Mar
31
Know When Two Sites Are Better Than One?
06:49 pm
Back in the good old days it wasn’t nearly so tough to get decent rankings fast. Wasn’t nearly so complicated either. You put up some pages, got some links and built from there. Enjoying improving rankings on your way to the top. But that was then and this is now. Now there might be times where you WOULD be better off with two sites, (same niche) than just one.
And if I might chance to read you mind you’re thinking, “What? Is this guy crazy? I can’t keep one site going and growing much less two.”
I’m with you. But read on to discover when you might want to break out the second site.
===> Aggressive Article Marketing
Say you’re engaged in an aggressive article marketing campaign. Or you’re chasing as many reciprocal links as you can. Both legit ways to drive potential visitors or customers or subscribers to your site.
Yet how’s that going to mesh with the go slow approach to links Google now favors? Think your zeal might throw be like throwing sugar in the gas tank? And ace you out of the running for top rankings in Google? Maybe.
So if you want to use an article submission service that blasts your article far and wide you might want to rethink that. Or at least develop a second site for the links in your resource box to point to. Since if you’ve got a site you’re grooming for Google, too many links of any kind too fast raises a red flag.
===> Link Triangulation
It’s helpful to have two sites to do link triangulation. Which is a great way to get one way links.
Let’s assume you feel one way links are better. To get those two sites are a must. Simply offer to link to your link partner’s site from Site A while they link to your Site B.
Next time offer to link to the other web site from Site B while they link to your Site A.
This approach lets you build one way links to two sites at once, albeit at half speed. Which is a good thing since you’re building links slowly. Or the currently approved approach for Google.
===> Adsense or Affiliate Site?
Some seemingly have strong feelings about whether or not Adsense cannibalizes affiliate sales.
Of course the ONLY way to know for sure is to test it. Simply take an established site and run Adsense ads alone for one month. Then drop those ads and feature affiliate products only for the next 30 days. Which produces the most cash flow?
If you find Adsense does cannibalize this may be another situation ripe for the two site solution. Obviously you’ll want to edit the content so it’s close to unique for each site. Or you might emphasize product reviews on the affiliate site. While offering informative yet more topical articles on the site featuring Adsense.
===> Yahoo/MSN vs Google Focus?
More and more there is precious little overlap in the respective top rankings of Yahoo, MSN and Google. What works great for grabbing top MSN rankings might well get you in hot water over at Google. While Yahoo at times yearns to be more the anti Google than anything else.
That said, both Yahoo and MSN are more forgiving of, uh, enthusiastic optimization techniques. For instance you can get away with a higher keyword density with them than you would ever dare try with Google anymore.
But as in real life it’s hard to please two bosses. So the smart thing might be to set up two sites. To make it easy exclude the googlebot from the site designed with Yahoo/MSN in mind using your robots.txt file. And then reverse roles by excluding Yahoo/MSN from the site you’re using to catch Google’s eye.
So there you have it. Four instances when two sites may be better than one for your home based internet marketing business.
Filed Under SEO Tips and Tricks and Tutorials | Add comment
Mar
29
Forget Adsense for a While and Concentrate on Content and Traffic Building
08:05 pm
One of the things I have noticed in the past two years is how most Webmasters are obsessed with their Adsense Earnings or quick monetization techniques. I can see so many postings in other forum regarding how can I earn $20 or $100 a day, my Google and Alexa ranking is dropping and it sucks. But nobody is asking or working on sites which are build to entertain people and in the course earn money for the Webmasters themselves. When I built Ex-designz.net, it was not in my intention to monetize the site. My intention was to put stuff on the site that I’m passionate with. It took three years to get sufficient and consistent traffic. Then I decided its about time to monetize the website to pay for the cost of the web hosting.
You can earn from Adsene when people click on your ads, which means they have to leave the site. So to earn real good from Adsense your site needs to be boring and dead, unoriginal, MFA or a splog. Or in short your site should suck big time. But think for a moment… We are living in a great digital age, where new media is giving the old media run for their money. The big portals with niche are still in. We all are experts in our own fields. If we can’t monetize our expertize in this time, I doubt there would be any better time. So my suggestion is to build sites of your interests. Forget link building, directory submissions, gaming Digg and other Digg clones. Just write about what you are passionate about. Choose anything. And trust me it will take time, but you will get plenty of traffic, many more ways to monetize it, and something to show off to your friends, collegue, schoolmates and parents.
