No one is real sure what the deal was/is with Google. Some speculation was that it was a PR update, some said that Google is changing its algorythm while some others said they were changing their inbound link filters as it apply’s to your inbound links.

I have no idea what caused it. I had many sites bouncing around a few days. The good news is that most of them have their rankings back where they were before this whole shake up started. This isn’t the first time that a big movement in the Google SERPS has happened and it likely won’t be the last.

I had a few keywords ranking on other sites that lost their rankings altogether. These weren’t major keywords that the sites were ranking for, but they did bring in a little traffic. I’m not sure why these keywords lost their rankings, so the theory about changing filters may have some legs.

Whatever the cause, don’t panic when this happens. Most of you who’ve been around a while have learned to live with it. Judging by my email, some of you new people have been freaking out about it. Just relax and the let the little ball on the Roulette Wheel come to a stop…errr…I mean…just relax and let your sites settle down in the SERPS before you go bonkers.

Either way, whether your rankings returned or if you discovered you previously high ranking keyword is not on Page 6 of Google’s SERPS, it brings me to a very important tip for all affiliate marketers. If you haven’t diversified, do it now. I know how tempting it is to keep working on a site that is making you money. But if that site is your sole source of income, you could be living on shaky ground.

Work on getting your low paying sites up to being profitable. If you only have one or two sites, get more. Make sure you have sites in different niches. Ideally, you want your income spread over several sites in case one loses its rankings.

In fact, I’d say increasing the number of sites you have or making the ones you already have more profitable, is a great project to work on if your site has nose dived in the rankings!

Yeah, for some of you BANS owners, it’s been a pretty tough last few months.

I’m knocking on wood here. If you remember right from my initial Build A Niche Store Review, my goal was to build 100 BANS sites. Now I’m thanking my lucky stars that I have AMADD (Affiliate Marketing Attention Deficit Disorder) and only made it to 30 sites before I lost focus and went off doing something else. So far none of my sites have been touched by either Google or eBay. I’ll give you my theories on why that is on down the page.

A Few Theories Why Google Is De-Indexing BANS sites.

I’ve been following a lot of the chatter on forums about this subject as well as receiving a lot of email. This is what I’ve figured out to this point. No one has 100% concrete proof why Google is de-indexing BANS sites. There are a few theories floating around.

1. The BANS program was being used by a lot of spammers. Many of these guys/gals were throwing up huge numbers of BANS sites on .info domains. They never bothered to change anything with the programs, their only concern was to get as many BANS sites up as they could, as cheaply as they could. This left a huge footprint for Google to follow.
2. Most of these same people never bothered to put any content on their sites. They were simply ebay sites with ebay auctions on them. This would be what Google calls a “thin affiliate” site. And we know what Google does with thin affiliate sites.
3. In order for Google to get all the spammy BANS sites, it had to take some legitimate sites along with them. It’s the shotgun approach. Use a huge pattern to make sure you get all of them. Try and limit the casualties but go forward knowing some innocent victims will be in the pattern.

My Theory On Why Google Hasn’t De-Indexed All BANS Sites

Even as far back as when I bought the Build A Niche Store program, there was talk about Google finding the footprint of all the standard BANS templates and possibly penalizing them. It seems this bird has come home to roost. From the start, here is what I did to try and make my BANS sites unique from all the other cookie cutter BANS sites.

• I changed up the CSS a little bit on every site. I made sections like the header and content fields larger and smaller.
• I changed the colors on every site.
• I changed the size of the headers on every site and used graphic headers.
• I DID NOT go out and start sending hundreds of backlinks to my sites. I built them up over time using blog carnivals, article submissions, reciprocal linking and adding one way permanent links.
• I added content to nearly every page plus I used a lot of graphics.
• I never put eBay auctions on my main page. I put content on the index page to make it look as much like a informative content site as I could. Just look at how many BANS sites have nothing more than auctions on their front page.
• On many of the domains that hosted my BANS sites, I added blogs, article directories and forums to many. (mostly just blogs that supported the main domain)
• I never put more than 2 BANS sites on one hosting account plus I paid extra for all sites to have a dedicated IP’s. I’ve read stories of people hosting all their BANS sites with one hosting company. Wow, I can’t fathom that idea. I’m just too paranoid I suppose.
• I only used dot com domains. Of course, these last two items is what I do for nearly all of my affiliate sites, not just for BANS. I want to make it as hard as possible for Google or any other search engine to spy on my websites.

Now, I’m not saying if you do these things that Google will not index your site. These are the things I did to every BANS site I had. I did these things from day one and as I said above, knock on wood, my sites haven’t been touched. In fact, many are still climbing the SERPS.

Is the Build A Niche Store Still Worth Buying?

I’ve had a few emails asking that question. Honestly, I’d say yes it is. But only if you intend to build sites that have a lot of content and you make them unique. If you’re plan is to buy it and throw up a bunch of BANS sites without adding any value to them, I think you’d be wasting your money. Google is on to you.

Alternatives to The Build A Niche Store program

If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a week or so, you know I’m impressed with the PHPBay plugin for WordPress. As I stated in my post Advanced Build A Niche Store Strategies, I’ve been using PHPBayand WordPress to make blogs and stores with eBay auctions. It seems every week that my PHPBay/WordPress stores outproduce my Build A Niche Store sites. Hey, it’s no secret that Google is crazy in love with WordPress blogs. Why not take advantage of that? Plus, to be honest, a WordPress blog and PHPBay combination site just looks much better than 99% of the BANS sites out there, mine included. (hey, maybe Google hates ugly sites?)

