32 Most Important SEO Tips

Following these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free.

1. Make sure your site is not under construction, incomplete, with little or no unique content.

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submitting to other search engine but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Submit also your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.

3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)

4. Offer sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)

5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but same content.

6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keywords stuffing.

7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.

8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.

9. Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.

10. Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters including spaces. (about 25-30 words)

11. Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum.

12. Optimize Pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site's primary keywords.

13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.

14. If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines' spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.

16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (http://lynx.isc.org/)

17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.

18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.

19. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about Robots.txt file.

20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.

Entireweb Newsletter * August 7, 2008 * ISSUE #464 If you can't see images, click here to view this newsletter online * Printer-friendly version To ensure that you receive all our newsletters to your inbox, please add newsletter@entireweb.com to your address book.

32 Most Important SEO Tips

Following these simple tips will definitely boost your traffic and search engine rankings for free.

1. Make sure your site is not under construction, incomplete, with little or no unique content.

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submitting to other search engine but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Submit also your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.

3. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com (sitemap for search engines usually in XML format)

4. Offer sitemap to your site visitors for easy page navigation. (sitemap for visitors in HTML format)

5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but same content.

6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keywords stuffing.

7. Use text instead of images in your content, links and important subjects.

8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.

9. Title tag should be 60-80 characters maximum length.

10. Meta tag description should be 160-180 characters including spaces. (about 25-30 words)

11. Meta Tag keywords must be 15-20 words maximum.

12. Optimize Pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site's primary keywords.

13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.

14. If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines' spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.

16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (http://lynx.isc.org/)

17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.

18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.

19. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about Robots.txt file.

20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.

22. Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings.

23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.

24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.

25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site's reputation.

26. Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.

27. Make your site useful and informative.

28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site's visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.

29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.

30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.

31. Do not buy or sell links.

32. Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users.

StumbleUpon Optimization: Leveraging Photo Stumbles for More Web Traffic

An Introduction to Photo Stumbling

Photo Stumbling is a feature that is built into StumbleUpon, which allows users to post pictures on the web into their StumbleUpon blog. Not all StumbleUpon users are familiar with this feature, so this little introduction might be also useful for some of you who are new to StumbleUpon.

To stumble a photo you like, you’ll simply need to right click and choose the Stumble Photo Blog It! function, which will then allow you to submit the picture as if you were submitting any other webpage. Take a look at the screenshot below for an example:

If the picture is already submitted, you’ll been taken to the discussion page whereby you can add more tags or leave a comment. After doing so, click on the green ‘Save changes‘ button and you’re done.

Examples of Photo Stumblers

Active StumbleUpon users are very likely to be active photo stumblers as well. A brief review of the stumblers listed on the Top Stumblers List will show that most of them practice photo stumbling regularly. Thousands of other StumbleUpon users do so as well, although some use the feature less frequently than others.

To better understand what type of images are likely to be heavily stumbled you’ll need to first appreciate the different types of StumbleUpon users around. Here are three prototypical examples of StumbleUpon users who practice photo stumbling.

1. The Artistic Stumbler

CherishMe is a classic StumbleUpon user who combines stylistic imagery with unique commentary, which in her case is poetry. Her StumbleUpon blog is a work of art and is immensely popular with many StumbleUpon users. I myself am a fan of her work and there aren’t many like her.

2. The Humor Stumbler

AutoRave is my StumbleUpon username and my SU blog is similar to those of other stumblers, who generally use random pictures from a wide variety of sources. These photo stumbles are usually interspersed with text-only stumbles and they do not generally follow a pattern or theme. Pictures stumbled cover a range of topics from photography, art and web comics to funny pictures.

3. The Photography Stumbler

Mortal-Light is an example of a photography-oriented StumbleUpon user who focuses on stumbling images alone, very rarely including any text. The pictures stumbled are usually themed and in the case of Mortal-Light, her focus is on nature and urban landscapes.

Some of these photo stumblers are purists in the sense that they may not stumble your web page if there isn’t a picture they can incorporate into their blog.

Take a look at each of these StumbleUpon profiles and check out the profiles of other stumblers as well, so you’ll get a rough idea of how stumblers interact with images on webpages.

How to Use and Optimize Pictures for Stumble Upon

The process of optimizing your images and making them stumble-friendly isn’t difficult at all. Here are six steps you can take to prepare your images for StumbleUpon.

1. Allow Hotlinking Access to StumbleUpon

Yes, Photo stumblers are hotlinking your pictures. And yes, it does consume your bandwidth whenever someone photoblogs your image. I personally don’t mind being hotlinked by StumbleUpon users because the benefits outweigh the costs particularly so, when the bandwidth leeched is rather minimal.