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Mar
21
Unlock the Limits of Your AdSense Earnings Potential
05:16 pm
Reading all the bearish posts about AdSense lately would make it seem like the bottom is dropping out and nobody is on the upswing with AdSense. This would be incorrect because some of us are so busy improving our bottom line that we simply don’t have time to relate all of those positive stories. Finally, I decided today looked as good a time as any to time to write a nice bullish post about AdSense, so you bears keep off this thread and post your tales of woe elsewhere, this one is for the bulls.
Make a Compelling Mission Statement
What does your site do and why should I bookmark it and come back?
You need to explain what your site is about to a first time visitor in a single compelling sentence. Find something you could turn into a site motto that catches their attention and makes them bookmark your site. Lots of articles and content are nice but if you don’t SELL the customer (yes, visitors are customers) on your site it’s a one time encounter.
Busting the Earnings Cap Myth
A couple of years ago I once thought I was at the peak of my online potential with one of my sites, for both traffic and earnings. This temporary mindset happened because my site was performing very steadily, very predictably, very status quo day after day, week after week, month after month. I looked at the situation and realized I had a ton of information to attract people to my site but they weren’t finding it as well as they could be finding it in the search engines.
My daily traffic at the time was around 10K visitors a day so I took a step back and re-evaluated the situation and decided is was worth re-engineering my SEO site-wide to see if I could boost it to 15K/day as a simple goal. With a lot of research and keyword tweaking I was able to change how I positioned my site in the SE’s and in 4 months traffic was up to 15K visitors. Not so surprisingly, the types of ads being displayed got better as well and the AdSense CTR improved as I was delivering a overall better product to both the search engines and visitors.
Author website: http://incredibill.blogspot.com/
The encouraging thing was I added 50% more traffic and income with my first effort.
At this point, I figured the sky’s the limit and my own imagination is the only thing holding me back.
Expanding your site’s horizons
Just cranking out more and more of the same old content will not always bring you more and more visitors or improve your AdSense earnings.
Sometimes you need to expand and broaden your niche, take it local, make a compelling RSS feed for something other that just your articles. Depending on your niche, there may be a lot of local traffic you’re missing because you don’t address local markets. When I switched from solely doing generic content to also incorporate local content as well there was an almost immediate bump that propelled my site to 20K+ visitors a day and AdSense income improved as well.
Thin out thick content for more traction
Blogs and some CMS software are bad about having too much information on a single page. The best way to get good traction and leverage all of your content to the max is to break down each piece of content to it’s own unique page. This is important because that piece of content now has the full weight for the entire page and the SE’s and AdSense aren’t trying to figure out the mess caused by multiple items jumbled on a page.
Learn from the news and information services and use headlines and snippets to drive visitors to the full blown content. As an added bonus, you’re also driving them through multiple pages with multiple opportunities to display a wider variety of AdSense ads!
Maximizing each AdSense impression
Get rid of PSA’s and have appropriate affiliate ads installed for “alternative ads” when AdSense has nothing to display. We’ve discussed how to identify and get rid of PSA ads in the past, but it’s important you keep vigilant about this as every PSA ad is lost opportunity. The easiest way to identify when PSAs are being displayed is to look at your site stats and see how often your “alternative ads” page is being utilized. If it’s a statistically small number of page views then I wouldn’t worry about because I’ve seen PSAs pop up randomly for no reason and never show again on the same page. However, if PSAs are responsible for over a full percentage point of your page views you have a serious problem you need to fix.
How high is high?
I’m now getting about 700K visitors a month with that site and heading toward a million, that’s the next goal. Not a shabby improvement from when I really started moving upward with only 300K visitors a month. It’s a struggle and pushes my creativity to the limits to figure out how to take it to the next level, but that’s also the thrill to see if it can be done. Yes, I’m also working on other sites that are starting to achieve good growth as well, but the thrill of hitting 1M visitors/month with a single site has it’s own rewards in what you learn taking it there. At some point there is obviously a cap in how many people actually search for my topic on a daily basis but I’m positive I’m not there yet, not even close.
Competition in my area is heating up and in some parts I’m even taking a pounding from some newcomers, yet my traffic is still increasing. Some might see more competition as a problem but I see it more as a validation that I’m on the right track, doing the right things, and there will be huge rewards to gain.
Imagine that!
How good is your imagination?
While others imagine the AdSense system is set up to beat them with earnings caps, smart pricing, and all sorts of other problems, I imagine I can improve my service and earnings and have done so successfully just like many others on WebmasterWorld.
