Make Money Online: February 2007

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Link Popularity And The Effect On Search Engine Rankings

The amount of quality links pointing to your website determines the popularity of your websites with many of the search engines, so it is very important to obtain quality links. However, you need to know where your website stands in the search engine rankings in order to see how much work you need to do to increase and maintain that popularity rating.

Another way to build links is through free content creation or free article submissions. When creating your website you will need to fill your site with fantastic content and make updates so other sites want to link to your site. Search engines are now smart enough to know that content is related, so, links from relevant sites are more important then links from sites which are irrelevant.

The assumption still is that if a site has valuable content or services to offer that other webmasters will link to that particular site. Most importantly, work on your content for natural linking from other websites. It is hard to get one way links but if you have good content that goes far beyond other sites people will want to link to you, it is still harder to get one way links than it is to get reciprocal links.

Since page rankings is very important to the major search engines, and links influence this, it is important to create a game plan on how to build links to your site. A well laid out plan will help in establishing the overall link plan and strategy to drive traffic to your site. As time goes on your site will grow and your page rank will get better and you will have better chances securing quality links. As you website continues to grow and build in popularity you will need to quality links from other sites pointing to your site to keep your rankings. Link building never stops, if you stop link building and other sites stop linking to you, you could possibly lose your ranking on the search engines.

The amount and quality of links you need will depend on the competitiveness of the keyword phrases for which you are optimizing. If you put in the time and work on your link building efforts over time you will see results in the long run.

Article directories work with many different partners and by writing articles your articles can show up on many different sites. Your best bet in these times is to write articles and submit it to article directories. By using article submission services and directory submission services you are able to increase your ranking to your website, by submitting you are creating one way links back to your site.

Using automated tools are not link farms, the reason for this is because you decide who you want to trade links with each and every week. Continue building quality links and you will see that in time it will all pay off.

Getting the one-way link is more difficult to obtain than reciprocal links, but the pay off will come if you get solid long-term links and you will see the search engine ranking results increase.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Increase Search Engine Rankings Using These Easy Tricks

So you have a ranking in a search engine but it's not quite what you expected, right? Well there are a few tips for ranking higher and I'm going to share those with you today so listen up.

Rank Booster #1 Increase Your Reciprocal Links

This is a time tested approach and it works in both Directories such as Yahoo! and also in Spider Search Engines such as Google.

What you do is setup a link trading directory and make categories just like a mini Yahoo! except you have them all relate to your market. This provides keyword density and it also gives your link popularity a big boost.

But please be warned that if you just go and get any links you can (i.e. untargeted links) you will be penalized rather than rewarded in your rankings.

It's much better to get just a few high ranking link partners verses hundreds of unrelated and untargeted ones.

Rank Booster #2 Add More Content

This is a great technique that also works in both Directories and Spider Search Engines. By adding more content you will keep people who click over to your site there longer and this gets your ranking up in the Directories such as Yahoo! because they track how long a visitor stays at your site. If they click their back button then you will be shown as a site which doesn't help the visitor which will decrease your rank.

You will get a higher ranking on the Spider Search Engines such as Google because they spider through your whole site seeing how many pages there are and this increases your ranking because you have more information there for there visitors.

Both Directories and Search Engines love content and track how long people are staying at your pages which in turn also increases or decreases your rank based on how long they stay. If they stay longer, your rank goes up. If they click the back button immediately, your rank goes down.

Rank Booster #3 Improve Your Sites Load Time

This is another that works with both Spider Search Engines and Directories. This will improve your ranking in Directories because it will keep more of the visitors that click over to your site there longer. Internet users want information and they want it now. If your site loads like molasses then they are going to leave. Directories track how long a visitor stays at your site and rank you accordingly. If a visitor leaves immediately then you're rank goes down because your site was tagged as "not useful".

It will improve your ranking in Spider Search Engines because the spiders check for load time and load speed is part of the ranking system when they calculate relevance of a site.

Rank Booster #4 Improve Your Keyword Density

This one only works for Spider Search Engines. The reason is because Directories only review & list you once so you can change your keyword density after they list you but the review and placement of your site has already happened.

It works great in Spider Search Engines because they continually spider your site analyzing & updating your listing according to what it finds.

If you need a better listing then utilize these strategies in helping you boost your rank today. They work and although they all take time, you will see a difference.

