Decoded Review of Adsense
February 28, 2009 by The Big SEO
Filed under Adsense
Adsense Decoded is the latest adsense guide to hit the somewhat overflowing adsense market. Adsense Decoded claims to cover all the steps you need to take in order to make your adsense campaign successful. It consists of a series of videos hosted on the main website which you access with a user name and password. However you can download the videos to your hard drive and watch them at your leisure. For those of you who have been around the internet marketing scene for a while this may sound familiar, it should because the format is remarkably similar to Michael Cheneys Adsense Videos product which was released last year with a recent update?
Adsense decode comes with 10 videos the majority of which are at least 15 mins in length so there is certainly plenty of content. Video 1 shows you how Patricks (the author) traffic and revenue increased by 100s of percent in just a couple of days.
It also introduces the 3 main concepts you must improve to achieve success.
Video 2 discusses adsense ad formats, what they are and which are the most profitable
formats colors etc. It also covers the rest of your account settings which is very useful.
Video 3 explains the huge importance of adsense tracking, how to do it and how to use the results to improve your stats. Video 4 I found very interesting as it shows you how the best results are obtained from placing your adsense in the best positions (some of these I had never seen before) and then rather cheekily suggest that you might not want to use these as they are too successful at taking people away from your site! I guess what he means is use these on adsense only sites.
Video 5 shows one of Patricks adsense sites and takes you on an in depth tour of what makes it so successful. He then goes on to summarize the 20 best practices tips he has showed you so far. Video 6 goes into great detail about adsenses Smart Pricing concept. Obviously this is his opinion as Google do not release details about this but his ideas make more sense than many I’ve seen before. Video 7 discusses creating or obtaining content and ad targeting. For me this is one of the most important concepts in adsense revenue and he does an excellent job highlighting how to do this correctly, a very novel and refreshing approach.
Video 8 is all about pay per click traffic and shows you 7 different programs which he uses to increase his profits. This was another good video as so many of the gurus just talk about adwords which I actually find very unreliable for adsense and having actually run test on some of the sites he suggests I can verify that they do work and much more successfully than adwords. Video 9 covers additional revenues you can get from your adsense pages, which are and which are not allowed by goggles adsense tos.
Video 10 covers traffic generating methods opt in mailing lists and other miscellaneous information. So what is my overall verdict and how does adsense decoded compare to Michael Cheneys adsense videos? Well I don’t think I can compare the two as although they are very similar they do both contain different techniques which do actually work according to my tests. I think if you are looking to learn how to either start your adsense campaign or improve one that is not making you as much as you want then either of these products will work for you. They have both worked for me that am for sure so the decision on which one to buy is up to you.
The Easy Guide to Making a Robots.txt File
February 27, 2009 by The Big SEO
Filed under robots.txt
If you have a website you really need to have a robots.txt file. It gives search engine spiders specific commands and it is easy to use and easy to maintain. Here is an easy guide to a robots.txt file in five minutes.
There are times when you don’t want a search engine to index a page or a folder on your website. Maybe you have some information you just don’t want to have show up in google. This may include your statistics page, a page of notes, or a dynamic page. And, importantly, if you use google adsense and the search tool that displays search results on your website google mandates you exclude this page from search engines. Which means they mandate you having a robots.txt file.
A robots.txt file is a simple document named robots.txt and saved in the root folder of your website. Search engines see this and follow any commands it contains. Create a simple text document using any word processor program like notepad and put these two lines it:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
The first line tells all spiders to listen up because the following command is for you. The second line means do not index any of the following pages. And it is here you put the url of any pages you don’t want spidered. So if you wanted the spiders to skip your private page it looks like this:
Disallow:/privatepage.htm
If you want the spiders to skip a whole folder you put the url of that folder with a slash like this:
Disallow:/privatefolder/
Simply place this text file in the root folder of your website and you are done. In the future you can add and remove commands easily.
