AdSense Revenue

Earning a good revenue just from AdSense is a popular subject on the internet as well as a goal hoped to be achieved by thousands if not millions of internet users. So let's talk about it.

The kind of money you can earn from this program is ridiculous. I have been researching and learning how to effectively use Google AdSense. A common misconception in the initial set up of adsense is that you will start earning a good amount of money right away, which is the farthest from the truth. I went a good 5 months earning about 90 cents a day, which obviously was not enough for satisfaction. So I started to really learn exactly how Google itself operates, the algorithm portion of it. How the index ranks pages, websites ect. If you have done your research, you know that it's a bit more complicated than putting out a website, adding the html codes to it and letting the money come in.

The website (s) that you are promoting need to have a pretty good page rank, which we all know by now. But how is that achieved? Well, in experiments I have found that paying other high ranking pages webmasters to put a link on their site will work in ways. A lot of constantly updating content is also a key, again which we all know. So, you have a website all about GPS (example) You put some AdSense on it and hope for the best but you see less than a dollar a day, with some days panning out to absolutely nothing. You start to learn the basics of SEO and work towards getting your website noticed by a large croud, and not only that, you work towards keeping them coming back to your site for more information. You use AdWords ppc as a way to get the targeted traffic you want, but it does not work the way you want to. Then you wonder why? Your paying Google to bring readers to your content but there not really coming. Not Google's fault, its the way your campaign is running. Some people choose to target a broad audience with keywords that can be used for different things. Like the word GPS for example. Of course you could use it as a keyword but the thing is, when people reach your sponsored link through that and in reality they are looking to sell gps systems, your website does them no good. Then you start realizing you need to change some things, you put in some keywords relating to Gps, like Garmin ect.. Change your ad text a bit to revolve around 1 ad group. Target the users specifically so that the only people clicking on your ad are people who literally want to read and learn more about Gps systems, therefore rendering your site the jackpot for their searches.

You have links from Google in the appropriate places, users see ads relating to what their looking for, eh.. might click on 1 or 2- you just got paid for the click. So you see it can happen, and you can get paid for this. It is now your mission to increase the amount of people viewing your pages, obviously increasing your revenue. You work at getting your page noticed by more and more people, the search engines index starts to see that people are going into your site, and NOT going back to the search engine, therefore ranking you a bit higher. The websites you PAID to have your link on, start delivering targeted traffic right to your site. People start clicking, you have a day where you have 10,000 visitors go right to your page, and out of those 10,000, 2 thousand click on your AdSense ads. If the advertisers pay 30 cents per click (just say) than you just made 600 bucks. IN ONE DAY <<<>

Want First Place Google Results For Your Website?

You want to get the best search engine rankings because you know that is the key to getting tons of targeted traffic to your website, but how? You've got tons of search engine competition in a highly competitive keyword. You may need to focus on these search engine ranking strategies below if you'd like to achieve first place Google search engine results.

Create a website with content that is valuable to your targeted visitor. If you've got great content on your site the search engines will naturally be drawn to it as long as it's unique with proper keyword placement and structure. Some ways you could make your website valuable to visitors is by giving away an informative newsletter, ebook, coupons or just valuable information.

The keyword selection you use on your site is also very important. You should use keyword selection tools to find the most popular keywords for your topic to use on your site. The keywords to use are the ones that bring traffic. You'll find those by entering popular keywords from your niche into keyword search tools to drill down to find less popular words that you can dominate from a particular page of your website.

Once you've done your keyword research you'll have a list of keywords that receive traffic and you can place them strategically through your pages. Use these niche keywords in the right places in your content and use link references to other related pages on your site.

You'll also want to add keywords to your web page title, META tags, Headers and make sure they are not overused and dispersed throughout your page. You should try to place your primary and secondary niche keywords within the beginning of your page. You should use these keywords in the header tags and near the beginning of your first paragraph whenever possible.

Don't use the same keywords too much though. Search engines consider the use of keyword stuffing to be spam. One of the ways to avoid getting penalized is to use your keywords in appropriate places to give you the maximum results.

Search engines love valuable information and by creating pages of quality content you'll naturally attract high search rankings. Another benefit of having great content is that your site will become more popular among visitors. Many people will start recommending your site to their friends which leads to my next point.

