In the previous chapter, I talked about a number of different ways that you
can increase your traffic. Probably the most important method though is to
get a high ranking on search engines. That’s free traffic.
Again, there are all sorts of books and experts who can help you improve
your SEO and win a top spot for a site. I have had experience with a number
of strategies that could help you improve your ranking. I’d like to share
them with you now.
1 Robot.txt
The first thing you need to know about indexing your site at search engines
is that you control which pages are indexed and which are excluded. You do
that with a file called robots.txt.
Robots.txt contains nothing more than a record of which robots should index
which pages.
Without going into too much detail, there are two conventions used in a
robots.txt file:
User-agent: [Defines which robots the site is addressing.]
Disallow: [Allows you to list the sites or robots you want to
exclude.]
In general, you’re probably going to use "User-agent: *" to make sure that
you’re addressing the robots of every search engine and you’ll probably want
include all of your pages (although you might want to exclude your
directories: "Disallow: /cgi-bin/").
Robots.txt just allows you to control which robots index which pages. It’s
important to have in your directory but it won’t really increase your search
engine rankings.
2 Titles And URLs
I mentioned earlier that Metatags just aren’t what they used to be. I also
said that it’s important that your titles and URLs contain the most important
keywords for each of your pages in order to keep the ads relevant.
But those titles and URLs don’t just influence your ads; they also affect your
search engine rankings.
A page about toy cars called cars.html might have a low ranking when
someone looks for information about cars. Change the name to toy_cars.html
and you should get a much higher ranking when someone looks for "toy
cars".
The more relevant your URL is and the easier it is to read, the better.
www.domain.com/page is always an improvement than
http://domain.com/page.php?newsid=1234583373. That’s why on my
website www.familyfirst.com, I use URL’s like
www.familyfirst.com/miss_abigails_time_warp.html rather than strings of
number which confuse the robots.
One of the first places you should look when you want to improve your
rankings then is your titles and URLs.
3 Links
The more links you have, the better. And the better the sites that list those
links the more they’ll be worth. It is always worth aiming to put your links on
sites that look good and have high rankings. In fact, being listed on a poor
site can bring your ranking down.
One of the best places to place links to improve your search engine
rankings is on forums. This isn’t an exchange; you post your links on their
site, they don’t post their links on yours.
Make sure you browse forums regularly, add comments and include your URL
in your signature. You’re likely to get the best results on good forums related
to your topic but don’t be fussy. Even unrelated forums can help to improve
your search engine ranking.
Google’s spiders love forums and review them every week. And because
these sites tend have quite high ranking, those posts will do wonders for your
listings.
Of course, you shouldn’t ignore the SEO forums themselves for some good
tips. www.searchengineforums.com is one good place to browse and
http://forums.seochat.com/ is another. You should also check out my own
forum http://www.adsensechat.com/. Although this is mostly about AdSense
optimization, not surprisingly, SEO issues are discussed often, especially as
they relate to AdSense. It’s a great source to dig up new ideas.
And if you’re going to putting your links all over the forums, why not
do the same thing for blogs?
You can think of blogs as places to read someone’s writings if you like, but
don’t forget they also let you add your own feedback. That means that as an
AdSense publisher, you should also be thinking of them as free places to post
your links. Again, any blog is good but top blogs on your topic are probably
the best.
Don’t forget to check out the SEO blogs too. http://www.seobook.com/ is a good
one, http://www.bradfallon.com/ is another and of course there’s my own blog at
http://www.joelcomm.com/. You’re welcome to leave your links there!
It’s not just blogs and forum that that let you leave your details though.
There are plenty of sites that welcome free content and would be
happy to display your link if it means that they get an article in return.
Start by looking at other sites on your topic and then try
http://www.ezinearticles.com/. You don’t even need to write anything original when
you do this. If you write a new entry to your blog, submit it to an article site
at the same time as you upload it to your blog. Who knows where your links
will end up?
The easiest way to put your links across the Web though is to do a link
exchange. If you’ve got friends who have websites, start there. That’s
very easy.
While linking from friends’ sites is straightforward and cost-free,
www.linkmetro.com makes the whole link exchange process very formal.
There’s a giant range of different sites that you can exchange links with so
you can keep your links relevant and your ranking good and high.