These are much easier tactics than you will find in big, complicated SEO courses and there's a good chance that they may just bump your position up.

Get to work and start using them now.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Web Site Submission – What Are the Benefits?

Some people will tell you that submitting your site to a search engine is a difficult, time consuming task and has limited benefits. Not true. Web site submission is an important way to accelerate the discovery of your website. Moreover, it’s not as difficult as some make it out to be.

First, let’s look at the benefits. It’s easy. Forrester Research, a national research firm that studies consumer behavior, recently determined that 81% of consumers use a search engine to find the products or services they want. So the benefit is easy to understand: 4 out of 5 consumers look at a search engine first. If you’re not on a search engine, kiss of 81% of actively inquiring consumers and take a chance that they’ll find you some other way.

Second, what’s it take to do a search engine submission? Some will tell you it takes hours and hours of near-death boredom to submit your site to the several thousand sites around the web. This is both true and false. The false part is that there are only three general purpose search engines that matter: Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search. Sites like Ask Jeeves, Netscape, AOL and Altavista all source many of their results from these three sites. The true part is that there are hundreds and hundreds of country-specific sites and hundreds and hundreds of language-specific sites also. On top of that there are tens of thousands of special web-site, vertical search engines. To submit to all of these would certainly make web site submission a long and tedious process.

As a result, most people will focus on the big three, and then cherry-pick through specialty sites that are important to their marketing. There are benefits to web site submission and not least is that it’s fairly easy to do. Simply package up your site and submit it directly to a search engine. There no more to it than that.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Secrets To Getting Traffic With Internet Video

Internet Video has been around for quite a while now but its only with increasing broadband usage that a lot of people are watching videos online. With dial-up connections video can take a while to download so its not surprising that video didn’t really start to catch on until two things occurred.

First - broadband internet became common and affordable. I pay about $35 per month versus $22 I used to pay for dial-up... and I get a lot more done with my online time with broadband.

Second - Free video hosting is widely available. When Google purchased YouTube for an unheard of $1.65 billion dollars, it became clear that video was going to be the next big thing on the net... and Google was planning to make sure it played out that way.

Thousands if not millions of people are watching online videos every day. The most popular videos feature celebrities and politicians doing dumb things, scatological humor, tasteless jokes, satire, and girls... or a combination of these things.

For legitimate internet marketers working to get website traffic making these sorts of videos is not such a great idea unless your target market is the young male demographic that watches a lot of lowbrow video content.

The most direct way to get traffic to your website with video is to make a commercial that tells people about your product or service in a friendly, informative way. Uploading this video to one or more free video servers like YouTube or Google video, tagging it with appropriate keywords will get you a little bit of traffic on the video websites themselves. Try to tag your videos with keywords than people interested in your product might search for - if you can’t think of any, you have some research to do.

Videos get picked up by search engines fairly quickly and often rank well in “organic searches”, so if your video is tagged with keywords that get searched for but aren’t too competitive, you will get some traffic from the big search engines too.

The good news is that the software and equipment for making your own videos shouldn’t run more than a few hundred dollars. But undoubtedly the most challenging part of the process is writing a script with a strong call to action. I watch late-night television these days just for the infomercials - they used to be annoying but now I find them inspirational.

I don’t have the space here to explain all the details of how to get traffic with video. Let’s just say that studying the free video hosting sites like YouTube will yield some clues as to how other people are using video to get traffic, me included.

Get in the game with video now, its only going to get bigger.

Google Adsense: The Easy Way to Make Money Online

A few years ago, no one had ever heard of Google.

Today, it is a multi-billion dollar company that is used by just about everybody.

While Google is raking in billions of dollars from their own advertising, there are millions of people across the globe receiving checks every month straight from Google. And anybody can do the same.

Google makes its money by selling advertising. That's a no brainer. With billions of users, everybody wants to advertise on Google. However, there are so many advertisers that are wanting to place their ads on Google that the company actually runs out of room to put them all. There are more ads waiting to be run than there are searches every day. Because advertisers pay per click, Google naturally wants to show as many ads as possible.

That's where every day internet users like you and I come in ... and can profit.

