Don’t Click This

My god it’s been ages since I posted on here, just in case anybody is still reading I plan to be making some big changes to this blog over the next few weeks and giving it a new lease of life!

Watch this space…

Well, it’s been a while since I posted on here, to be honest I was finding it hard to come with new stuff to write about everyday on top of all my other business commitments, but I definitely don’t regret starting this blog. While I’ve been ‘away’ Google did a PR update which I’m sure a lot of you know about, and this blog is now a PR4. Subsequently, I’ve suddenly had a load of requests for links and reviews and I thought it was about time I cashed in on it as I’m really using the blog for much else right now! So if you would like to purchase a review or text link from this blog which is now PR4, and has links from such high profile blogs such as JohnChow.Com, send an email to ian @ this website address.

Cheers!

I’ve been working on an offline business idea with a friend, I haven’t actually had a lot of time for my websites, but I’ll be updating stuff soon!

SEO is confusing. It can take hours of hard work and seem like you’re getting no-where, until google final indexes your website. And even then, you may have to wait patiently for your site to slowly creep up the rankings to a decent position. On the flip side of that, you could create a website and be in the top spot almost instantly!

One of the things to bear in mind when researching keywords or checking positions on google or whatever is that it isn’t just the number of results you should consider, but also the number of results that have the specific keywords in the title. For example, I currently have a website that ranks at the number 1 spot for a specific keyphrase, out of a possible 49,000,000 results. The website is pretty new and only has a couple of backlinks. One of the reasons it’s at number one is because there are few results (only 233 out of the 49,000,000) with the keyphrase in the title, but my site was one of them. Granted, it doesn’t get that many searches but it illustrates a point.

Obviously, this alone isn’t what decides your rank and you need to consider links, page rank etc but it can be a pretty useful indication. The way to check on google for results with the keywords in the title is allintitle: keyword(s).

If you go back through my blog archives, you’ll find no links to any of my main websites. You may find this strange, but I do have a good reason. It is true that having a blog is a great way to get extra visitors to your website and I do actually run a separate blog in conjunction with one of my sites for this reason, but I never link to it from this blog.

My reason for this is Google Adsense, which I run as well as affiliate programs as my main source of income. You see, there are some really ‘clever’ wankers people who go around clicking on Adsense ads in an attempt to get that person banned from Adsense and unfortunately, it often works. This is made worse by the fact that from what I’ve seen it’s practically impossible to get back in once you’ve been given the boot. Both Chris and James have both recently been banned from Adsense for ‘invalid clicks’.

You may be thinking that I’m just being paranoid and wasting a perfectly good traffic source but it won’t take you long to find other examples of people being banned for invalid clicks and I know for a fact that a lot of these people linked to their own sites from their own blogs. John Chow recently made a post about someone clicking on his adsense ads over 1000 times (that person must lead a really fulfilling life), but lucky for John he’s a highly valued Google publisher and they know he wouldn’t be artificially generating clicks.

At the end of the day, you are always going to get haters and new web publishers are easy targets for them. Linking from your blog may seem like a great way to get traffic to your sites and an extra link but you may want to think twice if you’re running Adsense on those particular sites. Obviously, if you generate thousands of dollars a month for Google then you probably have a dedicated contact to resolve any situations like this but for most of us, that is unfortunately not the case.

I do this far too much. I start a project, get really excited about it, dedicate days to creating a website and then forget all about it or get distracted by something else! I’ve got a fair few sites from various failed…unfinished projects that I should really do something with…ah well. I guess this just proves that having some sort of structured plan is always a good idea, something I definitely learned the hard way! Anyway, I have started to plan my websites a lot more efficiently now though, and I’ve found that I’m a lot more productive when I write down exactly what I need to do on any given day the night before, because if I don’t I tend to spend a lot of my ‘working’ day browsing blogs and forums…

I know I haven’t posted for a while - been working hard on my websites - but here are a few things that I’m currently trying/will be trying in terms of website promotion, besides the normal link exchanges:

Forums: Great way to get traffic to your website, not just via a sig link (which I normally wait until I’ve made 10-20 posts before adding - don’t want to be banned for spamming) but also in response to other peoples requests. For example I often deep link to specific articles on my MTB site in response to peoples questions on bike forums.