The StumbleUpon user blogs/profiles do not see much traffic and only a small amount of bandwidth is used through photoblogging. This differs from traditional high traffic blogs, websites or forums which can steal a lot of bandwidth through the direct use of hotlinked images.

It is important to note that some StumbleUpon users do not practice photoblogging because they believe that hotlinking is in bad form and unfairly affects the website in question. I would recommend reading this detailed discussion on Photo blogging and hotlinking in the StumbleUpon forum as there’s a good deal of balanced information available on this topic.

I’m aware that some of you might run websites with low bandwidth limits or dislike hotlinking in general. Just be aware that if you disable hotlinking completely for your website, StumbleUpon users will not be able to stumble your images.

While this might be so, some StumbleUpon users will still thumbs up and stumble your webpage if they find it interesting enough.

2. Make Your Pictures the Right Size

This is the the most fundamental part of stumble image optimization. If your images are too big, Stumble Upon users will not be able to submit or photo stumble it, which defeats the purpose of using an image to attract stumble traffic.

Here’s an example of what happens when a particular image is too big to be stumbled (An error box will show up saying that the image is too large):

The key point here is to make sure that your images are not wider than 715 pixels.

3. Use Intriguing and Unique Images

Try to use an image that is not only relevant to your content but highly attractive. Flickr is a good place to look for images, as they have a large collection of pictures and also because you can easily embed the image into your webpage. Do remember to credit the image owner if necessary.

Alternatively, you can create your own unique pictures and graphics or make stylistic edits to specific pictures you have. These types of images are usually very well received by StumbleUpon audiences. Webcomics are a good example.

4. Leverage Another Platform: Use Flickr to Host Your Pictures

When your Flickr-hosted images are stumbled, StumbleUpon traffic isn’t directed to Flickr but to your specific webpage, even though your image is hosted on Flickr.

StumbleUpon has a feature called StumbleThru, which allows you to stumble within specific websites, Flickr being one of them. By uploading your images on Flickr and inserting a link back to your website, you are essentially creating another channel which will give your website more exposure to StumbleUpon users.

5. Create a List of Images Around a Theme

This method operates through a simple principle: The more images you have, the more likely you are to be stumbled.

A webpage with a collection of pictures is very likely to receive a lot more potential stumbles because users are able to selectively stumble the images they fancy.

Dismal World has a great example of a webpage that is perfect Stumble bait. Their list of unforgettable world photos has a coherent theme while featuring commentary which explains each picture.

This article was extremely well received by the StumbleUpon audience and received 148 reviews since it was first submitted on Jun 24th.

If you take a look at all the recent stumblers, you would have noticed that most of them stumbled different pictures within the list, once again supporting our theory that picture differentiation and themed images help to encourage more stumbles.

Oddee is another website that has a wildly popular collection of pictures. Titled 15 Unfortunately placed ads, this list of pictures feature a collection of images around the theme of misplaced advertisements.

Only submitted yesterday, it has already received 50+ reviews and reached the Digg frontpage as well. Creating a list of pictures will not only allow you to receive many stumbles; they can easily be cross-promoted on other social websites as well.

6. Add Commentary to Your Pictures

Adding comments on each specific image introduces the value of the images to visitors and personalizes it by making it conceptually unique. This has the possible benefit of encouraging more photo stumbles.

Photo Stumble Optimization Helps Your Website

As most of you will probably know, StumbleUpon can send a tremendous amount of traffic to your website and the consistent use of images fit well with the StumbleUpon audience, particularly because of the built-in photo blogging option.

These optimization methods are nothing devious because there’s really no way to trick a StumbleUpon user into thumbing your website. You can expand your network of StumbleUpon friends as much as you want but you can’t completely game StumbleUpon into giving you more traffic.

You can however, encourage a greater amount of organic, natural stumbles by simply making your website irresistible through optimized usage of attractive images.

How to Turn Visitors into Supporters of Your Website

Social media websites like Digg, Netscape and del.icio.us are bridges which connect your website with a large audience beyond your site’s normal reach. These websites will send visitors that can become future supporters of your site or brand.

Social media communities also expose your site to other webmasters or bloggers, the source of editorial links that will get you referral traffic and better search engine ranks.

Social websites are reliable sources of defensible traffic and should be cultivated as a means to increase your site reach and audience size.

The best way to achieve this is simply to consistently promote usage of a specific social website that is highly relevant to your site theme. This article will examine the methods which will allow you to do so.
Setting Your Social Media Objectives

First of all, determine what you want to gain from a social website. Are traffic or links your priority? Are you intent on getting more customers or subscribers?