Whatever the real reason that Google is de-indexing or penalizing BANS sites, owners using this program need to proceed with caution. If you continue to make sites with BANS, then do everything in your power to make them unique and stand away from the crowd.

So if you’re trying to get a brand new page ranked #1 for a competitive keyword or keyword phrase, good luck, these onpage optimization tips for Google will help you a little, but you’re going to have to have patience for your page to move up Google SERPS…and a lot of backlinks!

One optimization tool you’ll need is a Keyword Density checker. If I’m really wanting high Keyword Density, I’ll use a shorter article. It’s just easier to have a higher density with smaller articles, say 250 to 400 words.

I try and keep my density to around 2 to 7%. That seems to work pretty well for me in most cases. Higher doesn’t always mean better!

With all things being equal (backlinks, age, etc) an optimized page will outrank a non-optimized page. Some Webmasters still do not understand this.

Before we get started, I’m assuming that you already know which keyword you want to rank high for. If not, here is a handy keyword tool or use a free keyword finder like Wordtracker or even Google’s Keyword Tool.  Don’t think you’re going to rank high for every keyword because it’s not going to happen. Just choose a few that are relevant to your website.

Google On Page Optimization Tips

Prioritize your keywords. As I said above, you’re not going to rank #1 for all keywords, so take the time to choose only the ones that really fit your page. Also, don’t necessarily think you should try and rank for the top keywords. They don’t always bring you the best buyers. I like to target one or two keywords per page. You may find that the 2nd, 3rd or 4th keyword for your niche actually converts better.

Where to put keywords on a page? I like them above the fold. I also try and keep them fairly close together, without going overboard.

Use Title tags and use them wisely. Title tags are part of the URL pointing back to your site. Title tags contain the anchor text that describes you site to the search engines. This is probably one of the most important aspects of SEO but many people fail to take advantage of it when linking to other sites or their internal pages. Simply using your keywords as anchor text for internal links can really give some of your pages the boost they need.

Adding a title tag is an URL address is easy in WordPress and other programs. In the pop up box where you’ll be pasting the URL, at the bottom there is a field titled “Title“. Just put your keyword in that field and Shazaaam! You have a properly formatted URL with anchor text!

Optimize your page Titles.Preferably your keyword will come first in the Title of your Page. For example, let’s say you have an article about hacking the Apple iPhone. Your keyword would be “hacking Apple iphone”. Your title then should be something like “Hacking Apples iPhone in 3 easy steps.” Some people will carry this further and use the keyword twice in a Title. I’ve had varying degrees of success at this so use it at your own risk.  ”Hacking Apple’s iPhone, Secrets To Hacking Apples iPhone in 3 Easy Steps.”

Use the <strong> tag. This use to be called the <b> bold tag, but it has been changed around. The same can also be said for the italics tag <em> and underline tag. These give your keywords a little more weight than plain text. Don’t get carried away with it though. There is a such thing as “Over Optimization” and the Search Engines will penalize you for this.

<H1> and <H2> Tags.I’ve ran A/B testing on several websites before in the same niche with nearly the same keyword and with similiar content. Everytime I’ve done this, the pages with <h1> and <h2> tags outranked those that weren’t optimized. That’s good enough for me.

Filenames. This is one area I think many Webmasters do not take advantage of and one I think is very important. If you’re adding images to a page, rename to the keyword you’re trying to rank for. For example, let’s stay with “Hacking the Apple iPhone.” If you had an image on that page, rename it to “hackingappleiphone.jpg or hacking-apple-iphone.jpg.” Not only will this help you with your on page optimization, you’ll also show up in Google Images in case someone searches there.

Alt tags. Just as important as renaming your image with your keyword, making sure you have an Alt tag describing the image is as important in my opinion. Again, I use my keywords as my descriptive alt tage. Also, WordPress makes this easy when inserting images into a post. Just fill out the “description” and “title” fields when you’re uploading images.

I personally feel like Anchor Text, <H1>’s and Filename/Alt tags are the most important onpage optimzation techniques you can use. The other techniques are just a little insurance!

There you go. On page optimization is pretty easy. You need to keep in mind what your keywords are for that page and plan the layout of your article just a little bit. The more you practice this the quicker it will come second nature!

Since Google seems to have manually decreased the page rank of several high profile websites, it’s clear they’re trying to send a message to blogs and websites. Use paid links and we’ll slap your site down.

I’m not a pay-per-poster. I’ve thought about it many times, but honestly I’ve just never got around to signing up. I do have a few blogs that might do well, but it seems like you have to be on top of the request or miss out. I don’t have that kind of time.

Let’s face it. Many companies who hire pay-per-post companies to blog about their product or service want two things. Many want the PR that a blog can pass to their website while others want visitors. If you get both, that’s just a bonus!

The Problem With Pay-Per-Post’s As Seen Through Google’s Eyes

Google sees pay-per-post’s as paid links. Clear and simple.

Pay-per-posters say these are nothing more than paid reviews.

So who’s right? Well, since Google owns the search engines, if they say it’s a paid link and treat paid post as paid links, it doesn’t matter who’s right! It’s Google’s game and if you want to play, you have to play it their way or they take their toys and go home.

Unless, you can make them think you’re playing their game while you really play it your way

I do find it interesting unethical that Google sells paid links, but they don’t remove page rank from their site. This goes to show that Google feels their site is more important than any others.

Can Pay-Per-Posters Survive Without Google?

