How To Make More Money With Google Adsense

Google AdSense is a Pay-Per Click (PPC) service. Webmasters are paid a portion of the revenue which Google collects from advertisers each time a web site visitor clicks on an AdSense advertisement.

Each click may pay anywhere from a few cents to several dollars. The average click seems to be worth about $.20. The more clicks AdSense advertisers receive from your web pages, the more money you make.

The basic formula for thinking about revenue from Google AdSense is:

Revenue = (Impressions * CTR * CPC)

The methods of increasing your revenue from Google AdSense are:

Increase Impressions

Increase Click-Through-Ratio (CTR)

Increase Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

Increase Impressions

The most basic method of increasing your number of impressions is to increase the traffic to your web site.

The topic of increasing traffic to your web site is beyond the scope of this article, and most likely something you are already working on.

One technique for increasing the number of Google AdSense impressions without an increase in traffic to your web site is to motivate your users to enable JavaScript. Google AdSense ads require JavaScript. Visitors to your website who do not have JavaScript enabled in their browsers will not see your Google AdSense ads.

To encourage your users to enable JavaScript, create content for your web page which is only available via JavaScript. Implement browser JavaScript detection in your HTML to notify visitors without JavaScript enabled that they are only receiving a portion of your available content.

Increase Click-Through-Ratio (CTR)

A small increase in Click-Through-Ratio can mean a large increase in revenue. A rise from a CTR of 1.0 to a CTR of 1.1 should mean an increase in revenue of 10%.

Several on-page factors can influence your Click-Through-Ratio. These factors include:

Ad placement

Ad color

Ad unit style

Total number of links

Ad placement

The best location to place ads is wherever the web site visitor will be looking.

Open up your web page. Where on the page does your eye immediately focus? Place an ad there.

The best performing ads seem to be ads which are inline with content. However, it can be very challenging to place inline ads across entire web sites.

Placing ads across an entire web site is usually accomplished with Shared HTML (shtml) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This effectively limits ads to appearing in the same locations across a wide range of web pages.

Ads On the Top of the Page

Ads in the page header perform moderately well. The location is a good one to catch a visitors eye. However, many web users have developed a condition known as “ad blindness” where their brains automatically skip over advertisements.

One technique to reduce ad blindness is to place the advertisement below the page header and as far into the content space as possible. If your content space can be divided into multiple sections, this may work well for you.

Ads On the Bottom of the Page

Ads at the bottom of the page perform poorly. Web site visitors tend to read a page from the top down, and may never reach the bottom of the page. In addition, web site visitors have many different browser sizes, which may cause them to never see the advertisement unless they scroll down to it.

Ads On the Right Side of the Page

Ads on the right side of the page perform moderately well, and are currently in vogue. They appear to perform slightly better than ads on the top of the page at the current time, most likely due to better resilience to ad blindess.

When using ads on the right side of the page, it is important to test your web page at several different screen resolutions in several different web browers. Your web pages should automatically resize to ensure that the advertisements do not scroll outside of the browser window or get “bumped” down below the content.

Internet Explorer appears to have a bug which can cause right side ads to be “bumped” down below the content if the total width of all sections of the web page is equal to 100%. To work around this bug, ensure that the total width of your web page is 96% or less.

Ads On the Left Side of the Page

Ads on the left side of the page may perform the best. The left side of the page is normally reserved for the web site menu. This means that users frequently look to the left side of the page.

The difficulty is determining where to place your web site menu when the left side of the page is no longer available to you. A top menu might work for you, depending upon the design and content of your web site. Placing your menu on the right side of the page is another option, but one that may confuse some web site visitors.

If Google allows more than one ad unit per page in the future, the left side of the page might become an excellent location for a single ad, either above or below the menu.

Ad Color

Many webmasters report that brightly colored ads which contrast sharply with the color scheme of the rest of the web page return excellent results for them.

My experience has been that ads which mimic the look and feel of the rest of my web page return the best results. This is most likely because the Google AdSense ads closely relate to the topic of the page and therefore appear to the visitor as additional content.

