website building

Thursday, 14 June 2007

Viral Linking debate

Wednesday, 30 May 2007

SEO - linking via mini-banners

Linking or off-site SEO is crucial for gaining page rank, and a popular way of doing this is to exchange banners. There is a kind of accepted standard for these mini-banners which are both attractive and unobtrusive.
Munny4Hunny is running a promotion offering free custom-designed mini-banners for links - why don't you take a look at the rules of the promotion and have a banner made up for your blog or website.
Below are a couple of example banners:

You can also click the following graphic to take part:

Tuesday, 29 May 2007

Adsense pays out...

For all you skeptics out there.. I am pleased to announce receipt of my first ever Google Adsense payment directly into my bank account his morning. I had heard so many people doubting the Adsense scheme, and I have received a warning for using a traffic exchange program (I had no idea that this was against Googles' TOS...) - so I was wondering whether I would get booted before the long-awaited payout. I am very pleased to say that my good behaviour has been rewarded...I should make it clear that the adsense is not for this blog (though a very small part of it did come from here). Read through my posts if you are interested in finding out more about my website...

Sunday, 20 May 2007

Have a little patience

I noted that when I first had my website indexed, a google search only got me on the first page if I was really specific ie: 'Livewyre studio' the title of the site (unconnected to the URL www.cassette2dc.co.uk). Just using 'Livewyre' got me nowhere. Time and traffic has rectified all that and if you do a google search for 'livewyre' now, you will find cassette2cd occupying slots 3 and 4. Slot 6 is a free Lycos account that I use, slot 7 is this blog and Slot 10 is me on 'Bumpzee'.
That is a whole lot more satisfying than my first forages into searching for my sites in google... This just serves to demonstrate that the internet is fluid and changes from day to day, week to week and month to month - if you work on SEO, you can get your rankings to the top of the tree. Of course Livewyre is not an important keyword for me as it will not bring new visitors in itself as the word is meaningless, however proof that your site can be on the first page for SOMETHING is a reward in itself.
(Of course, the internet is so fluid that this may all have changed by the time this is published....)

Wednesday, 16 May 2007

SEO - What's the big deal?

Search Engine Optimisation is talked about that much, I wonder if I forgot to explain WHAT IT'S ALL FOR....??

Well, it's like this - we all treat the world wide web like a massive library conducting search after search until we find the information we require. The search engines are the library assistants who will find the information for you, because I forgot to say, in this analogy, you are blind!

Now some of the library assistants are sponsored by Virgin and Sony and Microsoft - they have football-style shirts with advertising on the front (which you can't see 'cos you're blind..). These guys will try to push you towards their sponsors, but all the librarians are really well-read and have their favourite books. They will point you towards the books that they like because of the way they are written.

Newer books take a while for the librarians to read and categorise the information, but eventually your new book (website) will stand alongside everyone else's.

OK I'm bored with this rather bad analogy now, but the point is that the search engine be it google, msn yahoo etc.. is the means by which most visitors will find your site, and SEO is all about making your book popular with the librarian - get it? (Wow, I used google image search and look at the image I found....!!)

Saturday, 21 April 2007

Index Stats

The following terms may be entered into google search to give you some useful basic statistics about your website:

"site:www.domain-name.com" - will return the pages of your site that have been indexed by the google bots.

"link:www.domain-name.com" - will return a search of sites that link to your index page.

"cache:www.domain-name.com" - will return the cache of your index page, giving the date that the index was last crawled and a representation of how the page looked at that time.

"info:www.domain-name.com" - will return a page with a list of searches as in the following example:

Show Google's cache of www.cassette2cd.co.uk
Find web pages that are similar to www.cassette2cd.co.uk
Find web pages that link to www.cassette2cd.co.uk
Find web pages from the site www.cassette2cd.co.uk
Find web pages that contain the term www.cassette2cd.co.uk

"related:www.domain-name.com" - will return a list of sites similar to the domain name you have used. In fact this search comes up with no results when I use my own domain name - I must be unique! If you enter google's own UK domain (www.google.co.uk), you get a list starting with google domains for other countries.

This of course, works for any domain you choose as long as it is actually indexed by google bots. You need to enter the bold phrases above (without " marks) into a google search to get the desired results. Using these terms will very quickly flag up the sites who have genuinely given you a reciprocal link, so worth trying if only for that...

