E-cash

SEO Primer - 7 Basics of SEO

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:37:00 +0000

We are going to look at 7 Basics of SEO below. These aren't the only things you want to know about SEO, but are the areas you should learn first. Some topics will only take you a minute, some will take a little longer, and others will become an ongoing process. But after reading through this list you should have a good handle on where to start and where to proceed next.

SEO Basic 1: Let's start off with a definition. SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization" and is the process by which you Optimize your web site so that it is positioned well in the search engines. This is not the same thing as designing a site so that it attracts customers and entices them to buy.

SEO is what you do specifically on your site to improve your Search Engine Position. If you do a search on Google for any search term you will be presented with a list of links. At the top of the page and along the right side will be PPC links where someone pays an amount per click to get positioned. With PPC the more you pay the better your position. Most people only glance at these listings. You don't need SEO to get one of these positions, just lots of money.

The body of the page contains "organic" listings. These links are listed in the order that Google determined best fit your search, with the best match first. There are only 10 listings per page, most people will only look at the 1st page, maybe the 2nd. So your site needs to be listed within the top 10 and at the worst within the top 20 for any useful exposure. With SEO you will be adjusting your site code so that your site will rank highly. This can be a daunting process as there may be thousands of sites competing for the same top listing. A trick is to aim your pages at less popular search terms to get higher placement. It is better to be on page one for a term that gets 1,000 searches per month than to be on page three for a search term that gets millions of visits.

SEO Basic 2: Your web site must be search engine friendly. The search engines send out "spiders" or "bots" cataloging web pages they come across. If the search engine has trouble getting through to your pages it will either rank your page poorly, or skip your site all together. Making your site Search Engine Friendly means having the code easily accessible, no errors in the code, and guiding the search engine through your site.

Try to steer away from complicated coding when possible. Check your site for coding errors. This is fairly easy to do with web programs like Dreamweaver which do this for you automatically. Plan on having text based navigation on every page. This is usually placed at the bottom of the pages. You may also want to have a "Site Map" page with easy to follow text based links to all of your important pages. Search Engines will look for a Site Map and will use that to navigate a site if available.

SEO Basic 3: The Most Important SEO Aspect is Keywords. Keywords are the terms you type into a search engine to find interesting web sites. You need to know what search terms people are likely to use to find your site, then use those terms as your Keywords. Make a list of the keyword combinations you can think of that you would use to find your site. Try them all on a search engine and see the results.

You need to see how these search terms perform on the web and what other search terms could be used. A great free tool to help with this research is available at Google:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You type in a search term, then you are given a list of similar search terms, how often they were searched and some advertiser comparison figures. You can quickly find additional keywords and to see how well they perform. A good idea is to optimize your site for a less frequently used keyword combinations so that you can achieve a higher placement. The Google Keyword Tool will help you figure this out.

Focus on keyword groups with 3 or 4 keywords. Many times keywords will overlap, so you can focus on a longer keyword combination and cover many other combinations at the same time. For instance, if you are designing a page to sell Photoshop Training, you can optimize for this keyword phrase "Adobe Photoshop Training Video". This will not only give you optimized performance for this keyword combination but also for these other keywords and combinations as well:

Adobe
Photoshop
Training
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop Training
Adobe Photoshop Training
Photoshop Training Video

So try to come up with a multiple keyword combination that will contain several other keyword combinations as well.

Once you know what keywords you want to use you are ready to place those keywords on your page. The main places you want to use the keywords are:

In the meta title of the page
In the meta description of the page
In the first sentence on the page
In all of the image alt tags
In links to and from the page
Well represented in the body text of the page

Make sure you Pick the right keywords, and make sure they cover more than 5% of the word usage on the page. An easy way to get more keywords onto a page is by using lists such as:

We carry:
Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Educators
Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Students
Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Business

Keep in mind that your page text should still be user friendly. If you use your keywords too frequently or in strange ways on your page, it may rank better in the search engines, but it will drive away visitors. Who wants to read a poorly written page?

SEO Basic 4: Don't try anything funny. There are lots of "tricky" things you can do to cram more keywords into a page without annoying your visitors. The problem is that the search engines know about these tricks and will penalize your site if you use them. So don't do any of the following or you may find your web site disappear completely from the search engine listings.

White letters on white background, or any other similar text coloring trick. Even using a very light gray text on a white background, or very dark gray text on a black background can get you bumped from the search engines.

Don't repeat your keyword over and over again. People used to do things like this at the top or bottom of their pages: Photoshop Photoshop Photoshop. This worked in the early days of search engine optimization, but no longer. You should also not try this trick in alt tags, image names, links or other places in your code. The search engines will spot this and you will be penalized.

Don't put keywords into comment tags. Also don't put keywords in hidden form fields. The search engines will spot these and mark you down accordingly.

Even though putting keywords into image names and alt tags is a great idea, don't think that you can just create a bunch of clear gif images sized at 1x1 and fill those with keywords. The search engines are very good at spotting tricks like this as well.

So use your keywords appropriately, don't try to sneak one past the search engines and you should do just fine. Just keep in mind, if you think that you need to hide the keywords to trick the search engine you can rest assured that they have already thought of that and will do their best to devalue your site accordingly if you use these "black hat" tricks.

SEO Basic 5: All pages should have links to other pages. The main search engines like links. They like outside sites linking into yours, but they also like links within your site going to other pages. So in this case having more pages can be useful. Also since you now have all these pages that you are linking to it gives you a great place to use some more keywords. Make sure that your links include your keywords.

But, and this could have been in section 4 above, don't create "doorway pages" that redirect you to another page. It used to be common SEO practice to create lots of doorway pages, each one stuffed with specific keywords, all of which would redirect the visitor to the actual page they were looking for. This would give your site lots of pages, with lots of internal links and would allow you to tightly optimize these doorway pages for specific keywords, but the search engines have gotten wise to this trick and now penalize the use of redirect pages. So don't use redirects unless you absolutely need to and never use doorway pages.

SEO Basic 6: Only optimize a page for one or two keyword groups. More than that just dilutes your keyword ratio. The search engines will analyze your web page to determine which words are used as keywords. They do this by looking at the title, the description, the page heading and the words used on the page. They then determine how relevant your keywords are to your page. So, if you try to use too many different keywords on a page, it will only bring down the percentage of any individual keyword or group for that page. It is better to optimize for a larger keyword group as discussed above than to try to optimize a page for a lot of individual keywords that can't be easily used in one sentence. If you need to have a page optimized for several different, unrelated keywords you are better off creating several different pages and re-writing the body text on each page to match the keywords you are optimizing for. This will make each page relevant for the specific keyword and will get a better placement in the search engines.

SEO Basic 7: Be patient. Even with a perfectly optimized web site it can take several months for it to rise in the search engine standings. I usually recommend waiting at least 90 days and up to 6 months to see how well a web page is doing in the search engines. Also, even though you have gone to great lengths to target a specific keyword or keyword combination keep in mind that the search engines aren't required to agree with you. So when checking your standings look at several different search terms that you discovered in your research and see how well your page is placing. Hopefully you will find that your chosen keywords are getting your page listed the way you want, showing that your SEO has worked properly.

If you find that your page is ranking better for a different keyword, you should examine your page code to see why and make adjustments as needed. Maybe your page is placing higher for a keyword combination you weren't focusing on, but it is still a good combination for your goals. This gives you an ideal opportunity to go with that new combination to achieve even higher placing.

So, get started right now on your SEO. The longer you wait, the longer it will be before your web site is showing well up in the search engines.

In Closing

There is a lot more to SEO than just these 7 quick points, but this will get you started on the right path. Go through these steps and your web pages will be well positioned for any other SEO you may want to perform on your site in the future.

