Opinion Pieces » The SEO Hobbyist

Google Adsense Alternatives

Here are two ad networks that I have used successfully as Google Adsense alternatives.  However, the best thing about the changes to Google Adsense’s TOS, you can now use both of these following ‘alternatives’ at the same time as Google Adsense. Remember, You can use any Ad network along side Adsense – once there is a clear difference between the two ad units. Your users should be able to clearly differentiate the two, and the best and safest way to do this is by changing colors and sizes.

Adbrite

Adbrite is one of the first ad services I used in place of Adsense. It has very similar CTR, eCPM, and Payout in my niches. One of its main benefits for beginner webmasters is that they have much more relaxed terms of services. Its easier for smaller sites or blogs to get approved and start monetizing their traffic – no matter how small. They do not have as many ad formats as Adsense but they do have the most common ones. After you add their HTML code snippet your page it can take a day or two before actual are serving relevant ads. If you can get over those minor inconveniences than it is definately worth checking out.

You share the revenue with the network, you get to keep 75% of all earnings.

Smowtion

I’ve recently learned about this international ad network called Smowtion. Some of the benefits are that these ads are great looking and have much higher CTR than my Adsense ads. The payouts were slightly lower Adsense, but as a secondary network it is great. Normally you only get to keep 60% of your earnings, but if you use this link you will get 80%. Since it is a relatively new network that is base offshores, many people are worried if it is legit or a scam. I can tell you from personal experience that they do pay.

Check this previous post if you are looking for Affiliate Partners and Direct Sale Alternatives For Adsense.

February 1, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment »

I Created My Blog – Now What? An Essential Checklist For Your New Website

There is no better time to focus on your new blog or website’s search engine optimization than during it’s initial setup. Being an SEO and Web Development hobbyist, I find myself creating new blogs and sites all the time and have become very efficient at it. You’ve already spent all that time registering a domain name and choosing a web host. You’ve probably already decided, installed, and configured your CMS. You are finally happy with how your initial page looks and now what should you do?

All the following tips are free and easy to implement. Here’s my New Blog/Website SEO Checklist:

1) MAKE A BACKUP

Even the best web-hosts can not be trusted. When I was first starting in web development, I bought hosting from a company who promised me redundant 2 weeks of backups. What I didn’t know was that really translated to 1 backup every two weeks. My website crashed on a Sunday, which turned out to be the same day it was backed up. Come Monday morning, the only backup of my site was a few hour old copy of my crashed site. I had to learn the lesson the hard way, you should not! I will soon be writing a blog post specifically on how to keep your blog’s information safe!

2) Start your Web Tracking With Google Analytics

Everyone has to start somewhere. It is imperative to track your stats from the very beginning. Not only can it be a great motivational tool when you see increases in traffic – but also provides INVALUABLE information about your site’s audience. Even if you only scratch the surface with this tool, you can track your daily visitor count and then get comparisons to the previous month. If you love statistics like myself, you can go crazy with it. For example:

  1. What Time of Day Do I Get the Most Hits?
  2. Who are my Top Referrers?
  3. How Many Hits Am I Getting From International Users?
  4. Is Anyone Reading my RSS Feed?
  5. What Percent of my Daily Users are Visiting for the First Time?
  6. How am I Doing Compared To Sites Similar to Mine?
  7. Whats My Most Viewed Content?
  8. How Long Does an Average User Spend on my Site?
  9. How Many Pages Does Each Person View?
  10. If you really want to get crazy, you can find information like What Version of Flash Player are Most of my Visitors Using?

I could go on for ever about the benefits of Google Analytics, plus it’s free. Use it and thank me later.

3) Submit Your Website to the Following Search Engine’s Webmaster Tools:

Google Webmaster Tools
Yahoo Site Explorer
Bings Webmaster Tools

Not only will submitting your URL to these services help get you indexed faster, but they also provide useful statistics and information about how your site appears in their search engine rankings. I use Google’s Web Tools the most because they have the best stats on number of pages indexed and page load times. They also display the number of pages indexed in your sitemap right on the dashboard. I love seeing this number increase every time I log in. Another good use for Google’s Webmaster Tools is that they make it easy to find 404 errors (Pages Not Found) and have great keyword analysis.

That being said I think that Yahoo’s Site Explorer has more in-depth and accurate back-link tracking (sites that link to you) and updates at a faster rate than Google’s. I normally only submit my info to Bing’s Webmaster tools for the chance at faster indexing, but they have some great new features as well. For example, their tools are the only ones who give page ranks on your inbound and outbound links. It can be very helpful to know the search engine authority and popularity of your link partners. If possible I’d make sure to check back weekly on Google’s tools, and monthly on the other two to monitor your progress.

4) Run it through Website Grader

I realize that this is a cheesy/novice tool. But, if you can ignore that – there is no better way to get a baseline/benchmark (to improve upon!). They also check to make sure you haven’t made any classic SEO mistakes (like canonical domains).

5) Do Some House Keeping

These are the types of tips that are small and you should normally only have to do once.

Take care of the little things:

  1. Make Sure All Your Images Have ALT Text – Check this post for Top 5 Ways To Dramatically Increase Google Image Search Traffic.
  2. Define Targeted Categories and Tags For Posts/Pages – Having your targeted keywords in the URL is always a bonus.
  3. Remove Date Information From Permlinks – Having text like “2007/11/04″ in your URLs only increases the length and can make your content seem out of date and inadequate after a few months when that might not be the case.
  4. Add Meta Data to Your Headers – I’m aware this is mostly useless, but it only takes a minute and can’t hurt.
  5. Validate your HTML http://validator.w3.org/ – the fewer errors in your HTML the more search engine friendly it will be.