Try it out and let me know what you discover

Friday, 13 April 2007

Write About Us – free linking

We discussed getting your site indexed via linking to another site with a higher PR in the post entitled SEO - Indexing .One site offering such a service is Write About Us , they offer free or paid links to websites and blogs. In exchange, you are required to write an article about them – a return link is appreciated but not a requirement. Write About Us will post your URL on their front page for as long as it takes to get 60 more submissions, as soon as you become link no. 61 on the page, you drop off the end. If you go for the paid service, there are 100 links and they are arranged in order of the highest bid. They even supply you with ‘resources’ you can quote so that you don’t even have to tax your brain too much. It’s a no-brainer, why wouldn’t you do it? Read more about it here

Thursday, 5 April 2007

Adwords

Now, it occurs to me that I have liberally discussed Adsense here and on other blogs and forums without really explaining how Adwords (it’s ‘other half’) operates. Most bloggers would just be interested in the potential earnings from Adsense and by-pass the whole Adwords program. It actually helps to know what Adwords is about as this is really the engine that drives Adsense.
Advertisers choose keywords that are linked to the service or product that they are offering. The keywords are ranked in popularity and you pay for the words you want. For instance if you were selling house insurance, you would no doubt find that the keyword ‘insurance’ will have been subject to a bidding war and costs for this particular keyword will be very high. What do you get for this charge? You generally customise a simple advert box with a few limited lines of text and your URL. When your search keyword is entered into Google search (and other related search engines), your advert will be displayed. The most common form is the advert box on the right-hand side of the search page, but you can also buy space at the top of the search page.
It pays to be clever about choosing your keywords and Adwords can even automatically search your site and generate a list of possible keywords for you. So, to take our example of house insurance, the bidding on the phrase ‘house insurance’ will probably be lower, but still significant. It pays to think laterally, how about ‘house cover’… Where Adsense comes in is that these same Adwords adverts are the ones that appear in Adsense banners all over the internet and especially in blogs. Knowing how Adwords works may be the key to getting Adsense to work for you

Wednesday, 4 April 2007

SEO - DIY

Basically what I am trying to say.... is that there is no need to pay anyone to submit your site to search engines, get quick google indexing, regularly update your keywords or offer reporting on rankings. You can do it all yourself for free, so why would you pay anyone? The truth is that the jargon used is off-putting to your average non-nurd! The whole internet is painted as if it is based on some sort of alchemey rather than a series of straightforward steps. Having said that, we all slip up along the way and make mistakes, sign up for programs that were useless and waste some time here and there doing so - but, at least if you have a go yourself, you will have learned something and you will not have been ripped off...!

Tuesday, 3 April 2007

SEO - indexing

The truth about SEO companies guaranteeing high search engine placements for $100 a month is that you can do a lot of this work yourself for free. We'll examine some of the things that these paid-for services offer, and offer a way in which you can do this yourself with very little effort.

Google do not charge for submitting a site for indexing, if you need to get indexing done quicker, then you will just need a link from a high-ranked page, check out what 'wikipedia' have to say about Craigslist as an example. Higher-ranked pages get indexed more regularly and can drive search engine bots to your site within a very short short space of time. If you can find a high-ranked index style site where you can post your URL for free you have just saved yourself quite a few dollars... and should have your site indexed in no time.

Click here if you are not sure how to see page-rank for sites you visit (discusses downloading the google toolbar)

Wednesday, 21 March 2007

Is it possible to make money online?

When I first saw this question in a forum, it was actually phrased more like ‘Can I make lots of money online?’, and I guess the important question for a lot of people is ‘Can I make a living’, or more often: ‘Can I make a decent second income?’. My first reaction to the question of whether there was money simply waiting to be made online was ‘Surely not!’ I went on to say that if you wanted to make decent amounts online, you would have to really work hard at it. In the main, I think that this answer still stands up, but I am coming to the conclusion (I am one of those who has to see it work, before I will advocate it..) that actually there IS money to be made, and PAID TO BLOG is one of those opportunities. If you live in a place where the USD is very strong currency, and incomes are relatively low, then you probably can make a relatively decent income online, and if you live in the West, you may be able to make a small second income without devoting ALL your spare time…I retain the view that if you want to make a legitimate living online, you will probably need to put at least as much effort into it as you would in a regular job, and I suspect that in reality, you would have to work harder. The upside is that if you do the groundwork, you may be able to establish a base that provides an income from less effort as you get better at it. The reality is though, if you have that sort of energy, you will be spurred on to achieve more and if spending more time with the kids was the plan, you might be better off with a 9 to 5.
To read the rest of the article follow this link to my other blog

