Traffic from Myspace and Facebook

If you a pop youngster, you must be a member of Facebook or Myspace. Both Facebook and MySpace is well-known for its huge online community and the way to do social networking, but it also can be a way to get your message out about your service or business if done in a non-pushy casual way. In this generation has seen so many ads and can block it out in a flash. What's important to remember that MySpace and Facebook are talking about making friends all over th world and casually mentioning what you do, what you've found helpful etc.

After setting up your profile at MySpace you can explore using the various feature which include adding friends, sending out bulletins, joining a group, blogging, writing comments and sending e-mails to your friends. Also when you set up your profile you are assigned a number but it's nice to change it to a catchy phrase because that will be part of the url or website address people use to find you.

The group tab on MySpace is wonderful to browse because you can find groups that are targetted on your niche and join them. For instance, if you study the pets and animals tab you'll see there are several groups available for dog lovers. The Dogs are the Best group has 31,901 members. There's another group titled My Dog Rocks that has over 54,000 members. There's also specialized niches as well such as a pit bull group that has 9000 members.

After joining a group, you need to wait a week to post and then you can either answers people's posts or post your own topic or question. It is best to put your offer in your signature file and to build up relationships with people in the group rather than be an aggressive marketer. Some groups also have a bulletin section which allow ads and you use that section as well in a more direct way. I have found that being anecdotal and talking about my own interest in the topic help builds connections with other group members. Think how long it would take you to grow a newsletter list yourself of 54,000 members and you'll get a glimpse of the potential this has to let others know about your product or service.

Another great feature I like is the commenting aspect. You can leave a comment on your friend's profiles that everyone who goes to their page will see. It can be worth it to make or buy a pretty banner so that you can include that within your comment. I always study someone's page before I make a banner so I can customize my remark to their personality. It takes more time but again it helps to build the relationship. If I see that the person likes a certain book I like or hobby I will mention that in my comment and then put a link to my site using a banner or a text link.

Blogging using the MySpace blog system is also a very good way to get traffic to your site. I usually post something in a diary or casual way and have a link to my site. I then will send out a bulletin to tell people I've updated my blog. Don't neglect MySpace in your marketing campaign as it has wonderful opportunities to help people get to learn about your website, service and business. If you are not a member of Myspace or Facebook, go and register now!

Tips for Increasing Website Traffic

If you sell products or services over your web site, then traffic to your site is the name of the game. It's simple: if you want more sales, you better get more traffic. To do that, make sure that you've covered all the bases of driving traffic to your site.

First, optimize. Make sure your search engine listings are all they can be. This means that you need to make sure that you're on the key search engines and second that your site is associated with the best searching key words. Check to ensure you are included in Yahoo!, Google, MSN and the Open Directory Project. After that, look at some private or industry-specific directories. If you're not listed, submit. But before you do make sure your keyword tags, description tags, and content have been optimized for being "find-able."

Second, advertise. Tell people about your web site. You can do this by email, pay-per-click advertising, print advertising or almost any other means of advertising. Whatever it is, point it to your web site. Experiment with the linkage between your ads and your site – e.g. make different offers and see what the effect is on traffic.

Third, collateralize. Collateral is the paper materials you use to conduct business. Yes, include this in your traffic building efforts, too. Make sure your web address is on your signs, your stationery, business cards, brochures, invoices and any other material that goes to the public.
With every change or addition you make to your web site, just remember: Optimize, Advertise, Collateralize. Your web traffic is directly related to these three activities.

About the author: Mark Fortimer, Download the free ebook, Steps to Internet Marketing Success.

Blogging for Profit: The Most Profitable Types of Blogs in the Blogosphere

Have you heard of the phrase 'Blogging for Profit'? Yes, some people are making success driving profits from blogs. The good news is, this can happen to you. If you love to write, blogging might be a profitable business model for you.

Just as you can start with any topic to blog about, there are topics that are more profitable than others. If you are eyeing to drive some profit from your blog, you should pick a niche topic that has some solid affiliate programs and search revenue behind it. And if you have existing blogs, see how you can increase your earning capacity.

The hottest topics to blog nowadays are those fall under internet marketing, cutting edge technology and politics. Arts and music related blogs also tend to draw a large audience.

Aside from selecting niche topics, two types of blogs are immerging to be more profitable. They are the product review blogs and informational blogs.

Product Review Blogs

Two successful blogs of this type are Gizmodo and The Gadget Blog. These blogs focus on news and reviews of the latest gadgets on the market and

You don't have to create blogs exactly like the above example as these blogs requires tremendous amount of search effort. Instead, you can narrow the theme to something like "the latest digital cameras" or "the latest mp3 players".

Narrowing the theme will make your job easier, and assure you a much greater change of finding merchants who carry these products and have affiliate programs.

There's virtually no cost to you to conduct product review and there's plenty of affiliate opportunities for them. Just describe the product, put up some product images and then, link to the website using your affiliate link.

Informational Blogs

Most internet marketing blogs fall under this category. An information focused blog is usually centered around news and "how to" information. Let's take for example this blog of mine. My "front end" product is the content I provide. As you can see, my blog is primarily information focused, rather than product review focused. I share "how to" info centered on online and affiliate marketing.

