Will your AdSense income come to a screeching halt?

This was posted a couple weeks ago, but I wasn't aware of it, so perhaps many of you aren't either. Seems like just another reason why I'm extremely happy that I run Mozilla's Firefox browser instead of Internet Explorer, and for many more reasons I recommend you check it out also.

Fixing IE security risk blocks AdSense: "'Microsoft is recommending that users turn off the 'Drag and drop or copy and paste files' option in Internet Explorer and set security levels to high for the Internet zone.'
This is the message in news articles all over the Web. Security is the #1 priority, I understand -- but the unintended consequence is that AdSense ads will not be displayed for users who set their Internet Zone security to 'high.' "

Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone - Does it Still Compute?

Oh, how I wish I would have written this article.

Oh, how I wish I could have written this article.

Oh, how I wish I would have found it when it was originally written over 5 years ago!

Those who took the 26 steps are most likely counting their money right now, but it's never too late to start. Perhaps one or two of the steps are a bit out of date, but I haven't found a better guide to success lately.

Take a look, it might be the most important thing you read this week.........

Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone: "The following will build a successful site in 1 years time via Google alone. It can be done faster if you are a real go getter, or everyones favorite a self starter. "

eBay taketh away, and eBay giveth back!

Those who have read about my Internet "roots" know I started earning my first online income, like many others, with eBay, back in the days when they used to tell how many auctions were running at any time on their home page, and when full-day outages weren't unheard of.

In the beginning, eBay was my entire online income stream, but fortunately I've been able to diversify by building web sites to sell merchandise and to earn affiliate income. Still, the auction site accounts for a portion of income that I would miss if it disappeared.

Recently there has been an uproar over uncoming fee increases. When I first read the announcement, I didn't think too much about it, it seems that the majority of the increase is for eBay store sellers. Though I do have an eBay store, I still consider it a bargain. For 2 cents a month, I can list items that would cost me about .35 a week on the normal auctions. I find that with proper merchandising, I can put my more active items on regular auctions, then refer visitors or buyrs to also visit my eBay store for accessory items, and that technique works well for upselling to multiple products.

So when they announced an increase in the final value fee from 5.25% to 8%, it seemed fair enough and still a good deal overall. I don't know why so many people are screaming "boycott", maybe because they never had a brick and mortar store (like I've had for 15 years) with annual increases in rent, taxes, utilities, payroll, and the like.

Anyway, the title of this post is "eBay taketh away, and eBay giveth back". The give back isn't just to eBay executives and shareholders (of which I am neither, unfortunately). The give back that I appreciate is an announcement I received today, that they are raising the commission that they give affiliates by a considerable amount.

When I joined the eBay affiliate program, they were paying $5.00 per confirmed new registration (they call it an ACRU). I think it was about this time last year when they raised that rate to $10.00, later in the year to $12.00, and as of February 1, 2005, they are raising it again, this time to $20.00, an almost unbelievable 40% pay raise!

Additionally, if you send a visitor to eBay, and the visitor is already a registered user, all is not lost. If that person places a bid on an auction (win or lose), you earn a dime. Unfortunately, eBay isn't raising that commission this time around.

Oh, the $20 is just the beginning. If you have a very active site, and can drive quite a few new users to eBay, you can earn up to $45 per new user (of course you'll have to send 7500 a month to reach that level), but eBay says there are "several" affiliates that earn over a million a year with them, so that's something to shoot for. I'm not one of the several. Yet.

If you're looking for good solid affiliate programs, I can't think of a merchant that I can recommend any more highly than eBay. Is there an American that doesn't recognize the name? And even though there are something like 70 million registered users, there are still many millions who aren't, hundreds of thousands of people log onto the Internet for the first time every month, and many of them do so just so they can become an eBay buyer and/or seller.

I know I'm going to look for more ways to send traffic to eBay, how about you? If interested (and I get nothing for this tip), eBay is a Commission Junction merchant, and CJ pays their commissions like clockwork every month that your accumulated commissions exceed a reasonably low amount (depending on the country you're in and your method of payment). So join CJ, join the eBay affiliate program, and start collecting those twenty dollar bills!

Search Engine Optimization - Using a Site Map

You should be very selective about linking from your home page.