The robots.txt file is a very easy file to write and maintain and it is a very powerful tool that will help you interact successfully with search engines. This disallow command is the simplest and most used command but there are also many other commands you can use and if you have a website it is well worth your time to have a robots.txt file and even to research it a bit further.
For more interesting insights into being a creative webmaster and making your website work for you visit the authors site at: The Creative Webmaster – Forging the Iron of Creativity on the Anvil of a Website
Search Engine Rank: Google Page Rank Misconceptions – 2
February 26, 2009 by The Big SEO
Filed under Google Talk
Improved search engine rank is difficult enough to obtain without you having to trawl through all that has been written about Google Page Rank in order to find the truth. There are many misconceptions about Page Rank, and Part 2 of this article dispels the most common of them, the first being that Yahoo and MSN have their own version.
In fact this is not so. Yahoo had a beta version of a ‘Web Rank’ visible for a while, ranking complete websites, but it is now offline. MSN has no equivalent as far I can ascertain. The term ‘PageRank’ is a trade mark of Google, which is why I refer to it as Page Rank and not PageRank. A small difference, but a significant one.
If you are one of those that believe that the more links you can get to your website the better, then you are wrong. When Google started the Page Rank frenzy by putting that little green bar on their toolbar, they didn’t realize the consequences of what they were doing. People fought to get as many links to their website as possible, irrespective of the nature of the websites to which they were linking.
That is misconception Number 2. You do not link to websites, you link to web pages, or should I say, you get links back from web pages, not websites. It is, after all, the link back that counts isn’t it? The link away from your site doesn’t count. Wrong! Misconception Number 3. The link to your web page counts no more than the link away from your web page. In fact, it could count less. You could lose out in the reciprocal linking stakes if your web page is worth more than the other person’s.
Let’s dispel that misconception right now. When you receive a link from a web page (not web site) you get a proportion of the Google Page Rank of that web page that depends on the total number of links leaving that page. When you provide a link to another web page, you give away a proportion of your Page Rank that depends on the number of other links leaving your web page.
The Page Rank of the website you get a link from is irrelevant, since that is generally the rank of the Home Page. You will likely find that all these great links you think you have from PR 7 or 8 websites are from a links page that has a PR of ZERO! So you get zilch for the deal. If you are providing them with a link from a page on your site even of PR 1, then you lose! Most people fail to understand that.
No incoming link can have a negative effect on your PR. It can have a zero effect, but not negative. However, if you have an incoming link with zero effect, and an outgoing reciprocal link with a positive effect to the target page, then you will effectively lose PR through the deal. Every web page starts with a PR of 1, and so has that single PR to share amongst other pages to which it is linked. The more incoming links it has, the higher PR it can have to share out.
If your page has a PR of 4 and has three links leaving it, each gets twice the number of PR votes than if 6 links leave it. Your page with a PR of 4 has to get a similar number of PR votes incoming as it gives away to retain its PR. In simple terms, if your PR 4 page is getting links from a PR 8 page with 20 links leaving it, you lose out big time! It’s simple maths.
No page ever gives away all of its PR. There is a factor in Google’s calculation that reduces this to below 100% of the total PR of any page. However, that is roughly how it works. You don’t get a proportion of the whole website ranking; you only get part of the ranking of the page on which your link is placed. Since most ‘Links Pages’ tend to be full of other outgoing links, then you won’t get much, and will likely get zero.
That is why automated reciprocal linking software is often a waste of time. If you want to make the best of linking arrangements, then agree with the other webmaster that you will provide each other with a link from equally ranked pages. That way both of you will gain, and neither loses. Some software allows you to make these arrangements.
Another misconception is that only links from external web pages count. In fact, links between your own web pages can be arranged to provide one page with most of the page rank available. Every page has a start PR of 1, so the more pages you have on your site then the more PR you have to play with and distribute to pages on your website of your choice.
