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11 February 2006
I love Google AdWords. It brings me traffic that makes me money. I have been using it for more than 18 months now. During this time, Google has constantly made tweaks and changes that has made it more or less difficult to drive traffic. Competition has increased tremendously but it is still quite possible and feasible to get cheap traffic (under $0.10 per click).I like to constantly tweak my ads and try new ad texts and keywords. There is no such thing as a perfect AdWords campaign and testing, tweaking and tracking is the way to optimize the value of your AdWords campaigns. However, I have been having problems with AdWords lately. Google seemed to accept the changes I made very quickly, but recently it is taking days for the changes I made to take effect. On two occasions my new ads stayed unapproved for one whole week before I emailed the AdWords support. Maybe I am not one of the big spenders, but waiting days for ad approval makes it much more difficult to optimize the campaigns. Support has responded within reasonable time limits (usually a day or two). My other problem is with Google’s minimum bid price. I started advertising on a keyword that only has 6 advertisers. The keyword is a high traffic one. The keyword is a broad match and thus the CTR is very low. The initial bid price was 10 cents. After running my ad for a few days, it turned out that this keyword converts very well into sales. Google took notice of that because I have conversion tracking and Google Analytics enabled. In response, Google upped the minimum bid price to $5! Five bucks for a click that cost me 10 cents just hours ago. If you discover some underused high converting keywords don’t be too quick to rejoice. Google will most probably skyrocket the minimum bid price. It happened to me and a friend of mine.
04 February 2006
I would like to share a very effective content building strategy with you. It can bring you search engine traffic and profits much faster than you would expect from brand new sites.Before I share the specific strategy with you, I want to say something important about Content Building. So listen up. Quality Content Building is the most important SEO strategy. Most people don’t consider Content Building to be a part of SEO, but I disagree. To me, SEO is anything that helps you get more organic search engine traffic and Content Building helps tremendously, especially with Google. Now let me ask you a question: consider two sites that are of the same age, the same link popularity, keywords etc. everything being equal, except that one of the sites has 10 times more content. How much more traffic will the bigger site get in the next few months? 10 times more? Sorry, you are wrong. It will get much more than 10 times the traffic of the smaller site, if you do it right. I will talk about the specific reasons in an upcoming SEO book that I am writing at the moment. The book will also discuss the recommendations that I will lay out in this article. The strategy is simple. Team up with 2, 5, 10 or whatever other trusted people that have good knowledge in the chosen field. Start building a content site and share the profit. Consider this fact. If you write one good article per week, you will end up with 52 articles in a year. If 5 people write one good article per week, you will end up with 260 articles in a year. That is a tremendous leverage for getting lots of natural links and getting traffic from Google. What kind of articles? Long articles will always outperform short articles for SEO, conversions, getting natural links etc. Long articles can and will rank for much more keyword combinations. Long quality articles can impress your visitors way better and make them want to link to you. Most of the articles that get linked to for years are high quality, long and comprehensive articles on a given topic. Posting short, controversial, flamy or newsworthy articles in a blog can get you links short-term, but in-depth long articles covering some specific topic will get linked to long-term. Treat the articles as sales letters. Make them long, interesting, in-depth. Start with a catchy title etc. Focus on content, not keywords. Trust me, long in-depth articles, covering the full aspects of a topic will outperform short articles any time. Don’t break your articles into smaller ones. Doing so has the only advantage of getting more keyword rich title tags, but long articles will still outperform the short ones. How to split the profit? That is the easy part. Every author can place his AdSense, YPN code on his articles (that is a good incentive to write more articles). The same can be done with AdSense channels. Profit from other sources can be split in any way you like. One person can take care of webmastering and SEO. All members of the team can post at forums and blogs with links back to the shared-profit-site. All members can actively monitor forums for questions about the field, hot news etc. and write about them etc.etc. Teaming up has a great leverage advantage that will easily outperform the competition. How will a single person produce more content, links and buzz about a single site? It is impossible.
22 January 2006
You’ve probably heard about the new SEO contest revolving about ranking for the keyphrase v7ndotcom elursrebmem. Let me ask you a question: what is the most interesting thing about this new SEO contest? No, it is not the $4000 1st place prize.The target keyphrease v7ndotcom elursrebmem is pretty darn interesting. Why? Because it is a topical query (hot topic). Topical queries are queries that suddently start to get searched for way more than before. I bet there are more than enough people who regularly check the top rankings of the contest query, which in the eyes of Google is a sudden increase (from zero searches). That IS a topical query – hot topic. Also when the number of documents containing a query suddenly increase (as in our case) – this indicates a topical query. So what? Google’s patent Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data has some interesting information about topical queries influencing the ranking of documents. The 2 major points are: 1. Google may score documents (sites, pages) associated with topical query higher! 2. Google’s anti-link spam detection is less sensitive to topical queries! How many people SEO for topical queries? Very few. Webmasters are fighting mostly for non-topical queries. In my opinion, all the post-seo-contest-analysis articles that are going to pop are going to be worthless and won’t apply to the real world (mostly non-topical queries). But that is not the end of the story. Based on the above information from Google’s paper, we can actually take advantage of topical queries - simply by regularly including content rich in topical queries! Consider this blog entry of mine. I used the topical keywords in the title. Also, all my blog and article pages list the latest blog entries (they list the title which includes the topical query). According to the patent, some or all of my pages can get higher rankings. This in turn according to the patent can further push the rankings up by getting my site ranked in the top 30 for more queries. According to the patent, it is a very good idea to regularly include content about current hot topics. How to do it? - write about current hot topics in your industry in articles / blogs - include a list of the latest articles / blog entries on as many pages as you can - include topical keywords in the titles - at times when your site is associated with a hot topic, you can be slightly more aggressive with link building Here are a few more examples of SEO specific topics that were hot no so long time ago – Google’s Florida Update, Google Analytics, Yahoo Publisher Network etc.