On this blog, I'm able to link using my affiliate link to products and services with just a mention of their titles, or in keywords associated with them. I also have the blog monetized in other places by using Adsense ads, affiliate banners and etc.

You can do the same thing for other niches. Just think of the areas that interest you or in which you have some knowledge to share. Your post doesn't have to be novel length. All you're really doing is writing short articles.

There you have it, the two most profitable types of blogs in the blogosphere.

How to Turn Your Adsense Earning from $10 to $800 a Week

I was inspired on the disclosure made by Chris with his Adsense income. Chris is 21 years of age and a university student from Brisbane, Australia. Over the last 12 months he has taken his sites from $10 to $800 a week of Adsense income.

He disclosed how he unfold the true potential of his sites, not just in terms of AdSense but also in terms of SEO and the importance of building a good quality site.

I like to quote his answers to the following questions:

How did you get serious?

I took a bit of a risk, bought a few books about AdSense, SEO and general website development and dropped down to part time uni and started dedicating more time to my websites. I started writing articles that were on topics that people wanted to know about and topics that people were searching for, and I placed these articles into a highly optimized template that was just designed for these articles, then I went about building a few backlinks for these articles to help with the SEO. I’d have periods of maybe a week where everyday I would sit down and write an article two, often three or four, and I’d just keep writing, sharing my knowledge, sharing my expertise.

Why were articles successful?

These articles each focused on an individual search term or topic within my industry. The articles were informative and useful. They were 100% original and completely unique in the industry. They were my thoughts, opinions and beliefs on topics that I was very knowledgeable on. They were detailed and lengthy. And the search engines loved them.

Why did the search engines love them?

Because they were original and unique, and because they were getting backlinks and they were on my established sites which I believe have a fair amount of "TrustRank" because at this point my sites were well over 2 years old and had thousands of backlinks, because I had slowly but surely developed them over the previous two years. Plus the articles were all on niche topics that there wasn’t that much competition for, and I had employed very basic, but very solid SEO techniques. Things like:

- Giving each article an individual highly relevant page title.

- Using meta descriptions and keywords, but not abusing them.

- Using H1 and H2 tags.

- Using good keyword density and specific phrase targeting.

- Using good quality, unique, original and focused content.

- Building some well anchored backlinks.

- With a good navigational system between articles.

- Using an aged domain with good TrustRank.

You can read his story along with the question and answer session that transpire in the following post on Digital Point forums: My 2006 AdSense Summary - From $10/Week to $800/Week. Go, read and learn from him.

He indeed turned his sites into money making machine. You too can!

Eight Benefits of Blogging

There's a reason blogging is so addictive! Whether you blog for a hobby or a career, you're sure to be enjoying some of the many perks and benefits of maintaining a blog or two. Here are the top eight:

1. Community
Where else can you meet so many great, like-minded people? Blogging is a great way to share ideas and enter into discussions with people who share the same interests. Nothing makes up a successful blog like a thriving community. Whether or not you share the same opinion doesn't matter. If you have an active community, you're never alone!

2. Recognition
If you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field, blogging is a great way achieve recognition and turn others on to your point of view.

3. Employment Opportunities
Blogging can open many new doors, many bloggers have been able to quit their day jobs to blog professionally, while other receive job offers as a result of their expertise.

4. Revenue
If your blog is popular, it can also be profitable. Some bloggers earn millions each year.

5. It's Fun!
Blogging is fun! Even those of us who do it for a living enjoy what we do.

6. You're Part of Something Special
The blogging community is a special one indeed. Even those who feel as if they never belong, find a place among bloggers. From the social networking to the sharing of ideas, there's nothing like the world you'll encounter blogging.

7. Find Other Great Blogs
Blogging helps you to findother great resources. Your community members are sure to have recommendations, plus you'll find lots of great stuff while researching your niche.

8. Swag
Sometimes businesses will send you products or books to review. Many bloggers receive great swag.

Important Skill in Blogging - Creativity

Do you face challenges or road blocks to success? How about on turning your blog into money making machine?

Some one says, creativity is a million dollar skill and I believe on this. Without creativity you lost your greatest leverage for producing value. In turn, this will cripple your earning potential as earning in most cases is a function of your ability to product value.

Creativity transforms good ideas into great ideas. Creative thinking can give insight into overcoming challenges. Creativity enhances the ability to problem solve. And the good news is – everyone can be creative.

Tapping into self creative ability is vital to maximize results. Even if you’ve never considered yourself creative, there are proven techniques and approaches to help anyone claim their own creativity. Along with the techniques and approaches to help you become creative, Steve Pavlina defines clearly the ground rules for maximizing your creative output.

Remember, creativity is a million dollar skill and can be learn. Use and maximize your creativity to turn your blog into money making machine.

How to Make Your Blog Unique

How Do You Make Your Blog Unique and Stand out from 55 Million Others?

There are 55 Million blogs out there and every day this number is still keep growing. They said, blogosphere is still in it’s infancy. So, how do you make your blog stand out from the rest?

As regards money, for example, 99% of blogs don't make a penny and most soon disappear.

The blogging winners will be those who persevere, adapt and keep on learning and try to be creative.