Search engine rank can be improved by intelligent use of links, both external and internal, but Google Page Rank does not have the profound effect on your search engine listing that many have led you to believe. Good onsite SEO usually wins so keep that in mind when designing your website.
Blog Marketing. Social Media Marketing. Content Syndication. SEO Backlinks
February 26, 2009 by The Big SEO
Filed under Backlinks
How To Build A Self Perpetuating Traffic Loop with Blogs, Social Media Web2.0, Search Engines and Quality Keyword Focused Content Syndication…
Search Engine Spiders And Your Robots.txt File
February 25, 2009 by The Big SEO
Filed under robots.txt
In this article we will discuss search engine spiders and what they do. You will also learn how to create a robots.txt file and why you might need one.
Search engine spiders are automated software programs that crawl the Web looking for pages to feed to search engines. They are also called crawlers, robots and bots. Spiders are one of the most useful programs on the internet. They are a key part in how the search engines operate. Spiders allow your site to be found by the millions of people who use search engines. Feed the spiders right and they will tell the search engines about your site.
How Spiders Work
A search engine is an index to the Internet, search engines point to relevant web sites depending on your search. Search engines need a tool that is able to visit websites, navigate the websites, decide what the website is about and add that data to the search engine.
Spiders are essentially programs that “crawl” sites and report back to their boss their findings. Their purpose in life is to make it easy for your site to get listed in search engines.
Spiders work by finding links to web sites, visiting those web sites, going through the content of a web site and then reporting the content of the site back to the database of the search engine they work for. From there, the information is added to the search engine, and the site then shows up in search results.
The robots.txt file
By defining a few rules, you can tell robots to not crawl certain directories or files, within your site. Web sites do not absolutely have to have a robots.txt file, they can get along just fine without one. Most spiders look for a robots.txt file as soon as they arrive on your site. Take a look at your site statistics. If your statistics has a “files not found” section, you may see many entries where spiders failed to find the file on your site.
The default behavior is to allow all unless you have a Disallow for that resource. If you wish to exclude some of your pages from search engine indexing, this is the tool approved by the search engines. Creating a robots.txt file that guides spiders is simple.
If you want to allow the spiders to crawl your site but exclude directories of your choice, copy and paste the following into a blank txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory1/
Disallow: /directory2/
Disallow: /directory3/
To exclude files of your choice, type in the path to the files you want to exclude:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory1/page1.html
Disallow: /directory2/page2.html
Disallow: /directory3/page3.html
To exclude all the search engine spiders from your entire web site, copy and paste the following into the txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This will keep a specific search engine spider from indexing your site:
User-agent: Name_of_Robot
Disallow: /
To allow a single robot and exclude all other robots:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
There can only be one robots.txt on a site, and you may not have blank lines in a record. Once you have it the way you want, save the file as “robots” and as a .txt file. Uploading the file to the root directory of your site, that is the directory where your home page or index page is. Put the robots.txt file right alongside the index file.
Is Google Page Rank Still Relevant?
February 25, 2009 by The Big SEO
Filed under Google Talk
What is Google Page Rank and how does it affect me you ask. Google Page Rank is a website score that represents how important a websites relevance is in the category of business they represent. Google gets this score from measuring the amount of quality links pointing to your site from other websites with the same relevance.
If you have a link to your website from another website with a Google Page Rank of 5 and is relevant to the subject matter your company represents, then Google sees that as a quality link. If you can get your link on a homepage of a high ranking website that is relevant to yours, then you will get a higher score than putting it on a sub page of the site which will usually get a lower Page Rank.
Google usually makes a major Page Rank update every three to four months. Its servers around the globe have to compare there information and the Page Rank is not complete until all of Googles servers have been updated with the new Page Rank scores.
The Page Rank is measured from 1 to ten one being the lowest score and ten being the highest you can have. New sites and sites that have not had any search engine optimization applied to them will have a score of 0. If you use Mozilla Firefox for browsing you can install a new add called SEO Quake. This tool will allow you to see how many links you have in Google and Yahoo.
