Adsense Video Ads

Google announced it's releasing on video ads with adsense, and they also indicated that something big could be about to happen. Video ads that look like television commercials could well change many of the strategies that we currently use to maximize our revenues.

In case you haven't seen them, the video ads are available in three formats: medium rectangle (300 x 250), large rectangle (336 x 280) and square (250 x 250). They begin with a static image and require the user to press the Play button to run the video.

You can either get paid by impression or per click -- but that's per click on the link or on the screen when the ad is running, not on the Play button.

At the moment, Google's video ad inventory is pretty small, but it's only going to get bigger. It's just so easy these days to create and edit a short ad, that there's no reason why even a small company can't create its own television-style commercial and send it out across the Web.

What are these ads going to do for your AdSense revenues?

It's too early to tell exactly. I think it's pretty likely though that they're going to prove to be popular and grow in popularity as advertisers figure out what works best.

Best of Luck!

Create custom reports to simplify and save time

When you've designed an experiment, it'll save time to design a custom report for that experiment. Custom reports enable you to customize and save the specifications for a report for quick access in the future, so you can avoid the lengthy process of generating the same detailed report over and over. You can save preferences like date range, any variation of channels or aggregate data, and whether you'd like to view page impressions or ad unit impressions. To create a custom report, simply follow these instructions.

After you've created a custom report, you can access it with one click from your Overview page, by using the drop-down list on your Advanced Reports page, or by having it automatically emailed to you when you use emailable reports.

Setting up a schedule to have any custom report emailed directly to you takes just a minute. On the Report Manager tab of your account, just select the custom report you want emailed to you, the frequency you'd like it sent, and file type you prefer.

Learn more from Google on Adsense...

Test your success with channels

Wondering whether a certain ad placement, format, or color will be effective on your pages? Run a test to find out. Experimenting with AdSense can help you discover what will work best for your site, and channels are the perfect tool for your experiments.

Any time you make changes to your site, take advantage of channels to measure and observe the effects. Whether you want to track a specific type of ad placement or an entire site, custom and URL channels will help you determine what'll be most successful.

Testing will also help you make smart decisions about your ads. If you're considering implementing one of our other optimization tips, we encourage you to test it out with channels. The more you test, the better you know the effects of the ads.

The better you know the effects of the ads, the faster you'll realize your revenue potential.

Tip for channel users: When you create a custom channel, give it a detailed name so you can easily identify it later in your reports. For example, "ArticleRightWideSkyscraperOpenAir" could represent your wide skyscraper ad unit with the Open Air palette, located on the right-hand side of your article pages.

Learn more for yourself from Google on Adsense...

Tip 4: View Other People's Sources

If you like a Web site and want to know how it was created, view the HTML source.
Most browsers include a View Source menu selection that shows you the HTML source of the site that you're viewing. Some browsers put the View Source command on a menu that pops up when you click the right mouse button.

If your browser doesn't support View Source, just use the File Save As command to save the HTML file to disk. Then open the file in your favorite text editor.

You don't have to wonder how the magician performs his tricks - just view the HTML source!

Tip 3: Create Simple Pages

There are several reasons why you should create simple web pages.

Simple pages download faster, and make an immediate impression on the reader. This is extremely important on the Web, where people will leave your site (click off) if your page doesn't come up fast enough.

Simple pages give a "clean" look, which often makes a nice visual presentation. (If you are trying to create a wild, busy look, please ignore this tip.)

Simple pages are also easier for you to create. Be happy with your simple efforts!

Tip 2: Get Several Web Browsers

If you're reading this page, you already have a Web browser. But one browser isn't enough! The reason is that different browsers display HTML differently. As an HTML author, you need to know how your pages are going to look on the different browsers.

Why do different browsers display HTML differently? Because HTML is not a layout language and it does not always specify how the browser should lay out the page. Ugh! This is a drag, and you'll just have to get used to it.

In my opinion, the most practical solution is to get a copy of the two most popular browsers, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. This should cover about 85% of your viewing audience. Whenever you create a page, view it in both browsers and make sure it looks the way you want before you put it up on the Web.

And don't panic - you'll get the hang of writing HTML for a variety of browsers faster than you think!

Beginners Tips for Web Design

HTML means (HyperText Markup Language). HTML is a simple language that just adds a few bells and whistles (called tags) to a normal text file. HTML tags basically allow you to add graphics images and hyperlinks to your document. Hyperlinks connect your document to other documents on the Web.

The good news is that you don't have to learn too many tags to create an HTML document. The bad news is that HTML doesn't give you a lot of control over how the document is laid out (unlike most word processors and desktop publishers). Don't worry about it.

Just give it a try!

My favorite list of HTML commands is Sizzling HTML Jalfrezi, which has an easy-to-use alphabetical listing of the commands and has clear and simple explanations. Check it out.

Now you need to get serious about learning HTML. Use the Web as your first source of information about HTML.

For alternative resources to learning HTML, we recommend:

W3Schools: http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
HTML Goodies: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/html/
HTML Code Tutorial: http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/

Also, check out a book on HTML, like Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML 4 in a Week, by Laura Lemay and Arman Danesh, ISBN #1575213362.

15 Shades of SEO Spam

By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
January 17, 2006

Spam, in almost any form, is bad for your health. The vast majority of web users would agree with that statement and nobody would even think of the finely processed luncheon meat-product made by Hormel.

