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SEO Tip: Use Comments Section of Your Blog to Get More Search Engine Traffic

Raj — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:14:21 +0000

I presume that you very well know how important it is to use the most appropriate keywords, in your blog posts and websites, to get the kind of traffic you expect from search engines. If you are still a beginner in this arena, I recommend you reading – 5 steps to finding the best keywords for your website, or, please continue reading this post.

I usually don’t find enough time to spend towards analyzing the web server logs of my blog for doing additional keyword research after it’s a while since an article has been posted. Luckily, for me, I found some free time last month that I thought should be spent in looking at the keywords that people have been using to reach my blog site. And I found something that did not strike my mind earlier. I quickly conducted an experiment and the result has been mind blowing.

I found that there were many posts/articles in my site that were receiving hits using various keywords, that too long tail, that I had not mentioned in the article when I posted them. Then how come they received traffic, a lot of traffic, using those keywords? – It was the comments section that enlightened me. There were many comments posted in the comments section of some articles and to my surprise someone had actually used good keywords, while posting their comments, that did not had lot of competition in the search engine. It was obvious that I had to start a little experiment to see if I could use it to my advantage.

How to use the comments section to get more search engine traffic?

My experiment had the following steps:-

First, I read through the comments that were posted.
Found relevant keywords that I had not used earlier in the post. Made a small list of at least 3-5 keywords such keywords that had less competition in the search engine.
Replied to the comments posted by visitors and included the keywords from my list in the sentences I used.
Made my reply look as natural as possible. The subsequent replies to the comments included more and more keywords.

Result of this experiment? – After few weeks of using this technique, I started receiving more and more search engine traffic because of those keywords that I had used in the comments section. I am now continuing to use this technique and results are outstanding.

Bonus Tips for using this keywords technique

If there are multiple comments, don’t reply to all of them at once. You should reply to each one of them individually and use different keywords in every reply. You may also want to repeat some of the keywords that you think are important.
If a visitor needs additional info that is available in one of your earlier posts, then put a link in the comments section to that post and use a good keyword as the anchor text to link to that article. Example – I will show you how to find the best keywords.
Always use the keywords that are relevant to the topic of your posts. Avoid using negative keywords that add no value.

Also, I am doing an another experiment to see if I can increase my AdSense PPC value in anyway using the same technique. If I see a dramatic increase in my AdSense PPC values, I will let you know about it.

Please post your comments and thoughts in the comments section below and I will take it forward. If you use this technique in your blogs, please do let us know how did it go with you. Remember – The success of this technique depends directly on the keywords you choose.

If you haven’t subscribed to my blog yet, please do so (Use Email or RSS) to receive such articles in future by either email or in your RSS reader.
[tags]How To, Keywords, Search Engine, Optimization, SEO Tips, SEO, Keyword Research[/tags]

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4 things to consider before submitting your site to web directories

Raj — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:00:07 +0000

We’ll know how important it’s to have as many as quality links from different websites to your site and most of us tend to rely on directory submission to get back links from high PR directories and its pages. But you should know that submitting your site to every directory doesn’t really help you in gaining more PR or any kind of benefit. Why? – Because, search engines have started to scrutinize web directories and their website inclusion process. The chances of a web directory getting penalized is very high when it doesn’t follow certain quality guidelines and hence your backlinks could be considered paid text links.

For the benefit of those who are interested in submitting their websites to various directories hoping to get some link love from search engines, here are 4 major points that you should consider before you decide to submit your website to a directory.

1. Does the directory accept paid submission? If a web directory accepts paid submission, that is, you pay the directory certain amount of money to get listed in their pages, someday that directory could get banned from search engines and you will stop receiving any kind of benefit from your listing in that directory. Why? – Because there could be no quality guidelines that the web directory might follow to list your website for a fee, wherein that fee is not used to main the software, web servers, payment to people who manually review a site etc. It could be just a money making directory but not a directory of genuine websites having good content.

2. Does the directory require a compulsory backlink if they list your website in their directory? If yes – This MAY be ok to a certain extent. But if a directory lists all sorts of websites and require a backlink before a site is listed its pages, think again. Such directories are only looking at getting as many as sites listed in its pages to get more backlinks and then use the traffic to make a lot of money. They could get banned any day in future. And since you are linking out to them, you may also suffer the penalty to a certain extent.

3. Are there any quality guidelines that the web directory follows to list a website? Is there a manual inclusion process or links are automatically placed in the directory? There are tons of directories on Internet which accepts websites from online/offline tools and that too without any kind of manual review of the website submitted, so, every site that’s submitted is listed. Such directories do not really offer any benefit to you in short/long term. Think again!

4. Consider the quality of URLs in the directory before you submit your website for getting listed in it. Lookup the category and sub-category in which you want to list your website and then browse the links of those websites that are already listed there. Check to see if those websites have good content and are genuine. There is not point in getting listed in a directory that consists of only low quality links despite manual review process.