A problem occurs when Google starts removing page rank from websites and blogs because it cost the blog owner in the price people are willing to pay for a review.  High PR sites command top dollar. Advertisers and pay-per-post companies use PR as one of the ways they determine what to pay a blogger. A low PR site will make less than one that is PR5 or PR6.

In order to survive in the future, I believe bloggers will have to convince pay-per-post companies and advertisers alike that PR is not an accurate way to judge a blog.

Traffic stats are one way a blogger can try and convince companies and advertisers that they can deliver targeted leads. But everyone knows that traffic stats can be manipulated.

Forget about using Alexa. Their stats can be inflated also.

So what is a blogger suppose to do?

I have no idea! But as long as pay-per-post companies and advertisers insist on using PageRank to judge a blog, Posters will continue to get less and less money per post.

You can include the “nofollow” attribute to all outgoing links in a paid review, but then will advertisers till pay top dollar for a paid post? They haven’t been willing to up to this point and I don’t see them willing to do this in the short term unless you have a high traffic site like John Chow’s.

I believe the wiser bloggers will figure out a way to sell paid post’s. Ways Google can not detect.

What Bloggers Should Do To Prepare For The Future

Lately I’ve seen a lot of blog networks popping up that were built for nothing more than paid reviews. A lot like back in the day when content sites were popping up in order to capitalize on Adsense.

Where are all the MFA (Made For Adsense) sites now? They’re either at the bottom of the Search engines or they’re cleverily disguised as content rich sites.

If I were a paid-per-poster and my blog was my only income, I’d be a little worried about right now.

First off, the last thing I would do is start making more Made For Review blogs.

Putting all your eggs in the pay-per-post basket is dangerous. Think Enron.

Blog owners will have to diversify if they’re going to survive.

Continue to build your traffic and implement affiliate programs into your blogs. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to have content rich blogs and websites set up with affiliate program.

Many bloggers are very talented. You should consider writing eBooks or eCourses on your subject matter and sell those on your website. You can also start your own affiliate program and have others sell your ebooks and courses if you want to make more money. After all, people come to your site to get the information you’re offering. They’ll buy your ebook also!

As I stated above, I’d work on the stealth links and stealth post.

As the last resort, you can agree to settle for less money and “nofollow” all links from a paid review. Which means you’ll have to work more to make the same amount of money you did before…which means less free time. More time and money is one reason people have turned to blogs to supplement their income. Now it’s back to the drawing board!

Now more sites are being hit with Google Penalties, although the penalties this time are not quite as severe as the one handed to David and others.

This morning I was reading Court’s ”Make Money Online“ blog and saw where Google had penalized his blog with a PR penalty for selling links.

Not only was Court’s blog penalized, but in his post he sited other blogs and websites that Google penalized as well.

Here’s a short-list of sites whose visible PageRank has been dropped for allegedly selling links (keyword allegedly because I have no idea whether they do or don’t):

• CourtneyTuttle.com – visible PR dropped from PR3 to PR2
• JohnChow.com – visible PR dropped from PR6 to PR5
• Statcounter.com – visible PR dropped from PR9 to PR8
• AndyBeard.eu – visible PR dropped from PR5 to PR4
• Stanford Daily – visible PR dropped from PR9 to PR7
• NetBusinessBlog – visible PR dropped from PR9 to PR7

That’s quite a list of reputable blogs and Websites!

It seems that Google is fighting back hard against paid links.  Even Text-Link-Ads doesn’t show up in the top Google SERPS when you type in the query “Text Link Ads”.

Brian Clark over at CopyBlogger also has a timely post about paid links and describes his blog’s strategy rely less on traffic from Google. 

Basically Brian relies on Subscribers and Social Media to drive traffic and higher profits for his blog and doesn’t rely on Google traffic as much as others. It’s a good post, go and take a look.

Lastly, we have excellent advice from people like Jim Boykin. His post about Google penalizing sites selling paid links is right on the money IMHO.

How To Prevent Google From Penalizing Your Web Site

Here are a few tips to keep your site from being penalized from Google.

1. Don’t sell paid links.
2. If you do sell paid links, use the NoFollow attribute in  your link structure like this “rel=”nofollow” (without the quotes of course)
3. Court has a disclaimer on his Advertisement page that his paid links do not pass PR. I’m not 100% sold that Google is okay with this but if I was going to sell links in my side bar, I’d certainly use such a disclaimer.

How To Sell Links and Avoid A Google Penalty…Maybe

For quite a while now, I’ve said that if you want to sell links on your website, they should be in the form of Anchor text in a post. From my experiments, 1 link with descriptive anchor text in a relevant post is nearly as good, and in many cases better, than site wide sidebar links.

When it comes to paid links and Google, I tend to follow the advice of Jim Boykin. Jim is one of my favorite SEO bloggers because he understands that there are some things Google can not do, like find well placed paid links!

If you must sell links on your site, do it discreetly with anchor text in a relevant post or use the “NoFollow” attribute. I believe that most people and companies buying paid links want some link love and may shy away from sites using the “NoFollow” attribute.

Just remember, you’ve been warned!

Seriously though, If you’ve read David’s blog then you know it was unintentional and that David is about the furthest thing away from being a Black Hatter as you can get.

However, this just goes to prove that anyone can get slapped by Google if you’re not cautious about the steps they implement on their website!

Running a contest and asking the participants to link back to you sounds innocently enough, but Google considers this a SEO Black Hat technique and will come after you for it.

In my opinion, Google really got serious about this technique when John Chow was using it to bomb Google with “make money online”. John Chow was slapped down then and has been since, for what Google calls Black Hat SEO techniques. Kinda sad isn’t it?

