When starting out, it can be frustrating trying to
figure out why your visitors won’t click your ads. There’s plenty of things you
can look at that you’re doing wrong. In this article, I will give you some quick
tips on how you can increase your CTR for Google’s AdSense and hopefully make
you more money.
Note: Most of the techniques discussed in this article
can also be applied to Yahoo’s Publisher Network
ads.

Blend Them
In
The most effective way of optimizing your ads is by
blending them in with your web site’s content. Making your ads not look like ads
is the key here. The more they blend in with your web site’s content, the more
likely your users are to click them.

Ad
Placements
In my experience, placing the ads right in there with
the web site’s content generates the highest CTR. You should avoid placing them
where it’s most likely to be avoided or scrolled passed. Put yourself in the
shoes of your users and pinpoint where you’re certain they look at while
browsing your website.
Here are some ad placement ideas for
you:
- Right below or above the header

I found that
placing a 728×90 ad unit or a 728 link unit below or above the header can be
effective in increasing the CTR because users probably think it’s some sort of
navigation or something important relating to the web
site.
- Inside the content

Place your ad code inside some
divs by your content and assign it a value of left or right and you’ll have
something that blends in seamlessly.
- At the start of the content

I have one site where
there’s a 336×280 block right before jumping into the content part. I’ve seen
great results with this so you might too.
- In between the content

If your web site has long
text, why not separate every few paragraphs with an ad block? I know you’ve seen
some of the bigger guys do this so it must work be working for
them!
- More ideas

Link units integrated with the web
site’s navigation

Ad units placed near images and photos

Smaller ad or
link units placed above submit buttons

For further information on ad
placement, check out Google’s very useful heat map.

Change the Default
Colors

You want your ads to blend in with your website,
right? Change the link colors to match with your anchor links; the text color to
match with your content’s text color; and so on. You’re not limited to a few
different colors so get creative and start picking out ones that gets you the
clicks by experimenting with different sets of colors.

Lose The
Borders

You don’t need them! By removing the borders, the
ads are no longer separated from your content (to be easily ignored by users)
and are now a part of your
content.

Utilize The Link
Units

Even though your users will have to click on two
links before you get paid, it’s still available for you to make even more money
from your web site. You’re allowed three ad units and one link unit so why not
take advantage?

Keep Experimenting Until You Get It
Right

Always keep at it until you’ve gotten the formula for
what works best on your web site. Most of the time, you won’t be making money
with AdSense overnight. It takes a lot of hard work and patience. That’s the
reason why a lot of the earners at Earners Forum are making a ton of
money.

Do It Again

Once
you’ve gotten the formula down; you pretty much know what works and what
doesn’t, it’s time to do it again. What I mean by that is, if you have one web
site make $100/month off of AdSense, why not make another one just like it? You
now know what you have to do in order for it to start raking in money, so do it
again and keep on doing it.
Good luck with your
earnings!

Tags: adsense, age, code, Google, Google, IDE, image, money, ping, SEF, visitors, XP, Yahoo

With some new tools that have been released in recent weeks, I wanted to write an up to date post about the Top 10 Free Webmaster Tools that are available on the web. Due to the large network of sites I have, I always want to work smarter and not harder. I am always on the look out for tools that will save me time, money, or just lessen a headache. As a webmaster, looking to be at the top of you game, you need to be in the know when it comes to tools that are out there to assist you in your daily / weekly duties. I certainly wish I had seen a round up of some of the web’s top tools a few years ago that would guide me in to being a more effective webmaster. Let us begin with our Top 10!

10. Page Rank Prediction Tool - I am not a big fan or believer in page rank, but that is why I have this in the #10 slot. Many webmasters (especially those newer to the business) are concerned with page rank, thus a Prediction Tool offered by Rusty Brick is very popular. This tool will show you the current page rank for the URL you submit along with making a prediction as to what it will be when the next page rank update takes place. Another like tool that also shows your pagerank by Google datacenter will shed a bit more light and you can see all of the fun fluctuations during an actual Google PR update.

.

