that is searched for 100 times in a month and when you search on that keyword you return 1000 results then the ratio is 100/1000 or 0.10. If you have a keyword that is searched for 100 times but there are 10,000 search return results then the ratio goes down to 0.01. The larger the ratio the better in terms of your ability to be competitive.

Finding the best keywords to use in your web site promotion is vital to effectively driving targeted traffic to your web site. Take the time to find out what people are searching for and your efforts will pay off in terms of traffic and sales conversion.

Tags: keyword, keyword search, keyword tool

Broken Links Are Bad News For Webmasters

A webmaster or website owner’s role or responsibilities do not end when the website he operates goes “live” and is now accessible by visitors online. There are a whole new set of responsibilities and functions that a website owner has to assume in order to make sure that his website continuously works perfectly and is able to fulfill its intended functions. Some of the responsibilities he has to assume include providing fresh content as much as possible, submitting the website to search engines and actively looking for reciprocal links in order to raise the ranking in search engines.

One of the most crucial responsibilities of a website owner is to check for broken links to his website. Broken links can be considered as one of the worst things that can happen to a website. A lot of not so good perceptions and negative effects arise from having a site that is riddled with broken links.

In fact, broken links are plaguing so many websites that it is being considered as a serious problem on the web. Many reasons can be cited for the spread of broken hyperlinks, the general causes of broken links include: Websites not being maintained with the appropriate degree of dedication, the architecture of the website and how information is placed within the site constantly changes, and the large incidence of websites that are closing down.

Hyperlinks are a very important component of websites because it aids in the navigation around the webpages and points to directions outside of the site. A website without links is like a ton of documents that are piled one on top of the other with no rhyme or reason and no intelligent way for you to get to the information that you need.

Link management is a very important and absolutely essential part of maintaining a website. As previously mentioned, broken links bring with it very negative perceptions about the website and these can have very detrimental effects on the traffic generated by the website.

From a technical perspective, broken links can stop search engine robots dead in its tracks, effectively preventing it from completely mapping out a website for submission to search engines. In addition, a website that is riddled with numerous broken hyperlinks gives visitors the idea that the site is unprofessional and that the website owner or owners have a dubious reputation – very costly image problems that are hard to change once it is established. Moreover, visitors who encounter many difficulties in a website will most likely not go back for a return visit, this is almost tantamount to losing prospective clients. They will be turned off because they won’t get the page that they are looking for, thinking that it is not really in the site when in reality the page is there only that an error in coding made the page inaccessible.

With internet users becoming more and more sophisticated as time goes by, it will take website owners more effort to entice these users to visit their websites and broken hyperlinks will not help this very difficult process in any way.

Website owners and webmasters should be very aware of the bad effects of having broken links in their websites. They should diligently weed out and fix any broken links. Fortunately, there are now a growing number of handy utilities that can help webmasters located broken links. With these utilities, managing a website becomes relatively easier.

For example, xml-sitemaps.com has programmed a standalone script that will not only create sitemaps but also looks for broken links in a website and then informs webmasters or website owners what links they are and to which pages the links are associated with. This automation of the task of checking broken links is a great time saver for webmasters and website owners.

Tags: broken links, find and fix broken links, Google sitemap

Building A New Website In PHP

New website owners and existing website owners alike consistently make a very common, yet extremely costly mistake. They find a web designer first and then an SEO second. Unfortunately, these entrepreneurs do not realize that literally every single thing that goes into building a new website will impact your SEO campaign. They commonly funnel thousands of dollars into a brand new website, only to find out that there are a lot of areas that must be rebuilt in order to have an optimum SEO campaign.

I will identify 6 major areas of concern, in hopes that even a small percentage of these website owners will come across this document at the right time, which is BEFORE they begin to develop their website.

1) Domain name registration & hosting. Make sure that when you register your website’s address that you register it for at least 5 years. Sites that register their site for a short amount of time send up a red flag at Google, who end up thinking that site site has been registered short-term in the hopes of helping another website, that is owned by the same person/company, to rank well by linking to it. When choosing your domain name, do not choose a URL that is riddled with hyphens between all your keywords. It is more important that you target this to your visitors than to the search engines.

2) Creating static URL’s. This is one of the most overlooked yet important things that you can do to ensure that your SEO campaign is a success. By eliminating dynamic parameters within your website’s URLs, you are ensuring that search engine bots will have no problems indexing all of your pages. Creating static URL’s can be accomplished by using the mod rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the root folder of your server. Here is an example of a dynamic URL (which you want to avoid), and a static URL (which you want):

Dynamic: http://www.yoursite.com/listings.php?ref=22
Static: http://www.yoursite.com/listings/22.html

Make sure that any potential programmer or designer that you hire understands that this will be a full requirement of the job.