How To Reverse A Google Ranking Penalty

Luckily, David got some help from a few quality SEO experts and was able to reverse his Google penalty.  Not everyone is so lucky.

In a nutshell, here is what David did to reverse his Google Ranking Penalty.

1. He removed the bad links
2. He asked all the contestant participants to remove links to his site
3. He submitted a reinclusion request through Google Webmaster Tools
4. He went over to Matt Cutt’s blog and personally swore to the God of Google himself that he’d never ever, under no circumstances what-so-ever play around with Black Hat SEO techniques and asked for forgiveness (okay, I couldn’t resist that description )

The God of Google smiled down upon David and forgave him and blessed his site once more with good SERP rankings! (okay, that’s the last one…I promise )

Yeah, I imagine it’s funny now but I know when you go from a couple thousand hits a day to virtually none, it’s no laughing matter. I am happy David got his rankings back!

To read the details of how David got his Google Ranking Penalty Reversed, read his story. It should be a reminder how downhill things can go without you even realizing it…until it’s too late. David has many excellent links to SEO resources and other information on how to reverse a Google Rankings Penalty. Let’s hope you never need them!

Let me clarify one thing up front. I’m assuming you have a Google Adwords account or have enough knowledge about the program to open one.This guide will be discussing Google Adwords, NOT Google Adsense. If you do not know the difference, go to Google and learn about both. In a nutshell, Google Adwords is a program where you’ll be using ads on the Internet to help you promote your products or services. Click the button below to sign up for Google Adwords.

The one of the fastest ways I’ve learned to blow through an advertising budget is to set up an Adwords account, find a huge list of broad matched keywords for my business and set a high daily budget for my account. Before I found out how to optimize my Google Adwords advertising, I could easily spend $100 to $200 a day promoting my small business.

It’s only natural for a business owner to want to try and attract everyone under the Sun to his website. But when you’re paying top dollar for every click, it’s only wise to bring in those customers who are ready to buy.

Here are the tips and techniques I’ve used over 5+ years to grow my small business every year.

It’s All About The Keywords

First off, forget about using the “broad matching” feature. You should set down and take your time coming up with a list of specific keywords that potential customers will be using to find you through search engines. Google has a keyword tool that is more than adequate for this purpose. As an Adwords client, you’ll have access to many tools such as this one and best of all, they’re Free!

What is broad matching?  Broad matching for example would be you selling blue rocks. You choose “rocks” as your keyword. Then, anyone searching for rocks, red rocks, green rocks, round rocks, square rocks, big rocks, small rocks, etc would see your ads. That’s broad matching.

Why is this bad?

Because if you’re only selling blue rocks and someone clicks on one of your ads when they typed in “red rocks”, then they just cost you a click, plus they’ll not likely buy any of your blue rocks because they were looking for red rocks specifically.

You only want people who are interested in buying blue rocks. I know it’s tempting to broad match. All those potential customers that you believe you’re missing out on do not want to buy from you. It’s the truth. You have blue rocks and they want red rocks.

You’ll blow through your Adwords budget very quickly with little to show if you use broad matching for popular keywords such as real estate, loans, mortgages, ect.

Know what these two terms mean. CPC stands for Cost Per Click. CTR is Click Through Rate.

Why are these important?

Let’s use the rock example again. Let’s say your competitor is also selling blue rocks. Let’s also say that both of you have a CPC of $2 on the keyword “blue rocks”. However, your competitor has a higher CTR than you do. Which ads do you think Google will show more? That’s right, your competitor because his CTR is higher than yours. This higher CTR tells Google that they’ll make more money showing your competitors ads than yours. It also tells Google that Internet users prefer your competitors ads over yours.

Just because you have the highest bid doesn’t mean you automatically get the top spot. The highest bid doesn’t mean anything if someone doesn’t click on your ad. If no one clicks on your ad, Google doesn’t get paid. Google likes getting paid!

Google combines CPC and CTR to come up with a value in ranking ads. (okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, but this is my nuts & bolts definition)

We’ll see later about testing your ads to get a higher CTR rate.

Dynamic titles are another tool that Google Adwords provides to advertisers. Dynamic titles allow you to have keyword targeted ads without creating an individual ad for every keyword. To use dynamic titles, use brackets around your keywords, like this {your keyword here}. To optimize dynamic titles, put an alternative title in Title field of your Google Adwords, like this {your keyword here: your alternative title here}. You’re using the alternative title just in case the keyword doesn’t show up for what ever reason.

Now when someone searches for “your keyword” your ad shows up with the keyword they used in the search. The keyword they typed in will show up in place of the “keyword”.

For example, let’s say you used the keyword “blue rocks with dots”. If you used the keyword “blue rocks with dots”, your ad will show up when someone searches for this phrase. Since it’s the same exact phrase they searched for, the chances of them clicking on that ad and visiting your site are pretty good.

If you were in the market for a new red sports car and clicked on an add that advertised the same model and color you wanted but after clicking on the link and arriving at the landing page you found it was an add for a used pickup truck, what’s the chances of you actually going ahead and buying that pickup truck? Yeah, slim to none.

Now, if the page you arrived at was all about the model and color sports car you wanted at an unbelievable great price, the chances of you buying that car has greatly increased.

Customized landing pages work the same way. For the greatest conversion rates, each keyword should have its own landing page.

Using your homepage isn’t a good idea unless the keyword matches a product or service on you home page exactly. Otherwise, use a landing page and then push them to the homepage if they need more information. Make sure you give them the option of ordering directly from your landing page also. Some people will want to order instantly and you should make their journey from your landing page to the order page as short as possible. It’s freakin’ unbelievable some of the hoops webmasters make their customers go through to order.