Once you've got good content and some traffic then website owners will want to start voluntarily linking to your web pages. It's like internet word of mouth which is a very strong motivator for people to check you out. If your content is influential enough it might generate a buzz that is talked about and shared.

Great quality is worth much more than great quantity and will reward you with more links and a long lasting website that people revisit continually. Getting a high number of incoming links is one of the most beneficial things you can do to increase your search engine results. Each inbound link is determined to be the equivalent of a vote from a website for your website.

If the site linking in is a topic related to your then it receives a larger SEO weight. Helpful incoming links are from sites that are an authority site that is well established, highly trusted, on an old domain, from an .EDU, .GOV domain, or have a high page rank. If this is the case of an incoming link you can be assured that it should help you receive better search engine rankings.

The more high quality incoming links the better and it's important to strive to find relevant link partners to get the best search engine rankings you can for your site. You can approach website that are not in direct competition with yours to do a beneficial link exchange. A link exchange is when you put their link someone on your site for a returning link from them. A lot of websites will agree to this; however you should only approach sites of high quality that will be beneficial to your site.

Many sites that have used bad linking practices in the past may actually harm your site by association. As a general rule of thumb, look for high Google trusted sites with a pr rank as an indication of SEO trust before you approach for a link.

For your websites design structure you should keep it easily to navigate so that your customers can find their way around. The site should have the same navigation throughout and each page should make good use of H1 tags for titles.

Whenever submitting your pages or building your incoming links you'll not only want to concentrate on the home page but on interior pages too. You could hire or outsource someone to do this for you. Just make sure this person uses a manual submission as automated submission services can sometimes result in adverse benefits.

Make sure you monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites in the search engine rankings to see how they have their pages setup. Looking at what your competitors are doing correct in the form of their content, navigation and keywords will give you valuable insight in to why they are ranking high.

Google Power - Explore google

Google is simply superb - the way they bring in different products suited to the differing needs. I use majority google products regularly. Let's check what I use form google's kitty!

1. Google Mail - mail to revolutionize the whole emailing. Started with 1 GB space - now more than 2.6 GB space, never delete a mail!

2. Google Talk - a voice messenger - initially was not that good but now it is quite good. Moreover, integrating gtalk with gmail was a masterstroke. No need to install separate messenger. I love it!

3. Googlepages - 100 mb free space to create your website and a cool template to choose from.

4. Google analytics - track who is accessing your website and from where. It's very good and free!

5. Google base - Post your advertisements here and you'll find it in google search.

6. Google earth - find your home from the google maps. Amazing product. I could see my locality from google maps. Last month I went to Vizag - I explored Vizag from google maps beforehand and believe me, I was not lost in the city - as I knew every street from google maps.

7. Froogle - You can sell and buy things here. Quite interactive. Surely in near future it will give some competition to amazon and ebay. Not very popular right now but with google you can expect it to crack every competition.

8. Orkut - If you are using internet and still not have a profile in orkut, I really doubt if you socialize. It's one of the most amazing networks, and it's faster than myspace. I have account in myspace, and it takes a hell lot of time to load. But, orkut is very fast and gradually improving, in 2-3 years you can be sure that orkut will rock the world.

9. Google scholar - It's not your normal search, it's the google scholar power - standing on the shoulders of giants! It mainly browses through the research and scholarly articles. It's one of the best gift to research community by google.

10. Picasa - now not only you can arrange your albums in picasa but share it in picasaweb. Great colour interface and takes very little time to load unlike yahoo photos.

11. Google groups - you are not satisfied with orkut - then you have google groups in the line of yahoo groups. I feel google groups is better as it is still virgin and unlike yahoo groups, spamming is less.

12. Google video - watch fantastic videos in google - direct competitor to youtube. Now you can share those videos in your website through embedded codes! What a gadget!

13.Blogger - you can write your daily diary here and it's qutie good.

14. Google notebook - use it as a notepad while searching the web and it will be automatically saved in your google account name.

15. Google spreadsheets - excel files by google. You can cut paste data here and also calculate different formula just like excel.

16. Google news - latest news brought to you by google. Very quick to load and update time is very fast.

17. Google translate - translate not only words but an entire website to any language. Check it - it's quite amazing!

And the star of the show - what started the google revolution...

GOOGLE SEARCH - Anyone using internet must have used google search. It's gaining more popularity every day! The best gift by google to mankind!

Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly? Your Personal Checklist

When I sit down with new clients and discuss the status of their new or existing site they are often shocked when I am forced to inform them that their site is not search engine friendly. Encountered with a blank but slightly shaken look I then explain that this means their site has a particular problem that is hindering search engine rankings. Often this is represented by an inflexible design, overuse of advanced web technologies, or simply a weak navigation scheme. As a result, if they were to continue with the site as it stands they are unlikely to attain competitive search engine rankings.

The following is checklist designed to help you gauge the search engine friendliness of your website and, if you are in the midst of planning a website this checklist will help you avoid the common pitfalls of unfriendly designs.

Technologies
First consider what technologies your website is using. There are certain technologies that require a little more hand holding than others to ensure search engine compatibility.

1. FRAMES
Lets start with this oldie. Luckily, frames are becoming a way of the past what with the use of DIV layers and the slow onset of incredibly flexible AJAX coding. The long and the short of it is that if you have Frames on your website then you are starting off at a disadvantaged position that cannot be truly search engine friendly no matter what you do. There are, however, some remedial fixes that will tie you over until you can redesign your site; yes I said redesign. The fix that I recommend is to use a noframes tag whereby you place another version of your web page inside of your framed page. This 'backup' page is what the search engines will view; here you can place relevant content and navigational elements so that the search engines can at least navigate portions of your site that are (hopefully) not framed.

More info on the no frames tags.

2. FLASH
There was a big brouhaha that Flash had become search engine indexable and you no longer had to worry about its search engine issues. Frankly, I have not seen the fruits of this 'improvement' to a respectable degree yet so I still consider it a kiss of death for websites designed solely in Flash. If you have a Flash-only website then I recommend one of these two options; one is to design an html version of your website and make the home page of your website html rather than Flash where you can then allow users to choose between html or Flash. The second option is to redesign the site so that it mixes both html and flash together. For example, this might mean implementing Flash amidst content on an HTML page as you would an image. I realize there are certain limitations to this option but if you can create a slick site in this manner then you will have the best of both worlds; clean search engine friendly content along with an interactive, multimedia feel. Just remember that the majority of relevant text should be in HTML format for the search engines to index.

3. Search Engine 'Unfriendly' Dynamic URL's
Unfriendly dynamic URL's are a common side effect of using a Content Management System that is not designed with search engine rankings kept in mind. Here are some examples of some unfriendly URL's:

Sample 1: http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts.php&354=prod333&subproduct

Sample 2: http://www.surfboardsatsea.com/boards/filename.php?
id=F98ZF4&productId=39222§ion=wicked&brand=582&template=532

These URLs are problematic because a search engine may consider these addresses too complex to spider. Why too complex? Suffice it to say that the more complex the URL, the higher the chance that a search engine robot will consider the content too dynamic to read; it changes too often to be valuable to a search engine.

The way around these types of URLs is actually not so difficult; it may only require a small ínvestment of time and monëy. The 'time' will be required when researching which URL fix is right for your system. The monëy may be required to pay a programmer to implement and test the new URLs. Here are how the URLs might look once they are fixed to be search engine friendly:

Sample 1 Fixed:
http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts/354/prod333/subproduct/

Sample 2 Fixed:
http://www.surfboardsatsea.com/boards/wickedboards/39222/board532/

These URLs are better because they do not include the extraneous characters that are so telltale on dynamic websites. In addition, the URLs are designed to appear like normal website directories when in fact they are dynamic URLs.

Important: it is vital that you minimize the length of the URLs that you use. Search engines may stop crawling a website if there appear to be too many subdirectories. The samples above show fixed URLs that have about as many subdirectories as I would allow (4).

Design
This section focuses on the overall layout and usability of your designs from the perspective of a search engine robot. Search engine friendly design is occasionally quite complex so I have provided a list of the most common issues to consider.

1. Menus
Are the menus on your website spiderable? If not you may be hiding major areas of your website from search engine spiders and missing out on additional search engine rankings.

The fact is there are very few menus out there that a search engine will have a problem following, but there are definitely some worth avoiding. For instance do not use a JavaScrípt Jump Menu (example) as the core mode of navigation of your website; search engines cannot index this type of menu. Also be careful of Flash menus, they look slick but they will impede the progress of a search engine spider especially if they are the only means of navigation within your site.