I am sure, SEO experts might add more points to the list above. If you have something to say, please write in the comments sections below and share your thoughts.
[tags]Directory Submission, Internet, Search Engine, SEO[/tags]

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Xinu: An all-in-one tool for checking SEO related stuff of your site

Raj — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:07:37 +0000

I always wanted to have an online tool that can show me almost every aspect of search engine optimization related stuff of my websites on a single page and I have finally found something that matches very close to my requirement. It’s called Xinu and is quite remarkable. Now I no longer need to check out ten different websites for checking 10 different aspects of my site’s SEO related things. Xinu makes all the information available on a single page and saves lot of my time.

Here are few important features that might be of your interest.

Website Ranking – Shows your site’s rank on Google (Page Rank), Alexa, DMOZ and Technorati.
Indexed Pages Info – Returns information about the number of the indexed pages from your website in Google, Yahoo, Live and also Google Images.
Backlinks – Shows number of backlinks from popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Live, Technorati, Ask Jeeves and many others.
Validations – Displays errors encountered in your site’s HTML, CSS and RSS validation.
Site Diagnosis – Performs simple diagnosis of a website for its Title, Description, Keywords tag and few other HTML tags.

There could be more such online tools out there on Internet. If you know of any such tool, please share the links in the comments section.

» Visit [Xinu]

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Finally an increase in traffic from Yahoo to my blog

Raj — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:59:23 +0000

I started blogging on this site in Nov’06 and since then it was always Google that referred the most of number of users from their search engine to my site for many articles that I have since posted. Yahoo on the other hand was very slow to pick up my pages despite the fact that I had submitted my sitemap to their search engine for better and faster indexing.

Since last few weeks, I see a lot of traffic from Yahoo search engine towards my blog. Their search referral traffic has increased almost by four times and I welcome that. I am not sure what they changed recently but whatever it be I appreciate it.

Having said that, Yahoo still fails to index my fresh content faster. Google does an awesome job of showing up my posted articles in their search engine results for various keywords within a week of an article getting posted. Yahoo on the other hand has my few months old content shown up in their search results. Could be that difference in search engine algorithm between Yahoo and Google, and also the index refresh frequency interval these engines uses.

Or, could it be that search engine optimization of my blog that I did was not in line with what Yahoo recommends?

Do you observe any increase in traffic from Yahoo search engine?

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SEO Tip for Blogs – Show Popular Posts on Home Page

Raj — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 21:00:39 +0000

I wanted to implement this since very long but did not made enough efforts to show the most popular posts on my home page to gain some search engine ranking benefits. Recently, I read a post from Matt Cutt’s blog and gone through his presentation on SEO tips for bloggers and one of the blogs that he referred to for SEO optimization of blogs was that of Stephan Spencer’s blog.

A big thanks to Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin which was very easy to install and setup. It did not take more than 5 minutes to get it up and running and as a result my sidebar now also shows the most popular posts.

From Stephan’s blog:

Wouldn’t it make sense to take your very best posts, regardless of posting date, and endow them with a maximum amount of link gain so they have the most opportunity to rank well in the search engines?

Putting together a Top 10 Posts list for your home page will do exactly that, by strategically passing link gain from your blog’s home page directly to these posts.

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What If Your Site Disappears from Search Engines?

Raj — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 21:01:15 +0000

Can you imagine, what could be the impact on your business or the web site if all of a sudden your entire site disappears from search engine’s results? That’s right, no more visitors coming to your site from Google and other search engines, just the traffic from referrals of other websites, bookmarks and direct type-ins.

For some of us this would mean a disaster and immediate drop in earnings, for others this would further result in loss of business following a closure. Can this happen to you? I think yes, it can happen to majority of us who depend on search engine traffic as our sole source of visitors who would then turn into customers.

Should you put your business in hands of search engines?

Yes, but partially! and only to an extent till which you can withstand the loss of search engine traffic at any time and still make profit. Most of the businesses out there heavily rely on the traffic resulting from search engines as the single most source of receiving potential customers. Even their business model is slowly adjusted to start depending on search engine’s traffic. This doesn’t alway work! You may lose majority of the search engine traffic, if not entirely, and if your business model depends on search engine’s traffic then you are in trouble. You must know that you can not always stand in top 10 results or the first page of the search engine for most of the time. There could be some other website that can start ranking higher than your site and drastically affect the traffic to your site. And since 90% of the users do not go past the second page of the search engine’s results page, this would mean further trouble! Think about it!

What can you do to avoid this potential risk?

One immediate step that you must take is to ensure that you stop relying on search engine’s traffic as the only source of getting potential customers to your site. Engage in affiliate marketing and other relevant marketing programs that will give you further exposure into the market and get more customers. This way you will slowly discover new avenues of receiving potential customers. Start building more referral links from other websites, participate in advertisement programs that will refer targeted customers who will be more likely to buy your products and services.

If you have some tips for our readers or suggestions, please share it in comments sections below.

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Matt Cutts WordPress Blog has been Hacked!

Raj — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:42:41 +0000

Matt cutts is currently the head of Google’s Webspam team and frequently blogs on his site.