You can also buy links on sites like http://www.adzaar.com/, http://www.adbrite.com/, and
http://www.linkadage.com/. Again, these allow you to choose sites on which you
can place your own links but charge a fee for the process.
I know of several associates who have done something similar, allowing their
visitors a tangible way to say "thank you" for their online efforts. Smart site
owners see opportunity in this strategy as you can acquire quality links
rather inexpensively. Here are some additional examples:
http://www.buyleoalatte.com/
http://www.buybarbaracoffee.com/
You can actually acquire the "Buy Me A Drink" script that all these sites run
on. Click here!
And finally, one resource that I highly recommend is WebRing
(http://www.webring.com/). This is such an easy way to gather links on relevant
sites that I can’t believe it’s not the talk of the net.
The idea is to link together sites on similar topics so that users can quickly
find topics that they’re interested in. Nice for them. But it’s nicer for you
when a bunch of links from similar sites rocket your SEO ranking. That’s
exactly what Google and other search engines are looking for when they rank
sites.
Usually, your links will lead directly to your home page. That’s where you see
your site as starting and that’s where you want them to enter.
But if the content the user wants to see is on one of the internal pages,
there’s no reason for them to have to click around to find it. Fill that page
with keywords that relate to the content on that page and it will have its own
search engine ranking — and well-targeted ads.
So if you have a site about cats and one of your pages was about cat food, it
would make sense to put plenty of cat food keywords on the page. That
would get you cat food ads and a high ranking on search engines when
someone does a search for "cat food" rather than just people who wanted to
know about "cats."
5 Automatic Submissions
Submitting your site to all of the search engines from Google and Yahoo!
right down to the smallest ones, and optimizing each of your pages for high
ranking can be a drag. You also have to keep submitting the site on a regular
basis and constantly check your position if you want to keep it.
The search engines are always re-indexing and reorganizing. A site that can
be in the top spot one week can be a couple of pages over a week later.
(Good news if you’re low down, not so good if you’ve spent hours changing
your pages to climb the rankings.)
That’s why many webmasters simply outsource their SEO so that they can
concentrate on content.
There are lots of companies that do this. Search Engine Blaster for example,
lets you choose from over 600,000 engines but there are plenty of others.
Personally, I think that’s a bit of a waste of time. Only Google, Yahoo and
MSN are important, in that order.
6 SEO Tools
There are a number of tools that I recommend to help with search engine
optimization. The first is the Google Toolbar, which will let you keep track of
your page ranking. You can download it for free at
http://toolbar.google.com/googlebar.html.
The Google Toolbar:
SEO Elite
SEO Elite is a really excellent tool for learning from your most successful
competitors. You can discover the optimum number
of times to repeat keywords, where you should put
them, whether or not to use h1 and h2 tags and even
your competitors’ link strategies, and a huge amount
more.
In short, you can find out exactly how your
competitors have got to the top of the search
engines, learn what they did — and do the exact
same thing to swipe their spot.
You can learn more about SEO Elite and pick up your
copy from www.adsense-secrets.com/seoelite.html
Reciprocal Manager
Reciprocal Manager takes much of the headache out of
managing your links. As you continue to optimize your
site, you will find yourself winning yourself more links
on other sites and being asked to host links from other
site. Reciprocal Manager creates a professional-
looking, neatly organized links directory that’s good for
both your link partners and your visitors.
The program also lets you offer sites the option of placing their links on more
than one site at the same time and, most importantly, to search for other
sites to link to based on search word or phrase.
Learn more about Reciprocal Manager at http://www.reciprocalmanager.com/.
Stomping The Search Engines
Finally, Brad Fallon is one of the biggest experts when it
comes to SEO optimization. His wedding favors site
grossed over $1,000,000 within a short time of
launching, mainly due to his ability to get his site prime
placement in Google and the other search engines.
I’ve met Brad and chatted to him about his SEO
optimization and I can tell you, he knows his stuff! I
thought I knew a bunch about SEO, but after spending a
couple of hours with Brad, I feel like a novice.
You can have thousands of web pages, but without a great search engine
optimization plan, you many not be making the money you want to with
AdSense. I HIGHLY recommend picking up Brad Fallon's 10 audio CD series,
Stomping the Search Engines. It is over 8 hours of Brad's teaching on how
to duplicate his success for your web site(s).
I own the set and have begun listening to it. It is truly FULL of incredible
material that you will find very useful to helping you reach your goals.