Webmaster tools for everyone

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:35:00 +0000

Here is a collection of what we consider "must have" tools for webmasters. These tools will benefit any webmaster, both novices and experts alike. Arm yourself with these tools in order to achieve a more professional online presence.

1. Custom 404 Page

Use a custom 404 page, so that if a user incorrectly types a webpage URL, they will still retain navigational options within your site and be provided alternative solutions. When a domain is correctly entered, but a specific webpage's URL is entered incorrectly, it is possible to display your custom error page to the visitor. By providing users with a navigational bar and further assistance, rather than leaving them with a generic "page not found" error screen, you can often keep prospective customers on your site by providing them with navigation alternatives.

2. UrlTrends

UrlTrends is a service that shows historical trends, so that webmasters can see how their SEO efforts are affecting websites in the search engines. UrlTrends should be used in conjunction with web-logging software.

UrlTrends - www.urltrends.com

3. Favicon

Polish your website by adding a Favorite Icon. When a "favicon" is available on your site, and the site URL is entered in the user's web browser URL box, the favicon will be displayed beside the URL. This gives the website a more professional and polished look.

Favicon HTMLKit - www.htmlkit.com

4. Color Matching

Match the primary web colors with those used in your logo. Simply choose a preferred color using the ColorBlender service below, and a 6-color matching palette and blend will be automatically calculated for you.

ColorBlender - www.colorblender.com

5. Online WYSIWYG Editing

Online webpage editing allows for collaboration, so that different users can log in and edit web pages.

Edit - www.edit.com

6. RSS Feeds

No longer considered to be just a nice addition, RSS feeds are now a "must have" for popular websites! Create RSS feeds for newsletters, press releases, educational articles, product tutorials, new product promotions, or just about any other sort of web content. FeedForAll - www.feedforall.com

7. MaxEmail

MaxEmail's very affordable Internet fax and voicemail service allows a fax message to be delivered to an email address as a PDF formatted attachment. This allows fax messages to follow you regardless of your location. And, it also eliminates the need for a costly extra telephone line and a dedicated fax machine.

MaxEmail - maxemail.com

8. Royalty-Free Images

Locate stock photos to incorporate into your web design. Use royalty-free stock photography to add professional, high-quality images to your website.

Photo Wizard - www.photo-wizard.net

9. Submit Corner Web Assessment Tools

These web assessment tools help you use search engines to effectively monitor who links to your website, how many links, and who your competitors are. The tools include search indexing, link tracking, and competitor identification.

Submit Corner - www.SubmitCorner.com

10. Ranks.nl

This service assesses keyword density and prominence of a domain. The tool parses keywords and assesses the number of times a keyword occurs, and then discerns the density of the keywords.

Ranks.nl - ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

11. Webmaster Toolkit

The Webmaster Toolkit is a collection of webmaster tools developed to help webmasters with daily webmaster chores. The suite of free tools and resources included continues to grow, and contains something useful for the beginner and the advanced webmaster alike.

Webmaster Toolkit - www.webmaster-toolkit.com

12. HTML Web Templates

Make it clean and professional. Use easy-to-edit HTML web templates for web design.

Web Design - www.webmaster-templates.net or www.webdesign-elements.com

13. TrafficZap

This website includes script, page rank checker, link popularity checker, and more.

TrafficZap - www.trafficzap.com

14. Compete.com

Web Analytics - Stay on top of rivals with site metrics and audience profiles for the top 1,000,000 web domains. Identify rival search marketing strategies to take your SEM and SEO efforts to the next level.

SiteAnalytics - siteanalytics.compete.com

15. Thumbshots

Easily add thumbshot images to your webpages. Integrate website thumbnails by simply copying and pasting HTML code. Additional software is not needed.

Thumbshots - www.thumbshots.org

Use top-notch tools to make web maintenance and management a little easier.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Content Relevancy and Link Popularity Explained

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:34:00 +0000

How does a web page get ranked #1 on Google? There is no doubt that the methods of the 1990s no longer work - and most definitely, not since Google went public in 2004.
Back then, the content of your website's pages was the major factor. Today, however, having links on the Internet that point back to your website is another important criteria, which will require that you involve yourself in the Internet community.

The later point is a very interesting to consider. How do you involve yourself in the Internet community? What does this have to do with search engine optimization (SEO)? Actually, involving yourself in the Internet community doesn't directly have anything to do with SEO; however, many people seem to pigeon hole anything related to the search engines into SEO. Therefore, we will need to define the various acronyms that are used in the Internet industry.

The Internet has also created an environment in which institutional control of information has been lost. As a result, control of information has trickled down to the individual level. Imagine the transition from several thousand companies once controlling messages through traditional media to today's expansive communication via several million individuals free to distribute their own information on the Internet. What you find is that the logic process has also been spread over millions of people; and for this reason, it is harder to explain why certain things happen on the Internet.

Because the Internet has opened the communications to the individual, the individuals are now exposed to the concepts of business. Not everyone has a business degree and most only have a superficial understanding. As such, the definition of marketing and how advertising plays a role in this process is not well understood at the individual level. This has caused improper usage of the various acronyms used on the Internet today.

Marketing and Advertising Defined

Before we can understand the various acronyms being used within the Internet industry, it is important to understand the definitions of marketing vs. advertising.

* 'Marketing' is the process or technique of promotion, selling and distributing a product or service. * 'Advertising' is to make your product or service publicly known; an announcement to call public attention by emphasizing qualities to arouse a desire to purchase

You can see from the definitions that advertising is part of marketing. Marketing includes everything about raising the awareness of your business from branding, messaging, public relations, advertising, events, customer relationships and much more. Advertising is a component of marketing and should never be the only method used to promote your business.

Defining SEM, SEA, SEO and LP

Using what we have learned about the definition of marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) would include all processes related to promoting all of your website's pages with the search engines. Included in this process would be Search Engine Advertising (SEA), which would be the sponsored search advertising - or, what some also refer to as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. These are the sponsored links along the top, right side and bottom of search results. Also, included in SEM would be SEO and your outreach program on the Internet away from your website that increases the number of links to your website, also known as Link Popularity (LP).

What is SEO?

It is important to understand how to tell the search engines that a particular page of your website is an authority in a particular topic. Keywords and phrases are utilized to communicate this expert status to search engines. You will notice that we are talking about pages of your website. Each page of your website can be optimized for a topic based on its visible content. We are no longer optimizing blindly the entire website for the same information, but using each page to help drive traffic to our website. By all means, this does mean that for a particular search result, visitors may enter your website from somewhere else other than the home page!

Each search engine has a different algorithm in deciding what the person searching is seeking and how relevant the information on the individual pages of your website relates to the search. They take into account the title of the page, the meta description, and the visible text. Some search engines do look at your meta keywords, but not nearly as much as they used to in the past. What you are presenting with visible text is what the visitor will see; and therefore, the content has more value than the Meta keywords. This also prevents spammers and fraudulent websites from hiding their true identity.

Why is SEO Important?

The volume of information on the Internet is staggering. The Internet seems larger than our real world. Search engines have an enormous task to filter all of this information to provide something meaningful to the searcher in a matter of seconds. Compared to the old days of using search tools like Archie and Veronica that required hours and sometimes days finding information on the Internet, the results from the current search engines are significantly improved.

The competition of web pages (whether they are direct competitors or not) as well as your business competitors are all seeking to also be ranked within the first three pages of search results. It is important that you seek out the right resources to help you optimize your pages and give you a fighting chance.

