Monday, October 12, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
Managing Comments
How do I manage comments?
Answer
TypePad gives you powerful controls for managing reader comments posted to your weblog. You can establish who posts comments and make sure all commenters are authenticated for security purposes. You can also control when and how comments are published by Setting Your Weblog Comment and TrackBack Preferences. To enable the comments feature, see Enabling Comments on Your Posts.
To manage comments, click the Comments link from the Home or Weblogs tab to go to the List Comments page.
List Comments Screen
The List Comments screen displays all comments that have been posted by readers to your weblog. Comments are arranged in a list that details:
Status - the status of the comment indicated by an icon. A comment is unpublished when the icon is displayed. The icon indicates the comment has been published.
Comment - title of reader's comment which is taken from the first few words of the comment.
Author - name of reader who made comment. If the author has been authenticated, an icon appears next to the name.
On Post - post for which reader made a comment.
Date - date of comment.
The number of comments displayed on the page can be 5, 20, or 50. The default setting is 20 which can be changed by clicking the Change link at the end of the page and clicking 5 or 50.
Organizing Comments by Filters
To organize your comments:
Click the Change link to the right of Filter to open the drop-down menu.
Choose a filter option from the drop-down list box. You can filter by Email, Author, or IP Address.
Type a filter value in the text box next to the filter option drop-down list box. For example, if you want to see all comments posted by genericuser@isp.com, type genericuser@isp.com.
Click Filter. Your comments list will re-appear according to your filter options. To clear your results, click Reset or click Change to select a new Filter.
Performing Management Tasks
You can perform management tasks directly from the List Comments screen by clicking individual items from the comments list. A task shortcut drop-down menu appears with customized options depending on the list item.
Below are task details for each comment list header:
Comment
The comment details appear, including an excerpt of the comment and its status (published or unpublished). You can change the publishing status by clicking Unpublish or Publish (only one option appears depending upon its corresponding status). You can delete the comment by clicking Delete. To edit the comment, click Edit Comment to go to the Edit Comment page. After making changes to the comment, click Save Changes.
Author
To see all comments by this author, click the View all comments link. If the author is authenticated, you can view his or her profile, by clicking View Profile. If the author is not authenticated, you have the option to ban all comments originating from the author's IP address.
If new comments are automatically published, you can change this option by clicking Set to: Hold for Approval (for authors who require authentication, an icon appears when you select this option, meaning the author is blocked from commenting without your approval). If new comments are already set to hold for approval, you must change this option by going to Weblogs > Configure > Feedback.
You can also ban comments by IP Address directly by clicking the 'Click here to ban all comments from...' link. More information is available in the Banning a Commenter article.
On Post
To see all comments on this post, click the View all comments link. Click Close Comments to discontinue the option for future reader comments (previous comment postings are kept and published unless you unpublish or delete them). To edit this post directly, click Edit Post and you will go to the Edit Post screen.
Approving Comments
To select comments for approval, click the checkbox(es) next to each comment list item and click Approve. To approve all comments in bulk, click the checkbox to the left of the Comment list header and all checkboxes will automatically be selected. Then click Approve. When comments are approved, they are automatically published.
Deleting Comments
To select comments for deletion, click the checkbox(es) next to each comment list item and click Delete. To delete all comments in bulk, click the checkbox to the left of the Comment list header and all checkboxes will automatically be selected. Then click Delete.
Unpublishing Versus Deleting
When you unpublish a comment or TrackBack, the item will still exist on your listed comments or TrackBacks, but will not appear on your published weblog. You can still publish it again in the future.
When you delete a comment or TrackBack, it is permanently removed from your weblog as well as weblog management pages.
Reporting Spam
The "Report Spam" button will remove the comment from your blog and place it in the Spam folder. Click the checkboxes next to each junk comment and then click Report Spam to remove the comment and report it as spam.
More information on managing spam comments is available in the Comment and TrackBack Spam Folders article.
Answer
TypePad gives you powerful controls for managing reader comments posted to your weblog. You can establish who posts comments and make sure all commenters are authenticated for security purposes. You can also control when and how comments are published by Setting Your Weblog Comment and TrackBack Preferences. To enable the comments feature, see Enabling Comments on Your Posts.
To manage comments, click the Comments link from the Home or Weblogs tab to go to the List Comments page.
List Comments Screen
The List Comments screen displays all comments that have been posted by readers to your weblog. Comments are arranged in a list that details:
Status - the status of the comment indicated by an icon. A comment is unpublished when the icon is displayed. The icon indicates the comment has been published.
Comment - title of reader's comment which is taken from the first few words of the comment.
Author - name of reader who made comment. If the author has been authenticated, an icon appears next to the name.
On Post - post for which reader made a comment.
Date - date of comment.
The number of comments displayed on the page can be 5, 20, or 50. The default setting is 20 which can be changed by clicking the Change link at the end of the page and clicking 5 or 50.
Organizing Comments by Filters
To organize your comments:
Click the Change link to the right of Filter to open the drop-down menu.
Choose a filter option from the drop-down list box. You can filter by Email, Author, or IP Address.
Type a filter value in the text box next to the filter option drop-down list box. For example, if you want to see all comments posted by genericuser@isp.com, type genericuser@isp.com.
Click Filter. Your comments list will re-appear according to your filter options. To clear your results, click Reset or click Change to select a new Filter.
Performing Management Tasks
You can perform management tasks directly from the List Comments screen by clicking individual items from the comments list. A task shortcut drop-down menu appears with customized options depending on the list item.
Below are task details for each comment list header:
Comment
The comment details appear, including an excerpt of the comment and its status (published or unpublished). You can change the publishing status by clicking Unpublish or Publish (only one option appears depending upon its corresponding status). You can delete the comment by clicking Delete. To edit the comment, click Edit Comment to go to the Edit Comment page. After making changes to the comment, click Save Changes.
Author
To see all comments by this author, click the View all comments link. If the author is authenticated, you can view his or her profile, by clicking View Profile. If the author is not authenticated, you have the option to ban all comments originating from the author's IP address.
If new comments are automatically published, you can change this option by clicking Set to: Hold for Approval (for authors who require authentication, an icon appears when you select this option, meaning the author is blocked from commenting without your approval). If new comments are already set to hold for approval, you must change this option by going to Weblogs > Configure > Feedback.
You can also ban comments by IP Address directly by clicking the 'Click here to ban all comments from...' link. More information is available in the Banning a Commenter article.
On Post
To see all comments on this post, click the View all comments link. Click Close Comments to discontinue the option for future reader comments (previous comment postings are kept and published unless you unpublish or delete them). To edit this post directly, click Edit Post and you will go to the Edit Post screen.
Approving Comments
To select comments for approval, click the checkbox(es) next to each comment list item and click Approve. To approve all comments in bulk, click the checkbox to the left of the Comment list header and all checkboxes will automatically be selected. Then click Approve. When comments are approved, they are automatically published.
Deleting Comments
To select comments for deletion, click the checkbox(es) next to each comment list item and click Delete. To delete all comments in bulk, click the checkbox to the left of the Comment list header and all checkboxes will automatically be selected. Then click Delete.
Unpublishing Versus Deleting
When you unpublish a comment or TrackBack, the item will still exist on your listed comments or TrackBacks, but will not appear on your published weblog. You can still publish it again in the future.
When you delete a comment or TrackBack, it is permanently removed from your weblog as well as weblog management pages.
Reporting Spam
The "Report Spam" button will remove the comment from your blog and place it in the Spam folder. Click the checkboxes next to each junk comment and then click Report Spam to remove the comment and report it as spam.
More information on managing spam comments is available in the Comment and TrackBack Spam Folders article.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Knocking on Google’s Door? Twitter Incorporates Search
Google beware? Twitter has just announced that it is incorporating search functionality into its site. This means you can now easily acquire popular trend data for keywords and look deeper into what people are talking about in real time.
So what is the significance of this? That of course is still up to debate. Some people think that Twitter is on the heels of Google already and others say that Twitter is no search engine at all.
Both sides of the argument have good points. Still, there’s no denying that Twitter is a race horse with a great future, especially with this new function. Twitter is getting huge and recently turned down an offer from Facebook for $500 million. And with its business model of Q & A features and search ads, you can see why. Not to mention the fact that Facebook is trying to keep pace by adding various Twitter like functions…
Some people can’t see much value in Twitter calling it just another social media site for friends to chat with each other. What people don’t recognize is the fact that Twitter is an extremely large pool of information based on our personal lives- which is invaluable to the marketer.
Despite the increasing value that Twitter leverages, it is still a new born compared to Google and may require a decade before being able to develop the technology and accuracy of Google’s search results. Still it has all the right stuff to get there eventually. Google’s market share is safe…at least for now anyhow.
Consider that Twitter communications are a true representation of the masses’ opinions. People can log on and get answers they can trust because they have their own network of people who they’ve already established relationships with. Google gives great results, but they are impersonal and often inaccurate. With people’s online lives enveloping more and more of their time, the personal touch works wonders. Corporate media and celebrity spokespeople only go so far.
In addition to that, information gathered on Twitter is more relevant to one’s location. With the personal profiles, and the ability to send messages from mobile devices, (enter GPS technology) Twitter can leverage this value and exploit what it can do and Google can’t.
Twitter is quickly proving it is the future of search. Its power lies in the fact that it enables people to get the opinions of others in regards to relevant current information. When searching, people want real opinions as well as the facts.
For example imagine typing something into Google and seeing all of the results pop up…They are put there from the businesses and individuals who want you to believe certain things about their product or service. Well, what if in addition to that, it had thousands of third party opinions that have no vested interest in those products or services? And imagine if all those opinions are from people you know? This is the dynamic that Twitter leverages, and if it plays it’s cards right, it will be siphoning off Google clicks in a few short years.
About the Author: Maverick Money Makers is a private society that will teach you how to build a six-figure a month business on the internet. If you want to make money online, join the society before it’s too late. Maverick Money Makers
How to Get Your Web Site Listed at the Top of Google
04 2009 Friday3
3
By Leo Emery in Google
The biggest challenge every single website owner has (including me) is getting traffic to his/her web site. And bar none the best traffic you can obtain is Organic Search Engine traffic.
So what is Organic Search Engine traffic?
Simply put, when someone is searching for a product or service they type their query into the search engine (google, yahoo, MSN etc.) and then the results of that search are displayed. And you want your web site to come up in that search query.
You probably already know that the majority of people will not go past the first page of the search engine results and even less people will go past the top 30 results. Therefore, your challenge is getting your website listed on the first page of the search engines for the keywords relating to your site.
Now there are a ton of people that will tell you there is some mystical voodoo secret mojo to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). And if you’re not familiar with the term SEO. Simply put SEO is where you build your web site in such a way that the search engines like it and the result is getting better rankings on the search engines.
Well I’m here to tell you that it is not as mystical as everyone would lead you to believe. Just like anything, advertising, google ad words, article marketing it takes constant work to achieve the results you want and in this case, that would be to maintain a top search engine ranking.
I will admit there are many things you can do optimize your web site but I am going to touch on the basics. I have been doing this for some time now. I was taught from some of the best people in the business, so I am passing onto you what was taught to me.
What I am going to share with you is for google. Since it’s the big guy on the block that’s whom I optimize my sites for. There is a lot of info I want to share with you so I have broken this article into 2 parts.
First, just as important as learning What To Do. Is learning What Not To Do.
These are known as black hat techniques. Just stay away from them, if your caught your website will be penalized or even worse banned completely from google. Then you have to start all over and that’s just not worth it.
If you want even more information of the Do’s and Don’ts by Google, just type into Google:
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Ok here are the no, no’s of SEO.
1) Door Way Pages. A doorway page has been designed just for the search engines and not for human beings and is redirected to the goal page. The goal page is the page you ultimately want people to see. So what the webmaster does is makes minor changes to the page and resubmits it to the search engine over and over again.
So when someone finds that page he/she is redirected to the real page and this is usually done with a fast meta refresh command. Google no longer accepts pages using fast Meta refresh. Google see’s these page(s) as duplicates and exclude them from their listings.
Don’t confuse a doorway page with a landing page. Landing pages are ok as they provide a lot of information, have relevant links pointing to them and can be seen by both humans and the search engine spiders.
2) Hidden Text And Links. As the term suggests keywords and keyword phrases are hidden on the page. Usually this is done by having the text the same color as the page color.