Ad Unit Style

The Google AdSense programs offers a wide variety of ad unit styles and sizes. The ad unit styles include:

Ad Unit Dimensions

Leaderboard 728×90

Banner 486×60

Half Banner 234×60

Button 125×125

Skyscraper 120×600

Wide Skyscraper 160×600

Medium Rectangle 300×250

Large Rectangle 336×280

Small Rectangle 180×150

Square 250×250

Leaderboard and Banner ad units are obvious choices to placement in page headers and footers. Leaderboards are preferable, because they are able to show more ads. Banners are a classic web format, and may be necessary where the width of your available space is limited.

Skyscrapers are an excellent choice for advertisements, because they appear to be less vulnerable to ad blindness than the horizontal ad formats. Google recently added the wide skyscraper format. This new ad unit displays one more ad than the classic 120×600 skyscraper unit. If you are currently using the 120×600 skyscrapers, switching to the new wide skyscraper format may increase your revenue from the Google AdSense program.

Rectangles, Squares, and Buttons are best used when placed inside a content area. This makes rectangles more difficult to place, but also gives then the best revenue potential.

Total Number of Links

Reducing the total number of links on your content pages can increase revenue from AdSense by reducing the options for a visitor.

If your web page has fifteen links and one AdSense wide skyscraper on it, the visitor has a total of twenty options for leaving your page without closing the browser window.

This means that, if the user clicks on a link, the random odds that the visitor will click on an AdSense link are 5 in 20.

If you reduce the number of other links on the page to 5, the total number of options presented to the user is now 10. This means that the random odds of a user selecting an AdSense ad are now 5 in 10.

Another option, but one which may annoy your web site visitors, is to open all external links in a new window. This will leave your page open in the users browser, giving them another opportunity to click on an AdSense link. This can be done by adding target=”_new” to your HTML links, or by converting your outbound links to JavaScript.

It should be noted that Google AdSense never opens ads in a new window.

Test, Test and Test Again

Testing is the key to increasing your CTR percentages. Change your ad colors, wait a week and look at the stats. Do the same with different ad units and different ad placement.

Increase Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

Not all Google AdSense ads are created equal. Google AdWords advertisers bid for keyword combinations, and some combinations are much more expensive than others.

The Google AdSense robot, Mediabot, automatically scans your web pages and determines the appropriate ads to display on your page.

It is possible to create web pages which are designed specifically to attract certain keywords from the Google AdSense program.

To determine which keywords have a higher Cost-Per-Click, create a Google Adwords account in the Google AdWords advertiser interface. This will enable you to determine roughly what AdWords advertisers are paying for each keyword combinatiom.

Based upon this information, you may decide to create a new web page or a whole new web site.

AdSense Alternate Ads

Google AdSense is not always able to find an advertisement which matches the content of your web page. Normally, AdSense selects a Public Service Ad (PSA) and displays it in your ad space. These PSA’s generate no revenue for you.

Google has created the ability to load an alternate ad when it cannot find a matching ad. This is accomplished by setting a variable called google_alternate_ad_url in your AdSense layout code:

google_alternate_ad_url = “/adsense-alternate-ad.shtml”;

These alternate ads can include advertisements from Google AdSense competitors, such as Clicksor.

This capability enables you to tap into a revenue stream which would normally by lost to AdSense PSAs.

Future Improvements to AdSense which will Increase Revenue to You

Google is constantly improving the AdSense program. Many of these improvements will mean additional revenue in your pocket.

Google has recently improved the speed with which MediaBot accesses new web pages. This means that you start earning revenue more quickly.

Google is constantly working to improve the relevancy of AdSense ads. Ads which are more relevant are more likely to be clicked on by web site visitors.

Google is currently working to give webmasters the ability to place multiple AdSense ad units on the same web page. This will enable the webmaster to place five small single-ad units around the web page, instead of one wide skyscraper. This should considerably reduce losses from ad blindness.