What to do before you SEO

Research, research, research! There are many tools out there that provide you information about what people actually type into the search engine, the number of searches performed over a 30 day period, as well as how many competing web pages exist for that search term. These are the three major parts to the research you are seeking. The search engines can provide you the first two with their tools, while the third item may require you to perform a search in quotes to get a real understanding of the total competing web pages. There are third party tools that can also provide the complete information, however, always keep in mind that the search volume is not an absolute from any source including the search engines. Use the information as a guideline to give you direction. Regardless of the tool(s) you use for your research, they will all provide you options for other key phrases to consider based on your initial entry. This will be helpful to consider other alternatives you may not have thought about.

In this process you will learn two important items.

* First you will learn that the rest of the world may not necessarily search for your website's products and services the same way you expect them to. For example, you may be ranked number one for a particular term, but if no one is searching for that term, what difference does it make if you're number one or number 100? Go with what people are searching.

* Secondly, you will want to seek out a balance between the number of searches and the number of competing web pages. The search term that has several million competing web pages will take you longer to rank where as those that are only in the thousands will be easier. Take a look at the search volume to see what would happen if you had 1% of those visitors purchase? Based on what you are selling you may not need to be ranked for terms that have thousands of searches. For your business, those with lower search volumes and less competition may suffice as a foundation.

Consider your research as a starting point, not an end point. You can always change your optimization later; and always keep in mind that you can optimize the pages within your website to cover a variety of possibilities from your research.

What you do to SEO

Search Engine Optimization does require some technical understanding of the HTML code in order to add the necessary meta tags, insure you have the right image alt descriptions, the right link title descriptions and lastly, to appropriately write the visible text on the pages. The elements of this process include the following:

HTML Code

Be sure that your HTML code adheres to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) standards. Many will ask the question why and the answer is simple. If you adhere to the standards, you can't go wrong. If you don't adhere to them, there is a higher chance that it will have a negative effect for browsers and search engines.

HTML structure

Websites with outdated Flash animations, frame designs, and broken links are certainly not going to allow search engines to identify the content of your web pages. Use current coding methods, not table based websites. Can you easily navigate your website? If not, then neither can the search engines; and therefore they cannot identify how to rank your web pages.

Website Flow

Does your website allow a visitor to reach your business objective easily from the point of entry? Make sure you have a call to action on all pages of your website.

Use of all meta-data

Meta data goes beyond Title, Keywords and Descriptions. There are a variety of meta tags that inform search engines about the content of your web page. Use all of them. Don't forget to have unique Title, Keywords and Descriptions for each of your web pages. Duplicate content is not something the search engines appreciate.

Visible Content

Be sure to have well-written, grammatically correct and spell-checked content to your web pages. If your website becomes a resource for its unique content you are more likely to receive traffic-seeking information about your business.

Your Outreach Program: Link Building

Consider link building as a process that will increase the critical mass of information about your business. The information or content you post (vs. advertise) on the Internet will have a shelf life of years. Therefore, the links to your website will also accumulate over time and also have a shelf life of years.

The more links you have pointing back to your website the more popular your website is considered by the search engines. Based on the content that is posted your website will be considered an authority on that topic.

The process of posting content on the Internet will not only generate traffic from the search engines, but also generate traffic to your website from the websites where the content is posted. Oddly enough you will get traffic from these websites before receiving traffic from the search engines.

Content you will post on the Internet will come in five primary forms: Articles, News Releases, Videos, Photos and Social Media Marketing. The process of content marketing is quite involved and is also labor intensive when done correctly. If you come across anything that may sound like a "link farm", you will want to run because they will not give you any long term results and are not considered responsible link building.

Finally the link building process comes in three formats: direct links to your website, cross linking content on the Internet, and deep linking to specific pages within your website. Understanding this process becomes a strategy in order for your prospects to find you and have all paths lead back to your website.

Conclusion

Is this an overnight process? Absolutely not! It is an ongoing process that acts not only as a public relations tool, but also as a long term advertising tool. The process of maintaining your website and the content marketing process of link building is something you do daily, weekly and monthly. Part of this process and Internet marketing strategy also requires the initial research process and the measurement of the results and the effects of your efforts.

RSS and Search Engine Optimization

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 08:50:00 +0000

After putting a lot of thought into how to best use RSS feeds on your website and then creating them on your website,
the next step is to promote them. As with any kind of marketing, where and how you advertise your website can determine
the amount of visitors. The same applies to RSS feeds.

As you create your RSS feeds, keep in mind that the title should contain optimal search keywords. The more keywords contained, the more likely you are to have your feed come up when a particular search string is entered. This is not to say you should cram every possible keyword into the title of the RSS feed. Instead, keep in mind that you can have up to 15 different titles listed for the same link, article, content, etc. when creating the original RSS file.

Use descriptors to attract visitors to your site by tempting them to click on your feed. Think of text that will enhance your content, but not make it appear irrelevant. People are less likely to click on a RSS feed if it doesn't fit their needs and wants. By keeping the descriptors concise, but also tempting, you will drive people to click on your link over someone else's.

In keeping with the keyword search, don't forget that you can now search by theme. Use this to your advantage and group your RSS feeds into themes. When submitting them to search engines, group the feeds into specific themes. This can help bring your feeds up more often when similar themes are searched.

When you add RSS feeds from other companies, you can tell your website how to react when the feed is clicked on. Rather than have visitors transported to the new site, have it come up as a new window. This will help lessen the chance your site visitors will leave your website completely.

People don't use the back button as often, so it increases your chances of the person to continue to peruse your site if the RSS feeds pop up as new browsers.

As you design your RSS feeds, include your company's contact information. This entails your website, any relevant contact information, and if possible, your logo. The more experience a person has with your website, the more frequently he or she will recall it when thinking of your products or services.

Consequently, it also goes to say you need to make sure the experience is a positive one because it goes the same way with a negative experience, except it deters visitors from returning.

Use your feed within your own site. By promoting it within your own website, you can improve its standing on external search engines. Search engines often return results by the most frequently clicked first. If you don't have enough faith in your own RSS feed to include it in your website, why would anyone else want to subscribe to it? At the same time, RSS feed search engines often return results alphabetically.

Typically an English teacher would not count the word 'A' in a title when cataloguing it, but in RSS search engines, it is viewed as the first word of a title. Try to word your titles to begin with 'A' to improve their standing. As they are clicked on more and more, it will increase the feeds' standings in other search engines.

In order to utilize your well written and constructed RSS feeds, remember to subscribe to them yourself. Nothing gives others' faith in their content like seeing it on the originators' website. Use keywords appropriately in titles because you can write multiple titles to fit the same content. You can also use themes to help capture the essence of your RSS feeds. Keep site visitors at your website by 'instructing' external RSS feeds to open in new browser windows.

Lastly, don't forget to include your company's contact information with the website in your feeds. The more often these are put out to the general population, the more exposure you will get.

More Traffic to Your Website for Free

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:49:00 +0000

6 Things You Can Do Today to Drive Traffic

More Traffic to Your Website for Free

Website (and business) marketing is not a one off exercise. Whether you have a brand new website or one that you've had for a while, you need to continue promoting it in order to bring you more visitors.
You need to constantly work on it, fine-tune it, discard methods that are not working and implement new ones.

The following 6 methods are simple to implement and can be done for free by you today.

1. Email Marketíng

Your first step should be to send an email to your existing clients announcing the existence of your website. You should also ask your customers to forward your email onto their friends, family and colleagues.
Think Web Pages, not Websites

If you are starting a new business and don't have any customers yet, send an email to people you know who may be interested in your products/services.

Remember to email your clients every time you make changes, add new offers or features to your website to remind them to come back.