Even the word itself is infectious in all the worst ways, being used to describe the dark-side and often deceptive side of everything from Email marketing to abusive forum behaviour. In the search engine optimization field, Spam is used to describe techniques and tactics thought to be banned by search engines or to be unethical business practices.

While writing copy for our soon to be revised website, the team put together a short list of the most outrageous forms of Spam we had seen in the last year and a short explanation of the technique.

Please note, we do not encourage, endorse or suggest the use of any of the techniques listed here. We don’t use them and our clients’ sites continue to rank well at Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. Also, since Google has been the dominant search engine for almost five years, most of the spammy tricks evolved in order to game Google and might not apply to the other engines.

1. Cloaking
Also known as “stealth”, cloaking is a technique that involves serving one set of information to known search engine spiders while displaying a different set of information on documents viewed by clients. While there are unique situations in which the use of cloaking might be considered ethical in the day-to-day practice of SEO, cloaking is never required.

This is especially true after the Jagger algorithm update at Google, which uses document and link histories as important ranking factors.

2. IP Delivery
IP delivery is a simple form of cloaking in which a unique set of information is served based on the IP number the info-query originated from. IP addresses known to be search engine based are served one set of information while unrecognized IP addresses, (assumed to be live-visitors) are served another.

3. Leader Pages
Leader pages are a series of similar documents each designed to meet requirements of different search engine algorithms. This is one of the original SEO tricks dating back to the earliest days of search when there were almost a dozen leading search engines sorting less than a billion documents. It is considered SPAM by the major search engines as they see multiple incidents of what is virtually the same document.

Aside from that, the technique is no longer practical as search engines consider a far wider range of factors than the arrangement or density of keywords found in unique documents.

4. Mini-Site networks
Designed to exploit a critical vulnerability in early versions of Google’s PageRank algorithm, mini-site networks were very much like leader pages except they tended to be much bigger.

The establishment of a mini-site network involved the creation of several topic or product related sites all linking back to a central sales site. Each mini-site would have its own keyword enriched URL and be designed to meet specific requirements of each major search engine.

Often they could be enlarged by adding information from leader pages. By weaving webs of links between mini-sites, an artificial link-density was created that could heavily influence Google’s perception of the importance of the main site.

In the summer of 2004, Google penalized several prominent SEO and SEM firms for using this technique by banning their entire client lists.

5. Link Farms
Link farms emerged as free-for-all link depositories when webmasters learned how heavily incoming links influenced Google. Google, in turn, quickly devalued and eventually eliminated the PR value it assigned to pages with an inordinate collection or number of links. Nevertheless, link farms persist as uninformed webmasters and unethical SEO firms continue to use them.

6. Blog and/or Forum Spam
Blogs and forums are amazing and essential communication technologies, both of which are used heavily in the daily conduct of our business. As with other Internet based media, blogs and forum posts are easily and often proliferated. In some cases, blogs and certain forums also have established high PR values for their documents.

These two factors make them targets of unethical SEOs looking for high-PR links back to their websites or those of their clients. Google in particular has clamped down on Blog and Forum abuse.

7. Keyword Stuffing
At one time, search engines were limited to sorting and ranking sites based on the number of keywords found on those documents. That limitation led webmasters to put keywords everywhere they possibly could. When Google emerged and incoming links became a factor, some even went as far as using keyword stuffing of anchor text.
The most common continuing example of keyword stuffing can be found near the bottom of far too many sites in circulation.

8. Hidden Text
It is amazing that some webmasters and SEOs continue to use hidden text as a technique but, as evidenced by the number of sites we find it on, a lot of folks still use it. They shouldn’t.

There are two types of hidden text. The first is text that is coloured the same shade as the background thus rendering it invisible to human visitors but not to search spiders. The second is text that is hidden behind images or under document layers. Search engines tend to dislike both forms and have been known to devalue documents containing incidents of hidden text.

9. Useless Meta Tags
Most meta tags are absolutely useless. The unethical part is that some SEO firms actually charge for the creation and insertion of meta tags. In some cases, there seems to be a meta tag for virtually every possible factor but for the most part are not considered by search spiders.

StepForth only uses the description and keywords meta tags (though we are dubious about the actual value of the keywords tag), along with relevant robots.txt files. All other identifying or clarifying information should be visible on a contact page or included in the footers of each page.

10. Misuse of Directories
Directories, unlike other search indexes, tend to be sorted by human hands. Search engines traditionally gave links from directories a bit of extra weight by considering them links from trusted authorities. A practice of spamming directories emerged as some SEOs and webmasters hunted for valuable links to improve their rankings. Search engines have since tended to devalue links from most directories. Some SEOs continue to charge directory submission fees.

11. Hidden Tags
There are a number of different sorts of tags used by search browsers or website designers to perform a variety of functions such as; comment tags, style tags, alt tags, noframes tags, and http-equiv tags. For example, the “alt tag” is used by site-readers for the blind to describe visual images. Inserting keywords into these tags was a technique used by a number SEOs in previous years. Though some continue to improperly use these tags, the practice overall appears to be receding.

12. Organic Site Submissions
One of the most unethical things a service-based business can do is to charge clients for a service they don’t really need. Charging for, or even claiming submissions to the major search engines are an example. Search engine spiders are so advanced they no longer require site submission to find information. Search engine spiders find new documents by following links. Site submission services or SEO firms that charge clients a single penny for submission to Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask Jeeves, are radically and unethically overcharging those clients.