To read more about Stomping the Search Engines and acquire your own
copy, click this link: http://www.adsense-secrets.com/seoexpert.html.
7 A Word About Cloaking
One issue that surfaced recently in the contextualized advertising world is
"cloaking": presenting a different site to the Google bot than the one you
present to users.
There can be good reasons for doing this. If you’ve got a forum for example,
the bot could read all the information on your page related to forums, links
and the design etc., find that it outweighs your forum content and serve you
ads related to forums in general instead of your site in particular.
You could also find that your search engine listings are affected too: instead
of appearing nice and high on the results page following a search for your
topic, you might only appear to people looking for forums. That’s not likely to
win you much traffic.
One solution is to strip the site down using javascript or one of the tools
available online so that when the Google bot comes, it only reads the
content.
Of course, you could also fool the bot into thinking that your site is about...
well, anything really. You could spam Google into showing your site to
anyone who was searching for anything.
And that’s why Google banned the practice altogether.
Any form of cloaking, whether it’s to get better targeted ads, improve your
search engine rankings... or spam the search engines is a breach of Google’s
TOS and could get you banned.
So what should you do if you find that your design has a bigger influence on
your ads and ranking than your content?
The best — and simplest thing to do — is to make sure that the description
and keyword meta tags are all filled in properly with terms relevant to your
content.
Section Targeting can de-emphasize problematic areas of your website and
might well affect your search engine rankings (it’s certainly worth a try).
And if these don’t solve your problem, you might want to think of a redesign.
8 TrafficAndConversion.com
I said at the beginning of this chapter that this book is about AdSense and
not about SEO rankings. That’s because I know much more about AdSense
than I do about search engine optimization.
We all have our strong points and AdSense is mine.
If you’re looking for someone whose strong point is search engine
optimization though, I recommend Mark Widawer at
http://www.trafficandconversion.com/.
Many of the ideas in this chapter came as a result of me raiding his brain for
some great strategies. If you’re looking for more of the same, you should
definitely check out his site and see what he has to say.
You won’t regret it.
http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/quicktour.html
can increase your traffic. Probably the most important method though is to
get a high ranking on search engines. That’s free traffic.
Again, there are all sorts of books and experts who can help you improve
your SEO and win a top spot for a site. I have had experience with a number
of strategies that could help you improve your ranking. I’d like to share
them with you now.
1 Robot.txt
The first thing you need to know about indexing your site at search engines
is that you control which pages are indexed and which are excluded. You do
that with a file called robots.txt.
Robots.txt contains nothing more than a record of which robots should index
which pages.
Without going into too much detail, there are two conventions used in a
robots.txt file:
User-agent: [Defines which robots the site is addressing.]
Disallow: [Allows you to list the sites or robots you want to
exclude.]
In general, you’re probably going to use "User-agent: *" to make sure that
you’re addressing the robots of every search engine and you’ll probably want
include all of your pages (although you might want to exclude your
directories: "Disallow: /cgi-bin/").
Robots.txt just allows you to control which robots index which pages. It’s
important to have in your directory but it won’t really increase your search
engine rankings.
2 Titles And URLs
I mentioned earlier that Metatags just aren’t what they used to be. I also
said that it’s important that your titles and URLs contain the most important
keywords for each of your pages in order to keep the ads relevant.
But those titles and URLs don’t just influence your ads; they also affect your
search engine rankings.
A page about toy cars called cars.html might have a low ranking when
someone looks for information about cars. Change the name to toy_cars.html
and you should get a much higher ranking when someone looks for "toy
cars".
The more relevant your URL is and the easier it is to read, the better.
www.domain.com/page is always an improvement than
http://domain.com/page.php?newsid=1234583373. That’s why on my
website www.familyfirst.com, I use URL’s like
www.familyfirst.com/miss_abigails_time_warp.html rather than strings of
number which confuse the robots.
One of the first places you should look when you want to improve your
rankings then is your titles and URLs.
3 Links
The more links you have, the better. And the better the sites that list those
links the more they’ll be worth. It is always worth aiming to put your links on
sites that look good and have high rankings. In fact, being listed on a poor
site can bring your ranking down.
One of the best places to place links to improve your search engine
rankings is on forums. This isn’t an exchange; you post your links on their
site, they don’t post their links on yours.