It will show you the sites page rank and when the site was registered. You can do a search in Google for new music for example. The free results will show up with all the link info and page rank score below the text listing. You can compare all the sites for yourself and can make a partial determination that the Google Page Rank is still a large factor is determining your placement for targeted keywords in the free listings.
I currently manage the SEO campaigns for 27 successful websites and have noticed my Google placement on all staying consistent in their positions as Yahoo and MSN positions continue to rise. Google has made several updates on my back link quality and count on each site but I see little movement in the sites placement since April when the last PR update was performed. The page rank is more than just a number and if it is that irrelevant than Google has not made many other major updates on its server since April either.
Just remember, optimize your site for your customers first and for the search engines second. You can get plenty of traffic using the wrong keywords but visitors will see your site is not what they were looking for when they get there. A few quality back links are more relevant than a bunch of non relevant back links. Use common sense and consider what your customers are looking for and what they expect to see when they get to your website.
Free Domain Search Engine
February 25, 2009 by The Big SEO
Filed under Domain Names
/>A Nationwide study shows that nearly half of U.S. adults are looking into owning their own businesses. While every business is not an “e-business’ or “click and mortar” business, there are growing numbers of brick and mortar businesses that are advertising, and even selling their goods and services online. It’s a well-known fact that any business needs an operating station, or in this case, a “domain name”.
Have you ever tried to find a domain for your business, organization or just plain personal use? In most cases you would have to come up with an idea, check if it’s available, and if its not, then you’d have to go through the entire process again. Because you would have to find a name not in a list of 40 million dotcoms, this becomes a tedious and timely process. There are now well over 56 million domains registered out of the global tlds (top level domains), which are .com, .net, .org, ..info, and .biz. So how do you find a quality domain that somebody in the world hasn’t already thought of? You don’t. Anything worth using has probably already been registered at one time or another. However, there are some things that you can do. You can either find someone who is selling a domain that you like and try to buy it at their asking price (which is probably very expensive), or you can save your money and use a different method for finding a quality domain.
Everyday over 20,000 domains become available. How does a domain become “available”? When a user registers a domain name they are actually renting it in one-year increments, if a user does not renew their domain at the end of their period it goes through an expiration process and then becomes available to the public once more. However, even though 20,000 domains are re-entering the market each day, the domain industry is still growing and rapidly. As of April 22, 2005 the global tld registrations broke 50 million. Today, about 6 months later, there are over 56 million registered. This means that there are even more than 20,000 that are taken each day. In fact, most of the domains that come back on the market are immediately taken. So how does one know when and which domains come back on the market? The answer is a special type of search engine known as a deleted domain search engine. This domain search engine allows users to search through millions of domains that have recently come back on the market and are currently available.
There are many paid and free domain search engines out there. A good free one is pcNames.com. pcNames.com has created a domain name search engine that caters to anyone looking for the simplest domain name, to those that are in need of a more “complex” name. Over 20,000 domain names are added to this domain name search engine everyday. For those users that go into a domain name search with no idea what they may want, pcNames.com offers suggestions for each keyword that appears on the right while searching. Finding the domain to fit your needs is made easier with this search engine. Upon finding your “perfect” domain name, pcNames.com allows you to purchase the domain name quickly.
pcNames.com has many features that even most paid domain search engines lack. They have recently released a filter, which removes all domains from your results that are not 2-words. Meaning, when you type in the word car, every result that appears contains the word car and only one additional word or acronym. This removes all the misspellings and long awkward looking domains, leaving only quality domains for you to choose from.
This free deleted domain search engine can be found at http://www.pcNames.com. With over 4 million recently deleted domains currently in the database, there is sure to be a domain for everyone. Now you can easily find and purchase quality domains without the large price tags.