Your blog post maybe speaking the same thing with hundreds of others. This situation demands maximum creativity in order to stand out. In one of the post made by Steve Pavlina, he gives us a sneak-peek at his flowing creativity experience. Learn from one of the top blogger, read his post entitled "My Experience in Creativity".

I hope you can get lessons from Steve on how to make your blog stand-out through creativity.

Monetize Your Blog with ReviewMe

Many of you have surely heard about blog advertising site PayPerPost. PayPerPost allows bloggers to make a few bucks by blogging about a product, service, or another website. The only problem (according to many) is that PayPerPost does not require the blogger to disclose the fact that the post was paid for. And they also require that the post be more or less positive in nature about the reviewed product or service. Needless to say, this opens the door for some questionable ethics.

Comes into play the newcomer ReviewMe, a PayPerPost (PPP) kind of ad network, with a twist. The contract between the ad network and the blogger makes it mandatory to disclose the fact that you are blogging for money but certainly not this one because I am not paid to write this post. I find my blog too young to join ReviewMe.

But that's not the only difference. Whereas a single fee per post is charged to advertiser for any bloggers, ReviewMe determines the set price by using an algorithm based on Alexa, Technorati and other statistics. The asked price varies, from 30$, up to an enticing 1,000$ per post, depending on your blog importance in the blogosphere.

And there is more. The blogger can share his/her honest opinion and still being paid. Of course, I have some doubts personally about how this can really be implemented. It is obvious to me that ReviewMe is trying to give a non-partisan flavour to their ad network. This way, it gives it more credibility. However, looking at it from any angle, since we're being paid by a third-party to talk about them, we can't truly bite the hand the feeds us. Anyway, the fact that we have the illusion of that choice is still a nice feature.

The only other requirement has to do with the review length and time limit to come up with a review, 200 words and 48 hours for this particular assignment. Payment can be made by check or by PayPal.

Getting Started

Signing up is extremely easy, taking literally one or two minutes to fill out a small form. You are then automatically logged in and ready to go. The next step is to submit your blog. This is done by entering basic details of your blog such as Title, Description, RSS URL, Keywords, and of course, your URL. Your blog is then either automatically approved or declined. This is based on Alexa ranking, Technorati ranking, and RSS subscribers. Publishers may have up to 6 different blogs attached to their account.

If approved, you're completely set up and ready to go. There is very little to actually read in terms of instructions on the site, but a FAQ section is there to help answer some of the questions you may have.

Reviewing

Reviewing is quite simple. ReviewMe's system works by advertisers choosing which blogs they'd like to be reviewed by. This is most likely determined by what topic and niche your blog lies in. You get to decide if you'd like to review them or not, the choice is completely up to you and you're not forced to review anything you don't want to.

Once your have finished your review and posted it on your blog, you simply return to ReviewMe and submit the URL of the post with the review and you're done.

Payment Details

Publishers are paid 50% of revenue, which may sound high, but is pretty standard. Also, ReviewMe's prices to advertisers are somewhat expensive so publishers are really getting paid quite well.

Price is automatically recalculated monthly, based on factors including theme, estimated traffic, link popularity, and estimated RSS subscribers. Publishers are paid the first of every month via PayPal or check.

Additional Information

Publishers may publish an unlimited number of reviews.

Reviews do not necessarily have to be in English. ReviewMe asks for reviews to be written in the Publisher's "normal" language. If their blog's category is German, for example, advertisers will generally expect the language of the review to be German.

Monetize with Affiliate Marketing

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Have You Ever Heard of JohnChow.com?

An hour ago, I come across a post from John Chow Dot Com entitled Review My Blog & Get A Free Linkback. John Chow has organize a review contest where you can win a MiniTV USB from him by writing a review for his blog. Besides the MiniTV USB, you can also get a linkback from his blog too.

The contest is now over but he said, he will continue to offer linkbacks for reviews.

Basically I would like to know the impact of his linkback to my blog. So I will give it a shot to review johnchow.com. I hope that after a month from getting his linkback I shall be on better position to evaluate the value of his linkback. I shall then make another post in here entitled “The Impact of the BackLink of Johnchow to my blog” so everybody will have an idea of the value of linkback from a popular blog such as this.

Johnchow.com is a technology blog. Even a car is considered a product of technology; I find his banner a little bit misleading. If a first time visitor spend just 5 seconds to his blog and right after ask about the theme of the blog, the visitor will probably answer the blog is all about cars. I also find his banner bigger than the average. It occupies greater space than the average banner size without giving any benefit.

The navigational feature of his blog is fare. But I find his category too broad having only 8 against 700 plus number of post. While the blog has a search function, it maybe more beneficial to the visitor to break down a little bit the categories.

I find his post valuable for anyone who wants to succeed online. Most of his topic center on marketing, traffic building, advertising and technology. .

While his blog earnings are high coming from multiple online streams, I still find his earning below his blog true potential. There is still a big room for him to engage to other revenue source.

I don’t find all his post interesting but generally all of them are informative while some are empowering.

So that’s it this is my review but remember this is not just a review but the beginning of an experiment to measure the value of the linkback from a blog like his.

I hope that after a month from getting his linkback I shall be on better position to evaluate the value of his linkback. I shall then make another post in here entitled “The Impact of the BackLink of Johnchow to my blog” so everybody will have an idea of the value of linkback from a popular blog such as this.