Not only Google but the other search engines have the ability to recognize that white text is being displayed on a white background or black text on a black background and so on.
If you want to see if your webmaster has used hidden text, start by looking for large blank areas at the top, bottom or sides of your web page. Now simple scroll your cursor over the area any hidden text will appear. Or you can look at the source code.
You can also hide Hidden Text in your “ALT” tag. The “ALT” tag text will appear when you place your cursor over the image. It will also display the text if your image does not display.
If a few words or even a sentence appears that’s ok. If an entire paragraph appears or a lot of words that don’t read as a sentence appear, that’s bad. Your web master has tried to stuff too many keywords inside the image’s ALT tag. Get rid of them.
It is best to use 4 or 5 words or a sentence of 4 or 5 words long in your “ALT” tag.
3) Cloaking. This is where the content presented to the search engine spider is different to what is presented to the browser (you). By doing this a page that other wise would not be displayed is displayed.
So what happens is the information being delivered is based on the content on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page.
4) Link Farms. I’m sure you’ve heard of the term link farm. All a link farm is, is a system where all the members are linked to each other via a common set of link pages. The result is that all members have a links page with the other members’ web addresses on them.
Many of these link programs have several hundred or even thousands of members, so by joining you have almost instant access to hundreds of other web sites that point links to your site. This can lead to your site looking very “popular”.
The big problem with this is that you are artificially boosting the popularity of your site. You see when a spider from a search engine (Google) comes to your site it checks out your links. If it sees you have a lot of inbound links you can achieve a higher ranking because the more inbound links you have the better. However, it also checks out the quality and relativity of those links to your site.
So if you have a site about “dog training” and most of your links have nothing to do with dog training you will not receive a better ranking. In fact anyone using this type of linking will be penalized. Either your site will get dropped down in the search engines listing or you will be banned all together.
5) Duplicate Content. The search engines only want to index original content. They don’t want to index the same content 1000 times. If duplicate content/site is detected only one will be indexed. The rest will end up as supplemental context and won’t even rank.
6) Keyword Stuffing. Yes you need to have your keywords on your site and in your meta tags, but there is a delicate balance. Sure, you want to rank for a specific keyword and the more times you use it on the page, the more likely you’ll rank for it. Just don’t go crazy.
I have about 25 keywords in my meta tags and all of these keywords are used in the content of my site. But they are used only when the content calls for it.
Keep your writing natural and use the keywords as you feel suitable. Using them too many times will make your site look spammy, which doesn’t sit well with either your human visitors or the spiders that crawl your site. Might not get you banned but you certainly won’t get a favorable ranking either.
Here’s an update many search engines Google for one, do not use Meta Tags as part of their ranking system any more. However, some still do so that’s why I mentioned it.
7) Duplicate Sites. This is when you clone your site under a bunch of different domain names with the same content and then you have the pages linked together so the can get a better ranking and get the top spots for your keywords. This is a really bad idea, and sure way to get banned. Short and sweet, never do this.
About the Author: Leo Emery has been earning a full time living online for over 5 years and is a member of one of the most respected Money Making Coaching Clubs on the Internet. If you’re eager to discover how simple it is to earn a six figure income online visit Net Wise Wealth.com
Oodles O’ Google Tools
03 2009 Thursday19
2
By Tom McCarrick in Google
Google’s position as search engine leaders is undisputed, and they wield enormous power over all who have designs on having a successful “paid search” campaign, otherwise known as Adwords. They basically call the shots on what are the ingredients of a successful campaign and they are first and foremost customer focussed. And that is understandable – they have every intention of continuing at the forefront of both paid and organic search. Organic search is what you see in the main body of the search returns when you do a search query on Google; paid search results are the more compact ads denoted “sponsored links” which appear along the right-hand side of the page (and sometimes at the top of the main page also).
And they have every right to “call the shots”. They are sometimes touted as being one of the Internet marketer’s enemies, as always playing “hardball” with the frequent “slaps” that they deliver. But at the end of the day, they must strive to deliver a positive search experience to their customers. Advertisers are going to be compelled to have ever more focussed, specialised campaigns as Google seeks to eliminate redundancy. For affiliate marketers, there is an ever-increasing need for their campaigns to include useful content for their prospective customer, and to deliver just what their ad says will be delivered.
And you could never accuse Google of leaving the web marketing community to fend for themselves. What a plethora of tools they have made available – and 90% of them are free.
Within Adwords itself there are many valuable tools for refining an advertising campaign:
Keyword Tool – A keyword tracker/keyword suggest tool that provides up-to-date keyword search volumes.
Campaign Optimiser - Performs analysis on a live campaign and suggests additional keywords and ad variations.
Website Optimiser – A more comprehensive feedback tool that monitors several important metrics to do with website layout and content. It takes a while to get up and running with this, but any time taken to implement it will be repaid with interest.
Budget Optimiser – Where you can tell Google your monthly budget, and ask it to go and get the maximum number of clicks for you. (I have found with Budget Optimiser that I never overspend, as I do when I have control over the campaign myself)
Keyword Diagnosis – The latest addition to the armoury of the pay-per-click advertiser. This will actually analyse which keywords are performing and which ones you are better off without. And it tells you why they are not performing, and what you can do to remedy it.
All of these tools are freely available within the Adwords interface and I am convinced that the majority of PPC advertisers don’t even realise that they are available. They are probably as good, if not better than many of the commercial keyword tools that are available.
I have not even mentioned the other great Google resources, like Suggest Labs, Google Analytics and iGoogle, which is your own branded page that you can load with various SEO statistics and data on popular searches. A discussion of these and other resources like Google Webmaster Tools, may be better to leave for another occasion.
About the Author: Tom McCarrick http://www.onlineglobalbiz.com http://www.ideal-biz.com
Google Adsense Income: The Three Keys
03 2009 Tuesday17
5
By Mike Adams in Google
Many people put together numerous (even hundreds) of niche websites to make Google Adsense income. You may have heard that a good target is earning $1/day from each web site, and you may have wondered if this is possible. Yes, it is, if you understand the three keys to Google Adsense income: click-through rate, earnings per click, and traffic.
You can improve the Adsense click-through rate by modifying your web site design. Observe which changes increase or decrease the Adsense click-through rate. It may sound funny, but you want a site that is good enough that it gets indexed by search engines and attracts visitors, but that is incomplete enough so that people want to leave in search of something more. And you want all of the obvious exit links to be Adsense ad links that seem to offer people what they are looking for.
Earnings per click depend on getting the content on a page (especially targeted keywords) to trigger Adsense ads that many advertisers are bidding on. One keyword might only make you $0.05 per click. Another keyword might make you several dollars per click. You want to target your page content around keywords that have many advertisers competing.
This is actually the opposite of what you want for search engine optimization. In general, you will be able to rank higher in the search engines for keywords with less competition. So how do you do this without destroying your search engine rankings? The secret is called “long tail” keywords.
Long tail keywords are longer keyword phrases that have searches yet have little competition in the search engine results. Be sure the phrases contain keywords that have high advertising competition. Google makes their money from advertising, so they will display the highest price ads that match the content on the page. But since you made sure you have one of the few pages targeted for the long-tail keyword phrase, you should also be able to rank well in the search engine results for the long tail phrase.
Once you improve your click-through rate and your earnings per click, it’s simply a matter of increasing traffic to your site. Getting traffic generally takes the most effort, in my experience. Basically, there are two ways to get traffic: You can buy advertising or you can get traffic through links and search engine results.
You could easily get traffic by buying Adwords ads. But it isn’t always easy to make more income than you spend on advertising. For an Adsense site, that generally means that you cannot profitably advertise it, so you need to get it listed in the search engines and get as many links as possible with a reasonable amount of effort. The two easiest ways to achieve this currently are article marketing and social networking.
Article marketing, sometimes called “bum marketing,” is pretty simple. You write one or more short articles (about 500 words or so) and submit them to article directories on the Web. You get to include an author’s resource box that links to your site at the end of the article. There are even services such as iSnare or Article Marketer that will submit your article to hundreds of article directories for you.
The more articles you do for a given site, the more links and traffic you get and the higher you get in search engine results. And you can get article ideas from anywhere. For example, this article started out as a response to one of my customers about how to do this. Since it was a long response, it was logical to also turn it into an article and publish it!
In social networking, you get your link on various social networking sites. Be sure to look through each site first and see what other people are doing and fit in with the community. Social networking sites have their own community rules, and you don’t want to get banned for spam.
These techniques will usually get your website indexed by the search engines within days. You will also get traffic from them, so don’t just do it for links, do it for traffic also.
Now that you know the three keys to Google Adsense income, click-through rate, earnings per click, and traffic, it’s time to start creating your Adsense empire!
Mike Adams - There is one more resource you need to create your Adsense empire: content! Creating numerous web sites takes a lot of content. Want a shortcut? Check out Mike Adams’s PLR-Content.com for all of the content you will ever need: http://www.plr-content.com/
Google Optimization: Using Search Operators
03 2009 Friday6
5
By Jeffrey Smith in Google
The underlying premise of SEO suggests that you understand the task at hand when it comes to outranking the other 999 entrants for any given keyword.
Google stops indexing a particular keyword after 1000 results when assessing the aggregate relevance score to determine which results are spawned. By truly understanding this, you can discover a great deal from using a few basic Google search operators to determine what type of foothold a competitor has for a given keyword or niche.
Basic Competitive Analysis Metrics
1. Start with the keyword you are interested in researching. Place the keyword “in quotes” in a Google search box.
For example “SEO” returns 262,000,000 competing pages with the chronological order of the strongest sites first.
Then look to the right and determine the number of competing pages you are up against “for that keyword”. It will say results 1 of 10 of (the number of competing pages).
This allows you to assess the competitive landscape with one brief metric. The extent of what you consider a competitive keywords depends on the website. For example, most websites can acquire a keyword under 50,000 competing pages with ease and competitive keywords start above 100,000 results and ascend into the millions (pages in index / divided by the top 1000 results).
The next few metrics will allow you to understand where your SEO ceiling is (what threshold your website has for keyword benchmarks). Our blog for example can devour a keyword with up to 1,000,000 competing pages just from one post of mentioning those keywords (without backlinks).
So, all the talk about building website authority does have a place when you understand the implications to rank with less effort. Authority sites have the ability to zero in on a keyword and skip over hundreds of other websites and reach the top 10 results by the merit of trust and internal link weight and dynamism they possess. In keeping with the topic at hand, let’s move to the next metric.
2. Evaluate your competitors domain and determine the amount of pages they have by using this search command in Google. You can use the #1 site and the #10 site to gauge an average of pages required to capture the keyword or, if you want you can use the #1st, 2nd and 3rd site that rank for the selected keyword to see which formulas they are entrenched in.
site:competitorsite.com (this shows you how many pages they have indexed in Google)
3. Next, determine how saturated their website is with the keyword in question.
site:competitorsite.com keyword
This shows you how many pages are indexed that include the keyword within their website. If the site in the top 10 is an authority domain, it can rank from one keyword alone in the title tag, description tag or having the keyword in the body text (or any combination of these three metrics).
While most websites do not have that luxury, often dozens or hundreds of pages are required to cross the tipping point of co-occurrence for that keyword within the website and acquire a top ranking. However each keyword has a threshold which is going to vary depending on the unique metrics of each website (which is why you need to look at more than one site for evaluation).
4. Now that you know that your competitors site contains Y amount of pages and X amount of those pages are dedicated to a specific keyword.
You can go the the most relevant listing returned from their site and look at the off page factors (which means finding out how many backlinks are linking to that page). To do so, use Yahoo Site Explorer and type the specific URL in and look at the inlinks tab to see how many pages are linking to that page.
For example, if the homepage is returned as the top ranking result for the keyword using the competitorsite.com keyword search command, ignore it and look for an actual page that has a title, or relevant shingle with the keyword (in the title, URL or description).
If they targeted a keyword using a broad match method (which means it was not necessarily the objective, but their site acquired the ranking based on ambient factors, then you will only see a sparse mention of the keyword). The point being, the homepage is a catch all and will not provide you with the same amount of depth when attempting to data mine deep links from your competitors.
The idea is, you want to know (a) how many pages they have indexed (b) how many pages contain the keyword (c) how many deep links (how many links just to that page) the top ranking page has (from outside the site) as well as (d) how well the site in internally linked (for that keyword).