Tips for Optimizing your Website for Search Engines

Search engine optimization would help you to get your site better in eyes of search engine. But one should start early to get earlier results. That way you can afford to play around with SEO knowledge.

Here are few tips for your search engine optimization.

Name your Files Well: You should try and save images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. This is just in theory but there is no harm in trying. For example, if your keyword phrase is “home business” you can save the images used on that page as home_business_01.jpg or home-business-01.jpg etc.

Your web page’s filename is also important because search engines now allow “inurl:” searches. So if your web page is on home business, you should name it home_business.html or home-business.html.

Help Them With Site Map: Creating a site mapis must for SEOing your website. Search engines love site map since it allows them to crawl all web pages since sitemap is linked to every page on website.

Put a robots.txt File: A robots.txt file at the root of your website would let the robot know which file to crawl and which not to crawl.

Making a robot.txt file is simple. To allow all pages to be crawled, open up a text editor and type “User-agent: *”. Save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain.

However it is a good idea to block irrelevant content because the search engine analyzes everything it indexes to determine what your website is all about. To disallow files to be read, by add “Disallow: /folder_name/” or “Disallow: /filename.html”.

Know Your Keywords: When you want to optimize your site for search engines, you would want to do that for best possible keywords. when performing a search, you should start by keeping your searches broad rather than specific. Discover Your Competitors We have discussed this before. It is important to find and analyze websites of competitors.

You should know a the keywords they rank in top for and number of inbound links. That would help to set a target for your site.

Optimize Your Website Title:Your website title should be keyword rich. You should put your keywords towards beginning of your title. Maximum length of title should be 66 characters because Google says so . You can use “|” sign to separate keywords or key phrases.

Keep Meta Tags Clean: Search engines do not place much importance to keyword metatags now until they are relevant. So keep your keyword metatag relevant and should not appear as stuffed. You should put a good description also which uses relevant keywords though not much importance is given to this tag too.

How to Design a Search Engine Friendly Website

 

One of the first questions you should ask for Search Engine Optimization is how to design a search engine friendly website. A website that is shall we say as non-friendly to search engines will lose potential traffic thus reducing visitors surfing their sites, and as far as we know such decrease in website activity will result in loss of potential sales from a potential consumer if you gear your site for selling things in the market. That is why it is also very important to build a search engine friendly website.

Now in doing such thing there quite a few things you should consider. In the book “Winning the Search Engine Wars” by SearchEngineNews.com, they list 6 things to consider in how to build a search engine friendly website, they are:

· Use of valid HTML and CSS codes

· Avoiding as much as possible the use of Flash, Javascript, and frames

· URLs should be properly used

· Well and organized website and directory structure

· Keep your pages as limited as possible

· Proper use of what is called the “robots.txt” file

HTML and CSS codes

Web pages should at the very least meet the requirements of or should be in accordance with W3C guidelines. That would mean that you should close all tags which need to be closed, as well as avoiding the use of source code in which will confuse the search engine spider (yes, avoid the use of old source codes), so that your web page can be spidered and cached properly by the search engines. In order to achieve this, the code must meet the minimum requirements of functionality and successful display.

Flash, Javascript, and frames

Now we all know that the use of these things will be an eye-candy, or will be very pleasing to look at, thus making your site very attractive. In the other side too much use of these things will slow the computer, it will just take too long to download your website, and, as most people tend to make most of everything especially time. They just tend to cancel the page and go back to surf another site. So to build a search engine friendly website, one must avoid the use of Flash, Javascript and frames, or if it is really needed, to limit the use of it.

URL

Another important thing to consider in building a search engine friendly website are the URLs. Search engine spiders find and process webpages by following links from one site to another, so consider building in which they can be easily followed. Broken links as others think will degrade your rank in search results.

Accessibility

Consider also the use of site maps in which to organize your websites. If a page is too far deep which means the viewer has to click a few pages to open it, the search engine will have a harder time of indexing it. Thus a well and organized web structure will ensure that the search engines will process all pages in your site.

