09.21.2007 | 12:48 pm | Beginners, Blogs, Getting Started, Google, SEO, Search Engines, Site Building
Now that your site has been listed in Google you may want to improve your sites rank.
These suggestions can easily apply to other search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, ASK ect.) as these are basic
Quality Unique Content
The most important thing you can do is provide a reason for people to visit and return to your site (and even beter link to your site from their site!). To have this happen naturally it’s very important you provide unique quality content on your pages. I could never stress how important this is. If you don’t stand out and get noticed then you will get no where. When you are building your pages build them for your visitors with information rich content that you write out in text. It’s best to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links ect. The more you give a complete discription of your page content, giving special attention to including the information you would use to search and find this information, the easier it will be for someone to find your website.
Natural Links
There is nothing more valuable to you than someone linking to your site with out any promting from you. Natural links show someone found your content valuable and useful enough to link to it so others can do the same. This ads value to your site in Google eyes and will improve your rank. Google can tell the differance between Natural and Unatural link (Paid links, link schemes, doorway pages ect) which are not acceptable practices and will actually take away forom your rank. Also, if the links are sites with the same or similiar topic asr your site gives it a little more weight in your favor. :o)
Your Domains Front Page
Use your front page to your advantage. Usually this page is the highest rank page, visited more often by the crawlers, as well as the most link to by others. You need to provide as much information about your site as possible on this page. Make sure to be honest and clear. Make it easier for your visitors to get to popular pages for this front page by providing an organized clear menu to your sites sub pages
Use your TITLE and ALT tags
Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are complete, descriptive and accurate. The Title tag should be used at all times. It is so important. Use this title to attract visitors. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images so using ALT tags will help the bot know what your image is. Images hold a bit of value themselves if acurately ranked
Search Engine Optimization
Don’t feel you have to hire someone to improve your rakings you can do this yourself with some simple tecniques. If you do hire someone be warned there are some techiques that are used by some SEO consultants that Google may not approve and of coarse NO company or individual can garantee you a #1 ranking and any one who does is trying to scam you. It’s worth the time either wat to do a little research and see what oyu can do to step by step to making your page more search engine friendly
Comments (0)
09.19.2007 | 2:27 pm | AdSense, Beginners, Getting Started, Google, Income, PPC, SEO, Site Building, Tips
If you are really wanting to make money with Google AdSense I think there are a few things that are important for you know or do.
Of coarse as always these suggestions are only my opinion. Please make sure you test what works best for your site . I can only tell you what is working for me take ‘m or leave ‘m but I tell you this same info made a big difference with my online income increasing.
- First off the most important thing I can recommend is to read Google Adsense’s Terms of Service. This is an agreement made between you and Adsense when you joined. It tells you a lot of information on what you can and can’t do while the ads appear on your pages. Not only do I suggest reading it once I suggest reading it so many times you could recite it by heart. It’s that important. Breaking Google’s rules can get you banned for life and nothing is worth that!
- Never EVER click your ads There is NO reason that its ever ok to click your own ad. There are always other options!
- Certainly don’t ask others to click your ads. I found out that the clicks will happen naturally.
- Play around with your ads colors.
- Try blending your ads background with your pages background color Remove ad border I.E. Blend border color with your background too.
- Use the same text colors that you have within your page. Maybe a slightly darker or bolder color for the Subject.. maybe your pages content links color.. color coordination is very valuable.
- Although many have found the border improves their CTR as well as making ads stand out more different colors than the page. Try. Test. Try. test
- Text is your best friend. Use it as much as you can. I could never begin to stress this enough. Google AdSense ads are created by the text found on your page as well as search engines use text to include you in searches.
- Use your META Tags. Be descriptive about your page in your title tag. Use Meta tag for keywords and pick out the best keywords from your page Use descriptive alt tags for images.
- Keep adding the code to more and more pages in visible spots. Don’t be shy with them. Higher in the page and close to content is best.
- Don’t talk with others (friends,family ect) about your ads or that you are or not making any money with it ect.
Comments (0)
08.20.2007 | 7:47 pm | AdSense, Google, Income, PPC, Statistics and Reports, Tips
Are you monetizing your website with Google AdSense? LOL
If you are you’re going to want to take a moment to set up alternate or default ads for your AdSense Ads. Alternate ads would be an ad that would replace the AdSense Ad when there are no available ads and instead a lovely PSA (Public Service Announcement) appears that when clicked will not result in any revenue for you (Example of a PSA RedCross.org). These ads, while helpful to communities and/or non for profit organizations, will instead lower your CTR (click through rate) as well as ePCM (Page View Value per 1000). I personally had no idea how simple it was to set up a default ad until fairly recently and wanted to take a moment to pass this valuable information on as it did increase my overall CTR and ePCM as well as created an additional source of revenue.