We can determine criteria a-c with simple search commands, and you can also determine if the site is treated as an authority based on the keywords that appear in bold when using the site: command, websites start transforming into authority sites through topical relevance after 200-300 pages are developed around a topic (if they are linked and optimized properly).
5. Crunch the numbers and assess the competitive landscape of the keyword in question.
For example, if you know that the top 3 sites all have an average of 1000 pages and out of those 1000 pages 50% or more of them contain the keyword in question and your site has 20 pages, then you are not being realistic with your ranking objectives.
I am not suggesting to go add 1000 pages overnight (as that would not be natural) but rather, start chipping away at the keyword using a variety of SEO tactics.
6. Check the allintitle, allintext and allinanchor thesholds for the selected competitors sites. This means finding where they rank in Google (in the top 1000 results before the results get obscured / redundant) using the following search operators.
allintitle:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of keyword in title)allintext:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of keyword in their body text)allinanchor:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of anchor text / links with this keyword)
Using Google again, you can look at the competitors on page and off page metrics, instead of breaking them out individually, you can just use NicheWatch instead, or our Ultimate SEO Toolkit, to perform this function.
The Conclusion
SEO is only limited by your imagination when it comes to determining the extent of how you use tactics for discovery and analysis. We covered a few simple metrics using Google search operators above that allow you to isolate co-occurrence and determine the global keyword density for a site.
This does provide a preliminary analysis to at least let you know what your up against (qualifying a competitor or your own domain to a keyword). If you reverse engineer the averages, you can find the tipping point for essentially any keyword and craft a plan of action to acquire it.
For example 1000 pages indexed, 900 have the keyword in exact match and the main landing page has 50 inbound links from Page Rank 4 pages. Now you have a threshold to exceed. Although this is a preliminary method, sometimes looking at basic metrics such as these can provide an immense amount of insight and determine the next competitive threshold you target for analysis.
Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.
The Changing Face of Search: Is Google Losing its Grip?
03 2009 Thursday5
2
By Patricia Skinner in Google
Search is changing at breakneck speed due to the colossal success of certain social media phenomena like Twitter , StumbleUpon and maybe FriendFeed.
There are definite signs that search is beginning to separate out, forming niches and tributaries that better feed the main knowledge stream.
Might Twitter be the New Google?
A few years ago formal search via a search engine was overwhelmingly the way people would set about finding whatever they were looking for on the Web. Google, Yahoo and MSN Live were the universal engines of search (hence their name).
Things have changed.
Michael Gray of Graywolf’s SEO Blog told me he uses the Customize Google FireFox plugin to get more out of the old method of search. But more and more web users are realizing that the top ranking web-page for a given search term submitted to a search engine will not necessarily turn up what you need to know in all its pristine glory. After all, you wouldn’t use Google to find a job online would you? Good. I’m glad you wouldn’t.
Change in search seems to be gathering pace, giving rise to a number of articles like mine. Here’s a similar opinion on the changing face of search: Twitter destined to replace Google Search.
As you can see, it’s not just because of the economy that Google stock lost a whopping 56 percent in 2008!
It is finally dawning on us that industry leaders or experts in their field are unfailingly the best source for information on any given topic. And it’s getting easier to find industry leaders and approach them, but not through search engines.
This is why sites like Twitter, Mashable, Alltop, SEOmoz, Sphinn, and other specialized social media sites that are increasingly used for search are gaining ground fast.
It’s not about centralizing your search anymore.
It’s now about finding better information than your competitors: can we say ‘knowledge is power’? Everyone is looking for those nuggets of information that will set them apart and above their competitors.
Skillful use of social media can put you in ongoing contact with the very people whose opinion and expertise you value. And there’s no limit to how much of this expertise you can tap into with tools like Twitter and the myriad of other specialized search applications springing up. Tap into the right sources and you can make yourself an industry-leader almost overnight.
Tracking News
Digg, Stumbleupon and increasingly Mixx are yet more sites that will help you find the latest on just about anything you care to name. You can subscribe to keywords so that you get everything on your subject of interest without having to do a thing.
Searching for specifics
Tip’d for financial information and news so you can invest your hard-earned money wisely.
FairShare helps you keep track of who’s copying your work and where it’s appearing on the web.
Checking up on gossip
Whether you need to keep an eye on your own reputation or that of a client’s, or if you’re digging up the dirt on someone (did I just say that?) you could do worse than use BackType.
Looking for a job
Mashable comes through for you yet again if you’re looking for a job: here’s a wonderful list of job sites to try.
Twitter is increasingly being seen by the search world’s industry leaders as an interactive search tool. Imagine being able to ask a question of the very top person in your field or in the field you want to know more about? This is quintessentially the beauty of Twitter.
Even if your target is not following you, it is still possible to address them directly. Of course there’s no guarantee that they’ll reply, but many of the top Twitter users, despite their busy lives, take the time to share generously with those who are interested in what they have to say.
This is like having a permanent spot at the stage door to see your favorite movie star!
Even AdAge and the Huffington Post have noticed that Twitter is the next big thing in search.
Tools to help you search Twitter
Twist is a new Twitter search application with lots of potential in my opinion.
Tweetscan where you just enter in your chosen keywords.
Twitter Search Results is a Greasemonkey script (Firefox only at the moment) to add real time results from Twitter to your Google search.
Your takeaway? If you’re relying solely on Google for your search needs maybe you should rethink your knowledge-building strategies.
Patricia Skinner is a Copywriter, SEO consultant & social media expert. She writes about what she knows best
WWGD: Why Google TV Won’t Match Google Search
02 2009 Monday9
3
By Dave Morgan in Google
I just started reading Jeff Jarvis’s book “What Would Google Do?” — and I love it. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since he told me about his idea for the book almost a year ago. As many of you know, Jeff is a former journalist and media executive and now very high profile blogger at Buzzmachine.com.
In Jeff’s book, he writes about the very successful — and fundamentally different — approach that Google takes in running its business relative to virtually every other company in the world. He details its obsessions in serving users, its “publicness,” its ability to create and exploit network effects. Then he hypothetically applies these principles to a number of other industries, from banking to retail, always asking the question, “What would Google do?” His stories and ideas are fascinating and the book is a fast read. I highly recommend it.
However, my purpose in writing today about Jeff’s book was not just to review it, but also to follow his advice and turn the question back on Google. Why? Because as I read the book, it occurred to me that Google has done some things that are not “what Google would do.”
Google has built an extraordinary business in search by focusing on the user and giving searchers more and better information faster than any other company. Its effort to organize the Web’s information certainly created “the world’s greatest Yellow Pages.” Then, the company combined this search directory with an enormously powerful and profitable advertising business, AdWords, which delivers commercial messages that are very relevant to the search results. Finally, its strategists extended the scale of the AdWords business with the creation of AdSense, where tailored commercial messages are distributed across millions of other Web sites. The combination of Google Search, AdWords and AdSense has given the company a media franchise of a size, growth trajectory and profitability such that the world has never seen before.
I think that the order in which Google created these businesses is important. AdWords worked because of the power of Google Search. AdSense worked because of the existing power of AdWords. These products would not have worked nearly as successfully, if at all, if they had been launched in reverse order.
Why then, when Google launched Google TV and Google Print, did it focus first on the advertising sides of those businesses? Essentially, these products aggregated commercial inventory from traditional media companies and offered them for sale through the same kinds of self-service interfaces used for AdWords and AdSense. Both Google Print and Google TV seem to have been the company’s attempts to horizontally extend its online ad franchise into traditional media, but neither product had the advantage of leveraging a massive user base viewing a “Googlized” directory of print or television content. Neither of them really focused on the user, nor did they follow users.
To me, Google Print and Google TV seem like the kinds of new business extensions that more traditional corporations would implement — on the counsel of expensive, brand-name management consultants, of course — rather than follow the model that Google did in building its core franchise. Maybe this is why Google Print wasn’t successful and was recently shut down. I don’t know how Google TV is faring, but my bet is that it will never be anything like the franchise the company has in search.
Why? Because they didn’t do it like Google would. What do you think?
Dave Morgan, founder of TACODA and Real Media, is Chairman of — and a partner in — The Tennis Company, which owns TENNIS.com, and TENNIS and SMASH Magazines.
Google Street View Continues to Raise Privacy Concerns
02 2009 Tuesday3
2
By Brian Cooper in Google
Google Street View, a Google Maps feature that lets users see images of streets and the surrounding areas, continues to generate controversy. Since its launch in May 2007, the feature has prompted questions about whether it constitutes an invasion of privacy, complaints about inappropriate images, and even a lawsuit.
Aaron and Christine Boring vs. Google
The lawsuit came from a Pittsburgh couple in April 2008. The couple lives on a private road. However, Google’s Street View team travelled down the road and continued taking images all the way up to the couple’s home. The images were then posted to Google Maps and included close-ups of the couple’s home, swimming pool, and outbuildings.
Google’s response? “Complete privacy does not exist in this world except in a desert, and anyone who is not a hermit must expect and endure the ordinary incidents of the community life of which he (or she) is a part.”[i]
While Google’s assertion that its Street View imaging team is an “ordinary incident of community life” is far-fetched, Google does make some good points in its response. Namely, that the plaintiffs could have simply requested that Google remove the offending images from Street View via a form available on Google Maps. Instead, the couple filed suit and in doing so have made the matter public record and ensured that the images will be viewed by even more people.
Since the lawsuit, Google has removed the images in question, but the suit remains open.
The Borings’ Neighbors
On Goldenbrook Lane, a nearby street, some of the Borings’ neighbors also had an incident with the Street View team. In this incident, the Street View team drove up Goldenbrook Lane and into the driveway of the McKee residence. They continued to drive, snapping Street View images the whole way, up to the garages of the McKees.[ii] While it appears that the McKees didn’t resort to a lawsuit, Google has removed the images of the home that were taken from private property from Street View.
Street View in California
In California, the antics of the Street View drivers continued. Drivers reportedly went on over 100 private roads in Sonoma County according to an analysis done by PressDemocrat.com. In another instance, Street View drivers went past two no trespassing signs as they photographed the 1,200 foot private road leading up to Betty Webb’s house in Humboldt County. In another incident reported by PressDemocrat.com, Street View drivers ignored a no trespassing sign, passed through a gate, and drove through someone’s yard on a dirt road near Freestone.
Street View and U.S. Military Bases
In March 2008, the Pentagon requested that Google remove some images of military bases taken from public streets due to the potential threat those images posed to national security. “It actually shows where all the guards are. It shows how the barriers go up and down. It shows how to get in and out of buildings,” said General Gene Renuart, commander of U.S. Northern Command.[iii] According to Google spokesman Larry Yu, Google has honored the Pentagon’s requests.[iv] However, the Pentagon was still reviewing the many images of military facilities that were included in Street View.[v]
Street View Goes Global
After the complaints in the U.S., other countries warned Google that Street View would have to be modified to comply with their stricter privacy laws. To this end, Google has improved facial recognition technology so that it can find faces in images and blur them so that they are unrecognizable. This technology has also been applied to license plates. The blurring feature has since been applied to U.S. Street View imagery in addition to images in other countries where Street View is now available.
Accountability
While Google has removed some of the aforementioned locations from Street View, the burden to monitor Google’s actions, be it Street View or other Google services, continues to fall on people like you and me. With regard to Street View, Google argues that “many people-visitors pulling in the driveway, neighbors turning around at the end of the road, deliverymen delivering packages-can all plainly see the exterior of the (Borings) home.”[vi] While these examples are likely accurate for the Borings and the population in general, they involve people that we know or strangers that we requested to come to our homes. Private residents didn’t request that Google visit these neighborhoods nor would residents reasonably expect that someone would be driving down their streets taking photographs of everything. In fact, I suspect that if you or I were to do the same thing, someone would call the police and we’d have some difficult questions to answer down at the station.
Potential Consequences
So, what could the consequences of Street View be? Well, while the feature has been used to aid police in a kidnapping investigation[vii], I think the feature could be far more useful to criminals. For example, a criminal could use Street View to case a neighborhood-checking Street View for cars that are parked in garages or driveways so they could know when someone isn’t at home, scan the yards and windows for any signs indicating that homes have security systems, check the proximity of neighboring houses using Street View and Google’s satellite imagery, look for signs of pets that could pose problems for a thief, see if the homes have newspapers delivered (which might help the thief determine if the residents were on vacation) and, assuming the criminal found a good candidate, select a few potential access points (like open windows) for breaking into the home. If the Street View car happened to pass through your neighborhood on garbage day, the camera might even capture the box of that new HDTV you got. Scary, huh?