File Size

File size also plays a major role in building a search engine friendly website. File size with more than 100k (or 150k, depending on the search engine) will not be properly cached, so that would mean you may not appear on those search results. So the best way to overcome this is to limit the file size of your website to 100k.

Robot.txt

The robot.txt file is another important thing to consider as this file tells the search engine whether or not to index a page from your website. Search engine spiders process things in a limited capacity. Robot.txt helps these spiders to direct their searches for the things that you really wish for the viewer to see on your pages.

Beginners – Getting Listed In Search Engines

Once you have your web site complete and ready to be listed you need to take a slow step by step approach to get listed in the search engines. If you do it right the first time and then build on that formula, your profits and your site will benefit in the long run. Those willing to spend the time and put these techniques into practice are the ones that will benefit and are more likely to be successful.

1. Your first page is where search engines will start and making sure that this page is fully optimized is one of your first goals. What’s optimization your ask? It’s making your site as search engine friendly as possible. You will also see people refer to this in the short form of SEO.

Your first step is the TITLE TAG. This is one item that search engines look for to start getting information about what your site is about. It is also what search engines will show above a clickable line on their results page. It is also a major consideration of where you will rank when certain inquiries are made of the search engine. TITLE TAGS are one of the major things to concentrate on and to make sure that you get it right. Doing so will result in not only better placement in the search engine, but enticing descriptions will also result in more people clicking on your link and visiting your site.

Take a look at what your competition is doing in order to get some ideas for your site. To see their TITLE TAG go to their web site and in IE or Netscape click on View then Source and you will be able to see their TITLE TAG. Don’t copy theirs, but let this help you get some ideas for your own site.

2. Putting keyword phrases into your pages – Finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages and knowing the right keywords to use is very important because your site should provide people with what they are looking for. A free program to help you can be found at: http://www.goodkeywords.com Good Keywords makes use of various tools provided by search engines like Yahoo, Google, Teoma and other services like Alexa. Using Good Keywords makes it all very simple, fast and straight forward. Just remember…don’t over do it or you will be penalized.

3. Writing your web page copy – Your next step is to incorporate those keywords into the copy on your web site. This is extremely important as search engines need to see these keywords on your page so they can then analyze these words and decide where your site should be listed in their categories. Write your content around the keywords and use them as many times as possible, keeping in mind though…that it is not just a search engine that is reading the copy but also your visitor.

4. META TAGS – Meta tags provide search engines with information about the content and purpose of a Web site. A Web site that uses meta tags to the best of their ability will appear more often in search results and will also be seen closer to the top on those search results. Many people feel that stuffing keywords into the meta tags will help improve their rankings. The original idea behind meta tags was to give a way to classify the web site. The problem now is that many engines don’t consider meta tags to be as relevant to the ranking, therefore they give them less weight overall because of the keyword stuffing techniques used. That’s not to say that you still shouldn’t use meta tags, just consider to use them for what they were originally intended – that is to give your site an accurate title and description with a few keywords (3 or 4 phrases max) outlining what the page, or site is about.

5. ALT TAGS – The ALT tag or ‘alternative text’ is an attribute of the IMG tag. (Any graphic on your web site) An ALT tag should be included for every image within your web site. The ALT tag provides an alternate message to your viewers who can’t see your graphics. Without ALT tags, images on a web site are meaningless to these users. If you will be using a graphic menu systems for navigation, these alternate messages are an especially important aid to users without the ability to see your graphics. Adding an appropriate ALT tag to every image within your web site will make a huge difference to the accessibility of your web site. Also, for those who use Yahoo and Google image searches, your ALT Tags can be very important and will help bring traffic to your site. Take for instance one of my sites – http://www.spasoftheworld.com I have loads of graphics of different resort spas and the graphics all carry the name of the resort. People looking for information on this resort may easily end up at my website because I names a picture with the name of the resort.