3) Editing the head tag. There are three areas in the head tag that you will want to be able to either edit yourself or have your SEO edit. They are the page title, the description meta tag and the keywords meta tag. Having control over these for each of your top level pages (all the pages linked to from your home page), will be critical to your websites success in the search engines. You definitely do not want these to be the same on every page (they must be unique and reflect the nature of the content on the given page). For other pages that will be created in high volumes, you will want to make sure that there is a variable string (your web designer/programmer will understand what this is) in place for each of the three areas in question, so that they will automatically be filled with content that is the right length and reflects the content on the given page.

Again, make sure that your designer/programmer understands that this is a requirement of the job.

4) Clean, simple code. Ideally you want to define all aesthetic properties that different types of text on your site are going to have in a separate CSS file. This means that you want to avoid using as many tags as possible, especially font, size and color tags. You also want to avoid creating PHP scripts that are either two long, and contain a lot of unnecessary steps, or ones that rely heavily on javascript. It is best to avoid using javascript as much as possible.

Remember, the most important thing your site can be doing is making it easy for search engine bots to easy scroll through the code of your website and follow all the links that it finds. When there is unnecessary code and script on your site, it makes it a lot harder for them, thus hurting your SEO campaign.

Make sure that whoever is helping you build your site understands that there job is to output the cleanest, simplest code possible. If you have any questions about this or don’t understand it, it is best to talk to an SEO expert about it, to ensure that it is done properly.

5) Ensuring that visible written content is editable. The writing within the body of your site is one of the most important areas for you or your Optimizer to help your site increase it’s rankings. Ensuring that either of you can edit it at your own convenience is extremely critical to the entire SEO campaign. This because from time to time search engine algorithms will change, and that might mean that a strategy that was implemented in the past might not suffice, so you must be able to change it to keep up with the most up to date SEO techniques.

6) Site structure. Considering the nature of PHP, your site will most likely (and should) be created by a series of includes that puts all of the pieces of a given page together. You want to ensure that the layout and placement of graphics and navigational links within these includes is strategically correct. Remember, you don’t want to have to pay someone to go back and redo this, so it is critical to get it right the first time.

If you are unfamiliar with a lot of the information that I presented in this article, it is probably in your best interest to at the very least, consult with an SEO or SEO company during the entire design process. A good SEO will be very comfortable working with you and your design team to ensure that the end product will be one that will last you a long time, and will go a long way in helping your site generate revenue online.

Tags: design, engine, optimization, php, search, seo

Build Your Website to Be Seen

When you are building links to increase your website popularity, whom do you link to? The question of where to link to increase ranking can be confusing. Logical thinking is needed to achieve link popularity in a natural way. Yes, indeed, Google page rank should come first and foremost. Page rank is part of the algorithm of Google’s ranking in the search engine results. Other search engines use link popularity in their algorithm to evaluate your website as well. But page rank is only one of the 100 plus criteria Google uses to evaluate your web pages. Use the idea of page rank as a “tool” to help make decisions, there’s no need to live and die by the results. Link popularity itself is merely one-way to improve your ranking.

In fact, there is a general fear of reciprocal linking to websites who inadvertently link to a “bad neighborhood” with penalties or page rank zero, passing on problems to you. Use your common sense. Is this a website you would want to visit or your visitors would want to visit? If the answer is no or you can’t tell what the subject of the site is, make a note of it and keep looking. A website full of links with little content doesn’t “make sense” because what benefit is it to you or your visitors? Of course you are going to link to your partners in business or maybe the small website that is doing a bang up job of selling widgets and providing widget information.
The idea of acquiring link popularity by linking back and forth to other sites to boost your popularity artificially is a popular method. But is it of value to your website? Ask yourself: Would you link to this site if link popularity in the search engines didn’t matter? Would your visitor care about this link or find it helpful? Does the website have good content? Is this an opportunity for you to publicize your website by being listed there? Will this link cause you to spend a great deal of time worrying about it?
Is the link “just a link” or do you want a link from any site whose visitors care about what you have to say

It makes sense to list your website in the search engines and directories. In fact, one-way linking, such as listing your site in directories, is a good way to improve your link popularity naturally. Well, you say to yourself, of course I’ve done that. Besides the major directories, what else is out there? You’d be surprised at the amount of good secondary and specialty directories that drive traffic. Some even specialize in a topic – maybe your topic. If you have a product to sell, look at who your competitor is linking to. Search for directories and business sites on your topic. Look for websites that talk about the widgets you sell and see if they accept submissions to their directory listings in the category for widgets. Do they accept original articles, product reviews, press releases or white papers about widgets? If so, submit your topical articles and watch your link popularity rise naturally. With your good content on other websites as well as archived on your own website, there you have it, links pointing back to your website.

Finally, enhance content stick-ness and optimize your web pages using proper keywords in your site to develop your website so once your visitors arrive, they will want to stay. The World Wide Web uses linking to connect us all. By using hard work to create a quality website and common sense when linking you can stop worrying and start succeeding in internet marketing attempt.

Tags: Link Building, link popularity

Buying expired domains for PR, does it still work?

I’ve done some experiments over the past few months about expiring domains with PR to see if it is worth your while to catch these expired and deleted domains.

My idea why I would like to use expired domains is the notion that old domains are favored than new domains, and to get instant PR.

