Showing posts with label Interesting Articles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interesting Articles. Show all posts

Wednesday, 30 January 2008

Back in Time to the Advent of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Did you recently learn what search engine optimization means? Learn a brief history behind this new industry, including which search engine first implemented what later became known as search engine optimization, and how initial unethical SEO practices forced the search engines to tighten their measures on how their robots rank and index Web sites.

As long as the Internet has been around, it has remained a mystery to the mainstream public how Web sites are listed at the top of search engine results. There are many theories of how search engines and search engine optimization (SEO) initially began.

The 1990s

Alan Emtage, a student at the University of McGill, created the first “search” program in 1990 called Archie (still in use today), to archive Web documents. The following year, Gopher started at the University of Minnesota, and this is when the concept of search engines began. In 1993, Matthew Gray created the World Wide Web Wanderer, the earliest known search engine robot that assists with ranking Web sites. But search engines as we use them today were born in 1994. In that same year, Galaxy, Lycos and Yahoo! were all started, two of which are still widely popular search engines today.

Yahoo! was among the first to implement SEO techniques, even though at the time they were unaware of the potential growth the industry would soon have at the turn of the century. Yahoo! Founders David Filo and Jerry Yang were trying to get their site seen by others on the Internet by giving it more exposure. Some excellent structure and tricky hand-coding, their site became more available for new visitors. They were not questioned about ethical business practices because nobody was sure what was considered ethical or unethical – there were simply no standards in place yet.

As the initial search engines were cataloging the early Internet, many business owners soon learned to appreciate the value of their Web site being listed in the search engines, as they first saw increases in visitors to their Web sites. They began submitting their URLs on a continuous basis, and changed their sites to support the needs of search engine robots. SEO companies started showing up, when they began experimenting with the concept of search engine optimization, with the emphasis initially on the submission process alone. Soon afterwards, the first automatic submission software was released, and it was then the notion of Spam came into existence.

The 2000sSEO professionals have been seen in a negative light over the last five years, due in part because in early 2001, enthusiastic webmasters quickly realized they could overwhelm search engine result pages by over submitting Web sites. Unfortunately, as the Internet industry developed, search engines quickly became cautious of new SEO companies attempting to generate visitors for their clients at any cost, however unfair or unethical. Tactics such as keyword spamming, doorway pages, cloaking, and hidden white text placed on white backgrounds proved too much for the search engines to tolerate. As a result, the search engines replied with numerous countermeasures, created to filter out any techniques considered spam. That is good news, although it forced ethical SEO companies to start using more subtle techniques to assist their clients Web sites with obtaining rankings in the engines.

The “big 3” search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo!, have recently come to the realization that SEO as an industry is here to stay, and to maintain effective results, they needed to accept the industry, even embrace it, and engines eventually partnered with successful, ethical SEO companies to establish typical standards for fair and ethical optimization. This is important to help keep information relevant and beneficial to visitors while still being unbiased to people who create the content on their Web sites.

The Current State of SEO
Today, there are major differences in how search engines work and how to get ranked in them. With the assistance of proper search engine optimization, Web sites can now have a equal fighting chance of obtaining high rankings. Because SEO is a highly specialized trade that requires both technical skills and business marketing knowledgeArticle Submission, it is only through the combination of these two skills that one can properly implement SEO techniques to obtain high search engine rankings. Many SEO specialists have since now realized it is “search engines or bust.”

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

Monday, 28 January 2008

Adsense Doesn’t Just Make “Cents”, It Makes Dollars Too!

By Shon Christopher

If you are one of the many webmasters today who are trying to make money on the internet by any means possible, then you may have already considered joining the Google AdSense program. If you haven’t yet made the jump to being an online publisher, let me be the first to tell you that you are definitely missing out of the chance of capitalizing on something that can be very profitable for you! Google AdSense is the most popular pay-per-click program currently online, they have offered pay per click, in one form or another, longer than any other search engine on the net.
If you are one of the many webmasters today who are trying to make money on the internet by any means possible, then you may have already considered joining the Google AdSense program. If you haven’t yet made the jump to being an online publisher, let me be the first to tell you that you are definitely missing out of the chance of capitalizing on something that can be very profitable for you! Google AdSense is the most popular pay-per-click program currently online, they have offered pay per click, in one form or another, longer than any other search engine on the net.

