Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Anybody want to guess what this chart represents? There is a bit of a clue in the title. Give up?…. That chart shows organic traffic for a new website built almost entirely from freely available articles. It is the laziest type of content and according to every SEO expert out there should not be getting organic search traffic.

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.

This was something that I’ve been wondering about for a while, I know I make a lot of typos, the question is does typing too quickly come at a cost?

Just like many an old internet marketer I’ve got a few “aged” websites that just hang around not doing much, they tend to stay where they are in the rankings paying for themselves but little else. What they are good for though is experiments, I like experiments!

So I decided to take one of these static websites (6 pages of embarrassingly bad HTML) and go through correcting my typos that had just been forgotten about. I was hoping that using the Queens English would benefit my affiliate conversions if nothing else (isn’t it really annoying when somebody is trying to sell you something but can’t even be bothered to use the correct grammar and correct obvious typos? It gives a really bad impression from the start).

Four weeks down the line it has actually turned out to be quit a productive little exercise. A jump of 28 places in the search engines and more affiliate sales in one month than the previous six. Of course the increase in affiliate sales could be down to the increased traffic from the better search results. And the better SERPs position could be down to Google treating it as new content (there were a lot of mistakes to correct!) but overall for half an hours work I have no complaints.

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a new “Make Money” idea that results in a rushed job, I’m as guilty of this as anybody. Having seen how taking your time can return better results I think from now on I’m going to give that extra time and be more considered in my approach. If nothing else running your content through MS Word’s spellchecker should help a bit!

Ever since I wrote my post about having a launch pad to boost any new websites you create I’ve been running an experiment. All I’ve done is create a couple of totally new blogs but instead of going through my usual approach of giving them some serious link love from my more established websites I’ve left them on their own. It’s been quite interesting for me to see that each of them has performed almost identically in terms of the traffic that Google has sent them.

So you start a brand new website, one of the first things you want to do is let the search engines know about it. A sitemap is one of the best ways of doing this, so 5 minutes later I had a sitemap that I submitted to Google’s webmaster tools. 2 days later I check and I can see that some of my pages are now included in Google’s index, excellent. Now in the first week my website starts to rank, quite well actually and I’m starting to see nice amounts of organic Google traffic heading my way. It looks like all systems go.

Jump forward to 2 weeks later, all of a sudden my website is no longer ranking anywhere and the traffic has all but disappeared. Has my website been penalised for something? What’s going on?

What I Think Is Happening
I think that Google loves fresh content. However because it’s so new it knows that it will have a very bad linking profile (if any) and so it’s rank is based almost entirely on it being brand new content. As the days pass your fresh content goes from being new to aged and at this point Google starts paying attention to who and what is linking to it. Don’t have any/many quality related links and you slip all the way down the SERPs.

How Do You Stop It?
There are 2 approaches I’ve found that work. The first is just to pump out more fresh content, that way you always have something that is fresh in the eyes of the search engines. It also helps if you can link back to some of your older content with your newer content, remember that your internal linking structure is just as important as your external linking structure. The big problem I’ve found with this approach is that after many months with none of your pages getting good links from external sources then Google seems to flag your domain as being crap (This is just my experience). At that stage it doesn’t matter how much new content your write you’ll find it very hard to attract organic Google traffic.

The second approach requires a little more work. You’ve heard of link building, well this is where it matters. I’ve found that even by having 4-5 new links to your new content every week or so can help to maintain it’s position in the SERPs. To keep your content in it’s original position for a month or 2 is not that hard with just those few links, it’s much easier to put that little bit of work in early rather than have to try and boost your content later when it’s fell of the SERPs altogether.

This one started about a month ago, I seem to be spending more and more time on my websites that produce the least. One good example of this is a ballroom dancing website I started nearly 2 years ago for my daughter. She was never interested in doing anything with it and it has sat there getting 1 or 2 updates a month for the last year. It makes enough money to more than cover hosting and the domain registration but not enough to justify the time I spend updating it. This was one of my original hand built websites written using nothing more than notepad and any new pages have to be manually linked to, menus and sitemaps updated etc etc. The thing is my wife is a crazy mental Ballroom Dancing freak and loves everything about it. In fact she is always commenting on forums so I decided why not give her own website? Unfortunately she is a technophobe so I’d need some sort of CMS so that she could create new content. After trying Joomla and Drupal I settled on a WordPress install (ease of use being the main criteria), I’m very glad I did!

So I set about moving my lovely ASP.net based hand coded website over to a free WordPress theme that I had found. I was prepared in the short term to kiss goodbye to all my good rankings and any money it made, this was about giving my wife an outlet for her dancing rants. I moved all the existent content over into new pages and posts (depending on the content) and my wife started posting about her favourite dancing programmes. I kept an eye on the site daily (waiting for my figures to disappear), here is the unique visitors chart from Google Analytics showing what happened (Our visits are filtered out):-

Unbelievable. In the space of 2 days the new website was performing 3 times better than the old one, natural search traffic had gone through the roof. Even better my Adsense earnings from that single website had increased by the same percentage. What all this comes down to is this, WordPress besides being an excellent blogging platform is a very search friendly CMS. To not waste my own time I put as little effort as possible into this change over but it has given me a blue-print for the future. WordPress takes your content and with a little help can create multiple search friendly copies that can really suck in those long tail keywords. This is where all my new traffic has come from. In fact I’m going to be moving one of my primary business websites over before the end of the month. I f I see the same results again I’ll be moving all my static websites.