I am a subscriber to his blog and use Netvibes to read the RSS updates from various sites and since yesterday the blog of Matt cutts was showing up an error message in Netvibes. I initially thought it be to a network related problem due to which Netvibes was not able to reach his blog site but it was only when I typed his blog’s address in the browser, to my shock, I saw this – “This site have been hacked by… message” on his home page (see the snap shot below).

This reminds us how important it is to secure our websites to prevent such hacks happening to our blog. We must ensure that we use safe and strong passwords, disable directory listing and ensure that we always update our wordpress version to the latest release.

Note: This incident coincides with April 1st and if Matt is playing a prank, it’s a nice one.

Update: This eventually turned out to be a prank by Matt Cutts that he setup for April Fool’s Day! and it was a good one!

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How To: Get Your Site Out of Google’s Supplemental Index

Raj — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:05:20 +0000

Since the inception of ‘Supplemental Results’ by Google, webmasters have struggled to get their content out of supplemental index of Google. New websites with fresh content often find their some or all of the pages in Google’s supplemental index and then it’s a long wait before your site’s content moves from supplemental index to the main index. Here are some tips to get your site out of Google’s supplemental index and move into the main index and stay in main index.

1. Make sure that every page of your site has its own unique title. If possible, give unique description to all the pages of the site.

2. All the pages must have unique content to avoid getting penalized by search engines. Avoid sub domain with similar content which is already in the pages of the main URL of your site.

3. Every page of your site must be linked through at least one other page of your site. The better inter-site linking you do, the chances of your pages not getting into supplemental results increases. Try to avoid links to pages using sessions IDs, don’t use dynamic navigation menu systems, avoid Javascript based navigation menus at all cost. Don’t use too many query strings in the URL. If a search engine crawler can not read your links, pages will not be indexed.

4. Adhere to W3C standards as much as possible. Get your HTML validated for standards. [This may not be applicable always]

5. If your content is short such as blog posts, try to use popular keywords in your content and link these pages from the main page or other pages of your site. [Similar to point # 3]

To check if pages from your site are in Google’s supplemental index, either type site:www.your-domain.com *** in Google’s search or use the nice handy tool at [oy-oy.eu]

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5 Easy Steps to find Top and Best Keywords for Your Website and Advertising

Raj — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 00:08:18 +0000

This is a very effective technique for people who are engaged in ad campaign, search engine marketing, search engine optimization and looking forward to either getting more traffic from search engines by using good keywords in web sites or increase the sales numbers from their ad campaigns. We will first learn to find the best keywords, their search volume and then learn about using those top keywords to our maximum advantage. You will not have to buy keywords list anymore!

The tool that we will use for extracting the top and best keywords is Google’s AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool. People with AdWords account must be familiar with this tool but we will extend its usage by couple of more steps for them too. And others who do not advertise on Internet can use it to discover the top and best keywords and respective search volume for using them in your websites.

» Step1 – Connect to Google Keyword Suggestion Tool.

» Step2 – You will see that the pre-selected tab is ‘Keyword Variations‘. Click on the second tab – ‘Site-Related Keywords‘. To select the country and language for your keywords, click on ‘Edit‘ link located just on top of those two tabs. Then select the country and language relevant to you.

» Step3 – Now type the website URL [such as your competitor's website URL or a website's URL from your niche area] from which you would like to determine all the keywords and also find keywords from pages that are linked from the main URL. First type the URL, then click ‘Include other pages on my site linked from this URL‘.

» Step4 – If you click ‘Get Keywords‘, it will anyway show you lot of keywords from the website you typed in. But let’s first select ‘Cost and Ad position estimates’ from the ‘Choose data to display‘ drop down box below. Choose a lower CPC value in your currency to get more keywords from the tool. You may key in a higher CPC value if you wish to.

» Step5 – Now that you have all the keywords and their respective CPC values also, export them into CSV and then open it using Excel. Filter the result set based on your requirement and use them in either your website or in your ad campaign.

That was simple. Isn’t it? We will now use the first tab ‘Keyword Variations‘ to get lot of keywords to use in our content. Start by typing in a keyword or a keyword phrase and then select ‘Keywords Only‘ or ‘Keywords Popularity‘ to see a list of keywords and their respective search volume. If you see keywords for which there are not many website in competition, then use those keywords in your website, do a proper web site optimization to achieve better ranking in search engines.

Bonus Tips: There are many other tips that you can follow to get more out of this tool.

» Tip#1 – In the drop down box ‘Choose data to display’, select ‘Keywords only‘ to get keywords based on the page you selected or keyword phrase you entered. You can use these keywords in your website for getting more traffic from search engines as these are the most widely used search keywords to find information using search engines

» Tip#2 – Select ‘Keyword Popularity‘ in the drop down box to see information pertaining to advertisers bidding for the same keywords vs actual search volume for the same keywords. Remember, best keywords will get you better results when used in either your website or ad campaign. If you are building pages to attract lot of search engine traffic, use the keywords which are used more in searches and in case of a niche area, use the keywords which are used less in searches for achieving better ranking in search engines.

» Tip#3 – Use the ‘Global search volume trends‘ option to see a trend of search volume for keywords you selected. This helps you in determining the most effective keywords to select.