General Menu Rules
The ideal menu would be text based and each text link would include the keywords you are targeting on the destination page. Setting up a menu with this much forethought requires that you determine the layout and content for your site before web design begins. Once you have a clear picture of the content for each page you can then research the keywords that are best to target per webpage. This essential keyword research can be done in house easily enough using systems-like keyword research tools that provide you with a glimpse into how your customers think by showing how many searches there are per month (or year) for a particular term.

Remember, almost every page within your site has a very real opportuníty to gain a top ranking; all you need to do is ensure that the design, content and site structure is optimized. Ensuring that the menu is carefully thought out and designed is a crucial step for top rankings.

Finally, if you are at all uncertain whether your menu is search engine friendly then be certain to back it up with a text menu in the footer of your page using the same keyword targeting principles noted above.

Tech Advice: a simple text menu may be less than desirable for you; in this case I recommend DHTML menus. These menus use text but in a manner that is quite appealing and very search engine friendly.

2. Sitemaps
Sitemaps can dramatically help the visibility of your website by allowing search engine spiders easy access to all of the pages in your site. Place a link to the sitemap on every page within your site to ensure easy access no matter where a search engine or user enters your site.

Sitemap Tips
Just having a sitemap will help but how you build your sitemap will also play a role in how well the search engines catalogue it. For example, if you have a twenty-page website it would be ideal to create a sitemap where each page is represented by a title along with a short description. Ultimately, the page may be a bit long but it will have content that the search engines like to index and it will boost the relevance of the linked pages because the titles will accurately represent the content. So in effect, you will now have more than just a sitemap; you will have a table of contents for your site that has the potential of getting a ranking and provides an extra boost to the ranking worthiness of each page.

Google Sitemap
Google Sitemap is an additional design element that you should consider adding. Here is an article Scott Van Achte wrote on how to implement your own Google Sitemap.

3. Layout
How you layout your page can make a significant difference in how well your site ranks and ultimately how search engine friendly it is.

Tips for Layout
Search engine robots read a webpage from the top of the source code (the programming that made your page – see "view source" in your browser) all the way to the bottom. As a result, it is important to ensure that both of the following elements are found as close to the beginning of code as possible:

A) A short sentence introducing the topic using the keyword targets you have chosen for the page. B) Your text menu and other navigational aids, or if this is not possible it would be even more beneficial to start with a paragraph or two of relevant content followed by the navigation.

By placing this information near to the top of the page, you will promptly present the search engine robot with relevant text that backs up the page title and backlinks. You will also provide an immediate sitemap of sorts for the search engine to spider, which includes keywords relevant to each page.

4. Splash Pages – ACK!
With the odd exception Splash Pages are a kiss of death for a website because the home page (the first page seen when someone visits your domain), your most important page, is often converted into nothing but an excess entry point with little or no relevant content on it. Aside from reducing your chances for ranking, you are also making your visitors take another step to get to content or salës material in your site. Any additional steps you add will lessen the likelihood of a successful sale.

Please Let Me Change Your Mind
If you think you need to use a splash page then you need to talk to someone who will change your mind. No, honestly, give me a call if you want because there is nothing more painful to a SEO or search engine friendly web designer than to see a Splash Page in use. If, in the unlikely scenario your splash page is required, there are ways to make it slightly more search engine friendly.

1. Add a highly relevant and well-worded paragraph to the page so that the search engines have something to index that shows them they are in the right place.
2. Either provide a link to your sitemap or implement a text menu in the footer of the page so the search engines can access the internal workings of your website without having to take an extra step.

Using Blog PR to Promote Your Site

The recent trend of using the press release to promote an online business has emerged with good reason – good press costs very little and can do more for a business than thousands of dollars of marketing. Most businesses use press distribution services like PR Web or PRFree to get the word out about their news. While distribution services certainly can be effective, they tend to miss out on arguably the most influential group of the press – bloggers.

Bloggers mold and shape the opinions of their readers, who are normally the most important in their particular industry, many of whom are also bloggers. Not long after a post from an influential blogger, your news has been picked up by several other bloggers and within days you are all over the blogsphere. Before you know it your site is getting more attention than it would if a story ran in the local newspaper! So how do you get the influential bloggers in your industry to run a story about your business?

Why Would Anyone Do a Story About Your Business?

Are you a new company? Did you just launch a new product that they could review? Did your business win an award? Are you a group of college kids who started a company on savings from your summer jobs? You get the idea. There needs to be a reason that someone would want to read about you. Bloggers take pride in the content they feed their readers. You don't stand a chance of getting a blogger to write about you if you don't have a story that their readers will be interested in.