One last tip, after making all these changes be sure to MAKE ANOTHER BACKUP – Both Full File System Database!

Check back soon for my next scheduled articles:

  • 5 Essential SEO WordPress Plugins
  • 5 Firefox Plugins for SEO and Web Development
  • Best Google Adsense Alternatives
  • How to Keep Your Blog Secure

January 23, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Increase Earnings With The Best CPA Networks (PPC Alternatives)

PPC Ad Networks can be a great way to monetize your website, but their value really varies depending on your content. If your blog or website is about asbestos removal, then you can average 10$ a click – but for the rest of us its much more of a struggle. On my golf blog I can sometimes get 2$ a click on golf lessons and equipment, but on some of my media sites I regularly earn less than 10 cents per click. Those numbers are regardless of the PPC network. (Adsense, Adbrite, Smowtion, Etc…)

When I realized my payouts were so slow, I wanted to find other ways to monetize my site and take full advantage of the traffic I was getting with a more balanced advertising approach.

Commission Junction:

The first alternative I found was Commission Junction. These guys are a gigantic online advertiser that specialize in affiliate marking. My favorite part about this network is that within a few minutes you can get ads from top-tier companies and websites.  My Google Adsense’s ads were frequently irrelevant – but with CJ you get to chose which companies ads to display.  I personally feel my site looks more professional when my banners are from well known companies, and way more relevant than the ads that are auto generated.

No one knows your audience better than you, and using CJ gives you the control you need to target them.

The only downside of affiliate marketing is that it can be very frustrating that after 200 clicks you still haven’t converted any sales. You have to pay close attention to your web stats and focus on the affiliate partners that are getting your highest click through rate (CTR) and adjust as necessary. As with many SEO ventures, patience once again is key.

AdvertiseSpace:

The concept of this website could not be more simple. There are NO impression requirements, eCPM, PPC, CTR, or any kind of analysis involved. All you do is set the price of what you think a banner on your site is worth and this partner helps you sell that ad space. Consider it like a web banner REALTOR®.  You register your site,  select a banner size, and a monthly price. They give you some HTML code that you insert into your page that acts just like a ‘For Sale’ sign. AdvertiseSpace makes it easy for advertisers to get their banners on your page without the headache of chasing all your third party clients for payments. The setup is very easy and they just send you payment via paypal every time you make a sale.

I am not recommending that you get rid of PPC ads all together. What I suggest is a balance of Direct, PPC, and Affiliate Ad Networks.   Personally, I kept the PPC banners in tight areas of my site that were more likely to attract clicks.  Conversely, I put the direct sale and affiliate banners in less condensed areas to increase readability.  If your content isn’t returning acceptable earnings per click – give direct sale and affiliate marking a try.

January 16, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

How to Dramatically Increase Google Image Search Traffic

As mentioned in previous posts, patience is a virtue when dealing with SEO. If you are lucky, some site changes you make can show results in Google Search after a few days/weeks. In my personal experience, it can take months before you notice the effects of Google Image Optimization. I personally run a few media/picture websites because I’ve noticed that the page views as well as time on site  is astronomically high. One example of this is my site http://randomfunnypicture.com, which averages 15+ page views per user.  It is actually the main reason on why I decided to write this post. If I break that page’s web stats down by referrer, my most active traffic comes from image search (25-35 pages per visitor).

Here are some of the things I’ve learned along the way that will help you increase your Google Image Search traffic.

1) Provide ALT Text For <IMG> Image Tags

Why is ALT Text Important? ALT Text is one of the most important because without it, Google’s search bots have no idea what the actual content of the picture is.  How else would you expect your site to be returned in an image search if your content isn’t properly labeled? Of all these tips, I’d say this one is most important because not only does it help you get your images indexed, but it also gives you an opportunity to adjust the keyword density on your site. You have the ability (WHEN RELEVANT) to use the keywords you are trying to rank highest on as your image descriptions. A Win/Win Situation.

2) Add Title Information to <IMG> Image Tags

Just like ALT Text, Title Text is another great opportunity to increase the density of your target keywords. What makes Title Text arguably even more important, is that many social media sites will auto-detect this information during submission/linking. For example, if you are submitting an image to Digg or Facebook, if you fill in the title tag it will automatically be entered into the description. Even at a minimum, this could be just another free relevant back link for traffic generating methods you are probably already using.

3) Choose Relevant File Names For Your Images

This one is a little bit simpler. Just as having a relevant domain name and URL are important to regular SEO, the same goes for file name. Choose a name that is highly descriptive of the content.

4) Provide Height and Width Data  to Your <IMG> Image Tags

Using the previous tips, an example of an SEO Image tag would be:

<img src=http://www.example.com/very-descriptive-name.jpg width=”433″ height=”600″ title=”Just as Descriptive Title”>

The reason for this is to help prepare your images for Google Image Search’s Advanced Options.

These Include:

› Medium
› Large
› Icon
› Larger than…
› Exactly…

If your dimensions are already included in your tags, it will be indexed faster and contain the right image information to be returned in when users perform these advanced searches.

5)  Surround Images with Relevant Keywords

Another way Google Image Search indexes pictures is by analyzing the content directly around images. If you can provide relevant keywords surrounding the image, it will help that picture get indexed correctly. When possible, I even use the <CAPTION> tag which makes it clear to search engines what the image is about.

Follow the steps above and your image search referrals will increase I guarantee it. Not only that, but you might also be pleasantly surprised about how much image search you get from Google’s foreign TLD’s (top level domains).

Not just images.google.com, but also

images.google.co.uk
images.google.ca
images.google.de
images.google.com.au etc…

Image search is responsible for 10% (and growing) of my overall traffic on my network and has way higher pages/visit and time on site than other traffic sources.

January 12, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | 20 Comments »