It’s Okay To Be Negative

Unless you have money to pee away on your advertising campaign, use negative keywords. Negative keywords are words you don’t want people finding you by. For example, if you’re selling Blue Rocks, you would use the negative keyword “free” because you don’t want people clicking on your Adwords ads and costing you money if all they want are Free rocks. You’d also include the colors such as “Yellow”, “Red” and “Green” because you only have Blue Rocks. Don’t waste your money bringing customers who aren’t going to buy from you to your site. Negative keywords will filter out the words you specify and will not show your ads when someone types them into the search field.

Keep It Simple At First

The Content Targeting and Search Network are two features best left up to expert Adword users. Keep them turned off at first. Wait until you have some experience under your belt before tackling these two. Conversions and click through rates can vary greatly when using both and there’s no need for you to waste your money if you don’t know what you’re doing. Keep it simple in the beginning and stick to what you know and what works for you. Once you get into the groove and feel like experimenting, then you can give these two a try.

It should go without saying that you creatives should be optimized. However, all you have to do is perform a search on  your favorite keyword to find creatives that leave you scratching your head and wondering what the advertiser had in mind when he created it.

You have an option in the URL fields of the URL show and the actual URL where the web surfer will be directed. You can use the shown URL for a little extra attention by using a creative URL. For example, you could have the URL show as www.mysite.com/blue-rocks-with-dots. You can do this with every specific keyword you have, www.mysite.com/blue-rock-without-dots, etc. This is attention getting.

Nothing turns most of us off than seeing ads that scream “Free”, “The Best”, “Download It NOW”, etc. Don’t use superlatives. Besides Google will probably reject these ads any way.

In the beginning, there were times when I’d blow a whole months budget in a week by getting into a bidding war with broad matched keywords and have little business to show for it. Fight the urge to get into a bidding war! Let your competitor pee away his budget.

If you ads aren’t converting, it’s likely not your position, but rather your ad. Keep changing the ad until you get the conversions. Don’t throw money at it hoping you’ll get it right.

Before starting a Google Adwords or other PPC campaign, you should have some way of tracking the results. It may sound anal, but I can tell you from experience that if you don’t have a journal or some other way of tracking your ads that it’ll cost you money in the long run.

One of the things you want to track is your Return On Investment (ROI). You should know what the campaign is costing you and how much profit your making for each unit sold. Just because you pay $1 per click doesn’t mean your paying $1 for each sale. If it takes you on average of 30 clicks to make one sale, each sale is costing you on average of $30, not $1. This can add up to be a big deal if you have a product or service with a low price point.

Other things you need to track include your competitor’s ads. See which keyword they’re using and their ad. Do they change their ad often? You’ll also want to track impressions, click through rates and clicks. Google makes this easy for you in your control panel.

You should continually test ads against each other in A/B testing. Google makes this easy to do. Test your creatives, test copyriting, test landing pages, test products and even test positions. Just because you’re #1 doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get all the clicks. Sometimes #2 and #3 bring in just as many clicks, but at a lower cost per click. Again, test, test and test more. Let your lazy competitor spend all his money. Our goal here is to help you keep your money and make more through wise advertising!

I like to start a campaign with about 6 ads. Google will allow these to be show evenly. The default setting will let Google show the ad with the highest CTR to show more often, so make sure you choose to have your ads run evenly while doing your test.

If you have a small Dry Cleaning shop in Chicago, there’s no use in your ads showing up in Japan, Europe or even New York City!

Use Geotargeting to drill down to your city if you have a local business.

In some cases, you can geotarget your state, region or city. Make sure you know your market and advertise accordingly. This goes back to that crazy idea of saving your advertising money.

Get Their Attention With An Arrow

This tip comes from Jeremy at Shoemoney.Com. A while back he mentioned that he tried arranging the keywords in one of his creatives so that they looked like the point of an arrow head. This would mean having keywords at one end on line one, at the other end on the middle line and at the same end as line #1 on line 3. I’ve tried this little trick and did notice a slightly higher CTR on my creatives. Some swear it doesn’t work, some of us know better. No one is sure why this works, sometimes it just does.

When it comes to my business, I’m willing to try anything within reason. Never disallow any idea just because “No one’s ever done that” or “Everyone says that doesn’t work”.

I started my business from nothing. Just me and an idea. Within a year I was near the top of my field. People told me it would take years, if ever, before I made any money. I set record earnings my first full year in business. People told me to do this or “you have to do it that way” to succeed. I ignored conventional wisdom and I tried everything.

Some people called me a “one shot wonder” and that “he won’t last long”. Now, after 6 years, some of those people work for me.

I had nothing to lose except for some money and I could always get a “real job” and earn that back. The worse thing that could have happened to me is that I’d have to go back to “working a real job” and I’d have loads of debt.

Pay Per Click companies like Google can be a huge boom to your business if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, they can suck you dry.

Google Adwords and a my own Website are two of the biggest reasons I was able not only to succeed, but to pass over many other companies who’d been in business for many, many years.

You too can carve out your place among local, regional, national and the global markeplace by using Google Adwords and other PPC programs wisely.

Last night I was browsing some forums and came across some members who had questions about building backlinks, commenting on other blogs and Google’s Supplemental rankings as it pertained to WordPress SEO.

As usual, there were some wild answers!