Protecting Your Privacy
So how can you protect yourself? First, check your address using Street View. To report a concern with Street View imagery, enter the address you desire and click “Search Maps.” Then, click “Street View” in the thought bubble that appears on the map. Once the “Street View” image appears, click “Report a Concern” in the bottom left corner of the Street View image and enter the details of your complaint.
Second, be mindful of how your information is used and act when you feel your privacy is being threatened. Google’s Street View can be a helpful tool, but it is meant to help Google sell ads and make money, not protect your privacy. You can write your local, state and federal representatives and even the local paper to voice your opinion.
Oh, and if you believe as Google does that “complete privacy does not exist,” then you should check out the house where Google CEO Eric Schmidt reportedly lives using satellite imagery from Google Maps. It looks like he has had some construction done in the past few years. A simple Google search of the address (366 Walsh Road, Atherton, CA) will tell you that Schmidt merged two adjacent lots in 2001[viii] to create the new lot and then added a new fence, retaining wall, and drainage in 2004.[ix] Eric, that creepiness that you’re feeling is probably approaching the level of the people who had Street View vehicles in their driveways. So, while it is Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful,” the company should thoroughly consider how that information can adversely impact the same people it is meant to help.
About the Author
Brian Cooper is the Director of Online Public Relations at Medium Blue, where he promotes the company’s clients on the Internet. He has a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a MBA in management from Georgia State University where he graduated summa cum laude. His articles have been published on numerous websites, including The American Chronicle, IM Newswatch, IT Business Net, Search Engine Guide, SEO News, Site Pro News, and TechLINKS. Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld in 2006 and 2007.
[i] “Preliminary Statement.” Boring vs. Google, Allegheny County, PA
[ii] TheSmokingGun.com “Google is in Your Driveway!”
[iii] Reuters. “Google pulls some map images at Pentagon’s request.” Mar. 6, 2008.
[iv] Ibid
[v] Ibid
[vi]“Preliminary Statement.” Boring vs. Google, Allegheny County, PA
[vii] Telegraph.co.uk. “US police use Google Street View to find missing child.” Jan. 9, 2009
[viii] Town of Atherton City Council Minutes, May 16, 2001.
[ix] Palo Alto Online, September 24, 2001.
Increase Your Adsense Cash
12 2008 Wednesday3
4
By Katherine Baka in Google
Adsense is really making a huge impact on the affiliate marketing industry nowadays. Because of this, weak affiliate merchants have the tendency to die faster than ever and ad networks will be going to lose their customers quickly. If you are in a losing rather than winning in the affiliate program you are currently into, maybe it is about time to consider going into the Adsense marketing and start earning some real cash.
Google is readily providing well written and highly relevant ads that are closely chosen to match the content on your pages. You do not have to look for them yourselves as the search engine will be the doing the searching for you from other people’s source.
You do not have to spend time in choosing different kind of ads for different pages. And no codes to mess around for different affiliate programs.
You will be able to concentrate on providing good and quality content, as the search engines will be the ones finding the best ads in which to put your pages on.
You are still allowed to add Adsense ads even if you already have affiliate links on your site. It is prohibited, however, to imitate the look and feel of the Google ads for your affiliate links.
You can filter up to 200 URLs. That gives you a chance to block ads for the sites that do not meet your guidelines. You can also block competitors. Though it is unavoidable that Adsense may be competing for some space on web sites that all other revenues are sharing.
Owners of small sites are allowed to plug a bit of a code into their sites and instantly have relevant text ads that appeal to your visitors appear instantly into your pages. If you own many sites, you only need to apply once. It makes up for having to apply to many affiliate programs.
The only way to know how much you are already earning is to try and see. If you want out, all you have to do is remove the code from your site.
The payment rates can vary extremely. The payment you will be receiving per click depends on how much advertisers are paying per click to advertise with the use of the AdWords. Advertisers can pay as little as 5 cents and as high as $10-12, sometimes even more than that too. You are earning a share of that money generated.
If your results remain stagnant, it can help if you try and build simple and uncluttered pages so that the ads can catch the visitor’s eyes more. It sometimes pay to differ from the usual things that people are doing already. It is also a refreshing sight for your visitor once they see something different for a change.
Publishers also have the option of choosing to have their ads displayed only on a certain site or sites. It is also allowed to have them displayed on a large network of sites. The choice would be depending on what you think will work best for your advantage.
To get an idea if some Adsense ads you see on the search engines has your pages, try to find web pages that have similar material to the content you are planning to create and look up their Adsense ads.
It is important to note that you cannot choose certain topics only. If you do this, search engines will not place Adsense ads on your site and you will be missing out a great opportunity in making hundreds and even thousands of dollars cash.
It is still wise to look at other people’s information and format your Adsense there. Just think about it as doing yourself a favor by not having to work too hard to know what content to have.
Topic to be avoided includes gambling, firearms, ammunition, tobacco or drugs. If you are being offered more cash in exchange of doing Adsense with these kinds, it is just like signing your own termination paper.
With all the information that people need in your hands already, all you have to do is turn them as your profits. It all boils down to a gain and gain situation both for the content site owners and the webmasters or publishers.
Make other people’s matter your own and starting earning some extra cash.
To Your Success, Katherine Baka http://www.profits2wealth.com
Why Does Google Penalise Webmasters – Are They Evil?
11 2008 Tuesday11
12
By Mike Gracia in Google
Let’s face it; any website owner wants to rank high in Google! So budding webmasters jump online, read a few forum posts and try to get their site ranked on the first page of Google. Many people, however, stumble at the first or second ‘SEO hurdle’ and either struggle to get rankings, to no avail, or get some decent positions only to then be slapped with a Google penalty!
It’s not just newbie website owners trying to promote themselves that get hit by penalties by the mighty Google Gods, large corporations and even some SEO companies are also fair game for a penalty if they don’t act within Google’s terms.
So, Why Do Google Penalise? – Are they really that Evil?
Like any argument, there are always two sides (At Least!). On the one side, the webmaster whose livelihood may depend on high Google rankings can understandably feel aggrieved by any penalty that Google may impose on them, after all, if someone in the ‘real world’ did something that could potentially shut down your business, then one would be rightfully P*#sed off at them!
It would pay for webmasters both small and large (No, I am not talking about waist girth here either!) to try to understand Google’s motivations a little before passing judgement though. Whilst Google may seem like some huge corporate entity that can never be hurt, it may well be that like a wounded animal, Google penalised you in defence…
Look at it this way, if you ran one of the largest, most successful companies in history – and your continued success depended on you returning the most relevant results for any given search term, which of course you do, due to the great algorithm you invented (An algorithm that, by the way, completely revolutionised the way that search engines… well, search!) – And then people came along and tried to manipulate their search positions, what would you do?
If you allowed people to manipulate their search positions, what would happen? Would you still bring the most relevant results for any given search? – If not, would you maintain your current position as the market leader in online search?
What would you do? Would you stand by and watch your company suffer, or would you act to stop the manipulation of your search results?
Once you understand that Google motivation for penalising webmasters and their respective websites is all about protecting their business, perhaps you may judge them a little less for the penalties they dish out.
It is unfortunate though, that some webmasters are ‘taken for a ride’ by certain SEO companies that promise to get them 1st page Google rankings, and use dodgy techniques that manipulate Google’s search results, and risk getting the website banned.
How To Avoid Google Penalties
Avoiding penalties that Google dish out to websites they suspect are manipulating their own search positions is pretty simple… don’t try to manipulate your search position!
While this may sound ridiculous, it isn’t really! You can still ensure your site ranks highly without resorting to trying to manipulate Google’s algorithm.
Try to think about why Google penalises… to protect its business by making sure it continues to return the most relevant results. On that basis, don’t waste your money with people that promise to get you ranked JUST by building links… that IS and probably ALWAYS will be in breach of Google’s terms!
In contrast, an SEO company that takes a broader view of Search Engine Optimisation can help your site a great deal.
The sort of work that SHOULD be done by an SEO company is checking your websites structure, internal linkage, and making sure there are no errors.
Next they would ensure that you have no ‘bad SEO’ techniques in place on your site, nor anything that the Googlebot could possibly mistake for ‘bad SEO’.
After this, advice should be given about how your site can be made more informative and accessible to your visitors, including how to keep the site relevant. There are a few on page factors that need to be considered, such a page title tags, heading tags etc. All of these, whilst they should be optimised for the search engines, should be optimised in a way that just helps confirm the relevancy of a page, and not in a way to ‘trick’ the Google algorithm.
It is hard to choose an ethical SEO companies as, to some extent, this is an oxymoron. All SEO companies are employed to raise your search engine rankings, and so the line between ‘Ethical’ and ‘Grey Hat’ SEO is a very fine one. If in doubt, be sure to pick a company that will be transparent, and will treat your site as an individual business, and not merely a statistic to be worked on.
Truly ethical SEO companies will be fine about taking the time to chat about your site, and they will make a custom plan about how your site can be improved, and how you can promote your online business without slipping into the old, tired techniques that may get you a Google penalty.
So what is the significance of this? That of course is still up to debate. Some people think that Twitter is on the heels of Google already and others say that Twitter is no search engine at all.
Both sides of the argument have good points. Still, there’s no denying that Twitter is a race horse with a great future, especially with this new function. Twitter is getting huge and recently turned down an offer from Facebook for $500 million. And with its business model of Q & A features and search ads, you can see why. Not to mention the fact that Facebook is trying to keep pace by adding various Twitter like functions…
Some people can’t see much value in Twitter calling it just another social media site for friends to chat with each other. What people don’t recognize is the fact that Twitter is an extremely large pool of information based on our personal lives- which is invaluable to the marketer.
Despite the increasing value that Twitter leverages, it is still a new born compared to Google and may require a decade before being able to develop the technology and accuracy of Google’s search results. Still it has all the right stuff to get there eventually. Google’s market share is safe…at least for now anyhow.
Consider that Twitter communications are a true representation of the masses’ opinions. People can log on and get answers they can trust because they have their own network of people who they’ve already established relationships with. Google gives great results, but they are impersonal and often inaccurate. With people’s online lives enveloping more and more of their time, the personal touch works wonders. Corporate media and celebrity spokespeople only go so far.
In addition to that, information gathered on Twitter is more relevant to one’s location. With the personal profiles, and the ability to send messages from mobile devices, (enter GPS technology) Twitter can leverage this value and exploit what it can do and Google can’t.
Twitter is quickly proving it is the future of search. Its power lies in the fact that it enables people to get the opinions of others in regards to relevant current information. When searching, people want real opinions as well as the facts.
For example imagine typing something into Google and seeing all of the results pop up…They are put there from the businesses and individuals who want you to believe certain things about their product or service. Well, what if in addition to that, it had thousands of third party opinions that have no vested interest in those products or services? And imagine if all those opinions are from people you know? This is the dynamic that Twitter leverages, and if it plays it’s cards right, it will be siphoning off Google clicks in a few short years.
About the Author: Maverick Money Makers is a private society that will teach you how to build a six-figure a month business on the internet. If you want to make money online, join the society before it’s too late. Maverick Money Makers
How to Get Your Web Site Listed at the Top of Google
04 2009 Friday3
3
By Leo Emery in Google
The biggest challenge every single website owner has (including me) is getting traffic to his/her web site. And bar none the best traffic you can obtain is Organic Search Engine traffic.
So what is Organic Search Engine traffic?
Simply put, when someone is searching for a product or service they type their query into the search engine (google, yahoo, MSN etc.) and then the results of that search are displayed. And you want your web site to come up in that search query.
You probably already know that the majority of people will not go past the first page of the search engine results and even less people will go past the top 30 results. Therefore, your challenge is getting your website listed on the first page of the search engines for the keywords relating to your site.
Now there are a ton of people that will tell you there is some mystical voodoo secret mojo to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). And if you’re not familiar with the term SEO. Simply put SEO is where you build your web site in such a way that the search engines like it and the result is getting better rankings on the search engines.
