Tag:Article marketing, free articles

So you have started a blog and you are excited about it and immediately you sat down to

write your articles. After a period of time, you found yourself unable to write any more articles as you have run out of ideas. You faced a mental block. You felt like giving up your blog altogether.

If you are facing the problem described above, cheer up! I have found a new service called Article Marketing Automation. Still in “Beta” it has done quite well, it has already secured 2,000 websites in its network.

By signing up for Article Marketing Automation, you can submit your articles and your articles will be published in other members’ blogs. This will create a lot of one-way links back to your blog. This will definitely give your Pagerank a boost because Google loves one-way links. This service is only available to paid members.

Alternatively, you can just sign up as a free member. To sign up as a free member, fill up the form and submit but do not pay when you are asked to. Being a free member, you can get free articles for your blog. This will save you the trouble to write your own articles. You have a choice of the topics that you want to be published in your blog. Choose only those topics that is relevant to your blog. You can have a choice whether to allow the system to automatically update your blog or personally approve the articles. You can decide how many articles you want to receive a day and also you are allowed to edit the articles as long as you don’t remove the links.

Article Marketing Automation helps you grow your blog organically and helps you grow your blog even though you have run out of ideas and mental block on what to write. But the only disadvantage is that you will have a lot of one-way links out of your blog which will affect your Pagerank. But on the bright side, it is still better than to have a stagnant blog.

Tag:make money online, wordpress adsense system

Make money online seems to catch everyone’s attention especially the new beginners who have just wandered into this competitive niche market.

After reading a few blogs on making money online, you got attracted by the amount of money they made online and thought that you might as well just join the crowd and share a piece of the cake. You may have stumbled upon Wordpress Adsense System and you got so excited about making money online blogging and you realized how simple it is to actually start your own blog with the step by step guide in the Wordpress Adsense System specially designed for beginners.

But to succeed in this competitive niche market is not easy. You will need to keep the passion going by constantly keeping your self up-to-date with the fast growing development in this niche. You should have a genuine interest in making money online and the determination to achieve the goals you have set for yourself.

“How to make money online” is the most popular niche market most new bloggers entered into without much research and no proper direction. This is because as a new blogger determined to make money online, this is the topic you explored the most and   most familiar with.

Beside “Make money online” niche, there are many other easier niches that one can explore. Find one niche that you are familiar with where your interest lies. It could be your hobby for example fishing, football or even stamps collection just to name a few. When you write about something that you love, you will find that writing is much easier and less struggle.

However, here are two links that will give you some guidelines if you have chosen “Make money online” as your niche.

How to survive in the “Make money online” niche by Andrew Pavelski
Are you blogging in the make money online niche? By Gobala Krishnan

Tag:anti spam, askimet, spam, spam filter

Spam does work! If not, there won’t be any spam reaching your email inbox or your blog comment. The amount of spam I have received tells me that spam is alive.

Nobody like being spammed but I must admit that sometimes the spam mail was so attractively titled that I fell for it and click on it. Well the world is full of curious people and some like me do actually click on the link. I do not encourage spam but it is a matter of fact that it works in one way or another.

Some email services have spam filter built to filter out most spam but sometimes normal mails were classified as spam by mistakes. There are other spam filters which claim to work better with more accuracy and ease of use and can be purchased and installed. These spam filters can be purchased online and downloaded instantly.

For blog comments spam, I use Askimet for my Wordpress blog to filter the spam and it works fine and save me a lot of time going through the comments to look for spam. So far, it has been quite accurate in filtering out the spam. Only on two occasions where real comments were mistakenly classified as spam. I am very happy with the results I got from Askimet.

Tag:Adsense earnings, clickable area, Google Adsense, Smart Pricing

Recently it has been reported that publishers are earning less from Google Adsense since the month of November 2007.

There are many possible reasons for these sharp decline but the center of conversation is that it is due to Google’s “Smart Pricing”. Many argued that this is the reason for the decline in earnings. According to Google Adsense Blog’s explanation:

“More than conversion rate goes into determining the price of an ad: the advertiser’s bid, the quality of the ad, the other ads competing for the space, the start or end of an ad campaign, and other advertiser fluctuations.”