For the New Webmaster: You might be wondering what Page rank is all about, in simple terms it is an indication of a site’s authority or trust in the eyes of Google. PageRank isn’t just an indication of how many Web pages point to your page, it’s an indication of how important those sites that point to your page are too. Here is Google’s definition:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Page Rank used to be much more respected, but people quickly learned how to “game” page rank and it went downhill from there. It got to the point where PR6, PR7, and PR8 links were being sold for big bucks even though they were “junk sites”.

9. Website Speed Tester - I know personally how much the load time of a website impacts the success of that website, and I have seen on more than one occassion where I have moved a site of mine previously under a high load to a new server with a lighter load and search engine rankings improve along with traffic. Here is a quote from a Guest Contributor on this blog, “The server was provisioned a few hours after I ordered it, and after about 2 weeks of testing, I moved my site last weekend. It’s only been a few days, but I’ve already noticed an increase in traffic, page views, and ad revenue. What does that mean? Simple: Slow Servers = Less Traffic, or more importantly, Faster Servers = More Money“. It is true that search engines and end users DO NOT like slow loading sites. A tool that I have found helpful in determining how fast my site loads is offered by iWeb.

If you find that your site loads slowly, there are a variety of things that you need to do to take action. The first two things I always recommend are checking the size AND number of graphics (images) on your pages. You should always have the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes specified and you should never bog your pages down with numerous graphics, especially those that aren’t compressed and take forever to load. The second things you should consider is your hosting platform. Are you on a shared plan, taking the inexpensive route, where you can be on a server with dozens or even hundreds of other sites? The cost to upgrade to a better hosting solution is likely going to have a big ROI longterm. Don’t be hesitant to fork over the dollars now, when ultimately you are costing yourself money by waiting.

8. Web Design Color Scheme Library - I don’t know about you, but color schemes I like tend to be far from what most people like. That is why I am extrmely grateful that Color Schemer put together a color scheme gallery where there are pages and pages of awesome color combinations to use in a new site design. They are rated, easy to browse through, and downloadable when you find the scheme you like.If it wasn’t for a tool like this (or the fact that I outsource all of my design work) I would end up with a site looking like this! Instead of pure ugliness, my latest design piece (this blog) was built around the color scheme similar to this one.

7. Keyword Typo Generator - If you do anything in the PPC arena, whether pushing your own products / services or as an affiliate marketer, there are numerous reasons why keywords typos are important to your PPC campaign. This is one of two tools that Aaron Wall offers through SEOBook.com that I have in my top 10 list today. If you aren’t marketing for typo terms you are leaving money on the table. This is a whole other angle on the meaning of “long tail” and can really separate you from your competition depending on the niche you are in. The Typo Generator tool is quick and very easy to use, and you can basically pull your results, upload them into your PPC engine of choice, set your bids and go.

6. Backlink Monitor - For the longest time I would manually monitor the number of backlinks to my sites by using the good ole link: examplesite.com search in Google. As my network grew this became a tedious task that grew old rather quickly. This brings me to a very new Earners Forum Tool that both the backlinks and indexed pages in Google for an unlimied number of sites (Google API key needed). You can add your entire network of sites individually or through a bulk upload (whether it be 3 or 3,000) in to this tool and it will keep track of this data for you. All youwill do is login to the system, click update, and BAM! the data is updated and viewable in a very clean format. If you can imagine how difficult and time consuming it would be to manually monitor backlinks across 50 sites on a weekly basis, versus using this tool which would allow you in less than 1 minute to check your backlinks daily if you desired to do so. This is another must use!

5. Site Validator Tool - This is a well known tool to most web developers and even though I don’t dabble in the design / coding personally I know the value of a tool like this. Basically, W3C has developed this validator tool that will analyze your site and check Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. This fantastic tool will show you line by line in your code what needs to be corrected. As you are going through and making changes to correct the errors, continue to come back to the tool and recheck things to see your progress. Also, if you outsource your coding work, you can use this tool to see if the coding work provided is within the normal standards or not. You need your site’s code to be as clean as possible, SO CHECK YOURSELF BEFORE YOU WRECK YOURSELF!