On the reverse side, ALT TAG stuffing, which is using the tags in an image to hide keywords will rarely help a site’s position. If you can insert a key phrase into the image description then by all means do so. Remember that Alt tags do usually count towards your overall keyword density so it’s better to have relevant keyword alt tags rather than something like “image01.gif”.

6. Linking – with more search engines coming online every day, search engines are looking for ways to serve quality links to visitors. This is where linking to other sites and having them link to you becomes important to both you and the search engine. People who assume that the more inbound links to them will help them, are very wrong. This may have been true at one time but not today. Search engines need to give quality results. One way they have of rating your site is by the quality of inbound links to your site. Therefore sites that are closely related to your site and that link to you will help boost your popularity in search engines. With Google this is a huge issue in how you rank with them. Having a hundred links from all sorts of site may result in hurting your ranking and you may be viewed as a link farm.

7. Spiders – A search engine is a database that has been put together by spiders. Spiders scour the Internet going through pages and recording information available on web pages. Spiders then give the information to the database and the database feeds the results. Theoretically, the web site should show up in the search results the next time the engine updates. It is important that all links on your site be active. A dead link may prevent a spider from doing your entire site.

8. Robots Text file – Search engines will look in your root domain for a special file named “robots.txt” (http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). The file tells the robot (spider) which files it may spider (download). This system is called, The Robots Exclusion Standard.

9. FLASH – This has to be one of the top mistakes a web site owner can do to hurt their search engine rangkings. Good content will win over flash every time and getting visitors to your site is what you are trying to accomplish. The only thing the search engines will be able to see when visiting a site where the first page is all flash are the title tags and links. In most cases that will not be enough. Over and over it’s content rich pages that will get you the rankings you need. You may have to decide between getting a high ranking or having a “pretty” entry page. Remember that you goal is customers and sales. It might be kewl the first time you visit the site but when you have to go there over and over again it becomes very annoying not to mention that people on dialup must cringe when faced with such a page. They often give up because of the length of time it takes to load.

10. Don’t expect results overnight. It takes time to get your ranking up there, even with paid inclusion. You may start out with a low ranking when you are first listed but as you continue to optimize your site and build “relevant” links you will start to see a gradual climb. As you wait for your rise to the top, concentrate on building as many relevant links as possible. Beside increasing your ranking you will be surprised at the number of referrals that you will received from those linked pages.

About the Author

Jean Sutherland has successfully run her own ezine for over 6 years and has a subscriber base of 35,000. Her ezine is geared to people doing business online and beside offering free software, it also provides traffic & marketing tips, informative business articles, free ebooks and computer tips for those trying to work online. http://www.thecompanynewsletter.com

Web robots and what they do

Web robots are also known as web-crawlers or web spiders. They connect to websites and then follow the links that appear on the web pages. They are used to collect information about web pages and the other web pages they are connected to. All search engines use them.

A search engine uses web robots to find out the topic of a web page and to figure out how credible an information source is (Google uses web robots when calculating the PageRank for a website). A people search engine could use web robots to find out how connected a person is and to figure out who the friends of a friend of a person are.

The way a web robot works is by connecting to a website and scanning for links and other information needed (such as the date the web page was published, what the title of the web page is, etc.). It then connects to the links extracted from the web page and keeps on doing that until it gets to a dead-end (no links left to connect to) or until a certain search depth has been reached. For every link, the information is stored and can then be used to perform analysis of the websites scanned by the web robot.

Another use of web robots is to make backups, also known as mirrors, of websites. This is done by going to the main web page and only scanning and connecting to the links that are on the same website as the main web page. Then you keep doing that till all web pages for the website are scanned and saved. You could also have the robot make backups of the files linked to and keep notes of web pages for you.

One important note is that websites can set up a robots.txt file in the main index (example: http://google.com/robots.txt/) to prevent web robots from connecting to web pages in private parts of the website.