Requesting reconsideration using Google Webmaster Tools
February 25, 2009 by The Big SEO
Filed under Google Talk
If your site has stopped showing in Google’s search results, there are some steps you can take to help reintroduce it to Google. From checking the site’s robots.txt file to submitting a reconsideration request, this video tells the story of one webmaster investigating his site’s disappearance from Google.
SEO and how to be #1 in Google and MSN!
February 25, 2009 by The Big SEO
Filed under Google Talk
Current Positions At the time of writing my site ranks for the term ‘website hacking’ (no quotes needed): MSN: 1st and 2nd Google: 3rd
Introduction The web started out as one big irrelevant mass of pages, you would have to guess URLs or remember all of them! Then along came the first search engines, these relied on manual submissions from webmasters and so developed slowly, then along came search engine spiders. As soon as these search engines were “crawling” or “spidering” thousands of pages, people immediately saw this as an opportunity to help people boost their search engine rankings. Unfortunately, as I shall show you throughout the article, not everybody goes about this business in the right way.
Relevancy The key to a good search engine ranking is relevancy, is your website relevant to the search terms you are targeting? Many times clients have wanted to be listed for terms which have nothing to do with their website. One notable example was a client who wanted to be #1 ranked for the phrase: “online clothing” when he was in fact selling deodorants and antiperspirants. Even if he made his ranking the visitors would not be interested in his product!
Competition & Keyword Choice The second thing to look out for is competition, the “keyword modifier” or second keyword can make all the difference, rather than “games”, try “board games”, rather than “parties”, try “birthday parties”. Not only will you get more relevant visitors but you will also find it easier to get top listings as the competition is not so great.
Link Exchanges Do not go about this the wrong away. As you can read in a recent article by Mike Banks Valentine (http://www.seo-news.com/archives/2004/nov/25.html) you can ruin your chances if you employ bad tactics or do not research your “friends” thoroughly. I rarely accept people into a link exchange – they must have a PR or 4 or higher, they must not employ bad SEO tactics and they must have good original content, because otherwise my sites could be penalised for the bad work of others. I also cross-check their name across black-lists to see if they have already been caught doing something wrong.
Doorway Pages Never ever use doorway pages. I recently saw a piece of doorway page generation software which was free and which claimed to be compliant to search engine guidelines. As the very notion of doorway pages is despised by all search engines this is impossible. Do not use them as they can only do harm.
However, as many are sceptical of whether or not this is true, I ran a recent experiment: I optimized my site for the search engines using the strategies above and at the same time as launching this site I launched an identical one on a URL I cannot publish. I used 1000 doorway pages generated automatically and pointed them to the main page from the same domain. With the first domain Google sends me hundreds of visitors a day, while the second example with the doorway pages is nowhere in the results, probably banned, for employing “black hat” SEO techniques.
Conclusion The moral of the day is simple, do not try and work around the search engines, work with them. Concentrate on relevancy, keyword choice and link exchanges, as these are the only ways you can legitimately get a top search engine ranking. Remember, content is King and relevance is Queen, there is no point having good content and irrelevant keywords and vice-versa, only aim for what can be achieved, watch your competition and be an honest SEO.
Internet Marketing Wish List | Directory Submitter » Directory.
February 25, 2009 by The Big SEO
Filed under Webmaster Tools
Forget Asking For A Link Exchange, Directory Submission is the Key to Strengthening Your Google PR & Increasing Your Search Engine Rankings!
Directory Submitter does exactly what it says on the tin with semi-automated directory submissions to the list of directories included in the software. The directory list is kept upto date with the lastest directories and you can also sort by free, paid and reciprocal link directories.
The nice thing about the software is that you can add multiple titles and descriptions for each link you are submitting to keep your link text fresh and get some great keyword backlinks. Just submitting to the free directories i can get most done within a morning and start seeing backlinks during the week.
You can download a free copy here and then upgrade to the gold version if you are happy with the software.. The gold verson is totally worth it and offers better options and more directories.
Submit Your Website To Thousands Of Website Directories Instantly!