13. Email Spam
Placing a URL inside a “call-to-action” email continues to be a widely used of search marketing spam. With the advent of desktop search appliances, email spam has actually increased. StepForth does not use email to promote your website in any way.

14. Redirect Spam
There are several ways to use the redirect function to fool a search engine or even hijack traffic destined for another website! Whether the method used is a 301, a 302, a 402, a meta refresh or a java-script, the end result is search engine spam.

15. Misuse of Web 2.0 Formats (ie Wiki, social networking and social tagging)
An emerging form of SEO spam is found in the misuse of user-input media formats such as Wikipedia. Like blog comment spamming, the instant live-to-web nature of Web 2.0 formats provide an open range for SEO spam technicians. Many of these exploits might even find short-term success though it is only a matter of time before measures are taken to devalue the efforts.

Search engine optimization spam continues to be a problem for the SEO industry as it tries to move past the perceptions of mainstream advertisers. When under-ethical techniques are used, trust (the basis of all business) is abused and the efforts of the SEO/SEM industry are called into question. Fortunately, Google’s new algorithm appears to be on the cutting edge of SEO Spam detection and prevention. Let’s hope 2006 is the year the entire SEO industry goes on a Spam-free diet.

Bad SEO Techniques

Avoid Obvious Tricks - Don't try These at Home

Avoid using cheap tricks to get search rankings. If you see anothersite ranking high using one of these tricks do not assume that they will be stillbe ranking high next month. Over the years, the search engines have improved theirskills at identifying attempts to spam their listings.

The engines will continueto improve their algorithms in the future.

Do not use a font color that is the same or very close to your background color.
Do not use too much font size one (1) text as the default text size as many searchengines consider tiny text to be spam.

Do not add a bunch of meaningless keywords to your page. It may help you rankhigh for a while but but it not worth the risk of being penalized by the searchengines. The integrity of your site could also suffer if you have unnecessary texton your site.

Avoid participate in obvious link farms or link exchange programs. The searchengines often refer to these as bad neighborhoods and will penalize or ban yoursite for linking to them. One definition for link farm would be: a site whose onlypurpose is to artificially inflate link popularity by exchanging links.

Don't payfor links unless you know how they will provide them.
Avoid using deceitful re-direct techniques. The integrity of your site will sufferif your users expect one thing and find something else.

Google has a page to reportspam. We are not sure how diligent Google is at investigating these reports,but the option is there if one of your competitors is gaining an upper hand throughdirty SEO techniques.

Names - Domain Names, Images, Alt

1) Whenever it Choose a domain name that includes your keyword phrase. The search engines don't really care if it .com or not. Try different extensions such as .NET, .ORG or .INFO.

2) The major search engines view characters like hyphen "-" as a space. Register domain names with the keyword phrases separated by hyphens.

3) Include an ALT (alternative text) attribute in image tags. Include the most important keyword phrases. Do not overdo the use of ALT text. If your overall keyword is getting too high reduce the number of these. Do not overuse this technique.

4) Name web pages after your most important keyword phrase. Separate the keywords using hyphens or underscores. I do not recommend spending time renaming existing pages. Example: free-directories

5) Name directories after your keyword phrases, using hyphens or underscores to separate the keywords.

6) If you use an image map, include HTML links, as some search engines do not follow image map links. Plus image maps do not offer search engines any link text to index. So, try to avoid the use of image maps as they do not help with your search engine optimization efforts.

Creating Spider Friendly Sites

Ensure that you do not have any HTML errors on your page, especially your indexpage. HTML errors, even minor one, can prevent the spiders from spidering your wholesite. Even though your page displays great you may still have errors. Use an HTMLvalidation tool to check your important pages.

Include all your pages on a text based sitemap so that your pages can be easilyfound by the search engine robots.

Avoid very big pages. Generally, the pages should not exceed 150kb.
Move Javascript code to a separate file, or to the end of the HTML document afteryour closing BODY or HTML tag. If you move the JavaScript code to a separate file then add the following in the heading:

The separate JavaScript file reduces your HTML file size, and therefore your downloadtime. It allows you to reuse the code on future web pages/sites.

Title & Meta Tags

Place the TITLE first, directly after the HEAD tag. Spend the most time writing the text of your title tag as it is given the most weight of the META type tags. For SEO purposes, your company name may be the least important thing to have in your title.

Include your most important keyword phrases at the beginning of your title.

Include a META DESCRIPTION tag. Include the most important keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the description as possible.

Note: The description is sometimes used in search engine results so ensure that you describe your site attractively. The description is now given no real ranking weight in Google rankings. Usecan use our Meta Tag Generator to get the format of meta tags.

Include a META Keyword tag. Although most of the major search engines do not use keywords in their rankings you should add keywords. Ensure that you at least have keywords on your home page as directories / search engines sometimes use your title, description and keywords to populate their listings.

If you use a META REFRESH tag, make sure it is set to refresh after 30 seconds.

Remove other meta tags (like author), unless you know for sure that they are necessary. The keywords meta tag is good to have, at least on your home page, as some directories get their information from your keywords.

Web Page Content

The best time to start optimizing your website is when you are in the planning stage. If possible, choose the keywords you want to optomize before you design your site.

Try to achieve a word count between 300 and 750 words on each page. Shoot for a keyword density of between 2% and 3%. If you are optimizaing for a competitive industry and you are not high in the rankings then you can try pushing the density higher.