Monday, 19 March 2007

SEO - spidering

A lot of web sites nowadays use some fancy script-based navigation with menus that drop-down on ‘hover’ and the like, but apparently these links are often not read or followed by the search engine bots that index the site.What does this mean? It means that there is a danger that only your homepage will be fully indexed. How do you fix it? Very simply, you add standard HTML hyperlinks to back up your other navigation. Many sites do this and place the extra navigation at the bottom of the page. You may think you can cleverly fool the bots by adding ‘invisible’ text ie. text which is a similar colour to the background or in a very small font. Be warned – the bots are wise to this, and will not take kindly to ‘hidden’ text.
Search engine 'bots' like to see good interconectivity between pages ie. the 'web' nature of pages that all connect together - make sure that you don't create dead ends in the 'spidering' of your site. The best way to achieve this is to create a sitemap and check that everything links together. As well as sitemap pages, there are sitemap files that you can leave in the root of your website which will be recognised by search engines. You may need additional facilities on your web host to do this. Google recognise sitemaps created via XML and RSS, check out what Google has to say about this and check whether your host has the appropriate software on your server. If not you can opt for a simple text file list - this will inform the bots of the pages that they SHOULD be seeing, and if they see a problem in navigation, it can be reported back to you in Google Webmaster tools.

Thursday, 15 March 2007

SEO - blogging

Techniques for SEO apply as much to blogs as they do to websites, but depending on your front-end editor, some techniques such as tagging are a bit tricky as you generally have to be able to edit the HTML if you use a service such as blogger.com.
The other side of SEO in relation to blogging, is that you can use a blog to promote your own website and get some reciprocal linking going. The theory is that regularly updated blogs are 'attractive' to the google search engine and may be in a better position to gain page ranking points than a website.
There is a vast blogging community and it is much much easier to get people to link to your blog than it is to get them to link to a commercial website. I am using two blogs - check the link to my 'other blog', and I am going to post another couple of links that you may find useful:
Ourblogreview.com - exchange links and submit your blog to be reviewed
Make Money with Ja Kel Daily - read the posts, exchange reviews, build your site traffic...

Tuesday, 13 March 2007

Web 2.0

Here is a hot topic, a new buzzword which requires some of the mystery taken out of it... Web 2.0 is all about the web going 'up' to another level, but there is no specific outline that defines Web 2.0 precisely. It is more of a concept which takes on board a lot of diverse ideas which might lift a website out of the boring flat HTML-only sites of yesterday. We are talking incorporating Flash, Java and good design to enhance the browsing experience and ecourage interactivity, forum-style posting and the like. How can I incorporate this into my humble little website then? Well, this is not an easy one to answer, but I can tell you what I plan to do with my site to start getting some interaction going: I have had various emails from people asking for advice on the DIY sections of my website. I plan to post the questions and answers on the relevant pages so that there is an element of interaction. You can incorporate forums into your site with a little java programming, but I have steered clear of a forum format as I prefer to have control of the posts on my site! To my way of thinking, Web 2.0 is about getting away from a static HTML site that doesn't encourage interaction and sits on the web from month to month without change. If you can find a way to get your website out of that particular rut, then you are on your way to Web 2.0....

Sunday, 25 February 2007

Page ranking on my website

Mixed blessings today, I noted a few days ago that my website , not THIS blog...was showing google ranking of 2/10 on some pages rather than the initial '1' which seemed to take so long to acheive! However, my home page is still 1/10. There are elements of my website that get increased traffic as I actively post URLs here and there on the internet - these are not necessarily my home page, so I assume the extra ranking point is due to the traffic these pages get. My aim is to get to 3 or 4/10 as I think this seems to be the average for reasonable sites (I'm not THAT ambitious!!). If you want to know the rankings for your own pages, download the google toolbar and enable the page rank icon. This will then report a page rank for every page you visit - might be a bit of an eye-opener!The pages on my site that get the higher ranking are my :'DIY' section, my download page, and my section concentrating on microphones. To be honest I don't drive THAT much traffic to the 'studio' section, so that one came as a bit of a surprise, however I can also report that this section of the site appears to yeild a better price per adsense click which makes me think I should try and drive more traffic there!!

Monday, 19 February 2007

SEO - keywords and other meta tags

The old Keyword has been so overused, it has more or less disappeared up it's own meta tag.. Most search engines will use your 'title', 'description', headings and first paragraph of content as priority indicators for searching. Of course, nobody (who is allowed to say) can know the full hysteresis for Web-site ranking, so most of the advice given is mainly hypothesis. It is possible that minor search engines are using keywords, and I think it is reasonable to assume proper use of keywords won't do any harm..
(NOTE I HAVE HAD TO REVERSE THE SYMBOLS TO POST THEM HERE.. FOR '<' READ '>' etc..)
The correct format in HTML is:

>meta name="keywords" content="mylist, of keywords, here with, variations, similar words, and anything else, I want to put here"<>title<>/title<>meta name="description" content="This is my chance to describe what my web site is all about and I am not going to waste it."<>/meta<>' etc..)