Give Away Free Stuff/Competitions: Obviously, this has the potential to become quite costly but it can also bring a ton of backlinks too - for example if you’re giving away a novelty pen when someone subscribes to your feed/newsletter or whatever, you can submit the offer to freebie sites which will probably list it, then you get lots of one way links to your site.

Myspace: Bit of a grey area this, but depending on your website it can be good for targetting specific demographics eg for my student site I can find students at specific universities, add them as a friend, they check out my profile and see a link to my site. It is a good idea to create a profile of a person though as opposed to a site, more likely to get a response that way. It’s preferable to make the profile with a picture of an attractive female too, dunno why that works so well…ahem!

Stumble Upon: I’ve yet to test this out but I’ve heard it can get a lot of traffic to your site. Basically you just add your website to Stumble Upon and people, um, stumble upon it and can rate it, discuss it etc.

Blogroll: I’ve found this one to be particularly good; creating a blogroll on your website for your specific niche and then finding related blogs and adding them. Once you’ve done that, send a bit of traffic thier way and then tell them how good their blog is - usually can get a link back. I’ve actually managed to get a couple of blog posts dedicated to sites this way - bonus!

So there you have it. If anyone has any other interesting, non-conventional traffic methods, leave a comment and if they’re good I’ll add em to the list.

…Following on from my pearls of wisdom, one thing you should definitely do is always make sure that you’ve inserted the affiliate links on your webpages. I’ve just checked my stats for a new program I was promoting, for which I was a getting a decent amount of natural traffic from google, only to find the reason it wasn’t converting was because I had failed to put the affiliate links on the page. BOLLOCKS!

First off, I should say that I know next to nothing about SEO, I just try and follow these basic principals which I’ve picked up along the way:

-Inbound links are great (one way inbound links even better)
-Link text should always be the keywords you’re trying to rank for
-The higher the PR (of the pages) of links to your site the better
-Content should contain keywords, but not too much

Anywho, when I started out with my first site I was just happy to get links - I didn’t really pay much attention to the link text (most of the time it was simply my URL) or PR or anything of importance from an SEO perspective - mainly because I didn’t know any better. However, I did get traffic from the search engines and I did start to make money. This was because my website was useful, unique and updated. The 3 U’s. I’m not saying that’s all you need to have a succesful website, I’m just saying this is what happened to me.

Now, I’m in a position where I can apply some of the things I have learnt about SEO to my sites to improve their visibilty in the search engines and increase my traffic numbers, but in my honest opinion the 3 U’s are so much more important. Why am I writing this you might ask? Because I think that too many people worry about SEO when they should be more concerned with the content on their site.

At the end of the day if you SEO a website to the number one spot on Google, only to have crappy content, I doubt people are going to hang around. But if you concentrate on writing some quality content and slowly creep up the rankings, maybe you’ll find people will hang around and they’re much more likely to return.

As I said at the begining of my post I’m definitely not an expert and I’m not trying to tell people what to do, I’m just providing an insight into my own experiences. I’ve found that providing you have the 3 U’s, the ‘build it in and they will come’ theory still applies. Obviously, this doesn’t mean a shopping directory, but you get my drift. Content is king after all…

Ok, I cheated a little bit with my rule about not paying for traffic for my MTB site. I was reading about AdEngage the other day and decided to try it out as I had $8 in a paypal account and it was hardly worth cashing it out. So, I bought 2 text links on two sites, just for a week, for $1 each. And I’m glad I did. By the end of the first day I had already made my back my $2 investment! I’ve recieved nearly 150 clicks from my text links in a couple of days - by the end my weeks advert I’ll have paid less than half a cent for each click if that continues!

Unfortunately though, the money earned will more than likely all be from adsense as I’m running affiliate links for a UK bike shop and as the traffic was from US sites it’s unlikely I’ll make any sales from them. This is actually one of the reasons I started up Text Ads Directory to find UK only websites to advertise on.