Do not optimize all your pages for the most popular keywords. This advice applies most for new sites. The search engines use link popularity as a key ranking factor and it takes a while to compete effectively with established sites. You are better off being on the first page of a less searched term than page 20 of a very popular keyword phrase. Very few people make it past page 2 of the search results.

Use a keword suggestion tool to find appropriate kewords.

If feasible, create separate pages for different types of informaton (e.g. themes, categories, product lines, products).

Use one or more header tags in your main page body and include your most important keyword phrases. Use header tags and you can use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to alter the appearance of your header tags so that you don't have to change the look and feel of your site.

Use the different versions of your keywords, when possible. The search engines have improved their use of word stemming. Word stemming describes taking the stem of a word and generating common variants of it. The search engines can find search results that include keywords that extend beyond what you searched for.Keyword: submission Possible stemming results: submit, submissions

Try to have your content be the first thing that appears to the search engines. Content at the top of the page is ranked higher. In some cases, adding blank table rows can prevent your menus from appearing first.

Avoid duplicate content between your own site and others. Google is quite efficient at identifying duplicate content. Both versions of the content will not appear near the top of the search results.

The Importance of Links

All of the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN now use link popularity and link anchor text as the most important factors in determining their rankings.

Submit your site to directories like DMOZ. There are hundreds of directories that will give you decent PageRank and some traffic. I especially recommend it for brand new sites that usually have less success exchanging links (see point 2). Our sister site has numerous list of the best free & paid directories.

Increase the number of external links coming into your site by starting a link exchange program.

Ask sites that link to your competitors to link to your site. To find out which sites are linking to your competitors, visit a search engine and enter, "link:" followed by your competitors' domain name. Example: link:www.web-directories.ws

Find sites that accept site submissions. Visit your favorite search engine and do a search for: : "add url" "your keywords"

Add content that will attract sites to link to you. This is a harder one, but it will pay off big time in the long run. Think of it as getting free advertising.

Within your web site, ensure that you link your internal web pages to each other. Add a Site Map. Ensure that you have links to your most important pages on every page of your site. This will maximize the PageRank to your important pages.

Paid advertising is another method to gain links. If possible, you should purchase links from sites with a similar these as yours. For example, if you are a travel site then other travel sites would be the most valuable links.

Patience Required

Be patient.

It is believed that there is an aging factor on new links in some search engines and that new links do not provide their full benefit for a number of months. There is also evidence that links from older established sites are more valuable than links from newer sites. To make things even more complicated, search engines, especially Google, give more weight to trusted, authority sites. Government and education sites are a couple of examples.

SEO For Google

This article is part three of a four part series on optimizing your website for the the three major search engines. Part one, titled "SEO For MSN" covered optimizing your website to rank highly on MSN, while part two, titled "SEO For Yahoo!" covered optimizing your website to rank on Yahoo!. In this article we will cover optimizing your website for Google.

I likely don't even need to mention that Google is currently the largest of all the search engines with ComScore Media estimating this giant to be responsible for 42.7% of all online searches in March of 2006. For this reason people tend to view Google as the engine to rank on. While this point is debatable (let's remember that there's still 57.3% of searches that aren't done on Google) it's definitely an important engine to rank on. So how is it done?

The Factors

To optimize and rank highly on Google, as with any of the major engines, specific areas need to be addressed. On Google the most important of these factors are:

• Backlinks
• Age
• Content
• How it fares in the results
• Backlinks

More than on either Yahoo! or MSN backlinks are key to attaining top rankings on Google. More importantly, Google's methods for calculating the weight of backlinks is very different than either of the other two engines. Once upon a time backlink acquisition was mainly a numbers game.

If you had more links you had higher rankings, it was basically as simple as that. Today however Google has an algorithm inside their algorithm for determining which links are more valuable than others. This algorithm has a number of factors itself, however there are some that are more important than others.

They key factors that determine the value of a link in regards to its contributions to the ranking of your site are:

The age of the links - Like domains, links gain weight with age. The longer your links have been on a web page the higher their value. Basically this means that your link building efforts today aren't going to pay off for a number of months.


The weight seems to age gradually. In a month your link will hold partial weight, in two months it'll hold a bit more and so on. Links hold the majority of their weight after about 5 to 6 months.

The location of the link - The physical location of your link on the page is an indicator to Google of it's value. A link buried in the footer of a page will hold virtually no weight whereas a link near the top (i.e. where a visitor is likely to see it) will hold much more. Another location factor is how this link is situated relative to the content around it.

A link that is located within content holds more weight than a link in a typical link-page or directory format with a title and description. The inline nature of the aforementioned location indicates that the link itself is more natural.

The anchor text and formatting - The linking text used is obviously important. If you are targeting a phrase such as "seo firms" then using these two keywords in the anchor text is going to attach relevancy between your site and these keywords. Be careful though, building a thousand links using all the same anchor text is going to look suspicious. Vary your anchor text, perhaps include other keywords and you'll find your efforts rewarded. The formatting of the link is also relevant. A link that uses bold, italics, etc. is obviously meant to be seen by a visitor and is thus more highly regarded by Google.

Relevancy - The relevancy of the site linking to you is of key importance. Getting a link on a health site if you're an SEO firm is going to hold little weight whereas a link from an SEO resource site will be much more valuable.

