I see on Sitepoint that Blueverse is now being sold, and for $10k no less. I think it’s a decent blog, with decent rankings and some income, but no way in hell I would pay $10k. Everyone knows that in all likelihood the revenue and subscribers tend to drop, at least a little, when a specific blog changes hands. I just can’t see paying 20x the monthly revenue. It’ll probably take longer than that to make back your purchase price with the drop. This is also not the first attempt at this sale, which leads me to believe that I am not the only one thinking this way, and why the blog hasn’t sold earlier.

The MMO scene is much too saturated. In my opinion, I wouldn’t even dream of taking over someone’s blog at such a rate unless the Alexa was in the top 100k, it beat all it’s competitors in SE rankings and the revenue was steady and provable for the past 12 months.

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The image below is a “heat map”. While most blogs will have different layouts, this image will give you a good idea of what placements work best when placing your ads. The darker the color, the better the placement. You’ll see why I never purchase any ads I expect to get clicked on the footer section of other sites. Outside of a text link to “maybe” help increase your PR, the footer is the least likely place that your visitors will click on ads. Of course the best placement is above the fold just above the content that is directed at your visitors.

I’d like to defer to a much more knowledgeable professional for additional tips. I’ve been reading Grizz’s blog for quite some time and have learned a great deal about bettering my Adsense from this site. Here’s one of his posts to get you started, and I highly recommend subscribing! - Optimization tips for Adsense

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I told you not long ago about what I was doing with Adengage, which is to find cheap but effective advertising, and it’s been turning into a great return for me.

In the past few days I have been able to generate thousand of clicks from Adengage for a total of $52 in advertising for 7 days. As you can see from the photo above, I’ve already made back my advertising investment, and then some, and still have 5 days left in the campaign. I’m going to let it run for a few more days to see how it performs, and if all goes well, I plan on upping the ante by doubling the advertising and seeing of the ROI follows suit.

This won’t work for every site. I’ve been lucky enough to find a great combination, where my ad is very attractive on the advertising site, and the niche I’m in is HUGE, so the visitors are constantly on the prowl for more no matter how much content you give them.  And it’s not just finding sites that will garner you thousands of clicks, but also having your site optimized for best Adsense performance. I’m going to do a post later today, or tomorrow, on good placement of Adsense ads for a better CTR.

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I got curious and wandered over to the Adsense forum at Webmasterworld. I found out quickly that everyone around the world was experiencing the same issue of delayed stats. Luckily we were all able to confirm to one another what we were seeing but many weren’t pleased that Google themselves weren’t acknowledging the problem and keeping us aware of the issue.

Well, they listened. By the end of the day there was a new page at Google announced, a known issues page. This page will keep everyone aware of any outstanding issues that Google is working on, and any workarounds if applicable. Excellent addition!

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1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues - www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem - you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog - reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

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For starters, you are putting your name/brand on the line when you leave public comments. Don’t fool yourself, the readers can tell the difference between someone participating and someone commenting just to get a link. Leave your comment and make it count. Look for entries that you are fluent in and actually engage the writer with something that “compliments” his or her entry. The readers that are actually benefiting from the entry and want to learn are much more likely to visit your blog if they feel you can help. It will also help more in the long run to continually hold yourself in a mature and professional manner. Readers will eventually remember the name leaving the comments on various blogs and it’s a great way to earn respect through the community.

Try sticking to blogs you truly enjoy as it will help ensure that your participation is more involved and on target with the discussion. You can actually build friendships this way by engaging other readers at the same time. Trust me, the long term effects of this type of commenting is much better than a quick “hit and run” blog comment.

Also, learn which blogs are leaders in the industry that have more exposure than the rest. You’ll want to target blogs that have a better chance of bringing traffic to your site as long as you are taking the time to enter quality comments. Remember, your link isn’t just there for the day on the entry and then disappears when they make the next entry - your link is likely there for the life of the blog. So 6 months down the road from now when someone comes across that entry via a Google search, your comment can still be drawing the long term traffic.