The ideal scenario occurs when your audience promotes your content to social websites regularly on their own accord. You also want your site to be well received on these social platforms, in order to get the greatest exposure possible.

How to Make Your Site Social Media Friendly

There are several ways to develop a close relationship between your web site and the specific social community in question. Done correctly, these methods will encourage users to promote your site through social media communities.

• Pick the Right Social Platform. Choosing the right social websites is important because your website might not mesh well with every social media site out there. A tech-oriented website will do better on sites like Digg while politics is more strongly emphasized on Netscape. Experiment and find out which social communities are ideal for your content.
• Build a Power Social Profile. This involves participating actively in the specific website in order to build a respected social profile to promote specific content that are beneficial to your interests. This is a powerful method, although it is time consuming and requires much effort.

  Rand from SEOMoz on the influence of a prominent social profile:

  Once you’ve built up a profile that people recognize as a valuable source for information, you become more powerful in that community. Your bookmarks/articles/submissions/etc take on a greater value than the anonymous contributions of newbies.

  This mirrors the social structure of many web forums - big voices carry greater weight. The ultimate goal of this visibility is to have the power to influence - once you have a voice, marketing becomes a soft-sell, rather than a hard one.

• Social Optimize Your Webpages. This involves including voting, subscribing or bookmarking badges on your website, thereby allowing your users to take action on your content or support its ongoing presence on a social website.
• Create Targeted Content. The best way for your content to be well received in any social community is to know what sort of content the community likes. Spend time studying which type of content gets the most bookmarks, user comments or page views. Targeting one social website instead of many might be a good idea as well.
• Start Your Own Social Network. This method mainly pertains to larger sites that are able to leverage their strong audience base or reputation. Search Engine Land recently started Sphinn, a search marketing social news platform that successfully attracts new visitors while promoting their overall brand.

  Another example is Mashable, which has a social network that encourages readers to interact with each other or share photos and videos with the whole community.

Social Media Evangelism: Converting Visitors into Supporters

Not all of your readers know about these social websites so generating awareness of their existence or purpose should be a priority. While all the methods listed above do work, the best ways to encourage specific behavior is to evangelize or promote a specific social community on your site.

Singling out and writing about a social community adds value to your audience, particularly if the community in question focus on topics that are highly relevant to your site. Choose a social media channel that offers the greatest returns on investment, in terms of exposure generated for your website.

Here are the steps to take when encouraging greater usage or cohesion with a specific social website.

1. Pick one or two social media platforms that best fit your website.
2. Write about these social websites. This can be a long article or a short paragraph which introduces the purpose or theme of the social website. Focus on the benefits to your user and not the benefits for your website.
3. Place a link to the article prominently on your website. You can situate this on the sidebars of your blog. If you’re simply writing a brief introductory paragraph, you can locate this in the ‘About‘ section of your page.
4. Generate repeat awareness of the website by linking to your main article within other webpages. Optimize your site by encouraging/reminding users to use the website through buttons, badges or text links etc.

New visitors will arrive at your website and come across your specific article, which may convert them into new users of the social website. End result: A potential visitor that will act upon your content through the recommended social website.

It’s really that simple. Don’t assume that every new visitor to your site is aware of auxiliary social communities. By evangelizing a specific service, you are converting visitors into potential voters and bookmarkers who allow you to reach beyond your current demographic and audience base.

An Introduction to Defensible Traffic

What is Defensible Traffic? Simply put, defensible traffic is web traffic from sources other than search engines (or Google). These sources can come from offline marketing efforts, traditional media, an established audience base or other online websites.

The benefit of cultivating defensible traffic sources is that you will still receive visitors to your website even if changes in search engine or PayPerClick (PPC)algorithms make it increasingly difficult to get search traffic to your website.

JazzcatSEO has a nice definition of defensible traffic, one which contrasts PPC traffic with an established and well cultivated website.

Anybody with a basic knowledge of PPC and a bank account can buy traffic for their website. And if their account is big enough, they can steal your PPC traffic by paying more per click.

Therefore, the only way you can defend that traffic is to pay more per click and cut into your ROI.. On the other hand, a well-optimized site with carefully developed content, quality backlinks, good domain age, etc. that ranks well in the SERPs has a huge advantage over newer contenders in the same space.

It’s much easier to maintain traffic from such a site, because anybody who want to compete with you in that space will have to develop a site with more relevant backlinks or better content, which is a lot more difficult than simply upping the bid on their PPC dashboard.