PageRank - While the value of PageRank is arguably dropping when one is considering it's importance in link building it is still a factor. A link from a PageRank 5 page is worth substantially more than a link from a PageRank 2 page.

Age

In a patent application from back in 2004 Google told SEO firms (and anyone else for that matter) that age was an important factor. Google has since become a domain name registrar which gives them access to whois data and thus they can clearly see the age of a domain, who it is registered to, where it is hosted, etc. The older your domain is the more legitimate Google sees it and thus the more likely they are to rank it.

Additionally, domains that are registered for longer periods of time are also seen as more legitimate and thus will tend to rank higher.

Content

Google is more picky than either Yahoo! or MSN when it comes to content. While the phrase, "content is king," may be overused it is still relevant. The more content you have on your site the more likely someone is to find what they're looking for when they get there.

Thus, the more content you have on your site the more likely Google is to believe a searcher will find what they're looking for there. This does not mean that you should grab every bit of content you can find and build a 500,000 page site about potatoes. The content needs to be relevant and preferably well written.

While a search engine spider may not be able to tell if your content is truly well written it must appeal to a human visitor. The reason for this will be made more clear below.

A blog is a good option for the easy addition of relevant content provided that you can dedicate the time (generally only a few minutes per day) to post some new and interesting information on your industry.

Keyword density is not as large a factor on Google as on Yahoo! or MSN however it is a factor and in the SEO "game" any factor that holds weight needs to be taken into consideration in all but the least competitive areas. While a site targeting a phrase such as "bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere" can afford weakness in some of the areas most of us cannot.

As noted in the articles on MSN and Yahoo! it would be unwise for me to specify an optimal keyword density here as the optimal levels vary by site type, topic, and fluctuate with the algorithm updates. Keyword densities need to be reanalyzed approximately monthly or any time an update is noted.

How it fares in the results

How your website fares in the results is a growing factor and will only continue to gain importance as time passes. If your website appears in the results for a specific phrase yet no one click on is your website will drop out of the rankings.

Arguably worse, if your website is clicked however after a few seconds Google detects that the searcher has returned to the results to find a new site your site will drop.

It is for this reason that it is important to insure that the titles you write for your website are both search engine and human friendly. You want Google to rank it highly and you also need humans to click it or Google won't rank it highly (circular logic I know but valid nonetheless).

You also need to make sure that what people see when they first land on your page either is the information they are looking for or alternatively, clearly indicates where that information can be found. This point may seem obvious simply from a usability standpoint however the number of sites out there that violate this basic principle is vast.

As part of your SEO efforts you will want to take a look at your site from a user's standpoint or better yet, watch real users navigate it to see if they can find what they're looking for quickly.

You have about 3 seconds to get a visitor's attention so make sure that your visitor can find what they want in that time. You may need to hire experienced web designers to bring your website up to speed however the cost of this is lower than the cost of losing rankings and business due to poor design and the falling rankings that will follow.

Conclusion

Google has the most sophisticated algorithm of the three major engines and must be treated as such. Tricks rarely work and when they do they tend to work only for a short period of time. Build a strong site with lots of quality content that is easily navigated and will appeal to your human visitors and you're off to a good start. Optimize your keyword densities and secure quality links to your site and while it may take a bit of time to get past the aging delays, you will succeed on Google.

About The Author

Dave Davies is the owner and CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc

Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

1. Bad Search
Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they're unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody.

A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document's importance. Much better if your search engine calls out "best bets" at the top of the list -- especially for important queries, such as the names of your products.

Search is the user's lifeline when navigation fails. Even though advanced search can sometimes help, simple search usually works best, and search should be presented as a simple box, since that's what users are looking for.

2. PDF Files for Online Reading
Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don't work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user's browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.

Worst of all, PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content that's hard to navigate.

PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. Reserve it for this purpose and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages.

3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links
A good grasp of past navigation helps you understand your current location, since it's the culmination of your journey. Knowing your past and present locations in turn makes it easier to decide where to go next. Links are a key factor in this navigation process. Users can exclude links that proved fruitless in their earlier visits. Conversely, they might revisit links they found helpful in the past.

Most important, knowing which pages they've already visited frees users from unintentionally revisiting the same pages over and over again.

These benefits only accrue under one important assumption: that users can tell the difference between visited and unvisited links because the site shows them in different colors. When visited links don't change color, users exhibit more navigational disorientation in usability testing and unintentionally revisit the same pages repeatedly.

4. Non-Scannable Text
A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Intimidating. Boring. Painful to read.

Write for online, not print. To draw users into the text and support scannability, use well-documented tricks:

subheads
bulleted lists
highlighted keywords
short paragraphs
the inverted pyramid
a simple writing style, and
de-fluffed language devoid of marketese.

5. Fixed Font Size
CSS style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40.

Respect the user's preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms -- not as an absolute number of pixels.

6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility
Search is the most important way users discover websites. Search is also one of the most important ways users find their way around individual websites. The humble page title is your main tool to attract new visitors from search listings and to help your existing users to locate the specific pages that they need.

The page title is contained within the HTML

Seo Tools

Search Engine Spider SimulatorThis tool Simulates a Search Engine by displaying the contents of a webpage exactly how a Search Engine would see it. It also displays the hyperlinks that will be followed (crawled) by a Search Engine when it visits the specified webpage.

Backlink BuilderThis tools help you build a LOT of quality backlinks, it searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like "Add link", "Add site", "Add URL", "Add URL", "Submit URL" etc. Most of the results could be potential backlinks.