The next step could be to send your announcement to an opt-in email list. Opt-in email lists contain people or businesses who have requested to receive information about certain topic(s). There are many companies who can provide you with these lists.

Under no circumstance should you EVER send unsolicited email (spam) to people you either don't know or who have not requested to receive your information.

2. Search Engines & Directories

Submít your website to as many search engines and directories as you can. (A search engine is a searchable database of websites collected by a computer program (called a crawler, robot or spider). When you enter a keyword, the search engine looks for keywords in its database, and any relevant records are displayed.)

Currently there are thousands of search engines and directories on the internet. Some of the main ones include Google, Yahoo, MSN. When submittíng your website to the search engines, you can either do it manually by going to the search engine website and adding your URL (website address) or you can employ the services of a Search Engine Submission company, who will do it for you.

Search engines try to rank sites that contain good content higher, so you need keywords and phrases on your pages that best describe your service and products. For example, if you are a florist, use words such as "florist, online florist, virtual florist, wedding florist, florist in Sydney, florist on line, flowers, floral, bouquets, floral arrangements etc." as many times as possible to ensure high search engine ranking. To find out what keywords your customers may be searching use Google's Keyword Tool or Wordtracker.

Once you decide on your keywords, use them in:

(a) Your website's domain name
(b) The title of your page - This is displayed in the top bar of your browser window.

(c) The heading of your home page.

(d) The first paragraph of your home page.

(e) Meta tags - Keywords, description.

(f) Titles of your graphics.

While it is important to use keywords as much as possible, it is also important you use them only if they are relevant and do not sound awkward. If you spam your keywords, you may be penalized or even banned by some search engines.
If this all seems too overwhelming, you can employ the services of a Search Engine optimization company, who will make your website's content more search engine friendly to make it rank higher.

3. Link Exchanges

Find websites whose business complements yours and add their website to your links/resource page. Then contact the company and ask for a reciprocal link. For example if you are a wedding dress designer, you could contact businesses that sell wedding cakes, jewellery, flowers and also venues, celebrants etc. By doing this your website will become a valuable resource for your visitors, since it will provide information they need. They may return to your site over and over to find more information.

On the other hand, you will have visitors coming to your website when they follow a link from your link partners.

Results in search engines are determined by the material you have presented on your site and by other off-page factors such as how many other sites link to your site. The more links you have pointing to your site from relevant websites, the higher your site will rank.

If you need help with this task, you can employ the services of a Link Exchange Company. They are generally inexpensive and can save you hours of time.

4. Email Signature

Every email you send should have an email "signature." This is text that is automatically attached to the bottom of your email message. This text can be used to publicize your business. You can include your name, business name, email address, street or postal address, website details, phone number, fax number, company slogan, description of your company and its products/services. You can set up different signatures for different purposes.

To set up your signature using Outlook Express:

Step 1: Select Tools > Options from the menu bar.

Step 2: Click "Signatures" .

Step 3: Make sure that you select "Add signatures to all outgoing messages" - within the "Signature settings" section. It is up to you whether you would like your signature to appear in "replies" and "forwards"

Step 4: Click "New" (you can change the name from "Signature #1" by clicking "Rename") - within "Signature" section:

Step 5: Type in the text that you would like to appear at the end of your email messages - in "Edit signature" section:

Step 6: If you're happy with this, click "Apply" and "OK".

5. Office Stationery & Merchandising Materials

It is extremely important that your website is included on ALL your office stationery so that customers can see it over and over again. That way they are more likely to remember it. If you've just had your letterheads printed, you can always add your website address on your wordprocessor, when printing your correspondence. For brochures, business cards etc, consider having small labels printed up. Your office stationery should include not only your website address, but also your email. Consider adding your details to:

• Letterheads
• Business Cards
• Flyers
• Brochures
• Labels
• Packaging
• Merchandise bags
• Catalogs
• Invoices
• Fax headers
• Display units

6. Set up a Blog

A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. Blogs are typically updated daily or weekly and can easily be managed by you. They provide a way for you to communicate with your customers directly, give you an increased presence on major search engines, allow you to stay ahead of your competition and so much more.

You can easily publish the following information in your blog: Articles, Media releases, Industry news, Surveys - so you can get feedback from your customers, Testimonials, Product reviews, Interviews, Case studies, Links to complementary businesses, Frequently asked questions and problem resolutions, Inspirational quotes, Research findings, etc.

Blogs give you an increased presence on major search engines, like Yahoo! and Google. If you use Blogger(Google's Blogging Tool), every message you post creates a new page on Google so in a very short time you could have a lot of pages pointing to your website, bringing you lots of new visitors.

Don't be scared to try some of these marketing methods - you have nothing to lose!

RSS and Search Engine Optimization

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:08:00 +0000

Ten Of The Internet's Best SEO Tips!

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:28:00 +0000

A good tip is a great gift to those who are in need of advice, I love the quote "give a man a fish, you will feed him for a day - teach a man to fish, you will feed him for a life time!"

If the tips are on SEO, they are bound to attract attention. So, we've compiled a list of TEN of the best SEO tips to be found on the Internet. Don't believe us? Find out for yourself now!

Let your content drive your website. Content is the king, the absolute truth and nothing but. Well-researched, authoritative and unique content that uses the keywords strategically to obtain top rankings, and attract inbound links is a MUST! Never compromise with the quality of your site's content.

Another royalty you can't do without are Links! Focus on building a network of the best quality backlinks for your website using your top keyword phrase(s) and your website name. Only link with sites that can offer you something substantial to chew up on. If it's not good, don't bite the bait!

Are you suffering from Pagerank obsession? Don't! Pageranking, despite what many SEO experts say, are just a small part of your SEO plan. The ranking algorithm is complicated; believe us when we tell you, a lower pageranked site can actually surpass a higher ranked site. So get a good night's sleep and rethink your SEO strategy. Pagerank is a great determination of a websites popularity, however, it won't be the major factor in gaining website traffic.

Stay fresh and update regularly. Yes, if you want to climb higher on search rankings ladder, make sure your site has fresh and useful content. Regularly updating your website's content is the best way to catch the eye of the search engine robot.

Dig for top search phrases instead of single keywords. The search phrases used by people and incorporated in your content will make it easier for your website to show up as a relevant search result.

Getting localized is also a very important SEO tip that few may share with you. When developing the content for your site, make sure you keep 'localization' in mind. This helps you win brownie points with the local users and the cherry on the top is that you get local customers. We recommend creating state and city specific pages to attract website traffic that would have previously never visited your website.

Always use text links on your website pages if using Java script for image maps, image links, or drop down menu. Since spiders don't follow Java script properly, text links are crucial from a SEO point of view. If your navigation links are images, place text links somewhere on your pages as well.

Always keep SEO in mind when designing your website. More importantly, your website designer must be an expert at Organic SEO. Try to design a simple website that doesn't have heavy Flash. Less graphics will give you better crawl-ability and trust from the search engines. This is because search engine robots crawl the text rather than images or Flash. Also ensure that your pages load quickly, we believe this will make a positive impact for the search engines.

Use search friendly URL's and meta tags, this will help to improve your rankings. If you change your URL's for sub pages, consider using 301 redirects to fix the file names and transfer page value.

Finally, proof read your all your content including taglines, copy etc. and make sure all the links are working before you go live with it. Always provide quality information on your website, getting the visitors is a hard and time consuming process, so make sure your website visitors like what they find when they visit your website!

My opinion is this, a great website is an always evolving and improving website. So work hard, and reap the benefits over time!