Five ways to get Explosive Traffic

Do you feel good about the volume of traffic currently you are getting? How would you like to exponentially increase your blog traffic without investing an extra cent on advertising?

Yes, this can be done. Your ultimate target should be to create sustainable traffic system, a kind that will pay you for years for a one-time effort. All this can be done through the powerful principle known as leverage.

What then is the secret to leverage?

The secret to leverage is in coming up with effective, efficient and self-perpetuating systems to gain traffic for years and years. You need to invest time creating traffic building generation tool. Once done, let it loose on the web and let others do the work for you. You will only do this once but the system continues to grow and multiply your results.

Any system you set up which allows your sales message or your links to propagate online in "word of mouth" fashion qualify as leverage. This can be an article with your byline and links on it submitted to multiple article directories, a free e-book and even your affiliate program.

However, for these tools to work their magic, the same must contain incentive either in the form of profit or value. You're either paying someone in commissions for their effort or you're offering them valuable information for free.

With this in mind, here are five no-cost explosive viral leveraging tactics you can put into action immediately:

1. Viral Free Report Traffic

Free reports are common these days. If you sell information product, it is almost a requirement to have at lease one freebie report aimed to pre-sell your information product and to be given away to other websites or blogs. Allowing others to re-brand your report with their affiliate links is the basic incentive for webmasters to let your report be downloadable for free at their website. In this case, your army of traffic multiplication is made up of other webmasters.

Place more value to your free report. Your success depend upon how likely webmasters are to earn commissions by giving it away. The more webmaster made your free reports downloadable, the more traffic you can win.

2. Viral Free Article Traffic

Yes, an article containing your byline and links submitted to article directories will gain you more traffic. Your traffic will be coming from the re-distribution of your articles with the clicks on the link in your byline and from the search engines themselves.

Place more valuable information on your free articles and optimized them as well. Webmasters love to publish valuable articles especially if it's for free. The more re-distribution you get, the more traffic you can win.

3. Viral Subscriber List Traffic

If you have built your subscriber list, not put it to work for you? Again, all you need to do is offer an incentive.

One great example is for you to announce to your list that one lucky member can receive a high ticket items from you for free if they can refer say for example X number of new subscriber to your list.

4. Viral Affiliate Program Traffic

If you have your own product or acquire a resellers right of the product made by others, opening your own affiliate program is a good traffic generator. The profit incentive is built in and you pay nothing for the publicity until an actual sale is made.

You can also consider implementing a multi-tier affiliate program with an attractive incentive plan. This will build your affiliate base like crazy and generate traffic on steroids for your site.

5. Viral Referral Traffic

I have seen this to some major sites. They have a referral script to implement a "refer a friend" feature. Remember, for this to work with great success, you have to give some form of incentive in exchange for the referral.

So, they are the 5 explosive secrets to boost your traffic for free for years. Try one of them. Integrate in your campaign the principle of giving incentives and watch your traffic multiply on autopilot that will last for years if not forever.

Remember, your ultimate target should be to create sustainable traffic system, a kind that will pay you for years for a one-time effort.

Good luck.

Advanced SEO Techniques

What about those sites above mine in the rankings that use spam techniques?Yes it's true that you will see sites above yours in the search engine results pages that have used questionable techniques to get there. This is a short term phenomenon! Those sites are usually crushed by the search engines at the next update. You can afford to be smug if you see those sorts of sites above yours - because when they get kicked out of the index for doing the wrong thing, your site will be there ready to move up a few more places! Remember, our watchword when doing SEO is patience, we can afford to smile because we know our sites will eventually prevail.

Linking out from your site

Who you link to tells a search engine alot about your site. Outgoing links are very important because they can help you recommend your visitors to more resources. Visitors appreciate being helped, so this is a good strategy to have on your website. The only problem is that search engines don't like you linking to 'bad neighborhoods'. 'Bad neighborhoods' are low quality sites which may tarnish your website. Avoid these like the plague. Try and link to only good quality sites which are relevant to your site. The better the sites you link to, the more favourably search engines look upon your site.

Paid links

From an SEO point of view these are bad news. Paid links should only be used to get traffic. Search engines don't like paid links that pretend to be a 'vote' for your website. If you pay for a link, ask the linking site to add rel="nofollow" to the link which tells the search engines not to count it as a 'vote'.

Duplicate Pages

Some people will tell you there is some sort of penalty if you have 2 pages the same on your website. Duplicate pages are where the URL is different but the content on the pages is too similar or exactly the same. For instance, http://www.google.com and http://www.google.com.in are nearly identical, even though they have different URLs. Typically a search engine will look at those two pages and decide they are both similar, and display only one. There is no penalty as the searcher finds what they are looking for anyway. The problem comes when there are links (or 'votes') to both pages. That means the 'votes' are split and the information is seen as less important than it really is. For this reason it is usually best to avoid duplicate pages from the start. If you already have duplicate pages, it is best to do a 301 redirect back to one.

What is PR? Is it important?