They’ve put a great deal of research and development into their keyword matching to ensure it is a profitable program. Not only have they been around the longest, but they also boast the biggest number of advertisers as well. Google requires website owners to conform to a number of rules, including: All pages must have at least one link that leads to it, without concealing pages. All links must be active and work.

There is a limit of 100 links per page. Creating a hierarchy should keep your navigation clean and well under the link limit. Tags, especially the ‘title’ and ‘alt’ tags should be explanatory and distinct. When designing your site, create one that is helpful to a user; don’t design a page for search engines. Make sure you clearly define what your site is about. Google forbids hidden text. Don’t colorize the text as the same color as your background, or even size the text so small it can’t be read. Google has been known to ban publishers who engage in these so called “black hat” techniques. Google strongly recommends that you include a site map page. They also strongly recommend you include a robots.txt file in your root directory.

The robots.txt file tells website crawlers, like those that will match the ads with your website, which pages not to crawl. This is especially important if you want ads for some but not all of your content or if you have password protected pages. Following the website design rules doesn’t make you bullet-proof, though. Even if you follow all of them, you may still be at risk of losing your AdSense account permanently or even temporarily. If you are indeed banned by Google to display AdSense advertisements on your page, you can file a re-inclusion request. Although not very successful many times, it still gives a publisher a chance to get back into the program. Here’s what you’ll need to include in your re-inclusion request: Your account name Your contact information A list of changes you’ve made to fix any violations A guarantee it won’t happen again Reports and evidence of click bombing, if you have any (more on this below) You should NOT include any threats to pull your business.

Visithttp://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py to contact customer support. Keep your email straightforward. The subject of your email should be “Re-inclusion Request” to make sure it gets to the right desk. Click Bombing Click bombing is when someone clicks on one or more of the ads that appear on your webpage repeatedly. While this seems like a great way to increase your profits, it is against Google’s policy and they are always searching for click bombers. While you can’t prevent malicious click bomb attacks, you can take steps to defend yourself should you be accused of it. Consider investing in a third party tracking software program that is approved by Google. Look for one that tracks IP addresses. Run reports often, and keep them stored separately from your Google account.

Should you be removed from the AdSense program, you won’t necessarily have access to run reports. If or when you are removed or fined by Google for AdSense abuse, make sure you send copies of your IP address reports along with your re-inclusion request. As mentioned before, even if you follow all the rules of appeal and properly request a re-inclusion, you are not guaranteed a reversal. It seems most requests to be reinstated are not acted upon by Google. Google’s policy has been always one of “protecting the advertiser by any means necessary”. Unfortunately, this may mean kicking a legitimate publisher out of the program needlessly if they’ve been targeted by a malicious person.

Earnings Calculations So how much money can be made in the AdSense program? Publishers can earn A LOT. From 10 cents a day, to over one hundred thousand dollars a day. Of course this is all dependant on how much traffic your website gets as well as how well you integrate the advertisements. But how does Google calculate per click how much that you, the publisher, gets paid? This is the fuzziest of all gray areas in the AdSense program. Google admittedly doesn’t disclose revenue share or whether the ads appearing on your site are cost-per-impression or cost-per-click. What they do tell you is how many page impressions (ads shown), number of clicks on the ads, page click through rate (CTR) and your earnings. Increase your impressions, number of clicks or CTR, and your earnings will follow.