SEO - Ghost domains

Duplicate sites can help to raise your website profile.
Search engines rate the domain name very highly when it comes to matching a query, thus if you buy additonal domains which contain your keywords, you may harvest more traffic.
If you have, for example a website for mobile phones, let's say it's called 'mobilephones.com' you could also mirror your website on 'cellularphones.org' or 'cellphones.net' etc.. etc.. This would help to pick up hits from searches which contain the terms 'cellular phones' or 'cellphones'. You could just use a redirect on the homepages of these domains, or configure all the links contained in the site to jump back to your main site.
Although this may seem an unwieldy promotion tool, bearing in mind the reasonably low cost of domain hosting nowadays, it is probably fairly cost effective. I would recommend duplication of the entire site and linking every page back to your main domain, this way you get a combination of the new domain name and your existing content to boost your ranking - it would make sense to have a link to your new domains on your link page just to complete the circle for reciprocal linking. Make sure you submit your new sites in the same way that you submitted your main domain for maximum impact.

Tuesday, 13 February 2007

Indexed Now!

Ok, a little under three weeks and this site is now indexed by Google.. I think you can pay to get faster indexing, but for a blog at least, I would rather wait...

Wednesday, 7 February 2007

Google Adsense

I have noticed that there are a lot of questions about Adsense around, and although I have mentioned Adsense before, I note that I haven't really talked about it in length.
Adsense is a Google product for placing adverts on a website. If you are looking for an additional stream of income for your website, you may want to consider what Adsense has to offer.
Adsense matches your site content to the large database of adverts that it has. Keywords in the content will trigger specific adverts. If you want to see this in action, you can see how the content of my site: http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk is refelected in the adverts that appear. My site is all about converting old style audio cassettes into CD's, the adverts offer hardware and software for this very purpose. If you visit the 'studio focus' pages: http://www.cassette2cd.co.uk/studio you will notice that the adverts are now aimed towards microphones.
If you are worried about a competitors advert appearing on your site, you can exclude their specific URL using the 'filter' section.
It is impossible to predict earnings using Adsense because of the variable nature of the cost of adverts. Google offers adverts to customers without a specific charge, allowing the advertiser to control an advertising 'budget'. The rate of pay per click could be anything from one cent to several dollars. The trick is to get high-paying advertisers on to your site (I don't know HOW you do it...but this will be your aim).
You can choose how the adverts will look on your page, and you can combine different types of advertising, though there are limits to how much you can put on a single page. You get to choose colours and whether the ads run vertical, horizontal or as a list of links. (note that the list of links only pays when a click is made on the SUBSEQUENT list of adverts).
I can only talk about earnings in relation to my own experience, I currently get (according to Google) about 160 page impressions a day, leading to approx 7 or 8 advert clicks, yielding approx $1 per day... not a fortune admittedly, but pays towards the running of the site.
To make any real money you will have to have lots of page impressions and have adverts that your visitors are going to click on. Ideally you want to attract high-paying adverts to your website, but I have no insight of how this can be achieved.
Now, it is important tp point out that Adsense does not pay out until you reach $100, which to be fair could take some time....at the rate of $1 a day, this is going to take more than three months.
In order to use Adsense you will need to register with Google, which is in itself, not a bad idea as you can access all sorts of other tools for your website.

Monday, 5 February 2007

SEO - Google overview...

Google is not limited to business use, but you will get more business than from any other search engine.
Search Technique:
Google is ‘interested’ in density of information and quantity of repeated words – each word is a ‘vote’ as far as the search engine is concerned. Google uses a ‘deep search’ technique requiring substantial information – associated (reciprocal) links will improve your Google. The search engine will follow all the links around the host website looking for links back and forth, and will follow links to other websites – the information which it encounters along the way will add to your rating if there is a return link to your own website.
To improve repeatability and to provide a bigger network of links (and thus a higher rating) include a glossary of terms (ie a page opening links up in a separate window explaining words appearing in the main website). Also use a site map with links to each page and corresponding links on each page back to the site map. This may seem over-kill, but it WILL ultimately increase your rating.
Google will also index the media it finds on web sites, calling the pictures by their proper names rather than default jpeg names. Ie: ‘ford_Capri.jpeg’ rather than ‘SMG0036.jpeg’ - Results of media searches reinforce the overall rating (be careful of using too much media on the homepage as download time will also affect your rating).
The ALT tags (box that comes up when your mouse passes over a picture) can also be scanned by search engines.
It is important that the title of your homepage is relevant to your market – this is what the searcher will see in the search results – Your homepage title should probably read something along the lines of a short ‘mission statement’ otherwise the first x number of words of body text will be displayed which may not capture the essence of the site.