» Tip#4 – If you select ‘Possible negative keywords‘ in the drop down box, you will see keywords that are not so relevant to use in ad campaign. A search phrase ‘Good SEO’ has the word ‘Good’ as a possible negative keyword but may work otherwise depending on your requirements. This is a little trickier than you think.

» Thinking out of the Box

Many publishers find it annoying to see Wikipedia dominating the top position for the keywords they use in their websites. To determine those keywords which make Wikipedia rank higher than you, simply enter the relevant Wikipedia URL in the ‘Site-related Keywords’ tab and then select ‘keyword only’ to see all keywords from those Wikipedia pages and then select ‘Keyword Popularity’ to find search volumes against those keywords. That tip should help a lot of publishers in ranking better.

» Tip for new web sites: For people with new websites who are looking for only keywords for their pages, I recommend that they first find the relevant pages in Wikipedia and then use the specific Wikipedia URL in the ‘Site related keywords’ section to find the best keywords for their web site.

I hope these tips will help you achieve your goals with ease. Please feel free to share your feedback, comments and suggestions regarding this post.

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Looking for ways to remove your site and its pages from search engines?

Raj — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:27:41 +0000

Are you a webmaster who is looking for ways to remove the old and non existent content of your site from search engines? If yes, then this is the right place to see some effective ways of getting your site, pages, blog and images out of search engine’s index.

First, let’s look at the most common reasons because of which webmasters want to remove some of the pages or an entire site out of search engine’s index.

» Very old pages with content no longer valid or applicable.
» Pages with wrong information which was indexed in search engines before you could act on it.
» Pages with confidential information was indexed as it was linked from a public page or due to other possible causes.
» Migration from an old domain or URL to a new domain or URL.
» Sub domain or a folder under a parent domain is no longer in use or applicable.
» The site was under testing when it got indexed.

Different ways of removing your content from search engines

While the reason to remove the content could be any, ways are limited and depends on which search engine you want your content to be removed from. Let’s look at some ways which are search engine specific and then common methods which are applicable to all major search engines.

» Removing your content from Google

Google provides you with an online automatic URL removal tool using which webmasters can request removal of their indexed URLs, domains, sub domains, group of pages, sub folder etc. To be able to successfully submit a request for removal, your existing URL must return a 404 header message to tell Google that the content is no longer available (or) add a META tag in your pages to prevent Google from indexing it again (or) use robots.txt exclusion. As long as the META tag is embedded in the pages, site crawlers will not index your pages any further. To successfully return a 404 header for pages that needs to be removed and no longer available, the 404 error page must be set to return a 404 HTTP header when it is called for. Many websites do not return a 404 header when the error page is called and that’s why search engines fail to detect absence of pages from your site.

» Other common ways of removing content from search engines

[Option # 1]: Using robots.txt file to remove site, partial content from all or specific search engines.

We can make use of robots.txt exclusion to prevent the search engines from indexing the pages, folders, sub domains etc. Let’s see how it works.

[Note: In the below examples, replace Googlebot with MSNBot for MSN search engine, and here is a list of many known robots that you can use in the following examples instead of Googlebot]

» To remove your entire website from all search engines and prevent further indexing by all search engine crawlers, place the following lines in robots.txt file in the root folder of your site.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

» To remove your site from Google only and prevent only Google bot from crawling your site in future, place the following lines in the robots.txt in web server’s root folder.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

» To remove only the https version of indexed pages from search engines, place the following in robots.txt file in the folder which serves the secured page of your site.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

» To remove all the pages under a particular directory [say scripts], place the following in the robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /scripts

» To remove all pages under a specific directory from just Google, use the following lines in robots.txt

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /scripts

» To remove a specific file type from search engines, use the following [example gif files]

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.gif$

» And to remove gifs only from Google, use the following.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.gif$

» To remove dynamically generated pages, use the following in robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?

» If it’s Google specific, use the following.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?

» To remove only images from Google’s image index, place the following in robots.txt file. I am not sure if replacing Googlebot-Image in below with a * will work with other search engines. You may try and let me know.

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /imagename.jpg

» To remove all images from a directory of your site, use the following.

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/*.gif$

[Option #2]: Using HTTP META tags in HTML pages to remove content from search engines.

» To prevent all search engine robots from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the section of your page.

» To prevent only Google robot from indexing a page, you’d use the following tag in your page.

» To allow all search engine robots to index the current page but NOT index any links from this page, place the following META tag on your page.

» To remove the page snippet that is displayed under the page title of search results, use the following:

Note: This will also remove the cached version of your pages from the search index.

» To remove a blog from search engine’s index, place the following in the tag of your site.

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How to use Channels Effectively to help you Increase Your AdSense Revenue

Raj — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 00:43:42 +0000

Channels help you determine specific data points about performance of pages, pages with highest AdSense clicks and effectiveness of Ad units in your site. There are many ways in which you can leverage the AdSense channels to measure the performance of different pages vs ad units, find the CTR of a specific or group of pages, track the performance across different domains and add up all these data points to determine the pages that offer maximum contribution towards your AdSense earnings. Using channels does not directly increase your adsense income but using it in such a way that you get to know about various performance data points can help you towards doing effective AdSense optimization resulting in significant increase in your adsense profits.