Make sure you browse forums regularly, add comments and include your URL
in your signature. You’re likely to get the best results on good forums related
to your topic but don’t be fussy. Even unrelated forums can help to improve
your search engine ranking.
Google’s spiders love forums and review them every week. And because
these sites tend have quite high ranking, those posts will do wonders for your
listings.
Of course, you shouldn’t ignore the SEO forums themselves for some good
tips. www.searchengineforums.com is one good place to browse and
http://forums.seochat.com/ is another. You should also check out my own
forum http://www.adsensechat.com/. Although this is mostly about AdSense
optimization, not surprisingly, SEO issues are discussed often, especially as
they relate to AdSense. It’s a great source to dig up new ideas.
And if you’re going to putting your links all over the forums, why not
do the same thing for blogs?
You can think of blogs as places to read someone’s writings if you like, but
don’t forget they also let you add your own feedback. That means that as an
AdSense publisher, you should also be thinking of them as free places to post
your links. Again, any blog is good but top blogs on your topic are probably
the best.
Don’t forget to check out the SEO blogs too. http://www.seobook.com/ is a good
one, http://www.bradfallon.com/ is another and of course there’s my own blog at
http://www.joelcomm.com/. You’re welcome to leave your links there!
It’s not just blogs and forum that that let you leave your details though.
There are plenty of sites that welcome free content and would be
happy to display your link if it means that they get an article in return.
Start by looking at other sites on your topic and then try
http://www.ezinearticles.com/. You don’t even need to write anything original when
you do this. If you write a new entry to your blog, submit it to an article site
at the same time as you upload it to your blog. Who knows where your links
will end up?
The easiest way to put your links across the Web though is to do a link
exchange. If you’ve got friends who have websites, start there. That’s
very easy.
While linking from friends’ sites is straightforward and cost-free,
www.linkmetro.com makes the whole link exchange process very formal.
There’s a giant range of different sites that you can exchange links with so
you can keep your links relevant and your ranking good and high.
You can also buy links on sites like http://www.adzaar.com/, http://www.adbrite.com/, and
http://www.linkadage.com/. Again, these allow you to choose sites on which you
can place your own links but charge a fee for the process.
I know of several associates who have done something similar, allowing their
visitors a tangible way to say "thank you" for their online efforts. Smart site
owners see opportunity in this strategy as you can acquire quality links
rather inexpensively. Here are some additional examples:
http://www.buyleoalatte.com/
http://www.buybarbaracoffee.com/
You can actually acquire the "Buy Me A Drink" script that all these sites run
on. Click here!
And finally, one resource that I highly recommend is WebRing
(http://www.webring.com/). This is such an easy way to gather links on relevant
sites that I can’t believe it’s not the talk of the net.
The idea is to link together sites on similar topics so that users can quickly
find topics that they’re interested in. Nice for them. But it’s nicer for you
when a bunch of links from similar sites rocket your SEO ranking. That’s
exactly what Google and other search engines are looking for when they rank
sites.
Usually, your links will lead directly to your home page. That’s where you see
your site as starting and that’s where you want them to enter.
But if the content the user wants to see is on one of the internal pages,
there’s no reason for them to have to click around to find it. Fill that page
with keywords that relate to the content on that page and it will have its own
search engine ranking — and well-targeted ads.
So if you have a site about cats and one of your pages was about cat food, it
would make sense to put plenty of cat food keywords on the page. That
would get you cat food ads and a high ranking on search engines when
someone does a search for "cat food" rather than just people who wanted to
know about "cats."
5 Automatic Submissions
Submitting your site to all of the search engines from Google and Yahoo!
right down to the smallest ones, and optimizing each of your pages for high
ranking can be a drag. You also have to keep submitting the site on a regular
basis and constantly check your position if you want to keep it.
The search engines are always re-indexing and reorganizing. A site that can
be in the top spot one week can be a couple of pages over a week later.
(Good news if you’re low down, not so good if you’ve spent hours changing
your pages to climb the rankings.)
That’s why many webmasters simply outsource their SEO so that they can
concentrate on content.
There are lots of companies that do this. Search Engine Blaster for example,
lets you choose from over 600,000 engines but there are plenty of others.
Personally, I think that’s a bit of a waste of time. Only Google, Yahoo and
MSN are important, in that order.