Over relying in search engines means that your online revenue is in the hands of major search engines like Google or Yahoo. Matt McGee suggests that your online income and business shouldn’t be fueled by traffic sources you can’t control:

Google is constantly tweaking how it ranks pages, and if all your eggs are in Google’s basket, your business is operating at Google’s mercy. What if the next algorithm change isn’t friendly toward your site and the SEO tactics you use?

Whatever you do, don’t rely just on Google. A business plan that relies on free traffic from an outside source you don’t control is no business plan at all. Spread your eggs around. Changes will come — you can be sure of that.

In order to make your website into a reliable cashcow in the long run, you definitely need to consider establishing forward income stability, which requires you to plan ahead for contingencies while initiating strategies which expand your income sources beyond search traffic alone.

Sources of Defensible Traffic to Cultivate

While optimizing your website for search engines is important, it’s important to understand that the following sources of defensible traffic are important for long term growth and sustainability.

• Partnerships/advertising with websites in your niche.
• Off-line marketing in traditional ad media, word of mouth promotion etc.
• Bloggers and Webmasters within and outside of your niche
• Online communities like forums, bullentin boards (e.g. Craigslist)
• Social media, bookmarking and voting websites (e.g. Digg, Reddit, YouTube )
• RSS or newsletter subscribers
• Type-in traffic and Effective site branding

7 Ways to Use Microblogging Services for Traffic and Brand Exposure

Micro-blogging platforms like Twitter and Pownce allow you to write short text messages to be shared with friends or everyone.

These messages are usually less than 200 characters and can be transmitted via instant messagers, text messaging, email or through a web browser.

These microblogging services are fairly popular because they enable you to share information or personal updates with everyone, especially when you don’t have time to update your blog or personal site.

This allows you to keep in touch with a circle of friends who might be interested in what you are doing from time to time.


Seven Microblogging Tips to Get Traffic for Your Websites

1. Build a Strong Network of Friends

People will only receive your updates when they add you as a friend. Your main goal is to get as many people to befriend you as possible. The more friends you have, the bigger your network and the increased potential for secondary links or traffic.

One common way to get more friends is to go around adding everyone you come across. This brute force method is practiced by some and it will work because some users will befriend you, even if they don’t know who you are.

Bear in mind that this practice can be fairly irritating to most regular users of the micro-blogging service.

2. Synchronize Updates with your Website

Most microblogging services allow you to put badges or widgets on your site to show your latest updates and they might be useful for getting more followers. They can be particularly useful for first time visitors who reach your site through a search engine.

You can also set up your blog to send new blog posts as updates into your microblog.


3. Develop a Natural User Profile

Try to update with interesting stuff and make your account look like its actually written by a human instead of a auto-linking bot.

4. One Account Vs. Multiple Accounts

Recommend to focus on building one strong account because it requires too much work to establish several accounts. You can however, create an individual automated account/micro-blog for each website you own.

Sync your website with each specific micro-blog so that your new articles will show up as updates. This allows you to get traffic from a handful of users over time.

5. Cross Post Your Updates

If you have accounts in different micro-blogging platforms, you can choose to post to most of them simultaneously in order to save time. This can be done via a simple hack as outlined in this article.

6. Network with Other Users

Services like Twitter and Pownce allow you to send private messages to friends. Sending them a simple message about their updates only takes less than a minute and it’s a fast way to say hi and start a relationship.

There are a fair number of authority bloggers on these services and this is a great way to communicate with them directly.

7. Ask Questions for Information

If you already have a substantial number of friends following your updates, you can start posting questions to acquire information and recommendations on specific topics of interest.

Questions can also be asked to acquire feedback on your websites or a possible course of action.They are also a great way to generate interaction and responses from your network of friends and fans.

List of Micro Blogging Networks

1. Twitter

2. Jaiku

3. Pownce

4. Dukudu (German)

5. Frazr (French or German)

6. Zuosa (Chinese)

An Informative Guide to Google PageRank

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has written a terrific introduction to Google PageRank that deserves to be read by anyone who’s interested in learning the details behind how Page Rank (PR) actually works as well its relevance to your blog or website.

With most webmasters eagerly anticipating the upcoming PR update, this article dispels several unfounded myths and situates the focus on PR within a balanced link building/SEO strategy.

Written for both internet searchers and webmasters, Danny uses a large variety of official documents from Google to come up with various explanations which define PageRank and examine it’s relationship with search rankings.

The article also highlights the key differences between the actual internal PR and the “Toolbar” PR, which is what you see if you use Google Toolbar or the brilliant SearchStatus Firefox extension, a extraordinarily helpful SEO tool which I highly recommend.