4. SEO Firefox Plugin - I am no SEO expert, but I know a good tool when I see one. This is a tool that I have been using for many months now, and I really do like it. It has allowed me to look closely at my competition for specific keywords and see why they might be outranking me or why I am outranking them. It lends much towards showing clearly why the search engine considers the site to be an authority. This nifty webmaster tool allows you get to pick and choose which data you want to see about each search result including: Page Rank, Age, Yahoo Backlinks, Yahoo .EDU Links, Alexa Ranking, Technorati Ran, del.icio.us Bookmarks, and so much more. See the options menu for yourself here:

The SEO for Firefox plugin brings in so much useful marketing data to make it easy to get a clearer picture of the competition in your market, all from within the search results. This is one of my MUST HAVE plugins for Firefox!

3. Keyword Suggestion Tool - This is a brand new release and a must see. With the recent decline in usefulness of the Overture Keyowrd Suggestion Tool, WordTracker has hit the market with a free version of their keyword suggestion tool which shows the top 100 results, pulling in data results based on the marketshare of Dogpile and Metacrawler. This is a newly released tool that will certainly be a great benefit to many webmasters looking to do keyword research. It also gives a bit of a differnt picture since it using Dogpile and Metacrawler data versus Overture or Google. If you are still a fan of the Overture system, OvtKeywords.com will be a fun find for you with some cool ajax functionality and added Overture search features.

After I perform a search for “webmaster tools”, I get the results (up to 100) displayed in this fashion:

2. Search Engine Rankings Tracker - Due to the fact I am no SEO, I don’t spend very much time monitoring my rankings for top keywords on various sites in my network. The time I do spend recently was cut down to no time! Earners Forum came out with a tool that will allow you to track keyword rankings by site, showing graphs and trends of how the keyword is moving up or down in the search engines. With this tool you can literally add thousands of keyword / site combinations and track them with ease. The interface and layout are pleasing to the eyes and very easy to read. The data this tool provides can save many webmasters hours of manual labor.

1. A Free Blog - There are a couple of reasons this made my #1 slot overall. First, I feel like every webmaster should have a blog. Whether it is more of a personal blog for fun or something you plan to use to promote your business and even make money, I think you need to be doing it. Secondly, what Blogger and WordPress have done for the blogging industry is absolutely HUGE. These other tools are awesome and will save you time, headaches, and money, BUT the free blogging system these two big players are offering completely rock.

Wordpress is where my blogging all got started and here are some beginning steps to getting started with your new blog. You should first read about the many features of Wordpress (along with their jargon) so you know what you are getting before you begin. When you have a good understanding of the software’s abilities you need to determine if you want to host the blog yourself on your own domain or just use their free service at WordPress.com. Whatever you choose to do, you can then follow along using their support material to get your blog online so you can begin writing!

So, there you have it, my Top 10 Free Webmaster Tools list offering up to date tools for your webmastering needs. I certainly hope this has been a help to you and I wish you happy webmastering!

from : webmaster-talk.com

Tags: age, ark, blogger, code, dev, download, engine, error, firefox plugin, Free, Google, IDE, image, Internet News, Keyword, keywords, list, money, monitoring, option, Other Sites, overture, page, PHP, Plugins, PPC, PROM, RAM, ranking, release, route, search, Search Engines, SEF, SEM, SEO, server, Sites, Software, traffic, wait, WordPress, XP, Yahoo

TrustRank algorithm

Google registered the Trademark for “TrustRank” - a possible succesor to the existing PageRank valuation display method that has been said to seen it’s end of live as it does not necessarly correlate with the search engine results for several months.

The TrustRank algorithm is a procedure to rate the quality of websites. The basic idea is similar to the PageRank algorithm - taking the linking structure to generate a measure for the quality of a page. The algorithm can be seen as a further development of the PageRank procedure.

Human editors help search engines combat search engine spam, but reviewing all content is impractical. TrustRank places a core vote of trust on a seed set of reviewed sites to help search engines identify pages that would be considered useful from pages that would be considered spam. This trust is attenuated to other sites through links from the seed sites.

Trust can be transferred to other page by linking to them. Trust is propagating in the same was as PageRank. Additionally one can select sources of spam. The negative measure (inverse PageRank) is propagating backwards and is a measure for bad pages (spam). For the ranking algorithm both measures can be taken into account.