PR stands for PageRank, Google's system of rating webpages. You can check PR of pages but the tools available show outdated information and are not really relevant. PR plays less of a role in search engine placement these days and you really shouldn't worry about it. Far more important is making good content and getting good incoming links to your site.

www vs. no www

Some search engines have a problem with www and non www. What this basically means is that they think there is one website at http://example.com and another website at http://www.example.com. Of course this is a silly concept for humans but a challenge for automated search robots. Always point internal links to either one or the other for your site. Of course there are people who will link to you the opposite way.

Dynamic URLs

Do you have a dynamic site? Dynamic URLs have a ? in them with a few parameters after the ?. Check to see if dynamic URLs are generated for your site by using a spider simulator on your site. If so, you will need to get rid of those session URLs for spiders! This can be quite complicated and depends on what type of server and software you are using, but you can start your research here and here.

Once you get rid of session ID's, dynamic URL's are indexed and ranked on Google quite well. MSN and Yahoo still have problems indexing those pages. Overall, if you have the skill or you can find someone to help you do it, it is better to convert dynamic URLs to static URLs. This gives you a better chance of being indexed by all search engines.

Photos and Images

For all photos and images on your pages, make sure they are not too large. It is best to resize them in an imaging program to their finished size before inserting them in your webpage and uploading them to your site. Make sure all images have an tag which accurately describes the photo or image.

The robots.txt file

A good robots.txt file is like an invitation for search engine crawlers to check out your site. It is also useful for stopping some crawlers. For example, I used to despair because I was using way too much bandwith on my webserver account for one of my sites. The main reason too much bandwith was being used was because the Google Image crawler was visiting my site a couple of times a month and downloading the thousands of product images we had. Now, there is no reason for my thousands of product images to be on Google search, these are well known products and people were just looking for images to steal to put on their own websites anyway. The solution? I blocked the Google Imagebot from my site using the robots.txt file. This saves many gigabytes of bandwith every month. The robots.txt file is useful for several SEO purposes - for example stopping search engines from indexing irrelevant content .

Get Your Site Indexed by Search Engines

First of all, you need quality content. That does not neccesarily mean a long boring article about some subject in your niche. For example, a friend of mine has a site with photos. Each page has a photo with a brief description of the subject. Each and every page of the site is indexed. Searchers usually find these pages because they are looking for a photo of the subject. So quality content can not only include articles, but also photos, tools, jokes, discussions, forums, videos, commentaries, advice, FAQs or a myriad of other types of content. Be brutal. If you came to your webpage as a regular visitor, would your page be entertaining and/or informative? Would you find your way around the site easily? Would you stay? And, more importantly for our next point, would you recommend your page to others?

You need incoming links! The best incoming links are what search engines call organic links. What are organic links? It is where someone likes your site, and adds an unsolicited link to your site from their site. Sounds easy? Wrong. Gaining organic links takes a long time if you sit back and wait for others to link to you. There are quicker ways to gain good incoming links which we can't cover here but I can thoroughly recommend this page - 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006. Of course, all links are not created equal. As a general rule of thumb, links from sites which are more authoritive relevant to your website carry more weight with search engines. Least weight is given to irrelevant links from low ranking sites. To give examples, if I have a site about growing cactus in the UK, a link from the British Cactus and Succulent Society would be an ideal link. A link from a home loan site would be totally irrelevant and would probably be ignored by search engines.

To summarize links, search engines consider links from other pages to your page as a 'vote' for your page, however some votes are better than others. As Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall say on the abovementioned page, "Because links are still the basic connector, the basic relationship, on the Web. And for the forseeable future they're going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page."

Links from better sites are always harder to get, but if your content is worthwhile major sites will happily link to you. Don't bother with reciprocal links (where someone links to you if you link to them) as these links are usually worthless. The better your incoming links, the deeper search engine crawlers will go into your site and the more pages from your site will get indexed. The better your content, the better your links, the more accessible your pages are, the higher you will rank.

Know how Search Engines Function

Just because your site has been crawled, doesn't mean your site will be indexed by the search engines. Lets take a quick look at how search engines work. There are 3 stages - stage one is where search engine crawlers visit websites collecting the information on webpages and following links on those pages to other pages to collect the information on those pages and so on and so forth. On some websites the crawler may decide to only crawl a few pages if the site isn't considered too important (and we'll come back to this later, as that 'not so important' site may be yours!).

After collecting all that information, usually hundreds of millions or even billions of pages, the search engine starts indexing those pages. The search engine analyses each and every page to see what the page is about and how it fits in the site and the overall world wide web. The search engine decides which search queries the page may be relevant to, and then ranks that page against all the other pages on the web which are about the same topic. A single web page may be relevant to few or even dozens of different search terms so these all have to be taken into account. Obviously this is quite a simplistic view of how this works but I just want to give you some idea of the enormity of this task.

When a searcher types a search query into the search page, the search engine searches through it's index for what it thinks is the most relevant pages which will match the searchers request. This typically (and quite amazingly) only takes a fraction of a second, and the searcher is presented with a list of webpages that the search engine believes matches their request. For example, I just did a search for "home loans" and there were 34,000,000 results returned. Consider for a moment that you would like your webpage to rank in the top ten for the term "home loans", your page would have to better than 34,000,000 others! Of course, that is not impossible but unless you are a large national or multinational home mortgage company, there is no need for you to rank in the top ten (from a searcher's viewpoint).