If AdSense turns sour I imagine I could also do well with YPN or something similar.
There are lots of options, lots of things you can do to improve your bottom line, but if you can’t imagine it can get better then it probably won’t, so imagine it will and take the proactive steps to make it happen.
Filed Under SEO Tips and Tricks and Tutorials | Add comment
Mar
15
Joomla RSS Feeds SEO
07:32 pm
Many SEO experts believe that incorporating targeted and relevant RSS content feeds from high ranking web sites within your web site as part of an overall SEO strategy can enhance your search engine ranking across the Search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN. It’s a known fact that if you keep your web site updated with fresh new content then Google will reward you but creating new content on a daily basis can be a challenging task and this is where RSS Feeds can help.
The aim of this article is to provide you with an overview to RSS feeds for Joomla and the reasons why you should use them for your Joomla web site. Again with all articles I don’t claim to be an expert in RSS feeds and the subject is open to debate but Joomla is all about sharing knowledge and at Joomlaseo that is what we like to do. For the SEO experts this might be a little boring but if you are new to SEO or Joomla then the following might be useful to you.
The first port of call is to give you a definition of an RSS Feed as taken from the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Feed
RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by news websites and weblogs. They are used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.
Joomla RSS support
The next stage will look at Joomla and the inbuilt support it offers for RSS feeds and syndication of content.
Joomla currently offers the following RSS functionality
- You can add and manage as many RSS feeds as you wish using Joomla from the administrator console plus you can display where the RSS feed will appear on your web site using module positions.
- Joomla provides you with complete control over the RSS feeds based on the number of items to display and when to display them.
- Joomla supports a number of different RSS feed standards including RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, ATOM 0.3 and OPML
- Joomla also enables you to syndicate your news to other web sites and blogs.
A number of 3rd party RSS feed modules and components are available for Joomla including DS-Syndicate and RSS 2 Joomla auto import which are included in the Joomlaseo repository.
So what’s so great about RSS feeds ?
When a user visits your web site they expect to see new and relevant content and the same can be applied to the search engine bots who visit your site on a daily basis. The fact is search engines expect to see new and fresh content and your search engine ranking can be effected based on how upto date your content is.
This is where RSS feeds play a key role. If you include 2 or 3 well respected RSS feeds from high ranking sites which includes content relevant to your site then the SERP’s will reward you. The key is not to fill your site with hundreds of RSS feeds and hope to get a number one position in Google because this will not happen. RSS feeds are designed to compliment and enhance your existing Joomla site content.
Do your research and find web sites who offer quality RSS feeds which has some direct relevance to your web site subject matter. Once you have found the RSS feeds add them to specific sections, categories of your site. So for example you have a topic which covers web hosting for joomla then you could include a feed from a respected hosting forum or site. If possible try and add the feeds to categories or topics which are relevent to feeds coming into your site.
Syndicate your content
We have talked about including content specific RSS feeds within your web site but another approach is to syndicate your content across other web sites. This can be achieved in a number of different ways.
Activate your Syndicate module.
You can do this from the Joomla administrator console which will enable users to click on the relevant RSS feed button and include your content on there web site. The benefit of doing the above is that the robots will index the site where your xml feed appears and following the links to your site therefore improving your search engine position based on link backs and relevance.
Submit your RSS feeds
The next approach is to submit your site to a growing number of XML feed sites who accept and publish XML feeds which are then distributed across hundreds of web sites on the net. If your XML feed gets accepted then you may attract lots of new traffic and your position across the search engines will increase.
Where can I publish my RSS feeds ?
We have included a number of web sites who currently accept RSS feeds but if you search Google you can find hundreds of web sites accepting RSS feeds.
http://www.syndic8.com/
http://www.completerss.com/AddFeed.aspx
http://w.moreover.com/cgi-local/site/sourcesubmission.pl
http://pingomatic.com/?oldpinger
http://www.rssfeeds.com/suggest_wizzard.php
http://www.stepnewz.com/sn/suggest_feeds.asp
http://www.feed-directory.com/addfeed
Where can I get RSS feeds from ?
Most of the big content web sites including Yahoo, BBC, computerworld, cnet and Joomla all syndicate XML feeds. The important point is to search for a site which has a high ranking and also has relevant content which can enhance or compliment your site content.
sources http://www.joomlaseo.net
Filed Under Joomla stuff, SEO Tips and Tricks and Tutorials | 1 comment