Overall, web robots are very useful for scanning web pages automatically and are used by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo for keeping their search engines up-to-date and relevant. They are used by web marketing firms, and other Internet Technology businesses to mine valuable data from the web. The networks that a site has are just as important as the site itself.

Where to find free webmaster tools – Part 1

Simple vs. Complex

Following are some tips to help you develop an effective website for your business:

Clarity is the Key

Small businesses attempt at times to create a website that will make them look large with a corporate look. This often is a big mistake… Customers do not appreciate to be misguided, and visitors are usually attracted by content and images that reflect the reality of the business . Once visitors feel comfortable with the kind of business you offer the potential for them to become customers get higher

Simplicity Attracts

The reason why people visit any business website is to get informed about the different kinds of products and services offered by that business. Therefore, visitors come seeking information, and they usually appreciate to get to it in the simplest way possible. Many businesses inundate customers with animation, music, video and other distractions. These extras may seem to look nice but they will cause web pages to download slowly and will definitely drive away customers rather than attract them.

Computer Literacy Helps

As a small business you need to look at the time you would like to spend and the money you would want to invest in a computer. Some businesses may choose not to have a computer on premises. When planning a business website you should factor in the time you will need to spend on the computer after the website is published. This will help you choose whether you would like people to place their orders on-line using credit cards or whether you would want them to complete a simple form to personally contact you. Do you prefer them to e-mail you or just use your Toll Free Number instead.

Set Target Goals

Is your website geared to driving new businesses? Are you catering to the needs of you current customers? Or are you just making your business known using the website as a marketing tool? It is very important to set target goals for your website. Once you identify the goals then it gets easier to find content and include graphics and have fun with the design.

Visibility May Take Time

It takes time to make your self known on the Internet. It takes somewhere between 6 months and a year for a website to drive any meaningful business. It requires that long for search engines to list a website. And the longer you persevere, the more likely it is that other related websites will place links to your site. The only way you can speed up the process is through advertising on search engines using their paid services.

Make the Right Choice

Choose a web designer you can trust. Look around and find someone who is knowledgeable, experienced and willing to answer your questions.

How To Link Your Inner Web Pages To Improve Your Search Rank

Ranking your web pages so that you climb the search engines requires a good understanding of links. You are probably aware that having good incoming links from authority sites can make a dramatic difference to your search engine ranking. What many people overlook is the links that they have implemented for their internal pages. When you are looking at your onpage optimization can be a perfect time to ask your self, Have I implemented the right linking strategies within my website?

To start this off, take a look at anchor text. Whilst doing your onpage optimization you will highlight the keywords that you consider most important. What many people will over look is the links to internal pages that they create using these keywords. Whilst we know that one of the key factors search engines rank a site page for is incoming links to pages, many people will pass by the opportunity to include incoming links from their own pages.

Linking your own pages is a great way to create one of the strongest types of incoming links. Maybe you have heard that incoming links that are directed toward your page via anchor links are some of the strongest links. If you have wondered just how to get these types of links to your pages, well here is the perfect opportunity. Anchor text is the word or phrase that holds the hyperlink to your page; when you link your pages together using anchor text, it is the perfect opportunity to get exactly the kind of strong links that will boost your site in the search engine page rankings.

When you are preparing you onpage optimization factors, this is a great time to check that the anchor text and internal links you have established are in line with the onpage optimizations you have done. The first thing that you want to do is make sure that the page title contains the keywords. For example if you have a site that sells shoes, if the page you are trying to direct the links to is for ladies shoes, then you want to make sure that the onpage optimization reflects this.

Make sure that you have the right heading in the navigation bar. If you have a page that is about ladies shoes, then you need a ladies shoes page within the navigation bar. Following this, ensure that you have the keywords ladies shoes in the page title, this means making sure that it says ladies shoes at the top of the browser window. Next make sure that you have bolded the keywords ladies shoes somewhere in the page. Also make sure that you use the keywords at regular and natural intervals throughout the page text. When you have done all this, the last step is to check that the term ladies shoes is in the main heading of the page.