Okay, this is where we get to part about why your pages aren't indexed. Even though your page exists, that does not mean it will be automatically included in the search indexes. There are far too many pages on the Internet to include every single page. Search engines need other clues about a page's quality to include it.

Make Your Site Become Search Engines Friendly

A very important point made by Google, MSN and Yahoo (and the others) is that your website should be designed for humans, not for search engines. I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment but you still need to make sure a search engine crawler can find it's way around your site.

You have to make sure every page on your site will be found by search engine crawlers and crawled properly. Your site and pages have to be set up correctly for this to happen. You need at least basic HTML knowledge to understand how to do the following.

Your website will need internal links that a search engine understands.

Your website should be linked together so that every single page can be found by clicking a link from another page. The best way to do this is to have a site map. A site map is a single page (or series of pages if you have a huge site) which links every page that exists on your website. If you use a javascript menu, you will need a "noscript" section as well. Another important point to remember is that, generally speaking, the more clicks away from the home page a webpage is, the less likely that page is to appear in the search index (but we'll cover the exceptions later).

Your web pages will need a unique title

Choosing titles for your web page is not hard - just choose a short sentence or phrase which accurately describes what your page is about. If your page is about growing cactus in the UK, there's your title... Growing Cactus in the UK. This is also what people will see in the search engine results pages, so if they see your relevant page they will click on your link, even if it is number four or five in the search results. Make sure every page has it's own unique title.

Your web pages will need a unique meta description

Make sure your pages have a unique meta description. An effective meta description is a short synopsis of what visitors will expect to see on the webpage. This is NOT a place for repeating keywords or telling lies about what the page is actually about. To use our example of growing cactus in the UK, an appropriate meta description would be "How to successfully grow cactus in the UK, with practical tips and examples". If you don't have different and unique meta descriptions for each page, the search engines may presume that all your pages are the same.

Your pages need <> and <> tags

These tags, as well as <> and <> tags, emphasize to the search engines (and more importantly, visitors) the overall theme of the content of your page. Remember, use these tags honestly and appropriately. One heading with <> is enough. A <> or <>for each relevant block of text is OK. One or two strong tag on a particular keyword or keyphrase is more than adequate. If your headings look ugly and contrived to a visitor, you will probably be penalized by search engines now or in the future for them.

Check for errors on your site

It's easy to check for errors on your site, and there are a couple of great tools available for free to do this. The first I use is Xenu Linksleuth. You can read about it and download it from here. Basically Xenu crawls your website like a search engine spider and reports any broken links. This is very valuable information, because broken links can stop search engine crawlers from crawling your site. Broken links can arise from misspellings or pages that were deleted.

Another useful tool is Google Webmaster Console. There are many useful functions in Webmaster Console which we will talk about later but right now we'll highlight their error reporting. (At this point don't upload a sitemap to the Webmaster Console, I'll talk about that a little later). Once you validate your website at Webmaster Console go to the crawl error screen and you will be presented with any errors the Google crawler encountered on your site. Obviously if the Google crawler has a problem navigating your site then other search engine crawlers will also have a problem.

Using these two tools gives you the opportunity to diagnose and fix any errors with linking on your site and ensure greater success when your site is indexed.

How to Improve Your Alexa Ranking?

Alexa is owned by Amazon.com and is a very useful indicator to show your relative ranking in terms of page views, reaches etc. You can use this ranking to compete and compare with your keen competitors. Below is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank. Most of the tips were gleaned from several fellow bloggers and webmasters who' ve experimented with Alexa.

Other tips come from specific articles and forums. Those that I have referenced are listed at the end of this post.

Do these tips work? Yes, they do. But most of them require active effort in generating traffic. They will work as long as long as you are consistently performing specific actions.

To increase your Alexa rank in the long term, I would suggest coming up with quality content which draws and maintains a large audience. This is an excellent way to passively increase your Alexa rank.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.



2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day.



3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers.



4. Work in an Office? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers.



5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.



6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you or visit your blog, which helps with your traffic rank.



7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. I like doing this for a few reasons. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and get some feedback in return. It’s also a good way to give back to the community.



8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.



9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.doshdosh.com . Replace doshdosh.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help.



10. Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some have suggested that Asian (Korean or Hong Kong) web users are big Alexa toolbar fans.



11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often visit your website to use the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.



12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Of course, you’ll have to develop link worthy material.



13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is about webmaster/tech related products/content.



14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as a resource for webmasters while helping you rank in the search engines.



15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget at the bottom of the post, call for Alexa signups or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.



16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.



17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or get respected users to pimp specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis.



18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers.



19. Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive (wierd/sexy/funny) pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. You’ll get a lot of clicks but it doesn’t mean people are visiting your website.



20. Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are most suitable for new websites with a terrible Alexa rank. There might also be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense.

How to Get Profitable Adsense Keywords?

Knowing how to find the best keywords for use in your Adsense ads is not a straightforward process. Finding and implementing high profit, low competition keywords in your ads really is the trick for making Adsense payoff big. The following process should yield profitable, low competition keywords for your Adsense ads. This process is not perfect, but when you analyze it and try it for yourself, you can see that it makes sense. Adsense that is.