Well I’m here to tell you that it is not as mystical as everyone would lead you to believe. Just like anything, advertising, google ad words, article marketing it takes constant work to achieve the results you want and in this case, that would be to maintain a top search engine ranking.
I will admit there are many things you can do optimize your web site but I am going to touch on the basics. I have been doing this for some time now. I was taught from some of the best people in the business, so I am passing onto you what was taught to me.
What I am going to share with you is for google. Since it’s the big guy on the block that’s whom I optimize my sites for. There is a lot of info I want to share with you so I have broken this article into 2 parts.
First, just as important as learning What To Do. Is learning What Not To Do.
These are known as black hat techniques. Just stay away from them, if your caught your website will be penalized or even worse banned completely from google. Then you have to start all over and that’s just not worth it.
If you want even more information of the Do’s and Don’ts by Google, just type into Google:
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Ok here are the no, no’s of SEO.
1) Door Way Pages. A doorway page has been designed just for the search engines and not for human beings and is redirected to the goal page. The goal page is the page you ultimately want people to see. So what the webmaster does is makes minor changes to the page and resubmits it to the search engine over and over again.
So when someone finds that page he/she is redirected to the real page and this is usually done with a fast meta refresh command. Google no longer accepts pages using fast Meta refresh. Google see’s these page(s) as duplicates and exclude them from their listings.
Don’t confuse a doorway page with a landing page. Landing pages are ok as they provide a lot of information, have relevant links pointing to them and can be seen by both humans and the search engine spiders.
2) Hidden Text And Links. As the term suggests keywords and keyword phrases are hidden on the page. Usually this is done by having the text the same color as the page color.
Not only Google but the other search engines have the ability to recognize that white text is being displayed on a white background or black text on a black background and so on.
If you want to see if your webmaster has used hidden text, start by looking for large blank areas at the top, bottom or sides of your web page. Now simple scroll your cursor over the area any hidden text will appear. Or you can look at the source code.
You can also hide Hidden Text in your “ALT” tag. The “ALT” tag text will appear when you place your cursor over the image. It will also display the text if your image does not display.
If a few words or even a sentence appears that’s ok. If an entire paragraph appears or a lot of words that don’t read as a sentence appear, that’s bad. Your web master has tried to stuff too many keywords inside the image’s ALT tag. Get rid of them.
It is best to use 4 or 5 words or a sentence of 4 or 5 words long in your “ALT” tag.
3) Cloaking. This is where the content presented to the search engine spider is different to what is presented to the browser (you). By doing this a page that other wise would not be displayed is displayed.
So what happens is the information being delivered is based on the content on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page.
4) Link Farms. I’m sure you’ve heard of the term link farm. All a link farm is, is a system where all the members are linked to each other via a common set of link pages. The result is that all members have a links page with the other members’ web addresses on them.
Many of these link programs have several hundred or even thousands of members, so by joining you have almost instant access to hundreds of other web sites that point links to your site. This can lead to your site looking very “popular”.
The big problem with this is that you are artificially boosting the popularity of your site. You see when a spider from a search engine (Google) comes to your site it checks out your links. If it sees you have a lot of inbound links you can achieve a higher ranking because the more inbound links you have the better. However, it also checks out the quality and relativity of those links to your site.
So if you have a site about “dog training” and most of your links have nothing to do with dog training you will not receive a better ranking. In fact anyone using this type of linking will be penalized. Either your site will get dropped down in the search engines listing or you will be banned all together.
5) Duplicate Content. The search engines only want to index original content. They don’t want to index the same content 1000 times. If duplicate content/site is detected only one will be indexed. The rest will end up as supplemental context and won’t even rank.
6) Keyword Stuffing. Yes you need to have your keywords on your site and in your meta tags, but there is a delicate balance. Sure, you want to rank for a specific keyword and the more times you use it on the page, the more likely you’ll rank for it. Just don’t go crazy.
I have about 25 keywords in my meta tags and all of these keywords are used in the content of my site. But they are used only when the content calls for it.
Keep your writing natural and use the keywords as you feel suitable. Using them too many times will make your site look spammy, which doesn’t sit well with either your human visitors or the spiders that crawl your site. Might not get you banned but you certainly won’t get a favorable ranking either.
Here’s an update many search engines Google for one, do not use Meta Tags as part of their ranking system any more. However, some still do so that’s why I mentioned it.
7) Duplicate Sites. This is when you clone your site under a bunch of different domain names with the same content and then you have the pages linked together so the can get a better ranking and get the top spots for your keywords. This is a really bad idea, and sure way to get banned. Short and sweet, never do this.
About the Author: Leo Emery has been earning a full time living online for over 5 years and is a member of one of the most respected Money Making Coaching Clubs on the Internet. If you’re eager to discover how simple it is to earn a six figure income online visit Net Wise Wealth.com
Oodles O’ Google Tools
03 2009 Thursday19
2
By Tom McCarrick in Google
Google’s position as search engine leaders is undisputed, and they wield enormous power over all who have designs on having a successful “paid search” campaign, otherwise known as Adwords. They basically call the shots on what are the ingredients of a successful campaign and they are first and foremost customer focussed. And that is understandable – they have every intention of continuing at the forefront of both paid and organic search. Organic search is what you see in the main body of the search returns when you do a search query on Google; paid search results are the more compact ads denoted “sponsored links” which appear along the right-hand side of the page (and sometimes at the top of the main page also).
And they have every right to “call the shots”. They are sometimes touted as being one of the Internet marketer’s enemies, as always playing “hardball” with the frequent “slaps” that they deliver. But at the end of the day, they must strive to deliver a positive search experience to their customers. Advertisers are going to be compelled to have ever more focussed, specialised campaigns as Google seeks to eliminate redundancy. For affiliate marketers, there is an ever-increasing need for their campaigns to include useful content for their prospective customer, and to deliver just what their ad says will be delivered.
And you could never accuse Google of leaving the web marketing community to fend for themselves. What a plethora of tools they have made available – and 90% of them are free.
Within Adwords itself there are many valuable tools for refining an advertising campaign:
Keyword Tool – A keyword tracker/keyword suggest tool that provides up-to-date keyword search volumes.
Campaign Optimiser - Performs analysis on a live campaign and suggests additional keywords and ad variations.
Website Optimiser – A more comprehensive feedback tool that monitors several important metrics to do with website layout and content. It takes a while to get up and running with this, but any time taken to implement it will be repaid with interest.
Budget Optimiser – Where you can tell Google your monthly budget, and ask it to go and get the maximum number of clicks for you. (I have found with Budget Optimiser that I never overspend, as I do when I have control over the campaign myself)
Keyword Diagnosis – The latest addition to the armoury of the pay-per-click advertiser. This will actually analyse which keywords are performing and which ones you are better off without. And it tells you why they are not performing, and what you can do to remedy it.
All of these tools are freely available within the Adwords interface and I am convinced that the majority of PPC advertisers don’t even realise that they are available. They are probably as good, if not better than many of the commercial keyword tools that are available.
I have not even mentioned the other great Google resources, like Suggest Labs, Google Analytics and iGoogle, which is your own branded page that you can load with various SEO statistics and data on popular searches. A discussion of these and other resources like Google Webmaster Tools, may be better to leave for another occasion.
About the Author: Tom McCarrick http://www.onlineglobalbiz.com http://www.ideal-biz.com
Google Adsense Income: The Three Keys
03 2009 Tuesday17
5
By Mike Adams in Google
Many people put together numerous (even hundreds) of niche websites to make Google Adsense income. You may have heard that a good target is earning $1/day from each web site, and you may have wondered if this is possible. Yes, it is, if you understand the three keys to Google Adsense income: click-through rate, earnings per click, and traffic.
You can improve the Adsense click-through rate by modifying your web site design. Observe which changes increase or decrease the Adsense click-through rate. It may sound funny, but you want a site that is good enough that it gets indexed by search engines and attracts visitors, but that is incomplete enough so that people want to leave in search of something more. And you want all of the obvious exit links to be Adsense ad links that seem to offer people what they are looking for.
Earnings per click depend on getting the content on a page (especially targeted keywords) to trigger Adsense ads that many advertisers are bidding on. One keyword might only make you $0.05 per click. Another keyword might make you several dollars per click. You want to target your page content around keywords that have many advertisers competing.
This is actually the opposite of what you want for search engine optimization. In general, you will be able to rank higher in the search engines for keywords with less competition. So how do you do this without destroying your search engine rankings? The secret is called “long tail” keywords.
Long tail keywords are longer keyword phrases that have searches yet have little competition in the search engine results. Be sure the phrases contain keywords that have high advertising competition. Google makes their money from advertising, so they will display the highest price ads that match the content on the page. But since you made sure you have one of the few pages targeted for the long-tail keyword phrase, you should also be able to rank well in the search engine results for the long tail phrase.
Once you improve your click-through rate and your earnings per click, it’s simply a matter of increasing traffic to your site. Getting traffic generally takes the most effort, in my experience. Basically, there are two ways to get traffic: You can buy advertising or you can get traffic through links and search engine results.
You could easily get traffic by buying Adwords ads. But it isn’t always easy to make more income than you spend on advertising. For an Adsense site, that generally means that you cannot profitably advertise it, so you need to get it listed in the search engines and get as many links as possible with a reasonable amount of effort. The two easiest ways to achieve this currently are article marketing and social networking.
Article marketing, sometimes called “bum marketing,” is pretty simple. You write one or more short articles (about 500 words or so) and submit them to article directories on the Web. You get to include an author’s resource box that links to your site at the end of the article. There are even services such as iSnare or Article Marketer that will submit your article to hundreds of article directories for you.
The more articles you do for a given site, the more links and traffic you get and the higher you get in search engine results. And you can get article ideas from anywhere. For example, this article started out as a response to one of my customers about how to do this. Since it was a long response, it was logical to also turn it into an article and publish it!
In social networking, you get your link on various social networking sites. Be sure to look through each site first and see what other people are doing and fit in with the community. Social networking sites have their own community rules, and you don’t want to get banned for spam.
These techniques will usually get your website indexed by the search engines within days. You will also get traffic from them, so don’t just do it for links, do it for traffic also.
Now that you know the three keys to Google Adsense income, click-through rate, earnings per click, and traffic, it’s time to start creating your Adsense empire!
Mike Adams - There is one more resource you need to create your Adsense empire: content! Creating numerous web sites takes a lot of content. Want a shortcut? Check out Mike Adams’s PLR-Content.com for all of the content you will ever need: http://www.plr-content.com/
Google Optimization: Using Search Operators
03 2009 Friday6
5
By Jeffrey Smith in Google
The underlying premise of SEO suggests that you understand the task at hand when it comes to outranking the other 999 entrants for any given keyword.
Google stops indexing a particular keyword after 1000 results when assessing the aggregate relevance score to determine which results are spawned. By truly understanding this, you can discover a great deal from using a few basic Google search operators to determine what type of foothold a competitor has for a given keyword or niche.
Basic Competitive Analysis Metrics
1. Start with the keyword you are interested in researching. Place the keyword “in quotes” in a Google search box.
For example “SEO” returns 262,000,000 competing pages with the chronological order of the strongest sites first.
Then look to the right and determine the number of competing pages you are up against “for that keyword”. It will say results 1 of 10 of (the number of competing pages).
This allows you to assess the competitive landscape with one brief metric. The extent of what you consider a competitive keywords depends on the website. For example, most websites can acquire a keyword under 50,000 competing pages with ease and competitive keywords start above 100,000 results and ascend into the millions (pages in index / divided by the top 1000 results).
The next few metrics will allow you to understand where your SEO ceiling is (what threshold your website has for keyword benchmarks). Our blog for example can devour a keyword with up to 1,000,000 competing pages just from one post of mentioning those keywords (without backlinks).
So, all the talk about building website authority does have a place when you understand the implications to rank with less effort. Authority sites have the ability to zero in on a keyword and skip over hundreds of other websites and reach the top 10 results by the merit of trust and internal link weight and dynamism they possess. In keeping with the topic at hand, let’s move to the next metric.