Alternatives If you’ve been removed from AdSense or are just looking for another option, there are a few to choose from: Yahoo! Publisher Network is very similar to AdSense. Experienced webmasters who have used both Google and Yahoo! programs believe Yahoo! is second best, but still a very good, profitable program. As it becomes more popular, more advertisers will jump on board with Yahoo thus creating a PPC race with Google. Chitika – A pay per click advertising stream. They don’t have as many or such a variety as AdSense or Yahoo!, but are usually less expensive to advertise on. AdBrite is very similar to Chitika, though slightly smaller. There you have it in a nutshell, utilizing Google’s AdSense program to increase your own profits truly does make “cents”..and dollars. How much you can earn is dependant on how much targeted traffic you can get to your site as well as how well you can integrate the advertisements in the site design as well. Get on board today and start making money!

About The Author: Shon Christopher can show you you how make money on the internet. It doesn't have to be untold riches, but what if he could show you how to EASILY make an extra $900 per month? http://www.internetmoneyrevealedcourse.com

Saturday, 26 January 2008

Never let someone else host your blog

Curious as to whether you should host your own blog, or blog from a remote server? This is a question more and more people are asking themselves after witnessing just how far the blog has come. Note that there are just as many disadvantages as there are advantages to doing both. But being experienced in a little programming, we believe blogging on your own server is far more advantageous for a couple of key reasons.

Reason #1: Limited Blogging Resources and Tools

Posting content through a remotely hosted blog requires that you relinquish a tremendous amount of control over how messages look and work. This is mainly because a remotely hosted blog by design is built to accommodate hundreds of thousands of bloggers. For such a big volume of activity, it can only afford to offer the very least. A blog that offers an extensive amount of features to a large number of people consumes much more resources than what its own servers can provide -- ultimately running the risk of major crashes.

Even something as simple as a low-graphic poll can consume an insurmountable amount of bandwidth if over 100,000 bloggers decide to offer one to their visitors. Imagine for example how much bandwidth a popular blog already consumes. **Popular** blogs can consume anywhere from two to three times that a week. If a blog server hosts 500 popular blogs, its capabilities would reduce with each use of a simple poll!

Resources simply aren't an issue with a self-hosted blog these days. With your own server, you can deck out your blog with as many plugins and widgets as your heart desires without having to fear server crashes or time outs. In fact, you shouldn't consume any more bandwidth with your own hosted blog than you would consume with your own hosted website.

Reason #2: Limited Money Making Opportunities

We couldn't count the number of people who want to monetize their blogs if we wanted to. The simple fact is that everyone and his "mom" wants to monetize their blog but the ugly reality is that many (free) remotely hosted blogs don't allow it. Limited resources could play a factor in this restriction, however since most monetized campaigns call upon the resources of a 3rd party, this restraint is mostly censorship. Blogs that curb 3rd party ads generally want to limit advertisements to their own products and/or services.

With your own blog of course, you can advertise whatever, whenever, where ever. You're only restricted by your conscience (or by the data revealed from your visitor stats) and the only policies that you have to follow are the policies of your 3rd party ad providers. This accordingly opens doors for tremendous opportunities with Adsense, Amazon, and any number of the hundred other affiliate schemes we have available.

An example restriction that you'd still have to watch for -- even with your own blog -- is Adsense's restriction against multiple ads. Although your own blog gives you the freedom to advertise what you want, Adsense restricts you from advertising more than a specific number of Google ads at a time and advertising Google ads with other competitive schemes like Bidvertiser. We find that Google ads used in conjunction with Amazon books ads, Clickbank affiliate links, and AuctionAds eBay products create a nice restriction-free mix of quality wares.

You will of course want to experiment. Just remember that all the plugins that your own blog comes with helps create a unique visitor experience. Open opportunities often lead to abuse, so keep a watchful eye on how your audience reacts to the ways that you customize your blog. Don't overdo it with ads and don't overburden your visitor's Internet connection with unnecessary plugins.

Author: Gobala Krishnan

Monday, 7 January 2008

Making Mini Sites With Joomla CMS

While almost everyone has heard of minisites by now if you know anything about internet marketing, very few people have considered using an open source and free CMS or content managment system, like Mambo or Joomla, which is based on Mambo code, to produce minisites.

What are the advantages of using a CMS like Joomla to rapidly make and deploy minisites on the internet?