Here is a excerpt from the article, on the difference between internal and toolbar PR:

Internal PageRank are the PageRank scores that Google uses as part of its ranking algorithm. Those scores are constantly being updated. In contrast, the PageRank scores that Google allows the world to see — Toolbar PageRank — is a snapshot of internal PageRank taken every few months.

The conclusion to Danny’s excellent writeup is also noteworthy because he brings out an important point that can be overlooked when building links for your website:

If you really want to know what are the most important, relevant pages to get links from, forget PageRank. Think search rank. Search for the words you’d like to rank for.

See what pages come up tops in Google. Those are the most important and relevant pages you want to seek links from. That’s because Google is explicitly telling you that on the topic you searched for, these are the best.

So if you’re trying to rank well for those lucrative keywords that help you make money, remember to not only buy relevant ads that send you strong referral traffic but also search optimized keyword links from similar websites in your niche.

While an attractive Page Rank will help you make more money from link selling, a more important long term strategy is to ensure that your website consistently receives organic search traffic, which you can monetize through on-site ads or affiliate recommendations.

8 Paid Advertising Models

8 Types of Paid Advertising Models for Your Website

Note that these are paid advertising channels and are not free promotional methods. I’ve included a brief comment on each advertising model, based on my personal experience and knowledge about them.

1. Pay-per-Click Advertising. Very targeted traffic from search engines. Excellent if you are promoting affiliate programs or building an email list through landing pages. Great if you are selling products on your website as well.

   Site-targeted advertising is very useful as well. PPC might not be necessary if you are primarily running a content website and already rank well for multiple relevant keywords.

2. Ezine or Newsletter advertising. Traffic is especially targeted if you can arrange for a personal recommendation within the newsletter/ezine by the owner. It can be hard to discern the value of the subscriber base so initially run test ads for short periods of time. Might not be useful to promote the same website several times on the same list as the members are largely the same.
3. Banner Advertising. Depending on the placement, banner ads are great for branding purposes. Clicking through rates and traffic is strongly related to banner design, tagline and the relevance of the site you are advertising on.
4. Feed-based Advertising. It’s slightly more difficult to measure Feed advertising’s ROI. Poor click through rates are usually the case for feed advertising although it can serve as branding scheme if one advertises on a site with a large subscriber base. There are various feed advertising networks which can help you to buy ad space on specific feeds.
5. Paid Reviews on Blogs. It’s important to pick quality bloggers with a decent amount of integrity, trust, reach and authority. Choosing a blogger that doesn’t do paid reviews very often in order to maximize the mental attention directed towards each review.

   The more objective the review, the better. Undisclosed reviews will generally work better but it is difficult to find high quality bloggers that don’t disclose.

6. Text Link Advertising. Useful because it can provide you with some SEO benefits. I would pick a high traffic site over one with a high PageRank anytime. Design your anchor text to encourage click throughs and ensure that your link is placed in a visible location and not somewhere like the footer.

   It’s usually better and cheaper to contact websites directly to inquire if they sell text links, instead of using a network.

7. Contests. This is not technically a form of paid advertising but can be considered so when you offer a substantial cash prize or product to generate buzz, links, traffic and new member signups. Marketing contests can also held whereby the winners will be determined according to the amount of traffic referred to your site.
8. Paid Syndication. This involves a sponsorship of a website, whereby your content will be syndicated and integrated into the framework of the site in question. Techmeme is an example of a meme tracker that offers paid syndication and displays sponsor posts on its sidebar and in-between regular content.

What’s the Best Way to Find Websites to Advertise On?

While you can easily find relevant websites through third party ad networks, highly recommend using the following method instead because it will guarantee higher referral traffic and greater brand exposure.

1. Make a list of the search terms/keywords relevant to your website’s theme.
2. Enter these keywords into search engines like Google and Yahoo
3. The best websites to advertise on are within the Top 30 search results
4. Contact each of these websites and inquire about advertising

Getting links from these related websites has the added benefit of improving your own search engine rankings, not to mention that you’ll save a considerable amount of money.

How to Get Repeat Visitors for Your Website

One important question to ask yourself when developing any new business idea or website is this: What’s going to make my visitors come back for more? Finding the answer to this question is essential for success on every level.

A long term profit strategy requires a solid understanding what drives your visitors to return to your website repeatedly. And what makes them want to recommend your website to others.

Think of it like a restaurant. Imagine visiting it for the first time. It’s quite easy to pinpoint what makes you want to return to it. Some of these factors include the taste of the food, the prices, quality of service, ambiance and the type of people who frequent the place as well. If it is crowded and exciting or quiet and dull.

When combined together, these elements make you decide whether or not to return for another visit. If you experienced bad food, horrible service and a high priced menu, you would probably not visit the restaurant again or recommend it to others.