When you have completed these onpage optimizations, you then want to make that final, crucial internal link. Establish direct links to the ladies shoes page from your other pages, via that anchor text. Ideally if you can create anchor text links tied to the term ladies shoes on every page of your site then do so.

Generating these internal links may well be the simplest link generation that you can do for your page, and yet it is one of the most often overlooked. Remember that your website is yours to do with as you please. Getting other links is not going to be as easy as this, so make the most of it. Create strong internal links that are focused and effective; its a great way to quickly and easily boost your search engine ranking.

Backlinks – How To Get High Quality One Way Links To Your Websites

There are basically two aspects to SEO, “on page” & “off page” optimization.

“On Page” SEO is easy because it’s totally under your control. It’s simply a case of making sure you have optimized your web pages correctly.

OK, so there is a bit more to it than that, like keyword research, keyword density & frequency, which html tags to use, making sure your site/pages are W3 Compliant, using relative/absolute internal linking structures to feed the pagerank where it’s most effective, using titles and descriptions that encourage people to click through from the SERP’s etc.

But essentially, once you know how to do all that, it’s not difficult to get it right for all your pages/sites.

It’s also less important in the long run than getting sufficient links to your site/pages from other sites.

Getting links to your site is fundamental to getting visitors, and without visitors all the time, effort and money invested in getting your site up and running, and looking “nice”, is irrelevant.

No Visitors = No Point!

So links are essential to the health of your site, and indeed your business, but all links are not equal in value to your site.

Reciprocal links will help, but they are far less effective than one way backlinks, i.e. links from another site where you don’t have to link back to them. These “One Way” backlinks will give your site a far greater boost in the search engine results and bring you more traffic, providing of course that you have chosen good (relevant) keywords for your links.

There are many ways of getting these powerful one way backlinks, but most you will have no control over the anchor text used (i.e. keywords) in the link, which means their “power” in unfocused and therefore of less use to you in achieving the targeted keyword results you are looking for.

For example, submitting your site to website directories can be a very effective way of picking up some high quality one way links from high PR sites, but you will seldom be able to choose the keywords/anchor text used for the link, often ending up with the site name as the link.

This is not a waste of time, as the Pagerank passed to your site will, with the correct internal linking structure, be passed on to your sites internal pages, helping them to rank better for their targeted keywords.

So how can you get highly targeted one way links?

It’s fairly common for webmasters to now buy or “rent” links to their sites through service like http://Text-Link-Ads.com, and these services will allow you to choose the anchor text, but they are far from cheap. A link from a PR 8 site can easily cost $150+ per month. In fact there is now a business model emerging based on building sites simply to sell these kind of links (see http://www.LazyGitMarketing.com).

Google has also publicly stated that they disapprove of this practice and are actively seeking to downgrade the value of such “paid links”, although personally it seems like a valid form of advertising to me, but maybe I just don’t have Google’s wisdom in these matters.

As always in business, there are entrepreneurs who have identified this need in the market and a whole new branch of linking services are popping up offering new solutions for one way backlinks.

I’ve been testing some of them out over the last few months and have found a couple that have had a significant positive effect on the sites I used them for.

The Backlink Solution [http://www.BacklinkSolution.com]

This first solution is a monthly subscription that provides a network of high quality blog sites for you to post comments on, including a link to your site(s) using your chosen anchor text.

Note: As you make the link yourself, you can also link to internal pages on your site to improve their rankings as well, which you can’t do with directory submissions.

It is a manual process, but is easy enough that it can be outsourced fairly cheaply.

The Pagerank of these blogs varies, but the links provided are very “natural” in appearance to the search engines, and as you can post unique relevant content on market related blogs, the links are highly relevant. You are also limited as to how many blogs you can post to each month, to ensure that the links grow naturally over time, rather than all in one go.

Three Way Links [http://www.3WayBackLinks.com]

The internet marketing market is highly competitive, so it’s hardly surprising that another service with a different twist has popped up from this market.