Research Bloggers in Your Industry

More is less when it comes to contacting bloggers. Buy a list of 1,000 bloggers and send out a generic email to all of them and you'll likely get no response. But send a small amount of personalized emails to the appropriate bloggers and you'll be shocked at how many positive responses you get.

The first step is to make a list of the bloggers that would be interested in your story. You can generally get a feel for whether or not a blogger would be interested in your story by reading a couple of posts and checking out their bio. If they've done a few similar stories in the past or they are heavily involved in your industry, there is a good chance they'll want to hear your story. If not, leave them off your list and move on.

The single best method that I have found to research blogs is the Technorati Blog Directory http://www.technorati.com/blogs/. You can peruse blogs in your industry in order of “authority” - how important Technorati thinks a blog is. This is extremely useful. For example, if you are in the travel industry, you can view a list of the most influential blogs in the world of travel.

Another great way to find the right bloggers is to search through your competitors press sections on their websites to see what blogs have mentioned them. You can also find out who has mentioned your competitors by looking at the sites that have linked to them (type in “links:www.theirsite.com” on Yahoo!). There's a good chance that if they found your competitors story interesting, they'll find your story interesting as well.

Compose Your Email

The best way to contact bloggers is by email. The good news is that most bloggers make themselves easy to access and provide their email addresses on their blogs. The bad news is that most people don't know what to do with said email address once they get it. Use the following outline for your email and you'll see amazing results:

Have a simple subject. You probably won't get many responses by treating your email like a press release and writing RELEASE in the subject line. Try something simple like “fan of your blog” or “comment about your blog.” You want to make sure they actually read your email and don't mentally mark it as SPAM when they see the subject.

Start by complementing them. Since you've read their blog and learned about them from their bio, you know quite a bit about them. Use it to your advantage. Complement them on your favorite post, or how cool it is that they worked for XYZ company.
Request them to post about you (be direct). In three sentences or less, tell them your story, why you think it would be of interest to them and their readers, and respectfully ask that they write a post about it. Be direct and to the point. They will respect that.
Offer something in return. You have something that could help them. Maybe it's a link back to their blog from your personal blog, or maybe you could provide them with a free product or service that could help them or their business. One way or another, there's something you have to offer them in return for the time spent on a post about you.

Close with something nice. Thank them for their time and wish them luck with their blog and/or business ventures.

Notice that of the five components of the email, only one is about your story. The rest of the email is spent complimenting them and offering them something. Your chances of getting a positive response have just gone through the roof. Every blogger, no matter how large, likes to hear that people are enjoying their posts.

Respond Promptly and Respectfully

Not everyone is going to agree to run your story. Some will say that they don't do that type of thing or that they don't have time. Since you have been so nice as to compliment them, they will still usually reply either way. Regardless of the response, be sure to thank them for their time and wish them luck with their ventures. You never know when they will encounter someone who needs your product or service in the future (remember, they are in your industry) and if they have a positive image of you and your company they will undoubtedly give you a good recommendation.

Sit Back and Watch the Traffic Roll In

Over the course of the next few weeks you will see post after post appear about your business. Be sure to send another thank you email to the blogger after the post and also be sure to promptly provide whatever you offered them in return. At this point you have developed a mutually beneficial relationship with someone important in your industry that can become invaluable over time.

That wasn't that hard was it? With a little research and a carefully crafted email, any business can effectively use blog PR to drive traffic to their site.

12 Free SEO Tools you Must Use

Effective SEO strategies require a lot of effort and time. Although in the search engines market exist very advanced tools that cost a lot, there are many free SEO tools which can help the novice and advanced SEO marketer to save valuable time.

Here is a list of free and proven for their effectiveness SEO online instruments:

1) Alexa Ranking . It displays multiple domains instead of one. Therefore, you can have instant traffic results from Alexa Rankings instead of typing and search each time separately.

2) XML Sitemaps . Sitemaps are extremely important for websites because they help search engines crawl and index them. This is a free xml sitemap generator.

3) Directory Manager . You can track your submissions to various web directories and you can also visit regularly to see new directories added to the list. You just tick the appropriate submission boxes when you submitted your website. It's very easy to use it.