What are channels?

Channel is a good way of mapping certain ad units, pages or groups of pages, sub-domains, domains to a friendly name which you can use to distinguish between the Ad units served across your site(s). You can create a channel name (say channel name is mysite_adunit_200x200) and map it to certain adsense code, say 200×200 ad unit, then use it on every page of your site at the top. After which when you look at your AdSense reports, the data about your adsense earnings, impressions, CTR and eCPM will be shown channel wise. So, if 200 ads of that 200×200 ad unit were served and out of which 5 people clicked on the ad, then it makes a lot of sense to use this data against other channels that you can compare with to track performance of other ad units on the pages of your site. Does it make sense?

Let me use another example. I run a forum based website and would like to use AdSense to track performance of ad units. I use a 480×60 unit on the top of every page and a similar 480×60 ad unit at the bottom of every page. I will now create two channels by names sitename_480x60_top and sitename_480x60_bottom, respectively. Going forward, this will help me in understanding which ad unit is performing best in terms of click through ratio and eCPM. I can then start experimenting with different ad units and name them accordingly to track their performance over time. The result will be lot of data that I can use for AdSense optimization for a forum.

Types of Channels

There are two different types of channels. URL Channel and Custom Channel. While URL channels can be used to track performance of ad units across your site, sub domains or a specific page, using Custom channels will let you track performance of specific ad units across different pages, one specific page, group of pages, adsense for search etc.

Using Channel Effectively

While there are no adsense secrets to using channels, there are some simple and logical tips that you can follow for effective performance tracking.

1. Use logical channel names that will let you distinguish between ad units of one type with ad unit of another types.
2. Use URL channels as much as possible to determine the performance of individual pages or group of pages.
3. Use URL channels for subdomains to get a quick understanding about performance between your sub domains
4. Follow a universal channel naming convention across all channels. One good example of a naming convention is shortsitename_adunittype_text(and|or)image_pagename_location, so examples would be bh_480x60_ti_thispage_top [where bh = bloghash.com, ti = text and image, thispage = a shortname of this page and top = location of this ad unit i.e top of the page]
5. If your site has less than 200 pages, I suggest you use a channel name for every page on your site. This will be very time consuming process but your efforts will be paid off very well.
6. Don’t create many channel names just because you have many available [200 of them], this will give you unrealistic performance report if you were to see a historical trend for a longer duration.
7. You can create, deactive, rename and delete channel names. So use them wisely.

Some Ideas with Channels

If you know how to code in PHP or other scripting languages, instead of embedding AdSense code on every page, use a simple PHP function to display adsense on the pages of your site. Use a mapping of URLs and channel IDs such that depending on the page that you are accessing, assign a channel ID in your adsense code using PHP. This is a simple trick to achieve with PHP. Since you have only 200 channels to use for your content pages, use this trick to measure the performance of as many page as you can.

I have implemented channels, now what?

Now that you have some data available for analysis, here is what you can do with it.

1. Measure the variation in performance of ad units over time.
2. Experiment with different ad units on pages with highest performance to determine the best performing ad units.
3. Measure the performance between different pages, sub domains and domains and place additional ad units of different advertisers such as amazon, text link ads or banners of some high paying affiliate programs.
4. Based on data available for high performing pages, determine which adsense keywords are attracting people from search engines to those pages or groups of pages on your site.
5. If you can, create a simple graph with available data to show top 20% performing ad unit and pages, look at it the other way, see the top 20% pages and ad units which are NOT performing well. Now, optimize the ad units formats and ad unit placements for only these pages to see an immediate impact on your adsense earnings.

It gets better only with experiments to determine the best suited ad units and effective placement of adsense ads on the pages of your site.

Related: How to make money with AdSense?

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Is Tracking AdSense or Ad clicks Good or Bad?

Raj — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:59:59 +0000

First, for people who didn’t knew that AdSense or other Ad clicks can be tracked, it’s possible with tons of such solutions already available on Internet. These solutions can effectively track the clicks on your AdSense ads. A simple Google search on ‘Track AdSense Clicks’, will produce lot of results to help you choose any of the available solutions to track the AdSense clicks.

Now, for people who want to track such clicks, there are few things to think about. Is tracking ad clicks good or a bad thing to do? Answer to this question should be available to you in few more minutes, after you complete reading this post.

An insider into how ad click tracking works!

Every ad showing program that publishers like us use on our site, has a landing page. So, if a user clicks on an ad on your site, he will be taken to a landing page on some remote website or your own website (if you serve internal Ads). To track those ad clicks, you will need to have some sort of solution on your pages that will track the outbound clicks to advertiser’s site. This is a little different when it comes to ad programs like AdSense where all the clicks will first go to Google’s website and then quickly redirect to advertiser’s website or a landing page. Google does this to record clicks from your website.

To track outbound clicks from AdSense served ads, you will have to track outgoing clicks to googlesyndication.com. Since you can not track these clicks using a server side script since the ads are clicked in the client’s browser, some sort of script must be used at the client side to track such clicks. Javacript based scripts are best for tracking such outbound clicks.

