I ran across this great list of tips for how to improve your rankings.  This is all most website owners will ever need:

So, I get out of the car (at the last possible minute… that’s how I roll.).  Then, I find a nearby sign in the parking garage.  And, I take a picture of that sign on my phone that is automatically entered into Evernote.  So, I am using the Evernote app on my Droid phone.  From there, I just mark it as “DFW”.  When I get back in town, to find my car, I know that all I need to do is do a search in the Evernote mobile app for “DFW”.  BAM!  There’s my car.  I am all about utilizing technology to simplify my life in any way possible.  Evernote has definitely made life a lot easier.

For a while, I thought it was intriguing that people weren’t afraid to use Foursquare to inform the rest of us where they are.  But, then … as I see that John is going to lunch at Long John Silver yet again in his effort to become the Mayor, I just became annoyed!  And, it caused me to wonder how many people are just as miffed about this kind of stuff as I am.  That’s when I abandoned FourSquare.

Last week, I was in London for the week.  Deliberately, I didn’t post it to a “status update”.  I admit I am fearful about people tracking my every move.  You read these crazy stories about the guy finding out via Facebook that you are out of town and robbing your house.  Not wanting to be that guy, I didn’t say a word.  And, then, when Latitude told me that they are tracking my every move, I said, this is just going too far.  So, I disabled that.  I think in the next few years, we are going to be seeing a lot more people turning off those features.

The first few years of social media brought about intrigue – intrigue and fascination with these new technologies.  But, now that we have been able to see and evaluate the results of these technologies, I think a lot of individuals will be more reluctant to participate.  I think that we are going to see a backlash and an attempt on the part of many to recover their basic rights of privacy – despite what Marc Zuckerberg wants them to do.

Well, if you are the site owner, it is smart business.  People can “like” your site.  Then, it will show up in the news feeds of friends.  And, it will drive more traffic to your site.

However, there is more at play here.  Think of the information that Facebook is collecting.  If you go to ESPN.com and you “like” ESPN’s draft coverage, then, you are probably a hard-core football nut.  Therefore, that will improve Facebook’s knowledge base on who you are and what your interests are.  Accordingly, those buying Facebook ads will be better able to effectively target you.

Therefore, it is clear that this is great for marketers.

On the other hand, there will certainly be privacy issues and questions raised.  How accessible will this information be to marketers?  Is this intrusive?  Here is my take on this.  Only your friends who have access to your profile will be able to see your “likes”.  Those buying Facebook ads will not.  Sure, it will more appropriately laser-focus the advertising to you.  But, is that such a bad thing?  It is not like the advertiser has access to your profile.

Brilliant move by Facebook.  Just brilliant.

I think it really depends on your sequence.  Are you talking about an upsell sequence or an extended page in a buying sequence?  For example, are you collecting the credit card on page 2 and some basic information on page 1?  If that is the case, I would recommend “Continue”.  Bottom line, that is what you want your customers to do.  You want them to “Continue” through the process.  Keep them going… “Continue… continue… and continue some more”.

But, if you have a product that you are selling, don’t you, typically, just go with “Add to Cart”?  Amazon does it… so why shouldn’t you?  “Add to Cart” is simple, but it is magic.  Based on all of the testing that I have conducted, observed and read about, “Add to Cart” tests out far ahead of any other messaging.  So, if you have a product that you are selling on a landing page, why not use “Add to Cart”?  It works.  Trust me.

On the other hand, I do feel that – due to recent FTC regs – it is important to be cognizant of how these changes and rumored changes are impacting the upsell business.  In the past, “Continue” had tremendous power as an upsell vehicle.  But, now, to keep your conversions in place and federal agencies out of your business, you might be advised to even go “Add to Cart” on your upsell pages, as well.  It’s good business.  It’s like the old saying that “you can never go wrong hiring IBM (though you can go wrong doing so today!).”  By going with the “Add to Cart”, you will not rob your conversions.  You can test more messaging.  But, you would be hard-pressed to find something that converted as high.