If you had great food but bad service and reasonable prices, you might still return to the restaurant one or two more times, to satiate your culinary desires.

The Difficulty in Satisfying All Your Visitors or Customers

While you can clearly identify the factors which provoke you to accept or reject a restaurant, it is considerably more difficult to second guess the intentions of visitors who arrive in hordes daily to your website or online storefront.

How do they prioritize the factors which encourage a repeat visit? What makes them linger? What makes them click away? It’s essentially impossible to understand how every visitor thinks or feels about your site.

There will be some who find your website amazingly useful and others who will find incredibly dull and redundant. Everyone has different levels of knowledge and its difficult to consistently write for some and still please everyone else.

The means producing layers of information: primers for newbies, budget design services, popular souvenir products. Move up the scale and you’ll have handbooks for advanced users, design consultations and vintage collectors items.

Eventually the critical mass you’ve developed will allow you to split into smaller, specialized niches or fulfill the needs of specific customers through a specific section of your site. It’s easy to put up another sub-domain or directory to re-capture focus.

Developing an Idea into a Profitable Business Model

A great concept is only truly profitable when you have a game plan for getting return traffic, return customers and long term supporters. You can put out an idea and make a splashy launch to bait attention. But if that is all you have, you’re not going to make it lucrative in the long run.

Your competitor has survived for a reason. Find out why people repeatedly return to their website. Why they trust their brand. Everything your competitor has marks the bare minimum that you must achieve. But you must go further and top your competitor in order to stand out and turn a greater profit.

Ways to Get People To Revisit Your Website: A Checklist

This is a simple checklist because as I’ve mentioned earlier, no method is bullet proof and defensible enough against hundreds of new and shifting visitor perceptions.

User perspectives are constantly shifting as they absorb more information from your competitors or elsewhere in their personal lives.

1. Are your product or service prices competitive?
2. Is your site populated enough to encourage participation?
3. How does your site feel to 10 random people who have never visited it?
4. Have you made usability and customer value a main focus for your site?
5. What is the perceived quality of your product/content? Examine the feedback.
6. Are you providing information that is coherent with your search keywords?
7. Do you celebrate, flatter or please your customers through your site?
8. Are you providing open channels for complaints and feedback?
9. Are users encouraged to interact with one another through your site features?
10. Do you offer an online service or tool that cannot be replicated elsewhere?
11. Is information continuously updated to fulfill visitor desires and needs?
12. Does your website project a unique, familiar and identifiable voice?
13. Does your business fulfill its mission statement or promise to the public?

Successfully answering these questions would then provide you with a higher potential for attracting repeat traffic, attention and sales from visitors to your site.

BlueSense - Adsense Ready and SEO Wordpress Theme

A very fast loading and search engine optimized Adsense Ready Wordpress Theme, BlueSense is specifically designed for all types of niche websites and will suit a wide variety of content and user preferences.

Built for heavy monetization with Adsense, the entire theme’s colors are perfectly blended with Adsense units on both homepage and single post pages for a maximum click through rate.

Other classic features of this Adsense Ready Theme:

• Separate Ad Blocks with easy editing and insertion of Adsense code. These ad blocks can also be used to insert other types of advertisements as well.
• Ease of use and convenience. You just need to insert your Adsense publisher ID in the existing ad units and you’re ready to go. It only takes 20 seconds to set up BlueSense perfectly.
• Well blended link units within the horizontal menu bar attracts navigational-style clicks from most visitors.
• Optimized Ads on the single post page. This includes a 468 x 60 Banner across the top of the post, a wide 160 x 600 skyscraper beside the post and a 336 x 280 rectangle below the post.
• Adsense unit colors are already blended with blog link and text colors. No need to pick and match colors on your part.
• Search Engine Optimized and dynamic individual page titles, which places your keyword post titles before the blog name.
• Compatible with Wordpress 2.0+ and above.

Important User Notes

Remember to change the Publisher ID for the default Adsense units after you upload the theme! You’ll need to get your publisher id (e.g. pub-xxxxxx) and insert this in all the Adsense units, which are found in the following files:

For Single Post Pages:

• Single_bottom_adverts.php - (336 x 280 Rectangle)
• Single_top_adverts.php - (468 x 60 Banner)

For Link Unit in the Menu Bar:

• Header_adverts.php - (Link units)

Customizing the Header with your own Banner

To insert your own header image, you need to take the following steps:

1. Go to your stylesheet (style.css) and look for this “#header“. You should see the following code:

   padding-top: 0px;
   background: #ffffff
   height: 130px;

2. Insert this code (in bold): url(’header.jpg’) top center no-repeat; right after “background: #ffffff ” on the same line.
3. The new header section should look like this (The new code is highlighted in bold).:
   margin-bottom: 0px;
   margin-top: 0px;
   text-align: center;
   padding-top: 0px;
   background: #ffffff url(’header.jpg’) top center no-repeat;
   height: 130px;
4. The header image that you want to use must be uploaded to the same folder as the other theme files and should be named ‘header.jpg‘
5. The header image size should be 815 (width) x 130 (height) but you can easily change the height of the image.