Companies or individuals offering solutions to tracks ad clicks have two types of solutions to accomplish this. First type of solution will place a Javascript on your site and track the clicks on a third party website such as website of the company offering the free or a paid solution. They will then be able to show you the click metrics on their web site. Second type of solution requires that you install or place [copy and paste] Javascript on your site and the clicks are recorded in a database on your site itself. The metrics are recorded and available from your site itself. The second type of solution does not transmit any data from your site to any third party website.

Advantages of tracking ad clicks using both types of ad click tracking solutions

The main advantages of implementing an ad click tracking solution on your site are:

Ability to track exact number of ad clicks on your site, including sub domains and all pages of your site.
Accurate reporting on number of ads clicked and pages they were clicked from and
A reporting system to show you some data about the how pages perform on your site.

Disadvantages of tracking ad clicks with programs that record information remotely?

Read this section carefully. The following are the disadvantages of using such ad tracking programs that records all click data on either a third party website or the website of the company offering such programs:

Information about your pages with highest performance is available to other companies.
Best performing Keywords and keyterms of your site is also available to them.
Your search engine ranking and the keywords that make you perform well is easy to derive from such recorded data. Since the click data is being recorded remotely, such key information about your site is much easier to find from the collected data.
Historical reports about your site’s best performing pages, keywords, search engine ranking can be easily used by your competitors to create similar pages and compete with you.

Conclusion: We don’t say that the companies offering solutions to track your AdSense or other ad clicks on their website and offer free stats will reveal important information to other party companies. But before you sign-up to implement such solutions where your click tracking information is hosted remotely, obtain clarification from those companies about what they will do with the recorded data from your website. If you already use such solutions, read the Terms and Conditions of your solution provider and ensure that the recorded information is not shared or sold to other companies. A program that will record all such information in your database without a need of having it transmitted to a remote server is what we recommend in a long term. After all, it requires lot of hard work to make it to the top of search engine results and stay there. Isn’t it?

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Top and Best WordPress Plugins You MUST See!

Raj — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 00:54:24 +0000

Of late, I have come across many posts and articles mentioning the top 10 WordPress plugins and I don’t want to be left behind. This post will show you some of the best and top WordPress plugins that will enhance the functionality of your WordPress blog.

Core Functionality WordPress Plugins

[Akismet] – It checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key [Free] to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. This is a MUST to have plugin and without which you will have a tough time fighting with spam comments on your blog. It is bundled along with your WordPress installation files, so all you need to do is get your API key and activate it.

[Spam Karma 2 (SK2)] – Another great plugin for fighting spam in your blogs. Read the FAQs about this plugin.

[WordPress Database Backup] – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. This plugin is bundled along with WordPress core installation files. Enable it and take regular backups. You never know when things could go wrong. Taking a backup ensures that you have all the content in your hand for easy recovery. This plugin can lets you download the backup, email it or store in a folder on the server itself. A must to have this plugin activated in your WordPress and more important is that you take backup of your WP database regularly.

[WP-Cache] – This is a very efficient and fast caching system plugin for WordPress. It’s a must to have plugin in these days when you never know when someone will digg you and your site might unexpectedly go down. Caching help your blog to a great extent by saving a static copy of your content and serve your visitors without a need to query the database to fetch the pages.

[Admin Drop Down Menu] – For people with lot of things installed in their WordPress, this plugin will be a time saver. When installed, you don’t need to click on top menu items in Admin menu, just hover your mouse and it will display the sub menu items just beneath that. This demo page is best to explain how it works.

Manage Advertising on Your Blogs

[Adsense-Deluxe] – This plugin places Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. The best part about this plugin is that it lets you create AdSense blocks with AdSense code in it. You are not limited to use it just to display AdSense, instead also put HTML, Javascript code of your newsletter subscription form or something else and it will work. At the end of this post, you will see a link to subscribe to our updates and feeds by email. That’s a simple trick with this plugin. Another great feature of this plugin is its ability to enable AdSense units selectively on only front page, single posts and globally enable and disable AdSense. To change AdSense unit code everywhere all you have to do is change the code in the Admin area and it changes it on all pages in one go. That’s a plus for people who frequently experiment with their AdSense units to achieve better performance.

[WP-Ads] – This is another top plugin that will let you create zones and place various ad units in those zones. You can place more than one ad unit in a zone and WP-Ads plugin will rotate it for you. The plugins page in admin section also shows the number of times the ad units were served. Creating and managing your ad inventory is very easy with this plugin.

[WP e-Commerce Lite] – If you are in need of a shopping cart for your blogs, this is the one. The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your product and services online.

External Services Related Plugins

[flickrRSS] – This plugin allows you to display Flickr photos on your site. The plugin supports user, public and group photo streams. It’s easy to setup and configure via an options panel. It also has image cache support too.

Feed Management

[Feedburner Feed Replacement] – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents.