SEO: Optimize Your Web Pages

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:23:00 +0000

Search Engine Optimization, widely known in the web world as SEO, has gained a lot
of attention in the last few years. SEO techniques are applied to web pages so that they
are ranked higher by the search engines (like Google, Yahoo, AOL etc.) for targeted key word searches.
This article
will provide some tips on how to optimize your web pages for a better search engine ranking.

Provide navigational links to all your web pages

In order for any search engine to index all the pages of your site, it should be able to find them.
An efficient navigation system is very important in this regard as explained in
this article. Avoid using images, JavaScript or flash
navigation links, because search engines look for HTML link tags for indexing.

Content is king

Search engines index the content of a website, and the more content you have, the better.
Add relevant content to your website. If your website sells digital cameras, you can
add reviews on the digital cameras that you carry. This will also attract potential buyer
to your website. Usually buyers do research first before they buy online.

Use keywords in text

In order to target keywords in searches, use the same keywords in the text.
For example, an article on design layout will use the keywords design and layout instead
of using architecture and templates. However, using the keywords repeatedly does not help
either.

Use synonymous phrases in title, meta tags and headers

Include related words and phrases in page titles, text, and header meta tags. This will
expand the range of keywords that the web page might be listed under. For example,
this page has a title of "Search Engine Optimization - Tips & Tricks", while the article
header is "SEO: Optimize Your Web Pages". This page has been targeted for anyone searching
for either of these words. Search engines value the page title, meta tags and page headers
(within HTML tags) more than any text in the page.

Order of keywords in title and content

The order in which the keywords occur in your web page matters in the search
rankings. For example, one of WebsiteGear pages is ranked #1 on Google for the keyword "favicon create",
whereas the same page is ranked #21 when the search keywords are switched to "create favicon".

Use descriptive links using key words

When linking to web pages within your website, use descriptive words in that link to
describe that page. Advanced search engines use these words as the keywords defining
the content of the page.

Use key words in file names

Use the keywords that best describe the content of the web page to name the page.
Use underscore '_' between keywords. For example this page is named as seo_tips.asp.

Submit your site to search engines and directories

Submitting to search engines is not new to webmasters. However, follow all the rules
and regulations of such submissions to each search engine. Your site may be rejected
if it detects spam submissions of your website.
Submit to relevant categories in popular manually edited internet directories like
DMOZ.org, Yahoo.com and Zeal.com. These directories are used by most of the
successful search engines like Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and LookSmart.

Conclusion

Plan ahead for optimizing your website pages and choose the keywords correctly. Add value to
your website so that visitors find it helpful and link to it from their webpages. Allow
some time before expecting results in the searches. If it is not satisfactory, update
your web pages again.
If you have to hire an external SEO company, search on the top search engines
for keywords such as
"search engine optimizers". Select one from the top 20 in the search results. If
they cannot optimize their site within the top 20, probably they
would fail in optimizing yours too. Read this Google article to
know more about SEO consulting firms.

No one can guarantee the #1 position in a search
engine for your web pages. Even Google is ranked #4 when searched on Google for the
keywords "Search Engine". However, rankings can be increased by tuning your web pages.

Adsense top paying keywords with CPC (Max and Avg)

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:33:00 +0000

Max CPC ($) Avg CPC ($) Keyword

27.80 23.55 compare life assurance
73.41 23.34 criminal defense federal lawyer
141.00 23.29 american singles
73.70 23.09 federal criminal defense attorney
34.61 23.07 laser hair removal manhattan
102.69 23.03 att prepaid wireless
170.89 23.00 fortis health insurance temporary
39.31 22.93 miami personal injury lawyer
37.79 22.75 hair removal chicago
69.09 22.74 at and t cell phones
37.59 22.61 refinance with bad credit
103.19 22.47 malignant mesothelioma
63.95 22.45 lease management software
169.05 22.34 primary pulmonary hypertension
37.77 22.27 miami personal injury attorney
53.88 22.24 anti spam lotus notes
31.56 22.23 life insurance quotes
105.05 21.91 egg credit
39.25 21.80 anti spam exchange server
65.98 21.77 lemon law
193.39 21.67 google adsense

33.09 21.67 best consolidation loan student
34.22 21.63 refinance with poor credit
77.44 21.49 employee leasing
34.61 21.36 student loan consolidation center
40.45 21.35 buyer mortgage note
57.49 21.34 federal student loan consolidation
55.24 21.33 symptoms of mesothelioma
30.51 21.31 city hair laser new removal york
133.02 21.20 att wireless com
30.03 21.15 san diego dui lawyer
66.79 21.14 indiana law lemon
58.27 21.10 law lemon michigan
70.76 20.80 angeles criminal defense los
27.42 20.80 refinancing with poor credit

106.26 20.64 home equity loan
41.31 20.64 action class lawsuit vioxx
32.65 20.49 term life assurance
42.74 20.47 e loan
63.54 20.46 celebrex lawyer
71.38 20.37 vasectomy reversal
56.24 20.36 mortgage rates refinancing
47.61 20.28 attorney law lemon
36.13 20.28 consolidate student loans
36.88 20.17 home equity loans
50.75 20.11 mesothilioma
43.02 19.99 new york personal injury lawyer

27.42 19.98 home equity loan rates
32.22 19.97 auto insurance quotes

64.02 19.93 georgia law lemon
37.31 19.90 homeowner loans

27.03 19.73 equity loan rates
61.52 19.68 administration lease software
100.26 19.63 egg credit card
31.75 19.58 student consolidation loans
65.83 19.55 microsoft anti spam

Top paying adsense keywords

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:40:00 +0000

Max CPC ($) Avg CPC ($) Keyword
520.52 97.44 domains yahoo
418.63 79.81 domain name yahoo
145.71 68.91 dc hair laser removal washington
119.63 66.15 law lemon wisconsin
135.94 51.14 hair removal washington dc
493.73 41.97 domain registration yahoo
262.02 40.36 benchmark lending
438.23 38.05 domain yahoo
330.50 37.86 yahoo web hosting
121.86 37.29 hair laser removal virginia
121.27 36.59 peritoneal mesothelioma
46.38 36.55 ca lemon law
81.58 34.13 best buy gift card
96.87 31.10 adverse credit remortgage
234.33 30.98 mesothelioma information
48.68 29.77 law lemon ohio
54.31 29.34 att call conference
83.22 29.10 insurance medical temporary
82.33 28.95 illinois law lemon
82.33 28.78 mesothelioma symptoms
60.86 28.51 angeles drug los rehab
36.88 28.26 personal injury solicitor
101.30 28.23 att go
61.47 28.03 accident car florida lawyer
159.00 27.11 google affiliate
90.48 27.11 at t wireless
172.60 26.31 100 home equity loan
46.72 26.28 mcsa boot camp
40.18 26.19 anti spam appliance
93.12 26.17 adverse remortgage
37.33 26.00 chicago hair laser removal
53.70 25.98 att conference
101.26 25.84 at and t
102.52 25.45 laser hair removal maryland
123.04 25.15 mesothelioma
74.66 24.88 buy gift card
114.88 24.80 mesotheloma
41.70 24.52 student loan consolidation program
58.70 24.45 california law lemon
112.22 24.30 event management security
129.13 24.15 canada personals yahoo
62.11 24.15 orlando criminal attorney
41.59 23.78 uk homeowner loans
48.65 23.71 vioxx lawsuit
27.80 23.55 compare life assurance
73.41 23.34 criminal defense federal lawyer
141.00 23.29 american singles
73.70 23.09 federal criminal defense attorney
34.61 23.07 laser hair removal manhattan
102.69 23.03 att prepaid wireless
170.89 23.00 fortis health insurance temporary
39.31 22.93 miami personal injury lawyer
37.79 22.75 hair removal chicago
69.09 22.74 at and t cell phones

Differences between Top and Highest Paying Adsense Keywords

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:34:00 +0000

Adsense (from Google) is an accepted way to earn a regular Passive Income from the Internet. There have been lots of studies and research by internet marketers into how they can maximize their adsense earnings the tips below will increase your income from Adsense.