An Adsense Ready SEO Wordpress Theme

This fast loading and easily customizable theme is built to accommodate heavy contextual ad monetization: Its very infrastructure is designed to direct maximum attention to Adsense ads while preserving as much focus as possible on your blog content.

Featuring built-in ad units with optimized placement and blending, ProSense’s broad design scheme makes it easily suitable for a wide variety of niche topics or content types.

A Guide to the Prosense Theme Features

Prosense was created with the aim of including several features which we knew most bloggers would find useful. One of these is the freedom to choose which type of ad units should be automatically displayed.

While designed to effortlessly incorporate a large amount of Adsense ads, ProSense allows you to have complete control over the amount of ads displayed and therefore is even suitable for bloggers who are not seeking to heavily monetize their blogs.

Here are some of the theme features, some of which are currently exclusive to ProSense:

• Separate and Distinct Ad Blocks. The use of distinct theme files for ad codes allows for easy editing and insertion of Adsense units. These ad blocks can also be used to insert other types of advertisements as well and are not solely limited to Adsense use.
• Multiple Ad Display Options. Unlike other Adsense Ready themes, ProSense allows you to choose between either banner or rectangle ads for the single post page, thus allowing you more flexibility when it comes to ad blending.
• Hassle-free convenience and ease of use. You’ll only have to insert your Adsense publisher ID in the default ad units and you’re done. It should only take a minute or two to set up ProSense perfectly.
• Integrated Ad placement on the homepage. Unlike most Adsense ready themes currently available, ProSense blends a 468 x 60 banner unit between the second and third post on the blog homepage.

  This enables you to display relevant ads to search visitors who arrive at your homepage, as they are more likely to scroll and scan through your posts.The inclusion of a well-blended horizontal link unit near the top of the homepage also attracts navigational-style visitor clicks.

• Highly Optimized Ad units on post pages. There are two types of ad blocks on both the top and bottom of the single post page. You can choose between using a 468 x 60 banner and 300 x 250 rectangle at the top of the post or a 468 x 60 banner and 336 x 280 large rectangle at the bottom of the post.

  The ability to designate and match different ad units is exclusive to ProSense and is currently not available for other Adsense Ready themes.

• Pre-blended Adsense unit colors. All Adsense unit colors are tweaked to match the blog’s link and background colors. There is absolutely no need for you to spend time picking the appropriate ad colors.
• Search Engine Optimized site structure. ProSense is built from good, clean code that validates well. The CSS positioning is written so that your blog content is prioritized in the source code as this may help to improve search engine crawling and ranking. Dynamic and descriptive title tags are also used for each blog page.
• Compatible with Wordpress 2.0+. ProSense has been tested with the latest 2.2 Getz version of Wordpress and no problems were experienced.
• Widget-Ready. If you’re a widget lover, you’ll be happy to know that Prosense allows you to easily install and use widgets to complement your content and advertising scheme.

Important User Notes

Please remember to change the Publisher ID for the default Adsense units after you upload the theme! You’ll need to insert your personal Adsense publisher id (e.g. pub-xxxxxx) in the various Adsense units that you decide to use.

All the ad units are found in the following theme files:

Single Post Pages:

• adsense_singlepost_top_square.php - 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
• adsense_singlepost_top_banner.php - 468 x 60 Banner
• adsense_singlepost_bottom_square.php - 336 x 280 Rectangle
• adsense_singlepost_bottom_banner.php - 468 x 60 Banner

Homepage:

• adsense_sidebar.php - 160 x 600 Skyscraper
• adsense_homepage_linkunit.php - 468×15_4 Link Unit
• adsense_homepage_banner.php - 468 x 60 Skyscraper

Alternate Color Schemes for ProSense

For those you would prefer a different color scheme, we’ve also provided Prosense in a clean blue or gray color combination so feel free to download these versions if they find them more to your liking.

Theme Support and Feedback

The theme is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license and requires you to keep the attribution links in the theme footer. Please do not remove them, if you modify the theme.

Theme support will be provided on this post itself so please leave a comment if you have any queries. Any feedback on the theme will also be much appreciated.