Forms in WordPress

[PXS Mail Form] – A great form for using in WordPress. It has a CC Sender option, validates email address, send email to multiple recipients and it will even create a drop-down menu if required to allow the user to select a recipient.

Podcasting in WordPress

[PodPress] – With this plugin, you can see how Podcast will look like on iTunes, Podcast Download stats, Support for Premium Content, Audio Comments and many more features. Visit their page for more information.

[PhoneBlogz] – PhoneBlogz allows you to blog to your WordPress by phone and they also support direct posting and remote polling. More information on their website.

Reports for WordPress

[Analytics and Feedburner Reports] – Anyone with an account with either Google Analytics or Feedburner would love to have this plugin. It displays statistics about your site in a very simple to understand graphics. It also the ability to automatically installed Google Analytics tracking code in your WordPress for you.

Search Engine Optimization [SEO] and Traffic Related

[Add Meta Tags] - A great plugin that adds the post’s categories and excerpt to the “keywords” and the “description” XHTML meta tags respectively, while viewing single posts. It also adds the blog’s description and categories to the “description” and the “keywords” meta tags respectively on the home page. A must for your SEO related activities. However, not every search engine relies on META tags anymore, but this greatly helps in improving your Search Engine visibility in many ways.

[Dagon Design Sitemap Generator] – Generates a customizable sitemap containing all posts and pages. You will have to create a page by name ‘Sitemap’ and use this plugin to generate a sitemap with all posts and pages of your blog. This is a great plugin to show a sitemap on your blog that automatically gets updated every time you post a new article or create a page.

[Google Sitemaps] – This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. The sitemap is automatically updated with your blog entries and you can use the URL of sitemap [http://your-domain.com/sitemap.xml] to submit to search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. Not only Google, but Yahoo! and Microsoft will also use the same sitemap going forward. [Read the FAQs on http://www.sitemaps.org/]

[Ultimate Tag Warrior] – It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in WordPress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAX box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors. [Note: Some blogs seemed to have performance issues with this plugin. Please observe for any such issues on your blog and act accordingly]

[Simple Tagging] – Those looking for an alternative to UTW plugin, look no further. Simple Tagging is another tagging plugin for WordPress that is much faster than other tagging plugins and very easy to use. It features auto suggestion of tags in Ajax style and can also import your existing WordPress categories as tags. I use this plugin for tagging the posts on this blog. You can see how it in Tags section at the start of this post entry or read my post on Simple Tagging for details.

Social Bookmarking

[Digg This Reloaded] – Adds Digg story link/button to your posts as well as options to submit to other social bookmarking sites. This plugin has an integrated release with Share This plugin bundled with it. After a post is dugg, it show the number of diggs on your post just like it’s shown on digg website.

[Share This] – A great plugin with options of many bookmarking sites in it. And it can also email from within the plugin itself.

WordPress Posts Related

[Related Posts] – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. At the end of this post, see the Related Posts section. That’s how it will show up on your site too! A great way to show more content to your visitors.

[Landing sites] – There is a problem with search results and that is when people search for content on Internet, they often land on pages from your blog looking for specific content which is readily not available on pages such as categories. This will drive them away and sometimes they may not even come back. To overcome this problem, help them by showing them related posts to their search on your blog? This plugin lets you do that, works with a long list of search engines! It’s NOT same as Related posts plugin, but works on similar concept by showing posts related to the search keywords used by a visitor. Test it out by search for “mod_rewrite example” and click on the link that points to this site. You will see this plugin’s implementation on the top of the page. Another advantage is that, by offering more number of relevant pages from your site to visitors, you increase the chances of retaining the visitor for longer duration on the site and it increases your page views.

[Recent Comments] – This plugin displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog. A great way to show recent comments posted in your blog site in your sidebar.

[Subscribe To Comments] – This plugin allows your readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. It also lets them manage the subscription by themselves without your intervention. You can see it in action under the comments section below.

Please let us know the plugins that you are using on your site, why you use them and if you recommend them to others. We will be glad to add them to this list.

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Tips and Tricks for Optimizing AdSense for Forums

Raj — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 20:55:18 +0000

These are 8 most effective tips for achieving better results with AdSense in forums.

1. Placing Ads for New Users – Let them be first time visitors or repeat visitors who will click on a thread for the first time to read the posts inside a thread, placing an Ad unit between first and second post in a thread performs best. You will have to blend the Ad unit well with your color schemes but do not blend it so well that your users will confuse between a post and an Ad. We recommend placing an horizontal Ad unit of size 468×60 and if your forum template is set to auto width, place a bigger and wide skyscrapper Ad Unit. If you don’t want to place a sckysrcapper unit, place a horizontal link unit between first and second post or between first three posts. This works very well with forums which are focused on niche areas and have a lot of keywords in their posts.

2. Placing Ads for Repeat Users – Repeat users are those who keep coming back to follow up on their earlier posts. They will immediately start reading the latest post and also since many forum softwares send a direct link to the page where the last post was made, they will not look at the beginning of the thread anyway. This also holds true when they have started a thread and have been following it for quite long. Placing an Ad unit just before OR after the last post performs best in this case.