4) 123 Promotion Keyword Research Tool. This is a very powerful tool. It displays, based on the Overture and Wordtracker keyword search tools, similar data, including search figures from the previous month. It also adds statistics for average searches per hour, day, week, projected figures for the next 12 months and then also a figure to see how searches may look in 3 years from now.

5) Keyword Density Checker . This keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters/SEO's achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms/keywords. This tool will analyze your chosen URL and return a table of keyword density values for one, two, or three word key terms.

6) McDar Pagerank and Backlink Checker . This is another Excellent Resource. When you enter the appropriate URL and keyword, it will display Pagerank and Back links pages for the Top 10 websites.

7) Robots.txt Generator You can create a free robots.txt file with this resource. So, you will be able to direct the search engines to follow the pages structure of your website and also direct the search engines not to follow and crawl specific web pages of your website you don't want to be crawled.
All you have to do is filling the fields and when the robots.txt file is created you upload it to your root of your web server.


8) Nichebot . This website displays keyword data using Wordtracker and Google search results. You just enter the keyword and press the button.

9) Domain Stats . You Enter the domain and get: domain age, number of pages indexed, and number of backlinks. The statistics include Alexa Taffic Rank, Age of the domains, Yahoo WebRank, Dmoz listings, count of backlinks and number of pages indexed in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn etc.
It will help you figure out why some of your competitors are ranking better than you.

10) Compare Search Engines . Shows top results from 3 search engines. This tool helps you get all kind of statistics of your competitor's domains.

11) Verify Result . This verification tool checks to see if your site is in the top three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword. You enter your URL/Keyword and it displays top 30 for 11 Search Engines.

12) Related Keywords. This tool generates a list of possible keyword combinations based on lists of keywords that you provide.
You enter a list of terms, one per line or separated by commas. This is very effective for Google Adwords and Overture.

CSS - Maximum benefits

What is CSS?

CSS is a simple file which controls the visual appearance of a Web page without compromising its structure. Using CSS we can control our font size, font color, link color and many other attributes on our web page. This will make our HTML code much more readable and the page size will be reduced.


Why to use it and how to use it properly

If you don’t use CSS on your web pages and you have many tables and content on them, chances are that your HTML file size will be quite big. Fact is that we live in a busy world, and people are not will to wait more than 5 seconds web page to load.


From the other side some web developers implement the CSS on wrong way. They write their CSS in HTML code of the page, like this:


<html>
<head>
<title>My Page</title>
<style>
A
{
font-family: Verdana;
font-size:8pt;
color:black;
text-decoration:none
}
</style>



What is wrong with this technique? Well, imagine that you have site with more than 50 pages. One day, you decide that you want to change font color and colors of the links on your site. You will have to edit ALL the pages on your site, and do to that you will need time, because you place your CSS in your web page.


Better way is to save your visual attributes in separate, external CSS file, and to link that file with your page like this:



<html>
<head>
<title>My Page</title>
<link href="myStyle.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">



Using this technique, you can change the look of your site within minutes, regardless of the number of pages, because your visual attributes are saved in ONE external CSS file. Edit that file, and you are done.


Benefits

Which are the benefits of using CSS? List is quite long and I will list here only the most important.

• Your web page will load faster
• Web page will become more search engine friendly
• You can change you site appearance within minutes
• You can write separate CSS file for handheld devices which will be called up instead of the regular CSS file
• You can forget about creating printer friendly version of your site using separate CSS file when user chooses to print the web page.

Avoiding standard HTML commands like:


<font color=”#0000ff”><font size=2>Product</font></font></font>


will help us to reduce file size, but that is not the only benefit. Using CSS word product in this example will be moved more close on the top of the document. Search engine will pick up more content and less code.


Imagine that you have 3 columns table on your page. When you see the code, you will notice that first come code for your table, and after that it come your content. Positioning your 3 columns using CSS instead of standard inline elements:



<table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="381" height="150" valign="top" bgcolor="FFEDD4">
My Product
</td>
<td height="150" valign="top" bgcolor="FFEDD4">



When CSS is used, your code might look like this:


<div id="leftcontent">
My Product
</div>



Again your code is much more clear, and your content is moved on the top of your document, making your HTML page search engine friendly, and reducing your file size.


Content is one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization, and you will benefit with removing the unnecessary code in your HTML and create search engine friendly web page.