Many publishers spend hours searching high and low for that elusive list of high paying keywords. You will find these types of questions in forums from all different types of people. This is because adsense publishers know that the formula to High earnings are based on 3 key formula components:

1. Traffic - The more traffic, the more unique visitors and page impressions, the more chance you will get a visitor clicking on your ad

2. Click Through Rate (CTR) - The higher the amount of clicks on your site ads, the bigger the multiplier

3. High Paying Clicks (Click Value) = Keywords - The higher the value of an ad click, the more income you will receive.

Thus the formula is:

Your Income = Traffic x CTR x Click Value

In the early days of Internet advertizing, it was common to get high paying ad clicks of $30 - $50 but these days are over. Even if you do find a high paying niche, such as Insurance, Cancer, Debt, you will notice you have the small chance of challenging rival websites to get traffic as these niches have been conquered by the big sites with lots of SEO money.

Not that it is impossible, but it will take a lot of commitment, time and effort to achieve some results in these niches.

So what can the average internet publisher do? we focus on the solid paying keywords with lower site competition which you can rank higher in search engines and enjoy natural search engine traffic with a moderate amount of SEO work and expense.

Earn from online by outsourcing work

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:29:00 +0000

Earn from online by anything you know about computer...Like programming, Word processing, rubel, PHP, ASP etc etc...........Join free and earn regularly.

Play Safe, Don’t abuse or get abused with Adsense

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:14:00 +0000

Well that's a question we may start to ask, Why?
Google has a very strict policy with how their ads should be displayed and what things every advertiser should follow.
Though you may find tutorials abundant, teaching you to using different tactics to get more ad clicks and increase your income, but do you aspire to lose your income before you get anything in return.
The worst and by foremost deciding factor on getting yourself from blocked Google Adsense is false clicking or a more known term called fraud clicks where in either you or someone for you keeps on clicking on your ads to increase your revenue.
Mind you Google is not a fool, with the amount of algorithms they have for each search term, they have the algorithm to maintain and see which partner site is getting more clicks and how and what to determine what is legal and illegal.
This is the most important factor one should refrain from and be careful from that is self clicking of your own advertisments.

Now refraining is one part, how do you be careful from it?
Well don't worry there is a software called Adlogger an open source adsense tracker which I came to know from Thilak's site which helps you track your ad clicks from which page your ads were clicked, which user clicked it, at what time the ad was clicked and much more, I too got to know it from my friend Thilak's Site from another friend John.
As soon as you start seeing some weird clicks going on, immediately report it to the Google Adsense support about the same.
Google Adsense is one of the most profitable partnership for a site and one that is brings contextual ads to the website and you wouldn't want lose a nice advertising partner would you.
Google Adsense also displays contextual advertisements which are specific to the content, I have tried various other advertising websites and the ads shown are not even related to what the articles are about.
Though there have been tall claims from people that you can get the biggest earning by following the trends mind you those trends are not too realistic at times, though I have not read those books ( I have checked their sites out of curiosity and really if you earn that much you can surely afford to get a better designer for your sites )
So stay safe rather than lose the biggest ad click payer for your site.

How To Control Sitelinks That Appear For Your Site In Google Search?

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:57:00 +0000

Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from your site’s contents.

This list of sitelinks is update periodically, so you may see different sitelinks for your site over a period of time. However, Google does allow website owners to control which sitelinks “should not” be displayed for your site.

Note: You cannot control which sitelinks should be shown, you only have control over which should not appear.

Most webmasters are unaware of the feature to disable certain sitelinks from appearing for their websites, this post will aim to teach users how to do that.

Step 1: Login to your Google Webmasters account, if you own a website and do not have a Google Webmasters account, we highly recommend users to add their website to Google webmaster account, we have a handy tutorial to get you started: How To Add Your Website To Google Webmaster Tools.

Step 2: From your dashboard, click on the website that you want to remove sitelinks from.

Step 3: Click on the Links link in the sidebar menu.

Step 4: Click on the sitelinks links from the content shown in the right hand side.

Step 5: In the new page that opens up, you will see the existing sitelinks for your website, click on the block link next to the sitelink you want to remove.

Step 6: Clicking on the link should display a form, where Google asks you the reason for removing this sitelink, select the appropriate reason from the dropdown menu and provide a optional comment, once your done with the form, click on the Block button, to remove the sitelink from search results.

On submitting the form Google will display a message, telling you that it has blocked the link till a certain date, though we are not exactly sure about this date, it could be the date when your sitelinks will be recreated.

The changes to your sitelinks will not be reflected till all of Google servers have been updated, check back to see if the sitelink has been removed after giving it ample amount of time to propagate on all the servers.

Are you a webmaster, looking for some more tips and tricks? Take a look at our Webmaster Tips section to find more interesting tips and tools.

How to make more money with Google Adsense?

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:49:00 +0000

Get more clicks on ads. We all want to increase Google Adsense CTR i.e. click through ratio, because the higher times the surfer clicks the Adsense ad, higher is the payout to you. So here are 15 effective ways to improve your Adsense CTR.

How to increase Google Adsense CTR?
■Post Adsense ads them on text rich pages and make sure that Adsense had a bunch of keywords to work with. Getting Higher paying keywords is better of course.

■Get rid of public service ads, which pay you nothing for your efforts. Here are some ways to avoid getting PSA’s.

■Avoid titles like the approved ‘Sponsored Links’ and ‘Advertisements’ above the Adsense ads. Why do you want to tell the world they are ads when google already puts ‘Ads by Gooooogle’ with them. These two terms are the only ones allowed by Google TOS. Any other terms will get your account terminated. Remember to avoid these 15 Adsense mistakes.

■Use section targeting - you can target an ad unit to a specific section of your blog, as well as block out irrelevant sections like navigational links. Useful to get more targeted ads.

April 1: Avst is ready. Kepp urself update with avast

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 11:01:00 +0000

avast! is ready for 1 April; are you?

April 1st is a date often targeted by the creators of malware and this year will be no exception. There are currently a lot of reports in the media about potential new virus threats and speculation about the potential impact of new viruses such as the Conficker worm. However, provided your computer’s operating system and your avast! antivirus are up to date, the risk is very small and there is no need to be unduly concerned.

To ensure you are protected against any potential new malware threats, before March 31st you should make sure that your antivirus program and virus definitions are completely up-to-date and that you have installed all available Windows security updates. We recommend checking that avast! is set to update itself and the virus database automatically – to check this, right click your avast! a-ball in the bottom right corner of your screen, select “Program settings” and then “Update (Basic)”. Here you should make sure that the virus database is set to “automatic”.

Also, whenever you switch on your computer, make sure that avast! is actually running. Some viruses are designed to specifically target antivirus programs and to turn them off, however avast! contains strong self-defense which is designed to prevent this. If avast! is running, you should see the normal blue a-ball in the bottom right corner of your screen. If it is switched off, it will contain a circle with a red line through it.

And finally, make sure that you have the latest Windows security updates. In particular, the Conficker worm takes advantage of a Windows vulnerability which Microsoft fixed in late 2008. Users of Windows Vista or XP (SP2 and higher) should have had this update installed automatically.

www.avast.com

Useful adsense tips and tricks- Edition III

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:30:00 +0000

Use Section Targeting for The AdSense Bots
Google AdSense bots are pretty smart and they can sniff out content pretty easily, but why not help it spot the content with ease?
Google AdSense allows for section targeting where you can specify where on the page the actual content exists. To use section targeting surround your content with the following code.