2. Evaluate your competitors domain and determine the amount of pages they have by using this search command in Google. You can use the #1 site and the #10 site to gauge an average of pages required to capture the keyword or, if you want you can use the #1st, 2nd and 3rd site that rank for the selected keyword to see which formulas they are entrenched in.
site:competitorsite.com (this shows you how many pages they have indexed in Google)
3. Next, determine how saturated their website is with the keyword in question.
site:competitorsite.com keyword
This shows you how many pages are indexed that include the keyword within their website. If the site in the top 10 is an authority domain, it can rank from one keyword alone in the title tag, description tag or having the keyword in the body text (or any combination of these three metrics).
While most websites do not have that luxury, often dozens or hundreds of pages are required to cross the tipping point of co-occurrence for that keyword within the website and acquire a top ranking. However each keyword has a threshold which is going to vary depending on the unique metrics of each website (which is why you need to look at more than one site for evaluation).
4. Now that you know that your competitors site contains Y amount of pages and X amount of those pages are dedicated to a specific keyword.
You can go the the most relevant listing returned from their site and look at the off page factors (which means finding out how many backlinks are linking to that page). To do so, use Yahoo Site Explorer and type the specific URL in and look at the inlinks tab to see how many pages are linking to that page.
For example, if the homepage is returned as the top ranking result for the keyword using the competitorsite.com keyword search command, ignore it and look for an actual page that has a title, or relevant shingle with the keyword (in the title, URL or description).
If they targeted a keyword using a broad match method (which means it was not necessarily the objective, but their site acquired the ranking based on ambient factors, then you will only see a sparse mention of the keyword). The point being, the homepage is a catch all and will not provide you with the same amount of depth when attempting to data mine deep links from your competitors.
The idea is, you want to know (a) how many pages they have indexed (b) how many pages contain the keyword (c) how many deep links (how many links just to that page) the top ranking page has (from outside the site) as well as (d) how well the site in internally linked (for that keyword).
We can determine criteria a-c with simple search commands, and you can also determine if the site is treated as an authority based on the keywords that appear in bold when using the site: command, websites start transforming into authority sites through topical relevance after 200-300 pages are developed around a topic (if they are linked and optimized properly).
5. Crunch the numbers and assess the competitive landscape of the keyword in question.
For example, if you know that the top 3 sites all have an average of 1000 pages and out of those 1000 pages 50% or more of them contain the keyword in question and your site has 20 pages, then you are not being realistic with your ranking objectives.
I am not suggesting to go add 1000 pages overnight (as that would not be natural) but rather, start chipping away at the keyword using a variety of SEO tactics.
6. Check the allintitle, allintext and allinanchor thesholds for the selected competitors sites. This means finding where they rank in Google (in the top 1000 results before the results get obscured / redundant) using the following search operators.
allintitle:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of keyword in title)allintext:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of keyword in their body text)allinanchor:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of anchor text / links with this keyword)
Using Google again, you can look at the competitors on page and off page metrics, instead of breaking them out individually, you can just use NicheWatch instead, or our Ultimate SEO Toolkit, to perform this function.
The Conclusion
SEO is only limited by your imagination when it comes to determining the extent of how you use tactics for discovery and analysis. We covered a few simple metrics using Google search operators above that allow you to isolate co-occurrence and determine the global keyword density for a site.
This does provide a preliminary analysis to at least let you know what your up against (qualifying a competitor or your own domain to a keyword). If you reverse engineer the averages, you can find the tipping point for essentially any keyword and craft a plan of action to acquire it.
For example 1000 pages indexed, 900 have the keyword in exact match and the main landing page has 50 inbound links from Page Rank 4 pages. Now you have a threshold to exceed. Although this is a preliminary method, sometimes looking at basic metrics such as these can provide an immense amount of insight and determine the next competitive threshold you target for analysis.
Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.
The Changing Face of Search: Is Google Losing its Grip?
03 2009 Thursday5
2
By Patricia Skinner in Google
Search is changing at breakneck speed due to the colossal success of certain social media phenomena like Twitter , StumbleUpon and maybe FriendFeed.
There are definite signs that search is beginning to separate out, forming niches and tributaries that better feed the main knowledge stream.
Might Twitter be the New Google?
A few years ago formal search via a search engine was overwhelmingly the way people would set about finding whatever they were looking for on the Web. Google, Yahoo and MSN Live were the universal engines of search (hence their name).
Things have changed.
Michael Gray of Graywolf’s SEO Blog told me he uses the Customize Google FireFox plugin to get more out of the old method of search. But more and more web users are realizing that the top ranking web-page for a given search term submitted to a search engine will not necessarily turn up what you need to know in all its pristine glory. After all, you wouldn’t use Google to find a job online would you? Good. I’m glad you wouldn’t.
Change in search seems to be gathering pace, giving rise to a number of articles like mine. Here’s a similar opinion on the changing face of search: Twitter destined to replace Google Search.
As you can see, it’s not just because of the economy that Google stock lost a whopping 56 percent in 2008!
It is finally dawning on us that industry leaders or experts in their field are unfailingly the best source for information on any given topic. And it’s getting easier to find industry leaders and approach them, but not through search engines.
This is why sites like Twitter, Mashable, Alltop, SEOmoz, Sphinn, and other specialized social media sites that are increasingly used for search are gaining ground fast.
It’s not about centralizing your search anymore.
It’s now about finding better information than your competitors: can we say ‘knowledge is power’? Everyone is looking for those nuggets of information that will set them apart and above their competitors.
Skillful use of social media can put you in ongoing contact with the very people whose opinion and expertise you value. And there’s no limit to how much of this expertise you can tap into with tools like Twitter and the myriad of other specialized search applications springing up. Tap into the right sources and you can make yourself an industry-leader almost overnight.
Tracking News
Digg, Stumbleupon and increasingly Mixx are yet more sites that will help you find the latest on just about anything you care to name. You can subscribe to keywords so that you get everything on your subject of interest without having to do a thing.
Searching for specifics
Tip’d for financial information and news so you can invest your hard-earned money wisely.
FairShare helps you keep track of who’s copying your work and where it’s appearing on the web.
Checking up on gossip
Whether you need to keep an eye on your own reputation or that of a client’s, or if you’re digging up the dirt on someone (did I just say that?) you could do worse than use BackType.
Looking for a job
Mashable comes through for you yet again if you’re looking for a job: here’s a wonderful list of job sites to try.
Twitter is increasingly being seen by the search world’s industry leaders as an interactive search tool. Imagine being able to ask a question of the very top person in your field or in the field you want to know more about? This is quintessentially the beauty of Twitter.
Even if your target is not following you, it is still possible to address them directly. Of course there’s no guarantee that they’ll reply, but many of the top Twitter users, despite their busy lives, take the time to share generously with those who are interested in what they have to say.
This is like having a permanent spot at the stage door to see your favorite movie star!
Even AdAge and the Huffington Post have noticed that Twitter is the next big thing in search.
Tools to help you search Twitter
Twist is a new Twitter search application with lots of potential in my opinion.
Tweetscan where you just enter in your chosen keywords.
Twitter Search Results is a Greasemonkey script (Firefox only at the moment) to add real time results from Twitter to your Google search.
Your takeaway? If you’re relying solely on Google for your search needs maybe you should rethink your knowledge-building strategies.
Patricia Skinner is a Copywriter, SEO consultant & social media expert. She writes about what she knows best
WWGD: Why Google TV Won’t Match Google Search
02 2009 Monday9
3
By Dave Morgan in Google
I just started reading Jeff Jarvis’s book “What Would Google Do?” — and I love it. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since he told me about his idea for the book almost a year ago. As many of you know, Jeff is a former journalist and media executive and now very high profile blogger at Buzzmachine.com.
In Jeff’s book, he writes about the very successful — and fundamentally different — approach that Google takes in running its business relative to virtually every other company in the world. He details its obsessions in serving users, its “publicness,” its ability to create and exploit network effects. Then he hypothetically applies these principles to a number of other industries, from banking to retail, always asking the question, “What would Google do?” His stories and ideas are fascinating and the book is a fast read. I highly recommend it.
However, my purpose in writing today about Jeff’s book was not just to review it, but also to follow his advice and turn the question back on Google. Why? Because as I read the book, it occurred to me that Google has done some things that are not “what Google would do.”
Google has built an extraordinary business in search by focusing on the user and giving searchers more and better information faster than any other company. Its effort to organize the Web’s information certainly created “the world’s greatest Yellow Pages.” Then, the company combined this search directory with an enormously powerful and profitable advertising business, AdWords, which delivers commercial messages that are very relevant to the search results. Finally, its strategists extended the scale of the AdWords business with the creation of AdSense, where tailored commercial messages are distributed across millions of other Web sites. The combination of Google Search, AdWords and AdSense has given the company a media franchise of a size, growth trajectory and profitability such that the world has never seen before.
I think that the order in which Google created these businesses is important. AdWords worked because of the power of Google Search. AdSense worked because of the existing power of AdWords. These products would not have worked nearly as successfully, if at all, if they had been launched in reverse order.
Why then, when Google launched Google TV and Google Print, did it focus first on the advertising sides of those businesses? Essentially, these products aggregated commercial inventory from traditional media companies and offered them for sale through the same kinds of self-service interfaces used for AdWords and AdSense. Both Google Print and Google TV seem to have been the company’s attempts to horizontally extend its online ad franchise into traditional media, but neither product had the advantage of leveraging a massive user base viewing a “Googlized” directory of print or television content. Neither of them really focused on the user, nor did they follow users.
To me, Google Print and Google TV seem like the kinds of new business extensions that more traditional corporations would implement — on the counsel of expensive, brand-name management consultants, of course — rather than follow the model that Google did in building its core franchise. Maybe this is why Google Print wasn’t successful and was recently shut down. I don’t know how Google TV is faring, but my bet is that it will never be anything like the franchise the company has in search.
Why? Because they didn’t do it like Google would. What do you think?
Dave Morgan, founder of TACODA and Real Media, is Chairman of — and a partner in — The Tennis Company, which owns TENNIS.com, and TENNIS and SMASH Magazines.
Google Street View Continues to Raise Privacy Concerns
02 2009 Tuesday3
2
By Brian Cooper in Google
Google Street View, a Google Maps feature that lets users see images of streets and the surrounding areas, continues to generate controversy. Since its launch in May 2007, the feature has prompted questions about whether it constitutes an invasion of privacy, complaints about inappropriate images, and even a lawsuit.
Aaron and Christine Boring vs. Google
The lawsuit came from a Pittsburgh couple in April 2008. The couple lives on a private road. However, Google’s Street View team travelled down the road and continued taking images all the way up to the couple’s home. The images were then posted to Google Maps and included close-ups of the couple’s home, swimming pool, and outbuildings.
Google’s response? “Complete privacy does not exist in this world except in a desert, and anyone who is not a hermit must expect and endure the ordinary incidents of the community life of which he (or she) is a part.”[i]
While Google’s assertion that its Street View imaging team is an “ordinary incident of community life” is far-fetched, Google does make some good points in its response. Namely, that the plaintiffs could have simply requested that Google remove the offending images from Street View via a form available on Google Maps. Instead, the couple filed suit and in doing so have made the matter public record and ensured that the images will be viewed by even more people.
Since the lawsuit, Google has removed the images in question, but the suit remains open.
The Borings’ Neighbors
On Goldenbrook Lane, a nearby street, some of the Borings’ neighbors also had an incident with the Street View team. In this incident, the Street View team drove up Goldenbrook Lane and into the driveway of the McKee residence. They continued to drive, snapping Street View images the whole way, up to the garages of the McKees.[ii] While it appears that the McKees didn’t resort to a lawsuit, Google has removed the images of the home that were taken from private property from Street View.
Street View in California
In California, the antics of the Street View drivers continued. Drivers reportedly went on over 100 private roads in Sonoma County according to an analysis done by PressDemocrat.com. In another instance, Street View drivers went past two no trespassing signs as they photographed the 1,200 foot private road leading up to Betty Webb’s house in Humboldt County. In another incident reported by PressDemocrat.com, Street View drivers ignored a no trespassing sign, passed through a gate, and drove through someone’s yard on a dirt road near Freestone.
Street View and U.S. Military Bases
In March 2008, the Pentagon requested that Google remove some images of military bases taken from public streets due to the potential threat those images posed to national security. “It actually shows where all the guards are. It shows how the barriers go up and down. It shows how to get in and out of buildings,” said General Gene Renuart, commander of U.S. Northern Command.[iii] According to Google spokesman Larry Yu, Google has honored the Pentagon’s requests.[iv] However, the Pentagon was still reviewing the many images of military facilities that were included in Street View.[v]
Street View Goes Global
After the complaints in the U.S., other countries warned Google that Street View would have to be modified to comply with their stricter privacy laws. To this end, Google has improved facial recognition technology so that it can find faces in images and blur them so that they are unrecognizable. This technology has also been applied to license plates. The blurring feature has since been applied to U.S. Street View imagery in addition to images in other countries where Street View is now available.