Validate it

Browser war is far behind us. Reality is that most of the people today use Internet Explorer, but you should try to be on safe side and ensure that your CSS code is valid. Not all browsers interpret the CSS on same way. You can validate your CSS here:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Effective Search Engine Use

The Internet is a wonderful place full of resources that can be really helpful for us.

The best way for finding information is through a virtual search engine. A search engine explores the resources on the Internet and gives results relating to your queries. Search engines allow keyword searches and use crawlers to locate sites or pages that match requests.

However, finding the information that is relevant for you is a challenge. Everyday more sites come into existence. A simple query like "web hosting" on Google returns 15,100,000 results. Now how does the user know which site is useful for them, thus creating an "Information Overload" of sorts. How is the user assured of the quality of the information?

The thing about search engines is that they generally display all the web pages that contain any or both of the words contained in the search query.

So comes the question: how do we find the information we are looking for?

There are various techniques that you can use to make your search query better which will then help to achieve more relevant results.

For instance if you use the "+" operator and restructure your query to "web hosting" + Windows it will show only those sites that offer Windows hosting. You can also use the "AND" Boolean operator, depending on what you are comfortable with.

You can use the "-" operator and key in "web hosting" - Linux thereby telling Google to make sure that it does not display Linux related hosts. This is the same as using the "NOT" Boolean operator.


There are also keywords like ADJ, NEAR etc. that are used by some of the search engines. The NEAR operator looks for keywords specified in the query within certain proximity of each other i.e. it makes sure that both the keywords "web" & "hosting" are present on the same page and are placed nearby to each other in the text.

The ADJ operator is a stricter filter and returns only those pages where the keywords are next to each other i.e. it will only return pages where the keywords "web" and "hosting" are mentioned together.

Another technique to make sure you get better results is to use a sensible query. Make use of words that you think will be contained on the site you are looking for: "web hosting" is better then "I want web hosting".

Also remember that search engines normally ignore certain words like "a', "for", "of", "in", "at" etc.

Another important thing to remember is that most search engines have a 'tips' page that specifically contains information on how to make better searches on the search engine. It is always good to read these tips.

Most search engines have an advanced search option that is really useful if you are not proficient at using operators while searching.

Searching and finding what you are looking for is easy if you are armed with the know-how of how to do it.

How I Increased Website Traffic Ten-Fold with Quality Backlinks

Having a goodly number of quality backlinks is one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that result in high Search Engine Results Pages.

It’s not enough to just have a high number of (incoming) backlinks. Rather, it is the quantity and quality of backlinks that allows your site to rank better in the search engines than your competition.

Simply, a backlink could be considered as a quality link if

1. it links to your website with the keyword(s) or keyphrase(s) for which you are trying to optimize,

2. the theme of the backlinking website is the same as (or similar to) your site.

There are a few free tools that will help you in determining the quality of existing and potential backlinks to your website (search on ‘free seo backlink tools’).

But, how do you really know that a link can be considered a quality link before agreeing to exchanging links with a particular web site? After all, the whole point of exchanging a link with another site is to benefit from the ranking of that web site.

It is therefore important that, before the link exchange is affected, that we investigate as to whether exchanging links with another site is to our advantage.

Google’s Index

The first and most important factor to check is if the site is listed in Google’s index. This can be determined by entering “http://www.sitename.com” in the Google search box. If there is no result displayed, then stop there and affect no link exchange.

To save your valuable time, do the same for the URL of the page which the site owner says will display your backlink. No Google index means that the spider will not find your backlink.

View the Home Page

The second step is to examine these three items:

the linking site’s home page,
the site’s HTML and Google sitemaps,
the site’s backlink page.

The home page will determine the suitability of the linking site thematically; that is, does the site’s content match (or closely match) that of your own. With the site’s home page displayed in your browser window, using your mouse, right-click and select “View Source”. Observe the site’s tags. Does the text match your expectations of site relevancy?

Next, open a www.google.com screen in your browser and enter the sitename without the http://www descriptor. For example, without the descriptor, http://www.msn.com would be entered as msn.com.

Press enter and Google will present something akin to

MSN.com Microsoft's newly renamed portal entry. Features personalization, channels of content sites like Carpoint... www.msn.com/

Google can show you the following information for this URL:

* Show Google's cache of msn.com
* Find web pages that are similar to msn.com
* Find web pages that link to msn.com
* Find web pages from the site msn.com
* Find web pages that contain the term "msn.com".