An Informative Guide to Google PageRank

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has written a terrific introduction to Google PageRank that deserves to be read by anyone who’s interested in learning the details behind how Page Rank (PR) actually works as well its relevance to your blog or website.

With most webmasters eagerly anticipating the upcoming PR update, this article dispels several unfounded myths and situates the focus on PR within a balanced link building/SEO strategy.

Written for both internet searchers and webmasters, Danny uses a large variety of official documents from Google to come up with various explanations which define PageRank and examine it’s relationship with search rankings.

The article also highlights the key differences between the actual internal PR and the “Toolbar” PR, which is what you see if you use Google Toolbar or the brilliant SearchStatus Firefox extension, a extraordinarily helpful SEO tool which I highly recommend.

Here is a excerpt from the article, on the difference between internal and toolbar PR:

Internal PageRank are the PageRank scores that Google uses as part of its ranking algorithm. Those scores are constantly being updated. In contrast, the PageRank scores that Google allows the world to see — Toolbar PageRank — is a snapshot of internal PageRank taken every few months.

The conclusion to Danny’s excellent writeup is also noteworthy because he brings out an important point that can be overlooked when building links for your website:

If you really want to know what are the most important, relevant pages to get links from, forget PageRank. Think search rank. Search for the words you’d like to rank for.

See what pages come up tops in Google. Those are the most important and relevant pages you want to seek links from. That’s because Google is explicitly telling you that on the topic you searched for, these are the best.

So if you’re trying to rank well for those lucrative keywords that help you make money, remember to not only buy relevant ads that send you strong referral traffic but also search optimized keyword links from similar websites in your niche.

While an attractive Page Rank will help you make more money from link selling, a more important long term strategy is to ensure that your website consistently receives organic search traffic, which you can monetize through on-site ads or affiliate recommendations.

20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank

Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

20 Ways to Increase your Alexa Rank

Here is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank. Most of these tips are derived from several fellow webmasters I know who claimed to have derived positive results through their experiments with the Alexa Rankings.

Some of the other tips were derived articles and sources, which I have duly referenced at the end of this post.

Do these tips work? According to some, yes they definitely do work. But do note that most of them require active effort of some sort and hence, they will work as long as long as you are consistently performing specific actions.

To increase your Alexa rank in the long run, I would highly recommended that one focus on developing quality content which attracts and maintains a large audience instead of purely focusing on artificially increasing your Alexa Rank.

Great link-worthy content will leads to an natural increase in site traffic and is an excellent way to passively increase your Alexa rank.

It is important to emphasize that you should devote most of your efforts in growing your site audience alongside integrated implementation of any of the following tips below.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.
3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.
4. Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.
5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.
6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.
7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.
8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.doshdosh.com . Replace doshdosh.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.
10. Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.
11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.
12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.
13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.
14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.
15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.
16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.
17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.
18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.
19. Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.
20. Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using with caution.

Resources on Alexa Rank

Several of the tips listed above were taken from Aaron Wall’s article on Alexa Ranking. This post by Aaron will also give you some insight on Alexa’s webmaster bias.

A lower Alexa number means a greater level of traffic, and the traffic drops off logarithmically. You can fake a good Alexa score using various techniques, but if it shows your rankings in the millions then your site likely has next to no traffic.

Alexa by itself does not mean that much, but it simply provides a rough snapshot of what is going on. It can be spammed, but if a site has a ranking in the millions then it likely has little traffic.

Peter Norvig writes about Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design. He examines some problems with Alexa as a traffic measuring tool:

But one bias they don’t really comment on is the selection bias: the data would be good if it truly represented a random sample of internet users, but in fact it only represents those who have installed the Alexa toolbar, and that sample is not random.

The samplees must be sophisticated enough to know how to install the toolbar, and they must have some reason to want it. It turns out that the toolbar tells you things about web sites, so it is useful to people in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry, so it overrepresents those people.

Google’s Matt Cutts compares his website against Ask.com and explains why his website enjoys such an impressive Alexa ranking:

One possible source of skewing in Alexa data is a bias toward webmaster-y sites. Alexa shows how popular web sites are, so it’s natural that webmasters install the Alexa toolbar.

Some do it just so that their normal day-to-day visits around the web (including their own site) are added to Alexa’s stats. The net effect is that webmaster-related sites are going to look more important to Alexa

Marketing Scoop has some tips on improving the Alexa Rank. (Thanks Beth!)

A very long thread on Digital Point which sees webmasters having a discussion on how Alexa Ranks can be gamed or manipulated through scripts and auto-surfs. Worth a read.

There you have it… twenty ways to boost your Alexa Rank and increase your site’s monetization potential.