1. Joomla is easy to use and you can use thousands of free CSS based templates that support the latest standards and have a site up in hours, not days.

2. Joomla support easy wysiwyg or what you see is what you get visual editors that allow you to set up and add content to a site as easily as using a word processor on your desktop computer. What this means is that your site supports the latest web 2.0 standards and can grow in content easily and quickly without redeveloping your website from scratch.

3. Joomla has thousands of extensions and you can easily produce websites that rival sites costing tens of thousands of dollars for nothing. You can easily add membership sites, photo galleries, streaming video, audio, chat, and forums as well as rich blogs. In short, everything to make your site "sticky" and keep bringing back those visitors over and over again.

4. Joomla makes changing the look of your site a snap, since you can change your template and quickly change the look and feel of your website in just minutes, allowing you to freshen up your site every once in a while.

5. Joomla is continuously updated and is now releasing a beta version called 1.5. Most people are still working on 1.03 or so, but it is nice to know that future upgrades are available.

6. Joomla is well supported by many Hosting services now, and is able to be installed by Fantastico scripts with just one click. There is a user manual and several video packages that show you how to make templates and set up membership sites for profit.

7. Joomla and most of it's extensions or add ons are free and open source so it is cheap to get a very professional web presence on the internet.

For all the advantages, it will take a few weeks to get used to the new methodology of using a CMS to manage and deploy your websites unless you are used to making websites from your browser. Once you get the hang of it however, you never want to go back to the slow laborious system of desktop website creation and uploading.

I recommend you go to one of the sites called Joomlatutorials.com and go through the tutorials right after installing Joomla and before you do any work on your own site. Basically, you start with a template that you get for free at the largest free site template repository called www.joomla24.com. They have over 1,500 free templates you can start with. Alternatively, you can go with one of the many commercial template companies that offer a variety of paid templates that you can modify and make into your site.

Once you select the template, you must change the permissions on your template and media areas of your template section in Joomla under your public html directory so that you can make changes to the appropriate template and files. You do this either within joomla or most often, from cpanel using your file manager functions and set the file permissions to 777 for the folders and 666 for files.

You must get a log in from your hosting company after installation so that you can go into the administrators section that you manage and build the site from and make changes and add content to the site.

After you log in, you go to the templates section in the site manager and click on new.

Then you are presented with a dialog that asks you to browse on your computer and pick the site template which must be in zip format and you upload the template on your site. After a few minutes, if it is successful, and it tells you so, and then you click on continue. Then your site template will be listed with the other default templates. You click the radio button to make the template you installed the default template.

Then, you click on the radio button to select the default template and then you click on html to edit the html for the template page. You will be checking for the image files on the page.

As you can see, you need to study html and I would especially study CSS or cascading style sheets and tables so that you know how to place things on the page. In any event you need to look for the header graphic and replace it with a graphic header of your logo or a header image for your site.

You must be sure the graphic is slightly smaller than the size given so that the header graphic or logo will show up without messing up the format of the template or page. You must upload using an ftp program like Transmit or Filezilla the image file that you want to use for your logo or header image. Once you find the joomla folder in the public html folder, you must click on it to find the templates folder. Inside that there is an images folder. You must upload your chosen image to that folder. It should be a .jpg or .gif file in the same format as that used in the template if possible. Once the image shows up in the file, your next job is to change the html in the html file and replace it with the name of the image you uploaded. Then when you pull up your www.sitename/joomla your front page should show your graphic logo or header file.

Next, you need to unpublish those buttons on the front page that you don't need. You go to the main menu section and unpublish everything but the home button. You will need to go to joomla extensions page and go to menu section and find a menu extension that will allow you to use images or other files to set up your menus. Then you will have the appropriate file extension ready when it is time to link your menus which is the last step in setting up your website.