Keyword Density CheckerKeyword Density is the percentage of occurrence of your keywords to the text in the rest of your webpage. This tool will crawl the specified URL, extract text as a search engine would, remove common stop words and Analyze the density of the keywords.

Check Yahoo WebRankThis tool help you evaluate the importance of a URL as perceived by Google and Yahoo.

Website Keyword SuggestionsThis tools tries to determine the theme of your website and provides keyword suggestions along with keyword traffic estimates.

Alexa Ranking ToolThis tools allows you to get the Alexa Traffic Rankings of you and your competitors.

How To Make YourBacklinks Count (Part I)

By Serge Botans

I think that we all know now how important backlinks are for the search engine ranking success of our web site. I also think that we all know now that one way to get these backlinks is by doing link exchanges with other sites. (For the uninitiated, backlinks are links on other web sites that point to ours.)

But do we know that there are various things we need to chëck before agreeing to exchanging links with another web site? After all, the whole point of exchanging links with others is to benefit from the ranking of their web sites.

It is therefore imperative that we investigate ahead of time as to whether exchanging links with another site is to our advantage or not

I have thought about this whole idea of link exchange preparation and came up with a 3-step process that involves an analysis of 3 pages of the web site we want to exchange links with.

The 3 pages are:

the home page where we will need to chëck 7 things about that page,
the directory page: this is the page that contains a list of categories that the site has put together in a bid to organize its link exchanges. We need to chëck 7 things here,
the backlink page: this is the page that will contain our backlink. We also need to chëck 7 things here.

Note that in some cases, the 'target' web site will not have a directory page. In that case, our analysis will be a 2-step one rather than a 3-step one.

In this first article, of maybe 2 or 3, we shall look at the 7 things (organized in 2 groups) we should chëck about the home page of the target web site.

1. We need to chëck what Google thinks of the site. This is done by looking at some things that Google is happy to report about a site. The idea here is to see if there are any problems with the site, from Google's point of view, that would cause us to decide not to exchange links with them.

I suggest that you look at:

a) how many pages the site has indexed? This can be done by using 'site:www.site.com' in the Google search box,

b) how many backlinks does Google report for the site? This can be done by using 'links:www.site.com' in the Google search box,

c) is the site listed in Google's index? This can be done by using 'http://www.site.com' in the Google search box,

d) what is the Page Rank of the site/home page? There are several ways of doing this. One way is to get the Google toolbar and visit the web site to see its PR. Another way is to use one of the many web sites on the Internet that enables us to find the PR of any web site. And still another way is to look for software that will tell you the PR of any web site.

Although you will generally need to look at these 4 things together in a sort of table in order to decide whether the target site passes the first step or not, there are definite results that would cause me to decide straight away not to exchange links with a site:

if the PR of the site is zero,
if the site is not listed in the Google index,
if the site does not have any pages indexed by Google.

You will note here that I am using Google as the first step in the preparation. In fact, we can use any search engine if we want to but given that Google is more fussy than others when it comes to backlinks, I would suggest using Google in the above first step.

2. I would then suggest that you look at 3 tags of the home page of the target site, in a bid to determine if the site has a theme compatible with yours:

a) Its title tag,
b) Its description tag,
c) Its keywords tag.

About The Author
Serge M Botans is the CEO of https://webmailcluster.perfora.net/xml/deref?link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.seo-analysis.com%2F online-tools where you will find 2 frëe custom SEO tools. One of these tools will enable you to conduct the link exchange preparation mentioned in this article.

Blogging for Money

Working life is not a bed or roses, waking up early in the morning and leaving late at night. Just imagine that in a given day you spend one third of your life sleeping away, the other third include eating, bathing, reading papers and perhaps some TV entertainment, and the remaining one third working for someone and building their dream.

If only we could be our own boss and have a say in our life wouldn’t that be nice? Imagine you set your own rules, free from being control by someone else.

In actual fact, we think that we’re making money while working, that is so untrue. Why spend the time helping someone else to making money when you could spend the same ammount of time making those money for yourself?

Blogging is very good way of making a few hundred dollars, require little investment or non at all depending on your choice of platform.

Does the image on the left gives you the dejavu feeling? This is what it is like working, I’m currently working and when ever there is a mistake, I’ll get scolding, and when mistake are done by other people, I get scolding for no reason. It is really a stressfull life, that is why I’ve decided to set up this blog and make something out of it and in hope others would benifit from the blogging tips below, blogging is the only way out from this rat race.

Thank You Google Adsense for giving me a chance.

Back to the main topic, why should we build somebody’s else dream? If you happen to be a shy person and MLM or direct selling is not your choice of self employment solution, then try blogging. Blogging can be fun, and it takes you about one to two hours per day, and if your topics happen to be good, chances are within one year you’ll be able to make a decent living out of blogging.

There is no gurantee that you’ll be a millionaire thru blogging, but do remember that one should aim from the lowest first, and a small amount of side income would come in handy, it might be your car loan that blogging is paying for you. Below are some tips for would be bloggers:

5 HIGHLIGHTS FOR BEGINEERS

1) Maintaining Momentum - According to Technorati’s research, one blog is created every second and that’s 86,400 per day or 31,536,000 per year. That is a huge figure considering that almost half of the planet earthlings are not connected to the internet.

The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months and about 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly. The main issue is how long does a blogger blogs before giving up? A week? One month? According to Technorati, half of the new blogs become redundant after just three months.