After all, your home page probably has the highest PageRank value, because most of the inbound links are probably coming to it, instead of to the deeper pages.

At the same time, since the crawlers start at your home page you need a way for them to find the rest of your pages. Some people put links to the rest of their site on the home page, but there's a better way.

I highly recommend the use of a site map. A site map should be a page that allows your visitors (including the search engine spiders) to easily find the rest of your site. It should be organized so that human eyes can quickly find where they want to go.

The site map should be linked to from your home page, of course. By doing so, you will transfer a large amount of PageRank value to the site map, which in turn can transfer smaller shares to your other pages in your site. Most importantly, it gives the search engines a direct route so that they can find the other pages without problems.

I'm not saying that your home page should only have one link out, to your site map. I'm saying that it should link only when beneficial to you. I like to link my home pages to the main product category pages that need the PR boost, plus the site map.

Here's the deal. Every site needs pages such as contact information, privacy policy, FAQ's, international terms, etc. Personally I couldn't care less if those pages have any PageRank, because they aren't pages that I want ranked in the search engine results.

So, don't give away home page PR to them. Put them on the site map, and only on the site map. By doing so your home page can preserve as much PR as possible, because remember, if it has 1000 points to transfer, each outgoing link gets the same percentage as the all the other outging links.

This is another reason to never link externally from your home page, except in very special situations.

Also, every page on your site should link back to both the home page and the site map. Make sure that the anchor text that you link back with has keywords in it. Not "Home", not "Return", not "Back". You get the idea, especially if you read the chapter on anchor text already. If not, I suggest you check out the archives links on the right hand side of this blog entry and read them now.

Rembember, a link to a page is a vote for it. All votes are not created equally. A link from an important page is an important vote. Give important votes very sparingly and with great thought, and you'll be one step ahead of your competition who isn't quite so aware or careful.

For an example of a site map of our merchandise site, look the WholesaleCases.com site map.

Search Engine Optimization - Does Keyword Density Matter?

Keyword density is determined by dividing the number of words of text in your page by the number of times your keyword phrase appears. If your page has 300 words and you use your keywords 3 times, then your keyword density is 1%.

You should strive to include your keywords often enough to the the percentage up a bit, but not at the sake of readability for your human visitors. Ways to increase the keyword density includes using the kdywords in "alt" tags for your images, as mentioned before in your title and meta description and H1 tags, and normal text content.

My opinion is that going more than 3% on keyword density is pushing it, and under 1% will affect your placement negatively. If you can get in the 1-3% range, without making the page sound tacky, you've done a good job, and should be rewarded by the search engines, assuming the other factors that we've already discussed are followed also.

Google's new policy limiting affiliate ads

I'm interrupting our series about Search Engine Optimization to report on a major news event in the world of internet marketing.

Back on November 26th, in this post titled Google Kiss of Death ... I mentioned a rumor that Google was considering getting rid of affiliate AdWords ads.

Well, it's now official, the rumor was mostly true, and the new policy is (in my opinion) done very well, and will be a good thing for real marketers.

What has happened, in a nutshell, is that Google will only allow a single ad, for a single search term, to go to a specific URL. In other words, if there are multiple people bidding on the same phrase and they all send traffic to an amazon.com page for a specific book title, only the highest bidder's ad will be shown.

Is reality, after digesting the news, that could turn into a good thing for those that can take advantage.

First of all, Google's intent is to make the searching experience more pleasurable and relevant for searchers. I believe this policy will do that. Instead of 8 affiliate ads sending traffic to the same page, the searcher will have 8 different ads, with 8 different destinations, to choose from. That's a good thing, and should keep Google from losing frustrated searchers to other search engines (and of course that should mean that advertisers on Google will have a larger number of viewers).

Second of all, an advertiser no longer has to specify the "affiliate" wording on his or her ad, giving more room for an actual description. That's very, very good. After all, the description is only 2 lines of 35 characters each, and each one is precious. Taking at least 4 characters (aff plus the preceding space), is not only inefficient, but it's ugly and proven to reduce clicks on ads.

Third, Google is not preventing (is in fact encouraging) affiliates to send traffic to their own "landing pages", which can then later send the visitor to the affiliate site. As long as the link doesn't go directly to the merchant, and isn't done in a sneaky way such as with redirects or framing, there's no restriction.