Accountability
While Google has removed some of the aforementioned locations from Street View, the burden to monitor Google’s actions, be it Street View or other Google services, continues to fall on people like you and me. With regard to Street View, Google argues that “many people-visitors pulling in the driveway, neighbors turning around at the end of the road, deliverymen delivering packages-can all plainly see the exterior of the (Borings) home.”[vi] While these examples are likely accurate for the Borings and the population in general, they involve people that we know or strangers that we requested to come to our homes. Private residents didn’t request that Google visit these neighborhoods nor would residents reasonably expect that someone would be driving down their streets taking photographs of everything. In fact, I suspect that if you or I were to do the same thing, someone would call the police and we’d have some difficult questions to answer down at the station.
Potential Consequences
So, what could the consequences of Street View be? Well, while the feature has been used to aid police in a kidnapping investigation[vii], I think the feature could be far more useful to criminals. For example, a criminal could use Street View to case a neighborhood-checking Street View for cars that are parked in garages or driveways so they could know when someone isn’t at home, scan the yards and windows for any signs indicating that homes have security systems, check the proximity of neighboring houses using Street View and Google’s satellite imagery, look for signs of pets that could pose problems for a thief, see if the homes have newspapers delivered (which might help the thief determine if the residents were on vacation) and, assuming the criminal found a good candidate, select a few potential access points (like open windows) for breaking into the home. If the Street View car happened to pass through your neighborhood on garbage day, the camera might even capture the box of that new HDTV you got. Scary, huh?
Protecting Your Privacy
So how can you protect yourself? First, check your address using Street View. To report a concern with Street View imagery, enter the address you desire and click “Search Maps.” Then, click “Street View” in the thought bubble that appears on the map. Once the “Street View” image appears, click “Report a Concern” in the bottom left corner of the Street View image and enter the details of your complaint.
Second, be mindful of how your information is used and act when you feel your privacy is being threatened. Google’s Street View can be a helpful tool, but it is meant to help Google sell ads and make money, not protect your privacy. You can write your local, state and federal representatives and even the local paper to voice your opinion.
Oh, and if you believe as Google does that “complete privacy does not exist,” then you should check out the house where Google CEO Eric Schmidt reportedly lives using satellite imagery from Google Maps. It looks like he has had some construction done in the past few years. A simple Google search of the address (366 Walsh Road, Atherton, CA) will tell you that Schmidt merged two adjacent lots in 2001[viii] to create the new lot and then added a new fence, retaining wall, and drainage in 2004.[ix] Eric, that creepiness that you’re feeling is probably approaching the level of the people who had Street View vehicles in their driveways. So, while it is Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful,” the company should thoroughly consider how that information can adversely impact the same people it is meant to help.
About the Author
Brian Cooper is the Director of Online Public Relations at Medium Blue, where he promotes the company’s clients on the Internet. He has a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a MBA in management from Georgia State University where he graduated summa cum laude. His articles have been published on numerous websites, including The American Chronicle, IM Newswatch, IT Business Net, Search Engine Guide, SEO News, Site Pro News, and TechLINKS. Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld in 2006 and 2007.
[i] “Preliminary Statement.” Boring vs. Google, Allegheny County, PA
[ii] TheSmokingGun.com “Google is in Your Driveway!”
[iii] Reuters. “Google pulls some map images at Pentagon’s request.” Mar. 6, 2008.
[iv] Ibid
[v] Ibid
[vi]“Preliminary Statement.” Boring vs. Google, Allegheny County, PA
[vii] Telegraph.co.uk. “US police use Google Street View to find missing child.” Jan. 9, 2009
[viii] Town of Atherton City Council Minutes, May 16, 2001.
[ix] Palo Alto Online, September 24, 2001.
Increase Your Adsense Cash
12 2008 Wednesday3
4
By Katherine Baka in Google
Adsense is really making a huge impact on the affiliate marketing industry nowadays. Because of this, weak affiliate merchants have the tendency to die faster than ever and ad networks will be going to lose their customers quickly. If you are in a losing rather than winning in the affiliate program you are currently into, maybe it is about time to consider going into the Adsense marketing and start earning some real cash.
Google is readily providing well written and highly relevant ads that are closely chosen to match the content on your pages. You do not have to look for them yourselves as the search engine will be the doing the searching for you from other people’s source.
You do not have to spend time in choosing different kind of ads for different pages. And no codes to mess around for different affiliate programs.
You will be able to concentrate on providing good and quality content, as the search engines will be the ones finding the best ads in which to put your pages on.
You are still allowed to add Adsense ads even if you already have affiliate links on your site. It is prohibited, however, to imitate the look and feel of the Google ads for your affiliate links.
You can filter up to 200 URLs. That gives you a chance to block ads for the sites that do not meet your guidelines. You can also block competitors. Though it is unavoidable that Adsense may be competing for some space on web sites that all other revenues are sharing.
Owners of small sites are allowed to plug a bit of a code into their sites and instantly have relevant text ads that appeal to your visitors appear instantly into your pages. If you own many sites, you only need to apply once. It makes up for having to apply to many affiliate programs.
The only way to know how much you are already earning is to try and see. If you want out, all you have to do is remove the code from your site.
The payment rates can vary extremely. The payment you will be receiving per click depends on how much advertisers are paying per click to advertise with the use of the AdWords. Advertisers can pay as little as 5 cents and as high as $10-12, sometimes even more than that too. You are earning a share of that money generated.
If your results remain stagnant, it can help if you try and build simple and uncluttered pages so that the ads can catch the visitor’s eyes more. It sometimes pay to differ from the usual things that people are doing already. It is also a refreshing sight for your visitor once they see something different for a change.
Publishers also have the option of choosing to have their ads displayed only on a certain site or sites. It is also allowed to have them displayed on a large network of sites. The choice would be depending on what you think will work best for your advantage.
To get an idea if some Adsense ads you see on the search engines has your pages, try to find web pages that have similar material to the content you are planning to create and look up their Adsense ads.
It is important to note that you cannot choose certain topics only. If you do this, search engines will not place Adsense ads on your site and you will be missing out a great opportunity in making hundreds and even thousands of dollars cash.
It is still wise to look at other people’s information and format your Adsense there. Just think about it as doing yourself a favor by not having to work too hard to know what content to have.
Topic to be avoided includes gambling, firearms, ammunition, tobacco or drugs. If you are being offered more cash in exchange of doing Adsense with these kinds, it is just like signing your own termination paper.
With all the information that people need in your hands already, all you have to do is turn them as your profits. It all boils down to a gain and gain situation both for the content site owners and the webmasters or publishers.
Make other people’s matter your own and starting earning some extra cash.
To Your Success, Katherine Baka http://www.profits2wealth.com
Why Does Google Penalise Webmasters – Are They Evil?
11 2008 Tuesday11
12
By Mike Gracia in Google
Let’s face it; any website owner wants to rank high in Google! So budding webmasters jump online, read a few forum posts and try to get their site ranked on the first page of Google. Many people, however, stumble at the first or second ‘SEO hurdle’ and either struggle to get rankings, to no avail, or get some decent positions only to then be slapped with a Google penalty!
It’s not just newbie website owners trying to promote themselves that get hit by penalties by the mighty Google Gods, large corporations and even some SEO companies are also fair game for a penalty if they don’t act within Google’s terms.
So, Why Do Google Penalise? – Are they really that Evil?
Like any argument, there are always two sides (At Least!). On the one side, the webmaster whose livelihood may depend on high Google rankings can understandably feel aggrieved by any penalty that Google may impose on them, after all, if someone in the ‘real world’ did something that could potentially shut down your business, then one would be rightfully P*#sed off at them!
It would pay for webmasters both small and large (No, I am not talking about waist girth here either!) to try to understand Google’s motivations a little before passing judgement though. Whilst Google may seem like some huge corporate entity that can never be hurt, it may well be that like a wounded animal, Google penalised you in defence…
Look at it this way, if you ran one of the largest, most successful companies in history – and your continued success depended on you returning the most relevant results for any given search term, which of course you do, due to the great algorithm you invented (An algorithm that, by the way, completely revolutionised the way that search engines… well, search!) – And then people came along and tried to manipulate their search positions, what would you do?
If you allowed people to manipulate their search positions, what would happen? Would you still bring the most relevant results for any given search? – If not, would you maintain your current position as the market leader in online search?
What would you do? Would you stand by and watch your company suffer, or would you act to stop the manipulation of your search results?
Once you understand that Google motivation for penalising webmasters and their respective websites is all about protecting their business, perhaps you may judge them a little less for the penalties they dish out.
It is unfortunate though, that some webmasters are ‘taken for a ride’ by certain SEO companies that promise to get them 1st page Google rankings, and use dodgy techniques that manipulate Google’s search results, and risk getting the website banned.
How To Avoid Google Penalties
Avoiding penalties that Google dish out to websites they suspect are manipulating their own search positions is pretty simple… don’t try to manipulate your search position!
While this may sound ridiculous, it isn’t really! You can still ensure your site ranks highly without resorting to trying to manipulate Google’s algorithm.
Try to think about why Google penalises… to protect its business by making sure it continues to return the most relevant results. On that basis, don’t waste your money with people that promise to get you ranked JUST by building links… that IS and probably ALWAYS will be in breach of Google’s terms!
In contrast, an SEO company that takes a broader view of Search Engine Optimisation can help your site a great deal.
The sort of work that SHOULD be done by an SEO company is checking your websites structure, internal linkage, and making sure there are no errors.
Next they would ensure that you have no ‘bad SEO’ techniques in place on your site, nor anything that the Googlebot could possibly mistake for ‘bad SEO’.
After this, advice should be given about how your site can be made more informative and accessible to your visitors, including how to keep the site relevant. There are a few on page factors that need to be considered, such a page title tags, heading tags etc. All of these, whilst they should be optimised for the search engines, should be optimised in a way that just helps confirm the relevancy of a page, and not in a way to ‘trick’ the Google algorithm.
It is hard to choose an ethical SEO companies as, to some extent, this is an oxymoron. All SEO companies are employed to raise your search engine rankings, and so the line between ‘Ethical’ and ‘Grey Hat’ SEO is a very fine one. If in doubt, be sure to pick a company that will be transparent, and will treat your site as an individual business, and not merely a statistic to be worked on.
Truly ethical SEO companies will be fine about taking the time to chat about your site, and they will make a custom plan about how your site can be improved, and how you can promote your online business without slipping into the old, tired techniques that may get you a Google penalty.
Make Your Small Business Look Big
Big Features, Small Budget
VerticalResponse offers an easy-to-use, web-based marketing tool that helps you grow your business through email marketíng, online surveys and postcards all in one place.
Email
Create high-impact newsletters, invitations and announcements in a flash. Enjoy flexible pricing options with pay-as-you-go or send unlimited email for as little as $10/month!
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Surveys
You don't have to be a big company or hire a market research team, simply use VerticalResponse surveys to understand what makes your customers tick. Choose from a range of pre-built survey templates, or create your own!
Sign Up Now - Your First 25 Survey Responses are FREE with your trial
Direct Mail Postcards
When you've got a great list of offline contacts, it's easy to design and send high quality postcards in a hurry. Use images from our library, or even your own! Add type, proof a pdf and get your postcard in the mail!
VerticalResponse offers an easy-to-use, web-based marketing tool that helps you grow your business through email marketíng, online surveys and postcards all in one place.
Create high-impact newsletters, invitations and announcements in a flash. Enjoy flexible pricing options with pay-as-you-go or send unlimited email for as little as $10/month!
Sign Up Today - 30-Day Free Tríal
Surveys
You don't have to be a big company or hire a market research team, simply use VerticalResponse surveys to understand what makes your customers tick. Choose from a range of pre-built survey templates, or create your own!
Sign Up Now - Your First 25 Survey Responses are FREE with your trial
Direct Mail Postcards
When you've got a great list of offline contacts, it's easy to design and send high quality postcards in a hurry. Use images from our library, or even your own! Add type, proof a pdf and get your postcard in the mail!