6 SEO Tools
There are a number of tools that I recommend to help with search engine
optimization. The first is the Google Toolbar, which will let you keep track of
your page ranking. You can download it for free at
http://toolbar.google.com/googlebar.html.
The Google Toolbar:
Pretty and useful too.
The Alexa toolbar is also useful and will show you how your site ranks
against others. You can download the Alexa toolbar at
The Alexa toolbar is also useful and will show you how your site ranks
against others. You can download the Alexa toolbar at
SEO Elite
SEO Elite is a really excellent tool for learning from your most successful
competitors. You can discover the optimum number
of times to repeat keywords, where you should put
them, whether or not to use h1 and h2 tags and even
your competitors’ link strategies, and a huge amount
more.
In short, you can find out exactly how your
competitors have got to the top of the search
engines, learn what they did — and do the exact
same thing to swipe their spot.
You can learn more about SEO Elite and pick up your
copy from www.adsense-secrets.com/seoelite.html
Reciprocal Manager
Reciprocal Manager takes much of the headache out of
managing your links. As you continue to optimize your
site, you will find yourself winning yourself more links
on other sites and being asked to host links from other
site. Reciprocal Manager creates a professional-
looking, neatly organized links directory that’s good for
both your link partners and your visitors.
The program also lets you offer sites the option of placing their links on more
than one site at the same time and, most importantly, to search for other
sites to link to based on search word or phrase.
Learn more about Reciprocal Manager at http://www.reciprocalmanager.com/.
Stomping The Search Engines
Finally, Brad Fallon is one of the biggest experts when it
comes to SEO optimization. His wedding favors site
grossed over $1,000,000 within a short time of
launching, mainly due to his ability to get his site prime
placement in Google and the other search engines.
I’ve met Brad and chatted to him about his SEO
optimization and I can tell you, he knows his stuff! I
thought I knew a bunch about SEO, but after spending a
couple of hours with Brad, I feel like a novice.
You can have thousands of web pages, but without a great search engine
optimization plan, you many not be making the money you want to with
AdSense. I HIGHLY recommend picking up Brad Fallon's 10 audio CD series,
Stomping the Search Engines. It is over 8 hours of Brad's teaching on how
to duplicate his success for your web site(s).
I own the set and have begun listening to it. It is truly FULL of incredible
material that you will find very useful to helping you reach your goals.
To read more about Stomping the Search Engines and acquire your own
copy, click this link: http://www.adsense-secrets.com/seoexpert.html.
7 A Word About Cloaking
One issue that surfaced recently in the contextualized advertising world is
"cloaking": presenting a different site to the Google bot than the one you
present to users.
There can be good reasons for doing this. If you’ve got a forum for example,
the bot could read all the information on your page related to forums, links
and the design etc., find that it outweighs your forum content and serve you
ads related to forums in general instead of your site in particular.
You could also find that your search engine listings are affected too: instead
of appearing nice and high on the results page following a search for your
topic, you might only appear to people looking for forums. That’s not likely to
win you much traffic.
One solution is to strip the site down using javascript or one of the tools
available online so that when the Google bot comes, it only reads the
content.
Of course, you could also fool the bot into thinking that your site is about...
well, anything really. You could spam Google into showing your site to
anyone who was searching for anything.
And that’s why Google banned the practice altogether.
Any form of cloaking, whether it’s to get better targeted ads, improve your
search engine rankings... or spam the search engines is a breach of Google’s
TOS and could get you banned.
So what should you do if you find that your design has a bigger influence on
your ads and ranking than your content?
The best — and simplest thing to do — is to make sure that the description
and keyword meta tags are all filled in properly with terms relevant to your
content.
Section Targeting can de-emphasize problematic areas of your website and
might well affect your search engine rankings (it’s certainly worth a try).
And if these don’t solve your problem, you might want to think of a redesign.
8 TrafficAndConversion.com
I said at the beginning of this chapter that this book is about AdSense and
not about SEO rankings. That’s because I know much more about AdSense
than I do about search engine optimization.
We all have our strong points and AdSense is mine.
If you’re looking for someone whose strong point is search engine
optimization though, I recommend Mark Widawer at
http://www.trafficandconversion.com/.
Many of the ideas in this chapter came as a result of me raiding his brain for
some great strategies. If you’re looking for more of the same, you should
definitely check out his site and see what he has to say.
You won’t regret it.
http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/quicktour.html
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