This is an automated “three way links” system, where you link to site A, which then links to site B, which then links back to you. Whilst this is arguably not as powerful as true “one way backlinks”, it’s still a significant step above one way “reciprocal” linking that is the more traditional method used by the majority of webmasters.

The process is also automated for you, making it very hands off. You can submit up to 20 sites with just one account and you can specify three different anchor texts to be used as the links for each site’s, making sure you don’t incur any penalties for over use of just one text link keyword or phrase.

It is also set up to gradually build up the links over time to make it all appear very natural to the search engines.

Your Own Authority Blog [http://www.BetterThanLinks.com]

There is one final service that I’ve found to be very useful, although it is more ideal for people with multiple sites to promote.

The service gives you your own blog on an existing high PR authority site. The site has 833,039 backlinks listed in Yahoo and gets spidered several times a day by all of the major search engines. For example in June 2007 Googlebot visited it 14,470 times and Yahoo Slurp 52,436 times, so you can see why it’s an regarded as an “authority” site.

I have used this to link to brand new sites and had them indexed by Google within 24 hours, so it’s a great way of getting a new site in to the SE’s quickly, and the link weight will obviously also help any site linked to.

As a side note, I’ve also found that my blog on this site can get fairly significant traffic itself when I take the time to keyword optimize the posts, which is always a nice added benefit.

I haven’t traded reciprocal links for any of my sites in almost two years, you can probably see why I don’t need to. Using powerful new linking tools and services like these means I am able to take total control over the “off page” SEO linking strategies for my sites in the same way as I do for the “on page” SEO factors.

Wouldn’t you like to do have the same level of control over your sites search engine rankings?

Put Ads on Google Adsense

Why, on your web pages of course. Ok, just kidding. The real question should be there really any truth to the rumors that where you place those Google AdSense ads can actually improve response? According to my best information, the answer to that question is: Yes.

Google AdSense experts say that that there is a direct correlation between the placement of the AdSense ads and the resulting clickthrough.

When ads are placed in rather than response rates on Google AdWords goes up. There are also indications showing that ads appearing on the right side of the page get clicked more than ads appearing on the left side.

Advertising analysts with degrees in human behavior and psychology have spent thousands of man-years (people-years?) studying how people read printed and Internet content and what it takes to get them to respond to ads. While some of these studies are proprietary, or are only available to anyone with $10,000 or more to spend on a copy, other studies have been made public and can be read by anyone who is interested.

Google themselves has released some relevant information which is focused directly on increasing your Google AdSense response. You can read their findings Here. One of the most important factors in determining placement of your ads is the type of content that your site delivers. If you are primarily an e-commerce site, and you have a lot of pictures and ad copy for your own products competing for attention against AdSense ads, then it is going to be a particularly tough challenge getting any kind of decent Google AdSense clickthrough. It is situations like this that require very thorough testing and a lot of trial and error.

Of course, all of the studies in the world worth a hill of beans if the findings work on your web site. Experiment with your Google AdSense placement and track the results over a period of time. Google provides response tracking tools in your AdSense control panel. Learn how to use them. As you begin to see what may be only subtle differences in response, you’ll be able to determine what works best for your particular site. But don’t get complacent. Advertising analysts with degrees in human behavior and psychology have spent thousands of man-years (people-years?) studying how people read printed and Internet content and what it takes to get them to respond to ads. While some of these studies are proprietary, or are only available to anyone with $10,000 or more to spend on a copy, other studies have been made public and can be read by anyone who is interested.

One of the most important factors in determining placement of your ads is the type of content that your site delivers. If you are primarily an e-commerce site, and you have a lot of pictures and ad copy for your own products competing for attention against AdSense ads, then it is going to be a particularly tough challenge getting any kind of decent Google AdSense clickthrough. It is situations like this that require very thorough testing and a lot of trial and error.

Blogs seem to have a lot of success generating high response rates to Google AdSense listings.
Regardless of what the experts say, your best bet is to tailor your Google AdSense ad placement to.