Step 1 Research some keywords for your niche that have a high CPC value. To do this, first find your keywords using the Google Adwords keyword tool or another tool that will give you niche specific lists of keywords. Save those keywords into a spreadsheet program as a csv file. Copy and paste those keywords into Google's Traffic Estimator (you will need an Adwords account). The traffic estimator will give you the estimated clicks per day and the average cost per click (CPC) for each keyword. Copy and paste this information back into your spreadsheet file for later reference.

Step 2 Multiply the average CPC by 30% to get an estimate of your maximum earnings per click. The higher the average CPC, the more likely the CPC for the 2nd - 8th positions are high as well. You want this higher average CPC to start because if the CPC starts to drop off significantly after the 3rd position, your chance of getting high click earnings as an Adsense publisher will be diminished.

Step 3 Use any one of many tools available on the internet for helping to estimate the 1st - 8th position CPC values. These tools will estimate the CPCs for each position and allow you to see how much the CPCs drop off after the first position. This dramatically helps your analysis for picking the most profitable keywords. If the CPC values stay close to the each other and to the value of the first position, then you will more than likely have a profitable keyword.

Step 4 Now determine which Adsense ads occupy which positions. You can do this by searching on Google for your keyword and looking to see which Adsense ads are generated in the search results and in which order they are. Another way to estimate this is to use the Adwords Accelerator tool. It has a feature whereby Adwords ads are dynamically displayed for a given keyword you input into the tool to check. If the Adwords advertiser has used "Adwords for Content" in his advertising, these ads will be the Adsense ads someone else is displaying on their website.

Step 5 Compare the ads you found in step 4 to the results of using a keyword check function tool (available on the internet). If the advertisers you find by doing this closely match those you found in step 4, you will more than likely have a profitable keyword.

If the advertisers are not he same, then the advertiser is possibly not using the "Adwords for Content" mode of advertising in his campaigns. This means that the keyword may not be the basis for the Adsense ads and may not be profitable.

Step 6 Now you must get the traffic. If you decide to get traffic using the Adwords approach, then just use the keywords in your Adsense ads that scored well from the above evaluation. Then, use lower cost per click keywords in your Adwords ads. The difference between the earnings from the click you get on your Adsense word from the cost of the click you pay on your Adwords word will be your profit.

If you are planning to use search engine optimization techniques to get traffic to the website where your ads are, make sure the keywords you choose have the highest KEI possible. KEI is the ratio of the number of searches for a keyword to the number of competing sites having the keyword. The combination of a high KEI and a high score from the above evaluation will yield the best profit results.

How to use Competitive Ad Filter?

Not every time, the ads delivered by Google is relevant. Or the ads shown is your keen competitor. In this case, you need to screen the ads out. In Adsense, it allows you to filter those unwanted ads with the use of competitive filters. The Competitive Ad Filter enables you to block specific ads, such as competitors’ ads, from appearing on your pages. This option is available under your Adsense setup tab and is called the Competitive Ad Filter. You can block ads across all subdomains, block only ads across a certain sub-domain, block all ads below a specific directory or block all ads for a specific page.

So I have decided to block google from showing their own adwords ads promoting their products on my website/blog. I’ve done this to show more relevant ads and well just to take that annoying “get your blog with google” and “Monetize your site with google adsense”. But beware, the competitive ad filter takes some time to take effect. According to Google Help, "Please note that Google does not commit that all ads for the websites that you add to your competitive ad filter list or ads containing objectionable content will be prevented from display on your site."

How Google detects Invalid Clicks

Still thinking to cheat AdSense? Stop that. It will never bring you anywhere. You might pull it off with smaller ads network, but definitely not with Google. Here are some detection methods they might use. At the very least, they have the resources to do so.

IP Address

If the AdSense click is originated from the same IP Address as the one used for accessing your AdSense account, your account is flagged.

Cookies

Most home users do not use static IP Address for Internet connection. In most cases just disconnect and reconnect will give you a new IP Address. But don’t forget, Google has set cookies on your computer.

Other Google Services

Thinking that you are safe just because you do not access your AdSense account? Think again. This time, consider these: GMail, Google Earth, Google Calendar, Google Search, Google Toolbar, Google Talk, Google Sitemap, Google Desktop, Blogger, and so on, and so on. With the wide range of services they provide, Google can trace the originator of most (or probably almost all) clicks.

Click Pattern 1

Oh, why this computer / IP address / person is so trigger-click-happy on this particular website but never click on the ads on other sites?

Click Pattern 2

And why is it that people accessing these sites direct (type-in URL or from bookmark) tend to be very active ad-clickers compared with those referred from search engine or other sites?

Click Pattern 3

And why the ad-clickers like to hit and run, compared with non ad-clickers that surf a few pages before leaving?

Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

Your CTR may range from 0.5% to 10%, but if it exceeds a certain point (probably around 10%), you are flagged.

Geo-Location

Used Urchin (Google Analytics) before? Then you should know that Google can trace traffics origin down to the small town. Different IP doesn’t mean much. Unless you site is really targetted to one small geo-point, a high number of clicks from nearby location will get you banned quickly.

