Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Check out this video from Google’s own Matt Cutts where he talks about the dangers of over optimizing your website for the search engines. A lot of what Matt says here is just common sense, at least for anybody who has been in this game for more than a couple of years. There were certain things we could do just 2 years ago that would have a positive effect on our rankings where today they would have a negative effect. The key points with SEO in 2009 seem to be “everything in moderation” and “make it natural”.

It’s now been 2 months since I wrote my first ever WordPress plug-in and I’m finally ready to reveal some results. The reason I’ve waited so long was that I wanted to make sure that any changes that I was seeing were long term and not just day to day fluctuations in search traffic. If you look below you can see a week-by-week traffic chart of the organic search traffic that Google has been sending me since I first implemented the plug-in (including the current part week):-

I’ve wrote before about how I tried using a top stripe ad on this blog and why I removed it. It came down to people not liking it and the fact that the click-through-rate which it attracted was very poor. After a couple of weeks I removed it never for it to return. However, the majority of the visitors here are fellow bloggers and webmasters and so are very hard to please. I know from experience that just because something doesn’t work on a blog doesn’t mean that that it won’t work on a more general interest content website. Another experiment was born!

The first problem was that the top stripe ad I was using is in fact a WordPress plug-in and I wanted to use it on static web pages. In order to mirror the affect I had to get my fingers a bit dirty and pull the CSS and HTML so that I could add it to any pages that I chose. Of course one major difference from the WordPress plug-in would be that my ad would now only be showing on a single page. Just in case anybody wants to do something similar here is the CSS and HTML I used to get my ad showing at the top of the page.

CSS-
#top_bar { background: #FFFFE1; border-bottom: 1px solid #808080; margin: 0 0 3px 0; padding: 4px 0; z-index: 100; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; overflow: auto; } * html #top_bar{ position: absolute; width: expression(document.compatMode=="CSS1Compat"? document.documentElement.clientWidth+"px" : body.clientWidth+"px"); }

HTML-

<-div id="top_bar"> <-p align="center">Your Text Here<-/p><- /div>

I wasn’t expecting much and to be fair I wasn’t disappointed, although CTR was quite high compared to my blogs, conversions were low. The big bonus was that I didn’t see any complaints about it, even on sites where I encourage feed back nobody seemed too bothered by that ad. A little extra money and no complaints, not a massive success but good enough.

The SERPs 1 Week Later
Jump forward one week later and I’m checking site stats in Google Analytics. Something strange is happening, a couple of websites have seen a 10-15% “jump” in visitors. Looking at more detail I can see that it’s individual pages that are in fact making the jump (mainly in Yahoo and MSN). No prizes for guessing what pages! The pages with the top ad have seen significant increases in the SERPs resulting in more traffic. As a test I remove the ad from 2 pages and sure enough the pages slowly slip. How is this possible?

I think it all comes down to on-the-page factors. You see by making that top ad completely relevant to only one page and one page only I’ve added more relevant content. Even more importantly by placing that relevant content right at the top of the source document i’m letting the search engines know how important it is. One of the great advantages of using CSS for positioning over a table layout is that it allows you to get your most important content to the very top of your source document. I wasn’t even thinking about this when I put those ads up but it really has worked. The key facts to remember here are:-

1. One ad per page and make sure it’s relevant and optimised for your other content on that page
2. Place the ad code as high up your HTML body content as possible, preferably straight after the body tag

With a properly designed custom xHTML/CSS website it should be possible to have all your most important text content as high up your page source as you want. Personally I have a few websites that still rely on tables for their layout but having seen the affect even this small example can have on rankings one of my jobs is now to go back over those and convert to CSS.

I have a very supportive wife that doesn’t mind so much when I spend hours and hours on the internet at home after I have supposedly finished my days work (probably because it lets her watch TV in peace!). The problem is that when I get an idea I have to go with it there and then which can occasionally disrupt happy family life. A while back in order to compensate for this I decided that we’d start a blog together, a learning experience for her. The truth is that Suzanne has never been short of an opinion anyway and was contributing to quite a few forums. Instead of ranting long and hard on other people’s websites why not have her own? And so the Ballroom Dancing Blog was born, somewhere for my wife to write about her favourite hobby with the odd rand for good measure thrown in.

Having been posting content for a few months now what has surprised me is how the evolution from a “I just want to write something online” blogger has evolved into a “now I want more readers blogger”. The next step of course will be the “well how can I make more money from this” blogger. She is interested in making money now (hence a bit of Adsense and a few small affiliate deals) but not as a priority, last night I decided to go through a few ways of increasing her traffic (and comments, she loves comments, if anybody wants to stop by and leave a comment please do!) and will eventually help her to make more money. The embarrassing thing was that as I discussed these things it became apparent that I wasn’t really doing any of them any more on my own websites. I can’t remember when I stopped actively link and traffic building but by all accounts I have! When was the last time my RSS count jumped up, I can’t even remember? I start “PROJECT TRAFFIC” on Monday.