Google described the ”Smart Pricing ” as:

“Google’s smart pricing feature automatically adjusts the cost of a keyword-targeted content click based on its effectiveness compared to a search click. So if our data shows that a click from a content page is less likely to turn into actionable business results — such as online sales, registrations, phone calls, or newsletter signups — we reduce the price you pay for that click.”

It means to say that if your site has quality contents, you are more likely to get higher quality, costlier and high conversion rate ads.

Another possible reason has got to do with advertiser budgets which have declined due to the economic uncertainty. It looks like if there is going to be a recession, Adsense profit would be badly affected too. Could this be the reason for the drop in paid click revenue for Google in the month of January as reported by comScore?

Joel Comm has his own explanation as to why Adsense earnings dropped in since the month of November 2007. He said that it is because Google has reduced the clickable area of the Adsense ads in order to cut down on accidental clicks. They did this around mid-November. So this is quite possible why the earnings has dropped. But then someone noticed that his click rate dropped by about 10% but his earnings dropped by 50%. The reduction in click rate does not correspond to the reduction in revenue. I believe the reduction in earnings is due to the few possible reasons listed above and not just one particular reason alone.

Below is the video courtesy of AskJoelComm.com in which he explained his theory and also give some words of encouragement.

Tag:blog, blogging, comments, negative comments

Blogging is not simple. First you have to find something to write about.

After doing that you would have to get people to read your post and then you would have to encourage them to leave some comments and finally to manage the comments. It can be quite a challenge for some especially if the comments are negative. How would you deal with them? WebProNews Reporter Abby Prince spoke with Leo Laporte, host of TWiT.tv and blogger of Leoville.com, as well as Matt Mullenweg, Founding Developer of WordPress and blogger of photomatt.net about these very issues. Catch their advice on this video.

Tag:Google, nofollow, pagerank, paid links

Much has been said a lately about nofollow and Google’s action on paid links. According to Google, paid links devalue their search results. One of the factors in Google’s PageRank weighting model is the inbound links to a site. PageRank is more like a popularity vote for a site. The more inbound links a site has, the more popular it is among all the other sites. People will link to a site when they find something of interest to them or something of importance of which they would like to share with other readers. Matt Cutts the head of Google webspam team has said that the best links are not paid or exchanged, but earned and given by choice. When people starts buying links to increase their PageRank, according to Google, the quality of their search results is affected, hence the harsh action taken against paid links is to weed these out. Google has warned everyone years ago that more severe action will be taken and now it has come for the warning to take effect.

Google introduced the concept for the specification of the attribute value nofollow in the year 2005. When a nofollow attribute is included in a link, it is actually telling the search engine spiders not to index the page the link is pointing to. An example of how the attribute rel=”nofollow” is included in the link is shown here.

<a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/” rel=”nofollow”>an example</a>

The site that the link is pointing to will not be penalized in any way but it will not gain in PageRank because the search engine spiders will regard the link as irrelevant and will not index the page.

Since its introduction, a number of blog software makers such as Wordpress, Blogger, Six Apart, LiveJournal, MSN Space have adopted it. Nofollow attribute is good in a way that it helps to prevent spammer from getting credits for their spam links which they leave at every blog comments that they can lay their hands on. They may get some curious visitors who may click on their links but the links will not improve their PageRank.

Google’s action on paid links has stepped on the toes of many and some argued that Google PageRank has actually damaged the web. It uses inbound links as a factor in weighting the search results and that has led many to optimize for that system and even game it. According to Google, this inevitable and now to cover the damaged done they introduced the nofollow attribute. Is rel=nofollow able to rectify the problem? Your guess is as good as mine.

It looks like they have no solutions to detect a paid link and now they are asking all webmasters to help to publish only quality links by including rel=nofollow in all paid links. The request comes with a warning, “If you don’t help us, you will be sorry!”