One thing you can do now is figure out what extensions or extras you will need on your website. You can just have a straight minisite but you will do better in the search engines and in the eyes of your visitors if you have a theme based content site and not just a sales page. If you add a chat client, a forum, and a blog to your site then you will find that your visitors become involved with the site and keep returning. The more they are on your site, the greater the chance they will buy what you have to offer, be it an affiliate offer, an ebook, or a membership. Check each section of the extensions. Especially the graphics section where all the banner advertising extensions are. You can monetize the site with banners and/or text ads that will bring additional money onto the site. It is true that if you use adsense on your site, your site will show up in the search engines sooner. There are several adsense modules. You will need to add docman or Remository if you will be setting up files for download on your site. Community builder or AEC will serve you well if you are setting up a membership site. You will need One of the wsiwyg content editors in the content and news section so that you can edit your pages easily and quickly. You must set up your wysiwyg editor as your default editor for Joomla. Then when you go to add content, you can easily and quickly edit your pages. You should go to the Blog section and add X-Blogg for editing your blog offline and download one of the blog programs for easily setting up and running a blog from your site. You will need to add one of the payment processors and/or a shopping cart for your site if you will be selling products from your site. Once you have added all the extensions, be it a component, module, or mambot you are ready to go to the next step.

Next, you will start adding the sections you will need in your site. Then you will add categories to the sections until you have divided your site into an organized entity. Then you will edit the front page using the content editor and the wysiwyg editor you have made the default content editor. You will add images and add articles so that everything is done to your satisfaction. Use Polls, banners, and the Adsense or other text ads for your affiliate programs to the front page on a rotating Banner or rotating ad schedule. That way you can track where most of your sales are coming from . Keep adding articles and other sections to your site until it is finished. Don't forget to add sales pages for each of the products or affiliate opportunities you are promoting. Then you will add a Thank You page for any downloads you need to offer or ebooks or software. You will have to set up the extension and add any thumbnails or links you need to download products for.

Once that is all set up check all your images and your spelling for all your articles. Check your links and make sure that everything is in order. Make sure your shopping Cart is working properly by adding a sample products and ordering them. Make sure that any forms are working properly to add your visitors to your opt in list.

Add your newsletter buttons and set up your mailings. Set up your autoresponders for any orders or requests for you newsletters. I suggest you set up your newsletters in an archive section on your site so that people can download them from the site in case their email Spam filter eats your newsletter. Once everything looks good publish your pages.

Congratulations, your site is now live. Write two articles in your area of expertise a day and you will have over 100 articles in a years time circulating all over the net earning you money. You just submit the articles to article directories and you will add a signature file mentioning your experience and your main web site. As I said, if you do this to hundreds of sites you will soon see a flood of traffic to your site and the money will follow! Joomla Greetings for the holidays!

Kathy Elliott is a 25 year computer programmer and consultant who specializes in showing people how to make money with their computers from her sites that she made with Joomla at http://www.getcomputergold.com and http://www.minisitegold.net

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kathy_Elliott

Adsense Make Money On Autopilot Technique

Adsense make money on autopilot works. Do not be fooled by the skeptics, the real way to make money online at anything is to establish one autopilot moneymaking system on one site and then move on to set up others one after the other, even as each one continues to bring in money on autopilot with very little additional input from you.

Adsense is definitely no exception and the way to make money from it is to set up one site after another that nakes money for you virtually on autopilot. To be able to establish a successful Adsense make money on autopilot site all you need to do is to focus on four critical issues. Namely content, the keywords used, how you set up the Adsense ads and finally the traffic.

All these four things are related and will impact on one another in creating an Adsense make money on autopilot web site or blog site. For instance, for content to have an impact, you will need to carefully select the keywords used. You mostly need keywords that will attract the highest possible traffic via leading search engines and naturally how you set up your ads will impact on the frequency at which people click on them.

Focusing on these four key factors will enable you to build one Adsense-make-money-on-autopilot-site after another.

Find out how you can learn more about the best Adsense make money secrets from an expert who makes over $19,000 a month from Adsense. Or grab my ezine on Adsense secrets for free by sending a blank email now to clickaffiliatesecrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Kyalo