There is a name for these blog - they’re often called splogs or blog junks. Most bloggers started out with a good intention, always with a big picture in their mind. The secret path to success is the ability to continuing blogging consistently.

It doesn’t matter if no one drop any comments or someone uses harsh words banging you, the ability to maintain the momentum and chunk out interesting articles is the key to success. Most blogs takes an average of 6 months to built up the much needed momentum to leap frog one to the other stage.

2) Topics - Choosing the right topic is like choosing the right partner, if you choose the wrong topic, especially the one that you’ve got no interest in, chances are you’ll soon end up in a crossroad.

These are some of the highest paying keywords in Google Adwords or any other contextual advertising program, and certain bloggers that are in for the money tend to blog about such topics not knowing what it is all about. Sure, you can plagarize these articles from Wikipedia but for how long? You’ll get caught one day for stealing.

The best topic would be something of your interest, be it music or art that has a niche market in the digital world. If you’re passionate about the topic you are blogging, chances are you will never run out of ideas, remember - maintain the momentum is the key to success.

3) Blogging Platform - There are a few blogging platform to choose from, the current market leaders are Blogger, Wordpress and MoveableType. I would say that these three platform has the lion share in the blogging world. All have their plus and minus points. A brief guide:

Blogger
- free, unlimited bandwidth
- 300MB hosting space
- no unique domain name (e.g. your-name.blogspot.com)
- no plugins, limited features

Wordpress
- free, host in your own server
- unique domain name
- Tons of plugins, full of features

MoveableType
- Commerical ware
- unique domain name
- Lots of Plugins
- Central comment center to control spam

Depending on your budget, if you’ve got the money and the desire to blog, then by all means get a paid hosting and host your own blog. The plus point in having your own domain name and hosting server is the ability to get a better ranking in Google Search Engine.

Most search engine tend to shy away from free hosting server, even Google rank blogs from their own Blogger.com below others that has their own unique names.

If you are not sure about getting your own paid hosting plans, I would recommend you to try out this reliable hosting company 3iX, its a Singapore based hosting company and you get a 14 day trial.

Unlike GoDaddy, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to install Wordpress, 3iX offers everything with a single click, yup, you can install wordpress with a single click.

4) Diversity of opportunities - Diversifing is the key to success, bloggers that seek a steady flow of income should have multiple blogs that spread accross different server and topics so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

Multiple blogs doesn’t mean one has to stick to a single contextual advertising company, recent years have withness the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers. Unlike the yer before 2005, adsense and blogads and a handfull of other are the only option available.

5) Discipline - This is a very important key element is becoming a full time blogger. To be able to make money out of blogging, one must be consistent, which means a series of discipline attitude.

Blogging is not as easy as what it seems, and pusing the “publish” button doesn’t mean you’ll get the amount of audience that targeted. A good knowledge of computer/html/search engine tweak and many more is the key to success.

You got to have a willing mind, the passion of learn and the ability to unlearn. Sometimes it takes more than a year for a blog to be successful, remember that if you kept on blogging, eventually you’ll succeed.

By http://www.geckoandfly.com/make-money-online/

Adsense Tools

By Graywolf

I was hoping to find more adsense tools to review and recommend, however I never received anything so we’ll go with what I was able to find.

Adsense Script Tools

These are the tiny little programs you install on your server (blech!) or locally on your machine that help you analyze your adsense clicks, CTR and earnings. Some of them are easy, some of them are difficult, and some of them help you make pretty graphs. To be honest none of them are worth recommending. You could do just as good a job by setting up your channels properly and dumping a CSV file into excel. If someone has a specific one or wants to send me a review copy of thier software, I will look at it. DO NOT send me anything that has to be installed on a server. I run multiple websites on multiple hosting companies, so I don’t need something that requires more maintenance thank you very much.

Adsense Preview Tools

The Adsense Sandbox comes via Digital Point. You put in a URL and it lets you preview what ads are most likely to appear on a URL. Pretty handy IMHO.

Adsense Tracking

While not set up to be an Adsense tracking tool per se, the free log analyzer from AddFreeStats is actually pretty good. You put a small graphic tracking bug on the bottom of each of your pages and it gives you standard logging reports. You can also activate adsense tracking to find out what ads are being clicked on what pages. Combine this with an excel spreadsheet and channels and you are good to go. You can upgrade to a paid version and get an invisible tracking bug. TIP: Lock down your stats under a password, I’m fascinated how many people leave that open.

Adsense in Action

Probably one of the best things you can do to increase your adsense earnings is to go and look how other people are doing things. The adsense case studies are one place. While these are Google approved you really don’t have an idea how successful they are. So you’d be much better off finding someone you know is in the UPS Club. Jason Calacanis who runs Weblogs Inc is on a quest to make 1 Million dollars a year from Adsense. While I do give Jason a hard time sometimes, I do actually admire what he’s built, and think there are some very valuable lessons to be learned from looking at the websites owns. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger also has two sites I really like the Digital Camera Review and Camera Phone Review. Don’t be a wanker and copy exactly what they’ve done, it’s bad form. Instead look at them, learn from them, and use it as inspiration.

SEO Basics

Before you start seriously getting into SEO there are several basics steps to make your website search engine friendly.

Keywords

One of the biggest mis take you could do is forgetting the first step that is developing a keyword list. It is common to see wrong keywords or no keywords at all on people’s websites but if this is you, optimize your keywords to optimize your website.