The first forum post I came across was from forum member who asked if commenting would help his new blog.  The range of answers varied from “Yeah it helps” to “No, all comments have rel=”nofollow” attached to outgoing links an it doesn’t help” (obviously this person doesn’t know what he’s talking about, big surprise in a forum, huh?)

This is how I answered that person…. 

Okay boys and girls, I’m going to help you out.

It seems the subject of commenting on other blogs is a big issue. Everyone has their own opinion on it, but here are my experiences on it.

1. Traffic - No-Follow or Follow, if you leave good comments blog readers will click on your name and come to your site. I often use my blogs name or anchor text in the place of my name where it ask for it on the “Comment” field.

2. Backlinks - I believe Yahoo, MSN and others give some weight to links with no-follow attached. There is also some who believe Google will follow a no-follow link. I happen to be one of those people. As to how much weight G gives that link is anyones guess but I think it was either Grey Wolf or Shoemoney who had an excellent article on this subject a while back. Their reasoning was that “if there is a link with the “nofollow” attribute that is being clicked regularly, do you believe Google’s not going to follow it?”

Hunt out bloggers who have installed the Do-Follow WordPress Plugin and have joined the Do-Follow movement. This plugin strips out the rel=”nofollow” attribute from outgoing links in the Comment field.

You can find blog owners who have joined the Do-Follow movement here. D-List of bloggers who follow your link back.

Obviously the WP Do Follow plugin is seperate from the Do-Follow List, don’t get them confused..lol

This is a good list. However, I’m seeing some Blogger owners who’ve joined the Do-Follow movement still have the “nofollow” attribute on their comments. I believe it’s unethical to join the D-List and still have the “nofollow” attribute attached to your commets, but there are people doing it. I just bypass the Blogger sites unless they have a high PR, in which case I figure I can lure some readers over to my crib. At last count, there were something like 170 sites on this list.

3. Networking - If you really like a site and they have “nofollow” attributes in the Comment section, go ahead and strike up a friendship. You never know where it will lead. It’s not uncommon for them to link to you in their Blogroll. Most bloggers do not have a “nofollow” attribute on their blogrolls.

Another question I responded too was from a reader who had a lot of pages ending up in Google’s Supplemental rankings. The reader was under the impression that Google was penalizing his blog because he used WordPress. Unfortunately many have this view. There are also those out there who are “swearing” that Google does not like blogs and will only allow a few into the top SERPS. (wrong again)

I’m not sure where the “Google Penalizes Blogs” thing comes from. Google loves blogs more than any other SE out there. It’s been said more than once that Google loves blogs because the content is updated regularly.

Google doesn’t like splogs or duplicate content blogs. Know the difference!

Now, as far as the original questions was asked about WP blogs being sent to Google’s Supplemenatl rankings, I think most bloggers face that with some pages on their site. Heck, static html sites face this problem also!

One problem with WP blogs ending up in Google’s Supplemental rankings is the WP themes their self. Not all designers are SEO savy. Most WP themes I see are too heavy on H1 and H2 tags. Some put the sidebar info ahead of the content. This is not good because it makes your pages look nearly the same to the search engine bot.

Long story short, there could be a mountain of reasons some of your pages have ended up in Googles Supplemental rankings. I find that my shorter content stories are ending up there quite a bit. It’s my long winded authority articles that stick.

Also, if all your meta tags on every post page are the same it’ll help in getting your post into the Googles Supplemental rankings. Use a Plugin that will take your tags and insert them as Meta Keywords and a Plugin that uses the first one or two sentences of your post as the Meta Descriptions. Yes Vern, Meta Keywords and Descriptions are still important in SEO.

Also, just because your articles are ending up in Googles Supplemental rankings, doesn’t mean they’ll always be there. Someone recently stated that Googles Supplemental rankings are like forced work camps for weak post pages. (I can’t remember who said that, I read too many blogs!)

Here is what I’m experimenting with to try and get some of my better articles out of Google’s Supplemental rankings. I’m linking to these pages internally, I’m asking others to link to them externally, and on some I’m updating the content on a few pages and I’m trying out several robots.txt files.

You know, every time a major or little hum-ding wannabe holdiay rolls around, Google redesigns their logo. It’s became such a practice that I look forward to seeing what they’ll come up with each time one of those “holidays” roll around.

But not Memorial Day. For some reason, the good folks over at Google decided not to pay any special attention to one of the most sacred holday’s on the Calender, Memorial Day.

The day we honor those who’ve fought and died for our freedoms in the United States. The freedoms that allow companies such a Google a place to work and to prosper without fear of reprisals from a tyranny government.

Here’s what the Google logo looked like on Memorial Day:

Well, at least we know where they stand as far as Memorial Day is concerned.

It goes without saying, I hope so anyways, that you’ll need an Adsense account. If not, go get one first before trying this.

I’m going to try and explain it here, step by step.  For this example, I’ll be using the Ads Minded Theme.

1. Choose an Adsense Ready WordPress Theme. You can get one by cliking the link above.

2. Download the theme, choose it in your WordPress control panel under “Presentations”.

3. Once you’ve selected the theme you want and it shows up on your site, go to “Theme Editor” under the “Presentations” button.

4. The Adsense Code can be in different files depending on which Theme you choose.  The Theme developer will tell you which files contain the Adsense code. You normally find this either on their website or in the readme.txt file. This is what it looks like.

5. Once you find the Google Adsense code in the file, highlight the existing code and replace everything between the <script> and </script> tags with your own code. Now save the file. That’s it. The code in the WordPress Theme should be your own.

DO NOT CLICK ON YOUR OWN ADS! It’s against Google Adsense TOS and can get you banned. I know it can happen sometimes when you’re working on a site and you do it without thinking. If that happens, you might want to contact Adsense and let them now what happened.