Going Broke on Google Adwords?
Forget Expensive PPC Advertising - Promote Your Web Site with ExactSeek's Affordable Featured Listing & Rapid Paid Inclusion Programs!
EXACTSEEK'S FEATURED LISTING PROGRAM can't be matched in value or performance. Why pay for ads in Google, Yahoo! or other pay-per-click engines that experience a 15% - 25% click-fraud rate and cost you more in one day than a sponsored listing with us costs in months. The choice is simple. ExactSeek and the ISEDN (Independent Search Engine & Directory Network), are able to provide a flat rate keyword program that offers webmasters & siteowners Top 10 Exposure across a large network of search engines and web directories at low, one-tïme, flat fee rates. We provide the only alternative to PPC that delivers solid value and true benefits:
How is Our Program Different From Google AdWords
Fixed Cost: $3 to $4 per month per keyword term, or less. No per-click charges. Volume discounts available.
Top 10 Exposure: Through a Rolling Selection System and restricted keyword sales.
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ADDING A FEATURED LISTING IS AS EASY AS 1 - 2 - 3
Step 1: Check the popularity of your preferred keyword terms using the Wordtracker Keyword Tool.
Step 2: Use the ExactSeek Availability Tool to see if your selections are available in our network.
Step 3: Place your order through Paypal or 2CO.com. Your financial information is 100% secure.
Receive 4 Bonus Downloads Valued at Over $90
Bonus #1: SEO Secrets v1.4 - A 49 page ebook in PDF format by professional copywriter, Glenn Murray, that shows you all you need to know to reach the top of the search engines.
Bonus #2: How to Optimize for Google - A 10 page whitepaper that touches on a number of aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, etc.
Bonus #3: What I Didn't Learn At School But Wish I Had - A 281 page ebook in PDF format by Jamie McIntyre that provides invaluable financial information and strategies that you can apply in your life today.
Bonus #4: Top SEO Secrets - A 78 page ebook in PDF format by SEO expert Sebastian Foss that covers the creation of search engine friendly web pages, writing effective SEO copy and search engine submission.
EXACTSEEK'S FEATURED LISTING PROGRAM can't be matched in value or performance. Why pay for ads in Google, Yahoo! or other pay-per-click engines that experience a 15% - 25% click-fraud rate and cost you more in one day than a sponsored listing with us costs in months. The choice is simple. ExactSeek and the ISEDN (Independent Search Engine & Directory Network), are able to provide a flat rate keyword program that offers webmasters & siteowners Top 10 Exposure across a large network of search engines and web directories at low, one-tïme, flat fee rates. We provide the only alternative to PPC that delivers solid value and true benefits:
How is Our Program Different From Google AdWords
Fixed Cost: $3 to $4 per month per keyword term, or less. No per-click charges. Volume discounts available.
Top 10 Exposure: Through a Rolling Selection System and restricted keyword sales.
No Hassle: No keyword bidding, no bid management and no incentive for click-fraud.
World-Wide Placement: Your listing(s) featured worldwide on over 200 search engines and web, blog & article directories.
Keyword Selection: If a good keyword term is available - it's yours. No keyword management or variable keyword pricing.
Quick Inclusion: Your Featured Listing will be added within 6 to 8 hours to our entire network of search partners.
ADDING A FEATURED LISTING IS AS EASY AS 1 - 2 - 3
Step 1: Check the popularity of your preferred keyword terms using the Wordtracker Keyword Tool.
Step 2: Use the ExactSeek Availability Tool to see if your selections are available in our network.
Step 3: Place your order through Paypal or 2CO.com. Your financial information is 100% secure.
Receive 4 Bonus Downloads Valued at Over $90
Bonus #1: SEO Secrets v1.4 - A 49 page ebook in PDF format by professional copywriter, Glenn Murray, that shows you all you need to know to reach the top of the search engines.
Bonus #2: How to Optimize for Google - A 10 page whitepaper that touches on a number of aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, etc.
Bonus #3: What I Didn't Learn At School But Wish I Had - A 281 page ebook in PDF format by Jamie McIntyre that provides invaluable financial information and strategies that you can apply in your life today.
Bonus #4: Top SEO Secrets - A 78 page ebook in PDF format by SEO expert Sebastian Foss that covers the creation of search engine friendly web pages, writing effective SEO copy and search engine submission.
Get top 10 rankings on Google
High rankings on Google and other major search engines are crucial to the success of any online business. IBP's Top 10 Optimizer helps you to get high rankings as easily as possible.
High rankings on Google in three easy steps
IBP helps you get high Google rankings in three easy steps:
Download IBP and install it on your computer. IBP runs on Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista.
Start IBP and enter your website address in IBP's Top 10 Optimizer tools.
Follow the instructions and benefit from top 10 search engine rankings on Google & Yahoo!
IBP tells you in plain English and in great detail what you have to do to get a top 10 ranking for your specific keyword in the search engine you've chosen. IBP supports all important search engines.
IBP uses a proven method that works
A search engine optimization method that really works is to analyze the web pages that currently have a high ranking for your important keyword. Since these pages have a top 10 ranking, the pages must have all the best settings.
With IBP, analyzing the top ranked web pages is as easy as 1-2-3. IBP analyzes the web pages that currently have a top 10 ranking in the search engine of your choice and compares them with your page.
IBP tells you how the pages have achieved that ranking and how you must change your web pages and the links to your website to obtain a similar ranking. Improving your website has never been so easy. IBP helps you get more customers and more sales with increased search engine rankings.
How to optimize your website for Google
IBP's Top 10 Ranking report demystifies Google's ranking algorithm and tells you in easy-to-understand words how to optimize and prepare your website specifically for better results in Google.
Suppose you want to know how to get a top 10 ranking for the search term "outdoor equipment" in Google. IBP will tell you how to optimize your website for exactly that search term in Google.
IBP's advice is based on in-depth analysis of current, up-to-the-minute top 10 results in Google for that search term and it is specifically for that search term and specifically for Google.
.
IBP's high quality analysis results are always up-to-date, specific, and accurate. You won't get that level of search engine optimization accuracy with any other tool.IBP also works with Yahoo's latest search engine ranking algorithm, with MSN Search and all other major search engines. IBP helps you get the rankings you deserve.
Is your search engine optimization company really good?
Did you hire a search engine placement or a search engine optimization company to get high rankings for your site? Use IBP to find out if they really optimized your site for high rankings on Google.
Of course, IBP also works with other search engines. Don't wait any longer and download the free IBP trial now.
Read what our customers say about IBP:
Marcus Allen, OrlandoVacationsOnline.com, says:
"I wouldn't normally get too excited about a product but when something like IBP has pretty much quadrupled your online income, it's only fair to make it known!
I recently upgraded my IBP, spent a few hours working with it over a two week period and the rest is obvious. [...] Our website is positioned at numbers 5, 1, 2, 2 and 1 respectively! Need I say more?
It's all due to IBP. IBP has secured us an extremely good position in the hugely competitive Travel market. Thanks Axandra!"
Michael Wong, Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com, says:
"IBP is a search engine optimization tool that turns SEO novices into experts overnight! [...] The report is not only comprehensive, but goes into the kind of detail that would take a professional optimizer quite a few hours to produce.
You then simply go through the checklist and make the appropriate changes to your web page. [...] You really have to see for yourself. It's so simple, even a complete computer novice can use it. I highly recommend it!"
Rob Coxworth, webFootLeisure.com, says:
"I'm impressed by the rapid improvement in my sites visibility. From virtually invisible unless I paid for clicks to rankings on pages 1-3 on a number of my keywords since late November. Great product and money well spent."
Richard Bravo, Jackson Hole Real Estate Company, says:
"I just wanted to let you know your software ROCKS! After just one week of implementing data from our IBP reports we have seen 23 NEW listings.
We jumped an average of 10 spots that put us on the first page of most of our key phrases and we just hit #1 on one of our most coveted key words. Yee-Haw! Thanks for developing such a great tool."
High rankings on Google in three easy steps
IBP helps you get high Google rankings in three easy steps:
Download IBP and install it on your computer. IBP runs on Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista.
Start IBP and enter your website address in IBP's Top 10 Optimizer tools.
Follow the instructions and benefit from top 10 search engine rankings on Google & Yahoo!
IBP tells you in plain English and in great detail what you have to do to get a top 10 ranking for your specific keyword in the search engine you've chosen. IBP supports all important search engines.
IBP uses a proven method that works
A search engine optimization method that really works is to analyze the web pages that currently have a high ranking for your important keyword. Since these pages have a top 10 ranking, the pages must have all the best settings.
With IBP, analyzing the top ranked web pages is as easy as 1-2-3. IBP analyzes the web pages that currently have a top 10 ranking in the search engine of your choice and compares them with your page.
IBP tells you how the pages have achieved that ranking and how you must change your web pages and the links to your website to obtain a similar ranking. Improving your website has never been so easy. IBP helps you get more customers and more sales with increased search engine rankings.
How to optimize your website for Google
IBP's Top 10 Ranking report demystifies Google's ranking algorithm and tells you in easy-to-understand words how to optimize and prepare your website specifically for better results in Google.
Suppose you want to know how to get a top 10 ranking for the search term "outdoor equipment" in Google. IBP will tell you how to optimize your website for exactly that search term in Google.
IBP's advice is based on in-depth analysis of current, up-to-the-minute top 10 results in Google for that search term and it is specifically for that search term and specifically for Google.
.
IBP's high quality analysis results are always up-to-date, specific, and accurate. You won't get that level of search engine optimization accuracy with any other tool.IBP also works with Yahoo's latest search engine ranking algorithm, with MSN Search and all other major search engines. IBP helps you get the rankings you deserve.
Is your search engine optimization company really good?
Did you hire a search engine placement or a search engine optimization company to get high rankings for your site? Use IBP to find out if they really optimized your site for high rankings on Google.
Of course, IBP also works with other search engines. Don't wait any longer and download the free IBP trial now.
Read what our customers say about IBP:
Marcus Allen, OrlandoVacationsOnline.com, says:
"I wouldn't normally get too excited about a product but when something like IBP has pretty much quadrupled your online income, it's only fair to make it known!
I recently upgraded my IBP, spent a few hours working with it over a two week period and the rest is obvious. [...] Our website is positioned at numbers 5, 1, 2, 2 and 1 respectively! Need I say more?
It's all due to IBP. IBP has secured us an extremely good position in the hugely competitive Travel market. Thanks Axandra!"
Michael Wong, Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com, says:
"IBP is a search engine optimization tool that turns SEO novices into experts overnight! [...] The report is not only comprehensive, but goes into the kind of detail that would take a professional optimizer quite a few hours to produce.
You then simply go through the checklist and make the appropriate changes to your web page. [...] You really have to see for yourself. It's so simple, even a complete computer novice can use it. I highly recommend it!"
Rob Coxworth, webFootLeisure.com, says:
"I'm impressed by the rapid improvement in my sites visibility. From virtually invisible unless I paid for clicks to rankings on pages 1-3 on a number of my keywords since late November. Great product and money well spent."
Richard Bravo, Jackson Hole Real Estate Company, says:
"I just wanted to let you know your software ROCKS! After just one week of implementing data from our IBP reports we have seen 23 NEW listings.
We jumped an average of 10 spots that put us on the first page of most of our key phrases and we just hit #1 on one of our most coveted key words. Yee-Haw! Thanks for developing such a great tool."
Monday, April 13, 2009
How to Copy Blogsome Themes
If you found out a good themes or template in blogsome.com blog and the themes creator won’t tell you how to download it, the following tips may be beneficial for you:1. To Copy the css layout: http://blogname.blogsome.com/templates/wp-layout.css2. To Copy main index: http://blogname.blogsome.com/templates/index.html3. To Copy post: http://blogname.blogsome.com/templates/post.html4. To Copy comments: http://blogname.blogsome.com/templates/comments.htmlOnce you opened the page, for example no. 1. Click the view -> page source ->Save it in notepad. Remember to name it like the original i.e. post, comments, index, etc. Repeat the same process to all four element of blogsome themes above.After it’s done.1. Login to your blogsome.com blog2. Click Manage -> Files -> copy/paste the index into index.html, post into post.html, and so on.3. Click Update Template everytime you made a change.Good luck!
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