First, you will need an alternate advertiser and/or affiliate program. There are many to choose from like Chitika, Amazon ect. but I suggest a non contextual affiliate program since you are probably running more than one AdSense ad block on a page and you want to stay within the rules of the AdSense program.
Second, you will need to create a basic template page. You can use Note Pad or HTML-Kit or a similar text editor. You will need to make this page a .html, .shtml, .php or what ever page type you want. I prefer .php myself so I will create a page called google-default.php. I suggest keeping your HTML in this page simple but you will want to at least a 0 left margin in the BODY Tag.
Then in the BODY area of the page you place the code for your alternate affiliate source. Upload to your site in a location you can easily remember. You can use this text as your initial AdSense alternate ad HTML code if needed. (To save code : Right click the link and “Save Target As”)
Third, you will need to update your AdSense code. The best way to do this is to login to your AdSense account and visit the create code area. When updating ad settings for your pages ad you will need to place your default ads URL, or web address location at your site, in the box for the “Alternate Ad” and it will automatically ad the proper code. It will ad a line in the code that looks similar to this
google_alternate_ad_url = "http://mysite.com/google-default.php";
You will need to repeat this process for various sized ads so the alternate ad that appears is the same size as the original AdSense ad would be so the alternate ad will appear correctly on your page.
Origanilally posted (12-08-05) by me at another blog.
Comments (0)
01.1.2006 | 7:32 pm | Ad Networks, Getting Started, Google, Income, PPC
If you’ve been looking for a fairly simple way to increase your website’s revenue, or even just supplement your sites hosting costs, Google AdSense may be your answer.
Google AdSense is a phenomenal advertising revenue program that is taking the Internet by storm. It was specifically designed to enable content rich sites to increase their advertising marketing revenue simply by displaying Google’s AdWords advertiser ads. The more content pages you have, the more advertising revenue you can make. It’s really that simple.
Google AdSense makes selling advertising space easy, as they handle everything for you. With access to a database of hundreds of thousands advertisers ready with pay per click ads as well as pay per impression ads, you’ll never have to worry about finding advertisers for your website again. The great thing about Google’s sophisticated advertising system is that the ads that display on your web pages are relevant to your content. They scan each page to determine what your page is about and display the ads accordingly. This will increase your click-through rate considerably, as relevant text ads combined with quality content are highly effective.
If you have a quality site that provides content to it users you may qualify to display Google AdWords text ads on your web pages. Although the AdSense program is free to apply, your site will be reviewed and must be approved in order to begin displaying the ads. As there have been many sites turned down, you’ll need to ensure your site meets Google’s criteria prior to applying by viewing their current guidelines and policies.
They’re basically looking for quality sites offering content. The keywords here are “quality and content” . So if your site is under construction, loaded with advertising and/or broken images and links, don’t even waste your time applying, as you won’t be accepted. However, if you have a quality site and provide your visitors with content, you will most-likely be accepted.
This great post was first posted here : Google Adsense
Comments (0)
11.14.2005 | 4:15 pm | Google, Site Building, Visitors
Guess what webmasters? Google wants you to attract more of the traffic you are looking for, and help you turn more visitors into customers. And even better it’s free!
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free full-featured powerful set of statistics and reports that will help you understand various things about your sites visitors. There are over 80 different reports available to track your visitors.
- How a visitor found your site
- What pages they visited
- Identify common exit pages
- Identify navigation bottlenecks
- How you can make their visit better
- Drive targeted traffic
- Improve conversion rates and increase your sites profit (increase ROI)
- Track performance of AdWords Campaigns, Email Campaigns and various other marketing campaigns
- Track Keywords and SEO efforts
- Can be integrated with your AdWords if you have one
Are you sure it’s free?
Yep it’s free. Google recently bought out a program called Urchin. They are now offering this same or similar service, which others have stated cost quite a pretty penny to use($200 a month), for free for those who have up to 5 Million page views per month(per account) or if you are an active AdWords user with a campaign in good standing you will be provided this service free without any page view limitations.
I found the Google Analyticssign up process quite simple as I just signed up myself (I already had a google login). I have the code set up on several sites and am no waiting for the reports to start coming back!
Google Analytics
Google Analytics Support and FAQS
New York Times Google Analytics Article
Comments (0)
10.28.2005 | 2:35 pm | AdSense, Beginners, Chitika, Google, HTML, PPC
So how does one “make eMiniMalls non-contextual” and thereby able to be run on the same page as Adsense?
Default Code
Chitika has made this extremely easy - in fact they’ve made it so easy you don’t have to do anything different at all because they’ve just changed the default of their ads to be ‘non contextual’. So when you log in and click the ‘Get eMiniMalls Code’ link and design your ads they’ll supply you with the code that makes using eMiniMalls work with Adsense without you having to mess around with adding code.