To me, that means that being an affiliate became a more professional trade. No longer can someone read a book, slap together an ad, and send traffic away, waiting for the money to roll in. Now they typically will have to at least register a domain, learn some HTML, and design a nice looking page that presells the fact that the searcher, now that they're there, should click again to go to another destination. Of course it gives the opportunity for the webmaster to get mailing list signups, to review the product that is being searched for, to provide comparisons of similar products, and to give the visitor reason to wander around the rest of the site.

Those that take the time to learn the skills of web page design and copywriting should have a definite advantage over those without those skills. To my way of thinking, this should definitely enhance the web surfer's searching experience. And isn't that why Google is doing this to begin with?

Stay tuned, you'll probably be seeing many new eBooks on how to succeed with the new AdWords rules. The old books are now suddenly out of date.

Search Engine Optimization - the proper use of heading tags

I'm going to give a very short but very powerful tip today. Taking heed to this advice will move your pages way up on the charts compared to those who don't know better.

There are several ways to tell a search engine what a page is about:

1. the URL for the page, i.e. www.your-domain.com/harley-jacket.html

2. The title tag, i.e. <.TITLE>Harley Jacket<./TITLE>

3. The heading tags, i.e. <.H1>Harley jacket at a great price!<./H1>

NOTE: Take the periods out before the title and h1 tags, of course, they are there just to stop blogger from parsing them as html instead of text.

Doing those three things will greatly assist the search engines in understanding that your page is indeed about "Harley jacket", and it will therefore rightly assume that your page is far more relevant than the umpteen hundred other pages that could have been returned first to a searcher looking for Harley jackets.

In analyzing the successful (in other words, on the top of the first page of search results for a specific phrase), it's usually the pages that have done all three of the above tasks that rise to the top, whereas the most common omission is to forget about the heading tags. Such a pity, and so easy to do.

Many web page designers don't like the ugly large fonts that come with the use of the heading tags, but with proper use of font or CSS tags, that can be easily overcome.

You can also use multiple H2 and H3 tags to point out secondary keyword phrases on your page, but I recommend that you limit yourself to a single H1 pair, and furthermore limit the number of words between the beginning and ending tags.

Make sure the wording is fit for human consumption, but remember the spiders love eating up the text between the TITLE and H1 tags, they really take notice of the first few words in the phrase, so edit accordingly.

That's it for today, I hope this advice helped you.

Search Engine Optimization - the importance of anchor text

Hello and Happy New Year to everyone reading this! Was one of your resolutions to get your new or existing web site more traffic, so that it can get you more income this year? If so, read on...

One of the least appreciated parts of SEO is the proper use of the anchor text used in links that point to your page. Anchor text is the text that someone clicks on in order to get to your site. When you have control, make sure that you use your preferred keyword phrase in the text, not some worthless phrase such as "Home" or "click here".

Interestingly, the #1 ranking for "home" goes not to Home Depot, a big real estate company, or something that would make sense, but to www.nasa.gov, for some reason. Perhaps if you could get a zillion links to your page using "home" as the anchor text, you could take over that spot, but what value would that have anyway, unless you did have a real estate related site?

An amusing proof of the power of anchor text in search engine results can be seen in the example of a group of webmasters that used "miserable failure" as anchor text to link to the George W. Bush biographical page at http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

If you look closely at that page, you will see that there is no on-page content for the term "miserable failure", but if you Google that phrase, you'll see the #1 ranking. By the way the Jimmy Carter bio is #2 and the MichaelMoore.com homepage is #3, for what it's worth.

It just goes to show that your anchor text is a powerful part of SEO. Take advantage of it when linking internally. Hint: change all your "home" anchor text to something meaningful that you want to get a good ranking for.

Another caution: there have been some recent studies that some search engines might penalize somewhat if your anchor text is always the same, so mix it up a bit and get some benefit for other keywords also. Be sure to make the text make sense, you might want to add a descriptive word in there to make it so, maybe the word will be "home", for example "Cheap Web Site Hosting home page".

Sometimes you have no control over the anchor text that will be used, for example when you're submitting your site for listing in a directory, often they will just list your domain name. That's a reason, when you're choosing a domain name, that you have your important keyword in the name itself.

See you next time, until then get blitzing on your new year's resolution to help the search engines find your page.