TrustRank can be use to automatically boost pages that have a high probablility of being good, as well as demote the rankings of pages that have a high probability of being bad and help search engines identify what pages should be good canidates for quality review.

TrustRank is based upon good pages rarely link to bad ones. Bad pages often link to good ones in an attempt to improve hub scores, the care with which people add links to a page is often inversely proportional to the number of links on the page and Trust score is attenuated as it passes from site to site.
When deciding what sites to review it is mostly important to identify high PR spam sites since they will be more likely to show in the results and because it would be too expensive to closely monitor the tail.
TrustRank can be bolted onto PageRank to significantly improve search relevancy.

Web Spam with TrustRank

This one introduces TrustRank that has been developed to help fight web spam. Here’s the abstract:

Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam. We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good. In this paper we discuss possible ways to implement the seed selection and the discovery of good pages. We present results of experiments run on the World Wide Web indexed by AltaVista and evaluate the performance of our techniques. Our results show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites.

The full text of the paper: Combating Web Spam with TrustRank is available as a 12 page PDF. It was co-authored by Zoltan Gyongyi (Stanford), Hector Garcia-Molina (Stanford) and Jan Pedersen (Yahoo!).

Brad Callen’s Breakthrough SEO Elite Version 4.0!

The Internet’s Most Powerful
SEO Software!
Get It Today!

Tags: age, ark, blogger, count, dev, engine, Google, Google, IDE, image, Internet, Other Sites, page, Plugins, proc, ranking, search, Search Engines, SEF, SEM, SEO, Sites, Software, World Wide Web, XP, Yahoo

Picture this: You’re a successful entrepreneur running a bustling online business. You’ve paid your dues, put in a lot of long hours, and your hard work is finally producing profitable returns. You have a steady stream of nicely converting traffic, excellent cash flow, and the power to be your own boss. Life is good.

One day you turn on your computer and because, like most of us, you’re obsessive about checking your search engine rank you do a quick search and poof! …your site, which was ranking #1 on Google’s results just the day before, is now suddenly nowhere to be found.

You check your logs and find that traffic is tanking at an alarming rate. Online sales have slowed to a trickle. Suddenly, life ain’t so good anymore.

Like most online entrepreneurs, your website is your livelihood – and getting kicked out of Google may be one of the most terrifying business setbacks imaginable. You need to know why it happened. You need to know the quickest way to get back in. Perhaps most importantly, you need to know how to keep it from happening again.

With that in mind, we present to you the complete guide to *not* getting banned from Google.

How Do I Tell If My Site Has Really Been Banned From Google?

First, let’s point out that having a site banned from Google is a fairly rare event, reserved for particularly egregious behavior. Usually, most objectionable offenses result in a reduced search engine rank; not an outright ban. Your page may still be in Google’s index, it’s just no longer residing in the upper echelon of the search results.

At one time, the Google toolbar was a fairly easy and effective way to find out if you had been banned from Google: A completely gray PageRank toolbar meant that Google did not have that page listed in their index – either because the page was too new to have been indexed, or the page had been banned by Google; a completely white tool bar meant that the page was listed by Google but had almost no PageRank, or that the PageRank hadn’t been calculated yet.

To a large degree, however, these guidelines are no longer reliable. The PageRank reporting, as indicated on the Google toolbar, has been inconsistent for the past several months now. PageRank updates have been taking an inordinately long time and often appear to be flatly inaccurate. Adding to the confusion are reports that banned pages are sometimes showing a white bar, sometimes gray, and sometimes even green. We’re not sure whether Google is having technical issues or if Google is purposefully crippling the PageRank feature to make search engine optimization more difficult.

Whatever the case may be, we can no longer consider the PageRank feature of the Google toolbar to a reliable indicator of whether or not a page has been intentionally dropped (banned) from the Google index. Fortunately, however, there are much more effective ways to determine if your site has been removed from Google.

The easiest way to tell if your site has been banned and completely removed from Google’s index is to enter the following into the Google search bar:

This will show you most of the pages that Google has indexed for this domain. If this doesn’t produce any results, try searching for some text – such as an address or phone number – that you are sure is unique to pages from your site and were previously indexed by Google. You could also try searching for a short piece of text. For example, to see if this page is indexed, we might search Google for the opening phrase of this article…

“Picture this: You’re a successful entrepreneur running a bustling”

Be sure to include the quotation marks so that Google searches for the entire string. And, limit the phrase to Google’s 10-word query limit.