I recommend going to 45n5 and going over their list of the top 100 blogs. Actually, they list about 300, so even better! You can browse through the blogs and find suitable blogs to comment on that relate to your own. Here’s the link - 45n5 Top 100 Blogs

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I came across a great free program to help you out with your commenting. It’s called “Fast Blog Finder” and you can go to their page here - http://www.howtorankhigh.com/download.html

They do offer an enhanced, or upgraded version, but the free version should suffice for your needs. Once the program is installed you can search for great blogs to leave comments on and then sort the results depending on what you’re looking for. As you can see from the illustration above, you can enter a particular search phrase for your search, such as “make money online”. Once you tell the software to start, it will retrieve up to 50 blogs that fit within that search term that you can leave comments on.

For each blog returned, it will tell you the PR of the site, the PR of the page and whether the page is dofollow or not. You can now sort your results by PR or even by the dofollow results. For each blog entry you click on it will open that page in a built in browser at the bottom, allowing for easy commenting before moving onto the next one.

Another great tip someone spoke of on the forums I belong to was to add “enable commentluv” within your search phrase. This will now return blog entries that have this plugin installed. Read about CommentLuv here. With this plugin, each comment you leave will try and pull YOUR last blog entry and add a link to it along with the title at the bottom of your comment.

This software is outstanding if you’re looking for a free and easy way to build up links and potential subscribers by commenting on similar sites.

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http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/34968

Apparently the site was a redirect or copy of another site, reedfirstsource.com. and somehow kept the pagerank intact. Of course, once Google updates its toolbars the site will likely have a PR of 0 and anyone who might of bought the site would now be the owner of a worthless domain.

You’ll see in the auction that other wise buyers utilize certain pagerank checkers to find out if the PR of a site is valid or not, and this site came up as NOT valid. You can also do a search on these types of domains when they’re for sale and pay special attention to the sites linking back to them. If someone is selling a directory, check and see if the sites linking to them are linking to a directory or another site that used to reside on that domain.

Of course this seller claims later to have already sold the site, regardless of the scam, but I find that doubtful. Hopefully the astute members of sitepoint prevented him from scamming someone.

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I’ve discussed Adengage before and wanted to push it on you again! No, there are no affiliate links and I get nothing. Hell, don’t even click on my link, go to Google and do a search for Adengage yourself to get there.

I monitor their site almost daily looking for cheap deals to get some traffic. I ran into one a couple of days ago that was $10 for one week. This allows me to display a 100×100 ad on their site for the whole week, for a measly $10. The first day alone brought me in over 800 clicks, and in return has already paid for itself (double actually) via Adsense on my own site.

I started 2 campaigns on the same day (in the photo above). You can see that my first site received 176 clicks in the first 24 hours for a .02 CPC while the site I am mentioning received 878 for less than a penny per click!

This won’t work by picking any site you find on there, you need a good mixture. First off, newly advertised sites on Adengage generally price themselves lower and will increase within a month or so. Secondly, you want to know what type of audience that site is catering to, and will your advertisement appeal to them. If you can find that right mix, you can get a ton of traffic for a very small price. I’ve been using Adengage for a few years now and never pay anything but $5-15 at a clip, and almost always get a ton of traffic as a result.

Just an Fyi - not only have I noticed that the advertisers will increase their rates quickly when they see how many clicks they can deliver, but if you repeat your ads on the same site you will likely see less clicks. The reason is that the sites are probably getting a ton of repeat visitors and they probably aren’t going to click on the same ad over and over.

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Being a fan of celebrities and all the hoopla that follows them, I like to read a few celebrity websites daily. I read TMZ.com, x17online.com & Perez Hilton.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I visit Perez Hilton quite often, even though I detest him. Why I would return to a site where the writer turns my stomach is beyond me! He can’t write worth a damn and is in love with himself. He likes to “pick on” celebrities and call out all of their faults, even though his “closet” is much fuller than theirs. I’m not a homophobe, but I don’t think an admitted homosexual that drools over other guys pictures should be preaching to me about what is healthy and what isn’t. He tells everyone how disgusting smoking is, and then a few posts later he’ll be posting about a guy he would love to be with. He makes loads of $$$ from his blog, and also TV shows and appearances.

This is what I alluded to yesterday. He makes his living based on controversy, and the readers love every minute of it. He doesn’t do anything special and I don’t find him talented in the slightest bit, but yet he continues to get richer and richer.

I think if you put a monkey in as a guest blogger without telling the audience, and just let him make inane comments and dabble little drawings on the celebrity faces, he would be just as successful. It’s not always WHO you are, as much as the content you’re delivering and how you deliver it.

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