The Changes I Made To Make WordPress As SEO Friendly As I Could

Once I had my WordPress install sorted and my template in place I did change a few things:-

1. Permalinks, I changed the permalink structure to /%postname%/
2. Add the All In One Seo Pack, Feedburner, Google Sitemaps and Related Posts plugins.
3. Add the following to the htaccess file so that only 1 copy (with and without www) of each page is linked to:-

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.yourwebsitehere\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsitehere.com/$1 [R=301,L]

4. Alter the robots.txt to the following to remove much of the duplicate content

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: */page/*
Disallow: /wp-images/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /banners/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /*?*

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

5. To only post to 1 category. The same content appearing in multiple categories is one of the biggest duplicate content issues with WordPress.

So that was it, those were the 5 steps I took. To be honest the only one that took any real time was installing and configuring the plugins. Even so I reckon from start to finish I could have a great performing WordPress website up and running within an hour. The only extra thing is that when it comes to making money I found that altering your Main Index Template to include a large Adsense block in the page not found area really helped. The results seem to speak for themselves, if I can repeat this success with another website then that would be proof enough for me to spend some serious time next year moving all my websites over.

If you’ve got some old content hanging around why not give it a go and let me know how you get on?

(Several people have asked in the past why I don’t link to my websites. Put simply it’s because far too many people steal/rip my original content from The Make Money Online Dot Net for me to risk sites that actually make me money).

This isn’t the sort of post I’d normally make on a Sunday, throughout the world of blogging Sunday is known as the slack day for off-topic posts. Just so as many people as possible get to see this I’m going to keep it as the first post for a lot of Monday as well.

SEO Factors

So what’s all the fuss? DealDotCom‘s product today is titled “SEO On-Page Factoring Guide” and they want to charge you $25 for it. In case you haven’t guessed already it’s another e-book, sigh! It’s going to tell you about what on the page SEO factors affect your ranking and how to use them to increase your search engine rankings. The question is would you pay for this information? If the answers is yes then you’re not using the internet to it’s full potential. I’ve always said that it’s very easy to make a profit if you’re not spending money so here are a couple of ways of getting the same information without spending a penny.

1. Download WebCEO. The optimisation tool will analyse and recommend the ideal densities in all key areas of your page content (Title, Meta Tags, Headings, Page Body). Not only are you getting the same information as in the e-book but it’s constantly updated to keep it current.

2. You want to know what SEO really affects your SERPS rankings. Read this page from SEOmoz several times until it all sinks in. What is worth and isn’t worth changing is all in there for free. It’s the considered opinions of some of the top people working in the area of SEO so take advantage of it.

If you do find that you are desperate to spend money on an SEO e-book then the only one I’ve read worth the money is the SEOBook. It’s not cheap but I’d rather spend $79 on something worth owning rather than $25 on rubbish.

Of all the possible sources of traffic for your new website, the one which most people agree is the most significant is that delivered for free by the search engines. The amount of money your website will make will largely depend on the amount of targeted traffic you receive and with Google, Yahoo and MSN Search being the biggest referrers of traffic on the internet it’s worth spending a little time making them happy. When writing a Blog most people tend not to worry about the search engines as much, a more natural style for your readers is often seen as more important but when it comes to actual websites then a little bit of SEO is a must.

The trouble with SEO is that it can be very time consuming, from researching which keywords you want to target to the many changes that are required for on-the-page optimisation. It’s not enough to learn what you have to do, you then have to apply that knowledge to each and every page you create! There is also the added complication of optimising off-the-page, this includes link building (which is vital for good rankings) and your websites structure. The different search engines all have their own algorithm for ranking based on both on and off the page factors to some degree, this makes it pointless doing one and not the other.

I’ve been working with SEO for more than 5 years now and about 3 years ago I found a secret weapon that helped me out a lot. It helped to confirm a lot of my theories and made the actual editing a much quicker process. In fact with the help of this tool I had one of my websites ranked in the top 10 on Google for one of the most competitive search phrases of all time, “Hotmail”. Not only that but I stayed on the first page (as high as position 5) for nearly 2 years. That one ranking combined with Adsense was enough to pay for several holidays, new TV’s, even this PC that I’m typing on now. It also got me hooked on other website ideas and that’s where I find myself today. What made this even better was the fact the tool was free. It had cost me absolutely nothing to use.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about WebCEO! It’s a free suite of applications designed to make optimising your website a much easier process. It includes a keyword research tool that will help you find those profitable search phrases in your niche, a link building management application for reciprocal links, a website audit tool to help eliminate slow pages or broken links from your website, an FTP up-loader , HTML editor and perhaps the one thing I use more than any other the webpage optimiser. With the optimiser all you have to do is put in the keyword you want to optimise for, select a webpage to optimise and it will give you practical advice (all the way down to optimal keyword body weight) on how to have that page rank well for that phrase. Make the changes in the editor and upload using the FTP client. Unlike some other SEO tools this isn’t about spamming people with link requests, it’s a genuinely useful tool to help you learn the basics of SEO. Sure there is always more to learn but as a shortcut into the world of SEO for your websites then you’ll be hard pressed to beat WebCEO. Like I always say, free, you can’t beat free!

You can download your free copy of WebCEO by following the link.