If your page shows up in Google’s search results, then you have not been banned. If neither searching for a unique string of text nor doing a site: search produces results, then your page/site is definitely not in Google’s index.

Don’t panic yet… this still doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve been banned by Google. There are several other causes for a site falling out of the Google index.

If I Haven’t Been Banned, Then Why Am I No Longer Listed?

• The most common reason that your site might disappear from Google is that your server was down when googlebot came calling to re-index your site. If their spider tries to download a page but instead gets either no response or an excessively slow response, it will assume that site or page no longer exists. Presto! …you’re deleted. To prevent this from happening, follow the steps we outline in our comprehensive article about maximizing your site’s uptime.

• Another common reason your site can disappear from Google is a faulty robots.txt file. We recommend robots.txt files as a great way to keep portions of your site off limits to search engine spiders. For instance, there’s probably no reason for Google to index your images directory or your cgi-bin directory, so why waste their time and your resources by allowing spiders to access parts of your site you don’t need indexed.

  However, it your robots.txt file is written or set up incorrectly, you could be inadvertently shutting googlebot out of your site altogether. One common mistake we see is where someone places the following code in their robots.txt:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /

  These two lines, when placed in a robots.txt file located in the top-level directory on your server, are enough to exclude every search engine spider from your entire site! Not only will you not get indexed by Google, you probably won’t be indexed by any other search engine either. And even if you were indexed previously, a poorly done robots.txt file can easily get your site deleted from the engines.

  To insure you are crystal clear about the correct procedures, be sure to familiarize yourself with the robots exclusion protocol.

  ( Editor’s Note: Use the robots.txt tester to check your robots file for errors or create a new one from scratch using the Simple robots.txt Creator. )

• Another commonly overlooked reason for dropping out of the Google index is that your site recently lost some links. If your site was made up of pages that had almost no PageRank to begin with, and those pages lost some of their incoming links, it’s possible that your PageRank dropped so low that your site was removed from Google’s index. While rare, this does occasionally happen, so check your incoming links and make sure you still have enough good ones to keep you well-listed in Google.

• Finally, sometimes getting booted from Google can simply be chalked up to faulty behavior by the Google spider. It’s not easy to maintain an index of over four billion pages every month. Sometimes things go wrong. If you think this may be the case, your best recourse is to contact Google directly at help@google.com. Calmly explain your situation. Politely ask them why your pages were removed from their listings. If it is their fault, they will usually reinstate your site fairly quickly – that is, once they’ve responded to your email, which can take up to a week or more.

Tags: adding, age, ark, boot, code, computer, download, engine, error, Google, Google, IDE, image, list, optimization, page, PHP, ping, proc, PROM, ranking, search, search engine optimization, SEF, server, traffic, XP

Google, a popular search engine, is a tool for finding resources on the World Wide Web. Google scans web pages to find instances of the keywords you have entered in the search box.

The Manuscripts Department at UNC Chapel Hills uses a special version of Google on its web site. This Google feature only searches the Department’s web site and not the entire World Wide Web. By using the department’s Google feature, you can focus your search solely on the Manuscripts Department’s holdings.

Google is web search program that ranks web pages in a list of hits by giving weight to the links that reference a specific page.

Google is a search engine owned by Google, Inc. whose mission statement is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The largest search engine on the web, Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services. The last reported figures were 200 million queries each day as of February 2004, up from 3 million queries per day in September 1999 resp. 10,000 queries per day in November 1998.

Much is being written about Gmail, Google’s new free webmail system. There’s something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into other applications; they’ve been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red herring.

No, the story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else.

I’ve written before about Google’s snippet service, which required that they store the entire web in RAM. All so they could generate a slightly better page excerpt than other search engines.

Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It’s a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup

Tags: age, Applications, code, computing, dev, filesystem, Free, Google, Google, IDE, list, memory, migration, page, proc, process, RAM, scripts, search, Search Engines, SEF, server, Software, World Wide Web