3: Place your content in the middle of the two comments for better section targeting

This will help AdSense to place more relevant ads on your website, which in-turn could turn to more clicks.

Don’t Abuse Google AdSense by Self Clicking or Asking Others To Click On It

The one rookie mistake while using AdSense is to click on your own ads or asking others to click on it. DONT DO IT. It’s pretty risky and while you may earn a few extra cents, you face the risk of getting yourself banned from Google AdSense, with the additional risk of losing everything you have earned till date.

Google also has a pretty strong policy of banning websites that urge users to click on ads, so stop thinking about adding “Please click on this ads” “Help our server costs, click on ads” type of messages on your website.

Keep Yourself Updated With Google AdSense Policy Changes
The AdSense team keeps on updating their privacy policy regularly, based on measures they have to prevent, fraud clicks and accidental clicks, if you are AdSense user, follow the Google AdSense Blog on a regular basis, to keep abreast of the latest news (and tips and tricks they publish), so that you can make changes as and when required.

And Yes Never Lose Your Patience Or Get Frustrated If You Don’t Make Much From AdSense

Blog income does not grow overnight or for that matter it may take few weeks or few months or even a year, it takes a lot of patience to start getting a steady income from AdSense, and there is no real time limit when you should give up, always keep trying and you will definitely see greener pasture.

Your AdSense won’t grow just by changing the layouts or formats, you need to work harder to grow your traffic, and get more traffic from search engines, its all a matter of how much patience you have and how you work hard to grow. Once you learn that these tips won’t matter much since you would have already learnt a lot, but before you get there get a huge quota of patience while you can

Useful Adsense tips and tricks-2

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:36:00 +0000

Experiment With Layouts and Colors

There is no reason that you should use a single type of ad for your entire website, you can always experiment with different formats and colors, over a period of time to see which works out best.

Remember that blending your ads entirely with the theme will not give you higher clicks, so keep experimenting with the colors, keep it for a day or two and see how it performs, then over a week go over the data to see which format or color works better and stick with it for sometime.
That said, keep changing the formats every few months to try and see if anything else works better, in my experience I have lost earnings over my experiments a few times, but after a week I was able to start using a better performing format, which in the end made up for the loss, so don’t hesitate to experiment as its always going to be beneficial in the end.

Being stagnant is one reason why people earn less with AdSense, you don’t have any limits, so why not make full use of it.

On the other hand, if content ads are not working for you, try using link units, they tend to perform better in sidebars and under menus, so give it a shot.

I can’t say for sure which ad unit will perform better, or which type of ad will, but I can say that experimenting with ads will give you a better view of it, each website has different ads that perform differently and you can understand that by experimenting yourself, no so-called AdSense guide will help you determine that.

Don’t Overwhelm Your Readers With Ads

The above image is a pretty bad example of displaying ads to your readers, in the image I have blacked out the places where the content appear to conceal identity.

But as you can see the content is almost hidden between ads, from my research you are not only spoiling your CTR and eCPM, but are also driving away regular readers from your blog.
Based on the first and second points I listed, try and display targeted ads to your readers, rather than having a website full of ads and hard to spot content. Nevertheless it is up to you on how you display ads to readers.

Useful secret adsense tips and tricks

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:27:00 +0000

Use Channels To Track High Performing Ads and Ad Placements

Analyzing AdSense performance is of utmost importance if you want to leverage more clicks from users. Why this helps?
1. You can understand user behavior and learn where to place the ads.

2. You can stop placing ads on lower performing places and increase your CTR and eCPM. Google AdSense provides you with a very handy parameter called Channels, so leverage it and start channelizing your ads to learn more on which format of ads work better and more importantly in which position.

Google AdSense has a excellent resource where you can learn more and create channels for your ads.

Using Custom Targeting for Displaying Ads

Lets be frank, you cannot survive running a website day in and out, without generating income from it, after a certain period of time, but that does not mean that you overwhelm your readers with tons of ads.

Having done quite a lot of research I can tell you that search engine users are the most likely ones to click on ads and more of the ads should be targeted towards that traffic.

On the other hand, in my experience of tracking ad views and clicks, social networking users never click on ads, on top of that they despise sites with ads and tend to comment negatively about it.

So targeting your ads to only certain sections of your traffic helps immensely. On this blog I do not display ads to users who visit it from social networking and also delay showing ads to regular readers.

Why Targeting ads will benefit?
1. You do not piss off regular and social users who do not like to see ads.

2. You are targeting to people who are more likely to click on ads.

3. Your CTR and eCPM will increase, because you are less likely to display ads to people who are not bound to click on them. How Do You Display Targeted Ads To Users?

If you are using WordPress as a blogging platform, the Who Sees Ads allows you to target ads to different sections of users, it is definitely a must have.

If you are more PHP savvy, here is a little routine I wrote, that can help you with ad targeting, it has conditions to sort out search engine users, social network users and tell you whether you should display ads or not. Feel free to modify and use it for your own purpose. Download Basic Ads Targeting Basic Logic.

As a footnote, I aggregated this data by channelizing the ads, the first step I told you about, so you can already see the importance of using channels for your ads.

Secret tricks and tips of adsense

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:23:00 +0000

Secret tips and tricks on AdSense

Google AdSense is an advertising program created by search engine Google for the owners of websites that are offered to place relevant or key - word targeted ads on their websites' pages. In contrast to another Google's advertising program named AdWords, Adsense is meant for publishers of websites, but not advertisers. The ads to be placed on an AdSense publisher's website have several options of appearance and quantity which depend on the publisher's preferences.

In order to become a participant of AdSense advertising program, an interested publisher needs to sign up for the program in the respective section of Google's official website. In addition, the website where AdSense ads are expected to be placed should fit certain criteria set by the advertising program's terms of service, while the publisher is also supposed to submit some information to qualify for the program. Nonetheless, as a whole, the process of joining the program is quite simple.

So - called Cost Per Click or CPC principle underlies the method of charging advertisers for AdSense services. The principle means that an advertiser should pay an agreed amount of money every time when his or her ad is clicked by a visitor of the website.

The advertising program is available for almost any website except websites that contain adult material. The program gets more and more popular as it allows websites' owners to monetize their websites and cover expenses that non - commercial websites might bear.

AdSense is actively used by file - hosting websites. File - hosting service or online file storage service allows to upload and store large files at its server by individuals or legal entities so that the latter could eventually use the files as they need or share them with others. As file - hosting websites usually offer file - hosting service free of charge, they need to compensate their server maintenance expenses. Therefore, file - hosting websites often apply for participation in AdSense program to get some revenues. Besides, the potential AdSense advertisers are also very interested so that their ads would appear on file - hosting websites as such websites usually enjoy some huge traffic. The huge traffic of file - hosting websites is explained by the fact that the websites attract a lot of people who seek a way to store and share their large files on the Internet for free.

Resource box

Everyone may take advantages of our free service at www.oxyshare.com, that includes unlimited disk space, an endless amount of file downloads and e-mail file delivery. Free registration also gives access to upload files using your favorite FTP client and opportunity to edit or delete files. Using our partnership program registered users may earn money for their files downloads. Uploaded files are accessible for 30 days if there was no request to download. Go to www.oxyshare.com

SEO checklist-Edition IV

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 17:38:00 +0000

Blogspot SEO Checklist: The Practical Way to Improve Rankings - Third Checklist: Keywords in Internal links

This is one of the most influential search engine ranking factors. Google places much more emphasis on the keywords in links more than in other places.