Refer back to this post from early 2008, outlining some of RipOffReport’s more heinous violations of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

Here are a few of the points explained in this article:

1.)Technical Guidelines from Google:

“Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.”

If you search for Rip Off Reports search results pages in Google by doing this site:ripoffreport.com – intitle:”search results” it will bring back only the search results pages that are currently indexed in Google which on my results shows 49,400. That is a lot of pages that shouldn’t be in Google’s index.

If you don’t think this is a big deal read this article from Search Engine Land and the main post from Matt Cutts of Google.

2.)Quality Guidelines – Specific Guidelines Section:

“Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Subdomains – w3.ripoffreport.com Exact replica of Rip Off Report over 2,000 pages indexed in Google.

Domains – www.badbusinessbureau.com Exact Replica of Rip Off Report over 17,000 pages indexed in Google.

3 Google Cached Links of the same exact post on all 3 domains, there are thousands of cached Duplicates.

They are definitely up for Spammers of the Year.

3.) also from Quality Guidelines – Specific Guidelines Section

“Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.”

There was even a recent post attacking us

Check out the title tag,

“97th Floor It Is Better On Top Spy With Firefox 97th Floor social media scam spyware tracked users scam 97th floor firefox social media Internet Internet”

They mention 97th Floor 3 times, Firefox 2 times, scam 2 times, social media 2 times then Internet Internet at the end.

But, despite these clear violations, the site continues to rock right along.

Example #2:  Mahalo

Rewind the clock back to February for the context here.  For those of you who do not know, Mahalo professes to be a “search engine”, at times.  At other times, it is an aggregator of information.  It basically depends on what mood Jason Calacanis (the highly eccentric founder of Mahalo) is in on that particular day.

Though Google has made it very clear that it will not allow search results to be placed within its search results, somehow, Mahalo listings are okay.  Listen to the mouthpiece of Google, Matt Cutts, explain this one:

It’s kinda interesting because I think Jason…he is a smart guy. He’s a savvy guy, and he threaded the needle where whenever he talked to some people he called it a search service or search engine, and whenever he talked to other people he would say oh it is more of a content play.

And in my opinion, I talked to him, and so I said what software do you use to power your search engine? And he said we use Twika or MediaWiki. You know, wiki software, not C++ not Perl not Python. And at that point it really does move more into a content play. And so it is closer to an About.com than to a Powerset or a Microsoft or Yahoo! Search.

So, basically, Matt Cutts is finding a way to justify the fact that they keep Mahalo ranked so highly in search results.  Where is this in webmaster guidelines?  So if you tell Matt Cutts that you are using a particular type of software, you are in the clear?  Is that how this game is played?  So, let’s not forget the fact that Calacanis autogenerates thousands of pages of content which he obtains by scraping the pages of others.  And, somehow, that is okay.  (I didn’t see that feature in the MediaWiki software.)

I say all of that to make a point.  When it comes to Google, it just matters who you are.  Two years ago, Answers.com received a significant penalty from Google because Google didn’t like the fact that they were just aggregating content and not creating value.  But, somehow, it is okay when Mahalo does it.  Based on Matt Cutts’ comments, it is clear that he is having a one-on-one dialogue with Jason Calacanis.  And, I can assure you that most normal website owners don’t have a one-way flow of communication to Matt Cutts.

For two years now, Google has been penalizing those who sell links.  Yet, somehow, they are not able to detect those such as RipOffReport that do it in the most obvious ways.

It is clear to me that Google has a tremendous amount of power over website owners.  And, unfortunately, I see that power being wielded in an arbitrary, unpredictable and inconsistent manner.  I could give you more and more examples.  But, unfortunately, the vast majority of them come down to one conclusion:  it isn’t what you are doing… it’s who you know (at Google).