Tag:SEO experts, SEO strategies

WebProNews talked to a few experts in the SEO market and they revealed all that you need to know to optimize your Web site for the search engines. Learn from the experts by watching this video of the interview.

Tag:contents, keywords, links, page titles, search engine friendly

The best website are those that are built around content. Google and other search engines loves regularly updated content.

Your site needs to have original content, content that’s not a duplicate of another site, content that’s focused on your topics or business and content that’s legitimate.

Website that uses fancy programming techniques are more difficult for the search engines to navigate compared to simple design site. Plain text links are preferred compared to graphics links. A good site is the site that can return a good match for a search query based on content analysis.

Links should preferably be placed after the content on the page. Content on the top of a page is considered more important compared to content at the bottom.

Page titles are also important when designing a page. A page title such as “Welcome to homepage” is not a good title. A page title should include keywords such as “Heart problem risk from Medical Journal” if the article is about heart problems.

Links should should contain keywords for example, “fishing tips” made more sense compared to “Article 12″ if you are linking to an article on fishing tips. Links should emphasize the keyword you use to describe that particular page.

Tag:Google, pagerank, text links

Text link and PageRank are making headlines recently.

Many established sites have noticed that their PageRank were downgraded by Google recently. Many speculated that they were penalized by Google for selling text links. It may just be true after all Matt Cutts, the head of Google webspam team has mentioned in his blog that Google is against those who buy text links to improve their PageRank.

Links are used to determine a site’s reputation and they are votes by choice and link-based analysis has helped to improve the search quality. Selling and buying links will affect the web searches and make it difficult for search engines to produce relevant results. Google is trying to prevent their search results from being manipulated and that’s why they are against selling and buying of text links.

I do agree with this as this will help small sites owner in their fight for PageRank. Big corporations can easily buy their way to the top of PageRank whereas the little guys fight with their contents. With this control the little guys can compete with the big corporations in the same level field that is contents.

But on the other hand, buying text links is legitimate advertisement to get visitors to your sites. It was already there since internet advertising was introduced. There are many sites mainly selling text links as their main business. Will Google penalize them for doing what they do best legitimately? How about Google Adwords? Aren’t they text links as well? Will Google drop their Adwords?

Google has created PageRank as a standard to measure the relevance or importance of a page using text links as one of the factors to determine PageRank. But now it looks like Google is to kill its own idea. If Google is worried that buying text links will affect their search results, then they may want to come up with a solution in determining the PageRank rather than penalize sites owner

Tag:Google, pagerank, relevance score, search engines

Of all the search engines on the web, the online search engine that was used the most is Google. For you to make your online

presence noticeable, it is vital that your site is findable in Google. You should also make your site part of Yahoo!, MSN Search and so on but the secret is, if your site rank well in Google, it will be well-ranked in other search engines too. Google has changed the internet searches by using a system where the search results are not just based on the page content but also the popularity of the pages indicated by the number of links the pages have. All other search engines not wanting to lose out in the competition, use more or less similar ways of search.

So it is a good to understand how Google works if you want to be successful online. But how Google works is Google’s best kept secret and we can only assume how it works. No matter what, the basic concept of PageRank and Relevance Score used will guide you to increase your findability.

PageRank is a measure of how popular your site is. If you have more inbounds links to your site, you will gain PageRank but it will also depends on how important are the sites that link to yours. The more pages linking to yours, the better will be your PageRank. PageRank value is given from 1 to 10. The higher the value, the greater is the PageRank. PageRank of zero value means that the page is not in Google database. PageRank of 10 are the tops sites on the internet.

Relevance Score is another secret of Google and nobody knows how it is calculated. Based on analysis, we can assume that the key factors of Relevance Score are :

Inbound links – sites that have more inbound links match better for a given search compared to those with fewer links.

Link Text – A link from one or more words ie words that are made clickable is more important than graphical link.

Content and Layout of the web page – the more frequently a word or a phrase is used on a web page, the higher is the Relevance Score.

These assumptions may not be true, but if you follow these steps, your site may have better ranking not just in Google but other search engines as well.