Because of the mass amount of ads that Google receives every single day, they pay internet webmasters and bloggers to post their ads. When internet users do this, and their readers click on the ads, the webmasters get paid. Here's an example:

Advertiser X sells insurance. Advertiser X pays $1.00 per click to advertise on Google. John Q allows Google to place ads for Advertiser X on his blog. When a user reads John Q's blog and clicks on Advertiser X's ad, Google pays John Q half of Advertiser X's cost (that is, 50 cents).

What all of this means to you is that you can start making money off of Google Adsense immediately by doing no extra work. You can place these ads in your blog, your online articles, your web site, newsletters, or any other pieces of information that is viewed by many people.

Today, there are blogs and websites that get thousands of visitors every day. If webmasters were just to add the simple Google Adsense code into their page, they could (and many do) pull in hundreds of dollars a day doing absolutely nothing differently.

The great thing about Adsense is that it is extremely easy to set up. Instead of setting up a campaign to sell advertising on a site, one could simply set up an Adsense account and see ads listed immediately. If the traffic is being created, Adsense can create the revenue.

To get started using Google Adsense, go to www.adsense.google.com and sign up. It's free, and you can be making money instantly.

It's a no brainer!

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

How to Get More Traffic to Your Web Site

It doesn’t take long to realize that making your web site was the easy part. Now, you’ll need visitors; you have to get more traffic to your web site. Here are a few suggestions for doing just that.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Make sure you have access to your web site statistics. No point in doing all kinds of promotional activities unless you can measure the effect of doing them.

Test different web promotional methods. Set up a schedule over the next six months of doing some specific promotions to get more traffic to your web site. Consider trying some of the following:

An email promotion that drives responses to your site.

Conventional advertising that drives responses to your site.

Advertise on the web with banner ads on appropriate sites.

Revise the keywords on in your meta tags and your content and resubmit to key search engines.

Initially, try each of these things separately in intervals of every six weeks. Carefully monitor your web statistics or web responses for each method. This should give you some idea of what works well and what doesn’t. As you come up with new promotional ideas, test them in the same way. Obviously the best strategy is to do more of what works well, and less of what doesn’t!

Keep careful records of web site traffic. Traffic is dynamic. That means: it changes. Keep careful records of total traffic to your site including specific traffic to each of the site’s main pages. Eventually, you’ll zero in on the best ways to get more traffic to your web site.

Monday, February 5, 2007

Link Popularity And The Effect On Search Engine Rankings

The amount of quality links pointing to your website determines the popularity of your websites with many of the search engines, so it is very important to obtain quality links. However, you need to know where your website stands in the search engine rankings in order to see how much work you need to do to increase and maintain that popularity rating.

Another way to build links is through free content creation or free article submissions. When creating your website you will need to fill your site with fantastic content and make updates so other sites want to link to your site. Search engines are now smart enough to know that content is related, so, links from relevant sites are more important then links from sites which are irrelevant.

The assumption still is that if a site has valuable content or services to offer that other webmasters will link to that particular site. Most importantly, work on your content for natural linking from other websites. It is hard to get one way links but if you have good content that goes far beyond other sites people will want to link to you, it is still harder to get one way links than it is to get reciprocal links.

Since page rankings is very important to the major search engines, and links influence this, it is important to create a game plan on how to build links to your site. A well laid out plan will help in establishing the overall link plan and strategy to drive traffic to your site. As time goes on your site will grow and your page rank will get better and you will have better chances securing quality links. As you website continues to grow and build in popularity you will need to quality links from other sites pointing to your site to keep your rankings. Link building never stops, if you stop link building and other sites stop linking to you, you could possibly lose your ranking on the search engines.

The amount and quality of links you need will depend on the competitiveness of the keyword phrases for which you are optimizing. If you put in the time and work on your link building efforts over time you will see results in the long run.

Article directories work with many different partners and by writing articles your articles can show up on many different sites. Your best bet in these times is to write articles and submit it to article directories. By using article submission services and directory submission services you are able to increase your ranking to your website, by submitting you are creating one way links back to your site.

Using automated tools are not link farms, the reason for this is because you decide who you want to trade links with each and every week. Continue building quality links and you will see that in time it will all pay off.

Getting the one-way link is more difficult to obtain than reciprocal links, but the pay off will come if you get solid long-term links and you will see the search engine ranking results increase.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Finding the Number of Backlinks to Your Site

One of the measurements of your website's popularity is the number of backlinks that point to it. A backlink is a link on another website that links to a page on your site.