Search Engine Ranking

Your website is not indexed on any search engine, not linked by any prominent website, but get consistently high traffic? That sounds like something is in play. Regardless of whether it is an adware-embedded software, spam, trojan clickbot, or intentionally installed click-exchange network, it doesn’t sound right.

Webpage design

How about the “click here” or “support us”? Google has the best search engine in the world. Is it really that hard to find those words?

Combo

Each of these detection methods might seem rather weak. But combine them together, and not many click-fraud can pass-through these filters. Even the smartest clickbot will have a hard time.

How to Cheat Google Adsense...

I found one article that is quite interesting and the topic is "how to cheat Google Adsense". But at the very beginning, I need to say that this is no way you can cheat Google to earn more money from this program. This article only gives a little joke on how to get banned by google indeed. Just read it without following the rules.

You come to this article probably thinking to find some ways to cheat Google, or to confirm whether some method you have on mind will work. Well, if you want to know how to cheat AdSense, here are the ways, focusing on the AdSense click-frauds. These covers from basic AdSense cheating techniques to the advanced class.

1. Basic clicker cheat
This is a noob. This guy knows almost nothing about web technology or network architecture. He clicks on his ads every time he has chance. It can be a few clicks to hundreds of clicks daily. Most likely he doesn’t even read the AdSense Program Policies and Terms and Conditions.

2. Proxy clicker cheat
She knows a thing or two about cookies and IP address. Or she doesn’t know, but somehow guessed that if she use the things called anonymizer, Google will not be able to trace her, because her identity is hidden. She may use anonymizer / proxy websites or specialized anonymous software like tor (The Onion Router).

3. Multiple computer clicker cheat
He knows that somehow Google will detect if the clicks are originated from his own computer. So he will try to even out origin of the clicks. He will recruit his friends, family members, relatives, neighbors, his cats, and his dogs on single mission: to click on the ads. He will also click on the AdSense ads when he is using the library computers, or his office workstation.

4. Software clicker cheat
Graduate to the next step is buyers of clickbots / click-bots. These are specialized robot software to click on AdSense ads. It will browse around your websites, clicking on the ads every few minutes. The more advanced ones will cloak the IP address too, so the website seems to be very popular worldwide. To cover the track, this clickbots will browse around the advertisers sites too while continuing its “click quest”.

5. Paid-clickers cheat
If you don’t like automated things, there is always other option for you. Just pay $50 dollars a month to the professional AdSense clickers. These are groups of highly specialized Internet surfers with office in the dark rooms in street corners of India, Pakistan, and China, helping AdSense account owner to earn good amounts of money ? before the AdSense account is disabled, that is. They will browse around your websites, clicking on the ads every few minutes. Because they use human eyes, they know which ads worth more. And to be more convincing they can click a link or two, or sign up free offers / newsletters on the advertiser sites.

6. Click-rings cheat
Network is power. So says many business gurus. Instead of taking things to their own hand, this people realize that they can join hands with those with similar goals and distribute AdSense clicks among themselves, the so called AdSense click-rings. Joining this click-ring network means that your website address will be made known to members, who will regularly browse the website and click on your AdSense ads. In exchange, you will also browse other members’ sites and click on their AdSense ads. The medium used varies. Some click-ring groups use mail-list for communications. Some are using bulletin boards/forum, Yahoo groups, or Usenet. IRC is another popular way. Slightly more complicated is specialized AdSense exchange software for collecting members website address and displaying others’ websites for clicking.

7. Other medium cheat
I have tens of thousands email address on my newsletter subscriber list. If I include AdSense ads on my newsletters, with 5% CTR, I can get a thousand clicks per one email. Not bad. Or I can pay someone to write some useful/nice/funny/cute toolbars or firefox extensions or screensavers that people can download and use for free, and display my AdSense ads there.

8. Visitor cheat
Simply putting “Visit out sponsors” or “Check out the ads above” on your website is cheating. This might not be very clear-cut cheat to some. But Google AdSense program policies has stated clearly, the only text allowed are “Advertisements” or “Sponsored List”

9. Spam cheat
This is the highest level all click-frauds, the Maestro of Fraudsters. She spams millions of emails regularly, offering to “satisfy your inner needs if you can help me check on the links on my website”. Of course, email is not the only way. What IRC and instant messaging (IM) are for, after all. She will look for unsuspecting victims, offering something too-good-to-be-true “if only they will visit the website and click on the links”.

10. Click-through-rate cheat
Whichever method(s) above used, there is one limiting condition: the CTR(click-though-rate). Any CTR that exceeds certain percentage (probably around 10%) will raise red flag in Google AdSense back room. To lower the CTR, the professional cheaters will create some pages on the same domain that attracts very high traffic. Some interesting freebies will sure do the tricks. AdSense code is pasted there, thus creating a very high page impressions. Whether or not the the ads are clicked does not matter anyway, because they are targeting low paying keyword that does not have much competition. The fake clicks are, of course, on where the big money is, the low traffic pages stuffed with high-paying keywords.

Disclaimer: I don’t say and don’t think that these methods will work. If you even need to read this article, there’s 99.999% chance you will get caught before you can even get your first paycheck. Your AdSense account will be disabled, and you get banned from ever applying for AdSense account again.