A Few Of The Things We Discussed

1. Forums – Forums are great for getting like minded people to your blog. My wife was already a member of several dancing forums and has a history of posting on them so the trust issue was not and shouldn’t be a problem. We updated her profile to include her website as her home page and I’ve left her to think of a nice signature to use. By ONLY posting a valuable contribution to any forum topic this is a legitimate way of link building and gaining traffic. My wife’s forum posts are epic, I also explained that when a post gets beyond the 3 paragraphs stage that it might be a better idea to hold onto that content for your own website.

2. Blog Comments – Having explained to her that a URI, URL and Website are all a place where you can put a link back to your own website and shown her a few Google searches for finding dance related blogs that have comments sections she can not get more active in her own niche community. This isn’t all about getting followed SE links but about getting more visitors to her website, doesn’t matter if a link is no followed for that to happen!

3. YouTube – There are lots of dancing videos on YouTube with lots of people commenting on them. Get your name out there, be witty and when the time is right consider posting a few videos of your own. We have hundreds of clips that could go online at some point.

4. Stumble – Each page of my wife’s blog is now stumbled by at least one person. With a few more (not a problem when you’re active in a niche community) this can be a valuable source of new visitors. I’ve only just started to reap some benefits from social bookmarking myself so I’m as interested in seeing how this turns out as she is.

5. The last source of links we talked about was directories. I’ve explained that most are junk and not worth wasting time on and then went on to go through some that might be worth going for a listing in. We have now submitted the site to a few of the higher quality ones (DMOZ, Aviva Directory etc), every little bit helps and besides a listing in DMOZ will provide some benefits with the search rankings, not that our dancing website ranks badly anyway.

Finally we discussed who was making the drinks and whose turn it was to load the dishwasher. As she was busy posting in forums it seems like it was my go to do both!

I did consider filming our talk and trying to sell it using one of those horrible black on yellow squeeze pages for $97 (with $182,291 of FREE BONUS ITEMS!), but in the end apathy took hold and I couldn’t be bothered. Maybe next time when I teach her about alternative revenue sources for her website?

This isn’t aimed at anyone in particular, OK well actually it is but it’s also some great general advice for anybody planning on making money from a website.

Links this, links that, links, links links. There are actually a number of things that are MORE important than links when it comes to creating a website that will do what you want it to do, be it make money, increase awareness or anything else for that matter.

1. Reliable Hosting
Your website has to be where it says it is as much of the time as possible. You need a host that keeps your web pages published on the web 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so that when one of the search bots/spiders comes on by it can trawl your content. When a visitor from any source finds your website your content is there. This is how the web works, if your pages aren’t there then it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 10,000,000 inbound quality links because eventually your going to not only lose your listings in the SERPs but even more importantly you’re going to piss off a lot of visitors. This is even more important if you’re running a business, you can not afford to have a domain holding page over your website for days at a time, it smacks of amateurism. If you want to change hosts and you rely on your website then remember the 6 P’s. Proper planning prevents piss poor performance. Plan with military accuracy. If you can’t manage that then kiss good bye to your rankings, visitors and reputation. Do it often enough and you can kiss good bye to your SEO Consultant as well

2. Unique Content
You should not syndicate your unique content to other websites, sales agents or anybody else for that matter. I repeat you should not give away copies of your website for people to re-brand as their own. IF people require content for sales literature then by all means supply them with cut down, altered content that links back to your website as the original source. This goes for people who like article syndication as well. If you’re going to syndicate an article make sure that you retain a full unique version on your website that can be pointed to as the authority copy of that content. Duplicate content penalties are not imaginary, it is something that the search engines really do take into account which means if you rely on your website it has to be unique.

I can’t believe that in this day and age that “big” companies would fall into the above mistakes and yet it’s still happening. Do you ever get the feeling that you’re talking to the wall? All I can say is that it’s a good job I keep a punch bag in the office!

UKWebmasterWorld have organised an SEO Contest to see which SEO can rank best for the phrase SEOContest2008. My friend Astrit over at www.dnseo.net has decided to enter the competition, good luck! I’ve not bothered for a couple of reasons, 1. I’m lazy 2. I don’t want anymore SEO work, I make more than enough from my own websites thank you so whilst the kudos would be nice I can live without it.

Anyway if you do Google search for the phrase SEOContest2008 (or click this link) you’ll notice that the top results are dominated by people who are using the phrase somewhere in their domain name. Whilst using it as part of the URL is a worthy substitute in my opinion you can’t beat getting your primary phrase in the domain name, it will be interesting to see who wins this SEO contest. My money would be on somebody using SEOContest2008 as either a sub-domain or as the domain name itself.