To make sure that the correct ads are showing, I monitor my Adsense ads in my control panel and make sure impressions and clicks are showing up.

Let’s say you have www.123abcdef.com with adsense on it. You’ve just used a new blog theme and inserted your adsense code into the theme. Let’s also assume that you’ve been receiving impressions and clicks so you know you have traffic. If you stop receiving impressions and clicks after inserting the code, you may want to redo it. Chances are it’s not counting.

Good luck and have fun with these WordPress Themes and Google Adsense!

I happened across this story from the Financial Times today.

I have to tell ya, it’s a little discomforting to read what Eric Schmidt of Google says about obtaining personal information on the world wide population.

On one hand, I love Google. They provide an outstanding product and service, but at what cost?

Google has stated in the past that they want to organize the worlds information. I’m down with that as long as it’s not the personal information they want to organize! But it seems Google is shooting for more personal data on you and me.

Eric Schmidt stated recently;

“We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.

“We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.”

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’”

Is it just me, or does anyone else have a problem with Google wanting to make everyday decisions for you? Have we come so far as to not be able to, or not wanting to, make simple everyday decisions such as “What shall I do tomorrow” or “What job shall I take”? 

Ummm, okay. That’s a little freaky. Hey Eric, dude, love the Search Engine and Webmaster Tools, but I don’t want you in my life, like, from here on out.

It’s not you, it’s me, I need to start seeing other Search Engines.
 

But wait, this isn’t the same ole dry, boring and in-depth type review that brings us to tears. This is Google Analytics the way I see it

I’m assuming most of you know about Google Analytics. If you don’t, go over to Google and sign up.

Let me see a show of hands of those who thought the original Google Analytics sucked?

Good, that’s what I thought. So did I.

The old version was clunky and not user friendly at all. I had all but stopped using it and relied on other tracking software.

What I want out of a tracking service is this;

• How many vistors to my site and how many pages they viewed. I like to drill down to single days or out to an entire month
• What pages they viewed and the pages viewed most often
• I want to know what pages people are linking to
• I want to see the most poplular pages on my website
• I want to see who’s sending me traffic and how much
• I like seeing what times of day people are visiting
• And while I won’t loose sleep if I don’t know, I like knowing where my visitors call home.

Google Analytics has always done this but now the new Google Analytics does this without sucking!

The new interface of Google Analytics makes it a breeze to find the data on your websites traffic.

My two favorite features are the Referring Sites feature under the Traffic Source button. My other favorite feature is the Top Content feature under the Content button. For me, these two features are worth the Price of Admission. (which is free)

Just a few weeks ago I had a major surprise when one of my articles was StumbleUpon and drew hundreds of hits. I’d never thought that article, titled The Secret Of Making Money With Affiliate Marketing, out performed all my other post.  While I thought this post was good, I didn’t think it was almost 12 times as good as my next post! However Google Analytics said it was.

You also have a feature called Bounce. Bounce is the percentage of people who come to a particular page then exit that same page. As if to sample that page of the website, find it boring, disinteresting or whatever, and leave without visiting other pages.

A high “Bounce” rate may mean are finding your page and not finding your content useful, or it could mean that whatever source is driving them is faulty. For example, let’s say ou spammed MySpace with a promise of sexy girl photo’s and when the clicked to come to your page, they found a slog about phome cards. You’d have a high Bounce rate on that page I’m sure.

There are a couple things I don’t like about the new Google Analytics. For one, I seem to get error messages quite often. I’m sure it something on their end since it’s still in Beta.

The other thing is the new Geo Tracking format. In the Old control panel, there were litle dots that would show up where your visitor was located. Move your cursor over that dot and it would tell you how  many visitors you had from that town. That was cool.

Now I have a Map of the Earth with highlighted green areas and muted green areas. It tells me how many visitors I had from each contry. Not cool.

All in all, Google has made a Grand Slam with this version of Google Analytics. It’s cool, useful and easy to navigate. I can get my info quicker which makes me less of a crotchety of fart!

Text Link Ads sell companies text links on websites. They’re a link broker. They will buy text links off of Webmasters and sell them to advertisers.

If you’re a blog owner or Webmaster, you may be able to make money with them.

In this review of Text Link Ads, I’ll be review their program from the Advertiser side, as one who’s bought text links from them.

I’ve used Text Link Ads for one of my new websites and one for my local business’s.

TextLink Ads Link For Website #1

The first link I bought was for this new website I put up. I wanted to get it indexed quickly and get some traffic coming to the site without spending a fortune on it. I chose a site with a high “link popularity” in hopes of getting some PR link love from the big G. I also wanted the traffic!

The site I chose stated that my link would appear on something like 50,000 pages. The link cost me $50 a month.

It took several days, but my link finally showed up. I kept close tabs on that look through the Text Link Ads control panel as well as my own site. The Text Link Ads control panel will show you how many backlinks are present from the pages where your link is active.  They’ll list the 1st 100 sites with backlinks to your site and highlight the ones from the page/site where your link is located.

I was a little disappointed that they use Yahoo to keep track of their backlinks rather than Google. However, if you stop to think about it, you can understand why. Yahoo counts every link back to your site, Google only counts those it feels has value. (who determines if the site linking to your site has value?)

Over the month that my link was up, I received very little traffic from the site where my link was located. At the end of the month, Yahoo only showed something like 3 links back to my site. I wasn’t very impressed with my first attempt at buying text links.