This can be done by using the keywords in the anchor text. In Google Blogger there are basically two approach that are important.

First approach: Blog front page targeted keywords

It is important that all of your posts link to your front page. Using this setup will give the front page the highest number of internal links, so it becomes more important to rank for the selected front page targeted keywords only (not the ones targeted by your post).

Second approach: Actual post URLs keyword in the title

Long tail traffic goes to your post. This means that the post titles themselves are sets of keyword phrases for which someone may be searching in the search engines. For example, a post title might be a phrase such as “How to Record Audio using your Laptop." It is important that these phrases should be in hyperlinks and point to the actual post URL. This is in order for the post's URL to rank in Google, and not other URLs in your blog, or the blog front page which is common.

Below I explain the tweaks you will need to make for each approach to work.

For the First approach

To make links point to the main page/front page of your blog from all URLs in the blog, you need to use the footer section of the classic blogger template.

Find the code in your blogger template and replace the information contained within

(colored red only) with your preferences.

SEO Checklist- Edition III

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:28:00 +0000

Blogspot SEO Checklist: The Practical Way to Improve Rankings - Second Checklist: The Meta Description of your Post

This is not a highly important ranking factor, but it's still an important checklist. The meta description is highly responsible for “clicks” from any search engine. Note here that I'm talking about “clicks,” not “rank” or “view.” In technical terms, view is also called “impressions.”

Meta descriptions are important. If your meta description is RELEVANT and directly shows a snippet that is related to what the searcher is looking for, the searcher is more likely to click through and read the whole post.

Thus, we can see that a simple searcher in the Google results will become a visitor to your blog after clicking on the search results.

Again, in Google, below are the important guidelines you need to follow whey you formulate a meta description for every post.

The suggested maximum number of characters should be around 160. This is to ensure that the meta description you intended to show to visitors can be completely shown by search engines. (They will truncate if it exceeds around 160 characters).

It should be different from the meta description on other pages, or it will not be friendly to search engines or users.

Meta descriptions should reflect the page topic.

To optimize the meta descriptions in Blogger, copy and paste the following code into the template:

Insert it below the

Also, you must tweak your front page meta description by going to Dashboard—Settings—Basic—and changing the text under the “Description” fields.

It should comply with the above guidelines. Basically this description is the one that is returned by

<$BlogDescription$>

Blogspot SEO Checklist-Edition II

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 07:47:00 +0000

The Practical Way to Improve Rankings - First Checklist: The Title Tag of Your Blog Post

The title is the single most important SEO element in your blog. It is mainly useful for three reasons:

Search engines put more ranking weight on a more descriptive, accurate and relevant title.

Visitors coming from any traffic source on the Internet (such as forums, other blogs, social networking sites and search engines) tend to click more on relevant titles.

Visitors tend to like your blog if your post titles are unique and relevant. This will result in more blog followers or readers.

Therefore, it is of primary importance to make your title accurate, descriptive and relevant.

In Google, there are three primary specifications that are important for a title tag:

The suggested maximum number of characters in a title should not be more than 65 characters. So it is good to check the number of characters in your post title to make sure it will not exceed this amount.

Never spam the title tag. Do not stuff keywords in it; not only will redundant keywords make no sense, but keyword stuffing will result in a penalty which is hard to get rid of and cost you time while you try to regain your rankings.

Make it directly relevant to the page topic, and see to it that the title is captivating to read while being both specific and relevant.

Replace the existing title tag code in the source code template with this:

To accomplish this, simply go to Dashboard and click the “Template” of your selected blog. Find the title tag indicated by:

This is your old title

Replace this entire line with:

After that, click “Save Template Changes.”

Blogspot SEO Checklist- Edition 1 (to be continued)

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 06:15:00 +0000

The Practical Way to Improve Rankings

So you started a blog on Blogspot, but you're not seeing the level of traffic for which you'd hoped. Are you going to have to give up your dreams of blogging for a living, or at least making a nice side income from your writing? Maybe not. This article will show you a few ways to improve your visibility in the search engines, and hopefully your traffic.Background

You can easily get a blog fromwww.blogger.com, popularly known as “Blogspot.” It is the most famous blogging platform. No wonder most blogs are using the Google blogger platform; it is very easy to set up and FREE!

With a free account comes one weakness, however: the default blogger is highly unfriendly to search engines. If you are a blogger reading this article, it will help you to address the SEO issues of your blogs. Being highly unfriendly to search engines means LOW RANKING = LOW TRAFFIC = LOW BLOG INCOME.

It is every blogger's dream to earn a high income through blogging. The best way to do this is to get a lot of traffic coming from search engines, particularly Google. You cannot obtain a high level of traffic if your blog posts are not well ranked in the search engines.

This checklist is aimed at Google. The advice in this article should be easy to apply even if you are not tech savvy. In short, what you will find in this article is do-it-yourself SEO advice that can save you hundreds to thousands of dollars hiring SEO firms or consultants. Yes, I am serious.
Before you can implement this diagnostic checklist, make sure you comply with the following

basic requirements:

Your content is original, marketable and written to a specific targeted audience, which can be easily understood and applied.

You have the time to update your blog on a periodic basis. It does not matter whether it will be daily, weekly or monthly blog updates.

You know what I'm talking about when I refer to Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics; furthermore, you have registered your blog using those tools.

You are using the Google Blogger Classic Template. The current/default or new version of Blogger does not give you the full control of its source code template that will be used to initiate SEO improvements. If you are using the Beta version, switch to the Classic version before you try to implement the actions on the checklist.

You should back up your blogger template source code before making any alterations. By this, I mean that you should copy and paste all source HTML into a notepad file, and then save it to your desktop. If things go wrong, you can copy and paste this backup source code to your template.

SEO: Tricks and Tips-IV

sidhrabd@gmail.com (Md.Masudul Hasan) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:39:00 +0000

Basic SEO: Tricks and Tips - Where to Get Content

There are numerous places to get content for your site. Keep in mind that all material you use should be appropriate to your site; this article is about SEO after all. Check out the following list of useful sources:

Websites – You can use material from either articles or newsletters, but you must contact the owner and get their permission.

Products – If you sell products on your site, ask the manufacturer for material about the product in question.

Content Syndication Sites – Material on these sites is free when you provide a link back to the original author's website. There are also sites that allow you to pay for material. Make sure you manually put the material on your site to preclude any SEO-related conflicts caused by browser-side inclusion methods (searchbots don't read browser-side code).

Government – Material made by (not for) the U.S. government does not have copyright protection, meaning it is free and in the public domain (the U.S. Postal Service and National Technical Information Service are exceptions).

Open Content – This is content that is available for modification and redistribution because of what's called copyleft, which basically means the original author released their work on the condition that no one else can claim original authorship. You might also want to check into content released under a Creative Commons license; there are several variations of this license, and not all of them will let you repost content freely. You will need to do a little homework.

RSS feeds – If you find a site that provides an RSS feed with boatloads of material related to your site, you should install an RSS aggregator to put the material from the feed into your website. This can be complicated for those without experience, so I suggest you do your research or get someone who knows what they're doing.

Create User-Generated Content – You can get content from your visitors by adding a Question and Answer or Frequently Ask Questions section to your site. You can also add a forum (sometimes called a Bulletin Board System) or blog on which your users can comment. Just search for the appropriate software on any search engine.

When finding content to put on your site, don't forget that you're doing so in order to optimize your site for the search engines. Make sure you search for content with your keywords. Just search for the specific type of material you want and add your keyword(s) to it. If you have a site focused on the Great Lakes, you could search for Great Lakes press release, for example.

That's all the tips I have for now. I'll see you next time.