The Amazon Assoociates program was the first really great affiliate program that allowed for scalability in products.  Plus, you were dealing with Amazon, so you knew you would get paid.

This method worked GREAT!  In ’04-’05, you literally could by some fairly good keywords for $.10-$.15 on Google Adwords.  Somewhere around 2005, it seems like everyone in their brother jumped in on this method and just killed it.  Suddenly, the clicks became unprofitable.  Do the math.  Pre-2005, if Amazon sold a $1000 TV, you pocketed (as the affiliate credited with the sale) 7% of that – or, $70.  To get there, you were buying some pretty targeted traffic.   The essence of this method was that you were buying model numbers.  So, yes, it was some pretty targeted traffic.  It was not outrageous to convert 7% on this targeted traffic.  (And, of course, this conversion rate greatly depended on the price of the product.  E.g, your conversions on a $60 phone would be much higher than a $1000 television, of course.)

So, ultimately, you were paying – let’s say $.15/click.  So, out of 100 clicks, you were paying $15.  So, you bought 100 clicks and converted 7% of those.  You can see how this method was lucrative.  Plus, I always found that hardly anybody ever JUST bought the thing they went to Amazon to buy – thus, contributing to the affiliate’s bottom line.

Forward the clock to the present day, you would get KILLED doing that.  Clicks have gone through the roof.  And, I don’t see that changing.  And, you can say “well what about Yahoo?  What about Bing?”… Sure, you can get cheaper clicks on both.  But, frankly, I have not found the volume there to even waste my time unless a campaign was particularly profitable and I had tested it in Google.

I spend a lot of time trolling the affiliate networks.  I look at CPA Networks but I also spend a lot of time studying Clickbank.  I have always found Clickbank to be a really good read on market trends.  Let’s go to the Clickbank Marketplace to examine where we are, today.

In the Marketplace, I typed in “abs”.  Then, I ordered the products based on “gravity”.  For those of you who don’t much about Clickbank, “gravity” is the measure of which products are really moving.  So, according to Clickbank, the top abs product is one called “TruthAboutAbs”.

Let’s get into the analytics of TruthAboutAbs.  Upon sale, the payout is $18.57.  But, there is a little continuity opportunity, as well.  At any rate, the avg. payout for a sale is $20.32.  Let’s do the math on this.  So, given… I have done some investigating and I also have some experience in this fitness niche.  You can get slightly cheaper clicks.  I would say that $.20-.30 is a moderately priced click in this niche.  (And, of course, you are going to have long-tail keywords that are paying less, of course.)  But, if you are spending $20 on clicks and pocketing $20 from Clickbank, it would seem to me that they only person who is profiting off of this particular niche is the product owner.  And, if you are making money as an affiliate, your margins are absolutely razor thin.

That’s why I have all but abandoned PPC affiliate marketing.  The example from TruthAboutAbs (I think) is very typical from what I am seeing throughout the market.  For example, go to Commission Junction.  Routinely, you will see EPCs (Earnings per 100 clicks) in the range of $20-30.  Tell me what kind of clicks you can buy to make that equation work.

Years ago, I knew tons of affiliates who were doing a lot of volume from PPC in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.  But, I think those numbers are drying up.  I had a conversation with an account manager at one of the larger affiliate networks the other day.  He indicated to me that – yes – few of his affiliates are actually having success with PPC anymore.  Really, the most successful affiliates are doing media buying.  So, it appears that we are going full circle, as a market.

I think that what I am seeing in practice online supports that conclusion.  Google almost any product and you are not seeing affiliates.  You are seeing the main product advertiser.  Gone are the squeeze pages and the landing doorway pages designed to drive you to the product page.  An affiliate simply can’t afford those clicks.

Yet, it kills me that there are still gurus and those out there that are pushing PPC as a reputable model for affiliate marketing.  I guess it is reputable … for them and their products!

I look forward to challenging myself with my landing page skills each week!