Clicking on the hyperlink in this line

* Show Google's cache of msn.com

will display the Google cache for the site. If there is no cache, stop there, do not affect the link, why link to a site that Google is not visiting?

Clicking on the hyperlink in this line

* Find web pages that are similar to msn.com

will display the Google “related” tag, listing the pages that are similar, the more the better,

Clicking on the hyperlink in this line

* Find web pages that link to msn.com

displays how many backlinks Google report for the site, once again the more the better.

Clicking on the hyperlink in this line

* Find web pages from the site msn.com

and

* Find web pages that contain the term "msn.com".

displays the actual number of pages within the site and the number of pages that contain the website name, the more the better.

HTML Sitemap

If you are satisfied with the results of steps one and two, it is then instructive to view the site’s HTML sitemap as well as the site’s Google sitemap.

The HTML sitemap is simply another web page in the site but is important as it compiles and displays every page in the sites, making it easy for the search engines to “spider” the site (and find your link).

Google Sitemap

The Google sitemap (usually sitemap.xml) is a specialized form of the above and complies with the Google sitemap specifications shown at www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

While many say that the above is unnecessary, this author argues that since Google has gone to much expense to provide and maintain the function, to ignore such is at one’s own peril.

To view the Google sitemap, enter the site’s home page URL, then append “/sitemap.xml” on the end of the address. Caveat, the address may generate a “file not found” error. The site may have a Google sitemap but store it under a different file name than that suggested by Google.

Google Page Rank

Note that I have made no mention of Google Page Rank. It is the opinion of this author that if you have done most or all of the above that you have qualified the potential effectiveness of the link, just as does Google with it’s Page Rank algorithm.

Redirect Affiliate Program Links for Maximum Effectiveness

If you promote an affiliate program and are not redirecting your affiliate links, you may be missing out on traffic and commissions opportunities. Redirecting your affiliate program links helps to minimize spam filtering of your email campaigns, increase the acceptance of article submissions, build backlinks to your site, and reduce "click fear".

Minimize Spam Filtering

If you are promoting an affiliate program through email, other (unscrupulous) affiliates of the same company may be indirectly hurting the delivery rate of your messages. Email filters will block messages that contain content or links associated with spam. Even if you send your message only to subscribers who have double opted-in to your list, your messages may still be blocked if it contains a URL used by spammers.

Search Engine Optimization

Most affiliate program URLs look something like http://www.example.com/?id=123. Unfortunately, most search engines have limited or no ability to read these links.

Google(TM) warns, "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." Google goes on to tell us "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index."

Furthermore, if you are publishing your affiliate link on other sites such as blogs, forums, etc., you are missing out on the opportunity to build valuable backlinks that could increase your search engine rankings.

Article Submissions

Submitting articles to web publishers and article directories is a powerful way to build backlinks to your site. Unfortunately, many publishers and directories do not accept articles that include affiliate links. However, virtually all will accept links to your own site. By replacing your affiliate link with a link to your own site, even one that redirects to your affiliate link, you will increase the number of article submissions accepted by publishers and directories.

Reduce "Click Fear"

Thanks to those few sites on the Web that distribute adware, spyware, viruses, etc., many web users are fearful of clicking on links, especially those that look "suspicious". To the average user who has no special knowledge of the internal workings of the Web, a link that has "unusual" characters such as those in dynamic URLs (e.g. http://www.example.com/?id=123&sub=456) will appear less trustworthy than a static link.

How to Redirect Your Affiliate Program URL

There are several ways to redirect your affiliate program links. The most "search engine friendly" method is the 301 Permanent redirect with the .htaccess file. You can use this method if your site is hosted on an Apache (Linux, Unix) based server.

To create a permanent redirect, open (or create) the .htaccess file. On a single line add the following code to the file:

redirect 301 /example.html http://www.example.com/?id=123&sub=456

This code tells the server to redirect "http://www.yoursite.com/example.html" to your affiliate link "http://www.example.com/?id=123&sub=456".

Other methods of redirecting include using PHP's header() function and HTML's meta refresh.

No matter what affiliate program you're promoting, you will benefit by redirecting your links. Redirecting your affiliate links can improve the delivery rate of your email campaigns as well as increase CTR. Your articles may be more readily accepted by article directories and web publishers. Furthermore, redirecting replaces links to your merchant with valuable backlinks to your own site.