Text Link Ads Link For Website #2

On my second try at buying text links, I chose to buy a link on a local TV station’s website (even though TextLink Ads said it was a newspaper). I know this website because you can’t open a newspaper, turn on the radio or TV without hearing about this TV stations Website. I decided to buy the link for my website of my local B&M business.

According to the Pop Up to the link on the TV Stations ad, my link was suppose to show up in their “Money” section on a page with a link popularity of 5/10. 

This link cost me $75 per month.

What I noticed after my link went live was that my link didn’t actually show up on the “Money” section page, my link showed up on article pages OFF OF THE “MONEY” page. Why should this matter? Simple, the “Money” page had a PR of 5 while the article pages off of the “Money” page had a PR of 0 or at best 2.

I went back to my Text Link Ads control panel and sure enough, it said my links would show up in the “Money” section and that the “Money” section had a “Link Popularity” of 5/10.

I emailed Text Link Ads and after two days of not hearing from them, I emailed them again. A few days later I received a reply.

In short, it said that my link was live and showing up on the article pages off of the “Money” section. (well duh! I already knew that). It also informed me that their “Link Popularity” does not correspond to a PR rank, although when you visit a page, the “Link Popularity” is the same most of the time as the PR.

In their defense, they did offer to refund my money for the time I had remaining. I declined and kept my link on the TV Stations website. I wanted local coverage for my local business!

I checked back after I received the response from Text Link Ads and the Pop Up for the TV Stations ad now says “Will appear on all story pages in the ”Money” section“. Nice of them to clarify that.

As for the backlinks, I honestly got a lot from those article pages. In the end, Yahoo counted something like 60+ links back to my site out of the top 100. However, none of those links on those pages showed up in Google.

The traffic from those links was minimal according to my stats. Since my B&M website already ranks at the top of Yahoo locally, I received no boost in the rankings.

Was it worth the $75? Yeah, this once it was. It was worth it in regards to the things it taught me, not the traffic or rankings it provided.

After Action Report – Things I Learned From Buying Links From TextLink Ads

• Don’t assume anything – I assumed Google would pick these text links up and reward me with PR Gold. It didn’t happen. In fact, I recieved only 1 backlink indexed in Google and that was for Website #1.
• Save everthing – I wished I had saved the pages when I purchased the link for Website #2 but I didn’t. My bad.
• Ask Questions before buying – See rule #1
• Define the reason for purchasing the links in the first place – Are you looking to get indexed in Google? Do you want to drive a specific target audience to your site? Are you hoping to increase your backlinks with a particular Search Engine, ie; Google, Yahoo, MSN? (some of those pages from the TV Stations website were picked up by MSN also)
• Research, research, research – I should have looked into the site where website #1 was placed. If I had, I’d known that it has pop ups and a bunch of other ads on their pages. When doing research, I like to use FireFox with the SEO Plugin. Makes doing SEO research a lot easier!

Some of the other things I learned that just because the Text Link Ad says you link will appear on 50,000 pages, don’t assume (see rule #1) that any Search Engine index those pages.

I’d like to know how Text Link Ads goes about determining its “Link Popularity”. What formula is used?

The text links you buy may likely end up at the bottom right of a page. About the worst spot they could appear at. These are also below the fold. That means people will have to scroll down and be looking over to the right to find them.  If you can’t figure out the site where your links will appear, then go there and see where the sponsored links are, then ASK! Now I know on some of the more expensive sites, ie; blogs, they may appear above the fold (ie; johnchow.com).

I also have to be honest and tell you that Text Link Ads recommends that you run the links for several months to see the benefits. From my experience with years of marketing my small businesses both online and offline, I can say that’s probably true.

Will I ever buy another Text Link Ad. Sure. But I will go into it knowing a lot more than I did before. I’ll be more careful to research the site my links appear on.

I plan on buying some links on a few of the blogs they have listed. These should produce some Google friendly links and hopefully some traffic. We’ll see.

UpDate 2008: By now nearly everyone knows Google frowns on buying links. I haven’t used Text Link ads since this experience and I’d strongly urge anyone considering buying links to reconsider, especially if you value your rankings in Google!

Jensense spoke with Brian Axe (the senior product manager on the Google Adsense Team) and he told her:

That is to say, publishers may now display other contextual ads on the same site or page as Google ads as long as they don’t have the same look and feel as our ads

To see what this could mean to you running two types of contextual ads on your site such as Adsense and YPN ads, click on over to her site and see her in-depth reporting on the subject.

Don

Competitive Ads and Services In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

From where I’m sitting, it looks like Google is forcing publishers to choose between Adsense or YPN or MSN. Google knows they have a huge majority of the marketshare in this sector and that most of us will choose Google Adsense over the others.

This means no more testing Adsense against YPN or MSN contex ads. No more Adsense rotation with YPN or MSN contex ads. See where they’re going with this? Google Adsense could pretty much kill MSN’s plans for contex ads before they even get out of the gate! Smart move on their part but not in the best interest of advertisers or publishers.

Don’t be confused into thinking these changes go into effect on a single page. These changes go into effect for your entire site!

Even non-contextual ads that look like Google Adsense cannot be displayed!

I’d like to hear from Google to the reasons for this? From what I can see, it’s just a move to cut out YPN and MSN. Google….is this correct?

The only way I could possible see to work around the new Google Adsense TOS is to change the text, background and borders of your YPN or other contextual ads. However, I would ask Google if they’re fine with this before actually implementing it on your website.

JenSense has a very good in-depth post on her blog. For the how’s and why’s check it out.

Now go and change all the ads on your sites

Don