Posted on Nov 11, 2008
Selecting a domain name that contains your keywords, remains memorable for visitors, and is actually open for registration, can be quite a challenge. Some people may choose a shorter 3 character domain name so that it is easily memorable for visitors, but a domain with your keyords is ideal for reaping the benefits of organic seo. For instance, if I want to create a website for watching House M.D. online, I might consider the keywords: stream, watch, house, online, or episodes. Obviously, many of the preferred domains have already been registered, such as watchhouse, watchhouseonline, watchhouseepisodes, etc. Instead of forcing myself to register a domain like houseonlineepisodesstream or housonlineepisodeswatch, which are both long and not in the preferred order for keywords, there is something else you can try. Combining the last letter of the word with the first letter of the next word; for example, the keywords watch and house can be combined into watchouse. Search engine will still recognize both keywords (watch and house) in your domain name, but you will be able to register a quality domain name that is actually open. I recently did this with the domain name watchouseonline.com. On Google it started to rank on the second and third pages a few days after registration with no promotion. After about a week of limited promotion, this domain started to rank on the first page for all of its keywords. Keywords in your websites domain name or url are obviously very important for serps (Search Engine Results Page), but you can’t always find the domains that you want open. With this tip you can combine your keywords in quite a few situations to be able to get a desirable domain name.
read more
Posted on Nov 10, 2008
Adsense text ads tend to blend into your website more, which results in a lower CTR; whereas, image ads stick out more against the content of your website, which results in a higher CTR. This does not necessarily mean that image ads are better than text ads. Generally, Adsense image ads are CPM ads; this means it might be a good idea to use these ads on webpages which are unlikely to get clicks. Depending on your website it may be beneficial for you to use Adsense text or image ads. In my experience with another blog of mine, I decided to switch from Adsense text ads to Adsense image ads; the results were surprising. I received ~25% more clicks while using the image ads, but the image ads paid ~50% less than the text ads did. Maybe this is because there is not as much competition for image ads in the niche, which would explain the lower amount paid per ad. The choice to use Adsense text or image ads really depends on your website. You should also consider individual ad positioning to see if certain placements are beneficial to image ads, while others are better for text ads and vice versa. You will not know whether text or image ads will actually perform better until you do a comparison between them.
read more
Posted on Nov 9, 2008
With our recent post about what smart pricing is, who it affects, and how to avoid it, we figured we mention that blogs appear to be high in likelihood to get smart priced. Generally blogs get the majority of their traffic from return readers or social bookmarking. Both of these groups are quite unlikely to click ads; this will generally result in a click through rate below 1% in most blogs. What really matters when it comes to smart pricing though, is the actual conversion rate of these visitors that click on the ads. Even though one of your websites or blogs may have a conversion rate of 0.25%, it may not be smart priced. The reason for this is that the traffic that is directed to these advertiser is highly likely to convert. Even though we said that websites with a click through rate of below 1% are likely to get smart priced, this is not completely true. This was a generalization for most websites, but blogs do not fit into this trend. I suggest that you do not worry about getting smart priced on any of your websites, especially your blogs. If you are smart priced, you will know it, and then you can make the appropriate changes to your websites.
read more
Posted on Nov 8, 2008
When your Adsense account start to generate CTR (click through rates) of lower than 1%, you are in danger of being smart priced. If your Adsense account has been smart priced, you will experience a extreme drop in earning. A click that used to generate $0.50 on average will now only generate $0.05; this means that you will only be received 10% of what clicks used to be worth, if you were smart priced. Additionally, if you have been smart priced, your entire Adsense account will be affected, not just the low CTR websites. To avoid smart pricing, you can remove low CTR websites from your Adsense accounts and display other ads on those websites. Also, you may choose to only show Adsense text or image ads to visitors that are directed to your site from search engines. These visitors will be more targeted than visitors from other sources. If you only show Adsense ads to visitors from search engines, you will increase your CTR and be able to avoid smart pricing due to previous low CTR websites. Once you implement these changes to an account that has been smart priced, you should see your earning return to their previous values in about a week or less.
read more
Posted on Nov 6, 2008
This Firefox add-on, Rank Checker, is a very useful tool for quickly find out how your website ranks for a specific keyword on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It is quite easy to use, and once set up it can be used to track your keywords’ rank over a period of time. Its auto update feature allows users to set it, so that it can retrieve the rank of your specified list of keywords every X days. These ranks of your keywords can then be exported into a .csv and stored for reference or be used to track your progress up or down your keyword ranks. I have heard of many webmaster who manually check their ranks in search engines regarding their keywords. This is an extremely tedious task and can be completely eliminated with the use of this add-on. There are an array of additional features that this add-on has to offer, but the core of it is quite a unique tool. If you want to easily track or check your keyword ranks in search engines, then this Firefox add-on is something that you should not be without as a webmaster.
read more
Posted on Nov 4, 2008
The market share of the larger search engines are as follows: Google – 60%, Yahoo – 18%, MSN – 12%, AOL – 4%, and Ask – 2%. Google clearly has the largest presence with regards to search engines, while Yahoo has a decent portion of the business, and MSN has a small but still noticeable presence. Even though Google has 60% of the market, that is still only 10% more than half of the market share of search engines. This means that as webmasters, we can not simply focus our attention on Google regarding search engine optimization. If a webmaster solely optimizes their web site for Google, they are in reality missing out on a potential 40% of searches. Recently, I have seen may webmasters concentrating all of their effort on their ranking with Google and completely neglecting the other search engines. If a webmaster is creating quality content, positive link building, etc. then your rankings in all of the search engines should be fairly constant. Instead of optimizing your site for a certain search engine, focus on all of them and your website will gain exposure and grow even more in a universal manner.
read more