17 January 2006
If you have ever stopped to think about your online / offline money making strategies, you have probably wondered how to structure your time / efforts into your business. It is extremely important how efficiently you spend your time. I have been thinking about this issue lately. In my opinion, the two most important factors are: short-term vs long-term revenue streams and the daily / weekly time needed to run your long-term revenue streams.What is a short-term and a long-term revenue stream? Let’s say you are a web designer. When you design a site for a client, you get paid let’s say $500. That’s not too bad. But that’s a short-term revenue stream. You are investing your time into one-time paying projects. How about making 100 pre-designed website templates and selling them on your site? You can sell these for years! That is a long-term revenue stream. You are probably very good with Photoshop? Then why not write and sell a Photoshop guide ebook? You write it once, and sell it for years to come (you’ll need to update it only when new Photoshop versions come out). Do you now get the difference? Every minute you put into short-term one-time paying projects is a wasted minute. Why not invest your time into projects that will bring in revenue for years to come? I decline job offers almost daily both online and offline. I have absolutely no interest in coding scripts for others, because these are all one-time paying projects. One-time paying projects are needed when you are low on cash. In such cases, you’ll need to take one-time paying projects while you are concurrently working on the long-term projects. I personally don’t think I can get rich doing one-time projects, be it as a programmer or a fitness coach. Most of my friends are content working for other companies. Unless I am very low on cash, I will never work for a monthly / weekly / hourly whatever salary. Most of the time you invest, should be invested in activities that help long-term. There are many tactics that work long-term. Writing Articles / Content Once you write an article, it will bring you revenue for a long-time. If you submit the article to directories, it will probably get published/reused (in exchange for a link to your site) for a long time. If you put it on your site, it will attract search engine traffic for a long time. InfoProducts (EBooks, DVDs, Videos, Audios) This is a great business. You write an ebook once and sell it for a long time. You shoot a seminar you gave, and you can sell it online for years. You get the idea? Software Selling software is my major income stream. I spent a year writing it, and have been selling it for close to 3 years now. PPC campaigns Optimizing your AdWords / PPC campaigns takes a few months. Once you’ve found what works, once you have optimized the ad copy, once you have made the campaign as profitable as possible and you are now just running the campaigns and they bring in revenue long-term. Viral Strategies You can write free tools / scripts that can get you links long-term. My SEO-Board script constantly generates links for its site. I can divert this traffic to my related websites. You can write a free ebook / report with give-away rights once and you will benefit long-term (links, traffic etc.) The second important factor is what amount of time / money you’ll need in order to maintain / run the long-term revenue streams. If it is a content site, you’ll need to pay the hosting and domain name. If it is an ebook or software, you’ll need to answer emails (something you can outsource). If it is a free script, you will need to make improvements over time. For PPC campaigns you will need to spend time monitoring the success of the campaigns. The really great thing about running profitable long-term businesses is that you can outsource most support. After all, the rich make money long-term, while at the same time exploiting the poor who work for them for short-term per hour / month whatever salary. If you want to make money and have time for family and tequilas, you may need to reconsider your time-spending strategy. Invest your time in long-term profits.
15 January 2006
I am restarting the blog from scratch with a new script that I wrote and a slightly different blog format. Here are the changes:1. No Comments, Please. I got sick of deleting spam messages. I researched the “does my blog need comments enabled?” question and I now think it is better to run my blogs without comments. Less spam and a bigger chance for someone linking to specific posts. 2. Categories are dead. Long live tags. Tags are great for attracting traffic from sites like technorati.com. I am organizing all my blogs around tags. If you are not familiar with the concept run a search on google with keywords like “blogging tags versus categories”. 3. A different navigation structure Navigation now revolves around tags and I have also introduced latest posts, related posts and top rated posts (you can rate my posts). I hope you will find it much easier to find stuff when the blog gets more content. 4. Use my own script I wrote a tiny blog script that perfectly suits my needs in less than 5 days. That gives me a lot of freedom in customizing the hell out of it. I am also releasing a web development blog, and honestly, I consider it shameful to not run it on my own blog script. Every time I start digging the documentation of wordpress or any other script and I get nervous. I am tired of looking at someone else’s code. I am used to my coding style and am now using my own blog script, affiliate tracking script and forum script. In the future, I will implement archives. Now, the bad news. I am too lazy to import the old posts. That also falls perfectly in love with my tendency to abandon old stuff and restart from scratch. Also, the blog is moved from blog.seoguide.org to www.seoguide.org/blog/ The urls of the rss/atom feeds have also changed. Your comments are welcomed. Oh, I forgot that you can’t comment on my blog any more. Pages: First Prev 1 2 |
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