So I set out to find deleted domains with PR that I can register. One characteristic of domains I was looking for was that the domain still had a PR, and it was still listed in google.

I won’t be mentioning the actual domains here as I need to control the results and prevent people from making backlinks to these domains.

I registered about 4 domains, some have PR2 and PR3. Some have a few pages indexed, some have a few thousand. I also bought a couple of new domains for my new projects.

I found out that google rarely visits these domains so I need to prime it but with some fresh backlinks. After creating some backlinks to these domains, two domains eventually lost their PR. These two domains have only a few pages indexed in google. In one domain, I did a 301 permanent redirect to the new index page. This domain retained its PR. One key difference this domain has compared to the other two is that this domain has thousands of pages indexed in google.

In another domain, I did a 301 and redirect it to a fresh new domain. The result is that the new domain got indexed faster and more pages were indexed compared to another new domain I registered at the same time. However, PR was down to 0.

There is also a case where I did a 301 redirect from an old deleted domain with PR and never got any benefit from it.

In conclusion, there is still conflicting results on whether buying deleted/expired domains. Some works, some don’t. However, what seem to work is that…

a. Old delete domains does contain traffic from existing backlinks. If the old domain has tons of backlinks, it still does generate some traffic.

b. Other search engines such as yahoo and msn do not seem to have an biases against expired/deleted domains.

Tags: expired domain, google, pr, seo

Basic SEO Wisdom

This is a  story about a poor guy with an inept domain that wanted to build a site geared for a very competitive keyword and his long, agonizing journey toward the true light of SEO wisdom.

Here’s a little foundation for what I’m about to cover here. A while back I bought a stupid domain name. It was one of those fairly useless domain names that might have been good for maybe selling cellphones or something. The thing is, though, I’m a poor guy. I don’t have time to taylor a site for cellphones with the pitiful amount of money I have. This was my thinking not long ago at least.

After sitting on this domain name forever I decided to put a site up there and give myself to the study of SEO or search engine optimization. It seemed like an interesting subject and I knew to those that managed to learn SEO, marketing, and some web design would fall infinite riches. It really sounded good to me.

So I went for the throat so to speak. More precisely I picked out some search terms that I will probably never be able to get traffic for in my lifetime. Smart I know. This had the grand side effect of having the site sandboxed by Yahoo and Google until pigs flew.

Recently they  flew, however, and I’ve come out of the sandbox altogether and hit face to face with a few SEO surprises. I did manage to get a tiny trickle of traffic but not from the terms I tried to get it from. After trying to optimize those pages for the key terms I received traffic from I got more traffic. This of course started me down a long road of speculation and hair pulling.

After many a night of such I’ve come up with a few things that I believe will give anyone the power to eventually pull traffic off the net and covert it into a good decent living. I’ll probably write an ebook and make millions one of these days.

<b>Optimize by the page</b>
Don’t fall into the trap of focusing totally on building this far flung and far reaching site that will rule the world or make you millions instantly. Unless you have lots of money you’re going to need to work for your traffic. Plan your site out carefully and make sure each page is a precision crafted piece of art.

I love serverside scripting and dynamic websites but I’ve come to realize there is a danger that people will overuse it. I know I have. If your site is dynamically generted, make sure every page isn’t a total cookie cutter image of every other page. It’s good to have the same navigation and same general layout but each page also needs to be special. Each page should have careful, proven SEO techniques applied to maybe a single key phrase.

Don’t try to optimize one page for a handful of phrases. Just focus on one phrase. Do your keyword research and, whatever you do,  don’t haul off and pick a key phrase with 2 billion wealthy competitors in Google.  Pick something that can be attained and can get you some traffic relatively fast. Select a phrase that is as specific as possible to your particlar niche and still gets a couple thousand or so searches per month from Yahoo.

Whatever you do, make sure that one web page has  good, solid, desirable content that is keyword rich and one of a kind. This will help make it special. At the same time your content  obviously needs to lead the customer toward your intented goal for monetizing your traffic.

<b>Keep it simple</b>
I’ve found to my dismay that building a complex web site with all the content management stuff and all the database thrills isn’t exactly what really gets the attention of search engines. Weirdly enough this can be true for internet surfers too. A nice, clean layout with very accessible content and intuitive navigation will be recognized by both search engines and surfers alike. If you can figure that part out you’ve just pinned down about 90% of SEO in my opinion.

<b>Engineer your site for your traffic</b>
When you start getting search engine traffic to your site take a very close look at what they are searching for. I assume you have some kind of statistics program and can mostly see what search terms people are using to get to your site. When someone comes in on a keyword or phrase you haven’t optimized for do a little research. Does the page they are coming to need touched up to include the search term or would this search term merit its own search engine optimized page to handle the traffic.

<b>Conclusion</b>
With every page you add you are gaining another potentially valuable piece of internet real estate. If you’re doing your job right then eventaully each page should get its own traffic and you should begin to attain your goals. Patience and learning are the name of the SEO game.