3. Using Image ONLY Ad Units – Placing at least one Image ONLY Ad Unit increases the CPM Ads. Sometimes depending on traffic you will see lot of CPM Ads which is good. You may use your primary Ad unit as a text only unit, use a secondary Ad unit as an Image ONLY Ad unit to receive lot of CPM Ads. This works very well for forums with high traffic.

4. Use AdSense for Search – Using ‘AdSense for Search’ on your forum does not always produce high revenue but adds up to your existing revenue and works well with large forums.

5. Monetize 404 and Other Error Pages – For forums with thousands of hits every day, there could be at least 50-60 404 [not found] or other such error messages encountered by visitors. Why not monetize the your 404 and error pages? Place Ad Link units or skyscrapper or any other type of Ad unit on those pages. This one will depend on how you want to handle and design your 404 pages, so experiment and decide the best Ad unit. Don’t just use the default 404 pages, replace them with a better 404 page that will show nice Ads and also offer suggestions with alternate pages.

6. Avoid Ad Blindness – Repeat users who visit your site almost every day develop Ad blindness to your Ads on the forum. Try to take advantage of color scheme rotation, change the Ad placement, size of Ad units on a regular basis. Changing the Ad placement on a monthly basis is advised. For example: for first month, you can place and Ad unit between first and second post. Next month, place it before the first post and after third post. Then in the following month, place it between first and second then between second and third post. Keep changing the places and experiment. Also, don’t forget to change the color scheme with each change.

7. Placing Ads on Left and Right of Post Area – Placing vertical skyscrapper on either left of right side of the posts in the forum is recommended. Blend it well with the existing color scheme of the forum. Try to move it at either side on regular basis. Example: First month, you may place a vertical skyscrapper on left, next month on right. Enable Image ONLY Ad unit, sometimes, to increase the CPM Ads.

8. Ad Link Units Placement – In forums, placing an Ad link unit just before the place where it reads “Previous Thread | Next Thread” works very well. You should blend it very well with the color of the link that reads “Previous Thread | Next Thread” for best performance. Don’t always keep it there, replace it with other Ad units on a regular basis. Disable it for a month and enable it again. Keep experimenting. Work on any Ad rotation strategy you like, to avoid Ad blindness.

[Conclusion]: On forums, users tend to develop Ad blindness pretty sooner than you think. Key to success with AdSense on forums is to keep changing the Ad placement, color schemes, Ad Unit sizes and things should work well.

If you run forums and need any suggestion or advises, please feel free to contact me for a free consultation. My response will be a little slow but I will help you for sure

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Website Optimization: Tips to Optimize Your Pages for Faster Loading and Response Time

Raj — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 21:24:25 +0000

These are some of the most effective and proven to work tips to increase the page load time of your website. You must try these not only to dramatically increase the page load time but also to achieve better visitor satisfaction. Would you go back to a site which does not load on time?

1. Optimize the Images – Many of us, including myself, use images to enhance the content and sometimes it’s imperative for publishers like us to put images in our pages for more clarity on the subject. While some of us know that it’s better to embed images which are relatively smaller in size for faster loading of pages, some of us do not pay attention to it. You must know that the faster the pages load, the chances of someone waiting for your entire page to show up increases. It’s also advisable to not to put images on the top of the pages but anywhere after at least one para of content [not a rule though]. This will ensure that even if your images are taking time to load, the user will at least see the first block of content and might wait for the rest of the page to load. Some online services to optimize your graphics are:- and . [Gifworks] and [Spinwave]. Gifworks will help you optimize only GIF images while Spinwave can optimize both JPEG and GIF.

2. Prefer External Scripting – It’s a common practice to use CSS and Javascript in your website for achieving many creative things. But do you put the CSS and Javascript code in your pages? That’s not good. You must include those files in your pages rather than putting them in each and every page of your site. Going external with CSS and Javascript will bring down the size of the pages to a great extent.

To include the CSS file in your HTML, you can use the following:-

and to include a .js file you can use

[Note: You can attach more than one CSS or Javascript includes in the HEAD section of your HTML].

The advantage of doing this is that when search engine spiders crawl your pages, they will not see CSS or Javascript code but straight away read your site’s content. This is a major plus for your site’s Search Engine Optimization [SEO].

3. Avoid External Images – If you are linking to images from other site then the page load time will directly depend on the speed at which the images are loaded from the external sites. If the external site is down then the images on your site will not load up at all and may also affect the page load time of your site. The best way around this is to upload all those images in a folder on your site and then embed them in your HTML pages. This will increase the page load time to a great extent. Some examples of most common images are from Digg, Online photo sharing services etc.

4. Optimize your scripting – Most of us use some or the other server side scripting language for processing pages and if the code is not well written, it may adversely affect the performance of your web server and also reduce the page load time. My advise to you is to revisit the code if the above 3 points fail to increase your page load time.

Other noteworthy factors that affect your site’s performance are – the load on the server on which your site is hosted, bandwidth available for the server and other hardware factors.

If you have any suggestions/comments to add, please feel free to post them through our comments form.

Related External Links:
[Akamai's 4 Seconds Research]

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