It seems that the post I did about SiteCube has caused a bit of a fuss. In fact I’ve removed the one way link to the reseller that was originally mentioned (because I was asked to) , I’m not trying to wreck anybody’s business, just make a point. Whenever I talk about Flash I’m talking from a business perspective, more specifically a small business point of view, if you want to have a Flash website built to host your family photographs then each to their own. Personally I’d go for a free service like Flickr or even better PhoTrade (and make some money out of it) but that’s just me.

Anyway, Flash and the small business. Here are my top 5 reasons why I don’t like Flash websites:-

1. Eliminating Dial-Up Traffic – I know this will shock a lot of people but there are still a great number of people who access the internet via a dial-up connection. A quick look at my stats shows around 40% of people who come here do it via a dial-up internet connection. The load time involved with even a modest Flash website will be enough for most people to hit the back button.

2. Portability, Or Rather The Lack Off – In a modern world where the world wide web is about far more than using a computer it’s important that your website is usable on as many devices as possible. There are portable devices that support Flash but because of the lack of external formatting options/settings in my experience it is pointless. With a nicely valid xHTML/CSS site you’ve got no problems.

3. A Whole Website On 1 Page – In the eyes of the search engines your website is going to be limited to your title, description, keywords and as much text as you can get into your noscript tag. This not only has a terrible affect on any potential rankings but it also means that if somebody wants to link to a specific part of your flash website they can’t. This actively discourages other webmasters from linking to you. It’s also commonly accepted that larger websites are seen with a better light by the search engines.

4. Link Relevancy – It’s not the number of links that count anymore, it’s the relevancy. How can the search engines know if something is relevant or not if it can’t read what is on the page (beyond the title, description etc). Even if you can get links (which you’ll most likely have to buy) the chances of the search engines counting them as quality links is minimal.

5. PPC Quality Penalty – Have you ever tried attracting visitors to a Flash website with PPC, I have? It all comes back to that same old problem of what the search engines can and can’t trawl but you’re going to find it very hard to get a decent quality score when your landing page is a Flash website. This mean higher PPC costs per visitor, you’d also better hope that they’re not visiting via dial-up.

I own a small business and the thing that has made me relatively successful is the idea of a ROI. Everything I do with regards to my business has to have a ROI, having a website built is no different. With Flash I see the chance of getting anything back out the investment (no matter how small that investment may be) is extremely limited.

Isn’t it funny but with the age of blogging so many of the skills that actually went into building the World Wide Web are being left behind and forgotten about. It wasn’t all that long ago that in order to have a website you had to learn at the very least HTML and what DNS meant. Nowadays with hosted blogging accounts on Blogger and Word Press it is entirely possible to forget all about that, to many publishing content on the web has become nothing more than word processing. Whilst all this is great for those that want nothing more than a place to write, for those of us interested in creating popular websites that attract search traffic then there is still the need for coding the correct way. To give yourself the best possible chance that means valid xHTML and CSS coding.

Website layout used to be all about tables, horrible nasty things that bloated your source with far more tags than could possibly be good. It was a horrible mix of content and layout. This wasn’t in fact what tables were originally for but because they could be used to provide some sort of rigid structure to your design they were hijacked and used. One major down side of using these tables was that they tending to push the content that the search engines were interested in (i.e. your text) to the bottom of your source. Whilst even today the search engines aren’t all that bothered about valid code (there are many experts who predict that at some point it will matter though), they do take into account where your text appears relative to other text in the source. Taking advantage of the many positioning attributes built into CSS it’s possible to create source that gets your text content where it should be, right at the top. Taking it to the next level and using xHTML instead of HTML offers even more benefits.

The Advantages Of xHTML Over HTML
If you can write nice clean, valid HTML source then you are on your way to getting your webiste viewed by more people.

Cross-Browser Compatibility – By using valid xHTML you have a much better chance of a browser rendering your page the way you originally intended. The days of writing differnent source for Internet Explorer and Netscape are days many of us would prefer to forget.

Portability – By using valid xHTML your web page can be reformatted to be viewed on PDA’s, mobile phones and many other portable devices that have browsing capabilities.

Cleaner Coding – xHTML is a strict language, where as HTML has recommendations, xHTML has requirements. Although this might seem like a pain what it actually means is that you have much easier to maintain source. The easier something is to change the more likely we are to keep it up to date.

It All Sounds A Bit Complicated?
With the new generation of hosted or “I’ll just download a template” (I’m certainly guilty of that one) website owners then these are skills that many people just don’t have. Either get ready for a lot of reading or hire somebody to do it for you! For example one of my regular readers (SEO Optimization) runs a webiste called xHTML Coding where they will create valid xHTML static code from any design you can supply from only $60. Alternatively if you prefer to use Word Press then for only $110 you can get a valid xHTML template. Relatively speaking then that’s pennies for something that will have a long term affect on your websites performance. If it’s a choice between a week/months advert or something that has long term benefits I know what I’d choose!

Update: I’ve just found out that xHTML Coding will also create original designs, just contact them to get a quote.