The all important code in what they give you is:
ch_non_contextual = 1;
If you’ve previously inserted code into your site it might be worth checking its in it or else your ads will be contextual.
Targeting Keywords - Rotation
So the question many will no doubt ask is “If the ads are non contexual - what determines what ads will now be served?”
Good question. If you look at the code that Chitika gives you you’ll notice another new line of code that comes to you by default like this:
var ch_queries = new Array(”digital cameras”, “ipod mini”, “sony playstation”, “dell laptop”);
This is the line of code that tells Chitika what ads to serve your site. If you leave it as is it will rotate four types of ads through your pages - ads for ‘digital cameras’, ‘ipod minis’, ’sony playstations’ and ‘dell laptops’. The beauty of eMiniMalls is that while these ads might pay ok per click - they are not likely to be highly relevant ads to the topic of everyone’s site - so you’re able to change them. Simply remove the words between the “and” marks and insert relevant words to your site. If your site is about MP3 players try “MP3 Player”, “ipod mini”, “ipod photo”, “iriver” etc. You can insert as many keywords as you like. This will help to keep your site looking fresh and hopefully stop your regular readers becoming blind to your ads.
For example, on a cameras site,you might change the list to be:
var ch_queries = new Array(’Canon Powershot S2 IS’, ‘Canon Digital Rebel XT’, ‘Canon Powershot A520′, ‘Canon PowerShot A510′, ‘PowerShot SD400 Digital Camera’);
You might also like to periodically check and change the ads you rotate to help with ad blindness. I know of a couple of sites who are changing the keywords that they target once per week to keep things fresh.
Targeting One Keyword
If you just want to target ONE keyword do so by:
1. deleting this bit of the code:
var ch_queries = new Array(’phrase1′, ‘phrase2′, ‘phrase3′);
var ch_selected = Math.floor((Math.random() * ch_queries.length));
ch_query = ch_queries[ch_selected];
2. replacing it with:
ch_query = ‘ipod mini’;
Targeting Titles as Keywords:
One of the things that is done on many of sites is picking keywords that are pretty specific. ie instead of just adding “digital camera” you can add “canon eos 20d” and get ads for a specific digital camera. This is particularly useful on a page about a specific digital camera as it will increase your click through rate quite a bit.
One way of targeting specific words is to target the titles of your pages (if you use titles that include the keywords of your pages that is). How you do this will of course depend upon the system that you use to make your site or blog - but if you’re using Movable Type or WordPress you’ll find that both of these systems have title tags that will trigger the title for a particular post.
For example on a MT blog they line of code targeting keywords would look like:
ch_query = ‘< $MTEntryTitle$>‘;
In WordPress to target the title you’d use this…
‘< ?php the_title(); ?>’;
If you use another blog platform please feel free to let us know what the code would be in comments below.
Keep in mind that this will only be effective if you use titles on your site that are pretty specific to products. If you don’t you might want to consider specifying some keywords as you might end up with empty ads or very irrelevant ones.
Comments (0)
10.28.2005 | 2:01 pm | Ad Networks, AdSense, Beginners, Chitika, Google, Income, PPC
Many of the questions I’ve heard asked about Chitika eMiniMalls have been related to whether or not they can be used on the same page as Google Adsense ads. This was initially of major concern for a number of us when we first came across eMiniMalls. As a result, many wrote an email to Adsense for clarification some a couple times even. The final response is that it was allowable from the perspective of Adsense to use Chitika eMiniMalls on the same page as Adsense ads in the following circumstance (I’m told by a YPN publisher that this is also true with YPN):
1. eMiniMalls must be made to be NON-contexual
This is great news as it added Chitika eMiniMalls as another revenue stream to the sites of many without compromising another important source of income like Adsense.
Note: Chitika has another ad system, called RealContext, that is NOT allowed to be used in conjunction with Adsense - don’t get them mixed up.
It is worth noting that different webmasters and bloggers have seen difference results from using Adsense and Chitika’s eMiniMalls on the one page. These results have included:
A few publishers have reported small decreases in their Adsense earnings. Some have even noticed a 5-10% decrease in overall Adsense earnings since adding eMiniMalls. Of course, this is considerably less than the overall increase in earnings that the eMiniMalls have returned so many are willing to take this hit knowing that an overall considerably better financial position.
A smaller number of publishers have noticed increases in their Adsense earnings when they replaced one of multiple Adsense Ad units with a Chitika eMiniMall unit. This sounds crazy - bit it makes sense when you realise that sometimes less Adsense Ad units on a page can result in increase click value amount for some ads (thats another topic for another day)
* Some have found eMiniMalls to be so well suited to their site’s that they’ve removed Adsense altogether and are just running the Chitika ads (I wouldn’t recommend doing this straight away without testing things first).
Comments (0)