The easiest and most effective way to find high searched and paid keywords is to use a tool call wordtracker.

Wordtracker by far is the best tool to use if you want to be successful making money online. Not only does it tell you how many people are searching for your key words or phrases but it also tells you how many websites use those key words and phrases. Knowing your competitors is very important when considering certain key words as your competition makes all the difference between making money or not.

When you have a list of key words or phrases then we can begin.

Page Title

Your page title should be similar to what your website’s page is about. Whenever possible, try putting your keyword in the title

Megatags

Another tip is use description and keywords megatags at the top of your page

Heading Tags

Putting heading tags are great as search engines view them as more important, so making sure they have keywords is vital. Making sure not to overdo the

should only be used once and the rest should be

,

,

, and

heading tags.

Page text

Having keywords in your pages text can increase your page rank further but make sure not to abuse this strategy. If you overdo using keywords in your text you can be penalized and even worst making it obvious for your visitors to notice.

Continue to SEO Basics (Part 2)…

What really is a blog?

If you are bran new to this topic then make sure you pay close attention, as you are not doing one of the best methods of making money online.

When I first started out online and blogs became popular, I always wondered for the longest time what a blog really is? It wasn’t in tell I bought a program on blogging called, “Blogging for Dollars.” And, boy was I in for a treat.

Not only did this product explain to me what a blog was and what it could do for me but how it can make me money, boost my search engine rankings, and keeping me with the latest money making trends on the internet.

So what is a blog?

A blog is a certain form of website that usually states what’s new, daily tips, articles, and up-to-date information frequently.

Blogs are usually written by one person on a certain topic that they are passionate about and like many which choose if there is market to make money. This new online tool has made another way for certain communities to communicate better with each other, and can be used for websites, audio, photography, and maybe just for personal use.

This new tool has open up new opportunities for relationships and interaction between individuals and businesses for sharing ideas or just working together to better their websites.

Professional, powerful, and well organized but might take a little time to learn and use.

One of the best ways I learned about blogs was visiting several hundred but for you a couple good ones should do. The next step is to start your own blog and experience the power of this technology.

Three types of blogging software I recommend:

Blogger = Free

Very fast, easy, and simple for beginners.

Word Press = Free

Easy and professional with moderate learning curve.

Movable Type = 1-5 users $69.95
Unlimited users $99.95

One of my biggest species of advice for learning more about bogging is to visit several blogs and visit these three software bogging programs for a further education on blogs.

Thank you for reading this post and have a great day!

Getting Yahoo Traffic for your Blog

One of the constant frustrations that I’ve had with blogging over the years has been my inability to rank well in Yahoo’s search engine results. Despite the fact that Google seems to love some of my blogs - Yahoo has always been rather standoffish with them.

It does seem to index my sites but it might as well not have as the percentage of traffic it sends is miniscule. This is until recently.

A few weeks ago I saw a number of bloggers talking about a technique that promised to get Yahoo indexing blogs better - so I gave it a go and have had some moderate success. Its still not traffic in the levels that Google sends (but I guess that would be hard as more people use Google to search the web) but its better than previous levels.

Really the strategy is simple and it involves signing up for a MyYahoo page and using the RSS Headlines feature. This feature allows you to track a variety of blogs via RSS. Simply add your own RSS feeds and it seems that Yahoo adds them to its own tracking system which must be linked to their indexing system.

Just a day after adding the feeds to my MyYahoo page I noticed an increase in my traffic from Yahoo. Since then as it has indexed more pages it seemingly is sending even more traffic across to some of my blogs.

No guarantees but Its worth a try if you’re looking for more traffic on your blog (and who isn’t).

Magic with Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization

From Jennifer Kyrnin

Using Meta To Improve Search Rankings

First of all, don't let me mislead you, meta tags are not the "magic bullet" that will skyrocket your site to the top of all search page listings. They are a tool that will help improve your standings in search engines that use them. Use them with other marketing strategies to garner more page views.

Another thing to remember: most search engines look at the body of text on your pages, as well as the page title. They take this information as higher relevance than any meta tags. So, be sure to always have a relevant TITLE on your pages, and relevant content in the body of the page. This will improve your rankings more than just meta tags alone.

What is a Meta Tag?

A meta tag is a hidden tag that lives in the HEAD of an HTML document. It is used to supply additional information about the HTML document.

How to Use a Meta Tag

Meta tags are included in the of an HTML document. If you are using meta tags to improve your standing in search engines, then you should focus on your description and keywords.

The description tag

Use the description tag to describe what your page is about. Engines that use it will supply the content of this tag when displaying a list of links. For example, if you do a search on About.com, you will see the description listed on the search results page.

The keywords tag

Keywords help search engines to categorize your site, and to allow people to find your pages more quickly. However, most search engines have limits as to how many meta keywords are viewed. It is a good idea to review your keywords and make sure that they are as concise and specific as possible.

Magic with Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization

From Jennifer Kyrnin

Using Meta To Improve Search Rankings

First of all, don't let me mislead you, meta tags are not the "magic bullet" that will skyrocket your site to the top of all search page listings. They are a tool that will help improve your standings in search engines that use them. Use them with other marketing strategies to garner more page views.

Another thing to remember: most search engines look at the body of text on your pages, as well as the page title. They take this information as higher relevance than any meta tags. So, be sure to always have a relevant