Backlinks backlinks backlinks!

Posted by stuart as wordpress, blog, search engine, search, google, google adsense, adsense

Backlinks backlinks backlinks!

Everybody keeps telling you to get backlinks to your site to increase your pagerank. Not easy, is it?

Conventional wisdom says there are a couple of main ways to get backlinks to your site:

1) Add your site to directories - time consuming - isn’t it!
2) Email site owners of complementary sites, and ask them to exchange links with you (good luck with that - no-one in their right mind is going to link to your PR0 site from their PR4 page, are they?)

3) Post links to your site in relevant forums (this is getting harder, too, as forum owners are getting wise to this plan, and requiring you to have a minimum number of posts to your name before you can post links.)

There is a way to generate relevant backlinks to your site, whilst contributing to the web community as a whole.

Most weblogs have the facility to allow you to post comments about the authors articles. Blog authors love comments on their posts for a couple of reasons: They like to know someone is reading their blog; they like to think that they’ve written something that was powerful to evoke a response; and they love the idea that they might be creating a community of sorts.

Now, the instructions: Go to www.technorati.com, and do a search for blogs of the same subject as your website. look for articles which relate to the subject of your site, go to those blogs, and post comments.

Remember, keep the comments relevant, and avoid spam, and your comments should be approved. Most bloggers won’t mind you including a link to your website in your comments, as long as you introduce something useful to their blog.

If you make it a rule to post five blog comments a day, you will have a valuable list of back-links in no time!

Google Adsense - Causing the devaluation of quality content?

Posted by stuart as search, search engine, google adsense, google, adsense, Uncategorized

Content, content, content!

“Gotta get more content for my site, that’ll bring in the Adsense clicks!”, I hear you say.

Every man and his dog tells you that the more pages you have on your site, the more your adsense revenues will be. This raises an interesting quandary:

If good quality content on a quality adsense site brings in good revenue, why can I buy articles for my site for $5 a piece?

You can’t possibly tell me that someone can write a quality, original, keyword researched article for $5, hand it over to me, and kiss it goodbye?

Which brings us to the issue of the quality of the article. In my article titled Google, responsible for all the crap on the web, I discuss this issue in more depth.

Put simply, good quality content takes time to produce, even at the very low rate of $20/hour, you just can’t produce four original, good quality, keyword researched articles in an hour.

So if somebody offers to sell you an original article fro $5, the chances are that it’s a quick re-hash of another article, a plagiarized work, or something that they’ve knocked out in five minutes. By placing it on your site, you won’t be giving your visitors anything that they won’t be able to get at a hundred other sites.

Using free content to increase adsense revenue

Posted by stuart as search engine, blog, search, google adsense, google, adsense

Go to google and type in “adsense revenue”See all those people who want to sell you a ready made adsense website. “Just upload it to your server, and watch the money roll in” they say.

Um…. OK

Let’s say for arguments sake, you did install one of these sites. Keep in mind, that there are probably over 100 other copies of the exact same site you have just installed under different domain names. Also, remember that the content on your site has been taken from free article sites on the net, so, at a guess - every piece of content you have on your site is duplicated around 1,000 times.

Now what differentiates your site from the other 1,000 times a particular page is published?

At a guess, I’d have to say “buggerall”!

Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but what you have done if you’ve bought an “Adsense Ready” site, is similar to the idea of setting up a pizza shop on a road with 100 other pizza shops as your neighbours.

So, does all this freely available content have a use? You bet:

1) Rewrite the articles. There’s a lot of great stuff out there on a million and one topics. Simply take the ideas from the free articles, and re-write them in your own words, maybe adding some of your own experience to spice it up a little.

2) Print out an article that appeals to you, grab a highlighter pen, an highlight the phrases that stand out to you. There’s an article in each passage you have just highlighted. You just have to look hard enough.

3) Search engines love regularly updated content. If they know that you update your site daily, they’ll spider it daily. If you find youself in the position where you can’t update your site on a particular day, use a free article from an article directory. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing. (Just be sure to include the authors by-line and link!)

So yes, free articles do have a use, just use them judiciously, and they can be a great idea-factory, or filler for your adsense site.

Protect your blogs adsense revenue

Posted by stuart as blog, wordpress, google adsense, google, adsense

There’s a lot to be said for how easy weblogs make it to bring in adsense revenue, but is someone else stealing your content and making money from your blog?

Most blogging software allows readers to use RSS feeds of your content, and anyone with even a modicum of web development knowlege can take your RSS feed, incorporate it into their site, with their google ads, and steal your adsense revenue.

This raises an interesting question - whilst RSS feeds are a great way to promote your site, thus increase your adsense revenue, you don’t want people stealing your content.

Luckily, Wordpress users (and probably most other blogging software) have a way to protect their adsense revenue. The secret is to syndicate only a part of your content. Allow the RSS feed to scrape the first paragraph, thus forcing the reader to your site if they wish to read the rest of the article.

Instructions:

Go to “Site Admin” -> “options” -> “reading”

Look for the “Syndication Feeds” section, and hit the “Summary” button.

Now hit the “Update Options” button

Now your site will only send out a summary of your blog, thus protecting your adsense revenue!

The ugly single page adsense site

Posted by stuart as search engine, search, google adsense, google, adsense

Eric Giguere put up an interesting article about the ugly single page site this morning.

So I’ve decided to try his theory - a single page ugly site, SEO’d up to the eyeballs, razor-targetted keywords, with no external links other than the adsense ads.

It’s on a subdomain of a domain that’s only been registered a couple of weeks, and been submitted to the three big search engines.

This blog post will be the only page linking to the page, so now I’ll just forget about it for a while, and see what happens.

Should be interesting.

The page is at http://kidney-transplant-donors.pimpmypagerank.com/