To measure this, you need a tool to tell you the number of your backlinks that are out there on the Net. Well, the tools are free if you know where to look for them.

Using Yahoo to Find the Number

If you want to use Yahoo to find your number, enter a search in Yahoo in the following format replacing "your-website-name.com" with the website name on which you want a banklink count.

linkdomain:www.your-website-name.com -site:www.your-website-name.com

There is a space between the first ".com" and the "-site". Your search will not work without it.

Look at the top of the resulting search results page where Yahoo will conveniently tell you how many links it has for your site.

Using Windows Live Search to Find the Number

To find what Windows Live Search knows about your site, go to Windows Live Search and enter the same search string that you used in Yahoo above. The results do not tell you the number of links, but it will tell you the number of pages it returned. Multiply the number of links per search results page by the number of pages and you get a rough estimate of the number of links.

The link for Windows Live Search is http://search.live.com/.

Using Google to Find the Number of Backlinks to a Page

I have not found a way to use Google to find all the links to websites. However, you can find the links to a particular web page by going to Google and entering the following search term (replace "the-name-of-your-webpage.htm" with the exact name of the web page in question):

link:www.the-name-of-your-webpage.htm

(There are no spaces in the above search string).

Remember that these backlinks enhance your website's rating with the search engines.

Page Rank and Backlinks

Another quick tip on backlinks ... The higher the page rank of the page where the backlink to your site is located, the more credible that link is considered by the search engines.

Some sites that have high page rank are selling the right to publish backlinks on the site. Google says that it does not allow this, but it has to prove that this is happening so the practice continues. If you want first hand proof, go to http://www.buy-selltextlinks.com/.

Another site that has an handy tool for evaluating backlinks is

http://www.build-reciprocal-links.com/backlink_checker_tool.html This tool will tell you the links, the page rank, and Alexa rank of each page containing your backlinks.

With these tools, you can chart the growth of your backlink count and measure the success of your marketing plan for promoting your website.

How To Be Sure Of Getting Listed In Web Directories

Adding your site to various web directories is perhaps the cheapest way of getting inbound links. Due to the nature of directories, the links are often of fairly good relevance. If you want your site to get listed, there are some things you should do, and even more you shouldn’t do.

To get your site listed in as many directories as possible, you need to think about why they would want to list you. If you have a high quality site, chance is higher to get listed, but if your niche is popular, this might not always do the trick. Many directory owners find them selves with hundreds of submissions every day, it’s hard to keep up. When faced with piles of sites to review, it’s only natural to try to speed up the process. They don’t have enough time to spend, to give every site a fair chance. To improve your odds of getting listed, your site should impress – or at least be of good quality – even at a first glance.

This includes having a nice, clean design – not a clutter of banners and ads, no broken links and, in my opinion, no overuse of testimonials. If you have a site and/or products of high quality, you shouldn’t have to write about it, but yet sites literally made up of testimonials are fairly common.

Choose the best category for your website.

Be sure to take a moment or two to really find the most appropriate category for your site. Don’t submit to a parent category if a more detailed page would be more fitting. The potential loss in PR will be more than compensated for by the high relevance in the more detailed category.

Reciprocate whenever possible.

Although many directories offer free submissions without reciprocal links, they – as any webmaster – also appreciate links. If you have link pages, you should try to reciprocate even if it takes a while longer. If you are submitting a web directory – or if your site is mainly consistent of links – reciprocating is pretty much a must at most directories.

Don’t submit all your sites at once

If you are running multiple sites of similar nature, submitting them all at once may seem too much for any webmaster reviewing them. Often the task of reviewing submissions can be lengthy, seeing virtually the same content on five sites will increase the importance of high quality sites.

Don’t submit all your sub-pages

If a directory allows deep linking – which is very rare for free submissions – it will almost always state it in the submission guidelines. If you do not see it, don’t bother submitting each and every sub-domain you can think of, it will only make your main URL less likely to be included.

No keyword stuffing

Adding to many keywords in the Title-field is an almost certain way of not getting your site listed. Stick to the official title, or small variations of it. Try to alter the description of your website if you submit it to many directories, to add some variation to your targeted keywords.

If you consider all these factors before submitting your sites to web directories, your chances for inclusion will increase, making it far easier to gain link popularity.